I wanted to try out Macro photography. Admittedly, it’s nowhere near as good as it should be, but I still love this shot (click to see larger picture and go to my album on Picasa with more such shots):

Well, there is something that you can do to handle this situation better, and here’s an article that tells you how: http://www.nagarro.com/blog/a-better-way-to-test-email-sending-functionality-is-to-use-your-own-smtp-server/

This article was also written by me at my employer’s corporate blog. Going forward, I am going to be pointing to any articles I write on that blog from here.

So, how do we solve this problem? Well, Chrome offers us a very cool functionality (which FireFox also has, I believe) where I can add many search engines to address bar, and I can choose which one to call by adding a shortcut word/letter before my search term.

Let me show you how you can do this, and let me take Bing image search as the example (since I use this).

Before you proceed, please read this article on how to add a new search engine to Chrome. Once you have read it you will know that you can easily go to the Tools menu, choose Options, and then click on the Manage button under the “Default Search” section to open the Search Engines dialog box.

Here, click the Add button and add the following values in the three fields:

• Name – Bing Image Search
• Keyword – i (notice this is a small ‘i’. It can be anything you like. This is the shortcut key that you will use to access the search from the address bar)
• URL - http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=%s

Press OK, and close the dialog boxes. Now, go to your browser address bar, and press i followed by the keyword you are searching for. Chrome will now directly show you results from Bing Image Search. What’s more the moment you type anything after i followed by a space, Chrome will let you know that it is going to use the Bing Image Search for this search (see below):

So, now it is very easy for me to search for images by employing this shortcut. This type of a function is not limited to search engines. You can add any site which support searching through query strings as shown above (in fact Chrome adds any site on which it detects functionality such as this automatically).

I have shortcuts for images, videos, and my own blog (almost all WordPress blogs support a search query syntax, so can be easily added here).

Adding Site Specific Quick Search

Actually, you don’t even need for the site to support such a syntax, and can use the power of the search engines to make a site specific quick search (although I can’t understand why a site won’t have search syntax). Here’s an example of how to do this (and I am taking my blog as an example, even though I can use the query string syntax to search on it):

• Name – Habitually Good
• Keyword – HG
• URL – http://www.bing.com/search?q=site:blog.gadodia.net+%s

Now, if you type “HG “ followed by any search query, you will get results only from my blog. Of course, this will work with Google as well.

Go ahead and add shortcuts to your heart’s content and make yourself more productive.

Most recently, I decided to take photos of Peach (the pup that we are going to keep with us), and it was becoming an exercise in frustration as she is so active and moving all the time. I was shooting at night, and indoors. And I didn’t want to use a flash, but for my abilities, she kept giving me blurry pictures.

So, I thought, that maybe I need to improvise. A thought struck me, and I turned all the lights off, and made the room pretty much completely dark.

Yes, completely dark. Now, I setup my camera flash (a Canon 580 EXII) so that instead of throwing light directly at the subject, it was throwing the light at the ceiling. And I pulled out the reflector that the camera has got in it so that some of the light gets reflected to the front of the camera. This has the effect of throwing diffused light on the subject.

Since everything in the room was dark, I was able to slow the shutter speed down a little bit, which allowed me to capture Peach sufficiently (because the lens mostly only recorded the image when the flash came on, and any movement while the shutter was still open got neglected because it was in the dark.

The results are below (click to see larger versions):

And here’s one of the other puppies, shot in normal light, as he jumped up to me.

Hope you enjoyed the photos.

So, today I thought to myself, maybe I should consider writing a WordPress plug-in for automating this task on the WordPress end. And the moment that thought came to me I almost kicked myself. Because I was suddenly 100% sure that someone probably already did that (I should have searched for it an year ago). But better later than never, I say. And so, when I searched, there it was waiting: Amazon S3 plugin for WordPress, by the author of tan tan noodles blog.

The rest of the article is about making it work for my setup.

