Blog of Justin

New hero in my list

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:40:00 +0000

This post would not contain anything that I want to say, instead read it for yourself and find out if this lady deserves a place in your 'Champion's hall of fame'

(source : wikipedia)

Sarah Reinertsen (born May 22, 1975) is an American athlete. She was the first female leg amputee to complete the Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. Besides marathons and triathlons, Sarah has also competed in bicycle races.

She was born with proximal femoral focal deficiency, a bone-growth disorder which eventually led to her becoming an above-the-knee amputee at the age of seven.[2] After the amputation, she began to run track and broke the 100-meter world record for female above-the-knee amputees at the age of 13.Since 1991, she has recorded a number of athletic accomplishments:

Setting world records in the 100 m, 200 m, 400 m in her division (T42);
Becoming the youngest member of the 1992 U.S. Paralympic Team to go to Barcelona;
Conquering seven marathons (NYC 1997, 1998; LA 1998, 1999; Millennium New Zealand 2000; London 2002; and Boston 2004);
Holding the world record in the half marathon (2:12) and the marathon (5:27) for above-knee amputee women

You can read more about her at http://alwaystri.com/AlwaysTri.com/About_Sarah_Reinertsen.html

Reached first milestone

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:15:00 +0000

70.00

Not even a gram less or more !! This was the number shown on the electronic weight scale today at one of the restaurants where I check my weight on a weekly basis. I was so over joyed that I could not believe what I saw. This would not have been possible without the great books, fitness videos, blogs, my hall of fame photos of people whom I want to become, and definitely motivating words/ tweets by hundreds of health/fitness lovers on twitter. And best of all nutritious and healthy food by my fiancee that just goes along with my daily exercise routine. Thank you all and a BIG thanks to you Jesus :)

Weight gain badge from livestrong

Arnoldation - Part 2 (Judgement day)

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 17:58:00 +0000

This is in continuation with my previous post 25 weeks to Arnoldation, which tracks my fitness goals and areas that I am proud and the things I should improve upon.

Weeks 5 - 10

Made it a point to hit park on weekends and other holidays and make atleast 5 - 8 rounds of jogging coupled with 10-12 rounds of fast paced walking.
Weight shot upto 69.5 KG, Yehaaaaaa, I am so closed to reach my first milestone, which is 70 KG(154.3 pounds)
'Push up' count reached 50 for the first time, and that too in proper form
Reps for flys, and raises have crossed 15(earlier less than 6)
More crunches that ever before, to take care of the tummy
I can see visible changes in my forearms, biceps, tricpes, rib cage, thighs; Small but significant and motivating me to push harder
Included meditation as a daily routine
Have become more conscious even while doing day to day tasks like, lifting a bucket, sitting while traveling, make sure to walk with the correct posture(ear, shoulder, hips on the same straight line)
Two rounds around ITPL(for about 20 mins) in the evening, on most days
Learned more about ab excercises from the book The Complete Guide To Abdominal Training by Christopherm Norris

Plan for the next 4 weeks

Include more variety in food intake to accommodate duck eggs, protein shakes, salads, cheese, butter etc
60 mins of strict workout and 20 mins of rounds inside the park, prior to that
'Presses' using barbell with 4 kg( 2 kg plate + weight of barbell)
Learn more about exercises, food, nutrition and physiology
Incorporate ALL the main moves that I learned in KungFu prior to the work out or during that
Make sleep and rise times fixed and do not fluctuate a lot
Increase 'Curls' and 'Fly's dumbell weights to 7 KG (5 + 2 kg plates)

Reaching my first milestone

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 04:17:00 +0000

(Weight graph as on Aug 29,2011)

Hi folks, I am an inch away in the weight tracking graph(see above) to reach my first milestone, that is 70 Kgs of lean mass, with as little fat, as possible. I have started to accumulate a bit fat in my mid-section(core) that I need to take care of. That means, more crunches, running and skipping( jump rope) It gives me so much happiness and confidence that I am going in the right direction, and would love to have all of these shared with the entire world. I want to do some before and after photos soon, again I would love to share that as well.

