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Death

There is a quaint similarity in The Namesake and Anuranan. Both are wrapped in Bengali
ethos and have utilized the shock value of death to the maximum. If the sudden death
of Ashoke in The Namesake rocked the viewer to the core, Rahul's cold hand in Anuranan
leaves him numb. Not too many times have I seen this brilliant usage of death in shocking
the audience.

Anuranan

A nice, slow and breezing movie.
Some of the fine moments in it :
1. When a kindergarten student proposes his Miss(Rituparna).
2. (a shuddering moment) When Raima touches Rahul's hand and finds it cold.
3. When Rituparna wakes up from a nightmare and fights with Rahul.
4. When a Tibetan kid holds Rahul's little finger.

The Tipping Point

Some concepts from The Tipping Point :

1. Dunbar's number - limit on the number of people one can be comfortable with.
2. Principle of Broken windows and its application in reducing New York city crime,

will post others as and when I read them.

Tyranny of niceness

Source
Many psychologists will tell you that niceness is bad for you. Some psychologists even talk about the "tyranny of niceness", the urge that prevents you reaching your full potential. No psychologist is yet on record as saying that niceness can cost you Test matches but, if Australia lose in Perth, Ricky Ponting might well receive a cold call from one.

Ponting and Bush

Ricky ponting looks and speaks like George W. Bush.

Side effects of shaving

Shaving can have numerous side effects, including cuts, abrasions, irritation and the feeling that something is missing. Many side effects can be minimized by using a fresh blade, applying plenty of lubrication, and avoiding pressing down with the razor. A shaving brush can also help. There are many products on the market to get rid of them, they commonly dry the affected area and some help to lift out the trapped hair(s). Some people choose to use only single-blade or wire-wrapped blades that shave farther away from the skin. Others cannot use razors at all and use depilatory shaving powders to dissolve hair above the skin's surface.

Many people traditionally believed that shaving would cause the hair shaved to become thicker and darker. However, this bit of conventional wisdom has been disproven. The resulting stubble only makes the hairs seem to be thicker, as a shaved hair has a blunt end as opposed to the tapered end of an unshaven hair, and because hair is often darker in color near the root. Clinical studies have demonstrated that shaving does not have an effect on hair growth rates or density.^[12]

^{Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaving}

Staring at screens is bad for your eyes

c. Staring at screens is bad for your eyes

Looking at a screen from the same distance for long periods leaves our eyes weak, dry and sore.

(To protect your vision, experts recommend taking a short break from the computer every 20 minutes, walk around. Focussing at different distances strengthens the eye muscles.)

Source : http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/no_one_looks_at_the_screen.cfm

CSS vs Tables

CSS versus tables

For more details on this topic, see Tableless web design.

Back when Netscape Navigator 4 dominated the browser market, the popular solution available for designers to lay out a Web page was by using tables. Often even simple designs for a page would require dozens of tables nested in each other. Many web templates in Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG editors still use this technique today. Navigator 4 didn't support CSS to a useful degree, so it simply wasn't used.

After the browser wars subsided, and the dominant browsers such as Internet Explorer became more W3C compliant, designers started turning toward CSS as an alternate means of laying out their pages. CSS proponents say that tables should be used only for tabular data, not for layout. Using CSS instead of tables also returns HTML to a semantic markup, which helps bots and search engines understand what's going on in a web page. All modern Web browsers support CSS with different degrees of limitations.

However, one of the main points against CSS is that by relying on it exclusively, control is essentially relinquished as each browser has its own quirks which result in a slightly different page display. This is especially a problem as not every browser supports the same subset of CSS rules. For designers who are used to table-based layouts, developing Web sites in CSS often becomes a matter of trying to replicate what can be done with tables, leading some to find CSS design rather cumbersome due to lack of familiarity. For example, at one time it was rather difficult to produce certain design elements, such as vertical positioning, and full-length footers in a design using absolute positions. With the abundance of CSS resources available online today, though, designing with reasonable adherence to standards involves little more than applying CSS 2.1 or CSS 3 to properly structured markup.

