She looks cute...

But sometimes she is not... :S

No modifications have been made to this picture, especially not the eyes. :p

Exit summer time.

Great great great! Summer time will be over tomorrow as from 2 a.m from what I heard. This means one more hour of sleep for me. One more hour of watching TV or taking my time to have breakfast. One more precious hour. At last!

The bad part is that when I'll be returning home in the evening, it will already be dark, but I don't really care right now. All I care for is my precious sleep! :D

Go ahead and enjoy life as it was before summer time dudettes and dudes!

Just a short note...

Hello dudettes and dudes, it's 11:51 pm but I could not resist posting about some stuff. But rest assured, I'll be brief and to the point! :D

1st, I am glad to announce that I am running 100% on Linux from now on and I must say that it is a pleasant experience. :D No more viruses or problems that have no solutions. Haha!

2nd, tomorrow is a public holiday. Hoorray!

3rd, did I say tomorrow is a public holiday?!

4th, I gotta get some sleep. My bed is calling me, really. This is a complete luxury, ain't it? Being able to choose the time when you'll go to sleep and not having to revise or finish some work for tomorrow.

Ah! Did I say tomorrow's a public holiday?! Hihi... Have an excellent weekend dudettes and dudes and my holidaying aliens.

Love.

The Drawbacks of Remaining Home Sick

There's no fun in being sick and having to remain at home, as opposed to remaining at home when your health rocks. You just can't do anything when you're sick. I spent hours lingering at home, trying to feel better. I was wondering what my friends were doing and was kind of missing being with them. :D

To pass the time I tried to photograph a helicopter which was passing around several times but could not catch it. Guess I was too sick to focus. I tried to photograph little birds and butterflies outside but those kids are way too rapid, trust me.

But there was one bird which seemed to be really enjoying posing for me.

So I'll leave you, dudettes and dudes, with pictures of the red bird, which is still here, by the way, waiting for me to shoot some more photos of him/her. I think this kind of behaviour is weird, for a bird cause they usually fly away everytime people try to approach them. Guess this one wants to be model. :D

Damn week...

Hello dudettes and dudes, bloggers and non-bloggers, this past week was a hell of a week and I'm glad I've recovered alright as soon as I've stepped in the house. Ah the magic of a home! Can't beat that!

Anyway, I've got to announce a few blogging news and ask a few questions.

First news - My sister has started blogging again! The blog is called Loona's very very unprivate world and I guess the title is appropriate for a personal blog! :D

A screenshot of Loona's blog.

Moving on, I'd like to share something that I've discovered today and it might seem like a weird question, but is Rama Valayden on blogger?

Check out the blogger profile and the blog.


Personally I believe it's someone else pretending to be him. If the Attorney General of Mauritius wanted to blog on blogger, he would either have created a blog anonymously or bought a domain and employed web designers to work on it! lol! Ok that's extreme! Anyway let's wait and see what's the outcome of this.

Moving on to something joyful and still related to blogging, I'd like to wish a very very Happy Birthday to Yashvin. Jevin and I send you all our best wishes. :D Keep blogging and keep inspiring many new bloggers! :D

I'm now off to making something to eat and like Keli said, have yourselves a merry weekend dudettes and dudes and my tired aliens.

Something Useless.

There are many stuff that I've bought in my life and which I have never actually used to their full purpose, like a book called "Barrage sur le Nil" which I bought during my egyptology period, or various punk t-shirts which I've never worn or recently the Nec Versa, which looks quite irrelevant compared to the IBM T30. Yeah, no kidding. After using a trackpoint for years, a touchpad seems to be too inaccurate. But I'm not waging a war against touchpad users, I'm just pointing out my inability to adapt to changes. :D

Touchpad in white, trackpoint in black and red.

Moving on to my list of useless objects, at the first place you definitely get the emtel mobile internet device or whatever they call it. I've used this thing a total of 3 times in my life and I'm not about to use it anytime soon.

Initially costing more than 6k rupees and now down to 5k rupees from the adverts I saw last week, its cost greatly exceeds its value proposition and in a country where we have many safety issues, it's irrelevant to advertise about how the device can be used anywhere (refer to radio adverts). I barely see people moving about with their laptops everywhere, at the seaside or on hills!

About the billing, either you use a pre-paid account and you have to recharge your account with a Rs50 credit every time you want to surf for about 15 minutes or you use a post-paid account and prepare yourself to be surprised on seeing the bill.

Therefore, this product is really for those who absolutely need to be connected to the internet anywhere they go and who hopefully get this service as a grant on behalf of their employer.

As for me, this little device will remain in its little box, safely waiting for something better to come its way. :D

The bloggers meeting was great.

I would just like to thank everyone of you bloggers who were here today. You just rock! :D It was fun to meet up, chat and interact with everyone and to finally put faces on the blogs! lol.

I just can't wait for the next edition of the meeting to come.

The photo album of today's meeting can be found here.

Else here are some "temps fort" of the meeting, in pictures.


















I will crop/resize pictures tomorrow. ;)

Have an excellent night dudettes and dudes and my happy aliens and keep blogging!! :D

A normal Independence day.

For me the day was a normal one, spent at doing almost nothing except some gardening and watching TV. The day was cool, lazy, punctuated by rain. I really love rain. When I'm at home, it's the best thing that can ever happen.

I leave you dudettes, dudes and aliens with some pictures, one of the garden, which has tremendously changed by the way, one of "goyave de chine" which I ate after such a long time today and one of "gateaux piments" which I feel should be the national Mauritian savoury, seriously! :D

Have a happy independence day and cheers! :D

The bloggers meeting finalised!

