Can we blog through sms?

This is an interesting question (thanks, Kartikey), I thought we could, and I googled around some, and it looks like we can.


The general idea is that you can post through phone if you have an advanced model that supports sending emails.


Here are links to the pages that tell you how to do that:


Post by phone to Tumblr


Post by phone to Posterous


Post by phone to Wordpress


Post by phone to Blogger


What happens essentially is that you get an email address to your blog, and then use your mobile web-enabled phone to do the posts. The links above suggest that you need iphone or Blackberry or something like that, but I think it is enough if you can send email from your phone.


But to blog through sms is a challenge, because when you send sms, you send it to a number- which means any basic model is enough. Is it possible? I think it is, and you will lose some of your hair trying to do it, but it is worth it.


You can do that via Facebook or Twitter: and it involves the idea of making use of RSS.


TechLifeWeb tells you how to get the RSS of your Facebook status feeds


And, here is Digital Inspiration on sending sms to Twitter.


I'll not talk about doing this with Facebook, because it seems somewhat difficult- also you get the idea that they have not standardised it, so the setup might go dead.


But blogging with Twitter via sms is easy and in about twenty minutes, you'll be up and running.


First check this twitter page to enable your phone to tweet to Twitter,


And here's the Twitter support page that tells you all about the commands that are connected with twitter and mobiles.

---

The idea is that one of your Twitter accounts is your blog (sounds crazy, right? Of course it is, but not wrong).


If you go to the profile of your Twitter account you will see the orange RSS icon low down the right hand column. This is the key.


What this means is that you can take all your tweets elsewhere to a feed reader and make use of it any which way you want to.


Here's how we do this, kaming use of Tumblr.


Create a Tumblr blog, and keeping yourself logged in, click the customise button: 


Now click services, and you will see this:

Automatically import my...

What you do is this:


Copy the RSS feed of your tweets from the profile page of your Twitter account and paste it here. Done.


Now, every tweet you sms comes into this Tumblr blog, which you can tag etc, and on which your friends can comment and so on.


Since this Tumblr blog itself has an RSS, you can import it and make is automatically show up in Wordpress. Perishable Press tells you how to. This requires a bit of technical knowledge which I don't have, but I think most of you will be able to do it.


What is my choice?


I will go for Twitter to Tumblr and stop at that.


But should I? May be not, because Tumblr as of now does not let you export your blog elsewhere.


So, what I'll do is, subscribe to my Tumblr blog in Google Reader, and then use the send to feature to push it into my preferred Blogger or Wordpress blog manually. Takes some time, but if you are not educated, you have to do physical work, right?


Literate people like you can sit back enjoy, having pushed a button to let things come to your plate!

Pause

Justine Musk writes in her post at the decadence- "failure is good for you: how practice novels helped me get published":

"Becoming a successful writer – and by this I define ‘successful’ as someone who writes publishable fiction, and by this I mean fiction that is skilled and artful enough to create a powerful emotional experience for a reader who is not the writer’s spouse, friend or family member, who doesn’t know or care about the writer at all but would be willing to do something so drastic as to pay money for the privilege of reading her work – is all about writing your way through a succession of big and little failures. There is the failure to sell your work, and the failure to get an agent, but these are capstones: the major reason why a writer fails at either is, ironically, because they haven’t yet failed enough. They haven’t pursued the craft long enough, haven’t written or revised enough, haven’t taken enough chances or gotten enough constructive feedback. They haven’t learned enough.

In short, they haven’t completed enough practice novels. And what is a practice novel but a novel that fails to be good enough to be looked on as anything else?"

Forget successful blogging, or writing- the point is you have to try and try before you come good.

She makes a reference to Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" to note that "...the difference between a beginner and someone who is successful at, well, anything, is 10,000 hours – about ten years."

---

I've been trying to warm up some response at this blog, and have failed abysmally.

So what I'd do is, take a break from blogging for a month.

But it won't be easy- so I've created some igoogle gadgets and so if you want to keep yourself updated, click this link to

See " my social gadgets" on your Google homepage »

---

And I am saving some of my links and notes at this Google Notebook, "Scraps". You can subscribe to it either in Reader or as an igoogle gadget or any other feed reader through this Feedburner link.

