low expectations when it comes to the salary 
For the past few days, I have been making yogurt at my home. I love having curd and flattened rice (chudaa or poha) in the mornings. However, buying yogurt from the market was getting a bit troublesome, so I decided to make the curd at home itself.
I had 3 failed experiments before I finally got the process perfected (thanks to my mother for the tips). According to my mother, the cool weather at Bangalore is not conducive for the preparation of yogurt.
Here are the steps
In a few hours, you will have fresh, tasty yogurt. I usually put the yogurt into the milk at night and I have yogurt by next morning. Remember to put the yogurt into the refrigerator once it is set.
Today was a funky sort day. On the work front, I did not accomplish much. I had been following the GTD methodology, but I have become tacky in doing my reviews and followups. I will fix that.
In my personal life, I am going through a rough patch. Not much to talk about there, but let us just say that I am living through interesting times, I am sure I will be a better person after passing through this patch in life.
Let us see what else is happening around the world.
The old iphones seem to be more valuable than the newer and cheaper iphones (half the price at $199), as the older iphones are easier to crack.
In her blog titles "Readin', Ritin', and Rithmetic, by Rote" , Vicki mentions that rote memorization is useless. I am not sure if memorization can be dismissed easily. I think having the raw data in your memory helps in solving a problem at hand faster.
I came across this small story by Douglas Adams today - The Private Life of Genghis Khan.
Here are some interesting fractions I came across today.
If you work on a Unix system, you can use bc to check this out
rshekhar|~$ bc bc 1.06 scale=40 1/81 .0123456790123456790123456790123456790123 1000/998999 .0010010020030050080130210340550891442333
I came across 10 Lessons of an MIT Education, an interesting document on scribd. Some good parts
Links
"Mr Beeblebrox, sir," said the insect in awed wonder, "you're so weird you should be in movies."
"Yeah," said Zaphod patting the thing on a glittering pink wing,"and you, baby, should be in real life."
These 2 headlines are so strange, they should be in the movies. Exercise caution when clicking on the links if you are surrounded by weird people
A few days back, the California Supreme Court overturned a ban on same-sex marriage. Just a few moments ago, I saw the news that Ellen DeGeneres and longtime girlfriend Portia de Rossi are jumping at the chance to get married. However, none of these things are important. The important thing is the comments for the story on DeGeneres and de Rossi getting married. If you are too lazy to click, I will list some of them
Now, on to the good ones (there are only a few of those)
What can you do
Insightful comment by Google's Marissa Mayer
Instant feedback enables a faster learning curve. She mentioned digital photography and Wikipedia as examples of how instant gratification helps drive people to become expert users faster. "If you have each transaction take less time, you have expert users more satisfied. You want lots of small and fast interactions if speed is important," she added.
Links:
I have posted a small article on my website about how a startup can scale up with MySQL. This article is derived from an impromptu talk that I did in BarCamp Bangalore 5.
Hopefully you will find it useful.
I am not sure when I got into this phase of my life. I was taking things passively and letting life pass me by, instead of making life happen.
This moment sounds an end to this phase. Things are not "Not my problem." anymore.
Time right now is :Fri Apr 11 03:27:48 PDT 2008
After a long time, I tackled under-documented php code and I came out victorious after wrangling with it for 2 nights (around 4 hours of work each night).
Joomla! is the cms I use to run my site and it has proven to be good software. There is a good collection of Joomla extensions, but quite a lot of the extensions are under dubious licenses and don't do all the work I want. Hence the need to get a clue on how to make joomla extensions.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its fragrance in the desert air
Nothing teaches us more about life than death itself. Journalist Beate Lakotta and photographer Walter Schels asked 24 terminally ill people if they could accompany them during their last weeks and days. From these vigils came a series of insightful descriptions and photographic portraits taken before and after death.
This sombre series of portraits taken of people before and after they had died is a challenging and poignant study. The work by German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta, who recorded interviews with the subjects in their final days, reveals much about dying - and living
Link: Life before death
I had to do some fiddling around with putting unicode characters in html text. Basically, I wanted to put the √ and ✗ characters in the html doc I was prepearing. I found these links useful
In January last year, President Hu Jintao reportedly ordered officials to regulate the internet better and "purify the online environment" ensuring that online information is "healthy" and "ethically inspiring".
Seen on BBC's website
low expectations when it comes to the salary
It has been a long time since I stopped playing new computer game - I have not yet played the Half Life 2 (the one that was released on the Source game engine). I rarely follow any new game releases and YET this game demo has me mesmerized.
The game that I am talking about is the Crayon Physics Deluxe which has a demo on youtube. The game allows you to draw objects and those objects become part of the game. The goal is to create objects that propel a ball toward a star. I know, this sounds pretty simplistic, but check out the demo before you make a judgment.
Links: