If I had a magic wand...

...I would dissolve all this fog over Delhi's skies. It depresses me
beyond limit.

Excerpts from Tibetan journey - a book by George N. Patterson

I have been fascinated with Tibet and its people since the
day I visited Mcleodgunj. So, when I saw this book named
Tibetan Journey, I had to pick it up. In fact, I picked
up another one as well, named Among the Tibetans.
But I couldn't bring myself to like the later at all because
of its sarcastic tone.

As far as the former is concerned, even that is not the
stuff which can be called - un-put-downable but after
reading few initial pages in sequence, I read few randomly
and eventually settled for reading it in the reverse order.
That made it slightly more interesting.

It is written by George N. Patterson, a Christian missionary
in Tibet at that time. He journeyed from Tibet to India to
be out of the Chinese clutches, which were about to grab
Tibet, in 1950.

The author was well versed with the local Kham dialect,
and it shows in his understanding of the local culture and
customs. Written in a humorous tone, the book is worth
one read at least, though in a reverse order :-).

Here are few excerpts :

.........
Our deliverance from the jaws of death had given
me an appetite, or perhaps just made me more
conscious of the digestive function, and I gave orders
to dismount for something to eat at a house which
suddenly thrust itself at us from amongst the trees.
.........
It was an iron bridge-at least , its name meant "Iron Bridge".
The iron was conspicuous by its absence and the bridge almost
equally so. The misnomer disturbed my aesthetic appreciation and
I asked the guide why it should be thus named.
...........
"How do you do?" we Britished.
...........

Setting Free Download Manager as your default Download handler in FireFox

How to set up Free Download Manager as your default Download handler/manager/application
in firefox :
Go to :
Options -> Download Options -> Monitoring

Under the title Monitor, select the checkbox in front of Firefox.
That's it.

Two things you can do with Yahoo! but not with Google

Here is the original Post.


1. Specifiy the order of search keywords in queries

Say you want only web pages where word x comes before y but not vice versa, then just put the search query in Square Brackets. An example:

[Sylvester Stallone] - will only return web pages where the word Sylvester appear before Stallone.

2. linkdomain - An undocumented Yahoo Web search operator.

A quick question - Can you find the number of articles on Wikipedia website that link to CNN.com ? It’s almost impossible to get this data from Google but you can do so quite easily in Yahoo! with the incredibly useful linkdomain operator. The answer is:

linkdomain:cnn.com site:wikipedia.org

Vampire Electronics Suck!

From Environmental Graffiti :
.........
Recent studies suggest almost 5% of all energy used in the US goes towards standby power. With new consumer gadgets, one of the biggest “vampires”, coming out all the time, that amount could reach 20% within three years. Currently almost $4 billion a year is used to power devices that aren’t being used.
.........

Read More Here.