Shandy's Blog

The Namaste Restaurant is a relatively new restaurant and is part of the Hotel Renuka situated on Galle Road. It is located in the northern of the two buildings.

When we arrived around 19:00 there were a few tables already taken. The drinks menu was delivered promptly and I ordered 3 coins lager and my wife a fresh lime soda. There was an excellent choice of curries on the food menu and it tooks us some minutes to come to a decision.

I ordered Butter Chicken Masala, Allo Gobi Masala and my wife ordered Gosht Taar Korma. We ordered Steamed Basmati Rice and Paratha & Garlic Naan. We were served with complementory plain & spicy popadoms with three accompyments, rata, (lemon tasting) chutney & one other I couldn't identify. I have to say the meal was magnificant. As good as anything I have had so far in Sri Lanka. Tasting not disimilar to the type of curry you can get in the UK the curry was spiced to perfection, hot but not overly so. Once we had finished my wife ordered Creme Caramel & I ordered a coffee.

The bill came to 2400 rupees (around £13). The service throughout was excellent and even the bill arrived promptly. We both agreed that this is probably one of the best restaurants we have been to so far in Colombo. It is one we certainly shall be coming back to again and although not the cheapest it is certainly worth paying the little extra compared with other, similarly styled restaurants.

On Friday evening we went out for a meal at the Palmyrah Restaurant, situated at the Hotel Renuka on Galle Road. This was our second visit to the restaurant, our first having been almost 12 months ago. Since then the hotel and restaurant went under some refurbishment and it was only in the last month or so we had noticed it was open again.

The Palmyrah restaurant is situated in the southern most of Hotel Renuka's two buildings. You get to it by going down the stairs opposite the entrance doors in the lobby. At the time we arrived, around 19:30 there were only a couple of tables taken out of the 20 or so in the restaurant. We were served with a drinks menu within a minute or so of being seated and both my wife and myself opted to drink 3 coins lager. The waiter was prompt to offer us the food menu which offers mainly Sri Lankan food but there is a good choice of western style meals too. The Sri Lankan food was Jaffna based according to the menu, which also explained that the Palmyrah was a plam tree that groows freely in the Jaffna region of Sri Lanka.

The waiter turned up promptly once we place the menus down on the table. I ordered the crab meat curry (whole crab curry was also available) and some saffron rice and my wife ordered the Fillet Steak Princess, medium rare. Whilst we were waiting for our meal we were served with what can only be described as a sort of spicey bovril. It came in a small cup and was accompanied by two varieties of popadoms, plain and spicey. When I asked the waiter waht the liquid was he said a name that sounded like Rassim. Perhaps some of the Sri Lankan readers of my blog can hazard a guess as to what it actually was? My wife was not keen on it but I really like it. The popadoms were excellent. Both were complimentory. Within around 15 minutes the food arrived. My meal was very pleasant, if a little on the small side but then generally with Sri Lanka food you order several different dishes to go with the main rice dish unlike the single one I ordered. My wife said her steak was cooked to perfection and her portion was too large to finish.

During the course of the meal music was playing in the background at a volume it was easy to talk over. The waiters were very attentive without fawning over us. In fact the service was so good I left a tip even though there was a service charge added to the bill (along with the usual government tax). The only blemish was it took two attempts to get the bill and it arrived at least 15 minutes after we first asked for it. A minor detail though. The bill for the meal & drinks came to around 1700 rupees (around £9)

In summary an excellent restaurant where we will come again without hesitation.

Well yesterday I got a most welcome email with the news that I have been made a VB MVP for another year. Its certainly a great honour and I am very thankful for Microsoft (MS) for recognising the contribution I make to VB via my postings at vbCity. I always feel a certain awe when I see the names of some of the other MVPs next to mine. Some of these guys really are the movers and shakers in the software development world. Although they are in a different league to me and my meagre VB talents it nice to see that MS recognise those of us , perhaps less talented, but who are prepared to put a lot of time and effort making use of what talents we do have volunteering to help other developers by answering some of the simpler queries they have.

There are many benefits given to MVPs and I have immediately taken MS up on one of them and that is by enrolling into the MVP academy, an on-line area for teaching MVPs new skills. I have enrolled for the basic VB.NET & XML courses and am really looking forward to them. They both start tomorrow and run until until the middle of May.

Another benefit of being an MVP is getting a choice of 1 year's free MSDN Universal or Technet Plus subscription. I have signed up for another year of MSDN Universal subscription on DVD.

