Last year, since I was regular at the NRC, I had trained well. However, this year, I was neither regular nor well trained. I wanted to do atleast 200K before the actual race and atleast 4-5 10Ks but I managed about 100K with not a single race distance. However, one good thing I noticed was that my overall pace had increased and I was able to do the small distances that I was running with ease. I was thinking that I would be able to do 52-54 mins for the 10k.
Once I completed, I took a few minutes break and went back looking for Vasu. She was near the Hudson circle gate and I pushed her to run the last 700 odd metres. This was her first 10K and I am glad she completed it under 1:30:00.
After the race, we went to the Nike Lounge for foot massage, photo session and a sumptuous breakfast. I also ran into Dr.Rajat at the lounge. He was cheerful and all smiles as always. When I approached him with a couple of questions, he was happy to provide me inputs on the spot. So bad that he does not consult in Bangalore anymore.
The lunch was at Ragoos, on Kanakpura road, a vegetarian place for pizzas, pastas and rice. More about it later.
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It is a fight between your body and mind. The body says it cant go any further but the mind is trying to push. When you achieve this harmony, then you can breeze.
-- Balaji, 2010
Since I see lot of hits on my blog looking for the concert details, here is the link to the mandali's website with the concert list.
It has been hectic and have not been to a single concert yet. Hope to listen to a few concerts in April
I have a convoluted synchronization setup.
- I use Thunderbird as my primary mail client.
- Lightning is my calendar application and is configured to synchronize with Yahoo! Calendar.
- I also have iCal synchronized with Yahoo! Calendar.
- Finally using Nokia's iSync plugin, I synchronize my calendar to my Nokia E75 phone.
- Also at times, I synchronize my phone with Ovi.com and with Nokia Ovi PC suite.
A few weeks back when I was upgrading the phone firmware, the calendar synchronization broke. I got this error message.
[Y man] There was an error getting data from the phone. The synchronization may have been canceled on the phone.
Device “Y man” synchronization failed.
This seems to be a common problem but nobody seems to have found a working solution. I tried to locate the calendar database on the phone to see if deleting it would help. But could not locate the same. Was contemplating a hard reset and restore from backup when I accidentally discovered a working solution.
Calander -> Select Any date -> Options -> Delete -> Before Date. This cleans up the calendar. A synchronization after this worked. Now you know what do when your calendar sync screws up.
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I'd love to go out with you, but I'm converting my calendar watch from Julian to Gregorian.
Why does drug dealers still live with their moms? What makes a perfect parent? With data and analysis, this book tries to answer some unrelated random questions.
Freakonomics is divided into six chapters, each starting off with a question. On initial thoughts, the answers look obvious. Using tools to reliably asses tonnes of data, this books comes with interesting and often surprising answers. Rather than being a dull subject, economics here is applied to a variety of common topics with amusing results.
The book drives on a set of fundamental ideas:
- Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.
- Conventional wisdom is often wrong
- Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle causes.
- Experts use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda.
- Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.
A must read if you are a curious cat and interested in knowing where have all the criminals gone.
One day I wandered into The Forum Mall and listened to Worldspace. They were playing a Haridas bhajan which was one of my favourites. Immediately decided to pick it up. My parents enjoyed having Shruthi for company. Especially my mother, who is an avid carnatic music rasika. Though I had mostly listened to only Shruthi, I would occasionally listen to other channels as well. KL Radio had some fantastic programmes on Saturdays and Sundays.
We got back from vacation and figured Worldspace was not working. On reading the news and talking to a few people, we got to know that the India Operations is shutdown for good. It has been almost a week now and the house is so quiet, having a haunted feel. Hope a miracle happens and Shruthi is heard again in our home entertaining, educating and soothing me with its collection of carnatic music.
It gave me company for almost 3 years.
It helped me listen to some good quality music.
It helped me in learning and identifying Raagas.
It brought me some good interviews with stalwarts,
It helped me in staying away from the idiot box.
