Medium Sea Green

you are mediumseagreen #3CB371

Your dominant hues are cyan and green. Although you definately strive to be logical you care about people and know there's a time and place for thinking emotionally. Your head rules most things but your heart rules others, and getting them to meet in the middle takes a lot of your energy some days. Your saturation level is medium - You're not the most decisive go-getter, but you can get a job done when it's required of you. You probably don't think the world can change for you and don't want to spend too much effort trying to force it. Your outlook on life is brighter than most people's. You like the idea of influencing things for the better and find hope in situations where others might give up. You're not exactly a bouncy sunshine but things in your world generally look up.

the spacefem.com html color quiz

Reciprocative Communication

Its a new communication strategy. Its simple in concept - Person A keeps in touch with Person B to the amount that Person B keeps in touch with Person A.

It works because it requires that both people put in the same amount (or lack of) effort to stay in touch. If the one person doesn't put in an equivalent effort in keeping in touch, why should the other person have to carry the load ?

Perhaps I should try this out. There are some people I know who never seem to be interested in keeping in touch from an 'initiate a conversation' angle.

So lets see how this goes shall we?

Computers cannot score essays (yet!)

Computers cannot and should not be used to score/grade an essay. At least for the current state of art, this is a fact. 10 years from now this post of mine might be ridiculous.

With the current state of art, if you depend on a computer algorithm to grade people's writing skills, you are making a big mistake.

Here's [yarnsoftheheart.com] one person's account of her experiences with an 'online essay scoring system'.

Read the 'essay' that was scored and the score that the system assigned to it. If you were the teacher grading that essay, would you give it the same score ? If you have a child going to a school that uses something like this to grade essays, you may want to have a talk with the teacher.

[via Kem's Utterly Merciless Guide to Essay Writing]

Busy tuesdays

With the new semester is fully underway, my Tuesday schedule seems to be the most solid booked of the lot.

Here's what it looks like at the moment:
Group Meeting : T 1200p-0200p
TA.Lab : T 0200p-0350p
Advisor Meeting : T 0400p-0500p

Without anything else, I'm booked solid every Tuesday from 12-5.

Add in the fact that I'm the department representative to the Graduate Student Council this year, and every 1st and3rd Tuesday of the month, my Tuesday stretches to 6:15pm. [The GSC meets 5:15p-6:15p ]

Should be interesting to see how this works out.

Random Win

Last night, I randomly decided to go to a graduate student mix-and-mingle event organized by the nice people at AGOSS (Adult, Graduate & Off Campus Student Services - part of the Offices of the Dean of Student Life)

There was a game of bingo in it, and believe it or not, but I won!
This is probably the first time I won something at one of these 'for-fun' events! :)

So what did I win? well, if you are reading this blog - you should have already heard about it from me. :)

If you haven't heard about it, then that should be an indication that you don't keep in touch enough.

Bugs

I stumbled across some interesting definitions of bugs on catb.org
--
schroedinbug: /shrohdinbuhg/, n.

[MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics] A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed. Though (like bit rot) this sounds impossible, it happens; some programs have harbored latent schroedinbugs for years.

mandelbug: /man�del�buhg/, n.

[from the Mandelbrot set] A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. This term implies that the speaker thinks it is a Bohr bug, rather than a heisenbug.

Bohr bug: /bohr buhg/, n.

[from quantum physics] A repeatable bug; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of heisenbug;

heisenbug: /hi:�zen�buhg/, n.

[from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. (This usage is not even particularly fanciful; the use of a debugger sometimes alters a program's operating environment significantly enough that buggy code, such as that which relies on the values of uninitialized memory, behaves quite differently.) Antonym of Bohr bug;
--
See more at The Jargon File at http://www.catb.org/jargon/

Clock Radio

I bought a clock/radio gadget. Not a simple one, a rather fancy one ;) Its got 21 different (independent) alarm settings, a nap timer, USB power out (for an external gadget that might need USB power) and more.

Now let's see if it can manage to get me up on time everyday.

You can see the site I bought it from and all the specs on this device from here [thinkgeek.com]

Cows point North ?

Apparently, cows have built in compasses. They can sense the magnetic North.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2623809/Cows-point-north-thanks-to-in-built-compasses.html

A 100 things to try to eat

Lilian posted this 100 things to try to eat at some point in your life.

Some of them I have tasted, a lot I haven't.
This sounds like an interesting list to try to complete!

FoxClocks

I found a most useful extension to Firefox today.

Called FoxClocks, it adds a number of clocks to Firefox! Allowing you to keep track of the time across the world, with a variety of formatting and customization options.