MVPs also get $150 to spend in the Microsoft Store. I spent $125 of mine today getting:

• A copy of Age of Mythology: The Titans Expansion
• GrandPaws Brown Plush Bear - for my wife, honest ;-)
• Microsoft Custom 3D USB Drive (128MB) - Exclusively designed for Microsoft, this is a high-speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive
• Microsoft Tech kit. This Tech Kit includes a 4-port USB hub, a retractable ethernet cable, retractable earbuds and a USB computer light packaged in a black zip-around case with the Microsoft logo printed on the case in silver.
• Software Project Survival Guide
• 1 Velocity Black and 1 Velocity Blue Ballpoint. I got one of these last year and lost it, hence the order for two this time. They are really nice pens that have a spring mechanism in them so they push up into a around 2/3 the size of a normal pen and hence fit easily into a pocket.

Other benefits include getting an invitation to both the Asia MVP Regional Summit 2005 and the MVP Global Summit. I am certainly going to the Asia one later this month and hope to get to the global one in Sep/Oct.

Each month I try to post a personal review of what happened at vbCity during the previous month and this month is no exception :)

Helper Of The Month (HOTM)

Congratulations to Arnaldo Sandoval aka rock for winning the March 2005 HOTM. This month was another really close contest between Arnaldo & Ben Spencer, aka Spebby. It was literally neck and neck untilthe last few hours when Arnaldo managed to win by only about 10 posts or so.

.NET Fella

Congratulations to David Wilburn aka doWhileSomething for winning the March 2005 .NET Fella Award. David is one of out more recent members , having joined within the last 6 months. David is already creeping up the HOTM list and I think it may not be too much longer before he is vying for HOTM!

Newsletters

Just one devCity Newsletters was sent out in March, on March 10th. We are always on the lookout for people to write articles for our newsletter so if you would like to get involved please contact Ged Mead, aka xTab

vbCity sends out a community newsletter email once a month, usually around the last week. All registered vbCity members can choose to receive it by going to their profile, selecting preferences and then ticking the Yes, send me monthly Community Update mailing checkbox. You might notice some items from this post appear in the newsletter!

Site News

Serge added a few new facilities for the moderators this last month. These were mainly providing statistics about vbCity like top .NET posters etc. Serge opened up a real can of worms when he gave us these and asked us if we wanted any others. He now has a long list to check through :)

Serge also introduced a new forum, .NET 2005 Beta so that there is a specific place to post queries about .NET Framework v2 and VS 2005.

Leader News

Each month our resident genealogist, Wonkotsane digs up some fascinating and little known facts about our new leaders and this month it was the turn of rock, aka Viscount Arnaldo

Just to prove that occasionally the vbCity leaders do have a life outside of software & vbCity Chris Manning, aka betrl8thanever was away for a short while on a recent deep sea fishing trip.

We also lost Arno, aka breakfast3001 for a few weeks whilst he spent some time taking his exams. The good news is that Arno passed with 78.6%. Well done Arno.

Another of our younger moderators, Robert aka xterra made a welcome return to the moderator's lounge after a long absence. Robert promised to pop by a bit more regularly and we all hope he'll stick to his promise :)

I also hope Richard, aka rjhare enjoyed his holiday at Burnham-On-Sea. Just before Richie went on holiday he found time to meet up with fellow vbCity leader Stuart aka wonkotsane, and ex-vbCity leader Tim aka edward. Stuart posted on his blog about the Meeting Richie & Edward

For more info about the leaders have a look at the vbCity Blogs where some of us are blogging.

Other News

One of most popular post in the vbCity Lounge Forum was Things that have irritated you today!, a thread that simply allowed our members to vent out what sort of things had been irritating them during the day!

The vbCity Introduce Yourself forum continued to be popular and has provided an excellent insight into some of the vbCity member's other interests. I found David Jeavons entry particularly interesting. David is currently quite close to the top of our HOTM list but I knew relatively little about him until this post.

If you haven't already entered our Free Competition where 3 full developer licences for Dockplus are up for grabs. Full details of the competiion are available on the Olvio web site, DevCity.Net Competition for PlusDock 1.0. I've certainly entered and the deadline has been extended to April 10th!

From The Archives

Each month I'm going to try and bring up an interesting thread from the vbCity archives. This month I thought I'd mention, Do you have an inney or an outey?....Bevel border, that is!!. I would imagine this is a thread known to most of the regulars at vbCity who have been around a few years but may not be known to some of our neweer members. I never knew Amy Owen who started the thread as she left vbCity before I joined but I did know the other two main contributers, Jeff Lingis breifly and Edward Moth (aka Tim Dutton) fairly well. To me, this thread is all about what vbCity is all about. A good discussion on a topic with some friendly banter and amusing inuendo thrown in for good measure.

At the end of January we had a total of around 393000 posts and 139000 registered users at vbCity.