The plug-in is straight forward enough, you install it as usual – by dropping it in your plug-ins directory and activating it from the admin panel. Once you do that, there are some options to setup as shown below:

The keys you will find in your Amazon Web Services account. And some of the other settings are dependent upon how you setup your S3 account. By the way, if you choose the setting for “Bucket is setup for virtual hosting”, it might give you a warning message that the DNS is not configured properly (it did in my case), but I ignored the warning, and it works fine for me.

Now, the moment you set this up, the plug-will use whatever configuration you have for your file uploads to create a directory structure in the Amazon Bucket you chose. So, if you have an existing setup you may have to tweak it a little to make it compatible.

In my case, I had a folder called blog in my bucket under which the images were kept and I had chosen to adopt the same standard that WordPress uses when it organizes the folders into years and months. So, all I had to do was go to the Miscellaneous Settings screen and change the upload folders storage path to blog:

One undesirable side effect of doing this was that my media library broke. Not that I use it, and not that it will make any difference to the past posts (from when I used to upload the images to WordPress instead of Amazon S3). But, then all I had to do to fix it was to copy the contents of wp-content/uploads (my earlier setting) to a newly created folder in the root called blog.

And that’s it, I was done. Now all the images I post from LiveWriter automatically get uploaded to my designated Amazon S3 bucket. And it makes it much easier for me to deal with them.

Update: As sad as this sounds, the plug-in is not working as expected. For me, it loads the files to Amazon S3, but it also retains a copy on my webhost. And the links that are created in the post are from the webhost instead of links from Amazon S3. I will try and either fix the plug-in myself, or try to find a fix on the Internet (and requesting the author).

Not too much time passes before I hear from someone or another that their mail account was hacked, or their messenger account was compromised, or something like that. They can’t understand what happened. While there are plenty of ways through which a hacker can gain access to your account, one of the most common is by guessing the password that you use.

By guessing the password, it means that the hacker is using a program which will try thousands of possibilities to guess your password. Well, if your password is easy to guess, then you are in trouble, because the hacker will have it sooner or later.

So, what can you do?

The answer is not to keep weak passwords. There are may ways to ensure this. The Internet is full of good articles around this topic.

While it is possible to think of a really random and hard to crack password such as IE^dO#12o2s7, it is also almost impossible to remember such a password. Passwords have to be such that they should be easy to remember. Here are some ideas that you can use:

• Do not put any personal information in your password (name, phone number, etc.)
• Do not use the same password for all your accounts.
• Try and have a complex password which is a mix of letters, numbers, and special characters.
• Try to have at least 8 characters in a password.

So, how do we make it easy to remember?

• One trick is to choose a phrase which you will never forget, such as: “I grew up in Philippines”. Now take this phrase and add some numbers and characters in it and remove the spaces: “9Igrewupin@Philippines!”. Now that is a nice password – it is easy to remember since it states a simple fact – the only thing that you have to remember is where you put the numbers and the special characters.
• But you can’t go about using the same password for every account, so what you can do is use the same base password, but change it a little to reflect the account for which you are choosing the password – so using the example above, for my account on Yahoo I would choose “9Igrewupin@Yahoo!”; or for my Google account I would choose “9Igrewupin@Google!”.

The real important thing is this: there are times when we have to share our passwords, so you should never share your password directly. First you should go and change your password to something simpler, then share it. Once the person you are sharing it with is done, then go and change the password back to the original – this has multiple advantages – if you are using a pattern such as described above, it is not revealed – another is that if you have the same password for every account, you don’t show that.

If your passwords are not strong, you should change them all today. So, that you are not ruing tomorrow the fact that your account got hacked.

There are many ways to go about doing this:

• I can simply try to right-click the logo on the webpage and try to save the file or copy the image from my browser. If this works, then we are done (but it doesn’t work a lot of times, see below for why).
• If the above doesn’t work, I could try and take a screenshot of the webpage and try to get the logo that way. This is a problem is the logo is on a colored background (or worse a shaded background). Because then you get the color in the screenshot as well, and you need some skill with Photoshop to resolve this situation – in any case this is too time consuming.

So, how do we do this?

Well, first let me explain why you are not able to right-click and save the logo. The reason is that a lot of websites embed the logo into the webpage through a CSS attribute instead of a direct image tag.