---

Wish you well.

photo

I found this great picture at The Big Picture:

It is that of the launch by NASA of its I-X prototype vehicle.

igoogle

I tried to post this from a gadget at igoogle. Let's see if this works.

The Ultimate Truth

Aldous Huxley at his death-bed told his friend:

It's a little embarrassing to have spent one's entire life pondering the human situation and find oneself in the end with nothing more profound to say than try to be a little nicer"

"

An issue of life and death

There is a good article at The New York Times- "A Place Where Cancer Is the Norm"

It is about a hospital where Cancer patients are treated, and the article says, it is a small world in itself.

"With more than 17,000 employees and warrens of color-coded hallways so vast that even employees get lost, M. D. Anderson is its own parallel universe, where nothing matters but cancer. Patients sit in the lobbies and compare notes.

“Everyone in the waiting room talks about ‘How did you find yours?’ ” said June Toland, 71, of Harlingen, Tex., who is being treated for sarcoma, a cancer of connective tissue.

Every patient at Anderson has cancer. Every family member sitting anxiously in the lounges or lingering at a bedside or sleeping in a Murphy bed in a patient’s room has had the life-changing experience of being touched by cancer.

“It feels sometimes like the entire world has cancer,” said Cindy Davis, a nurse in the breast cancer clinic who has breast cancer herself."

Now I could go on and on about this article, calling attention to extracted passages. I don't want to do that.

The article is an example of fine, sensitive writing backed up by facts.  It narrates the atmosphere in the hospital, and more specially how it feels to be a cancer patient. It made me think  about mankind's battle with disease, and cancer is one at which we are throwing more money and effort than others, such as malnutrition.

But the issue of the article, that interests me more than others is this:

"Dr. Russell Harris, an associate professor of medicine at the University of North Carolinaand a member of a board that evaluates cancer therapies for the National Institutes of Health, said the temptation at major cancer centers like Anderson was to try treatment after treatment.

“Everyone is totally immersed in the idea that death is the enemy,” Dr. Harris said. Such a no-holds-barred stance, he added, is spurring a growing debate in the cancer community.

“There is a lot of concern within the oncology community right now, and appropriately so, that people don’t completely understand what they are getting into,” Dr. Harris said."

Your comments appear here

Google Social Search

This is an exciting feature you will love:Google Social Search.

This is right now experimental, and what it means is that when you make a search in Google, you get stuff from people you know (at the bottom of your search results). You also have the choice of looking only at your friends' stuff by clicking "Social" after "Show Options".

You can read more about this at the link you find at the top of this post.

Now, I am enclosing a poll form here- I do this only because I want to give you the option of making your comment right from where you are reading this- if you are reading this as a feed via Google Reader, it okay, just click the box and make your comment (sorry, it becomes public only after three days- but you can view the comments made in this box here at Google Docs.)

True Love

Image via Wikipedia

Consider love: people want their companions to be kind and courteous, but only towards themselves- they hate this when this goodness extends to strangers:

""Both sexes preferred very high levels of kindness and trustworthiness only when considering behaviors directed toward self or close friends and family, and much lower levels of these traits when considering behaviors directed toward other classes of individuals. In fact, people may actively prefer that their partners not be too kind or too trustworthy toward people who are not companions, friends, or family…."

- Love, Sex, Attraction…and Science

About the Header

Sorry for yet another change in the header- Lunar-tic didn't survive for long, did it? Its time was up about two or three weeks back.

Now. I've found that Google Docs offers a brilliant, easy to use service- making use of its Forms, you can create polls and put it up as posts or whatever.

You might question the necessity for that. Let me think of one.

Now, I don't know your reading habits. My suggestion is that this blog reads better when you read it through Google Reader. That is because you get everything that is written here as soon as it is posted on this blog, plus you are rid of the useless clutter that weighs down this blog- it does take some time to load, right?

Now. if I include a form inside the post, an interesting thing happens.

The form shows up in the feed of this blog at Google Reader. And you can fill it up from right where you are!

You know what this means?

You don't even have to come to this blog to make a comment. You can do that with a single click in your Reader.

Isn't that amazing?

