Month: March 2003

Came across a nifty toolbar when I was browsing https://mozdev.org

Its called Stumble Upon The base line says “Word of mouth Web”

StumbleUpon allows you to “stumble upon” great sites that have been highly recommended by friends and community members with interests similar to your own.

It is a very interesting concept and I did stumble upon interesting pages like this one

https://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/2874495.stm

But be warned – After Swati installed it on her Mozilla 1.0 for Linux the browser refused to start, however it runs perfectly on my Mozilla 1.3b on WinXP as well as Linux

Woke up at 5am and hacked away at some totally useless code while listening to the birds gradually waking up and trying to recognise who’s who without looking outside. Returned to the bedroom to wake her up at around 7:30… … ummmmh

Lunch was fabulous Gobi Parathas made by our excellent cook… …

After which Swati and I settled down to watch the movie “Frida” – loved the character, want to read the book.

achitnis‘s daughter has turned 13 congratulations and our blessings to her – she *is* a fine young woman – and best of luck to her father 😉

Was a stand in Forensic Lecturer as a favour to a friend at JNMC during an official inspection 😉

This College is about 80kms from my home and has a nice campus – I am very much tempted to pick up a regular once a week teaching assignment for the next academic year. Forensic Medicine is still the same after 5 years…

Came back home and discovered that Aasim had made some profound statements.

Do children grow up faster these days?

What about the so called innocence? We just try to avoid Aasim seeing the gore, otherwise he is pretty much free to watch news… …

That reminds me – the other day Swati thinking that wild life on NatGeo and Discovery will be safe programs to let him watch, started it, only to find several programs depicting animals engaged in copulation!!

That act is something he is not allowed to watch or question till he is old enough to, BUT I wonder how old is old enough?

Humans are perhaps the only animals in whom sex is a learned behavior and sadly very few learn it right in the first place.

Here are a few random “right start-up” tips which I can think of… …

The most important ingredient for repeated good sex with the same partner is LOVE.

The second most important ingredient is COMMUNICATION – in short ASK 😉

The third ingredient is de-focus the act from COITUS – there much more to it than “wham bham thank you ma’am”

Planned sex is just as good as spontaneous sex, and what follows as a corollary is no sex != no love.

If it hurts – you are not doing it right.

Forget G spot, search out Y spots (Spots which make him/her wonder why are you doing it 😉

Be innovative – a personal fav is the game of “No Touch” – Think what it could be!

Lastly if you really need help – get a good book which tells you how, like “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amazing Sex

Failure is often a stepping stone to success. Mistakes are often stepping stones to utter failure…

Readers Digest when I should be working is perfect vehicle for a guilt trip BUT then there *is* no work to be done.

May be I take life too seriously. How does one learn to live a purposeless life?

Got back from Aasim’s last PT meet of the session. The assessment for him is “Average” for most of the things, “Good” for math, table activity, jigsaw, “Slow” for reading and writing.

If I type in my Gaim (yes he is on local Jabber) asking him to “come here” he will type back “why” – guess that does not count, neither does beating me in Quake III death match counts.

I was actually taken by surprise when to humor him I got into a multi player arena and was fragged three times before I started playing dirty. Sid Carter will be surprised to know this because when he was here Aasim was barely starting out again on Quake after a gap of almost 2 years, no don’t flame be for introducing blood and gore to him.

He has his share of Reader Rabbits and Jumpstart CDs which he plays when he wants.

Unfortunately keyboard from an early age has meant that he is very averse to writing using pencil and paper, same is the problem with reading handwritten text, We intend to remedy this in summer – don’t know how successful we will be.

A while ago, one of my programmers published phpExifRW, A pure PHP class to read and write EXIF data to and from jpeg files. Most distros install PHP which does not have the EXIF extension also there is no way in that extension to write / transfer EXIF data. Add to it the fact that GIMP destroys EXIF data when you save a jpeg (note: convert from ImageMagicK preserves EXIF info)

While looking thru the download stats of our other programs I noticed that our “Open Source Business Model” page showed up as a top entry page, little bit of investigating revealed that this page was mention in the World News section of Linux Magazine in March here

Lastly came across this in Linux For You
RMS when asked Then how does one make money out of developing software? replied I dont know if they do, and it is not important

Wonder what to call it, arrogance to the point of being assnine or plain simple ego trip…

“the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”

Samuel P. Huntington

Taken from “Where is Raed” link picked up from khorgath

If feel so infinitely blessed, all I have to worry about is that the dial-up connection sux, our washing machine needs a change. I need a holiday, will our TV be repaired by Sunday when India plays Australia

The only thing that could have possibly stopped this war was presence of a bigger bully . The erstwhile USSR did serve a useful purpose. Today there is no one in the world who can talk back to USA the way Khrushchev did at the time of Cuban missile crisis

My knowledge of the Cuban missile crisis is more or less limited to what my Dad told me as a teenager – but a cursory reading on the web confirms most of the things.

More saddening is the fact that some of the local media and politicians are using this as an opportunity to rattle their sabres and rankle up communal passion.

There still is hope for this world?

An unexpected thunderstorm today morning zapped Aasim’s PC, 3 ports on my main switch and a network card.

It also fried the router / repeater at my cable guy, several modems at VSNL are also dead – I am stuck with a really lousy dial up again

What does one do for surge protection via network cables?