deviationz .LOG

Quoting Moin Khan:

“Sachin’s controversial dismissal reminded me of a few batsmen who preferred walking off the pitch on their legs rather than being carried away on stretchers when the great Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis were at their brilliant best.”

All I can say in retaliation is that Moin Khan probably suffers from amnesia. How could he forget the innocent looking 16 year old take on the above mentioned greats on a lively pitch in Karachi in 1989, taking a blow to his nose with blood gushing out, refusing to succumb and proceeding on to save the test match and with it announce his arrival in world cricket. Shame on such people, who only speak to create a sensation. Agreed, Sachin is out of form but he is not a quitter and never has been.

Fcuk (intentionally misspelt) you Moin ……..

I think that should be Google’s motto as opposed to “Don’t be evil”. Simple things like providing a link to track your package when you receive a mail saying your package has been shipped goes a long way. Otherwise, you will have to copy the tracking number, go to the UPS/FeDeX website and go through a process before you know where your shipment is. Google just does this. Take a bow.

Note to self: Never ever drink water right before it almost turns into ice.

Scene 1: On a nice and warm Friday (a day when I took off from work at 2 p.m. to come home and take a long weekend), I decided to take things a notch up. For some strange reason, I was insanely thirsty and it seemed a nice idea to drink very cold water to supress that thirst. Not satisfied with cold water, I decided to place a jar full of water in the freezer and when the top layer started turning into ice, I took it out of the freezer and gulped away. I could feel my throat burning a little, but nevertheless, it felt good.

Scene 2: Woke up at 5 in the morning on Saturday (due to habit), and found that swallowing saliva was becoming an issue. Reality then struck me and I rewinded back to Friday night. And the only thing that came to my mind was the saying, “Digging your own grave”. And before I forget, let me mention that I HATE to visit a physician/doctor. So I tried to fish through my medicine cabinet to find amoxicillin [something that has saved me time and again]. Sadly, I had exhausted my saviour. And then I turned to a medicine [Febrex Plus] that I used more regularly in India [people who know me well will know the reason for the emphasis] only to find that it had expired in September ‘05. It’s to be noted that I haven’t fallen sick since Jan’ 05. The day drags along and I decide to see if the body can heal itself. I reminded myself of “Feed the cold and starve the fever”. Actually, its the cold that demands food more than us having to force to eat. Drank and ate lots of hot fluids and made myself a nice rasam with an overdose of pepper, tempered with a lot of mustard seeds in ghee, sauteed ladies finger (okra) with onion seasoned with garam masala and papad.

Scene 3: Things did not seem rosy on Sunday morning. Some quick internet search on Walgreens and CVS showed that I could get myself some Amoxil [another amoxicillin equivalent]. I hop [I HOP ??] into my car and drive to Walgreens and searched every tablet on the Cold Remedies aisle, only to find that antibiotics are prescription drugs. That bummed me to no end. Did it mean that I had to go to a doc to get a prescription for an antibiotic or was there another way out??? You guessed right, there was another way out. I figured that my uncle’s friend [who’s an oncologist] ,who I had’nt spoken to in more than 3 months, could give me a prescription. So, I called him and asked him to prescribe me amoxicillin. He called into Walgreens and voila, in a few minutes, I had my drug.

Sidetrack: In my quest to drink hot fluids, I decided to make some tea. Strangely, ever since I left Blacksburg, I have never been able to make the kind of tea that I used to make [really good ones and my friends can vouch for that]. I finally decided to figure it out. First and foremost, I was making tea in Miami in non stick vessels and not stainless steel. Secondly, I was using 1% Fat milk instead of whole milk. Thirdly, I was not using elaichi [Cardamom] and/or adrak [Ginger]. Lastly, I was using tea that was 9 months past its expiry date [Thanks to a Gujju Indian Grocery Seller who told me stories about how tea leaves never expired, inspite of the Taj Mahal package reading “Best if used 1 year from date of manufacture”. Only desi grocers have the balls to do it. I almost decided to take action after an altercation with him].

Scene 4: After figuring out the tea issues and convinced that I needed to fix the aforementioned problems, I decided to go to another Indian grocery store [about 35 miles from home, and near the temple] and get unexpired tea leaves and elaichi. Some quick scanning of the aisles led me to Lijjat Papad, which is the best thing to have with rasam when you are sick. Enroute from the temple, I picked up a stainless steel saucepan , ginger and whole milk [with all the fat needed for a good cup of tea].

