Part Of Being Sane Is Being A Little Crazy

The past two days have been kind of hectic, what with illness striking my sister and all the painting going on. Now that things have settled down, I have some time to write.  One my favourite apps that I use all the time is Launchy . Its small, skinnable and does what it is supposed to do very well. The only flaw if you can call it that is, it uses way too much RAM and sometimes (very rarely) locks up my CPU with high usage. Considering that I don’t exactly have a high end PC, I was always looking for a replacement. Well, my search has come to an end (for now).  It is Find and Run Robot or FARR in short. It has all the advantages of Launchy, without any of its drawbacks plus some very useful features. It is also way more customizable than launchy. Even with all these inducements, I was reluctant to ditch my favorite app.   My ‘AHA’ moment came when I found out that it has a plug-in which integrates FARR with one of my other indexing app, that is, Everything . So what is t

It has been quite some time since I started Star Trek: The Original Series. So where am I now? I’m on my sixth book.What? just the sixth? I know that is a tad slow (duh! understatement) but it isn’t all my fault. We started painting the house at just about the same time, so I keep getting a lot of interruptions plus all the dust on my laptop screen plus science fiction naturally seems to take me longer than the usual. Yet, I soldier on. Coz this series is quite unputdownable (is there such a word? the red squiggle says there isn’t).  A word about painting your house. Never paint your home when you are in it. Boy does it create a mess. Never seen so much dust, even for Delhi. The painters are going room by room, working from inside on out. Once the rooms are all done, I’ll put up some pictures, kind of like a before and after. God knows if my purple room will come out all right!

Generally when I don’t keep up with my Reader subscriptions, like if I don’t access it for a day or so, the unread RSS feed items pile up. Usually they number around 50 or so. Well yesterday, I went to the National Museum on Janpath road with RS (as an aside, we had a blast!), so didn’t check in on my RSS feeds. Imagine my surprise when I logged in today to find more than a hundred unread items! well 120 to be exact but who’s counting? Anyway the first item that caught my eye was an article over at Gizmo’s Freeware on an easy way to use Linux in windows itself. That triggered my memory on a similar article I had read at Lifehacker some time ago. So I checked it out and landed up at the Portable Linux homepage. Seems a pretty nifty way to run Linux without messing up your windows system, I’m always on the lookout for those. For someone who wants to try out Linux, or only needs a few particular applications or even someone who’s bored and simply wants to mess about with somet

Its true. I’m in love. Or rather I’m back in love. Now what am I going on about you wonder? Well for some reason or the other, for the past 2 years I haven’t read a lot of books. Either I didn’t have the time or the inclination or didn’t want to read on the computer screen. Anyway, a couple of days ago, RS suggested that I read Star Trek: The Original Series or Star Trek: The Next Generation.  And well, the long and short of it is, I fell in love again! I started off with the Original Series, which is the adaptation of the TV scripts and hence they’re more like short stories than anything else. But boy does reading those bring back the memories. Quite frankly I’m barely even coming up for air. Its a lot of fun and just like in the old days when I used to read in the bathroom, under the bed covers, the staircase and while walking to school! I even took books to read in my coaching classes for the boards. And probably as a reward for all my hard work, I didn’t do that badly in

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any. – Russell Baker Written with me in mind? So often I’m left wondering just what am I doing here? Trying to write a blog about, well, everything. Quite ambitious and probably just a tad too impossible. So far I’ve written about software that I use, the things I’ve done, opinions, rants…everything and the kitchen sink. Not only does it feel very confused and mangled, I have a feeling I’ll be doing this for a long time to come, like now for instance.  Is it true that the more you want something to happen, the lesser the probability of it actually happening? I mean like are we subconsciously jinxing it or something? Where ever you may be from, if you are an Indian this has probably happened to you. You’re reading or watching a movie and you start thinking and you wonder what if that (insert appropriate catastroph

I recently came across this article - Playing God in caste-crazy Bihar in the Hindustan Times. An excerpt from the article: Couples opting for sperm donations in Bihar are demanding to know the donor’s caste before they go ahead — and often getting their answers as well. “Neither features nor height nor even IQ concerned us as much,” says Anuradha Rai (36), an Internet marketing manager from the Bhumihar community. “My husband felt if the sperm donor was from a different caste, the baby would not get the right genes.” I couldn't believe my eyes. This is urban, smart the next generation of India? The so called hip Gen-X? The same generation which was supposed to finally throw off the shackles of colonialism, step out of the shadows of Partition and take its place on the international stage in an age of globalization? Where has that generation gone?  I thought education was supposed to enable people to think differently, analyze and decipher the meanings of thoug

These 4 little words are enough to drive any man to despair; they're right up there with "Do I look fat in this dress?" and the dreaded "Is she prettier than me?". Of course, the right answer is yes to both, but if you like your life, you'll say no. Which leads me to my current post - what should my blog wear? A nd my tumblelog too while we are at it.  Till I plunged headlong into the wild jungle that is otherwise called blogger templates, I had no idea there were so many. I literally spent hours trying on different themes to pick out one which offered me both functionality and cool. To be quite honest, I haven't tried on so many clothes for myself in my entire life!  Finally, as you can see, I settled on The Reflections template by Cebong Ipiet for my blog, as it had all the functionality I wanted. It could auto summarize posts, display a thumbnail of the pictures, had a space for featured content and to top it all off, it was a combo of my f

Aah, it is that time of year again. When roads are laid, flyovers get completed, the garbage actually gets collected and storm drains get cleaned. Just what exactly is the magic that causes all of this to happen? No, it is not the road pixies or the garbage troll, it is the humble Election Fairy. That magical, mystical and maybe soon to be mythical creature that ensures we have a democracy, ostensibly of course.  Quite apart from all the election perks that we get to enjoy, which ironically enough is what we rightly deserve throughout the year, these elections got me thinking. And before you ask - no the Apocalypse isn't just around the corner, this just happens to me sometimes. I try not to let it interfere with my life as I know it, but this is one of those times. So just bear with me all right! Now what was I saying? Oh yeah, the elections got me thinking. Just for this achievement they deserve a medal, but I digress. With all the election posturing on TV and other medi