Mario’s World

I took the picture above at Chennai airport. This is at the section just after immigration.

As you can see, everybody (except Ro and I) were crowding at one spot, all of them trying to get a glimpse of the bomb. Yes, there was a bomb alert, with a guy in full bomb disposal armor and 2 sniffer dogs and they all still wanted to get as close as possible to the action.

I’m not sure if this is just us Indians in our usual inquisitive Indian mode, but who goes “near” the bomb. If I thought there was a bomb around, I would walk as far away from it as I could.

And our brilliant airport authorities just left the immigration counters running so people could keep piling up to watch all the action up close. Luckily, it was a false alarm. No bomb in sight. And we could all leave after a good 40 mins of watching the dogs and the armored guy take turns checking out the “un-attended package”.

Still, good job by the guy in the armored suit and his two cuddly sniffer dogs.

I found this very interesting chart on global airline traffic at Amadeus. It’s based on a study between airconomy and Amadeus.

Our tour guide took us to the famous Peradeniya Royal Botanical Gardens at Kandy in Sri Lanka. The garden was very nicely laid out with lots of interesting species of trees, herbs and flowers. They had a lot of exotic looking plants as well and some great landscaping.

Even more interesting were the dozens (or more) of couples who came there for their smooching sessions. Almost every third tree has a couple standing below and smooching away. Even the big ol haunted looking tree with thousands of vampire bats hanging from above had a couple below getting very romantic. And all this was on a weekday!

You just gotta love the Sri Lankans for that.

Yes, you read that sign correctly. “Poo Paper Sold Here”. And you thought you were saving trees by not using paper!

Think again. The paper you are using could have started out as elephant poo.  All the more reason to go digital and save paper.

I caught that sign while visiting the elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka. I though it was a joke at first. But its for real and there is no shortage of elephant poo over there. They can collect tons of poo every day from this small herd of about 50-60 elephants.

This place along the highway was full of trees before the construction began. And only one survived. The luckiest tree in all of Kuwait.

I got a call recently from Monster about updating my resume and I decide to start working on it. I came across these very interesting samples in the form of infographics. They are really amazing and I never imagined people creating resumes like this.

One site, Vizualize.me, which is to launch very soon will be able to create stunning resume’s from your LinkedIn profile. There seem to be other sites on the net doing the same thing. Another example below is form re.vu.

I wonder how hr departments will react to receiving these instead of the traditional pages of text.

I just could not stop laughing after watching this video.

The Gulf Traffic Week is back in Kuwait. Those signs alone may cause more accidents this time. There is so much text to read and it changes between Arabic & English pretty fast.

Seems there is a small town in Australia called “Speed”. For their traffic awareness month, they decided to rename the town to “SpeedKills”. It definitely caught someone’s attention cause the welcome sign to the town was stolen shortly after.

The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) recently granted Executive Jet Management the permission to use iPads instead of large stacks of paper for charting and maps. This was after a 3 month period of testing including 55 pilots on 250 flights.

Seems the Mobile TC application developed by Jeppesen never failed during any of the tests. And neither did the iPad.

A lot of other airlines & pilots are bound to start with this trend. So long as that’s the ONLY app installed on the iPad, I think it should be fine. Wouldn’t want the pilots competing for the highest scores on Angry Birds instead of flying the plane.

Either this guy was pissed with people taking his parking spot or it was “bring your washing machine to work” day.