With some knowledge of html and things like that may be you can make it so that the comments that are made in the form immediately show up at the blog in the comments column, may be it is possible, may be it is not, I don't know- but the point is this: you are reading a post as a feed, and this gives you a chance to make a comment from within the feed, and your comment can be integrated into the blog.

This, to me, is amazing.

I hope someone big in the social network world, or Blogger wakes up to the potential of this and implements this, so that all comments show up immediately with the post.

But unfortunately, as it is, your comments will be saved in a spreadsheet- I won't know who you are, but I will get what you say. That is why the name of this blog is 3 day pollster- otherwise it'll just be pollster.

What this means for this our close-knit community of vbelongherers is this- you will have to wait for three days to know what happened to your comments.

I don't think this will be too much of a problem- there are just three or four of us reading and commenting on a regular basis- if you are dying to know what the other two or three of us are saying, just send me a mail and I'll let you know.

Life is good, right? You can never tell...

Choice

Note: You name or email id or nothing that identifies you is saved in my spreadsheet. This is totally anonymous.

Skiing Robot

For your viewing pleasure:




via Boing Boing

Gyrobike

This is amazing: a child can learn to ride the cycle within thirty minutes, thanks to the Gyrobike:



via The Gyrobike

Buy your child one.

A Marriage Proposal

Enjoy:



via Neatorama

Going to School in Swat Valley

For your viewing pleasure:



via 3Quarks Daily

An Accident

For your viewing pleasure:



via The Presurfer

Bouncing Pebble Toad

Look At This:

Hospitel

Hotel/Hospital of a different kind- suit yourself.



:::" Here bartenders wear lab coats and waitresses and are dressed in skimpy nurse uniforms and fluorescent orange wigs. They will strap you in a strait jacket and spoon feed you if you order that special item in the menu, and sign the mandatory agreement. Meals are served in stainless steel dishes and eaten with surgical utensils. Drinks are served in medical beakers and test tubes."

- via Atlas Obscura

Open Up

I think I will make it a video day today-



via Boing Boing.

This is in appreciation of British MPs living it up on public expense.

In Defence of Globalisation

Irony:



via YouTube.

The Last Words of John Brown

Surprising things come up in blogs:

For instance, I read this wonderful speech at Brittanica Blog:


"I have, may it please the Court, a few words to say.

Image by Wease via Flickr

In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, of a design on my part to free the slaves. I intended, certainly, to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moved them through the country, and finally leaving them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing again, on a larger scale. That was all I intended to do. I never did intend murder, or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite the slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection….


This court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done – as I have always freely admitted I have done – in behalf of His despised poor is no wrong but right.


Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments – I say, let it be done!"

The man was fighting for anti-slavery, he captured an arsenal, held some people hostage- he was arrested, and sentenced to death.

He gave this speech from the gallows, before he was killed, I think.

Please subscribe to Brittanica Blog- one of the best.

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie got awarded another award, and I found this interesting answer:

Image via Wikipedia

"Do people make history, or does history make people?"


... "Fury came out on September 11, 2001," he said. "No one felt much like reading that day. What was written as a portrait of contemporary Manhattan ended up being a historical novel the very day it was released." He described reading what he had intended as a sharply satirical passage at a Manhattan bookstore after the attack. But the context had changed. "I got waves of nostalgia coming from the audience.""

The March of Technology

I can never imagine, let alone comprehend, the potential of science and technology:

Can you believe this?

"In our work, we explore a novel approach of using infrared optical sensors embedded within a dental retainer to sense tongue gestures. Our first prototype discriminates among four simple gestures: swiping left, swiping right, taping up, and holding up. We have demonstrated using these gestures for real-time control of applications through the game Tetris."

- T. Scott Saponas

A video of which is here (It takes an eternity to load the video)

Ideology and Development

Let's get thinking for a change:

This is from London Review of Books, David Runciman:

""‘Political differences are more a reflection of different beliefs about the solution to problems than of disagreements about what the problems are,’ they write. ‘Almost everyone, regardless of their politics, would prefer to live in a safer and more friendly society.’ But they also reveal a hankering for something more. ‘For several decades progressive politics have been seriously weakened by the loss of any concept of a better society. People have argued for piecemeal improvements in different areas of life . . . But nowhere is there a popular movement capable of inspiring people with a vision of how to make society a substantially better place to live for the vast majority. Without that vision, politics will rarely provoke more than a yawn.’""

