A Futile Holidays

Ah! The old school topic. We'd come back after holidays and the English teacher would ask us to write an essay about how we spent our holidays. I'd write the same things everytime. Heh.

So what did I do in my holidays? Hmm...let me see now. I would do usual stuff, eating, bathing, then try to study, but would surf the internet, procrastinate, sleep at 4am, repeat, for 30 days in a row.

Alas, for I have wasted my precious holidays, which by some unknown power has been effectively extended from 3 to 5 week, and when all my friends have been studying really hard for the boards and the plethora of tests that we have to take inn 5 months, I have covered nothing. This experience has taught me I am truly a slothful rogue procrastinator.

I vow to study well, work well and not waste time doing useless things, which is what I did everyday in the holidays. But this time, it's different. No, wait. It's not...ARGH!!!!

Delhi Explosions

Looks like Delhi has been hit by terrorists this time. I wonder if it was a suicide bombing, but I don't think so. People will jump every time a cracker goes off this Diwali in Delhi.

I read an interview-article recently in TIME magazine with a suicide bomber 'supplier'. He says that the suicide bomber were actually very happy and they believed that they would go to heaven and God would give them high honours. I can't believe those guys were so brainwashed. They must have been pissed when they died and nothing happened.

Alas for all those people who were just minding their own business and next thing they know some screwhead detonates a bomb which is 10 feet away from them. Damn, what a waste of life.

I think the only way this can be reduced is get an education and a proper life to everyone, so people won't have to kill to get to heaven.

Other stuff
Microsoft accused of piracy
Maybe I can play MMO's now
Mutated gene seems to prevent HIV

The Indian Rape Scene

I bumped across this.

An 18-year old engineering student could not approach her mother when she was abused by her uncles. “I had been abused by my maternal uncles for five to six years and after a while it just stopped bothering me. It just didn’t matter and I did not tell my mother because I didn’t expect her to understand,” she said.

Quite alarming. I thought it was total strangers who rape, not uncles and brothers. Now I know better. The worst part is, most parents hush it up.

What can a girl do in such a case? Those who were supposed to be helping her were making her life a living underworld. I wonder what a young girl will be thinking when she is going to be raped, they probably don't know about sex, considering India's highly conservative attitude.

And many parents don't want to believe it. Or maybe they do, just don't want to ruin the 'family reputation' and make a mess of it. Or maybe they think they can't do anything about it. What reputation do they think they have by actually allowing their children to get raped? Maybe others will continue to think well of them while they themselves are facing problems.

It found that 76 percent of respondents had been sexually abused as children; of them 71 per cent were abused by relatives or someone they knew and trusted.

I wonder why. Probably because rapists feel safer abusing someone who they know trusts them. And they would have easy access to them too. Just walk into the house...

Sex Education: Does it help?

Living in denial isn’t going to help. We need to accept that incest occurs in many families and once we accept the reality, we can then fight it. It is our responsibility to talk to our children and to introspect ourselves as parents. As we introduce sex education in schools, egged on by the fear psychosis of HIV and AIDS we should include the topic of sexual abuse and include lessons that encourage girls to stand up for themselves, that give them courage to say ‘No!’ And the courage to share their trauma with an adult.

There was this sex education 'talk' thing in our school a few months ago. It was a total mess. The 'educator' avoided the real topic about sex and instead focused on HIV/AIDS. He was actually suggesting that sex was a bad thing and only should be done after marriage. The worst thing to do with a group of hormone-pumped teenagers is to TELL them to do something. I don't know about other places, but I suspect it's the same everywhere, except for a few places. As a side note, many people in India(including women) don't what what a clitoris is.

Sex Education in it's proper form does help however.

To Arms: Prevention is better than therapy
If the rapers can't be stopped, then the raped must be armed. Children must be taught to fight back. Not in the literal sense. But given knowlegde about what can happen can help likely victims avoid it. Knowledge is Power, they say. Also it can give them courage to face the situation if they are forced to face it. Atleast they know what's happening. They'll also be given courage to tell others what's happening.

And parents should not shush things, they should take action. If the uncle is raping, then it's the uncle who will be in trouble. Nobody will gasp at the mother/father for that. It's not exactly their fault.