It was good while it lasted.
Bye Bye Worldspace.
Wish you and your family a very happy and prosperous new year 2010.
I discovered Vimperator about 3 months ago and I fell in love with it. Browsing with Firefox suddenly became so powerful and efficient. But a couple of days back, the status bar disappeared. Without the status bar, I felt crippled. Tried reading the help pages, asked around for tips, updated the extension, downgraded and what not? Nothing helped. Unfortunately, search did not help too. And finally I stumbled upon this tip in the mailing list. The status bar was disabled from the menu. How dumb? Interestingly, more than one person had faced the same problem but none had a solution. Looks like the mailing list is not archived and that is the reason why search did not help. Let us hope this blog post shows up soon in the indexes.
The title looked interesting and I picked this book from the library. Idli - okay, but what has orchid and will power got to do with it?
The book is an English translation of the autobiography by Vithal Venkatesh Kamat. It is about taking an idea, a dream to fruition. No matter what obstacles comes, what ever be the struggle, use them as stepping stones and move forward. The book is bubbling with his drive and energy to get things done. His presence of mind seems to have bailed him out more than once. He has also used his networking skills effectively to generate more business.
The book is not without its pitfall. The size of the book is awkward and I did not find it comfortable holding it. The language is not all that great. This could have been because of the translation from Marathi to English. There is no clear flow in the book. I felt as if I was jumping back and forth with little coherence. But those few points should not take away some of the great learnings from the book.
Interestingly this book was published by a so called "Orchid publications" and I could not find any information about this book online. I stumbled across Swaroop's post about this book and he also indicates the same. I am not sure if it is a marketing gimmick to garner attention.
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Where there's a will, there's a way.
A reader was kind enough to point to me that my Greasemonkey script for BSNL Cellone bill payment no longer works. This is due to the fact that the BSNL site changed the site URLs earlier this month. He had also pointed out the fix. It is updated now and available for download. Enjoy!
As an aspiring runner, it is always the motivation factor that keeping me going. I always think I am mentally strong to accept and face challenges. But running is a different ballgame altogether. As in any other group activity, people draw energy from one another and motivate one another. Hence, while running at the Nike Run Club, there is no dearth of motivation. But there are times when I don’t have company. One of the biggest problems when running alone is the boredom that creeps in. I still have the energy to do another couple of KM but feel like stopping. Like last week, when I started off planning for a 15K, I had all the enthusiasm but into the second KM, I wanted to stop. The music player in my phone complained of corrupt files and stopped. I had no inclination to continue. I was figuring out ways of keeping my mind busy and the idea for this blog post was born.
When I used to run on the treadmill, usually my goal was to run as much as the person next to me runs. If the person started running before me, I will try to do the same distance he/she does in a minute or two less. If the person starts running after me, I usually try to run as long as he runs. I remember an incident that occurred a while back in Fitness One. Another guy and me started running around the same time. We had completed around 22 minutes at a decent pace. I did not want to give up until the other guy stopped but I was unable to go any further. After another couple of minutes, I pressed the emergency stop button and stopped. The other guy also did the same almost around the same time. After he stopped, I told him that I was trying to run until he stopped, but could not and he said he also usually does the same thing and he was waiting for me to stop :-)
Another trick I do is to find someone who runs at a decent pace and try to maintain the same distance. A friend once said that, he clocks his runs by the number of songs that play in the gym. One song is normally 4 minutes, so on an average he does about 5 songs for 20 minutes.
My wife has just started cycling and her biggest challenges are the uphill paths. She pants and puffs her way through them. She says, when she sees an uphill, she diverts her mind by thinking philosophy or tries to recollect lyrics of songs she learnt as a child. Sometimes, she says, she also sings aloud or smiles or waves at strangers. This diverts her mind, and she gets through easily.
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Unless you're not pushing yourself, you're not living to the fullest. You can't be afraid to fail, but unless you fail, you haven't pushed hard enough.
-- Dean Karnazes
