New Year's Eve Special Broadcast :-)
Ok ,so i am a self-confessed workaholic . Today is the 31st December 2003 , the last day of a month and a year and the last time when the last date of a year will match my age...in gregorian calendar years of course.And i am at work.So , it's a good thing i am a procrastinator . I wanted to blog yesterday and could NOT have written that opening line but ...... read the earlier sentence.And now ,since you are able to continue reading - you have hopelessly failed the turing test as ,if you had NOT failed it, you would have been banished into an eternal loop - which probably lands you pat in the middle of the sapien species that can read .You see it always feels nice and warm to be read by a fellow human being- what with all the dangers lurking of terminators !

Alright , i admit i find no segue to get myself to the topic that i want to write about so i dive right in w/o anymore preambles and w. sharp laser like focus ( so help me god ): Alan Sandage said the greatest virtue is discipline.However , it took me sometime to even understand what that means.Coz, i read that in "The Red Limit" by Timothy Ferris at an impressionable age of 12 ,but when i was going through my most disciplined years - w/o even knowing it. Here's why : In school we needed to have things straight. Which brings the adage of :Straight as in straight does ( robbed from Forrest Gump's more popular aphorism).
The straightness required straight lines - i don't know what that means after an advanced math course and reading lobachevsky math - anyway , so focus - washed,dried ,ironed shirts and pants in uniform.Assemble at a common place at 8:00 am in the morning.Sing a prayer and hear some thoughts ,speeches and rarely an act till about 9:00 am - all this while standing in lines w/ almost army standards which extended from the periphery of the centre stage around which we gathered around - till the end , height-wise! Immediately after we needed to pull out our homeworks(h/w) and put it on the teachers desk [ so ,you needed to have a homework and a classwork copy -or notebook].The teacher disciplines , chides or punishes the 'child' who hasn't submitted the h/w or whose h/w book is missing.Remember , children had no rights those days.They were slaves ;-) though i admit i didn't feel like one ! Actually i must have been scaled a lot coz , like today i couldn't remember for the heck of me to get my h/w notebook.Until i figured that you could combine the h/w and c/w by a simple trick - use one book for both .The front-side h/w the back classwork (c/w) or vice-versa.And submit that to the teacher's desk at the end of the class such that the h/w side had the front cover.Gosh, this seems tricky but i thought it was really cool.Except of course when those teachers did NOT do their h/w. and so did NOT get our h/w but insisted on seeing c/w done.This required lightning thinking to produce a different subject's[ yes , we needed to have c/w for each subject] and start from the middle pages.This would do the trick for most.Except when the teacher insisted on seeing yesterday's classwork and correcting it ,which could be sorted if you quickly copy that from a fellow 'upright' student , but failed miserably if your turn came before you could actually do that. More scaling*( this was quite like what you are thinking ,like a fish scaled .. you could get your skin really burning after some wood hits your knuckles or knees ! )
Anyway , it was all fun then . We really didn't care what 'they' did. And it wasn't all that bad too.Some teachers really liked kids . We used to have laughs. But , all this missed the point totally. The idea was to inculcate discipline.To drive home the principles of organized activity.However , for most of us , just the opposite started happening. We all suffered from cognizant dissonnance. A real world disconnection .Compartmentalized discipline,if you will.To the extent of schizophrenic.You lived differently and schooled differently. Extend this many years hence when you are in college doing your Msc Thesis.Then you needed to have a rhythm. " Dude- get into a rhythm " your buddy told you " If your guide doesn't see you when you have this brilliant idea you want to talk about .. get into a rhythm.." We forgot about having classworks , homeworks and corrections. Forgot to sharpen the pencils , wear the right clothes.We - the college dudes - became social anachronisms. And now work - sometimes i force myself to write things down as a list of things to do.However, i have so many ways of doing it today - like my machine which even has a reminder that can get down to the granularity of telling me - get up and walk , else you will be numb - and yet i don't find the things-to-do that i started the day off with.Or that list seems so small that i had finished in 2 hrs , what about the rest of the 10 hrs? Ahhh .. that's where this article is going you think : what to do w. the rest? Heck no: this one talks about those 10 hrs being consumed literally in writing replies to chain mails at work and doing your stuff.Then the paper pops up under a sheaf of other papers : todo list - and almost all of them are untouched - paying electricity bills, insurance ..renew the book at the library!
So you say : ok - so you don't have organization - what's the big deal ? What's the weekend for ?The weekend happens to be the time when you do what you want to do.And that doesn't include paying electricity bills ;-) .Don't get me wrong , i want to pay for what i use.But , i don't want to do that on a weekend !

Time for me to run to the tennis courts - yes , i got a call to play tennis on the 31st December 2003. That was also NOT on my TODO list for today , oh well sigh. New Year Resolution : TODO what is there in the TODO list. Hehehehe.

Long live resolutions ...

