Starlight:: Mensaweekend 8 was nothing but relaxing and enjoying the glorious weather:: rain. the rain would not let us go anywhere. we did not feel like going anywhere. so, we sat at home and revised most of our movie collection while munching on steaming hot curry-puffs and finger food. mmm!!
so, since i don't have much to yak about, let me tell you about this black-tie dinner we attended a few weeks back. apparently citrix made a substantial contribution to this charity called the starlight foundation, along with many other companies. to pay compliments to the companies, and to attract more fund raising IT companies, starlight had organized this dinner along with a quiz contest:: well, mensa-type quiz (which is not really real quiz anyway imo). the event turned out to be a big success with 61 companies attending the dinner, with one or two tables each. we ended up being somewhere in mid twenties, e-bay won the contest. hey now, atleast we were ahead of apple, google, and microsoft. the reason i went ranting about the whole thing is coz i have some pickies from the event and wanted to show you some of the guys at the sydney office. martin, the head of sydney office (and the head of CTO office) and james (director of communications) were there as well. check the photo tags. will probably upload more pickies of the eng group [later] from some of the group lunches, but untill then, this'll do.
Jenolen Caves:: Week 7jenolen is an amazingly colorful cave system with a multiple layers of involved exploration:: that was the gist of what most people in the office here had to say. the caves not only stood up to that explanation displaying a plethora of contorted decorations but also catered to the inquisitive explorers with a system called adventure caving. its practically loading up on a few basic necessities, like a rope, a set of clutches, a pickax, and a few energizer bars, and start exploring for new caves.
since most part of the cave system is relatively unexplored, the area is yours to explore. you now have the chance to creep through any small dark hole you find in the mountain or an existing cave and figure out if it leads anywhere. if it does, well, you've got a cave named after you. if this motivates you enough, then consider the risks. the hole might be a small opening at the roof of a big, grand giant of a cave (like the mines of moria) and one wrong step, you come crashing down in a near-abysmal pit before some stalagmite-filled rockbed breaks your fall. or the hole might lead you through a long tunnel of air gap, and into a labyrinth of openings that are difficult to maneuver with your current abseiling skills, in which case, good luck with those energizer bars for the next few months before some one, who might accidently make the same mistakes you did, rescues you. the whole 'unsupervised crawling into miniscule dark holes without much knowledge of what might have made it' kinda thing is not for me. so, i stuck to 'site-seeing' the already explored ones.
of the bunch of caves that we could trip through, we chose the lucas and the temple of baal. the lucas cave is one of the largest in the cave system and was named after the person who found it. it is also the most famous one for its broken column (pic above). the river which runs underneath displaces rocks from time to time and the numerous columns that are formed from the stalactite-stalagmite combinations are broken due to the rock movements. you probably also notice the borders of the rock sheets in the above pic.
the temple of baal is the most colorful one. its nameology is intricate and fascinating, but difficult to explain without pickies. so, i've added a bit more detail in my pickies' decription. all-in-all, it was an equisite panorama to withhold.
the funny thing was:: i was walking a few steps ahead of pj in the lucas cave, and i suddenly hear laughing and excited talking. i look back to see that he is deeply involved in a conversation with someone in nepalese. while in the cave, pj manages to meet his old nepalese chum from high school. wtf? they both haven't seen/kept in touch/talked/emailed or even known each other's whereabouts for the past 16 years. and now, they meet inside this creepy little cave, recognize each other in the dark, and pickup where they left off. no, really... wtf? *shake my head* unbelievable!!