To be able to find the logo, you need to be able to read the CSS of the website. This can be quite tricky at times. The long method is:

• View the HTML source of the page – decipher it so that you can locate the element where the logo is being displayed.
• Then locate the CSS class which has been applied to that element.
• Now locate the URL to the CSS file in the html page.
• Download the CSS file, and locate the CSS class to find the URL to the logo.

Good luck doing all that. Luckily, you don’t have to. Most modern browsers have features which can ease your task. Let me show you how you can do the above in Chrome (the browser that I use).

For an example, we will take my blog (which has the same problem – you can’t easily download the logo).

Step 1: Right click the logo image and choose the Inspect Element menu option (as shown below):

This launches the Inspector window in Chrome which shows you the HTML structure of the page (and automatically highlights the element that you right-clicked on in the HTML pane. Further more, for the highlighted element it shows you the CSS styles which have been applied on that element. Yup, we got it.

Here’s what it looks like (click the image to enlarge):

As you can see in the image, there is a background attribute applied on the element which contains the URL of the logo.

Step 2: Copy URL and paste it in the browser window and press enter

That’s it, you are done! As I said, its a stupid trick, but sometimes it works.

Out came the trusty Visual Studio and I started coding. A couple of hours later, I have an application which does nothing more than allowing you to copy the Twitter theme from any user on Twitter. (yup, I know its a useless app, but I was just having some fun).

I am going to show quickly how the application is used, then list a few disclaimers, and then provide a link to download the application in case you are feeling bored enough to go copy someone’s profile theme.

After installing the application, you should find an icon on your desktop, simply launch it. You see the following screen:

In the screen, just enter your Twitter username, and your Twitter password, and also enter the name of the profile whose theme you want to copy. I am choosing the theme of Caterina Fake (a co-founder of Flickr), who has a nice looking theme (shown below):

Once you have entered the details, just hit the button and if you entered the right username and password, then you should now have the theme of the person whose name you entered (in my case Caterina).

And sure enough, here’s my profile after I clicked the button:

Simple, isn’t it?

Disclaimers:

There are many disclaimers that go along with this application (should you decide to use it):

• It doesn’t copy the tiled background setting. So, if the profile you are copying from has the background image tiled, and you don’t, then after the copy is done, you will have to manually go and check the tiled box in your settings page (and vice versa). The reason it doesn’t do that is simple – I am using Tweet# as a library to access the Twitter API, and they seem to have forgotten to implement this option (and I was too lazy to fix that code).
• There is no error handling. So, if something goes wrong (such as the wrong username/password) then the app won’t tell you. Sorry, but this was a weekend fun task – so I didn’t want to spend too much effort.
• It requires .Net framework 3.5 to run. Chances are that you will have it installed, but if you don’t the installer will tell you and you will have to download and install it.
• Standard disclaimer: I am not responsible for anything that arises from the use of this application.

Download Link

If you would still like to give this a try, then here is the download link: http://files.gadodia.net/blog/2009/06/TwitterProfileHelper.msi

Here’s my (probably myopic) view on the situation. And this is based on the fact that I use Google quite extensively in my daily routine, and I switched over to using Bing about 10 days ago. Below is the sum total of my experience on Bing.

Well, let me begin by saying that I use Chrome as my browser. I setup Bing as the default search engine on it. This is important because I am used to searching by simply opening a new tab and typing my search query (or using Alt+D to go to the address bar of the current tab). Now, in Chrome, when you want to do a search query, if you prefix the term Google to it, Chrome automatically converts this into a Google Quick Search (as shown below):

So, by setting the search engine to default, and using Google Quick Search, I can use both the engines without much inconvenience barrier. This is what allows me to see quickly what Google is giving when I am not able to find what I am looking for on the first page of search results on Bing.

Google understands context better! That is my conclusion. Google knows what I am looking for.

