While coming back from Chennai, I found an advertisement of Madhya Pradesh Tourism in Air Deccan’s inflight magazine which featured a stop sign on the camera. That image struck in mind and got me thinking that they do not allow taking pictures of the tourist places. But I was wrong they have not mentioned anywhere that they not allow such activity but going through the text, it says :

The beauty, the splendour, the stories, the histories, the romances, and the variety of experiences that is Madhya Pradesh, cannot be captured in photographs. It can only be appreciated, wondered at, see, felt and experienced. And of course, remembered and revisited. So, if you want to share your travels with friends way back home, ask them to experience it themselves.
Besides, it helps if your hands are free when you climb the stupendous heights of Pachmarhi, negotiate the steps to Roopmati’s pavilion at Mandu, …

I think the MP Tourism seriously need to have a second look at the ad and reconsider it before having it published again. I am bringing this issue as I love to travel and apart from experiencing new places I love to shoot pictures of the places I visit because that gives me a thrill when I see the pictures after few years. The picture also helps bringing the best of converation when you are describing the place to your mates/ relatives that you have visited.

The main aim of having an image on ad is to immediately catch the attention of the person in a postive way rather than putting a wrong perspective.

I have never been to Madhya Pradesh and their tourism is also not as developed as some of the other states such as Kerela, Rajasthan, J&K in India but they have some of the best places which can help them promote tourism. Places such as Khajuraho temples, Amarkantak , a pilgrimages, Bandhavagarh National Park, Gwalior Forts, Mandu-The City of Joy surrounded by defences both natural and manmade, Panchmarhi-the queen of satpuras which is known as wealth of beauty. For more information on tourist places you can visit www.mptourism.com

Yesterday night I read a post that an Indian consulting company’s website got hacked by some Pakistani hacker group. I am not mentioning the name of the company because it might unduly create a bad image and hurt their reputation.

The hacker group was trying to shown some smartness by putting some strange message that Consulting company needs to protect their website and hence need some consulting themselves. I would say that most of the companies use shared hosting and their core business activity was not security or anything related, so they need not be worried but that company must make sure that their hosting provider have all security policies in place.

The group also posted a message that India, Israel, US should stop shredding the Muslim blood. They need to get their facts right and just look into their activities themselves, how few people have distrupted the peace of the world. To have peace you need to be peaceful first. Whether such activities on their part will be of any benefit, I seriously doubt it.

Anyway the company’s website was back to normal in few hours.

Xdrive.com is offering 5 GB of free online storage space, I have just registered for an account with them. One has to have an AOL then only you can log into Xdrive with it, if you do not have one then you can register with AOL - its absolutely FREE and immediately get access to 5GB of storage space. Xdrive also offers a desktop utility which enables you to manage your storage from Windows explorer itself. The web interface is also pretty nice and easy to use.

With 5GB of secure online storage there’s plenty of room to keep backup copies of digital photos, all your important documents, e-mail attachments, and other files — and still have space leftover for your music collection. It’s the best way to keep computer crashes from becoming disasters. Think of it as hard drive insurance.

Share folders of photos or other files with one of more recipients, and control what they can do with them. Your shared folders are preset to read or view only, but you can chose to let your recipients also edit, download, or share the files. And if you change your mind later, you can change the setting again.

Stream your favorite songs or an entire playlist from your Xdrive account directly to your web connected PC or SmartPhone

Stream your favorite songs or an entire playlist from your Xdrive account directly to your web connected PC or SmartPhone

Note: I was not able to find whether this account has any limitation in terms of usage for number of days, bandwidth etc.

I returned yesterday night after attending BlogCamp 2006, it was indeed a lovely experience meeting bloggers from all corners of the country, interacting with them about their blogging experiences and sharing a platform where so much was discussed about blogging. Not only that it can be described as an event where every thing was planned so well that it can be called a perfect beginning considering there are already talks of having BlogCamp 2007. It was only made possible by efforts put in by the organising team, hats off to them. My special thanks to the whole team for having done such a wonderful job. I would also like to thank the sponsors - Yahoo!, Nokia, Ford, MeriNews.com, Zoho.com, Sify, Sulekha which enabled the organisers put such an amazing show.

A lot of stuff has already been published by the bloggers about the event and lot of them did live blogging too. I also tried to make most of the event by moving up and down and tried to attend the sessions as per my interest. One can find about the session searching on Technorati.

Apart from this I had a quite an interesting trip where I got a chance to meet few people and had some nice expereinces which I will post soon.

Here’s an article about BlogCamp- Living the Blog, in Chennai which was printed in The Hindustan Times Delhi issue on 3rd September.

Click on below image to see a larger version of image.