People – Go with family or a like minded group of friends with children of the same age group.

Venue – You can tour anywhere – in parks, meadows, the zoo, or near beaches (if you live next to the seaside) and historical spots. If you don’t want tour washed out, be sure to check the latest weather forecast conditions.

Food – Prepare simple, “dry” fare-tasty finger foods, pasts dishes, stuffed parathas and sandwiches. Include fruits – they keep well, and are refreshing. Pack the food in aluminum foil, airtight containers, hot cases and casseroles. You can divide dishes among families, pot-luck style – this way you get variety, and there’s n need to preplan the allotment of dishes.

Beverages – Bring what you want to drink in ice boxes, along with lots of ice and drinking water. Do remember the bottle and the wine openers. For tea and coffee, It’s best to bring boiling water in thermoses, along with instant coffee powder, tea bags, sachets of creamer and sugar.

Other essentials – Rugs or durries, blankets, plastic sheets, table clothes, paper napkins, towels and trash bags. You also need cushions, umbrellas, sunhats, sunscreen, insect-repellent creams and a first-aid box.

Entertainment – Get Frisbees, discs, and balls for children, and playing cards, scrabble or ludo those who want to laze. Also bring a stereo and good mix of music that all will enjoy. Do have quality camera to capture all the fun moments in your trip.

After 40 years, he passed away, left her a letter which said…

Japan’s third largest automaker said on Wednesday it would reduce output by 79,000 cars from January to March by cutting shifts or operating days at plants.

The 500 workers are all on temporary contracts.

Nissan said that it took the decision to ‘manage inventory levels and ensure a balanced production supply in response to continued declines in global vehicle sales.’

Nissan, whose net profit slumped by more than 40 per cent in the first half, said in October it was slashing 3,500 jobs worldwide.

It had already in recent months said it would cut production by 137,000 vehicles, mostly luxury cars and sports utility vehicles that had been meant for export to the United States, which has seen demand plummet.

What is the difference between a man and a calculator? You can count on a calculator.

Well, it is a pun, but how easy is it to actually count on a calculator? On my Casio scientific calculator, you need to think a little bit, it’s not like there is a [count] key. In fact it is quite simple – hit [Ans] [+] [1] [=] and then keep hitting [=]. Of course, calculators generally work in similar ways whereas men generally don’t – you can count (rely) on some but not on others.
So, although the joke might not be that funny, it is probably quite true.

I also saw a mug with the following formula on it:

Love = Passion / Patience

There are no definitions of the variables on the mug, but this seems patently incorrect to me. As Patience tends to zero, Love tends to infinity? Surely this can’t be right?
I also saw a mug bearing this formula:

Dad = (Football + Barbeque) / Helping with homework

I wonder if there are any more in the collection….

Even though I’d heard of microformats before, I still think I learned a lot from listening through the 70 minutes of audio. They talked a lot about the principles for microformat design, which make a lot of sense when explained well. Microformats are a good idea from a producer/publishers point of view because they’re designed to be easy to read and write, and to fit into the already existing software.

However, I’m not really a producer or publisher; I definately fit into the programmer category. What makes microformats really cool for programmers, though, is the fact that they’re standardising problems that every blogger solves every day in his or her own way. They’re saying (for example), ‘If you’re marking up a series of events, do it this way’. This convergence of implicit structure built on convention to explicit structure built on a formal specification is really exciting. If support for microformats really gets rolling, that means that everyone is marking up their events in the same way. As microformats are also designed to be machine-parseable, that means that everyone’s events are suddenly machine readable and, more excitingly, aggregatable. Just think through the cool things that could be built on a tool that crawls web pages for hCalendar snippets and aggregates them into a centralised list. And that’s just a single microformat. There are so many more. Score one for the openness of the web as a generic publishing platform.

You probably don’t know, but I’m working on a generic compound microformat parser, Comfort. The current release does fairly well at parsing the basic hCalendar spat out by Comfort’s parent project, bCal, however I’m working on it to be a more useful parser. I’ll be throwing a lot of data at it because I want this to grow into a really powerful parser. Microformats aren’t exactly easy to parse (as they’re designed for humans first, all the trade-offs and comprimises that are a natural part of specification design make microformats that bit more difficult to parse), but I think there’s a real need for a generalised compound microformat parser. It would have to be easy to extend, as the microformat project is and hopefully will continue to grow as unbelievable rates.

If you’ve never seen microformats before, do check out microformats.org and specifically read the introduction on their wiki. Whether you’re just Average Joe blogger or are interested in building tools that can pull from the biggest database of all, microformats should be the way of the future. Lets just hope they aren’t crushed by the corporate weight of the W3C and its Semantic Web.

The veteran Tamil film director C.V Sridhar (80), died today (Oct 20) morning (9.45am) at Malar Hospital in Adyar, Chennai. Sridhar who had suffered a stroke a few years back, was admitted into the hospital some days back, when his condition deteriorated.

Sridhar was a romantist and brought about a whiff of freshness into Tamil cinema in the early 60′s. Who can forget his classics like Nenjil Oru Aalayam which was remade into Hindi and became a super hit as Dil Ek Mandir?

Sridhar started as a dialogue writer when his play “Ratha Pasam” was adapted as a film. He made his debut as a director with Kalyanaparisu, a super hit. He started his own production company Chitralaya in 1961 and made a series of commercially successful films.

His formula was simple. He had big stars notably an actor of caliber like Sivaji Ganesan, steamy melodrama and supreme sacrifice which ensured that women audiences thronged his films. All this was laced with a humorous comedy track,preferably by Nagesh and the songs in his films were melodious and chartbusters. Who can forget the soft romantic Kamal- Rajini film Illamai Oonjal Aadirathu (1978)?

Some of his more successful box-office hits in Tamil were- Kadhalike Neramillai, Nenjil Oru Aalayam, Venneer Aadai, Gallata Kalyanam, Ootty Varai Uravu, Illamai Oonjal Aadiruthu, Kalyana Parissu, Aalaimani, Thennilavu,.

Sridhar was the most successful Tamil director in Hindi with super hits like Dil Ek Mandir, Pyaar Kiya Jaa, Nazarana, Gehri Chaal etc He has directed films in Telugu and Kannada.