Anish - Inside / Outside

Benny & the magical Bentar

2006-12-20T08:16:00.000-08:00

Today I had the opportunity to listen to the stories and music of an exceptionally talented person – Benny Prasad.

The 'Limca Book of Records' acknowledges him as the most traveled Indian musician. He is also the creator of the Bentar – a guitar with 54 strings!

Pic. of Benny with his Bentar – from his personal website.

Amen!

2006-12-14T08:04:00.000-08:00

When we've been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we'd first begun.

Amazing Grace...... one of my favorite songs - many times has brought tears into my eyes. To hear Victor Wooten play it such with such alacrity.... Awesome.

And here is the MIDI version of the orginal tune.

Steve "The Crocodile Hunter" Irwin

2006-09-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

Stephen Robert Irwin - The Crocodile Hunter

(Feb 22, 1962 - Sept 4, 2006)

May his soul rest in peace!

Image from The Age

Today is 3108 Day!

2006-08-31T11:05:00.000-07:00

OK, so Blogs and Bloggers have their own day – 3108 – 31st August and here are my picks for 2006:

I - Montessori Mom – The latest in Montessori Education

I like this site as it helps me understand what is happening at my son’s school.

From the site's about us page: We provide free easy fun filled ideas for educational and developmental learning for your preschool or day-care age child, and the whole family as well.

II – The Happy Husband.... celebrating marriage in a hostile world

I am glad someone thinks this a subject worthy of a Blog

According to the author Curt Hendley, this blog is “an affirmation of marriage as an enterprise worthy of pursuit, a daily journal of my thoughts concerning my own happy marriage.”

III – my dilemma (a daddy blog)

Who says you can only blog about technology? This blog has insights into the lives of David, Lillian, Maddie (5 yrs) and Aaron (3 yrs).

David started this blog way back in 2002 as “a blog of anecdotal stories about fatherhood.”

IV – Go2Web2

Review of Web 2.0 sites by Orli Yakuel.

V – Persecution Update

Dr. Sajan’s blog about the persecution of Christians in India

While religious conversion in all forms is to be strongly condemned, no law or extremist action can stop a genuine change of heart. The Bible says that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved”

Microsoft Tech Support

2006-08-19T04:06:00.000-07:00

It’s been a long time since I laughed till I had tears in my eyes…. Don’t miss the transcript that accompanies the voice. [Via Negative99]

Coming Soon To A Computer Near You!

2006-08-18T23:41:00.000-07:00

More about this later..... Happy Weekend and Be Good :-)

Grand Prize

2006-08-18T11:28:00.000-07:00

I got a surprise invitation to a concert by a Christian band called Grand Prize, who performed at the Bangalore Campus Crusade for Christ today evening. They were real cool… check them out and listen to some of their tracks at GrandPrizeMusic.com. They also have a blog at MySpace.

Today’s was their last performance in Bangalore. They have two more shows planned in Tamil Nadu next week (6:00 PM CSI Community Hall - Nagarcoil on 20th Aug and 6:00 PM Sawyerpuram on 22nd Aug). So if you live in these places drop in ;-).

Pic of Luke (lead vocals, guitar) from their fansite.

Apparently they rechristened themselves as Esterlyn recently.

Captain’s Blog?

2006-08-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

According to Tom Galloway’s post on the Official Google Blog...

Did you ever realize that among many other things, Star Trek predicted blogs? Think about it -- all those "Captain's log" and "personal log" entries that Kirk would make. He was definitely a blogger. And of course the communicator-inspired cell phone design. And the crew was constantly asking the ship's computer for information...sort of like Google.

You have a point there Tom!

Celebrating John and Emelty’s Wedding

2006-08-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

Emelty, my sister-in-law and John were married on 17th august 2006 in the gulf. All of us wish them a very prosperous married life ahead. A lot of prayers from so many people have gone into this marriage. I am sure they will have a very blessed time ahead.

