50 things students can't miss ;)

Was reading a post by Ben Jones(Director of communications at MIT 04-08).
Few points I liked from his post ( in no particular order)

1. Call someone you love back home a few times a week, even if just for a few minutes.
2. Carve out an hour every single day to be alone. (Sleeping doesn't count.)
3. In the first month of college, send a hand-written letter to someone who made college possible for you and describe your adventures thus far. It will mean a lot to him/her now, and it will mean a lot to you in ten years when he/she shows it to you.(I enjoy doing this even now :) but the frequency has dropped :( )
4. Embrace the differences between you and your classmates. Always be asking yourself, "what can I learn from this person?" More of your education will come from this than from any classroom.(This is most important)
5. Working things out between friends is best done in person, not over email. (IM does not count as "in person.") Often someone's facial expressions will tell you more than his/her words.(Indeed that's true)
6. Welcome failure into your lives. It's how we grow. What matters is not that you failed, but that you recovered. (Very true)
7. Every once in awhile, there will come an especially powerful moment when you can actually feel that an experience has changed who you are. Embrace these, even if they are painful. (This could sometimes be the turning point of your life too.... )
8. If you need to get a job, find something that you actually enjoy. Just because it's work doesn't mean it has to suck.
9. Don't always lead. It's good to follow sometimes.
10. Eat badly sometimes. It's the last time in your life when you can do this without feeling guilty about it. (Many such moments :))) )

Well, the post had 50 points(few not applicable in India but read for a laugh). Find the complete article here.

Public Data Explorer by GapMinder

A very useful tool from GapMinder

More about the tool here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/statistics-for-changing-world-google.html

What's next on GMail and Gtalk?

Guess it would be something like a stealth setting in chat
Though the block option is available, it doesn't let you chat until we unblock them.

With this kind of stealth setting, we can choose which friends can see us online or offline.

tips for not falling asleep in class . :O :D

This is interesting :D

Domain Names in Indian Languages

Transliterating a Telugu word or phrase in English is challenging. Of late, I faced this problem when I tried registering a blog by the name abaddhaalu.blogspot.com

One of my guidelines was to register a name that would be easy to remember and at the same time be unambiguous so that users can type it right in the first go.
Abaddhaalu can also be written as abadhaalu, abaddhalu etc.
And that was the time when the idea of having Domain Names in local languages came to my mind. A wild guess that some organization like the w3c might already be working in this direction.

It would be interesting to see the challenges faced in this process.
Would love to have a domain in Telugu :)

హెటిటిపి://వవవ.అబద్ధాలు.బ్లాగ్ స్పాట్.కాం ;)

Updates as status messages ;)

I was about to check how Indians(Tendulkar actually) were doing in the second ODI at Gwalior. When I was about to do this, I saw a contact on my chat list change his status message to
"score .. 143/1 - 22.2 overs. "

I was wondering how would it be if a plugin updates our status message with the current score. ;) cricket scores especially.

Events from a news feed/news alert can also go as a status message.

Will we see and live in THE MATRIX?

Nice read.
The article concludes with this paragraph.

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.

Yeah, if this turns real, that would be amazing..... we would then be living in THE MATRIX.

Here is the link to the article, Have breakfast..... or be breakfast.