Currently my food table looks like this:

When ?	Food item (Primary)	Food item (Alternative)
Breakfast	Milk with Protein powder, Bread Sandwich	Milk with oats
Lunch	Rice	Chapathi
Post mid-day	Light snacks	Fruits
Dinner	Rice with curry. 2 boiled egg whites	N/A

Influence of Twitter
I must admit that twitter has to be one place I turn up for inspiration on a daily basis. Right now, I follow about 385 + people, most of them being body builders, fitness experts, nutritionists, athletes, models, fitness figures. Its a great inspiration to be going through their thoughts and aspirations and believing that you too be like them one day. Below is a brief list of people I follow in twitter

Twitter ID	Name
BikiniStaci	Staci A.
missleisl	Leisl
marissaroxks	Marissa Iuculano
DonnaBlase	Donna Blase
Tiff_Crystal	Tiffany Crystal
Laura_Superhero	Laura_Superhero
TiffanyGaughan	Tiffany Gaughan
TiffanyyUpshaw	Tiffany Upshaw
sha_sha_fierce	sharon phillips
theextrarep	Sheri Gaskins
desertMike	Mike McCollom
MzKameka	Kerry
Melanie_Collins	Melanie Collins
MissNadiaE	Nadia El
HotAtHome	Jackie B
karenkwilliam	Health &
Heather632	Heather Chavez
FranciscaDennis	Francisca Dennis
EJM3577	Ask Me!
MissSnoogie	lauren barthman
JillianJones1	Baybgirl811
ACE_Motivates	Alicia Rachelle
Bxtreme_Tanya	Tanya Martinez
ChristineGus	Christine Jenkin
TonyXXL	Antonio Mosely
DustinPoirier	The Diamond
ryanbader	Ryan Bader

In other news..

I was happy to find Melvin's email today morning, telling me that he finds my recents posts as inspirational. Love you buddy.

Befriending greatest body builders of our time

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:57:00 +0000

I was going through my facebook page, and was amazed at the number of trash talk that turns up, which made no sense at all to me. I was shocked to find the amount of time, I spend each day in going through pages that had no relation to what I was doing and where I wanted to go ( my goals)

As a first step, I decided to read more about lives of body builders and people who are into health and fitness. Since it hard to 'friend' someone in facebook, I decided to find their blogs/ twitter and follow them there. As a first step, here are some of the links that I found today.

People I am planning to follow

Another fitness site was recommended by Nandu today, and it contains a pretty good number of interviews too.
www.muscleandstrength.com

Weight gain

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 08:32:00 +0000

(My weight tracked in the past 6 months - courtesy Live Strong website)

Hello everyone, just checked weight today ( as I do on all Tuesdays),and I was so happy to see the numbers on the display. I was at a cool 66.5 KG (146.71 lb) and the gain has been going on, in a steady rate. The target is to reach 75 Kg ( mostly with muscle and bone mass) at the end of 6 months. The chart posted above depicts my weight gain in the past 6 months, tracked using Live Strong website.

I just had a box full of green vegetables (primarily consisting of carrots, cucumber, tomato etc) prepared with the magic hands of my fiancee, and it tasted so good. I am beginning to love this food style and I hope to continue this for a really long time. Veg pulao is waiting for me, in the bag. My cubicle mate Venkatesh just told me I look a lot different and he was happy to see that I have food at regular intervals. God bless him :) and all those fine people who are standing by me.

As a side note, I am also sporting a french beard. ;)

25 weeks to Arnoldation

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 16:17:00 +0000

Started my workout approximately 25 working days after my 25^th birthday. Probably on Jul 5/ 6^th. Prior to that, my physical activities included heavy cycling, covering upto 6 -10 kms everyday when I was around 11 to 14 years of age, martial arts (Kung Fu) between ages 20 –23 and I had joined gym back in 2010. Each time, the experience and the results were much different. And now when I consider body building as a serious hobby, to be perfected at home, I bet all my previous experience could help me a lot, which I would love to share with you all.