- On ideology and development.

Noble Truths

For your viewing pleasure:



via Ox Herding

Mize through Mace

For your viewing pleasure:

Bullet

For your viewing pleasure:

Insomnia

What do you do when you find it difficult to sleep?

Image by Loving Earth via Flickr

Curse your fate?

Or take a sleeping pill, get psychiatric help?

Here is someone who has found it an advantage:

" Paul smiled and nodded and lifted a finger as if to promise greater miracles. We entered a part of the barn given over to countless mechanical music machines: Calliopes, robot orchestras, automated one-man bands, wind-up music boxes…
"We ascended another flight of the circular staircase and found ourselves in one of the most extraordinary rooms I've ever seen, up there under the high eaves. This was a workshop for the hand-manufacture and repair of small mechanical devices. Here Paul worked on his dentistry inventions. He restored small toys — mechanical banks, coin dispensers, Punch and Judy shows, music boxes."

The man who didn't sleep- Roger Ebert.: A great blog with good videos. Check that, please.

A Very Special Blog

Image via Wikipedia

A tremendous story from Futility Closet:

"…The natives took the pilot’s pistol and papers, and then endured a week’s terror as he roamed the island trying to retrieve them. Ni’ihau had no electricity or telephones, so the desperate natives tried signalling Kauai with lanterns and a bonfire and finally sent a party to row the laborious 10 hours for help…."

This is a very special blog. I don't know where he finds such material- unpredictably surprising material...

Amazing Photos

If you are interested in photography, you will like this:

More is at

Banff Mountain Photography Competition 2009

Facebook and MySpace

Image by atomicshark via Flickr

Are you on Facebook or MySpace?

Time to rethink- because you could get profiled upon that:

"...almost 23 percent of Facebook users earn more than $100,000 a year, compared to slightly more than 16 percent of MySpace users. On the other end of the spectrum, 37 percent of MySpace members earn less than $50,000 annually, compared with about 28 percent of Facebook users.

"Even more affluent are users of Twitter, the microblogging site..."

via The Situationist: The Social Status Situation of Online Networks 

Something for your viewing pleasure....

Enjoy!

(I didn't know Dolphins had this streak of sadism in them- pity, no one is perfect)

Is there is Something of the Self-deluding Stout Irishman in Me?

At Anecdotal Evidence, a Chinese poet is quoted to have written, among other things,

Image via Wikipedia

"We could inscribe our poems on biscuits

And homeless dogs wouldn't deign to nibble."

And here Patrick Kurp sardonically observes, "He might be talking about bloggers."

Which is right, of course.

So, here comes-

Blogger, take no pride in thy great content,
while no troll or spammer cares to comment.

Titanic Effort

I read this:

James Cameron and “Avatar” : The New Yorker:

"The pressures on Cameron are extreme, never mind that he has brought them on himself. His movies are among the most expensive ever made. “Terminator 2” was the first film to cost a hundred million dollars, “Titanic” the first to exceed two hundred million. But victory is sweeter after a close brush with defeat. “Terminator 2” earned five hundred and nineteen million around the world, and “Titanic,” which came out in 1997, still holds the record for global box-office: $1.8 billion.

Cameron is fifty-five. It has been twelve years since he has made a feature film; “Avatar,” his new movie, comes out on December 18th and will have cost more than two hundred and thirty million dollars by the time it’s done. He started working on it full time four years ago, from a script he wrote in 1994. “Avatar” will be the first big-budget action blockbuster in 3-D; Cameron shot it using camera systems that he developed himself. He is a pioneer of special effects: the undulating water column of “The Abyss” and the liquid-silver man of “Terminator 2” helped to inspire the digital revolution that has transformed moviemaking in the past two decades. The digital elements of “Avatar,” he claims, are so believable that, even when they exist alongside human actors, the audience will lose track of what is real and what is not. “This film integrates my life’s achievements,” he told me. “It’s the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.” Another time, he said, “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”"

Long article, but totally enjoyable.