The Answer to Brain Memory Storage
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/techscience/story/0,4386,227249,00.html

Thought of the day
If George W. Bush would speak his mind, he'd be speechless.

RSS Demystified :-). One of the better articles of this 'new' tech trend.
http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html

Some LifeSavers that prevent your PC from getting hurt.

The SpyBot Search And Destroy Donation Ware : Great Work
http://download.com.com/3000-2144-10122137.html?part=104443&subj=dlpage&tag=button

Ad Ware - freeware from lavasoft - told me Microsoft has a tracking s/w in IE - it's that good !
http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=506

And Finally , a Microsoft programmer who opens his source for all - rare !
Here is a good utility to store passwords w/ source code in C++ using MFC( of course)
http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/passwordkeeper/

Hmmm.... i should add one of these engines for getting people to add information. Welcome to the WIKI World and WIKI Engines
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines

The ThanksGiving Break
Air travel to Sioux Falls was uneventful - even the planes were on time. Then my niece came into my arms at the airport - which felt pretty good and my ego was floating out there in the 10th heaven momentarily until my sister went on to tell me :" ...o ,yeah ,she's quite social. she goes to almost everyone ..." karashboom fa-laat - that's how hard 'it' fell , though i recovered admirably and felt lucky that she did NOT reject me outright [ count your blessings they say ].

The weather held great and we finally got a glimpse of the midwest - rolling corn fields for miles and miles as far as the eyes could see. This is how i had pictured America , North America esply.California does NOT have it and i felt i had made peace with myself visiting South Dakota. Despite the cold , the migrating geese, the short wintry day, we drove all of the 425 or so icy miles to Mount Rushmore. Like my sister later put it : ' .. the journey was the best part ....' .Rushmore itself was quite magnificient but came w/ it's set of disappointments.Although , the history and making of the mountain heads were quite overwhelming - for its ambitiousness at the time ( no one ever had done such a project prior to this ) , for its speed of completion ( 14 years in all including stops for generating funds ) ,it's innovative and novel technology ( most of the heads were blasted by precisely placing dynamites on the mountain head -compare this to the way the egyptian Sphinx may have been constructed ) and for the choice and likeness of the Presidents -George Washington , Thomas Jefferson , Ted Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln -each of who are recognized instantly at such a large physical scale !
On the other side ,the mountain peak where the heads are carved isn't quite so imposing.The heads cannot be seen from far and as it turns out is just another average peak in the black hills.We also managed to miss the best viewing sites because lots of vista points were closed for the winter.

A nearby place - crazy horse -named after the last indian chief of the sioux frontier to 'surrender' to the union - tries to mimic Rushmore,only twice more ambitious in scale ,construction and funding [ refuses govt. funding in principle and works off 'public support' ]. So, you can guess the rest - the project has been going on since 1947 and is NOT even half finished.

By this time we were quite sleepy and detached to the going ons - having driven all night - and were ready to enjoy some unpolitical fresh air ! Thankfully, for us tired travellers there was an abundance of that at a scale only nature can provide in the beautiful and bewitching black forest surrounding us.The mountains were covered with glittering white snow and yet there was the canopy of the darkest green all around us.It was right out of walt disney's 'escape from the witch mountain' - enchanting and seducing.

We remembered the Doris Day song :
Take me back to the black hills , the black hills of dakota , to the beautiful indian country that i love
Lost my heart to the black hills, the black hills of dakota , where the pines are so high that they kiss the sky above

And when i get that lonesome feeling , and i am miles away from home ,
I hear the song of the mystic mountains calling me back home ,
So , take me back to the black hills .....

That song really completes the black hills experience . The journey continues .....

Thought(s) of the day

What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream ?Or what's worse , what if only that fat guy in the third row exists ?

This is powerful stuff

I think we can use some of it for India and all based on SolarEnergy / Wind Energy / Stationary Bicycle ( So , you could lose weight and generate power :-)) The guy looks at different types of power generation models and keeps an open mind for new technologies which are open source at the same time and free as in freedom (FSF)

The Gujarat company helping Jhai : http://www.ecozen.com - this is the bicycle that generates power.

The Jhai Site Itself : http://www.jhai.org/jhai_remoteIT.html - the foundation website itself

I also found the Jhai presentation - quite instructive :
http://proedvid.stanford.edu/seminars/ee380/030108-ee380-100.wmv
The Abstract of the talk follows :
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The Jhai Foundation is working with a group of villages in rural Laos and has responded to the request of the villagers for a communication capability. The system under construction is Linux-based,802.11b-interconnected and intended to be operated by villag! e youth. With one station per village it will provide IP telephony to both the local network and the Internet, and will also run the KDE suite localized for Laos. The story of the development of this system may provide some insights into user-centric design in a completely different culture, and in turn may inform further efforts to bring digital Internet-based communications technology to other developing societies.
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Urukhai's of the World Unite!