Hello blogging dudettes and dudes, the time and venue of the bloggers meeting has finally been confirmed. It will be held at 2 p.m on Saturday the 14th March at McDonald's, Port Louis.

We are certainly not trying to promote junk food. :D It is just that this place is more apt to accomodate all of us.

If ever you are on Facebook, please visit this page for any queries and suggestions and to confirm your presence.

Else, feel free to mail me on lastmorina AT gmail DOT com.

Looking forward to seeing you all on Saturday! :D

Finepix for finer pics...

I got a Finepix Z10 fd yesterday. Fd stands for face detection and I must say it really detects faces, even faces on posters. I don't know how it does that, but it really kicks at doing it. Mine is red because it'll go well with Jazzie's interiors but it comes in different colors, pink, green, orange and the list is long.

So I am now officially shifting from doing weird and crappy photography to not-so-crappy photography. :P I must say that the transition will be hard; I'm not used to working with relatively good material. With my old camphone, I always lost precious seconds entering my 7-digit security code before I could take a shot. The new cam's really rapid, just slide the lense cover and the job is done.

Having a cam can be really handy if, for example, you have to take a snap of a tyre exploding in the bus in which you were going home, of police officers packing away all hawkers' products at the Victoria Station or of a bus conductor having to use a wooden stick to keep the bus going.






The pictures above were taken from the old camphone.

And pictures below from the new FinePix. :D Ah! Long post I know!



It's the first time of my life that I've managed to catch details. :P

A bloggers meeting.

Following Yashvin's idea of a bloggers' workshop, we've thought that it would be nice to meet some (hopefully all) bloggers in the Mauritian blogosphere in person.

We could plan a meeting on Saturday the 14th of March. This date is only a suggestion. If you are not available on this day but still wish to participate, please let us know, by contacting either of us on our blogs or by mail, we could change the date to enable you to be present for the meeting. The venue has not yet been set. But I suggest Caudan where a previous meeting had been held some years back. And frankly it's an easily accessible place .

My e-mail address is lastmorina [at] gmail dot com.

Please try your best to be present and don't be shy or scared, it will just be a casual meeting and we promise it won't be boring.

So who is in?

Update(09.03.2009): The meeting will most probably be held at 2 p.m on Saturday the 14th. Everything will be confirmed by Thursday, latest.
Thank you all for your coorperation and willingness to participate. ;)

International Women's Day

Tomorrow we celebrate yet another International Women's Day and the Ministry of Women's Rights, Child Development and Family Welfare has figured out that the best way to promote women is to take a popular presidential campaign slogan, to modify it a little and to plaster it all over billboards accompanied by pictures of nice-looking women.

Women We Can

What the hell is that supposed to mean? That we can sell vegetables, or work as assistants or call-centre agents, or become police officers or even occupy a savvy post in an organisation? Thanks for telling us what we have been knowing for decades!

Why not try providing assistance to women really needing the help for once?

Oh! And I hope you CAN update the Ministry of Women website because it badly needs some work done on it.

Can't wait...

It seems like ages since I've been out with friends. Like a real sort of trip. Packing food, shopping at the last minute, planning a theme and then getting done and forgetting something at home and then telling yourself "heck! it doesn't matter... what does matter is the fun that we're gonna have."

Yeah it's been one year already, or almost one year since the Indie picnic, held on the Independence day. Last year was the first time and it was so good that it has become a tradition. Weird huh? But that is how we roll. :P

So ladies and gentlemen and my tired aliens... I really can't wait for this day to come. Till then I'll just go on HRMing. Ah life!

Discounts do not do the trick.

Some organisations tend to think that the only thing customers are searching for are discounts and lower prices. When special sales promotion work for some, others blindly follow, unaware of the fact that they could have sustained a regular clientele had they first invested in changing customer opinion regarding their organisation.

Recently, Spar and Jumbo have indulged into massive ad campaigns promoting their new pricing strategy. This campaign might be fruitful in the shortrun but I sincerely doubt that it will have any longterm impact due to the following reasons:

1. Their employees are incompetent, almost rude to customers; I've never once at City Spar been greeted nor smiled at by those girls who're supposed to handle bags and other belongings. They've just got a blank look on their faces and lazily take your bag and then give it back to you. Do you think they've got a special recruitment criteria to employ that kind of person?

It might seem unimportant to greet or smile at people, but for an organisation these immaterial things tend to add a little plus towards customer service. The organisation might spend a lot to attract customers, but at the end of the day it is the employees that come closer to customers and in customers' mind they represent the organisation. I think the way you make customers feel matter a lot. You wouldn't want to go home feeling all annoyed at the rudeness of a bag counter girl.

2. They've advertised massively but they haven't foreseen that they'll be getting an increased number of customers, so they would need to open up most of their cash counters to prevent long queues from forming. Last week at Jumbo Riche Terre I waited for 30 minutes in a queue and I was purchasing only 2 cables. They 'forgot' to open the "quick counters". Pictures below were taken yesterday and you can clearly see some unoccupied check-out counters and long queues.

3. And my last point is that their prices are not even that low. Perhaps in Jumbo and Spar standards they could be qualified as discounted prices. But on the overall some products still remain priced above others found elsewhere.

Anyway consumers should think twice before getting lured by those advertising campaigns.

Just to make it clear, those situations were found in Jumbo Riche Terre and Spar Port-Louis, if the situation is different in other branches, I wouldn't know.