Green peas masala

Couple of days before, we finally made up of our mind to prepare green peas masala at home. Here are the steps we followed.

• Peel and chop onions, small one are tastier. I assume the onion amount should be as much as the vegetable we add.
• Fry onion in oil. Make it to golden yellow.
• Add ginger garlic paste, garam masala, pepper or chilli powder. Keep stirring.
• With the brownish paste in the pan, add green peas.
  Let the peas be fried in oil first.
• For richness, grind some cashews in water. Add this paste to the peas mixture. Add some more water.
• Instead of cashew paste, tomato or coconut milk will also be good. None of the above is also an alternate option.
• With added water, close the pan for few minutues. Make sure all ingridents mix up well.
• Serve hot with chappathi or parota or dosa or lemon rice etc.
  
  

Handling old laptop battery

If I disconnect the power from my laptop, the laptop shuts abruptly in 5 to 10 seconds. Looks like the battery is gone. However, I suspect some kind of firmware involvement also in this problem. When windows desktop is put under some prompt, then the laptop doesn't die even after removing the plug. So, if I wanted to move the laptop around while still working, I click on shutdown and leave the shutdown prompt as it is. After shifting, I cancel the prompt. So for this method helped in retaining for power for 15 minutes. Let to try beyond.

Ideal expense writer

We tried maintaining personal expense using different tools and techniques. Started with a fancy spreadsheet, then a website, moved on to traditional paper book, a pocket sized one etc. Nope, none helped us to stay on track. After couple of days, laziness pulled us away from these equipments.

While thinking about an ideal expense maintainer, here is what I wish to have. A box kept inside the house, close to the entrance. I can drop any receipt of different shape and texture. The box equipped with ocr will grab those pieces of papers, analyze them and find the expense to be entered. A calculator size panel in the side of the box would beep out the number it found. I can alter the number within 15 seconds, or else that number will be entered in a registered. The receipt will be filled neatly inside the box.

Blue toothed box will sync up with my computer on a daily basis. QED.

catalyst

The purchase did happen, along with some kind of drama which happens in these kind of deals. At one stage, the seller and the buyer slightly withdrew from the interest of making the transaction happen. When the two parties were about retire, the middlemen swung into action. They rescued the spirit. Brought in required parameters and convinced the parties to move ahead. Quite interesting experience. Till the last moment we didn't know if we will be buying!

To buy or not to buy

A purchaser's dilemma. Particularly when the stake is high and the buy is ornamental. Many comments, speculations to digest from different walks of people. Is the price high? Are clean hands involved in the deal? How much to rely on the seller? Will the ROI be satisfactory, whatever may be the expected returns be?

Guess we will have to keep moving with timely decision. Just enjoy the positive effects and correct any mistakes.

first last Vs last, first names

Most occasions we use the format, first name last name. There are few places, particularly while writing, that the structure last name, first name is adapted. In good old days, most often the last name reflected the occupation of the person. We see many family names with Baker, Clerk, Smith etc. So, while entering names in the record, last name sorted list would list out folks as per the jobs they work on. That would be easy for some one to keep track of the records and call the right set of folks for duty.
Not sure about the above theory. This occurred at me while using the address book in my mobile. I try to store the occupation of the person first before his/her name, eg Elec Sekar, Taxi Gopal, Law Ganesh, CA Manikam etc.

Back to yoga

After almost an year, I am restarted yoga practice. It is quite difficult and muscle flexibility ought to be regained. Quite good to do and body feels light.

Reflected on the reason for dropping out of a regular practice. Guess it is lack of concentration while doing alone. Mind gets drifted away into its own world of thoughts. Getting back to exercise, that too in the early hours of the day, is difficult. I used to convince myself that if I had some company for yoga or I joined any yoga institute, then I would be able to do better.

This time I had decided to keep doing on my own and focus on the task at hand.

Tactics of the leaves

While watering the plants, a cool insight of the plants came upon. The leaves starts from the stem and raises up in a slanting manner. They form v shaped pattern through out the stem. Having a flat structure, instead of v shape, might be more efficient to capture sun light. The advantage of v shape showed up while watering the plant. Water falling on the leaves rushed towards the stem and finally close to the root. Had it been a flat arrangement, water from the leaves might have splashed away from the root to the ground instead of towards the stem.

May be the plants have to form a strategic positioning for maximizing sunlight as well as rain water.

Freedom to mind

While going through the strange world, I got a light all of a sudden. What a freedom and relief we get once we are out of an issue. The issue may be minor, but we feel our mind relaxed and calm.

The problems and issues we face need not be a real challenge. They can be just a lack of knowledge about that particular system or situation. If we put some effort to understand the functionality of the system and behaviour, we may be through the difficult moments.

Strange world

When we reach an ideal point in life, we settle down happily. And then creeps bunch of issues here and there. That leads to the yearning of cleaning off such negative factors. We want those issues to vanish so that we can relish in our imaginative conditions we fantasized on the first place. Slowly the goodness of this experience drops off and only the bad thingy stick to our mind. If more and more such issues pile up, the particular point reached will itself be a burden. We start fantasizing for something else. Back to square one.

transparent editor

What if the text editors we use are transparent? Or transparentable? This occurred to be when I had to switch between different window, refer info at various source and come back to the editor to continue composing. Instead, if I have transparency, I will have focus on very few lines close to the current line I am editing. This patch of visible lines should be draggable/movable. Remaining area of the screen will be displaying the windows that are at the background. I can refer or even cut n paste from any of the available screen. With a snap of key or click, I should switch from transparent mode to opaque. Would be cool.