Do read it.

An Argument for Equality

I am quoting this rather extensively, but that is because, there can be no better argument for doing away with economic disparities:

This is David Runciman reviewing a book called "The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better", by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett .

Here's the first para of the review I found in London Review of Books:

Image via Wikipedia

"The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the performance invariably is. In graph after graph measuring various welfare functions, the authors show that the best predictor of how countries will rank is not the differences in wealth between them (which would result in the US coming top, with the Scandinavian countries and the UK not too far behind, and poorer European nations like Greece and Portugal bringing up the rear) but the differences in wealth within them (so the US, as the most unequal society, comes last on many measures, followed by Portugal and the UK, both places where the gap between rich and poor is relatively large, with Spain and Greece somewhere in the middle, and the Scandinavian countries invariably out in front, along with Japan). Just as significantly, this pattern holds inside the US as well, where states with high levels of income inequality also tend to have the greatest social problems. It is true that some of the most unequal American states are also among the poorest (Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia), so you might expect things to go worse there. But some unequal states are also rich (California), whereas some fairly equal ones are also quite poor (Utah). Only a few (New Hampshire, Wyoming) score well on both counts. What the graphs show are the unequal states tending to cluster together regardless of income, so that California usually finds itself alongside Mississippi scoring badly, while New Hampshire and Utah both do consistently well. Income inequality, not income per se, appears to be the key. As a result, the authors are able to draw a clear conclusion: ‘The evidence shows that even small decreases in inequality, already a reality in some rich market democracies, make a very important difference to the quality of life.’ Achieving these decreases should be the central goal of our politics, precisely because we can be confident that it works. This is absolutely not, they insist, a ‘utopian dream’."

I hope people of India, the comfortably ensconced middle class, puts away its myopic glasses and look out and look at the poor people.

The justifications of these car-cocooned ("money will percolate down to them after we are done with it") are more heartbreaking than the grinding poverty of these gentle souls (okay, they are idlers and ruffians, but they don't rationalise their wrongs with Nobel-Prize winning theories, right?).

Someone has to do something- a kilogram of essential vegetables costs as much as a litre of petrol! If you don't do anything, these we well-off will have to face the consequences of our narcissism: our children will take to drugs, we will be mugged, our houses burgled, and our women inside our air-conditioned flats will tremble when someone rings the calling-bell. And then, when we manage survive everything- swine flu will get us.

Serves us right.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Why More Equality - The Effects of Inequality (endhereditaryreligion.com)
• Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (themoderatevoice.com)

Guide for the perplexed

Image via Wikipedia

I've been married for ten years, and something happened today that made me think about choosing the right girl so that you will make a happy family with happy children.

After ten years of experience in marriage, and knowing friends who have married happily, survive unhappily and divorced happily- I ask myself, what would I do if I went looking for the right girl.

1. Looks are important.

Most of us don't acknowledge it, but physical attraction is important. You must be, to be blunt about it, aroused by the girl, though truth is, most of us will be aroused by more or less anybody. But a few of us are finicky about this, and if you are particular about getting the right girl, for heaven's sake- go for the girl you find physically attractive. If everything else fails in your marriage, this will survive- and it is enough motivation to keep being married.

I am not sexist, so I won't say that physical beauty is everything- if you like her voice, even that is a good pointer- eyes may fail, and nose not get into the act- but keep your ears open.

2. Don't try to find happiness through marriage.

Because you will fail- happiness is something innate to what we are. No one can take it away, or make us more happy. We have a baseline level of happiness/ unhappiness, and we should be aware of that. So, don't ask to be more happy through the girl- instead, think what kind of environment you want to create in your family, and ask whether this girl will help you do that.

3. Be sneaky- look at her childhood photos, especially school albums.

There is an interesting finding that people who are happy as children are happy as adults, and childhood photos are good pointers of that. So, while you can't make anyone more happy or unhappy, and there is no way anyone will give you more happiness or unhappiness- if you make the right choice, you get the chance to live with a happy girl, but whether you will enjoy that or not depends on what sort of a person you are.

There are more, but depending upon the response I get, I will tell all or quit this subject and return to stuff like The Reason Why Obama Got Nobel Prize.

