I’ve been tagged by wavesnsands, You have to write Ten things that you hate about the opposite gender. This’s an easy one So here I go:

1.Attitude: Totally turns me off when I see a girl throwing oodles of attitude. I usually make sure, she realizes that I care a damn about her.

2.Shopping: There are two types of girls in the world - i) Who goes around shopping for long hours and want everything she sees. ii) Who goes around shopping for long hours, but finds nothing worth buying. The common point being long hours, both irritate me.

3.Bitching: Girls are totally bitchy, every girl always has something bad to say about another girl .

4.Phone freaks: These are meant to be born with an ear-peace and microphone. They’ve no life.

5.Vanity freaks: They always look for something that reflects - Mirror, glass, steel, leather shoe. Never miss an opportunity.

6.Fake: Girls that wear fake anything - nails, hair, breasts.

7.Sex: Girls who demand lots of foreplay before sex .

Ok I give up after seven, can’t think of any thing else . This wasnt as easy though. That’s probably bcos I have a lot of strong women in my life and I hugely admire and respect them.

Disclaimer: If any of the above points hurt you, it means they’re probably true , Neverthless I’m sorry.

Take Indian cricket, mix it with Shane Warne, Anil Ambani and Shahrukh Khan, Throw in some cool publicity and bollywood glam, There you have the IPL*. You love it or you hate it, but you cannot ignore it. With all the hype and hoopla, with biggies like Anil Ambani and Shahrukh Khan bidding for Teams, IPL kick started with its celebrations, each BIG bollywood star endorsing a team.

This wasn’t the way we’ve seen cricket. Cricket was a Gentle”Man’s” game, where emotions rule over the game spirit, so much so that we literally idolize the cricketers when they win, and treat them with bangles when they loose. Fire crackers when we win and poison coach on defeat. So what’s wrong with that (except the poisoning part ofcourse)? Nothing, we are like that only. But are we so prejudiced that we can’t welcome a change?

Lakhs in every gully play cricket, Thousands take it seriously, Hundreds pursue it professionally and only Eleven people get to play the REAL game. All others loose hope and become average Engineers or Doctors and IF their parents allow, something else. So If IPL could give more players the opportunity to play their dream game, that too with contemporaries of International standard, then why not? Why not encourage more players to pursue their passion? Then there could be the other extreme, where no International player is allowed into the IPL teams, so as to let maximum Indian players play. But that becomes mediocre again, players are neither playing the game at its highest standard nor they would get the kind of exposure that they are getting now.

Another golden dot on the bright side of IPL is that it truly encourages the sport spirit and rather looks cricket like a sport than like a modern day battle between two countries. With players of same country playing against each other and rivals playing together, it could serve as the terminating point for all the personal grudges that players might have against each other.

There are dark sides however, while some think there is a lack of team spirit in the game to which I agree to an extent, others fear the extinction of one-day cricket. Isn’t test cricket extinct these days and frankly, how many of you guys miss it? I personally believe that team spirit will build up as time goes, ofcourse unless players keep juggling around the teams and I do not believe there’s any threat to the one-days.

The bottom line is IPL has lived up to its hype till date and does more good than bad. I see more chances of it catching up than dropping down.

*IPL: Indian Premier League

I really never believed in lotteries, cos I was sure I wasn’t gonna win one. And there’s no fun in buying a lottery ticket and waiting for the results when you know you have only 0.01% probability of winning it. I’d rather play Blackjack or poker and loose money than do the same with a lottery ticket, in the formers I’d atleast have had fun.

This all started one year back at the time of H1B visa applications* (make sure you see the footnote if you have no idea of the H1B application process), when the general category went over the cap on the very first day and a random selection was applied to it, the Adv. Degree cap was however spared as the cap wasn’t reached for about a month. Then began the speculations of both the categories going into the random selection for this year. This was the favorite topic of every debate and discussion in the home. feeling bored? Guess what? We have H1B to talk about and worry about. We didnt ever expect that the extrapolation techniques we learnt in those stat classes could be put to use in life, Stat pros started extrapolating H1B applicant number for FY2009, drawing histograms representing staircases and linear ramp graphs. H1B was pretty much the subject of all debates and discussions, arguments and opinions. The ever optimistic me, still believed that the Adv. Degree cap would last atleast for a week this year.