These days most modern browsers have solved most of these quirks in CSS rendering and this has made many different CSS layouts possible. However, some people continue to use old browsers, and designers need to keep this in mind, and allow for graceful degrading of pages in older browsers. Most notable among these old browsers are Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5, which, according to some web designers, are becoming the new Netscape Navigator 4 — a block that holds the World Wide Web back from converting to CSS design. However, the W3 Consortium has made CSS in combination with XHTML the standard for web design.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_design

Sehwag is back !

One of the most satisfying songs ever ...

Song by ex-students from XLRI, Jamshedpur.
Download and enjoy :
http://www.jammag.com/mp3s/bodhi/bodhitree_gaand_mein_danda.mp3

Lenovo laptops

Avoid buying them.
I had to replace my battery once since it stopped charging altogether
and now just when the warranty period is over it refuses to start up.

My tryst with ergonomy

Problem : lower back ache.
Solution : lumber support(from Ergoworks/Amaron etc., available in pharma shops)
Exercises : for lower back,abdomen(leg raises,stomach crunches)

Problem : wrist pain in right hand
Cause : a combination of excessive usage of keyboard/mouse/playing table tennis :-)
Solution : Shifted mouse to left hand, wrist support by WristEase,
Exercise : wrist/finger/thumb stretching exercises, push ups



Problem : a combination of neck-ache coupled with upper back ache, which led to back spasm.
Solution : exercises prescribed by an Orthopedic surgeon at Appollo clinic, Sector-56,Gurgaon
and general exercises(climbing stairs at high speed etc.) . A video is also available here.
Also, as long as possible don't use laptop on your work-desk. If needed use with a docking-station or a spare monitor attached externally to your laptop.

Gurgaon vs. Noida

Is there any comparison really?
Noida is well connected internally and to Delhi via buses, cycle rickshaws, auto rickshaws etc.
Gurgaon has no auto rickshaws, very few and expensive cycle rickshaws,
Connectivity to Delhi via buses is pathetic.

Electricity situation is much better in Noida. Roads are well planned, make
right angles. Gurgaon lacks there too. Traffic signals are much more than Gurgaon.

But one thing is in favor of Gurgaon, and that is, at a lot of places its air breathes
much easier and better than Noida. May be because of a huge number of industries
are set up here in Noida.

About smoking

Summary of an essay in the book "The Tipping Point",

it's about how to stop teenage smoking which leads to

smoking addiction.

Key conclusions :

1. it's in the genes, the amount of nicotine you can take.

2. the people who affect the teenagers the most are,

not their parents or other adults, it are other teenagers.

solution : addiction requires crossing a certain threshold

of nicotine you take per day. if cigarette companies

put less nicotine in each cigarette, that threshold would

never be crossed and no one would become an addict.

Windows registry cleanup and disabling autorun

***************
Some malicious softwares can use Autorun to infect your Windows PC.
You can disable this feature using TweakUI on WindowsXp.
If you are not using XP, search www.microsoft.com or google to find out
how to disable it.
****************************
Today I uninstalled a lot of programs on my XP machine, since I thought
a large registry may result in slower performance. After that I was about
to run a registry cleanup tool when I read this :

"
There are a number of problems with the concept of a registry cleaner. Most notably, there is no reliable way for a program to know whether any particular key is 'junk' or not. Windows is closed source, so registry cleaner designers can not know for sure whether any particular key is still being used by Windows or what detrimental effects removing it may have; leading to examples of registry cleaners causing loss of functionality and crashes.