USE CASE 1:

I saw on Twitter that one of the featured Twitter applications is called wefollow.com. Well, I went to wefollow.com and couldn’t make heads and tails out of what the heck it is. So, I binged it. Here’s the exact search phrase I used:

what is wefollow.com

The results on Bing were disappointing. The first page didn’t have a single result which explained what wefollow.com is. Here’s a screenshot of the results page (to run the query yourself, click here: http://tinyurl.com/l52fkt.

Here’s the result from Google on the same query (to run it click here: http://tinyurl.com/ltbyl9):

Notice the huge difference in the quality of results. I immediately get several links which will explain to me what wefollow.com is. Now, that is what I call search results quality.

USE CASE 2:

A few days ago, I was encountering an error in my WordPress installation. One of the plugins was misbehaving, and was throwing an error on the WordPress pages. So I binged again with part of the error message as the search query.

Bing returned me a set of results each one of which was a site which was experiencing the same error. Read that again. This means that the results that Bing returned to me were sites where this error was displaying on the page as well.

Google returned me sites where other people had written about this error (forums and blogs).

USE CASE 3:

I used Google to find the time in various cities around the world a lot (visit that link if you don’t know how that works). Here are some queries that I ran on both Bing and Google:

I live in Gurgaon. Bing doesn’t even recognize it as a place where it should give time.

And in this one, both of them show the New York Times site as the first result, but Google also shows the current time in New York, which is what I was searching for.

By the way, Bing does have the feature of showing time. Try searching for San Jose time (or click here: http://tinyurl.com/m67xvw). It shows you the time in San Jose, California. If you make the same search in Google though, it shows you the time in San Jose, California as well as San Jose, Costa Rica.

Conclusion

There are tons of queries that i can keep displaying (because I am experiencing this on a daily basis). I am not saying that I always have to go back to Google. But a lot of times the results that Bing returns are just not good enough.

Note, for the times I do not go back to Google, it doesn’t mean Bing gave better results. It only means, that I found what I expected (for all I know for these queries Google might give better results, I won’t know since I don’t try in these cases).

In conclusion, I can safely say, that for my footprint of queries, Google does a better job of understanding my intent.

So, why do I use Bing? Well, I like Microsoft (please don’t start a flame war) and I would like to see some competition in the search space (as competition usually ends up benefiting the consumer = me).

What are your experiences on Bing?

So, when Bing launched, even though I told myself I will give it a shot, I found that I was still using Google to do my searches because of the habit with the address bar. So, to stick to my decision to give Bing a fair try, I just made Bing the default search engine for Chrome. Here’s how to do it if you want to do it for yourself.

1. Fire up Chrome, click on the tools button, and click Options – this will open the Options dialog box.

2. On the Basics tab, locate the “Manage” button under Default Search section, and click it – this will open up the Search Engines dialog box.

3. Click on the “Add” button and enter the details as shown in the picture below, and press Ok – this will create an entry for Bing as a search engine in Chrome.

4. Almost done. Select Bing in the list of search engines and click on the “Make Default” button – the entry will probably be in Other search engines, in the list.

That’s it, we are done. Now whenever I search for something using my usual process, I end up using Bing. You can add Bing as a default search engine in whichever browser you use. The process is usually similar.

Happy Binging!

So, which one did I choose? Before I disclose that, here are the factors that I took into consideration when I compared Tata Sky Plus to Airtel IPTV.

So, what are the considerations when you make such a decision. The usual suspects are:

• Cost
• Picture Clarity
• Support Services Quality
• Program Recording

For Tata Sky, these are the details:

• Cost: there is an upfront cost of the device which can be prohibitive for some. Its between Rs. 8000 to Rs. 10000. The rest is your usual Tata Sky subscription along with Rs. 50 per month for using Tata Sky Plus.
• Picture Clarity: same as Tata Sky, which is pretty fine.
• Support Services: Tata Sky people are pretty professional and I have never had a problem with them. They have a great website through which you can make online payments and configure your bouquet of services.
• Program Recording: this is where the DVR power comes in. All those Amir Khan advertisements are true. There is the ability to record any program on any channel, pause live TV, etc.