Follow British or American

While interacting with American colleagues, one of the confusing factor is the date format. Desis are used with dd/mm/yy and Americans insist on mm/dd/yy. Upon pondering on this conflict, interesting things surfaced. It is not only date format, there are many things Americans wanted to move off from British traditions. Here is a short list.

road side

Brits ride to the left side. Anyone following that convention will find it tough on American roads that drive on the right hand side. Car steering is also position in appropriate side of the car.

switch on/off

Simple light bulb switch. Do we pull the knob bottom to top or top to bottom for turning it on? Depends on the country.

Culture

Britons and I guess most of the European countries adhered strict hierarchical order in the society. The working place too followed such bureaucratic structure. Americans bent such rigid model and practice somewhat loose hierarchy.

Language

The formal British English had to give way to American slangish language.

Considering these factors, looks like such drastic change were taken upon themselves to symbolize their freedom from a former colony. They want to show their difference.
May be top to bottom writings of Chinese, right to left of Arabs could have originated out of similar identity establishment.

The power game

Recently Manipal University was derecognized as a quality medical college. The reason given by the government inspecting body is that the univ is lacking resources. Considering the recent past, where the institute is considered one among the best (to be precise, fourth best medical college in the country), such a lack of resource is a surprising findings. Are our institute adhere such a low standard?

Clearly the corrupt hands of the inspecting body wants to tamper into a resourceful setup.

A thought occurred to me. The state government is somewhat friendly towards MU. If a state government inspecting body could be floated, that would ease out the issue for now. Slowly the authenticity of such inspecting board can be popularized among other states.

This will bring down the power of the Central inspectors. However, the new setup will introduce few more flangs of its own.

Travel updater

Recently I happen to be on road and rails for four days. Just kept on moving from one city after another. Apart from the hackers, beggars, loud video player .. a new annoyer had joined .. it is the co passenger yelling at his/her mobile. Observed a pattern in this mobile usage. These people HAVE TO inform the other party about their exact longitude, latitude coordinates. Even if they don't know, they would wake the co passenger from sleep and question them with, "where r we now?" .. followed by ... "Aaang, I have crossed so-n-so place." As thou the listener is going to open up their GPS box and start monitoring the movement of this guy.

Wondering if we can have a personal mobile phone jammer.

rattled mind

In a volunteer mailing group, a small ripple will create a big wave of mails and an ultimate splash. One definite rocker is 'switch off lights' and 'save tissue papers'. What creative suggestions come out of these simple topics .. people get very unconventional and emotional about their ideas.

Recently such mail thread started with simple suggestions like:

Put some posters about power saving.

Encourage taking stairs as opposed to elevators.

Turn off lights in huddle rooms/conference rooms.

An engineer's response:

We are the engineers, we need to think of some innovative power saving
measures !

/What if there is sensing device at the entry of pantry as in one enters,
lights ON... and /

/as soon as one exists, lights OFF !! ( depending on the total number of
heads entered MINUS/

/total number of heads exited ) = 0 Implementation of this would cost intial
investment but would/

/save lots of power & power bills later.../

Someone started cribbing :

I do not see this poster idea is working, there are
posters just near the tissue paper in the toilets but people still use the
tissue paper. To my surprise even people stand and read this poster and use the
tissue paper as if the content is in French.

If we dont want people to use tissue, dont keep there! simple.

Followup ideas ...

On a related note, the quality of the tissue paper can be
improved.

Can someone tell this environmentalist that quality paper => cutting more trees

There were other suggestions like volunteers calling employees and advising them on tissue usage. People were going further to trace the origin of tissue, wondered if great grandfather and beyond used tissues etc.

What idle brain can do!

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Remember reading this book during college days. Couldn't recollect much of the story thou. Yesterday I had to travel alone in a taxi for 2 hours. While looking around for a book, got this one. Suitable to spend 2 hrs or so.

The first part of the book talks about how general trend in people and what kind of inertia hold them back from moving out of the flock. Also the kind of struggle and hardship of successful people. Particularly the kind of changes they have to make and willing to go through tough time due to different life style.

Second section is quite heavy with meta-physics and after life stuff. The highest thing that to be worked out is - love. Guess westerners have the notion of seeing love as the ultimate thing to go for.

Last part was too much .. purposefully painting a messiah image to the hero. It was able to cure a bird whose wings were immobile. Lots of followers and enemy camp and so and so.

A nice inspirational book.

fluid containers

Ever wondered about the shape of the fluid containers? Most of them are cylindrical. The petrol, milk tank containers, milk can, over-head water tank, water heater, most of the kitchen utensils, pen, water pipe, ...

Any idea about the reason?

Helping tendency

Someone sent a technical query to our office internal mailing list. The query was kind of simple. In no time there were so many replies and suggestions. Some of the answers were repetitive. Even two people replied after two days .. which is rare considering that most mails in that forum dies out in couple of hours.
The reason behind the mails is .. the questioner is a girl, that too with an attractive name. Guess the guys didnt know her age or other details, if so they might not have bother to provide such help.

perception

Morning I was looking at small spiders, ants and lizards. The first instinct is to drive them off. I was also trying to see their perception about human. They might have an image of 'annoying monsters'. Always the monsters chase them away. At time spray chemicals or set hazardous mechanical, electrical devices on them. Doesn't allow them to lead a peaceful life, the nest they construct is destroyed in fraction of seconds.

If only we could listen to their conversation, it would be really interesting.

Voyage haiku

Planning travel across our galaxy
may be far beyond Andromeda or Triangulum
Packing two condoms for safety