I really never believed in lotteries, but i didn’t know USCIS had different plans for me. Finally the day came which I marked in my calender as ‘THE BIG DAY’ and yes, both the categories went over the cap and the applications were to be picked via a random selection, in uncomplicated non-euphemistic English - Lottery. The speculation turned into a nightmare, only that it had a recess (which was the extension of OPT*). Retaining work in US came down to the flip of a coin, and so what did I do? I flipped a coin. Coin flipping site became the most visited site by me and probability class came back to use. Stat pros took in charge again, calculating the probabilty of getting selected in the Lottery and almost everyone seemed to have their own magic number. Guys bad at stats resorted to God, I even called up an overnight bhajan* and suggested that everyone sleep during the day at work and do bhajans* in the night so that their application will be picked. Fingers were crossed all the time anyway.

The Real Big Day was the one when USCIS conducted the Lottery. Heartbeat skipped when a friend informed that he was picked in the Lottery, the Time has come, the Time came indeed. Then the Forum freak took birth, started investigating the ‘other’ ways of knowing if my application was picked in one of the several forums, dedicated to the topic. The one obvious way in all the posts was to check if the application fee cheques had been cashed. I ran to our cashier and asked her to check the cheques. Fits of panic came to me when she informed me that my cheque wasn’t cashed. I asked her if it was canceled, she said it was still outstanding. So I still had hope. I called in my Attorney to check if she had heard something, she hadn’t, either ways. But she promised to inform me as soon as she knows the result, whatever it be. While i was trying to work normally, every few minutes a friend was informing me that he had gotten through the lottery. Why God! Why me! I was sure I wasn’t gonna win one .

It was time to get off work and I was happy that I wont have access to net for sometime. Sometime being 15 mins, the drive from office to Home. My Roomies also hadn’t heard of anything which kinda calmed me, If I’m going to hell, I dont want to be alone. Then it was about 10.30 in the night, I checked the office email. Voila !!!!! The lawyer had emailed me the application receipt which meant mine was picked in the Lottery. I laid to rest in my grave(bed) with some costco wine and grape juice. Apr 15: H1B application picked in the Lottery. Apr 21: H1B approved. Apr 29: H1B Documents received.

Footnotes:

*H1B visa applications: H1B is the work visa which allows a non-immigrant worker to work in United States. The stipulated amount of quota(cap) is 65,000 visas for general category and an additional 20,000 visas for people who hold an Advanced Degree from a US university, per Fiscal year. If the number of applicants exceed the cap in the first two days of accepting applications, the applications to be processed are selected via a random selection.

*OPT: Optional Practical Training under which a foreign student graduated from a US University is allowed to work in United States.It has been increased from 12 months to a whopping 29 months.

*bhajan: A ritual where groups of worshipers sing holy songs to worship God.

A few days back I had read a blogger friend writing about her Friday Friends - People you meet only on fridays, in their great make ups, in their finest dresses and probably in their best moods, And she was writing how difficult was it to really understand them.

But then I have friends who are difficult to understand though I feel I’ve known them from years. This one friend of mine’s like that. I thought she was a dear friend and then I knew it was only me who thought that. Everytime we talk on phone, we have such great conversations and then the next time i call her she’s so indifferent that i go, are u the one with whom i talked last time?. Gosh she’s horrible, she must be either having fits of schizophrenia or a really bad person.

If friends come in buckets, I probably would have two of them blue and yellow. Blue with the ones with whom I can get senti and yellow with whom I can’t. Yellow are the funny type, they come with fits of laughters that never end, but Blue are the one who really know me. Yellow’s are the party friends, with whom you can laugh, say them your funniest jokes, occasionally treat them nasty if you want to and get away with it. Blues are the ones with whom you go on long walks, share your so called secrets and feelings and these guys you really cant afford to hurt. Ofcourse the only time when the blues and the yellows merge is when everyone’s drunk .And in college slang when becoming senti is used with a negative connotation more often than not, I think I’d prefer to keep it that way.

Then there is a purple one, with friends whom you hate. This mostly consists of people you’ve got a chance to observe from a rather close corners. Its very difficult to hate a person without knowing them well. For a glimpse, people probably show their best shades and then with time you get used to each other and then u realize their flaws. Not that you dont have them, but still you hate them.

These are some lines from the movie I like a lot in the recent times, Jab We Met.

