Personally, 2008 has been quite productive for me in the sense that I did couple of projects in MVC (using CodeIgniter) and was able to go through the basic of LINQ as my intern project was based on ASP.NET + LINQ + SQL Server (the project is still incomplete and a bit buggy as well). It was 2008 that I wrote my first unit tests and since then I have been learning and trying to follow TDD approach. And yes I have not forgot Obama got elected the same year and finally I passed my under-graduation in Information Management (though still not received my final transcript).

But 2008 was kinda nightmare for most parts of the world. Shrinking stock market, booming unemployment, near collapse of Wall Street and global financial system (financial power house like Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG, WaMu, Citi Group are gone or being bailed out by the US government), terrorist attack in Mumbai and overall the whole world experience slow down and recession with financial crisis as never seen the great depression of 1930’s.

My short list of resolutions for 2009

• Design Patterns, IoC, MVC
• Test Driven Development
• Developing REST based application(s)
• Ruby and/or Iron Ruby (But I am not so sure I will get enough time to learn and implement Ruby)
• Maintaining the current momentum of blogging + tweeting
• Getting Zend Certification

And here are few wish lists for 2009

• Get involved in some kind of open source project
• Want to see end of this financial crisis (very low possibility though)
• Want to see some permanent and effective solution of energy crisis in Nepal (feels like I am wishing too much)

I guess my list of new year resolutions are kinda achievable but I can’t do anything about my wish lists because it’s human nature always having desire to get extra and in fact impossible stuffs

So, folks wish me best of luck!

Finally, Happy New Year 2K9 to all!

It was a wonderful experience of hiking from in Shivapuri National Park. A six hours of continuous walk was quite exciting. The hiking program was organized by CodeArts as a refreshment program. We started our journey from Sundarijal at about 10 AM and we finally completed our journey at about 4.30 PM.
We encountered an unexpected event during this hiking. One of the members of CodeArts had bought movie camera and when we were preparing to initialize our core journey from entering gate of Shivapuri National park we were told a movie camera capable of capturing still photo shots would cost us NRs. 3000.00. It was quite ridiculous rule in the sense that nowadays most of the people have a movie camera embedded in a digital still camera or a multimedia mobile handset. The folks at the gate warn us that if we went without paying fee for movie camera and if the guards or military personnel inside the park check us then the movie camera could be seized. Since we were coming from one gate (Sundarijal side) and passing through another gate (Narayanthan) so, it was not feasible and assuring to give the folks at the gate our asset. So our CEO (Mr. Brijendra Joshi) called some known guys (suitable to say doctors) from Nepal Medical College and movie camera was returned to them. It took our 2 hours of our precious time and we formally started out core hiking journey at about 10.45 AM. A real mess due to some shit rules.
After completing the hiking in the national park we did not see any authorized personnel checking anything. So, at last we found that returning the movie camera was just the waste of time.
But don’t worry we did break the rules (of course pathetic ones) by capturing movies from our mobile and digital camera :).
Google Maps Link is here.
Some snapshots of the trip:

A panorama at its best

Sun is shining

A blue grape like thing but not exactly

Its me

What is this?

One can view the photo album here.

Conclusion: A hiking full of fun; will never forget it indeed.