Cafe Terra in Koramangala is now my favourite restaurant in Bangalore. If you enjoy European food, you’ll love it too.

They’ve got the full blown English breakfast — Scrambled eggs, Toast, Sausages, Fried Potato and of course, Tea. There’s also a Belgian variety which comes with Waffles and/or Muffins. Just perfect for a laid back weekend breakfast.

Don’t let the name fool you though, it’s a pretty good lunch/dinner place too. They’ve got a nice selection of omelettes (try the Chicken or the Ham & Mushroom varieties) and an omelette here is a meal in itself. The menu is not restricted to European food only: they have got some finger-licking good Thai, Sri Lankan(!), Tibetan, etc. dishes too. Have a look at the (nearly) complete menu at their website.

The food, excellent as it is, is not the only thing going for the place. The ambience is unbeatable. It’s a small room with six to seven simple tables surrounded by a sober decor and you tend to feel relaxed the moment you enter it. And it’s got a reasonably good collection of comic books to keep you company. Whatanidea!

The place is nearly empty most of the time. This has gotten me worried that it might close down . So I’ve decided to patronise it, even at the risk of getting too many people there thus spoiling the very thing I like about it. You can find directions to get there at their website.

…a place where you can pick up girls on IRC!

Lately I have become quite fond of one line descriptions of anything and everything. Thinking of Bangalore this morning, this struck me.

No, really, it actually happened to me! No, I did not pick up any girl on IRC: I was lurking around on #bangalore on DALNet when this dude PMs me with “ASL?”; he was there to pick up girls and told me as much. I don’t know if he met with any success, but Bangalore is one of the few cities where he actually has a chance.

Starts tomorrow, 19th April 2007. Register yourself. See you there.

I was at the Yahoo! Open Hack Day this weekend with my friend and colleague Sundar. For the most part, it was a lot of fun.

The hacking started at 5pm on Friday and went on till 5pm on Saturday. I had finished my hacks by late night and got really bored from then. Tired too. It seems I am becoming old quite fast! There were times when I could did go without without sleep for 60 hours straight and here I was tired in just half as much.

I did a couple hacks by myself:

Google Search Assist: An implementation of Yahoo! Search Assist for Google. Well, almost.

Del.icio.us Tag Management: A set of ruby scripts that allow you to deal with your tags in del.icio.us in a more automated fashion. The first script identifies duplicates like “movie” and “movies”, asks you which to keep and automatically renames all tags accordingly. The second script allows you to keep del.icio.us tag bundles updated.

and helped Sundar a bit with another hack:

Zooky: Find precise answers related to local, movies, restaurants, ringtones, ATMs, and a lot more info. You can also ask or tell your friends about your find! All from within Y! Messenger whether they’re online or not. We’ll probably be releasing an enhanced version of this in the future.

I won the Best “Really Needs an Interface” hack award for the del.icio.us tag. Christian Heilmann, a UI guru from Yahoo! UK gave me a book (that he co-wrote) as the prize. The book is, aptly, about web interfaces. Thanks, Chris!

Even better than the award was a comment I got about the same del.icio.us hack: “that’s the only hack among all the hacks here that I see myself using.” Thanks, Naseer!

Check out all the hacks that were presented, there sure were some very interesting ones: results of the Open Hack Day Bangalore 2007.

The weather, I mean. But with such a climate one cannot really experience anything else. I was at proto.in for the last couple of days and couldn’t wait to get back into an air-conditioned room not five minutes after I was out of one. So basically, Chennai weather sucks. Big time. Most terrible. Un-liveable. Even Hyderabad weather sucks way less than Chennai’s. Enough said.

I love Bangalore, it is my Paradise City!