Kareena: “Main maanti hoon, har koi jo life me really chahta hain na, use wahi milta hai”
Shahid: “kahan? music se bada passion nahi tha mere life mein”
Kareena: “toh? ab life ho gayi hein tumhari?aise bol rahe ho jaise kal mar rahe ho”

When I went to my graduate class for the first time in US, the student body was as eclectic as I could imagine. If there were Undergrads who were more worried abt the ranch in their salad or their belly button ring, there was also this man old enough to be my father sitting with me and taking notes. And in several cases in several classes I’ve seen students much older than me trying to learn something new to make their life better than it was or simply for the joy of it.

Education in India is mostly perceived according to age. If one has spent two extra years to clear their medical entrance, its called wasted but is still acceptable. But anyone who wishes to study medicine at the age of 40 is called insane and the government wont allow him to take the entrances anyway*. Most of the formal education that someone receives should be in his formative years and once he turns thirty he could hardly learn anything new. My Mom is learning block painting and I know a lot of other people who learn what they love informally, but what if one wishes to go through a formal training or wishes to learn something that could only be taught formally (medicine/law/engineering) ?

Learning is a constant process and it should not be restricted on the grounds of age. Age restriction should be taken off the pre-requisites and ones eligibility to enroll into a formal educational process should only depend on his/her aptitude to learn the education imparted.

* 
West Bengal Joint Entrance Exam:
Age Restriction : Applicant shall be between 17 years and 24 years of age on 31st December 2008.

Bihar Combined Entrance Competitive Exam:
Age Limit -> BCECE Entrance Exam
17-22 years on July 1 of the year of admission. (5 years relexation of the upper age limit for the SC/ST candidates).

Recuperations:

1. End of Student life, Start of Work.
2. Finally found something which really interests me.
3. Posessed a car and the first ever vehicle which I can call my own.
4. Diet control and lost abt 13 lbs.
5. India trip, not as great as expected.

Regrets:

This is the year where finally I can say I have no Regrets. I’ve learnt somethings the hardway, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. Yes really, no regrets.

Resolutions:

1. Some more attention to physical fitness.
2. Excel at work.

Happy 2008.

Im tired of saying “I’m back” so found a not-so innovative way of saying the same thing differently. The transition phase is over and I’m back to my Igloo again. Life’s been pretty much predictable. Except, ofcourse the car I bought.

2007’s been another transitional year. This was the year I officially started working after studies, I lost considerable weight and went to gym the max. no of days.

I knew the blues would go away and the sun would turn the sky crimson again. I’m just happy it happened soon. I got a Job offer. The company is not big but the work is good and most importantly something I love doing.

Thanks for being with me in my low time and I cant forget the help that some of you offered. I had to believe something would workout and it did. I’m starting off tomorrow.

Last Updated : May 07, 2008

Like most of the young bloggers, I started off with Blogger(Blogspot). And then like the period of puberty, where you want to experiment, I loaded my sidebar with all the Javascript I could. The site became slow, neverthless I was happy. If there was some thing that amused me the most, It was certainly the captcha word verification in the commenting system of blogger. And not to say the times it behaved weird. Adding stuff to the sidebar was becoming increasingly difficult, cos the only way to do it was to edit the html. Just when I was contemplating about a move to another blogging platform, Blogger anounced its beta version. Life looked great again. With the new widget system of the template, adding stuff was as easy as it could get. It was integrated with my google account, so I didnt have to remember another password. There were some new templates and it was altogether a new start. What remain unchanged is the commenting system and the platform that still behaves weirdly at times. While I knew the existance of wordpress, I never got a chance to look at it closely as almost all my blogpals were in blogspot. And then one dull evening when I had nothing to do, I thought why not change the blog platform. And the import feature in the WordPress which promised to import all my Blogger posts and comments only motivated me more. And there you go I made a shift and I never regretted.

This is a post I’ve been planning to do since a long time. The comparision between two most popular and widely used blogging platforms : Blogger and WordPress.

Look and Feel:

Though WordPress offer some clean and fresh templates, Blogger offers more flexibility with templates. If you have a designer eye and would like to play around with your CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), Blogger is the best. While WordPress does offer custom CSS, its a paid upgrade. And as WordPress doesn’t allow Javascript in the sidebar or anywhere, most of the funky and cool stuff that you might want to add to your blog remains a wish. You can probably play around and make your blog look the way you want in Blogger, Blogger wins this battle.