Crusty Mark Twain Gets Poetic

Mark Twain via last.fm

You know, we should not judge an author by what he writes- for example Mark Twain. Can you imagine him writing ths? More chance that George Bernard Shaw would write a poem declaring his love.

You are a decoration, you little witch!:

"The idea of your house going to the wanton expense of a flower garden! Aren't you enough? And what do you want to go and discourage the other flowers for? Is that the right spirit? Is it considerate? Is it kind? How do you suppose they feel when you come around looking the way you look? And you so pink and sweet and dainty and lovely and supernatural? Why, it makes them feel embarrassed and artificial, of course; and in my opinion it is just as pathetic as it can be. Now then you want to reform dear and do right. "

But, apparently he wrote it to a nine year girl. Amazing.

Who is your Herbert Spencer?

I found this in TLS Letters to the Editor:

Image via Wikipedia

"Gandhi cites Chesterton as saying: “What is the good of the Indian national spirit if they cannot protect themselves from Herbert Spencer? I am not fond of the philosophy of Buddhism, but it is not so shallow as Spencer’s philosophy. It has some noble ideals, unlike the latter. One of their papers is called The Indian Sociologist. Do the Indian youths want to pollute their ancient villages and poison their kindly homes by introducing Spencer’s philosophy into them? . . . But Herbert Spencer is not Indian; his philosophy is not Indian philosophy; all this clatter about the science of education and other things is not Indian. I often wish it were not English either. But this is our first difficulty, that the Indian nationalist is not Indian”."

This is from a letter by Anthony Parel.

The question raised by G.K. Chesterton seems relevant to me, even today.

Any rejoinders?

If yes, we should speak Indian if we are to be Indian, okay let's rid ourself of present day's Edward Spencer.

But where do we stop?

At the borders of our state, language, culture (Hindu?).

I, for one, would like to stake my claim that Herbert Spencer is an Indian, because he is a part of our collective consciousness.

Religion and Technology

Can't argue with this, can we?

Though I wonder what science has to do with religion, or technology with spirituality, or reason with faith-

The Dalai Lama on Science:

“If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.”

– Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

The Salmon Protocol

Image via Wikipedia

This could change the way we do business:

louisgray.com: Proposed Salmon Protocol Aims To Unify Conversations on the Web:

"The proposed Salmon Protocol would similarly watch both source and destination sites for comments, and upon discovering new comments, it would send the new comments to the site which is lacking the full conversation. If multiple downstream destinations are designated, the Salmon Protocol will also populate these multiple sites."

I think this is supported by Google, I am not so good at social networking language so I am not sure of all this.

But what I understand from this is that once you integrate your Gmail account and your Blog into this, you have the option of making your comments elsewhere go to a specified place you want them to go, and more importantly, all comments that people make on your post elsewhere on the web (friendfeed, sidewiki etc), automatically appears in the comments part of your post.

Seems great, right?

A New Gen Magazine in Tamil

There is a new magazine in Tamil, it is "Puthiya Thalaimurai" and is priced at Rs.5/-.

To be frank with you, there are no good magazines in Tamil. Period.

On second thoughts, they are more or less glossy wastepaper that comes stapled together, and they usually depend upon sensational, veiled porn to sell their issues.

Politics, Crime, Cinema- if you take these out of your magazine, you are more or less likely to be left clutching at thin air.

Honestly.

But not this one-

The issue I have at hand has-

Inspirational articles by Abdul Kalam (on youth and 2020), Vairamuthu (on how he overcame his fear), by Ramesh Prabha (on business management), Iraiyanbu (on travel)...

Informative articles on Venky (The Indian who got the Nobel Prize this year), Nandakumar (the boy with Dyslexia that no school would take in, yet he studied in private from eighth standard on and got selected for Civil Services), on self employment (Mehndhi, Photography), learning Japanese, on our heritage, on efforts by MAFOI to produce excellent sportsmen, on Teenage Premier League 20-20 organised by three young men, on Madhumita (who sung in Slumdog Millionaire), on Stress Interview, on how to stop poisoning yourself with tobacco, on ethical journalism, on Thozhan- a NGO and more.