Out of the Shell
Indians need to start shedding their conservativeness, because they are way too conservative. Mothers don't allow love-marriages for Lord's sake. What's wrong with that, I don't know. If we don't change a bit faster, the whole world might surpass us.

Some free speech!

This has happened before. It is similar to the IIPM thing. What I don't understand is, why don't these schools don't take it up as a sort of challenge and use the stuff they see on the blogs to improve themselves instead of snubbing and threatening them? Not only is it a violation of free speech, they're creating a bad name for themselves.

The justifications they give is silly too. Does this-"Rev. Kieran McHugh, the school's principal, said that he was trying to protect students from online predators.", make any sense? Ofcourse! I can swear there have been atleast 3 sexual predators on my blog over the last hour. Yeah, right.

Kids are the parent's responsibility. The school can warn in a affable manner but they can't threaten them with expulsion. The school can in no way ban blogs on the basis of something that they actually have no right over. What the children do at home is none of their concern. As long as the parent is okay with blogging, it's okay.

Hiding Secrets? Maybe it's that these kids are letting others know that the school is really horrible and that they shouldn't join them. Something similar happened in the IIPM case. f there's nothing wrong with them, they should allow bloggers and maybe even encourage them to talk about them.

Good Intentions,maybe...Okay. Maybe they really have a good intention. They should just tell them to remove their real names and photos. THey don't have to expel them. That's crazy and it doesn't fit in.

Just mind your own business, bastards! Anyone can say anything they want about you. If you can't deal with it, and you cry like a little baby, you'll have a lot of crying to do.

If this is continued, more and more bloggers will go anonymous and faceless people can be dangerous...

Bunch 'o links

I was cleaning my bookmarks list and thought I should post a bunch of interesting links.

MIT's OCW- Contains lectures notes and assignments from MIT courses. Good.
Jedi Trainer-Flash game. Good pass time.
Computer books-Loads of books.
Top Ten Linux Commands
O'Reilly CD Bookshelf-Lots of O'Reilly books
Firefox tweak Guide- A must
Relativistic Physics - If you want to learn Relativity
Ten steps to boost creativity - Still have to try them...
Physics Flash Animations
Universal Pen Spinning Board- To spin pens, these guys are good

That's it for now.

Rain Mayhem

It's raining quite, nay, really heavily here in Bangalore. Why, tommorow I have no school because it's been declared a holiday! I won't say no, I shall gladly not go!

From the news, it looks like the situation is bad. But as for myself, I'm enjoying the rain. It's really cool and wet here. And it was raining all day today. Got wet too^.^ I think giving a holiday is going too far, but then again...

Mind, Subconscious

Reading 'Blink' got me into thinking about the power of the unconscious mind(sub-conscious). How many times have you done something wonderful without planning or thinking about it? Some of our best decisions are made instantaneously. And all those times something like that happened, I thought it was pure luck, and you probably did too. But it isn't. That's your subconscious.

When I crack a good joke, I don't think ages to get one. In fact, never have I got anything like by mere mental force. It happens, just like that, blink! And I am sure, it's the same for you. Memory is unconscious as well, we don't 'think' to remember. And many other normal daily activities are because of the subconscious mind.

Well, great! The subconscious is powerful, so what? We can't use it at will. Or can we? I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure we can. It's always working, behind the 'locked door'. You need to just think less and feel more. Try to capture your instincts, like a first impression.

The law of your mind is the law of belief itself.
75% of all sickness is from the mind. If you feel healthy, you are healthy. If you feel happy, you are happy. So just feel happy, feel good. The subconscious will register that. And it works! I've tried it. Positive thinking works because it 'primes' your subconscious with good thoughts.

I was always a mindful, analyzing type of person. I analyze too much. I've decided to reduce that. Introspection can be dangerous. It can confuse the subconscious with too many signals. But changing habits is hard.

Although the subconscious is powerful, it's still a human thing:It makes mistakes. So balance is important as well.

So, Listen to your intuition, but don't be led astray.

Flock

Flock is the latest internet browser out here, and there's lots of talk & buzz. It's based on Firefox. They use the gecko engine. It's touted a 'social browser' and is Web 2.0 style. First, Opera goes free and the Opera 9.0 tech preview is realeased. Now, Flock is here.