For Airtel IPTV, these are the details:

• Cost: there is an upfront cost of around Rs. 3000 to Rs. 4000 for the installation and the devices. And then there are 4 plans which vary between Rs. 400 per month to Rs. 1600 per month. The cheapest plan doesn’t include Internet. The other 3 plans have Internet available at varying speeds and they are all of unlimited download types. What you get for all this, is a telephone, a DSL connection, and the IPTV service, and 135 channels.
• Picture Clarity: while I have heard a lot of rants about how poor the picture quality is, I run it on a 40 inch LCD TV, and I find it comparable to the Tata Sky that we are running on our other TV (which is also 40 inch LCD).
• Support Services: Airtel has excellent support services and once again there is a website through which you can do all of your transactions.
• Program Recording: this is where things start to differ a little. Airtel IPTV has live TV pause, rewind, and all those features of the DVR, but with a caveat. It only has these for 35 odd channels. Also, you don’t need to record the programs that you want to watch later. For these 35 channels, Airtel records ALL programs for a week. Therein lies the other limitation, if you want to watch an episode from more than a week ago, you are out of luck.

So, which option did we go for? We went for Airtel IPTV.

• First, because we needed an Internet connection and a phone anyway.
• Second, because it really is pretty relaxing not to have to remember that you have to set some program for recording. Also in TataSky Plus, there is a limit on how many simultaneous programs you can record. In Airtel IPTV, at least the 35 channels are all recorded for a week.
• Third, because it was something new and we had the option since we already had TataSky on the other TV.

How have your experiences been with Airtel IPTV?

As you can see, there is a problem here. Unless you read files like these for a living, this format is pretty much unreadable. There is one more problem with Amazon S3 logs – it is that there are always too many of them. S3 doesn’t create one log per day per bucket. It creates many logs per day per bucket. So, for one of my buckets, for 3 days worth of logging, I had 329 log files. Clearly, I will go crazy if I was to open each one, one-by-one, to see what was in them.

Well, in this post, I am going to outline the solution I came up with.

Before I begin, there are of course ready made methods out there to interpret Amazon S3 logs. I must say, that I would love to use them as they provide so much more information and analysis than the simple reading of logs that I do, however, they don’t always work, or work like you would like them to.

Here are two other ways to analyze your S3 logs:

• S3Stat – this is a very awesome service, which costs next to nothing (and actually, you get to try it for free for 30 days). However, there are certain limitations that it poses in the way you want to manage your logging. I didn’t want to do it that way, so I didn’t use it. I highly recommend that you check it out, though.
• SiSense Prism Viewer – On the CloudBerry Explorer blog, you can find some information about this neat product (which is again free in a limited way) which allows you to pull the logs on your desktop and run analytics there. This program didn’t work for me.

Having got those out of the way, let me go on to demonstrate how I solved my problem of reading the Amazon logs.

Problem 1: How do I handle so many files?

I needed a way to combine the files into one big file which I can then try and open in a more readable format. Well, old school computer skills came to my rescue (when I was even thinking of coding a program to combine them). I remembered the copy command – specifically, I remembered that copy can be used to copy multiple files into one file.

So, I fired up the command prompt and issued this awesome command on my log files. Here’s how to do it.

1. Before anything, create a folder on your hard drive and copy the logs that you want to process for a given bucket into that folder from Amazon S3. To keep it simple, make sure that you don’t have any other files in that folder.
2. Go to your Windows Start Menu, and Choose Run (alternatively, you can press Windows Key + R).
3. Type cmd and press Enter. This should open up a command prompt window.
4. Now change your directory to the folder where you have stored your log files. You need to use the CD command in order to change directories in a Windows command shell (click here for a quick tutorial).
5. Once you are in the directory where you had stored the log files, simply issue the following command: copy * big_log (as shown in the picture below).

This should create a file called big_log in the same directory as the other files and it will have all the log files combined into it. Now, we move to the second problem of how to view this combined log in a format which is easier to understand.