Personally for me I am thankful for the role Emelty played in arranging and organizing my marriage. It’s sad none of us could be present there to help out with her wedding. We will only be meeting the couple when they come down during their holidays.

//After Blog// *

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Google Analytics - The wait is over!

2006-08-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

You can now sign-up for a free Google Analytics Account instantly. According to the post on the official Google Analytics Blog:

Now anyone with a website can instantly create one for free by simply by visiting google.com/analytics or by clicking on the "Analytics" tab within AdWords.

Thanks guys.... Any update on MeasureMap?

Flowers From Ray

2006-08-16T13:04:00.000-07:00

I was amazed to find a mail in my inbox today with "You got flowers from Ray" in the subject line. With his mom's help Ray managed to send me these flowers from Orisinal.com - one of his favorite websites.

Ray has recovered completely form the injury suffered during the fall. The sutures were removed last Wednesday. I want to thank everyone who supported Celesty and myself after the accident - especially my colleagues. Thank you for every prayer that was made on his behalf. Thanks to everyone who checked on Ray's progress by SMS, phone calls and in person. God bless you all.

Celebrating India’s Independence Day

2006-08-15T10:56:00.000-07:00

Ray holding India's flag on 15th August 2006

Mother, I bow to thee!
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
bright with orchard gleams,
Cool with thy winds of delight,
Green fields waving Mother of might,
Mother free.

Glory of moonlight dreams,
Over thy branches and lordly streams,
Clad in thy blossoming trees,
Mother, giver of ease
Laughing low and sweet!
Mother I kiss thy feet,
Speaker sweet and low!
Mother, to thee I bow.

From the English translation of Vande Mataram

On this occasion let us pray for India, and for our central and state leaders.

Pray every way you know how, for everyone you know. Pray especially for rulers and their governments to rule well so we can be quietly about our business of living simply, in humble contemplation.

From the Bible

//After Blog// *

My friend Ananth sent me an SMS greeting today:

If you are married pls ignore this message, or else Happy Independence Day…… :-)

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Don't let them find out....

2006-08-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

I was trying to reach W3Schools.com, a site with free website building tutorials.

I misspelled W3Schools as W3School (without the "s") and landed on an interesting site about Bible Studies.

The banner on top of the page said "Don't let others find out where you've been! - Click Here! 100% Free". Huh..??

Compliments anyone?

2006-08-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

I am not sure of the exact path I took to reach the blog called Complimenter. It was a link from another site with a button that said "I've been complimented".

I in my opinion the Complimenting Commenter's (CC's) blog-idea is really good.

CC also has some other interesting projects going on:
1) The Birthday Compliments list. I have included myself here.
2) Change the World which I think is a wonderful idea that I'd like to emulate and
3) Summer of Compliments 2006 - This happened in 2005 also... kewl

Also CC says we just need to send in an email to be on the BlogRoll – complimentable indeed!

We can all do with some positive strokes, can't we? :-)

Google Webmaster Central

2006-08-05T16:50:00.000-07:00

Google Sitemaps is now Google Webmaster Central.

Please see Philipp Lenssen's post.

Lost and Found

2006-08-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

As you can see I have been working on reviving the blog for more than a week. I started by picking a new Blogger Template - a step that removes all your customizations. For the last two days I have been focusing on putting some stuff in to the sidebar.

Lost Code Episode 1 - Somewhere in the middle of the night, August 5th
In my opinion saving changes made to your Blogger Template and republishing them (before you can view it again in a browser) takes time. I prefer to use the the preview button. Yesterday I would add some code to the sidebar and preview it, and then make some more changes to the code and preview it again. I never saved the template changes and continued to work in this manner for a long time. Unfortunately right towards the end of my task-list my browser crashed! I say unfortunate because I use Firefox which never really gives such trouble. I lost more than 50% of what I had done. :-(