Short term goals

Weight gain. Reach 70 KG
Have a great physique
Look and feel Healthy(S*xy)

Long term goals

Weight gain. Reach 80 KG of pure muscle and bone mass
Well built proportionate body
Look and feel Really really Healthy(S*xy) and Strong

Here is a short summary of the progress I made in the past 5 weeks

Week – 1

Started working out with my dumbelss (2 x 4 KGs), some basic exercises, that I had learnt while I was in Gym
Jogging ( On spot)
Medium stretches
Dumbell Flys, curls and Dead lift

Week -2

Started food tracking by amazing free site - LiveStrong
Got myself ‘Arnold’s Modern Encyclopaedia of Body building’ from FlipKart
Also got myself ‘Dumbbell Training For Strength And Fitness by Matt Brzycki, Fred Fornicola’

Week – 3

Good news from Doctor. She said, I had the best cholesterol levels she had seen in any patient
Consulted doctor and as per her recommendation, got myself Protein powder ( 18 g/ scoop)
Got myself a barbell ( 5” , 3 Kgs approx)
Shocked to see my weight shot up to 65.4 KG
Took a couple of ‘before’ photos :)

Week – 4

Received the book ‘Men’s health big book of excercises’ home delivered by FlipKart
Shocked to see my weight shot up to 66.6 KG
Took more ‘Before’ photos
Posted about my new found interest in this blog

Week – 5

Bought myself two 5 Kg plates and a skip rope. Tried and found that it’ not that easy, I definitely need more practice and also a place to do skipping
Prepared a list of things I would eat each day
Steadily been tracking my food intake for the past 3 weeks, and it’s hovering around a cool 1800 + calories a day. Target is 2000+ so that I could have a steady 1/2 kg weight increase each week

Bigger trousers

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 09:05:00 +0000

I have become very comfortable with skipping now (Jump rope) The only issue is that, its a very tiring cardio workout and you really need some stamina to keep going. Big cheers to all you guys who do a 100 + each day.

In other news, most of my size 32" trousers just don't fit anymore. I guess I have graduated to 34" now, after the 4 Kg + weight gain that I had in the last 4 months. I guess I might need to maintain my waistlines and tummy in this shape or convert more fat to muscles.

Muscles are forever

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 08:02:00 +0000

The title of this post is taken from Scooby's work out site, and it had a profound impact on me. I had thought that if you stop working out, in a few days/months time all your muscles are gonna get melted out or something. But it doesn't, it would be really really slow gradual process and I am sure when you start seeing it (I am sure it won't happen to you, if you do regular workouts - atleast 30 - 40 mins for two days, a week) just make sure you stick to your fitness regime.

And moreover once you start enjoying the benefits of good health and strength, I am sure there is no way you are gonna slow this down.

Skip Rope

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 05:35:00 +0000

(NSFW : Kindly excuse the skimpy clothes in the video, but its indeed a great workout video)

'Skip rope'ing got into me after I saw this amazing video on youtube posted above, about skip rope(jump rope)by Zuzana from body rock site. I googled for several videos since then, and hence I decided to include it in my workout routine. It's been 3 days since I bought the skip rope but it's been idling since then, due to the roadblocks I have listed below.

Road block – 1

My first plan was to head to the nearby park, for skipping due to lack of space at my place. The park closes by 8:00 A.M and several attempts to reach before that turned out to be futile, since I was unable to get up and be there, before that.

Solution: I decided to do skipping on the terrace

Road block – 2

Got up @ 6:00 AM went to terrace on Monday( Jul 19), and started skipping. The loud thud caused by me jumping up and down, was almost unbearable, so I was kindly requested by my cousin to stop it :)

Solution : I have to find some place else, but no idea where . . .

Road block -3

Since the option of going to park and skipping on the terrace was out of question, I had to think about something else. Our bedroom was hardly 8 feet high and there were lot of things inside it(including a TV, closet and a bed), so I couldn't possible even think about skipping inside the bedroom.

I did it !!

I was so disappointed thinking about all that, and I switched on my laptop to hear some music (which I always do when I hit road blocks like these)and stumbled across the video of this muscular guy and something inside me told me that I wanted to be like him.

I got up from my bed, took the jump rope, came back to my bedroom. I moved a couple of things around, made sure I stayed AWAY from the TV and finally tied the rope around my wrist so that the length reduced so that I would not be hitting the ceiling when I do the skipping/ jumping. And guess what ? In 10 mins I had done 8 sets of 4 reps each ! And I am sure this would be daily routine henceforth.

So why sharing this ?

The whole idea of sharing this with you is that, you might be having several roadblocks that prevent you from reaching your fitness goals. Keep looking out for options and I am sure you would hit the solution pretty soon . Several posts by Melola from Spark people had also inspired me in thinking of ways in achieving my fitness goal. In one post, she even stated keeping her jogging machine inside the kitchen since there was no place other than that in her house.

