Waves

Dear friends, I wish you all a very & safe deepavali.

May the festival of lights bring tremendous joy and pleasure to you and your family.

😀

Man! seriously I say… you have to be in T.Nagar to feel the pulse of shopping extravaganza that the area offers. There are about 4 fly-overs being built in the area meaning which, everything roaming around will have to share the small place called “road” which is full of dark slush, created by the few hours of rain today morning. But nothing seems to dampen the spirit of shopping :D. From smallest 1 month old baby to the oldest grannies, everybody is simply thrilled to shop in T.Nagar at this time of the year. There are ofcourse special traffic regulations around this area; but this time nothing much could be done to control the crowd!

Half of the crowd will be in Saravana Stores and other half will be roaming the other zillion shops, while a few others will try and dance in front of irate bus drivers who try to drive as fast as possible out of T.Nagar. So after a futile attempt to shop at Saravana Stores, we headed to RmKV to buy new clothes for Deepavali :D. We shopped at this place for about 3 hours. Just for the fear getting lost among the crowd, we brought all our clothes here he he he… and headed home.

My mom is an amazing cook. Within a few minutes after we reached home, she cooked a superb meal for us :D. It ended with vanilla ice-cream. What a way to spend the evening! I enjoyed every minute of it 🙂

Yep, that’s the name of the event, which is the first of it’s kind to happen for just 1 minute (60 seconds). That’s all. Nothing more, Nothing less. Participating in this event is damn easy. All you need to do is carry a camera and when the clock strikes 3:11 PM, click whatever you see. Then upload the pic here or to your favourite photo sharing service such flickr, zooomr etc. Don’t forget to tag your photo as “311PM”. That will help us to find the photo after you upload it.

This event will show Chennai as it exactly is for that 1 breathtaking moment. Snaps taken across the city will show what other people are doing at that instant. It’s a wonderful archive to maintain and look it up later. Even if all you have is just a mobile VGA camera, it’s time to participate & show the world how the world around you looked at 3:11 PM 😉

Read more here and here. Happy Clicking!

My dear friends, I’m shifting my blog to wordpress. The blog may be unavailable for a day or two since I’m experimenting a few things. The experiments will definitely be updated on my tech blog.

Just to assure you, my non-tech blog URL (http://blog.aswinanand.com) and its feed URL (http://blog.aswinanand.com/atom.xml) will continue to work as they were :-). Thanks to the magic of mod_rewrite. The same goes with my tech blog also. The existing links http://tech.aswinanand.com and http://tech.aswinanand.com/atom.xml (for feeds) will work as well. That saves you from updating your feed links ;-). In a day or two, I will be updating my feed burner feeds as well.

Shifting my blog to wordpress, writing a wordpress plugin, wildcard domains, htaccess and mod_rewrite… whoa! All that was such a nice learning experience. Will be posting all that over some time on my tech blog.

Thanks a lot to all my readers 🙂

Update: The shift has been completed. The old non-tech blog is at http://aswinanand.blogspot.com/ and the old tech blog is at http://techlight.blogspot.com/.

So, you are out shopping in the busy Tnagar area in Chennai and you don’t find a place to park. After struggling for half hour, you come to terms with a small place with enough place only for a rat to sneak in. Somehow managing the difficulty, you park your brand new Bajaj Pulsar 200 cc bike and set off happilly for shopping.

Now, when you return your bike is lost! How come? You start wondering, start crying and even roll on the road. But the bike won’t come back. Here’s why.

Just a few days back, I went to the mechanic shop to repair my bike horns because they were not functioning properly. The guy who repaired was small… say may be 14 years old. He challenged me by saying that he could kick-start my bike without the keys! Man.. I was shocked. After meddling with something below the handlebar, he told me to remove the keys from bike. May be offered a small prayer or something but as soon as he kicked on the starter, the bike came to life. He was beaming, all this 32 teeth showing. He went for a small round and came back!

Now you know how many (if not all) bikes get stolen. Never ever forgot to side-lock your bike. If at all your bike was side-locked, even though starting it is not a problem, riding it IS definitely a problem.

Get it? 🙂

Hi guys, it’s been a long time since I made a post on the blog. I will be back in full swing soon.

But before that, a small news 🙂 I have been writing a few articles on http://thoughts.clubecho.org/. Please do read them and comment on them.