With regards to performance, whilst on Windows 9x computers, it is possible that a very large registry could slow down the computer's startup time; the on-disc structure of the registry is entirely different on the NT line of Operating Systems (including Windows XP and Vista). Slowdown due to registry bloat is thus far less of an issue in modern versions of Windows. More importantly, however, the difference in speed due to the use of a registry cleaner is negligible: rarely do they remove more than a few kilobytes from the total size of the registry. In fact, technology journalist Ed Bott has claimed that no-one has ever succesfully managed to measure any significant performance increase from the use of a a registry cleaner. Any potential user of a registry cleaner must thus balance a probably negligible perfomance increase against a non-zero possibility of system instability.
"
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registry_cleaner

So, I dropped the idea of using a registry cleaner.

Why open source softwares are good for India?

Because India has a huge services industry and an almost non-existent
product-industry in software. Now, advocates of product based companies
abuse services companies with all the venom they ever possessed.
And sometimes rightly so. But an open source model can go very well
with the current software demographics in India. As Ajay Shah wrote
a decade ago :

, "Open source is a profound idea.... The enduring puzzle of India's software companies is their persistent inability to grow from projects to products. Open source is a powerful answer to this problem. Open source reduces the importance of products and raises the importance of services.

With open source software, Anyone can contribute by improving the code -- adding new features, correcting errors, etc. The open source universe avoids the waste involved in 'reinventing the wheel,' which takes place in all software companies. In the open source world, each programmer builds on the work of others before him. This brings down the cost of development."


Source : http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4250

'Indians Are Privately Smart and Publicly Dumb'

In his book Games Indians Play: Why We Are the Way We Are, V. Raghunathan writes about a farmer whose corn won top awards year after year. When a reporter asked about the secret of his success, the farmer attributed it to the fact that he shared his corn with his neighbors. Why, the reporter wondered, would the farmer want to share his seed when those neighbors also competed with him for the prize? The farmer's reply was, "The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbors grew inferior corn, cross-pollination would steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbors do the same."

That Indians often fail to act like this farmer is the principal theme of Raghunathan's book.

Here is the source.

The fastest man on no legs

For more, read here.

Why we flock to India for a bride(Confessions of an NRI)

Some time ago, I was part of a yahoo group consisting mostly of NRIs.
There once started a discussion on why most Indian men go back to India in search
of a bride. Here is an interesting response from one of those Indian men from USA:

"
You want to really know why? Because here we believe in freedom and all these great values
but when it comes to practice Indo Americans fall short of acting on it or maybe because of
race prevented from becoming these values. As a result, they really just care about the
American dollar. How does this tie in with marriage. Well Indian women see Indian men as
second class citizens here in the states. This country the minute you set forth makes you
very aware that you are not important culturally. The white man here especially dates all
our beautiful Indian women yet the Indian men who want to date anyone have problems because
they have been given an inferiority complex and also often are told that they have never
been seen in good light. Ever seen a white man come up to you when you are with their own
kind quite frequently. Do you see an Indian man approaching an Indian girl who is dating a
white guy. Never they have no balls (well most of them). So the truth of the matter is that
the Indian man is forced to go back to India and marry a woman because his status becomes
so high because he has American dollars now. That is probably the only reason it is so easy
to flock back to India and pickup a wife. Of course any parent from India is going to see
that the guy is a dollar sign. Of course luckily we are so traditional as a culture that
even money doesn’t necessarily become the only glue for the relationship well at least
I want to think so.
"

Hard work never killed...

"Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?"
- A quote attributed to various people.

This quote always comes across as a joke on the lazy type.
Whoever dared to think there was something wrong
with working hard, was instantly forced to think of himself
as someone making up excuses.

But the fact is, that hard work actually kills people.
And not only the blue collar people(working hard
physically), but also the white collar ones.

Have a look at this about what has happened/is happening in Japan :

Source : Karoshi
"...during the Bubble Economy, however, when several high-ranking business executives who were still in their prime years suddenly died without any previous sign of illness, that the media began picking up on what appeared to be a new phenomenon."

So next time you want to work hard, think hard :-)
--------------------------------------------------------
Original post on 01-01-2008
Work-related stress can kill, study finds(Added on 23-01-2008)