Part Of Being Sane Is Being A Little Crazy

Yesterday, March 29 of the year 2009 A.D was a historic one. We, the people of Earth - at least the estimated one billion of us who participated - raised our collective voices against the destructive havoc caused by Man in his pursuit of progress and comfort for himself at the expense of all other species of this blue planet. So what does Earth Hour look like? It looks like this in Toronto, Canada. Sydney, Australia. I can almost feel the difference. It isn't surprising that Australia is leading the charge for Earth Hour. After all, the movement was born here in 2007.  Earth hour was conceived by WWF and the Sydney Morning Herald in 2007, when 2.2 million residents of Sydney participated by turning off all non-essential lights. Following Sydney's lead, many other cities around the world adopted the event in 2008. Earth Hour 2009 was from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. local time, March 28, 2009. Over at my house, we took Earth Hour pretty seriously. By 8:30 p....

I was feeling a bit bored the last couple of days, my semester exams not withstanding, so I decided that my desktop needed a makeover. My previous desktop sojourn was fairly simple which was probably why I was feeling that itch again. After a lot of reading, browsing, downloading, editing and tinkering, here's what I came up with: Looks amazing right? right?? oh well, it works for me. It didn't take that long to get it looking like this either. The row of icons on the left was achieved using Rocketdock . The system stats on the right is courtesy Rainmeter (a very small but useful app). Now just to show how easy it was for me to get this screen and for anyone who wants this for themselves (once you get the apps, play around with the options, there are plenty), I'll give it the old 1-2-3. So here goes. For Rocketdock: Download the two apps I mentioned earlier and install them, usually they would go into your Program Files folder Now get the Reflections...

Now I've seen everything. I'm sure this global recession that we've been having lately has driven a lot of people to prayer. But paying for prayer? (Isn't money what we are praying for in the first place?!!) That's right. A new service called Information Age Prayer offers to do exactly that. Here is what they advertise on their website: "Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget." And continuing the grand tradition of 'something for everyone' on the Internet, the prayers are not only for those who walk  in the footsteps of Jesus. Jewish? No problem. Muslim? Come on up. Here is a screen shot: Of course, the service comes with a 'disclaimer': "At Information Age Prayer we think our service should be used like a prayer sup...

Well I put Digsby through its paces for the last couple of days. I should say I'm impressed with it. It offers loads of pretty skins, which is very important to me (you can laugh all you want RS), is very easy to setup (I was up and running my Google,yahoo and MSN accounts in minutes) and does a fantastic job of consolidating my online communication. It almost makes me want to twitter just so I can check out what it can do. After all the tweaking, here's what it finally looks like:  I got to admit it looks good and works even better!! But, unfortunately there are two bugs which make it quite unusable for me. File transfers across networks or even the same network does not work (I tried gtalk to gtalk-failed, yahoo to yahoo-failed, and gtalk to yahoo-failed). For all I know this could be a problem with the respective networks, it still means I cannot use it. Running digsby puts a serious load on my laptop and that is definitely a drawback to this otherwise solid...

Finally It happened. I thought I had safely corralled all of my friends into the same IM network, thus ensuring I could survive with just one IM client (for the curious ones,GTalk). As for email, I got it all together in two accounts (Gmail & Hotmail). Thankfully I use just one social network. I thought I was king ahem *cough* no, the queen of consolidation. Turns out I was wrong. I still have a ways to go. Enter Digsby. What can it do? In a few short words: IM+Email+Social Networks. For those who are interested, click through for a download - Digsby It has quite a few unique features, not that I've used many multi-protocol clients. Apart from being able to chat across various disparate networks, you can check your mail from different accounts and keep up with all your friends on twitter, Facebook and what not. You can reply to messages from the pop up, so you never have to switch from what you were doing and have multiple conversations in the same tabbed ...

I have often wondered why people object so often to the use of sense and reason. Many people when even asked this question will probably claim that yes, they do value rationality and reason. But dig a little deeper and I often find contradictions.  Take religion, why that almost always requires a suspension of reason and intellect. Oh! if I had a nickel for every time I've heard the sentence 'You have to believe'. One of the more interesting arguments I have come across to prove the existence of God is that of the empty room. It goes something like this. You are in an darkened room. There is another person inside with you whom you cannot see because it is dark. Does that imply that the person is non-existent? Surely not. Invisibility does not imply non-existence of course. Presto! God does exist. Not so fast. The invisible and the non existent do look awfully similar. How do you really know? Next up on the table, culture & t...