A Healthy New Lifestyle

Do you need to make some healthy changes to your lifestyle? If you haven't made any New Year resolutions yet, then it's not too late!

Some tips to help all think about a healthier lifestyle and maybe make some positive changes that will benefit your health. By taking on board healthy eating advice and physical activity tips you'll soon see yourself on the way to a healthier lifestyle.

Poor nutrition, inactivity, smoking and excessive alcohol consumption are major causes of premature death in this country. However, over the long term even small changes can lead to benefits to your health.

There are five areas where making changes will benefit you greatly and lead to a healthier lifestyle:

A healthy diet
Eating well can improve your general health
Test your knowledge regarding food related issues by clicking on the following link: www.eatwell.gov.uk/info/quizzes

Be more active
Regular physical activity benefits many aspects of health
To find out how many calories you are using click on this link: www.eatwell.gov.uk/healthydiet/healthyweight/caloriecalculator

Trim excess weight
Being overweight is not just a cosmetic problem - reducing any excess weight or maintaining a normal body weight will prevent many health problems
To find out if you are overweight calculate your body mass index (BMI) by clicking on the link below: www.eatwell.gov.uk/healthydiet/healthyweight/bmicalculator

Don't smoke
Stopping smoking is the single best thing you can do to improve your health and life expectancy
To find out how much smoking is costing you click below:
cost_of_smoking_calculator @ www.givingupsmoking.co.uk

Reduce Alcohol Intake
The benefits of reducing your alcohol intake are enormous
To calculate the number of units you are drinking, click on this link:
www.portmangroup.org.uk/alcohol/214.asp


For further information contact:

• Your Own GP
• British Nutrition Foundation: www.nutrition.org.uk/
• Food Standards Agency: http://www.eatwell.gov.uk/
• British Heart Foundation: http://www.bhf.org.uk/
• NHS - Quit Smoking: www.givingupsmoking.co.uk/home
• Alcohol Concern: http://www.alcoholconcern.org.uk/
• Alcoholics Anonymous: http://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org/

This article caught my attention so I am posting it here...

Happy New Year

I am in a somber mood today. It’s been 4 days since I touched a computer and that’s a rarity considering my profession. And my sadness has nothing to do with any pc-detachment that you might think.

Oh!!! I miss you all already. No I am not talking about my emails and this blog. I am talking about my family. My cousins were here in Gurgaon to visit us for holidays and they have just left. It hasn’t been 15 minutes and already I am feeling sad. And its all the fault of Krystal my cousin sister. We call her Kittu. She cries herself and then slowly *forces* everyone else to cry also.

We had a great time these 4-5 days. They arrived on 28th. My uncle and aunt celebrated the 25th anniversary of their marriage. They live in Muscat and could have had the most extravagant party there but they chose to celebrate here in India.

Time flew by like lightning and now it seems like it was an age that we spent together... Our house is sufficient for the eleven people who currently live in it. Add to that seven from overseas and three from my aunt and one more aunt who is the sister of an aunt and the total comes to 22. Now put all these people in the same living room and put in some music and food and wine and when you get tired, some guitar and some Antakshari and you are in for some rocking time for the new year and Christmas. Then of course you have the wedding anniversary complete with the mass and retaking of the marriage wows and the party later with its share of fights and drunk people.

Since there wasn’t enough space, bedding is made on the floor and all the kids are thrown onto it (Including me, although I am 25 as of now) But this opens up opportunities for a lot of fun. So now we are about 12 kids in a room *told* to be quiet and go to sleep immediately. And instead we are playing stupid games all through the night and into the wee hours of the morning. That would include dumb charades and an unnamed game where we all sit in a circle and the *it* asks a question to someone and the person on the left is to reply while not answering the question asked. We slept at 6 in the morning last night.

I was able to enjoy all this while as I had known about this visit for quite some time and had planned my leaves accordingly. I am to join office from tomorrow. My brother wasn’t so lucky. His office gave him a leave on 25th but wouldn’t consider any more leaves and the boss told him that he would have to take disciplinary actions against him my brother if he chose to take any unscheduled leave he wouldn’t even consider a half day on the day of the anniversary. But with constant pestering (which included my inputs on how to) Rohit was able to arrive just in time for the mass.

There are so many stories I could recount and keep going on and on about them for the days to come.

The flip side of it all was that I got cut off from the rest of the world. This included something which I am not particularly proud of. My friend’s grand father died and I didn’t even call him let alone visit him. He has joined back office. I know because I see a lot of mails from him in my inbox. In my defense I have only one excuse and it is just what it is an excuse. My phone was with my uncle the whole time and he was using it for his communication needs. Also I don’t handle deaths very well. I just don’t know how to react and in such times the simplest of stupid behavior could backfire and turn relations sour. I hope the haven’t already.

That said, I will probably remember this magical year end for quite some time to come as I remember the earlier ones when my cousins had come back then. Right now Al Green is singing “Ain't no sunshine” in my ears.