Wishing you all the best.

Body Building

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:54:00 +0000

(Cover image of 'BIG Book of Exercises' that I bought yesterday)

I don't know what got into me, but I just know that, I have fallen in love with body building. And I have just two things in my mind as the goals

Gain weight in terms of sheer muscle and bone strength ( current aim is 70 KG)
Endurance training resulting in more strength and stamina along with fitness

Now I know that, these goals cannot be reached overnight, But I just started loving the journey towards it. And the best part was that, my body has reacted in a very positive way (Contrary to my 'friend's' comments that I will never put on weight) And with the mouth watering nutritious food that I get from my fiancee I believe this would be one ride I would not forget(Yeah, she comes to my office just to give me this amazing food)
I was able to gain over 2 Kgs(over 4.4 pounds) in less than 2 weeks, and I want to continue in that path. The best part is I don't look that different :)

Firstly started with a pair of 4 KG dumbells, then recently graduated to a barbell, without weights, since the shop did not have stock for 2 x 2 KG steel plates. But that turned out to be boon for me since I think I might actually move to 2 x 4 KG plates ! in a few weeks time

The current routine looks like this

Exercise Name	Total Time(mins)
Jogging	10
Stretching (Kung fu based)	10
Upper body(with weights)	10
Lower body(with weights)	10

Nowadays, I regularly track my food consumption using Livestrong website and I got a chance to learn from several of these websites mentioned below

Dumbbell exercises for Men
Hundred pushups in 6 weeks
About Calisthenics (Also 'Google' in videos for Calisthenics)
Review of fitness sites
Scooby's free site about excercise, nutrition and tips

Books that I am reading now

Dumbbell Training For Strength And Fitness by Matt Brzycki, Fred Fornicola
The New Encyclopedia Of Modern Bodybuilding : The Bible Of Bodybuilding, Fully Updated And Revised - Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Dobbins
The Men's Health Big Book Of Exercises - Adam Campbell

I ordered all these books from FlipKart and delivered to me in much less rates(And free home delivery too)

I will keep you posted(Hopefully with some 'Before'/'After' photos too :) ) with all the happenings around me related to Health and Fitness.

Happy rocking your body, bye.

Best stock trading tools

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 19:54:00 +0000

Hi, In this post I want to cover the best stock trading tools (that also supports Indian stock markets BSE/ NSE) These could be online tools as well as desktop tools that are free and easy to use.

Stock tracking and analyzing sites (online)

Best Portfolio and stock Management tools (desktop and free to use)

JStock

I am researching on free charting software using the data sets from a free provider (eg: Yahoo finance) Currently look at Wintrend, iTrade, jCharts etc

The stock traders slang

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 07:41:00 +0000

I am basically an IT guy, and it took a while for me to get my head around various terms used in the stock and trading industry. Some of the concepts had my thought process going back and forth but it was definitely worth investing in terms of time/ money. And as I learn more about this industry, I must say that I am really impressed by the depth and breadth of this great field.

Trade specific terms

Research Ideas

(more to be added later)

Stock trading through SBIcap

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 19:28:00 +0000

(NOTE: This post is very India specific)

After researching on various brokerage firms( companies that help you buy/sell shares), I decided to zero in on ICICI Direct, Reliance Money and SBICap Securities Due to relatively low 'Account opening charges' and 'Minimum balance' and brokerage charges, I decided to go for Reliance Money or SBI. Since SBI people reached back to me first and I already had an account with this bank, I had my account created in less than week and I placed my first order yesterday.

Links about using the SBI platform

Other related resources

Realtime Details on stocks from Rediff
Comparison of various brokerage companies (The details presented might be a little outdated, by the time you read this, so check the respective brokerage firms to get
Top 100 bullish shares

Towards wealth and investment

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 16:26:00 +0000

With suggestion from my best friend and fiancee, I had decided to go for investing in Gold shares. And the first place was to ask my parents, since they were veterans in share trading over the past 2 decades. With some basic information, that I got from them, I decided that it was upto me to take this forward. So I did the following changes in my lifestyle to accommodate this new interest in wealth and investment:

