Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 11:15PM When reading articles in Tamil on the iPhone, the font is messed up. The same pages load okay on Firefox and internet explorer.
Considering that the fonts are in UNICODE, it does not make any sense on why this is..
If any of you iPhone Tamil news readers / Bloggers have figured out an answer, kindly let me know.
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Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 11:58PM Today has been a great day.
No, the wife is in her usual weekend clean up mode and the kids are doing the same things they do..
But there has been a marked change in me. No grumpiness for not being able to catch up on lost sleep from the last week.
There has been a positive attitude to things.
The last week has been very tiring with 2 AM phone calls and lots of work.
Decided to download an iPhone App called "sleep cycle".
This app uses the accelerometer in the iPhone, figures out when you are in deep sleep and when you are rolling around in the bed and times it so that you wake up when you are in deep sleep. The alarm sounds are wonderful and they gradually fade in to high volume.
As an added bonus, it keeps all the statistics and allows you to send the graphs to your gmail account!
In all my life no one has ever done a wonderful job of waking me up like this!
Thank you Sleep Cycle!
Thank you iPhone 3GS !
Thank you Technology !
Now all those <6 hour sleep nights are not going to be that bad after all!
There are other reasons for the exuberance.. but that will be explained later..
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3GS, apple, apps, high tech, iphone, sleep, sleep cycle, technology, waking up Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 6:56PM 
The homework assignment for Photo school this week..
Commute!
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 9:20PM When we see comments like "you have way too much time on your hands" after watching the mysore pak or vadam videos, cannot help but smile.
The whole idea behind doing the videos was to show folks that
a. you do not need a lot of time to make it
b. it is not that difficult to make these things
That is why the time was mentioned in the videos. The mysore pak was done in 1 hour and 4 mins (and if the ghee was premade it could be done in 50 mins.) The time it takes for you to drive around to an Indian Restaurant and find mysore pak(you can find Soan Papdi and Haldiram stuff here in stores but not MysorePak), stay in line, pay, come back home is almost an hour plus.
It will also cost you 1$ per piece + gas for that while it costs you 10 cents to make it at home!
The vadam making started at 12:42 and we were done by 1:08, in under 30 minutes! We got 72 pieces for ~$1.5 total! Your other options are to wait for closest friend or relative to get you some from India or buy 20 pieces for $3.99 from the local Indian store.
It would have taken the same time to make 4 times that quantity of the gel and another 10 minutes to spread it out!
Was telling Sangeetha earlier today "Has cooking ones own specialty items become that unfashionable that only people with time to waste or too much time on their hands can do it?"
Is this a phenomena with the younger generation? Eating fast food or buying your food is somehow supposed to be a "time saver" and therefore a cheaper option?
Just think about it!
We cook every night and we take our lunch with us to work. (San always packs my lunch.. also everyday I do call her at lunchtime to have a chat, if not about the food, at least we have a chat). We cook for the kids anyways, so it is a no brainer to spend the 10 minutes to pack lunch. One can always argue that if you get paid enough, the cost of that 10 minutes is more at an hourly rate and therefore buying food is cheaper.
So many recipes are going to be lost. It has been ages since I even smelled some of those divine smells that would come from the kumuti aduppus (charcoal stoves) when my grandma and her aunt would team up to make sweets for the family on a whim!
Just wish I could replay those smells like we replay youtube videos! It doesn't have to be lost. We don't have to rely on MSG and complicated carbonates and coloring agents to add pep to the food we eat.
On a similar note, when we pulled potatoes grown in our backyard and made a simple curry, the smell and taste were orders of magnitude better. It was like being transported to my 10 year old phase, and I was sitting on the floor and my mom was sliding more curry on to my plate from the "ilupa chatti"!
The potatoes looked ugly and gnarled, but the taste was out of this world. The picture perfect potatoes from the local grocery store are practically bland compared to this. We as a consumer would rather have our food look good than taste good.
A lot of the younger generation prefers to buy food than make food and the convenient excuse becomes "you have way too much time on your hands if you are cooking!"
By the way, bloging and videoblogs are easy, especially if you can type 70+ words a minute and you have been doing this a lot.
We all have 168 hours a week. If you spend 42 hours sleeping, 14 hours driving to and from work and running errands over weekend, that leaves you with 112 hours.
If you work 11 hours a day, 5 days a week and another 10 hours over the weekend that takes out 65 hours and you have 47 hours. You spend ~2.5 hours a weekday with your kids and 12 hours with them over the weekend and that is another 17 hours and you still have 30 hours left for eating breakfast, dinner, watching movies, doing dishes, grocery shopping, making that once a week cooking video,etc. no?
Jr., after watching the "Making of Vadaam" video, decided to make a cooking video earlier today (aka irritating your mother video). I did not know about this till San told me. It was hilarious to hear her commentary and the videography.
She adapts, refines, starts this one at the beginning of the Dosai making cycle..Watching this brings happy tears! My little girl is already an expert videographer and cooking aficionado!
You see how a 7 year old can do this by observation (between watching food network and her dad). Next thing you know she will be collecting advertisement money.
Kids today!
ps. You have to have the audio on high to really hear her comments.
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Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 11:48PM Recently a DVD that we got from Blockbuster online did not play on the player. It kept showing "No Disc" and we returned it. The customer service guys at Blockbuster promptly emailed us a e-coupon good for a free movie at a store to compensate.
We do not have a printer at home. So I called the store and said "If I have the e-coupon and can give you the code on the coupon instead of the barcode can you give me a movie?"
The teenage kid who was manning the store said "Think we should be able to do that if you can give me the number"
So off I went to the store, got the movie to the counter and started searching my Inbox for the email on my iPhone.
Spent a precious few minutes searching and almost gave up. Then saw that the email was not from Blockbuster.com but instead from something called webmaster@bbpm....
Then while zooming into the barcode to read the coupon number, there was a lightbulb moment!
Looked at the kid and said "Let me zoom in on the barcode and bring it up horizontally to completely cover my iPhone screen. Can you try to use your scanner and just scan this barcode directly from the phone?"
The kid's eyes light up at the geeky idea and he said "Let us try it!" and
Lo and behold, he was able to use his hand held scanner and directly scan the coupon from the iPhone!
Not only can you photograph any barcode and get prices on it from your iPhone (yes, there is an app called Redlaser which we have that actually does that! you scan the barcode and it shows you item name, compares prices, closest location available etc. etc.) but you can also scan barcodes off the iPhone!
Technology is amazing, isn't it?
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3GS, barcode, blockbuster, high tech, iphone, nerd, technology 