I am now a married man!

The marriage ceremony took place at Kalaafaanu School, Male' at 20:15 last night. Close family members and friends were present as the "gaazee" carried out the marriage ceremony. My friends Nishan and Mugay served as the two legal witnesses for the entire marriage process. The wedding celebration dinner was held right afterwards. Much of our family and friends attended the gathering and contributed to a friendly and fun time together. Apart from the inconvenience of having to stand at the entrance for over 2 hours, we were thrilled with the events of the night. There certainly was an interesting mix of emotions on display - happiness, sorrow and a lot of excitement...

The night was the successful culmination of almost two tiring weeks of hard work on preparations; marriage application and processing, preparing dinner invitation lists, creating invitation cards, securing a venue for the party, hiring a caterer and a lot more of countless other details. My brother and M flew in to Male' and contributed a sizable chunk of the work that went into the event. Nishan with his photography workplace ProStudio, generously provided the backdrop creation and photography services. Above all, I really appreciate all the extra effort that mom and dad pulled in to get everything smooth and enjoyable.

Anyways, the day marks the beginning of a new chapter in my life. Wish us the best of luck in the journey ahead!

This goes out to someone special that has stormed into my life, bringing along with her a miscellany of most awesome wonders...

Oh boy Oh boy Oh boy! I've got a four week break away from the university starting yesterday. I am so glad I don?t have to wake up early morning and I could even numb my mind from the usual bombardment of information that I subject my poor brain to everyday. Anyway, a timeout from studies to settle other matters queuing up in my life seems to be an essential step right now.

There seems to be a gazillion projects Technova needs to handle and finish now. We are currently working on several projects including websites for National Center for Information Technology and Miadhu Daily newspaper. I also have one project lingering from the days I was freelancing earlier this year after I resigned from Itek Pvt Ltd (a business I had co-founded and worked under since 1999). The holidays have given me time to dive back into programming.

I can now spare chunks of time to work on my pet projects as well. There are quite a few technical experiments I have wanted to undertake over the past few months - like I could finally take out that PIC chip I've had stashed in my cupboard and get on with experimenting with microcontroller programming. I think my electronics course covers PIC programming next semester so this hopefully will be beneficial for then too. This year has also seen the coming of what has been named "Web 2.0" and other new technologies that am just dying to read up on and familiarize myself towards fluency. The science book I am trying to write can also begin with new vigor and maybe reach a conclusion.

The winter holidays coincides with the beginning of a period that my horoscope calls an excellent time for love and relationships. So hoping that the astrologer is right, I?ve decided to head out to acquire new female companionship ( that's ?female companionship? as in "girlfriend"!). This concludes a period of conscious aversion to females. Hehe.

It's the weekend finally and I get to sleep a little (a lot?) longer. I woke up today to the sound of my Pocket PC declaring that it was the first of Ramazan. I am not sure how it came up with that announcement but today certainly is not the first of Ramazan - I should get around to reconfiguring Pocket Islam for the correct dates and location.

Past week has had many ups and downs. I finally got my luggage back about 3 days ago - yes, after 4 long days of waiting empty handed. It was such a relief to get all my gear back intact and totally made my day. Sadly, however, one of mom's kulhikaajaa packets had burst open and spread all over my clothes and I ended up vacuuming the clothes and the room. The airline isn't offering any compensation though and hasn't responded to my emails. Anyway, I don't think I'll fly Qatar Airways from now on.

On the same day, my girlfriend of 4 years came online after successfully avoiding me for almost a month to kindly declare that after a long period of reflection and thought, she didn't think we should continue the relationship anymore. Interestingly I wasn't surprised or hurt or depressed - I guess I had gone through all the scenarios in the weeks she avoided me. She has her own problems - studies, family, work and all of the rest of lifes confusing blessings to worry about. Well, I am free and single now... so, girls: let the flirting begin!

The enrolment, modules selection, health registration and all the other miscellaneous registration processes have also been dealth with during last week. I will be doing modules on cybernetics, maths, electronics, internet, software engineering and programming for the next year. Studies begin Monday and I am quite looking forward to it. Hopefully this will tickle my mind more than work has for the oh-so-many years. My tutor is a Dr. X. Hong specialising in cybernetics and seems to be a nice person. Well, I hope she is. She is supposed to be monitoring my academic and personal performance throughout the year and I surely don't want to be in her bad books when I need some favour or exemption.

My flat mates are a nice bunch. Everyone seems to get along with each other fine. Everyone's been nice to me and quite helpful too. Sadly, the cat has got my tongue so I end up keeping quiet most of the time. I have yet to figure out this introvertedness in me - maybe it's intimidation, maybe insecurity or maybe boredom. I have always considered myself to be an extrovert, confident and talkative but then again I think I've always taken a while to warm up to new people and not just foriegners.

Enough of my mundane blabbing for the time being. Tata.