Cricket is a lonely game, lonelier to be preciese

Just to quote from an article about this book :

By His Own Hand: A Study of Cricket's Suicides
by David Frith


Some excerpts :



"Tension and psychological stress in cricket are greater than in most other sports," it cannot be dismissed out of hand. Especially when he says that findings show the suicide-rate among professional cricketers around the world is higher than in any other sport.

"Only superficially is cricket a team game. It is an individual game, and a lonely one. The player has to work out his own solutions in his playing days, and after retirement train himself not to dwell on the past too much."

David Frith's By His Own Hand is a study of some 80 cricketers who committed suicide, and few write with his breadth of vision and depth of knowledge.

"Cricketers are vulnerable because the game attracts sensitive men of aesthetic temperament, the very men who are, in the end, least well served by it."

Jodhaa Akbar

Forget the historical correctness, no one is sure about it.
Watch it as a work of fiction, and you will love it.

Another quote couplet

Submit and be saved. - Jesus Christ
Defy and be damned. - Karl Marx

From the prologue of "Tibetan Journey", a book by George N. Patterson.

A quote couplet

"Life is unfair, get used to it." - Bill Gates

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. "
- George Bernard Shaw

But Bill Gates has made a lot of progress Mr. Shaw, and not only for himself but many
others as well. Or hasn't he?

P/E ratios

I was just comparing P/E ratios for the same company(ies) in various publications.

	Moneycontrol	Rediff Money	Times-of-India
Bharti Airtel	30.02	42.67	29.7
Reliance Industries	20.49	32.48	19.8

So, there is a clear difference. Moneycontrol and Times calculate PE based on trailing twelve
months whereas Rediff calculates based on exactly an year ago.

For e.g. a company A has following quarterly earnings :
Mar'06 : x
June'06 : y
Sep'06 : z
Dec'06 : w
Mar'07 : p
June'07 : q
Sep'07 : r
Dec'07 : s

So, to calculate P/E today(Feb'2008), Rediff would take E = x+y+z+w but Moneycontrol
would take it as E = p+q+r+s.

pagerank of fundooquotes.com

Google pagerank of fundooquotes is 1/10 now.

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.