Blogging should be easier !!

When I first started blogging it was a slow process. I signed up in Jan of 2005. But didnt really figure out how blogging worked. I wondered who would actually know about a little html page which in plain and simple 10 point Ariel font said

"Hi"

Then Balaji told me about his blog and how the thing is purely "word of mouth" publicity and this is the same things as the homepages we used to maintain as graduate students.

Then I slowly started exploring the other tabs on blogger, instead of being restricted to the Posting tab ! Then the exasperation started. Having leant HTML as soon as it became public domain (1993) and having graduated slowly to HTML3, my web authoring skills were impressive till about 1995-1996 and I had one of the few fancy homepages in my Department at College. Still remember those NCSA telnet days and the birth of Netscape, Yahoo, Hotbot, Lycos just to name a few.

Then came "Javascript".. my nemesis. Gone were those easy days of just adding a few tags and changing things on different frames ! You had to learn coding now to keep on par with those other fancy web authors.. That was probably the single event that made me close that page and contend myself to be just another happy surfer !

I still tried to keep pace once in a while, trying to add scripts to have things scroll at the bottom bar or have windows pop up with a userid and password. But it was too taxing for me. I didnt want to go back to school, just to fancy up my webpage.

Now I am back to square one.. except my copy paste skills have improved significantly and I am more determined to give this blog a nicer look and feel. This, especially after I saw Praveen's page with the collapsible menus !! I have been trying to figure out how to do this for a few days and then I got a windfall. Nikhil Raghuram, my friends son, showed up at home one day and he showed me how to do this in three simple steps..

So, now this blog is a work in progress !! If you noticed, the "My cooking" link in the sidebar is now a collapsible menu. I have also been designing my own link buttons for the categories.. here are some of them..


Note that the O's are actually a plate of noodles cooked by yours truly !!



Now I have to work on getting these in the page.. Since I am limited to an hour or so of blogging every day, I will focus on improving the template this week.. The posting and commenting will have to take a backseat for now..Stay tuned !!

How not to woo money - A demo by Tamil Nadu .

Recently saw the post by Kaps on Bill Gates visit to my hometown.

Yes, He went there to meet with some prominent locals.

Just as in any other place, my great home state of Tamil Nadu has two political parties. The ruling and the opposition.

Mr. Gates was in India on the request of a prominent Minister who happens to be affiliated to the opposition party. This guy is actually good, tech savvy and is the brains behind Intel, AMD, NOKIA and others even considering deals in India. Unfortunately, these politicians in India are in the habit of doing good deeds only if

a. they get the credit ! and
b. the other party gets penalized for not doing the good deed !

Wouldn't it have been great to have a bipartisan effort to woo Mr. Gates to Tamil Nadu and unload some stuff off his heavy wallet ? What a Shame !!

This is where we have to learn from the Chinese. We have a long way to go . . .

How old do I think I am ?

You Are 28 Years Old

Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe. 13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world. 20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences. 30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more! 40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

What Age Do You Act?

I took this test after seeing it on Divya's page..
By the way, I am much older than 28 !! and I tried to answer truthfully.. he he...

Lies, damn lies and Statistics ...

My statistics guru used to say, there are three types of lies. Lies, damn lies and statistics. But since Statistics is the chosen method to differentiate between a signal and a noise (declaration of any event), we will have to bring it in to evaluate most things.

I have received a lot of emails on my post about the Astrology using your thumbprint. I had suggested that maybe we need an extensive database and a large sample size to see if there is some hidden formula for lifes events compared to thumbprint features.

On an interesting note, my buddy (yes, my chai partner) who happens to be a Ph.D in particle physics told me some things. They sit in trailers along the tangent of a giant underground tunnel (called a particle accelerator) where sub atomic particles are made to circle the tunnel (the diameter of this tunnel is a few miles, I am not kidding.. I have been to Fermi Lab three times to visit him) and then they are crashed into other particles and the by products are sucked into these tangents on the tunnel using special electric and magnetic fields. I am sorry to bore the average reader with this depth of scientific detail. Lets get to the point .

Here is a conversation we had a long time ago:

me : how many more years are you going to keep doing this thing. I have already finished my degree and I am going to work. Your parents are getting impatient right ?
dost : it is not that straighforward macchhi. i am trying to prove that a certain particle reaction occurs. (when particle A hits B we get particle C + something !!)
me : why does it take that long then ? just find it.
dost : ha ha.. the tunnel is running 24/7 and the data is also being collected 24/7. But most of the time the common well known reactins predominate. The rare ones happen one in 10000 times !
me : You are saying 24/7. I can also do some math. So you should have had this reaction at least once in the last 5 freaking years you have been sitting in this trailer right ?
dost: yes. but just by showing that reaction happened once, no one will give me a degree. I have to show that it happens consistantly (?!). I have to show that it happens at least a 10000 times. That means after collecting 10 billion events, I have to filter out this event and show it happens 10000 / 10 billion times to prove it !!
me : good luck. I will come back a few decades from now and hopefully you will have graduated.

(the guy did graduate and is on his way to a professorship !)

But there you have it folks, sample size matters. If you look at one feature on a thumbprint and associate it with say a short life expectancy, we have to compare that same feature and its variations over a large enough sample size and then maybe we can determine the confidence level in that prediction. I also recieved a lot of mail on how astrology is actually all mathematics. I can see how astronomy is mathematics, and how some parts of astrology like horoscope determination is mathematical, but the predictive part being math is hard for me to believe. That does not mean it is not mathematical, just that my small brain goes into overload at that thought. If you know of any treatise, thesis on the mathematical nature of predictive astrology, please forward it to me !!

Outnumbered 4:1 !!

This is not a sympathy post !!

Ever since my wife gave birth to the baby and started the recovery process, we are getting used to a new diet. One that is focussed on helping the pregnant woman recover. If my mother in law does cook other stuff and we eat it, both of us feel guilty because my wife cannot eat the stuff.

The stuff we eat is being made very tasty, thanks to the transforming power of Indian spices. However, the choice of raw materials is questionable.

I am not complaining about the fact that the whole house smells of garlic, this includes the wife, the kids, me, my M-I-L and did I mention the whole house !! This is okay because I happen to like garlic.

The recent diet has a heavy dose of the Indian Bottle Gourd called "Doodhi" by Indians. The Indians claim that it is as Indian a veggie as they come and it helps pregnant women secrete more MILK !! The web page I linked shows that this vegetable came from Africa to India and all it mentions is that it is a tasty vegetable, sans any special benefits. I am not a big fan of the taste of the Doodhi. It tastes like cabbage, but while my wife and mother in law are running the

"GOT DOODHI ? GOT MILK ?" campaign I am running the

"Say NO to Doodhi !" campaign.

If this vegetable is indeed good for lactation, and possibly branded as one that promotes female hormones of sorts, I should be excluded. Just because I am outnumbered 4:1 in this house, I should not have to eat doodi. But in the meantime, I dont want to stop eating this stuff because I am just fixated on this lactation stuff. Maybe this is just another tasty veggie !! Can anyone else out there reading this, confirm medicinal properties of Doodhi (doodi) ???