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Showing posts from 2010

Quantified Son

Today my ADD took me on a very interesting journey which may end up destroying itself once for all! The idea is to design our own experiments for behaviour change by quantifying the change we wish to make resulting in the vastly improved (but perhaps unbearable) Quantified Self ! A lot of tracking the good and bad behaviours is involved. But, someone has eliminated coffee with such ideas and someone else has proved butter makes you smarter! For example, I know searching for papers related to my research frequently has me easily distracted by easily digestible but useless sites (duh!). But, if I can quantify how much, how long I was distracted and how much better I worked when I desisted, I might end up enhancing my productivity (and lose the ability to gather interesting tools forever! Hey, is this why youngsters who are a lot less disciplined at work end up changing the game altogether far more often than less-young-fogeys like me?). Of course, keeping track of all the focus and

New Year New Beginning

My second one is going to be a year soon! How time flies! While the quantity of research I have done is dismal (we won't even mention quality here), I am beginning to feel things will look up soon. For one, I will reduce frequency of nursing without a feeling of guilt - 50% of calories only from me not 90. He will also start playing more with toys and less with/on me (fingers crossed) and I can pack him off to a daycare when he is 18 months for 3 hours everyday. Also he will eat more table foods and less special foods. Time spent slaving at the stove should reduce. The problem now reduces to my own intractable ADD. We have sort of decided on a apartment to buy. I have spent huge chunks of time at home and work just day dreaming about furniture placements, paints, kitchen recipes, grihapravesam, vastu, healthier lifestyle resolutions, friend search, activity search etc... and Google has aided and abetted me. I claim no faith in vastu but I spend a lot of time wondering h

Chennai Vs Bangalore

We have been here for 6 years now and are finally looking into buying a flat here. We would prefer south chennai - Adyar,Besantanagar, maybe Thiruvanmiyur. Prices here are exorbitant! We keep revisiting the question of best city to settle down. S. would prefer coimbatore, me Bangalore and my son wants to stay put right here in Chennai preferably in the apt we have lived for the last 6 years. He thinks we should just persuade the houseowner to sell this flat to us. I have grown rather fond of Chennai in the past few years and I am increasingly disillusioned by the changes in Bangalore, so I reserve the right to mention the negatives of Chennai alone. Weather sucks big time. Most days you cannot dream of going out between 9 and 6, it is simply too hot! People are totally lacking in civic sense. From the hallowed grounds of IIT's guindy national forest to the innumerable supermarkets dotting the city, no one thinks twice about eating off of a plate/cup and just dropping it

Interesting blogs and Cool fact of the day

I am always on the lookout for interesting read. My favourite procrastination while trudging through the insurmountable doubts my Research throws up. Today's accidental Gem: Blogging the Periodic Table He is actually blogging about the periodic table! What a cool idea! I can't wait for Gau to be old enough to read it and more importantly appreciate the Periodic Table. Helping Gau with his booklet on Swordfish, I discovered they truly hunt like warriors. They race (swim rapidly at 60mph) to a school of fish and just thrust their sword through the school hoping to land a few fish for the day. Also their underside is white so that the poor fish down below thinks it is looking at the sky not the belly of a powerful predator. I am also going to try and cook/serve 2 - 3 different grains, vegetables and beans/lentils daily. Today's Menu : Breakfast Apples, Sattu Mavu, Oats and raisins for baby, Dosa and Karamani (leftover from yesterday) for hubby. Lunch : Basma

Non Sequiter

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I bought a new HP Pavilion DV4 laptop with all the works. HP has a promotion going on, allowing us to download 1000 songs.  I did not get the activation code for the promotion so I tried to get to HP support. I tried online chat help - no help for HP Pavilion DV4 available. Then I tried calling their helpline - after they walked me through 4 options they gave the recorded message "On account of Good Friday all our service centre's are closed" Finally i entered a complaint online and the complaint registration ended with the promise to email my complaint details to me. This is the email i got: So basically techsupport.India does NOT exist!!!!! I finally got in touch with a phone support person on 7th APril, she asked me to contact a delhi-based redemption center which directed me back to the support center. I have filed a online complaint now and I have a complaint code to track status. Let us see what happens now.

Apple Pancake

When we were kids and people came to visit, they usually brought the fruit(s) of the season for the hostess and sweet limes.  The fruits were always delicious and devoured with great appreciation within a couple of days.   The tradition of buying fruits for the hostess continues, but with burgeoning supermarkets the fruit of the season concept has dropped along the ways (except for mangoes, Thank God!)  Consequently I seem to end up with nearly a dozen apples every other week.  These are NOT the delicious apples of varying sizes and complex flavour I remember from my childhood, these are imported red delicious variety.  Each apple looks exactly like the other in size and all are a uniform red like they have been dipped in a bucket of acrylic paint labeled "Red Delicious #2"with no shades of yellow/orange for relief and they all have a slightly sweet mealy flavour*.  Ergo I have the daunting task of feeding tasteless apples to my very picky son.  I douse the apples in fruit ch

101 recipes Potato Sandwich

My eldest son is ultralite and an extremely fussy eater.  Every meal is a battle and at 8 years I still spoon feed him frequently!  My meal plans tend to gravitate towards a high protein diet, but, being vegetarian, it doesn't quite reach atkins level.  I add a good bit of fat to my son's diet to up his calorie intake.  Off late he seems to love potatoes in every form, so I (hubby's suggestion actually) have decided to add a lot of potatoes and sweet potatoes to his meal plan, especially his lunch box. Coming up with interesting lunch box menus has become especially hard since new baby arrived.  I am still very sleepy at 6:30 and lunch has to be packed and ready to go at 8:00.  So when a quick serendipity meal hits bulls eye on all counts - easy to make, healthy,  gau finishes the lunch and asks for more of the same when he gets home - it is definitely a bookmark worthy recipe. The second time around this recipe was just as popular, but I took the time to note down the meas

101 tried tested and appreciated recipes

It has been nearly a year since my last post.  Lot of changes since the last post.  I finished my PhD coursework and I am ashamed to say I made a C in one of the courses Gau has finished all the Raold Dahl books he could get in his library. We cracked open the picocricket set I had ordered and he got his first taste of programming :)  On to lego mindstorms now! Gau has been making great strides in learning music, finishing his grade 1 trinity exams and he is now able to play by ear! he can actually listen to any harris jayraj number a few times and play it commendably well on his keyboard. And lastly and grandly I have a beautiful new baby boy!  He weighed in at a substantial 3.6kg on 28th December 2008.   In light of new baby and increasing workload, the time I have to dawdle and come up with new recipes in the kitchen has drastically reduced.  I have been forced to come up with a new resolution - bookmark 101 recipes ;  recipes which can be recreated with ingredients available local