Today was a busy day for myself and the other guys. I was busy at the UCSC, preparing few lecture notes that I didn't have time to do over the week, as well as conducting lectures and instructing the practical. The other guys were busy at BMICH explaining and demonstrating to the large crowd that turned up for the last day of the ASCIO exhibition.
I got a call from Nadeeka around 6:00p asking me when I'd come over there. We had planned to meet up after the exhibition to go out and eat, drink and chit chat. "I'll be there soon" was all I could tell him. The class had just finished, but my good friend Vinesh had come over to UCSC and was trying to setup MRTG , a network monitoring tool for his new office. He had gotten some weird error on Redhat when he had tried it and now I was getting a similar error on a freshly installed Mepis (Debian like). Ah! it suddenly hit me... the FIREWALL, stupid dog! Turning off the the Guard Dog firewall rules seemed to fix it. Wonderful! I can make it on time before the exhibition ends.
I got there around 7:00 o' clock and since there wasn't much time decided to check out the Epsi stall again. They had some pretty cool stuff like a slim barebone, Gaming machines, color PDA's with Wi-Fi etc. Met a couple old friends/clients I used to work with so it was all good :) My only regret was not having time to walk in to the Microsoft stall with my RedHat cap on (for the record I almost was going to do that but my friends stopped me).
Everything came to a standstill at 8 o'clock sharp as air conditioning was turned off and people started packing. Soon we got to know that we had to leave SBMICH premises and leave behind the stuff to be collected tomorrow.
We headed straight to this small Chinese restaurant in Narahenpita, adjoining the highway (you know the really slow highway with lots of traffic lights :P) I thought the place to be quite crowded for a Sunday evening with a lot of chatter boxes spread out across the room. We managed to find a corner table that was big enough for the 7 of us. Some nice, constructive and hopefully productive conversations came out as we drank away a couple of Beer bottles, while chewing away plates and plates of friend rice.
Dining time was over at about 11 O' clock and we headed home, hoping to meet again soon. Considering some recent developments ;), I have a feeling we'll be able to keep to this promise.