Developed a new interest in reading financial newspaper. A special mention goes to 'Economic times'. You can get its e-version here. ( Man !! can't believe the trash that comes in today's regular newspapers)
Changed my home page to forbes.com. I must say that's definitely one site that must be on your daily reading list, among others if you are serious about wealth and investment
Got some really amazing books : 'Rich Dad, Poor dad', 'Success Secrets of the Rich and Happy' and many others
Started making entries of my daily expenditure, first started with excel then moved onto full fledged software - Gnucash
Started thinking about ways I could reduce my expenditure, including reducing my broad band plan, which I rarely used, Using more public transport than private cabs. The habit of making note of daily expenditure helped me identify these hot spots and take measure to solve them (Again another amazing suggestion from my fiancee)

In the next post, I would try to tell more about my adventures in stock market and the thought process behind those decision. Until then, be happy.

Indexing our life - Dreams

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:41:00 +0000

[ (c) stock.xchng]

It would be blinding to ignore the fact, or rather the truth how much my friend wants to be in a job, more than anything else and could go to whatever extend to get that point across. It just brings to my head, how much powerful our minds are in creating situations that match our personality/ beliefs and value systems.

Today I realized for the first time, the true power of focusing. If we focus our efforts on one thing and constantly think about that, make ourselves believe in it entirely, Its just a matter of time before you can see it unfold in front of your eyes.

As a matter of fact, it was not my friend's dream that I see around me, right now. I had dreamed my friend dreaming about this. Which means, when my friend's dream came true, it was my dream which came true in the first place, so this is very interesting indeed.

Money minting while you sleep

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 17:55:00 +0000

I have been looking for ways to monetize my blog and I came across some options which I wanted to share with you

Blogging ads (url: http://www.bloggingads.com)
I was looking for a place to sign-up and finally I got it, I was supposed to click on the link 'Bloggers' on the top right corner of the home page. After the quick registration process(which also requires you to have a PayPal account) I was told that my blog do not have the 'REQUIRED PAGE RANKING' . Good !

What I gained ?
Due to the requirement mentioned in this site, I got myself registered in PayPal and its free and you could link your bank account to it(Some one earlier told me that its mandatory to have a credit card before you could register in PayPal)

PayPerPost (url : https://payperpost.com/)
Although this site had a more intuitive user interface, after the entire process, it just told me 'SOMEBODY' will contact me with a prospect ad. Wow ! And I was supposed to wait.

What I gained ?
Made me think about Adsense more

Adsense(url : https://www.google.com/adsense )
Although I did hear about Adsense and also that my cousin still gets a decent 300$ + check from Google (thanks to adsense) was more than ringing bells in my ears. I decided to go for it. The result of which you can see in my blog( on the right) The process is pretty simple.
1. Just log in to adsense site with your google account and create a free adsense account.
2. Fill in the details(The house address needs to be correct)
3. Go to 'My ads' and create a new ad
4. Paste the code in your blog/ site

Its that simple, and you could get help for all of these steps, elsewhere. So my first step towards reaching the goal of money getting credited while you sleep is moving towards its destination. Hope found this post useful

Investment freak

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 10:56:00 +0000

(c)stock.xchng

My crush with investment started a few weeks back and it was a combination of things that triggered it. It started off with some amazing books "Sucess secrets of Rich and Happy "by Bart A Baggett , "Rules of Wealth" by Richard Templar and "Rich Dad Poor dad" by Robert. Slowly I started to see a lot of things in a different perspective.

The flashback
I first heard about shares and stocks from my parents. But it remained inside me, until my fiancee asked about things that she could do after marriage, at home. And it occurred to me that, my mom had been doing share trading in her free time, back in my college days. I remember she studying about various companies and investing in the ones that would make profit in the future. Her effort did yield results and I told this to my fiancee. Now I had no idea about banking/ finance/ economy or money for that matter. The only contact that I had with money was when I swiped the cards and withdrew cash from the ATM. Equity, stocks and forex sounded like foreign terms

Now
(NOTE: The following numbers are very specific to India)
It's been two months since I have been seriously looking for investment options around me. I am no more satisfied with the 3.5 % that I get if I stash it in a savings account in a bank. If we are looking at an inflation rate of 8% +, we need to talk about some serious number about investments.

Firstly I started with moving my current savings to a Fixed deposit where I could get maximum returns(for a bank deposit) in a short amount of time. My dad informed me about a Co-operative society where they would give 8.5 % for 3 months. This looked like a good deal. So there goes my money. Other options included Fixed Deposits in SBI/ Dhanalakshmi Bank etc, Most banks these days offer a sleek interest of 9.0 % + for long term deposits.