The Admin area of the wordpress has improved significantley with the new WordPress 2.5 and wordpress is adding more and more community driven blogging features like possibly related posts.

Commenting/Anti-spam system:

WordPress wins hands down. WordPress has this simple commenting feature, which is easy to use with not many fields to fill ie only ur name, email and website (other than the comment ofcourse). And moreover it remembers this information on a particular system. So surprise yourself when you open the same blog next time from your personal computer, that info is already there. Though Blogger has got three ways of commenting (as registered user, other and anonymous) I do not see much use of them, esp. the ‘other’ and ‘anonymous’ options are redundant.

WordPress has this wonderful Anti-spam system called Akismet. It really works like magic. From what I know it checks for spam if a comment has more than two links. This sounds logical because mostly the spam comments tend to have lots of links. And by chance if some spam makes to ur comment section, just mark it as spam and Akismet learns, Vow! Blogger really sucks at this, it has the age-old captcha word verification system which forces the user to do his part to avoid spamming. i just wish google guys would soon replace it with a more easy to use system.

Tags/Categories:

While WordPress had the tag feature where you can assemble your posts into certain tags, Blogger had none. In those days this was considered a major USP of WordPress. With Blogger beta, it has introduced labels which work similar to tags. So this made WordPress and Blogger equal. But wait, WordPress has recently identified the difference between Categories and tags and has separated the both. While categories are like a table of contents into which you arrange the posts of your blog, tags are more ephemeral, like the key words in a post.

As a CMS (Content Management System):

Editor: I somehow love the post editor in WordPress. I feel it has more useful functionality. For example I always want any external links in my blog to open in a new window. In Blogger I had to edit the html to make this happen. WordPress gives me a small pop-up box where I could choose where I want the link to open. With the new toggle screen option intoduced in WordPress 2.5, you can concentrate just on your post while blocking out everything else.

Timestamp: I’ve also dreamt of being able to schedule the delivery of my posts to a future time. While this feature is readily and visibly available in WordPress, I’m almost sure its not available in Blogger(Plz, lemme know if I’m wrong)

update: Cuckoo just informed me that this timestamp feature of scheduling posts in future is available in blogger too.

SEO:

Blogger being owned by google, one naturally expects Blogger to be better indexed by the google search. But somehow WP has a higher hand in this too. When I had the same post on both Blogger and WordPress, WP post ranked higher for the same search term than the Blogger post. I guess the credit goes to the great SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by the WP team.

Advertisements:

There is no way you can put ads on your free WordPress.com blog. Blogger supports this through Google Adsense. So if you are very particular about earning revenue through your blog, you must go to Blogger.

Additional Features:

Tracking Replies: The one additional feature that I love at WordPress and which is still unavailable at Blogger is tracking the replies to my comments on other blogs. WordPress allows me to track the replies to my comments on other wordpress blogs, if I was logged in when commenting. This makes life much more easier. And really makes the comment a conversation.

update: Blogger introduced this feature too, infact with all the blogger accounts associated to Gmail accounts, it also give you the option to email you the follow up comments.

Post Password: though I haven’t used it anytime, for people who want to protect the reading previliges of their posts, they could password protect individual posts.

Recent Comments/Tag cloud: Though you could add them to your Blogger blog via a third party, WordPress have them inherently and they are beautiful.

Blog stats: While the disadvantage of WordPress is that it wont allow a third party stat tool like Google Analytics integrate with itself, it has its own little Stat maintenance page which shows you which posts on your blog where the most popular ones, via which links did visitors visit your blog and the search terms which showed up your blog (this one’s really fun). Yeah for people who want a more detailed analysis, WordPress might suck, but for people like me who seldom open a third part tool to check the stats, this one seems to be more advantageous.

Import/Export: If I couldn’t import my Blogger posts and comments here, I wouldn’t be here. The import function really tempts you to move to WordPress and the export function comes in handy if in future you decide to move the blog to your own domain and host.

As you might see I’m mostly biased to WordPress. All you Blogger fans, let me know if there are any mistakes in the post or if there’ve been any improvements in the Blogger.

The right video at the right time. This is Steve Jobs speaking at Stanford commencement in 2005. Saying the speech is inspiring would be an understatement. Excuse me if you’ve already seen it.

Some quotes I loved:

So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.