Lost in Dreams…

As promised to a friend last week, I am giving my weekly updates over here. Lately I have been out of touch with my world and lots of people are thinking that I have gone into hiding. So these update posts are to broadcast the boring stuff I do on a day to day basis and prove to them that hiding is not worth it..

Mercury is rising all the time here, with days becoming worse than the previous day. Just wishing it rains here. It has been a mixed week at work. Most of them are on vacation and sometimes it’s really very boring to look at the same faces who are stuck up like me without a vacation. It’s so boring that we miss even the “office joker” who mostly is  a pain in the wrong place. We hope he comes back fast because his place might be taken up by another.

I have been spending some real time on “bit Feed“. One of the major updates was designing the logo. It’s a standard Web 2.0 logo designed in Inkscape. Lots of experimentation went on different plugins for WordPress and CSS layout. Also updated the WordPress to the latest 2.6 “Tyner” version. I might be doing the same to this blog too. Also put up some test Google Ads in the sidebar of bit Feed. Please do “support” me by clicking some ads if you think the ads are related to something you were thinking of.

I have been also doing some contribution work at “Freebase“. This is one place where I think, I will be a regular contributor. Even though it’s in Alpha stage, it looks very promising. Please watch out for a more detailed posting in “bit Feed” in few days.

Another great tool that I have been trying this week is “RescueTime“. It’s a time management tool to track where exactly you spend time more and try to calculate efficiency and productivity. Mostly would do a posting on it shortly.

I am on my 3rd week of 50 (25) Book Challenge and my initial speed has slowed down. I am only on my third book. In movies, it has been a dull week, where I watched few good old action flicks. It was “Die Hard” and “Lethal Weapon 2“. Expecting to watch some new flicks this weekend. In music section, the albums of the week are “The Essenstial Anan Vissi” by Anna Vissi, “Reload” by Metallica and “Vazthukal” by Yuvan Shankar Raja. Out of these, Anna Vissi is recommended for everybody who wants to get a taste of Laïka. Reload is a must for any heavy metal fan and Vazthukal contains just one track(Enthan Vaanamum Neethan…) that is worth spending time.

At the personal front, I have lost 2 kgs with no changes in the waistline. I guess the reason must be all the butterscotch. The room is in the worst shape ever. I will not be able to locate my wallet if I dropped it there. So there ends my Week 29 update.

ps: Looks like Project ZIEL may be postponed.

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We have heard and used “Free Public Urnials” and “Pay & Use Urinals”… But the only place where you get paid to dump your urea is Musiri, Tirchy in Tamil Nadu. After a unsuccessful campaign to promote hygiene among the local population, the local authorities decided to adopt a different approach for the problem. They decided to pay (bribe) the locals who used the facilities instead of street corners and village idiot’s house walls.

Till now this novel idea has been successful with people queuing up to use the urinal. It’s so strange to see that you need to pay the people to cultivate the civic sense and concern for community health.

It seems all that extra urine is collected by the nearby agricultural university to explore the possibility of its usage a crop fertiliser.

Is this another political stunt before elections ?  or a Real change ?

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I happened to come across the “50 Book Challenge” in the blogosphere last month. It’s a kind of resolution where you hope to finish 50 books in a year. That is nearly one book a week. But since I found this in the last week of June, I kind of decided to go for half the challenge. I hope to finish 25 books by the end of 2008. I have been lazy for quite sometime and my literary intake is nearly zero. So I guess it’s time to change all that. So from July 1, I have finished two books. I am managing to read them during my  travel to office, just before hitting the bed. The first one to finish was John Grisham‘s “The Appeal” which was not all that appealing to me. The second one which was tough to put down was Jeffrey Archer‘s “False Impression“. It was quite a good read. Hoping to write a review sometime soon here.

2 down and 23 more to go…