In this post, I am going to speak a little bit about Mutual funds

I had been hearing about Mutual funds, the last time, it was from my Manager on a casual discussion about investment options and today I was doing some homework on that.

I started with Mutual Funds India. This site has details on various mutual funds, their growth etc. The section about Mutual funds was also interesting.
I learned about Tax Savings scheme here.
Next to get a listing of top players in various industries, I checked out India infoline's mutual fund section
To buy mutual funds online, check out this page, where you could get listing of several popular online mutual fund offerings.

The phone call
Next thing in my list was to give a ring to my dad. He had been investing in several mutual funds over the last couple of years. And from him, I got to know about various definitions used in this industry
There are some basic things that has to be in place before we could proceed further
(I have tried my level best to keep it simple, if you need a more authoritative explanation, look somewhere else)

When we buy shares of a company, there is a high risk potential. If the share price of the company goes down, you would in for a toss(For the record: I believe almost all financial investments have some inherent risks associated to them, Its all about doing your homework and hoping for the best)

So here comes mutual funds, where the amount we put in, goes to several shares bought on our behalf.

There are 2 types mutual funds

Once which invests in shares that belong to same industry
Diversified mutual funds - Here shares of companies that belong to different industries are invested on

Some mutual funds would have entry/exit loads(see below). Check them before you buy

Also there would be a minimum investment amount. So even thought the NAV me be 10 Rs, you might need to do a minimum investment for 10,000 Rs

Investment duration - The duration for which the amount is invested. Withdrawing/cancelling the amount before this time might result in exit load (see below)

Entry load - Amount paid to the company issuing the mutual fund when we buy mutual funds from them
Exit load - Amount that has to be paid if money it taken back before the mutual funds compelets its maturity period

(More investment/ financial things coming up in future posts)

I believe just like any other industry, I guess I need to go a long way, investing time and money before I could see results for my effort. But I would be more than willing to share what I learn with all of you. Wishing me all the best. Have a great day. Bye

Softwares of the week

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 20:15:00 +0000

I came acoss some really cool softwares, that i want to share with you all

Sandboxie (www.sandboxie.com)
This free software sandboxes any software that you have, thereby protecting from potential attacks, especially useful for protecting users from threats that arise out of compromised Web browsers. You can just sandbox any software. For brief intro, check out pcworld and for a detailed intro check out the original site. I just downloaded it and I surely have a long way to go

PS: Visual Studio 2010 installation which just used to fail incredibly after its few mins, ran magically in sandboxie, and I don't know why. Since I am yet to learn about this software, I cancelled the VS 2010 installation in between, not wanting to take any calculated risks

Omni writer(http://www.ommwriter.com/)
From initial looks, looks like a great concept. Its a free WYSIWYG editor with non-cluttered UI. There is a good review @ lifehacker.

My Home project updates

There are 2 projects that I am actively pursuing in my free time
1. Easy music copier/ mover
2. My account and expense manager

I will get back with more details about both these softwares soon.

Training @ Microsoft for Visual Studio 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:27:00 +0000

(source : fotopedia)

Got a chance to learn the latest and the greatest features of Visual Studio 2010 at the training that was conducted at Microsoft Campus, today.

The details
Venue : Embassy Golf Link park, from 9:30 AM to 1:00 PM
Speaker: Abhimanyu from iMentor

It was the first time, I got a chance to have a peek inside one of the companies that I wanted to work, back in the days when Microsoft was the new Google (or the new facebook?) So when the day for nomination came, I made sure that my manager did not miss out my name.

Getting up was a bit difficult but was made super easy, by that someone special. I reached the campus by 9:00 AM and was a cool 30 mins ahead of the scheduled time. I liked the building and the office space. All in all, it was a great training session, and I really did feel that Visual Studio 2010 + Team Server might actually turn out to be a pretty interesting combination. I got a chance to learn about how developers, database programmers, testers and architects could collaborate and work on the same platform. Since my exposure other suites is limited, I might be a bit biased here ;) Kindly excuse

There are 2 more training sessions, that I plan to attend. So take away for me is : Even if you hate meca-shaft as a company or their policies(Ballmer - Linux is a cancer), don't hate their ideas. May be you could learn from that and find other softwares that does the same thing, or even think of implementing it, in your own way. Needless to say, companies that ARE good at product making, might continue in that direction for some more time to come. So until then, leverage that.
Happy programming !