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
It's not warm when she's away
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And she's always gone too long
Anytime she goes away...


Happy New Year !!!

White Peacock

Traditionally, if anyone saw white peacock,

your fortune just turned better!!

FireFox Plugins

If you needed any more reason to switch to FireFox, let me point you to an excellent article by Quinn Norton. In “The Firefox Hacks You Must Have”, he refers to some excellent plugins which can prove to be quite useful.

Here is the link:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69781,00.html

Some excerpts I found nice:

“allows you to download little snippets of code that act as the software equivalent of small consumer electronics devices, only they are free”.

Yes I like free stuff.

“DownThemAll is a bulk downloader that allows you to copy everything you want from a website at once. Whether you need to grab handfuls of thumbnails from a picture album or a page full of interesting MP3s, this tiny app gets them all with a single click.”

Lovely !!!

“With this baby installed, you just right-click over virtually any popular website's login form, and the plug-in will tap BugMeNot, find a usable name and password donated by an existing user, and log you in.”

The BugMeNot extension.

Over all there are quite a few plugins available and you can just go on downloading till either the Brower or the Harddisk crashes.

Apart from these I found some other extensions which will be usefull to specefic groups of users

SearchStatus
http://www.quirk.co.za/searchstatus/
A toolbar extension designed for the highly specialised needs of search engine marketers. It lets you view a site’s Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN - all in one place.

View Rendered Source Chart

http://jennifermadden.com/scripts/ViewRenderedSource.html

• Creates a Colorful Chart of a Webpage's Rendered Source Code
• Charts Dynamically Generated HTML and Static HTML in Concert
• Great Visual Aid tool for Learning Environments

Generally a great plugin for us developers.

I will add more as I come across..

Inferiority complex

Every techy person has a little bit of inferiority complex... So do I.

I am constantly in doubt of my capabilities and am constantly searching for a little appreciation from every one. Now that person may or may not be capable himself (as per my inference) but I will anyways look for approval from them… I have noticed this for quite some time but don’t know how I can get rid of this. Or if I should get rid of this… this characteristic of mine.

I guess I have always had so many detractors that invariable I am almost always proving myself to someone or the other… Now either my knowledge lacks something or the knowledge of my critics has some excessive deficiency… I feel that there are more chances of the former as I have almost always been able to prove myself right to them. I feel that there are more chances of the former as I have almost always been able to prove myself right to them.

But today something happened which has given a huge boost to my ego and the general state of my happiness. Ask my colleagues, I have been talking about the event for the whole day and I guess they are just about to shout with frustration… So I deduce that this is the idle blog content for the day for me.

To cut a long story short, today, a piece of my code was opened by a few *important* *knowledgeable* people… (2 of them from Microsoft, which I guess is the Utopia for a programmer) and they were… simply… stumped.

Some of the comments before seeing my code were:

• This cannot be done
• This can be done in this way but the logic will create a humungous amount of data (in tune of terra bites) and the resultant application will be way too slow...

Some of the comments after seeing my code were:

• Pause!!!
• Silence!!!
• Have *you* written this code?

Cant tell more about this... Cause anyways that will be too technical for you guys…

But Today was a good day!!!

Tomorrow is a new day

Tomorrow Is a New Day
Sometimes we do not feel like we want to feel
Sometimes we do not achieve what we want to achieve
Sometimes things that happen do not make sense
Sometimes life leads us in directions that are beyond our control

It is at these times, most of all that we need someone
who will quietly understand us and be there to support us
I want you to know that I am here for you in every way
and remember that though things may be difficult now
tomorrow is a new day

- Poem by Susan Polis Schutz




Tomorrow's A New Day



As we travel the road ahead
Choices will have to be made.
Sometimes they seem so difficult,
And answers just seem to fade.


Sometimes the best that we can do
Is try to let go and move on.
Look for courage, search for strength
And let go of what's already gone.


If our lives weren't complicated
And answers were easy to find,
Then we could look for tomorrow
And leave our troubles behind.


I know there's sun beyond the cloud,
Look closer is what I must do,
Think positive and keep my faith
And God will see me through.


I'll put one foot in front of the other
And take life day by day,
I'll not look back to sorrowed times,
Tomorrow's a brand new day.

Early morning

Tomorrow is gonna be tough. I am going to have to get up at atleast 6:30 in the morning. Some of you might think its not such a big deal, but for me it is. Especially since I get up at 9-9:30 usually. I mean its still midnight at 6:30. arrrggghhh !!

I have to take my grandmother to the hospital to get her eyes checked up. She will have her cataract removed and get a brand new lens in her right eye in jan and this is a preliminary check up.

My aunt is a nurse in a hospital and her hospital is somewhere after ITO… some kadkaddooma place… sounds like a lightening strike ;)

Will be driving there and trying to give the morning traffic a miss...

And oh !! The place preet vihar is just next to this kadkaddooma lightening strike place… and preethi lives there… maybe we will bump into each other… and she is a bit round so I will have to be careful during the bump or I might just get kadkaddoomaed ;)