Lost Code Episode 2 - Somewhere in the middle of the night, August 6th
I started with renewed vigor tonight. After all I knew what pieces of HTML had to go where. This time I was more careful and I kept saving the template changes regularly. After my final change when I previewed the page in my browser I found more than half of my sidebar missing. I kept refreshing the page and no luck. So I went back to the template page and found that half of the code had vanished from there too! lol. So what were my options? Restart from scratch...? Cam'on, I've lost plenty of sleep doing this thing man - it can't just start over! Thankfully I managed to find a fairly recent copy of my page through the back button of the Internet Explorer. I had used IE to preview my page recently (while I was doing my changes using Firefox). So I did a "view source" in IE and saved it as a text file. The next thing I did was to get whatever HTML I can from the Blogger Template Editor page (in Firefox) and save it into another text file. What I had to do now was to take all the customizations I had done to the page from both these files and put it all together and hopefully I will restore my page. Somehow the idea of doing this from two text files using Notepad (or even Notepad2 which I have installed) didn't appeal to me. I searched the web for a HTML/ Txt editor which supports editing on multiple files through tabs. I download NoteTab Light and found that I matched my intent. Just a few minutes later I had my code back. Ctrl. C + Ctrl. V into the Blogger Template Editor page and we are back in business. Amen.

This has been a learning experience. I don't have any idea of HTML - I need to learn... and I also need to keep some back-ups of the templates.

As far as the reason why I lost a good part of my template code... think the explanation is this: Blogger's Template Editor page has a text box using which we can edit the code. For some reason the entire template code had not loaded into the box (timed out?). I have noticed this earlier occasions where all of the template code is not loaded in to the editing area. Based on my experience I typically would scroll down to the end of the code page till the last tag is reached. Just before I lost the code I was working on some tags in the beginning of the page and didn't bother to scroll down. The template code had not loaded fully into that box and I saved my page.

In addition to the customizations that you are seeing in the side bar I also have some HTML snippets related to web stats which is hidden. It would have been a real pain to to log back into all those sites and copy and paste the scripts in to the template. I am glad I didn't have to do that. All is well that ends well!

I did some screen caps just after I lost the code - see below. Notice the < after the Blogsrater badge? I had lost the rest of the sidebar.

Ray's Accident

2006-08-03T11:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was indeed a sad day for all of us. I received a call on my mobile from Ray's teacher and the moment I heard her voice I knew something was wrong. I could also hear a child wailing behind her - and I realized it was Ray. She informed me that he has been hurt in a fall and is bleeding. I left for the school immediately, but by the time I reached she had already left for a hospital close by. My wife who had reached the school earlier was with her.

At the hospital, although the Doctor's room was bolted I could recognize Ray's voice coming from within. I was close to him but I had no access to the room! His teacher found me outside and said he had a fall and has a deep cut on his face. All I could blurt out was "Is he okay? Is he hurt in the eyes?" and she said no. I knocked on the doctor's door and when it opened I could see Ray on the examination table - as we saw out each other he held out his hand I grasped it and said "It's okay son, Dada is here...". When I saw him I realized that he was hurt and bleeding but it was not serious or life threatening. I also realized that the doctor was preparing to suture the wound. I took a moment to step out of the room to think.

I decided it was best to take him to the hospital that we usually visit. So with their permission of the doctors we transported him to Bangalore Baptist Hospital where he was finally attended to.

My experience with this hospital has never been good and yesterday was no different. This time one of the doctor's in the casualty ward prescribed an antibiotic syrup that is not manufactured!! The medicine is only available in tablet form. Unaware of this fact I went to different pharmacies near my house and even called up the Cash Pharmacy - all of them confirmed that no such medicine exists in the market. What were we to do? This is an antibiotic and we need to give him the right dosage. We then had to make several calls to the hospital to figure out the correct dosage of the medicine that has to be administered.

Earlier in the day the pharmacist had made such a fuss over my payment as I intended to pay by credit-card. All this while Ray is waiting in the casualty ward - and the treatment can only begin once I get the prescribed items! I am at a loss of words to describe the hospital staff's apathy....