At first I wasn't so sure about Flock. Now I know it's gonna rule when it's done.

1) It's Beautiful! Firefox looks like a serious work thing compared to Flock. Flock's got a cool Mac look.2) Bookmarks, Exuent. Favorites, Enter. Favorites isn't very different from Bookmarks, except that it's all stored on the web and integrated with del.icio.us. Social.
3) Integrated Feed Aggregator. This is something which Firefox didn't have. It also checks for feeds on your favorites and caches them. Another very nice thing is that pages with Feeds have a Feed button in the URL bar, like Firefox, but it shows you the stuff in the feed instead. That is quite useful. What happened to to Live Bookmarks? I have no idea...But who needs that when you can view the whole feed?
4) You own Shelf. There's a Shelf, where you can drag 'n drop webpages. Sort of like a 'a lil while later' box.
5) I'm having trouble with Integrated Blogging. It seems to work for most people. But weird stuff happens when I try to blog with my Blogger account.I'm very dissappointed here. I put the BlogID, API URL and it still doesn't work. Flock's auto settings don't get my correct blog. Maybe I'm doing something wrong...But the idea is good. It will encourage blogging.
6) Flickr Integration is nice for people who share images a lot.
7) When you start typing in the search box, Flock searches your history for relevant results.

There are quite a few more new stuff. There's the Blog and Flickr 'Top bar'. And you can change your toolbar on the spot to view different sets of bookmarks.The browsers seems to be slightly faster, but maybe it's because I've installed it newly.This is only a preliminary preview. There's gonna be a lot more on v1.0.

But there's a lot of things missing. Extensions for one. Most of them don't work. But time will heal that. There could have been something like an inbuilt Page rating system. They can do something like comments for pages and loading similar pages based on tags given by users.

Flock seems to be too less for Web 2.0. They need more idea, more breakthroughs. It needs to be big. Flock right now is just Firefox with a theme and extensions. Just a bit of delicious integration and blogging won't cut it.

I'm not exactly switching over from Firefox. Flock is great and all, but Firefox is light. I'll stick to the original, for now.

Update: I go the integrated blogging tool working. It works fine. I dunno what was wrong before...

:Colon:

The colon(:) is my favourite punctuation mark. The reason? Because of this: It's simple, effective, and elegant.

The colon is used to introduce a distinct concept. It's the 'introduction' punctuation mark. It creates a nice pause, long enough to give the reader a breather, yet short enough to keep them there.It creates anticipation, thus spurring the reader to read on. It creates continuity. The 'pause' helps emphasize the point to be made.

The colon is also a relatively simple punctuation mark to use. It's not confusing like the apostrophe. It's quite easy to know when it's not supposed to be used: usually after verbs.

The colon is one if the writer's powertools. It is, sadly, underused. Throwing in a colon here and there adds more variety.

So remember:"The Colon Is Your Friend"!

Modding a Nano

Well, somebody has taken apart a Nano and connected a 200Gb hard drive to it. Kinda cool actually. Only problem is that the play time is 6 minutes. It could be hooked up to a bigger battery.
I love these kind of mods. Although I wouldn't dare try any, fearing that I may ruin any electronics.

Inter'net'

Well, my phone is back to normal.
My 15 days, or so, without any Internet has taught me an important lesson: the importance of the Internet for my brain's normal functioning. I was disconnected from the world and my life felt meaningless. All was dark.
Now it is returned. I feel invincible. I can do anything! Ha! I have the power of the Internet, along with my own, I can achieve miracles!
Now, if I can just stop browsing nonsense...

Life without Internet

The reason I have not posted for so many days is that my Internet was down. Actually, I use Dial-Up and the phone has a lot of noise in it, so the internet doesn't work properly.
I have gone two weeks without Internet and it has been a horrible experience. Do not try it!
I am typing very fast and I want to make a post before the noise starts again! Those BSNL dudes are doing nothing to reduce the noise, even though I call them up twice a day. I guess I'm being too nice!

Study Group hell

About a year and half ago, I got a brilliant idea . The notion was to make a study group. So, I asked some (good)friends and told them about it, and they thought it was a good idea. So, five of decided to meet every Sunday afternoon.