Problem 2: Reading the log

Well, this is even easier. To my rescue comes Microsoft Excel. If you have Excel installed on your computer, then you can simply open the log file and then tell Excel how to interpret it. Here’s what to do:

1. Start Excel and go to File menu and choose Open.
2. In the Open File dialog box, navigate to the folder where the big_log file was created. You may not see it, because by default this dialog will only show files supported by Excel. You need to choose “All Files” in “Files of type” combo box.
3. Locate your file, select it, and click the Open button.
4. The moment you do that, you are presented with the Text Import Wizard. The screenshots below show you what you should do.

Choose “Delimited” in the Original data type options, and click Next.

On the next screen, check “Space” in the Delimiters options, and click Finish. Immediately, Excel will divide your data into the right columns and rows, and now you can work with this data to slice and dice it the way you want it. To understand which column represents which value, here’s the Server Log Format Documentation.’

What I usually do is that I get rid of some of the columns that I don’t need and I resize the others and put filters on top of them. This allows me to do my basic analysis of the data. One of the key things that I am usually interested in knowing is whether someone is hot-linking my files. I can easily tell them by looking at the Referer column (which is the second to the last column), and if that column contains any URL other than my own website, then I know that this URL is hot-linking to my images or files.

How do you analyze your S3 files?

One of the drawbacks of moving to S3 is that you pay for accessing your files and images. That is fine as long as you are the only one accessing these (or the access is controlled by you). For example, I am okay with paying money every time images I host on S3 are accessed by people who are visiting this blog (and in the process they access the images). But since providing such access makes the images public, anyone can link to these files from their websites or blogs. This is called hot-linking images, and is one of the worst things you can do on the Internet.

So, how can you prevent this? You can’t prevent it directly, but you can monitor if this is happening, and there are a number of things you can do if you discover hot-linking of your files. Amazon S3 allows you to enable Logging on your buckets, and I describe the step-by-step on how to do this.

Step 1: Download CloudBerry Explorer

Actually just about any of the popular S3 tools would do, but I use CloudBerry, and I highly recommend it (here’s the story behind it).

Step 2: Understanding Logging and Buckets

If you have made it this far, I am assuming you know what S3 is and the fact that all data is stored on S3 in buckets. In S3, logs are generated at the bucket level. So if you enable logging on a bucket, all activities on any files in that bucket will be logged.

For you to enable logging, you need to have a target bucket which will store the log files. This can be any existing bucket, or you can create a new bucket just for storing the logs. This is what I choose to do.

Step 3: Launch CloudBerry Explorer

Once you start CloudBerry Explorer (and configure it with your Amazon S3 credentials), you will be able to see all your buckets in the right pane (by default, this is the case, but if you have already navigated to a bucket, you will need to navigate to the root level).

Step 4: Create a Logging Bucket

This is of course optional since you can use any of your existing buckets, but I like to keep things clean. Simply click on the New Bucket icon on the tool bar in the view where your Amazon S3 buckets are showing.

You can choose any name for your logging bucket. Mine is called logs.gadodia.net (as it goes well with my naming convention).

Step 5: Enable logging for your buckets

Once you know where you are going to keep your logs, its a simple matter of invoking the Logging command from the context menu. Here’s how it’s done. Select the bucket on which you want to enable logging, and right click it. Choose Logging.

When you choose the Logging menu item on the context menu, you will be taken to a properties dialog box, where you will need to enter two values (as shown below):

Here, the prefix can be anything. By default it is the name of the bucket. This allows you to identify the log file for this bucket. Second, you need to choose which bucket the logs will be created in.

Once this is done just press OK and you are done. Of course, in the backend CloudBerry Explorer carries out a number of tasks to set this up for you; and if you are interested in learning about it, then I recommend reading Amazon’s article on Setting Up Server Access Logging.

I will try and put up an article on how to interpret the logs that are generated in the future.

Daddy, I can’t pedal anymore, I’ve used up all the food in my tummy.

As funny as the kiddy talk is, I just couldn’t stop laughing at some of the comments that followed Scott’s post. Look for yourself in the screen shot below.

These are various things that could think of. Please add your ideas in the comments.