We thank God, Ray is recovering well - he seems more energetic than ever.

I am of the opinion the doctor has really been negligent and I have the prescription to prove it. I intend to bring it to the attention of the hospital officials. Any one has any idea on what authority/ agency to approach with my complaint if I don't get a positive response from the hospital??

Please leave your comments on what options I have....

Also do any of you know of a good hospital in the north of Bangalore?

55 Ways to Have Fun With Google

2006-07-31T13:48:00.000-07:00

This book Philipp Lenssen which retails on Amazon for $19.66 is now availabe as a free download.

Philipp also publishes a famous blog called Google Blogoscoped

Meet Roscoe...

2006-07-31T12:13:00.000-07:00

(can't you hear him breath...?)

Roscoe the Pug With Ice Bag On His Head- Miserable in the Seattle Heat - Originally uploaded by zoomar.

The calendar can wait... I want to see you smile

2006-07-29T10:40:00.000-07:00

My sleep habits have changed over the past few weeks since I took on my new assignment with a BPO. I typically start work at 5:00 Pm and work in to the night. This means that I also get up much later than I used to. Today was no different and I got up to find my son and wife a little bored. I realized that my change in timings does have an impact on them too.

As I was getting ready to go in for a scheduled meeting (not related to my work, we are closed on Saturdays), my mind went back to the days where we used to go out regularly on Saturdays. The last time we did that was probably in the first week of April this year. I felt it was not fair for us to miss out on family time like this, after all today was my day off and Ray did not have school. When I was almost ready, I changed my mind about the meting and asked my son where he wants to go today? He gave his usual answer - Cubbon Park! So I decided that the calendar can wait this time and off we went on an impromptu visit to the park. The line at the Toy-Train counter was not very long and we got our tickets soon. To see the joy on his face and the smile while we rode the train... I was glad I decide to break my schedule for the day - his smile was worth it.

Good Night Dallas & Good Morning Bangalore!

2006-07-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

I had a conference with today with my clients based in Dallas along with my CEO who is in Bangalore. Now Bangalore is ten and a half hours ahead of Dallas. So while closing the call at 9:00 AM IST I said good night to my clients in Dallas and good morning to my boss!

Google Talk?

2005-08-23T07:29:00.000-07:00

I’ve been following this in the Blogosphere for some time now. And today major online news sites have been talking about it.

What’s interesting is that they are quoting Reuters, who intern are quoting an LA Times report. Hope we are not going around in circles here…. Personally my sense of precognition tells me that Google will go ahead and launch an IM product.

The best part of the rumor is that this googly IM thingy will be based on Jabber!

Here are some of the links:
LA Times.com | Technology
Reuters
USA Today
CNET.com News
ZDNet.com News
Softpedia News
bnc: The Blog News Channel

And of course there’s always more on: Google News.

Gartner: Google's Sidebar is best in class!

2005-08-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

Analyst group Gartner has welcomed the second version of Google's desktop search application, saying that it is an improvement on competitive offerings from Yahoo and Apple.

This is a significant endorsement for Google, as Gartner had criticised the first version of the desktop search tool for creating worrying security issues for IT managers and chief information officers.

Source: ZDNet UK News

Catholic Concerns

2005-08-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

"I joined the Roman Catholic Church because I was looking for God. I entered the convent because I wanted to be close to God and to serve Him with radical devotion. But it wasn't until after I left Catholicism that I found the kind of relationship with God that I had been looking for all along. You can read about it in my poems."

"My testimony is not unusual. A number of former Catholics have written me sharing how they found a living, personal relationship with God when they became born-again, Bible-believing Protestants."

- Mary Ann Collins, A Former Catholic Nun.

Yea, that would make her a Protestant, rather a believer of the Lord Jesus Christ. See her site: Catholic Concerns:

5 mistakes to avoid to make sure your CV is a winner!

2005-08-20T13:05:00.000-07:00

Source: rediff.com