I was wronged in that moment,which was fateful even, I may add. The problem was nobody came. We have met only 10 times or so in 1.5 years. Each one would give a reason such as,"I have to go to the temple" or "My cousins are coming over" or "I have to go shopping" or something equally silly. Why silly? Because, why can't they go to the temple, shops or their cousin's place before and after the meeting. Sure, sometimes it is important, but I find it absolutely crazy that most of these airheads are not free every afternoon. It's for their own good too.

And when we meet, some interrupt with some useless stuff about Cricket, or my neighbour's dog or about their school's teachers.

So, why didn't I find others? Others are either too dumb or live too far away. I'm not saying these guys are brilliant, they are rather dull and have a rather narrow view of everything.

Lesson- Don't even bother.

If they don't care, there's no point in me wasting my time and energy on those silly meetings. This has been a good lesson to me. And it's pretty much ground into my brain after that long time.

Eclipsed Minds?

Today(yesterday, actually), there was a solar occultation. And quite a lot people hid in their houses.

I can't imagine why people do this. My grandmother is highly superstitious, and thus she covered all windows with curtains, put grass near stuff we eat and all sorts of weird stuff. She forced me not to eat anything and thus I am pretty starved today. She went as far as to say that there is harmful radiation from the sun, and tried to appear 'modern'. Ofcourse there is harmful radiation, it's always been there, since people started ruining the planet. It's perfectly okay to be outside when a solar 'eclipse' is taking place.

People know perfectly well that no devil is swallowing the sun. Rahu isn't angry either, for how can a planet be angry? We have perfectly plausible explanations and proofs as to the causes of eclipses. People believe it, know it's true, but STILL carry on with the bathing and the cleaning.

Things are looking better though.

More people should viewed the eclipse just to remove their superstitions

says a lady from the Delhi Planetarium.The newspapers also helped in the campaign against superstitions by putting up constructive articles.

Now all we need is more of this for stuff like 'Rahukala'.

Superstitions-Dispel!

Astrology banged

I don't believe in Astrology at all. It seems likes a bunch of cleverly chosen words that fit into many contexts. Motivated by this fellow, I decided to check my horoscope for today.

dailyhoroscopes.com says,

Progressive people and idealistic groups or concepts play a more important role in your life now, as a new energy begins.

New energy is beginning, it's my dasara(mid-term) holidays.

During a get-together with friends or loved ones this morning you may gain ideas of how the trends in business will be moving this winter.

What get-together? I was as alone a dead tiger today.

Today, however, is full of opportunities to rest and relax in your own private environment.

How contradictory!

It looks as if this afternoon will be the best time to catch up on any reading, cooking, mending, cleaning and whatever else has been nagging at you to be attentive lately.

Everyone always does whatever job is nagging them most. Besides, this evening was not the best for catching up, I was too lazy!

The good life, and all that is fine and luxurious, may be what you value just now. You put your feet up and just lay back to relax later today. You find solutions to whatever problems you have.

I decided to get working for the IIT-JEE. I did, however, relax today, by reading "The Comedy Of Errors". They got lucky. And problems...I couldn't get a single damned solution to any problem, or do they mean solutions from the solution manual?

This evening someone else cooks for you.

I dunno how to cook(except Maggi and Sunfeast).

To me, this looks like balderdash. Tommorow, I think I'll check with a different horoscope site. Maybe they'll get lucky.

Pinchbeck

Hello and Welcome to my blog.
Today was the last day of our Mid-term exams in my college(12th std school actually). I actually taught a younger student who was sitting next to me an answer.

I don't cheat in tests and I detest doing it. But others in my school don't seem to care. They were copying answers from each other. The test wasn't that important. The scores weren't counted for the finals. But still people want to get good scores, even if it is by cheating. I don't get it, why do people have to cheat, run the risk of getting caught, punished and worse-expelled, just for a few measly marks that nobody except themselves care about? Why don't they study hard and just do their best?

My opinion is that parents and teachers rub it into students that marks is more important than anything. My physics lecturer says,"Ultimately, you are recognized by your marks". I am inclined to disagree. Surely, experience, skill and social abilities are more important and marks.