Those of you who have seen my Windows desktop, would have seen a Yahoo Widget that I use called Timezonabulator that serves the same purpose. This is a Firefox add-in that serves the same purpose.

Get a copy of FoxClocks from Mozilla addons here : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1117?id=1117

I found this when wandering around Wikipedia, from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CatherineMunro

Olympic Games Opening Ceremony quote

I liked a comment on radio today -- "The only people who probably won't
be happy about today's grand opening of the 2008 games, are probably the
folks in charge of organizing the 2012 opening ceremony"

$500 Audio cables ?

Read the reviews here Cat-5 AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cables.

In case you do get inspired to buy one of these, stop for a moment and pay a visit to the experiment listed on the Consumerist website on whether coat hanger wire makes for good sound quality http://consumerist.com/362926/do-coat-hangers-sound-as-good-monster-cables

From Steve Bass's Tips and Tweaks Blog and the EndUser Blog

My MP3 player works again.

Whoop!
My MP3 player (A Sansa c240 that I got from Woot) is back in operation.

A couple of weeks back, I went in and deleted some stuff off the player and accidentally ended up deleting something that I probably shouldn't have. It turned my player into almost a brick. Out of the ~80 tracks that I had on it, it could only see 30 seconds of one track. Over the course of the last weeks, I tried poking it and restarting it and reformatting it, to no avail.

So this morning, I decided to go for the heavy action. A couple of hours of looking around the web, led to re-flashing the device (install new firmware on top of the old one) thrice (yup, not once, but thrice), multiple formatting sessions in the middle of all this, and countless reboots later it works!

Back to regular operation as usual. I can once again drag and drop music onto it from my desktop and not have to use custom software to get into the device! :)

Being a geek can be useful.

------

Thank you! to the folks from the following places:

The people on the forums at "Anything But iPod" : http://www.anythingbutipod.com/forum/

The people on the forums of Rockbox : http://forums.rockbox.org/

People on the forums of SanDisk : http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board?board.id=c200

Southpark Avatar

I credit (perhaps that should be blame) Lilian and Mags for this creation of mine. :P This be my Southpark avatar !
If you want to make your own SouthPark Avatar. Go here : http://images.southparkstudios.com/games/create/

I'm running for election.

When, and only when you are done watching the video, if you are still interested in following through to the source from where I got this idea from, go here

The Jedi Gym

Former swordplay trainer to the stars and Star Wars fanatic Jeremy Flynn recently opened "Jedi Gym", a fitness center in Torrance, CA where members channel characters from the Star Wars film series to work out, meditate, and improve their lives."Star Wars is all about the Hero's Journey, and so is working out," says Flynn, " you leave home, battle your demons, and hopefully return home stronger."
Flynn is frustrated with his students' lack of commitment and focus, but when a 7-foot man in an incredibly authentic Darth Vader suit arrives at the gym, Flynn thinks he's found his dream student.
Instead, Flynn and his students learn, first hand, about how powerful the Dark Side can be...

Watch it to the end... Its worth it.
Note: If you are not a Star Wars fan (or don't know the base characters of Star Wars, you probably won't find this interesting.)

What's going on ?

A week or so back, I got notified by the university that there was an armed bank robbery in my university town. This was followed by a message some hours later that the culprits were apprehended by state rangers. All's well I figured.

Until today, when a friend informed me that the bank robbery was actually at tje bank that is less than 5 minutes walk from where I stay! Which means, this is the bank in which I have my bank account!.

So, in the last few months- the area has had robberies, aggravated assaults, a stabbing incident, an aggravated robbery (mugging) and now an armed bank robbery.

So much for the safety of a small town.

Part of a world record attempt

Part of a world record attempt, originally uploaded by Suneil.

Its official, the firefox team did set a world record for the most number of downloads inside a 24 hour period.

I contributed to it by getting my copy of Firefox 3 during this period (see previous post that has the certificate)

Carpets and Doorways

Yet another random post - this time to store a thought on carpets.

"Do not spend $$$ and install white wall to wall carpets which start at the front door of the house, if you don't want to spend the rest of your life worrying that your white carpet is going to get a stain of some sort"

In fact either don't get carpets at all, or get a color other than white, and you'll find your life at home that much less stressful!

Countertops

A random post to store a thought of mine on Kitchen Counter tops.

"It makes absolutely no sense to spend $$$ remodeling a kitchen, including a very expensive new counter top, to get a counter on which you can't put anything hot."

What's the point of installing a counter top on which you shouldn't put a vessel that is at a temperature of more than 80F ?