If you are an intellectual in Tamil Nadu, it means you are language-chauvinistic, caste-conscious and anti-globalisation.

It would be great to see a magazine that steers away from these traps.

Wish them well- if you know Tamil, please get a copy of it- at just Rs.5, it is a steal.

Blogger

Image via CrunchBase

I am avid blogger- if you know me, you'll know that I am addicted blogger.

I am sorely tempted to move on to Wordpress, and as of now, I am tethered to Blogger due to my affection for Google.

One of the reasons Wordpress is attractive is to do with what Blogger is not, and this is just one of them-

"Themes

It’s painfully obvious to any visitor that your blog is just another lame project that barely gets worked on if you’re still using minimia black with hopes of getting high readership. You have to make it look attractive and inviting. Not like it was made in Soviet Russia."

-4 Easy Tips to Improve your Blogger Blog, MakeUseOf.com

N

Plinky helps you blog

Image by emdot via Flickr

You might wonder what is the point of it- but bloggers need to blog, and plinky is a place for you to get some ideas that help you blog.

All it does is, it asks you a question every day, and your answer to it becomes the blog post.

What follows is mine.

It is also social, which means there are people there- you can follow them, they can follow you, you can favorite their posts and so on.

Try it.

I was prompted today to provide a couple of money saving tips,- and here they are:-

Go without a meal and walk short distances.
It might look mean, but going to sleep on a full stomach is not good for your sleep, not good for your health- it also saves some money by the way.



I think if we all go to sleep after having had a banana or two, then we will get a good night's sleep and wake up raring to go.


Walk short distances.
Obvious. Nothing original in that. Saves precious energy, saves the Earth- and saves some money.



If you sit down and calculate how much get wasted in riding short distances, you will appreciate the point of it.

Cute Apology

Image by almost witty via Flickr

Apology Form for Drunkeness:

Letters of Note has a form letter from the 9th century found in western China produced by the Dunhuang Bureau of Etiquette.

"Yesterday, having drunk too much, I was intoxicated as to pass all bounds; but none of the rude and coarse language I used was uttered in a conscious state. The next morning, after hearing others speak on the subject, I realised what had happened, whereupon I was overwhelmed with confusion and ready to sink into the earth with shame."

The Chinese are definitely great culture, with hoary history of civilisation.

Today is World Poverty Day

Image via Wikipedia

Today is World Poverty Day:

"The observance of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty can be traced back to 17 October 1987. On that day, over a hundred thousand people gathered at the Trocadéro in Paris, where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in 1948, to honour the victims of extreme poverty, violence and hunger. They proclaimed that poverty is a violation of human rights and affirmed the need to come together to ensure that these rights are respected. These convictions are inscribed in a commemorative stone unveiled on this day. Since then, people of all backgrounds, beliefs and social origins have gathered every year on October 17 th to renew their commitment and show their solidarity with the poor. Replicas of the commemorative stone have been unveiled around the world and serve as a gathering place to celebrate the Day. One such replica is located in the garden of United Nations Headquarters and is the site of the annual commemoration organized by the United Nations Secretariat in New York.

Through resolution 47/196 adopted on 22 December 1992, the General Assembly declared 17 October as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty and invited all States to devote the Day to presenting and promoting, as appropriate in the national context, concrete activities with regard to the eradication of poverty and destitution. The resolution further invites intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations to assist States, at their request, in organizing national activities for the observance of the Day, and requests the Secretary-General to take, within existing resources, the measures necessary to ensure the success of the Day's observance by the United Nations."

I don't think I can add anything to this, or do anything to abolish poverty (in fact, if someone helps me rid of my poverty, I'll be eternally grateful!).

Be that as it may be, let's just be aware that there are poor people in the world, and if we do whatever we can we can help them breathe a bit easier.

Personally I would say that I am poor internally, spiritually (emotionally, existentially- not religiously)- and there is nothing you or anyone can do about that.

But there are people struggling for food and clothing- and it's a pity we think we can do nothing about that.

I would think up one or two things this day, to help ease up the life of at least one or two people. Let's see.

By the way, this is Diwali- the Festival of Lights, and I wish you all happiness.