100th post

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 20:57:00 +0000

(This is my 100th post- source: FreeFoto.com)

Its been a while, I have been to blogging, actually its going to be a year . . . Some amazing things have happened in this short amount of time. And I would be all glad to share it with you.

May: First and foremost, my brother was blessed with a sweet little baby girl in the month of may

June: I got the chance to work with some amazing people and be part of a major delivery of our project that had to be delivered in July. Completely changed the landscape of my career.

July: The project we all had been working so hard, was completed on the planned day. Great celebration everywhere ! Chance to move on to the next project

Aug: Completed another year @ ACS, A Xerox company, thereby totaling 2 successful years, by the grace of god. Got official laptop and wireless net connection !

Sep: B'days of 2 most important people in my life :)

Oct: Got some new responsibilities at work. Work/ personal life going great.

Nov: More people joined our team, seeing lots and lots of growth opportunities here.

Dec: Saw the new house dad bought in Trichur, its really HUGE, with 5 bedrooms and attached bathroom for all those bedrooms. Spacious hall, sitout and a garden. Met parents and had a great time for the 5 days, I stayed there.

Jan 2011: New year comes up and I Got chicken pox ! But learnt the breadth and depth and the true meaning of relationship and love. Got some amazing books to read, esp on personality development and never had to look back ever since.

Feb: Enriching my work/ personal lives. Learned a lot of new stuff at job. Daily expense + month estimation going great. Starting implementing lot of stuff, I have been reading, seeing some amazing postiive results. My favorite books now are : 'Cup of Comfort - BIG book of prayer', '7 habits of highly effective people', 'The monk who sold his ferrari', 'You can win' and many more

March: Got back to blogging :)

A small note of thanks
I want to end this post, with a small note of thanks.
A BIG thanks to all those people who made me who I am. A BIG thanks to God, my personal savior. And all those amazing books which helps me see the world in a brand new perspective. And for my organization, which is helping me take my career to all new heights and the amazing people I got a chance to work with.

Hoping to see more challenging and enduring results in the coming year.

In the land of music

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:54:00 +0000

Hi ,
This post comes to you after a while since my last post. And lot of things happened since . .. . I would love to share a lot of things that happened during this time, in the days to come :)

Whats happening now ?

Okay so what's happening now ? I am actively pursuing my passion in music and computers. And from the perspective of music, lot of things, I mean really lot of things have happened. I would share those things too with you the coming days, in various posts. These things have influenced and changed my life in more than one ways.

So what happened today ?

Today I came across the site http://tfmpage.com/notes with this really huge list of notes of various tamil songs. Man !! you need to check this. Now I could just have a look at this site, select the song I like and play it on my sweet guitar. Now for all those guys who wonder, what all those 'S, R,G, M .. ' means, check out this page http://www.tfmpage.com/notes/leg.txt from the same site.

Future post

In one of the future blog posts, I would speak about harmonics, what is it, how you could learn about it, and some really cool songs that has used harmonics to some amazing effect.

Play on . See you guys in the next post

Homecoming of another DELL

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:16:00 +0000

(Dell 1440 Laptop)

It was a sunny morning of Sept 25(10 days back) when the phone rang and the person at the other end wanted to confirm the address of the shipment. Once it was informed that he was from Blue dart and he wanted to deliver a sleek new DELL laptop, our joy knew no bound. In another hour's time we(me, mom and dad)saw ourselves, this beautiful and powerful baby(our sweet DELL laptop), right in front of us ......

I still vividly remember the day I got my DELL laptop(Inspiron 1420) last year. I still have it and love it for its sheer performance and stability. Now the one I am talking about here, is the one mom got for herself. We placed the order on Sept 21(which was a public holiday - Ramzan) but DELL functioned as usual. And here we have this great piece of hardware, ready to rock us.

The custom configured 1440(yeah, dell laptops can be custom configured to the core) has some really cool stuff inside.It featured a 45 nm architecture Penryn, dual core 2.0 Ghz T4200 Processor with 1 MB l2 cache, 800 MHz FSB, 4 GB ram, 320 GB Hard drive, DVD writer, on-board Intel graphics,and usual array of things like - wifi, blue tooth,1.3 MP built-in camera. The total cost including taxes and delivery came to 33,000( $ 691 approx) The package also features free trials of Office works, McCafee and the best part was it came with an installable Vista Basic.