Spread Awareness

• Call up 10 people you know and ask them what their planet saving resolution for Earth day is. If they are not sure what you are talking about, explain to them the concept of Earth Day, and also tell them that this is a great excuse to make a resolution (such as one you make on new year) to start doing something about the planet. If they are not convinced, throw out some of the facts about how the planet is fast tracking towards complete destruction (see facts below). If they need ideas on what to do, show them this article.
• Do you have a blog? Write an article on it, like I am doing here. Make a convincing case for your readers that they really have to do something on Earth Day. Do you have a podcast? publish one for the Earth Day. Do you have a website? Put on an Earth Day banner. Are you on Twitter? Tweet this post.
• Get your HR department to conduct an activity for all employees in the office and thus spreading awareness.
• Make sure you update your Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, etc. statuses to reflect a message that tells people about what you have done on Earth Day, and asks them to do something as well (e.g. I adopted a Panda, what have you done?)
• Send out a mail each on all your mailing groups talking about Earth Day and the importance of saving the planet.
• Wear clothes with Earth Day messages. Have bumper stickers on your car for the Earth Day. Fly the Earth Day flag from your balcony.

Act

• Say no to plastic, seriously. Start carrying reusable bags with you so that you don’t need to use a plastic bag.
• Plant 10 trees. This helps prevent soil erosion, cleans pollution, and provides home for insects, birds, etc. increasing the biodiversity of the area.
• Read on 5 different issues concerning the environment and therefore learn about the problems that are ailing the planet, and what you can do to help. If you are in Gurgaon, India, two very important topics that everyone should know about are rainwater harvesting and garbage disposal.
• Change all your lighting in the house to energy efficient lighting. CFLs and energy star rated lighting may cost you a bit more up front, but will pay off more than their cost over the life of their operation in terms of reduced electricity consumption.
• Organize a community cleanup campaign – put together groups and pick up litter from roads and parks and dispose of it properly.
• Adopt a wild animal which is endangered. One great source for this is the WWF site: http://www.worldwildlife.org/how/index.html. Most people don’t realize how important wild animals are to the survival of the planet.
• Save fuel consumption. Start a carpool for going to office, school, etc. Turn off your engines at long traffic stops. Drive moderately. Get a car which is fuel efficient, hybrid, or electric.
• Optimize your house hold heating and/or cooling. Make sure you don’t keep your refrigerator door open more than necessary (or better, be quick about it when you open your refrigerator). Make sure your windows and doors are closed and you don’t move in and out of a cooled or heated room too frequently. If you are using an air conditioner, try to set the temperature to a couple of degrees above what you normally would (and vice versa if you are using a heater).
• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – Use as little as you can. Reuse as much as you can. Recycle what you don’t need and buy recycled products.
• Use Google to search for the usual keywords such as “How to save electricity?”, or “How to save water?” or “How to save fuel?” and so on. Look through the top 5 results, and adopt at least 1 suggestion from each of your searches.

Points to Ponder

• If you are on a cruise on a luxury ocean liner, in one week, your ship generates 800,000 liters of sewage, 3.8 million liters of gray water (from showers, sinks, washers, etc.), 150,000 liters of oily water, and over 8 tons of solid toxic and non-toxic waste. There are hundreds of these ships in the world (do the math).
• Over 1,000,000,000 (One Billion) plastic bags are used every day. That’s over 10,000 bags a second. And this is in the US alone. Around the world, each year we use between 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags (over a million per minute).
• Energy needed to create 1 new can = Energy needed to create 20 recycled cans.
• Recycling 1 ton of paper = Saving 17 trees.
• In the US, a 100 million trees are chipped down each year to produce junk mail.
• Pollution of drinking water is a problem for over half the world’s population with 5-10 million people dying each year from water-related diseases.
• Each year, plastic in the water kills 100,000 marine mammals (whales, dolphins, etc.), 1 million sea birds, and countless fish.
• 40% of the rivers in the United States are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life.

This post barely scraps the surface of the problem. But, we need to keep trying, and so here we are. Please leave your ideas in the comments on what you are going to do on Earth day or what you suggest every one can do.