Scene 5: Revival of the lost art : To the saucepan, I added half a cup each of water and whole milk, sliced and crushed elaichi and adrak, fresh [unexpired] tea leaves and sugar. I could see it coming along better with the aroma filling my kitchen [reminded me of the days with Nitin and Anand in B’burg. Miss those days of drinking tea about 6 times a day]. Finally, after a lot of boiling and simmering to concentrate the tea, I had the best cup of tea since coming to Miami. As the first sip went in, I could’nt help but say, “Waaaah, Taj boliye”. Folks, remember the 4 ingredients for a cup of good tea [the stainless steel vessel, good tea leaves, elaichi and adrak].

Scene 6: Woke up this morning, with lesser throat pain and a conversion to cold and phlegm [signs of improvement]. The amoxicillin did its trick again. However, I decided to rest my body and skipped work. I ran a few errands and deposited age old checks in the bank [some more than 6 months old, hope I get the money], mailed a few papers home to dad, and bought myself a weighing scale. However, the good deed for the day was buying myself a set of these. Stainless steel rulezz.

Lessons Learnt : Never ever drink ice, always make tea in a stainless steel vessel with whole milk and deposit checks on time [especially if they are $100 and up]

Phew, long post…..Now I can go back into hibernation. That’s all folks.

New Year resolutions don’t last a long. It’s always hard to take it past January and again I failed. I had to work over last weekend to meet a deadline on Thursday [put in around 17 hours saturday + sunday]. That blows away my resolution of trying not to work over the weekends. But I don’t regret it. I just love what I do and when that’s the case, the effort and time never seems a lot. This is my time to learn and I am having a blast. All bosses are happy, all clients are happy and I am happy.

On a totally unrelated note, I was amazed at a study conducted in Italy [CNN report] that showed that people who have television in their bedrooms tend to have sex much less than ones who don’t. On an average, people without televisions in their bedroom tend to have sex 8 times a month and people with television in their bedrooms have sex 4 times a week. Who’s to argue against a survey?

Once upon a time, there was a picture on my site, which was a photo I took of a newspaper cutting that I had pasted on the wall of my apartment. And now it appears on many other walls (a.k.a webpages). Here take a look

Natural disasters are recurring at a far more alarming rate as compared to the recent past. Strange things are happening all over the world, may it be the wild fires in Texas and Oklahoma, or the earthquake in Greece (felt all the way 650 miles away in Egypt), or the cold wave in Asia that has accounted for nearly 70 lives in Japan, brought temperatures in North India to a record low in 70 years killing around 30 people.

The world better brace for a big impact and with the impending bird flu in the horizon, 2006 does not seem to have started on a great note. However, technologically we are making great strides forward with Europe launching its own GPS (Galileo), Apple to launch intel powered computers, nintendo making sleek looking video game hardware. The geeks and the nerds have nothing to complain, but the pre WW II people sure seem worried.

months after graduation, I received my diploma. It was a long wait, primarily due to my long name and the printer’s ability to not get it correct on the first try. Apparently, the staff at Virginia Tech detected the error (thankfully) and sent it back to get fixed. And during this fiasco, I had emailed the grad school requesting them to mail the new one to my office address in Miami. And after another long wait, they said that they had mailed the diploma to my office address in Miami. But surprise, surprise……………a month or so later and after me having to work out different scenarios of what could have gone wrong, my uncle calls me up saying that he had received it in mail. I was relieved and did not bother taking the matter up to the people at Virginia Tech. And here it is….

Orkut seems to have messed up my profile inspite of my trying too hard to fix it. Here is what it looks like as I update it, but here is what my profile looks like.

It will certainly be interesting to know what is causing this and I surely hope I am not the only one.

It’s not been long (little over 7 months) since I got my new car and I have already blown past 10,000 miles. At this rate I will be on target to get my new car in another 4.5 years.

On an unrelated note, deviationz.log is now powered by WP 2.0 and thanks to Pramod, I realized that there was a tiny problem with the comment counter on WP. It is a WP 2.0 related issue and a lot has been posted on support. The simplest tweak is to deactivate the current Spam Karma Plugin (anything < 2.1 beta). Delete the Spam Karma folder in your plugins folder. Upload the new beta version into the plugins folder (i.e. yourblog/wp-content/plugins/). Get the SK2-WP2compatability plugin and place it in the Spam Karma plugins folder (i.e. yourblog/wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_plugins/). Reactivate the Spam Karma plugin and go to Options -> SpamKarma -> Approved Comments. Select all the comments and run them through the WP2Compatability plugin. This should fix all your problems henceforth.

For comments posted in the timeframe between the upgrade and now, the easiest way I found was to fix the comment counter was to go in and self comment on the posts and then delete those comments. This way the comment counter reappeared and all I had to do was mass edit my comments.