All in all, it was a great deal. And I just love my DELL :)

My guitar story

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:37:00 +0000

A short story of boy and his guitar

Okay, now first of all this is a real story about me and music, so you would find very little technical(computer related) stuff in this, so may be, you want to skip this.

Okay now getting back to the story. It started with the guitar classes that I used to attend when I was some 9 years old. It was an acoustic guitar. Back then, I remember it as a very huge instrument, and that I always wanted to play what I wanted, but our teacher, used to have very rigid rules as to how once must proceed during the course of learning guitar. Although the classes stopped when I had to shift my school, the desire remained within.

Fast forward 10 years, now in college, thanks to my amazing friends, Melvin, Nithin, Nandu and many others, I started to get to know and see music and also try out various stuff. In the mean time, I had been trying out various stuff in Fruity loops(Its a great software, where you could have different instruments, and compose music with those instruments, right on your computer, with no additional add-ons)

The break through in music in my life happened, when our class decided to go big time with electric guitar and stuff for one of the events in the college. I was informed that Melvin would be on the lead, with electric guitar and the practice would be happening in the classroom where we had our 1st semester. As I slowly entered the room, I felt the entire room and world getting transformed around me..... He was trying out various effects on the pedal, like wah-wah, echo etc and he played a few licks. It was an amazing experience. After that I made sure that, whenever they practiced, I did not miss that out.

Some months later, when I decided to come to Bangalore to pursue my studies at NIIT, Melvin had come to my place and he had brought his accoustic guitar with him. After he showed me various stuff in it and we spend some time, he just kept the guitar at my home and said he would take the next time he comes to my home. And it did remain so the next couple of weeks at my home. Back then, I did not even know the right way of holding a guitar and this was the time when he just kept it at my home, and I did not know what to say. I tried out various stuff, I mean just playing around until I broke one of the strings :( ( Sorry buddy )

After I came to Bangalore, I kept contact with Melvin and asked about guitars and music. Finally when I saw the movie 'The rocker'(The songs in the movie by actor/ singer Teddy Geiger is just so cool) and 'Freaky Friday', especially the final scene in 'Freaky friday', I wanted to go for an electric guitar. In a span of 4-5 months, and a lot of discussion later I and Melvin decided to hit Brigade road, the home of many guitar and music shops in bangalore. Finally when the day arrived, I was excited beyond measure. And here I was at brigade road, and we hit the first shop.

(The story would continue in the next post)

Bitten by twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:13:00 +0000

It was recently that I decided to check out this cool microblogging site thanks to geekandpoke and my friend Swaroop . Twitter has this concept that, when you 'follow' someone, you get know by minute updates on the things that they do. When you 'tweet' it means that you just update what you are doing now. So if I was tweeting now, I would something like 'blogging about twitter'. To know more -> twitter help.

Twittering with python

Twitter is a cool micro blogging site, with many people updating their day to day activities on a minute by minute basis. So what if we could get as well as post updates in a neat way. The possibilities are endless. One possible scenario would be, If you have a firewall, your firewall could 'tweet' every time it is targeted by an attacker. So people around the world( who follow you) would get to know the attack process in real time !!!

Now lets try to programmatically read and then post a few tweets using python.

So lets get started,

The first site would ofcourse be the python section of twitter api library - http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Libraries#Python

In the next 4 steps, lets see how we could post a tweet in twitter

1. First download the wrapper python twitter.

2. Run > cmd. Go to the folder where you have downloaded python twitter( as mentioned in step 1 ) and Fire up python

3. Type
>>> import twitter

4. If you want to get latest tweets of someone, then the type the following

>>> client = twitter.Api()
>>> latest_posts = client.GetUserTimeline("yourusername")
>>> print [s.text for s in latest_posts]

5. If you want to post your own tweets, then type the following

>>> client = twitter.Api(username='yourusername', password='yourpassword')
>>> update = client.PostUpdate('The Twitter API is easy')

Other cool twitter api wrappers

Twyt - A twitter api interface for python
Python twiiter tools

Hang on buddies, more updates coming soon.