Few days ago, I wrote an article for Club Echo’s blog. For the reader’s convenience, I have reproduced the same article below. Read it and tell me how you feel.

Stress is very common. Everybody has it. Everybody faces it. Without even a bit of stress, everything in this world would come to standstill. That is because stress is the critical component that moves things around; that gets things done. But, one thing to remember is that, stress should not overtake permissible limits.

Apart from work stress, there are other kinds of stress that knowingly or unknowingly affect us. Together, all the stresses collate at the end of the day and tire us out. This article is going to be about killing the extra stresses so that life beyond work will be awesome!

Stress outside work occurs when the mind is chattering unnecessarily. “Chattering unnecessarily” means that some thought or the other keeps doing rounds in our minds. To attain peace and relief from stress, one must try to stop the mind from chattering. If there is no work to do, engaging in a hobby or two is a good thing. Learning new skills is another. Meditation for even a few minutes is great. A luke warm water bath does so much good. … See the point? There are a lot of things to do if you WISH to do.

Chattering mostly occurs when we are doing routine tasks. That’s because the mind/body is so used to doing the routine tasks that it just doesn’t concentrate on the task at hand and starts wandering. Most popular routine tasks that fit the bill are riding, walking, reading, cooking and watching TV.

There is one simple solution to get the mind to stop thinking uselessly – Condition it. Do you think smoking is bad? If yes, it means that you are conditioned so strongly to believe that smoking is bad. Similar conditioning of the mind is required to keep it from chattering. Every now and then, when you start drifting and realize it, stop then and there and COMMAND your mind to stop the useless thoughts. Keep doing this repeatedly. This is a very simple task. Once you get used to it, after a certain period of time, your mind will not go on its own; which means, you enjoy the task at hand. Slowly, as and when more and more tasks are getting done, we even get better at multi-tasking.

May be there could be a Leonardo Da Vinci in the making 🙂 . Here are a few solutions to some common problems:

• You are having a heavy fight and you are immediately moving out somewhere. Of course, you will have a foul mood and your driving will be rash and your mind will go crazy of thinking how to punish the people who made you feel bad. Right? A wise man is one who doesn’t act when he is angry. So, as soon as you are away, stop aside, close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, relax and then resume driving. Spend some time alone and do not let your mind wander.
• You are just out of an unusually hard day at office and you are about to date your favourite girl 😀 but the foul mood continues 🙁 . So, the most simplest thing you can do is, keep repeating to yourself that office is over and you are going to have an awesome time 😀 . It will save lot of energy and you will be radiating optimism.
• Drink lots of water. That way, even if you don’t want to, you will walk to the restroom. It will keep you away from boredom and will keep you productive.
• Write simple articles like this 😉

There are many other simple problems that everybody faces day in and day out. It’s all up to us to manage them and conquer them. Share your simple problems in the comments section and show us how you tackled them.

How was it? Liked it? Have suggestions? Let me know in the comments section.

Thanks for reading!

A few of my good friends have come with this initiative of filling up potholes in the Chennai city. They will be doing it over a period of 2 days, starting yesterday night and resuming again tonight. Please visit the wiki for more information.

I may be joining them tonight 🙂

As expected, the rooms running the internet, mobile and startup collectives are packed. Will keep this post updated as the day unfolds 😀

…for BarCampBangalore 4th edition :D. I’m taking part in the Ruby and the Startups collective.

I attended a few sessions on the Internet collective. But they were pretty boring.

The session by the co-founder of Sloka Telecom, one of the selected companies of the Proto.in first edition, gave an awesome pep talk on how he built his own startup. They are 3 years into it and doing a pretty good job. He made the whole thing look so easy that, the next thing that you want to do after getting back home is to form a startup 😀

Another guy from PicSquare (sorry, I forgot his name) also shared his experience. I’m with the ruby collective now. Will keep you updated on this.

Very much looking forward to the Startup collective that is going to continue tomorrow morning.
Oh! yah.. met some pretty cool people, including Freeman, who is organizing SkillsCamp in Pune.

Having a nice time! 😀

Update: The ruby collective was damn interesting yesterday. The crowd seems more interested in the internet, mobile and startup space. So, hopefully day 2 will be packed of such sessions.