What to do during free time

Most of us have our own idea of spending free time, anyway this is just a hint of what i do during free time. If you are against generalisation read the title as "What sen does during free time". By free time i mean the time you are trying to kill, when you are deprived of electronic gadgets and if you do not want to do any
useful work.

Newspaper is the best friend

Newspapers are mighty tools that help in killing time. Anyway it depends on the choice of the newspapers. There are few newspapers here in bangalore which contain nothing but gossips. Starting from hollywood, bollywood the gossips boils downs to that of individual personal life. If a techie eats it becomes a news, if he  breaks his  relationship with his girlfriend it becomes the headlines. Sudokus in  newspapers also help a lot.

Phone a Friend

Sounds like a Kaun Bangega Crorepati option, is it ? This is one of the best options that i use almost every  night. If there is a friend who is in the same state like you, without work, with no option left to kill time,  then he is the right choice. Pickup the phone call him and talk rubbish for hours until you feel sleepy. Since   i have good amount of free talktime for local calls, talking for hours has not troubled me.

Sit and Stare

The most effortless option, lie down on your bed or if possible on the terrace, stare at the sky or ceiling and  let your imagination run wild. Think about what will happen tomorrow, what will happen if you meet a  beautiful girl tomorrow or what will happen if you get a chance to thrash your manager... If you want to  test your memory, think about what happened this day, last year. Rummaging through the past will always be interesting, as long as the present is pleasant.

Specifying categories for posts from weblogger

After all it is possible to specify categories for the blogs posted
from the weblogger mode in emacs. All you have to add is to add the
"Keywords" section to the header and specify the categories as comma
separated values. The only limitation is that, you cannot add any
new categories using weblogger.

If the header that you get is something like this,

Subject:
Newsgroup:
--text follows this line--

Add the "Keywords:" header and specify the existing categories,
something like,

Subject:
Newsgroup:
Keywords:
--text follows this line--

Now the only feature that is needed to make the configuration complete
is adding tags. Searching for ways to add that.

Using Weblogger mode in Emacs

Wow finally i was able to blog from emacs. First had thoughts ofwriting a python client using xmlrpc for posting in wordpress but thatwas all before i came to know about the weblogger mode. What has to be done to enable the weblogger mode in Emacs ? All you have to do is to download the weblogger.el and the xml-rpc.el to a directory of your choice and enable them. Once you downloadthe el files add the following lines to your .emacs file

(add-to-list 'load-path "")
(require 'weblogger)

Now reload the configuration or restart emacs. Weblogger need xml-rpc and URL. If you have them  installed, Emacs would startup without any problems. Setup weblogger using the command, M-x weblogger-setup-weblog and enter the weburl, username and password. For wordpress the URL is http://yourblogaddress/xmlrpc.php

Now you are done, start blogging using M-x weblogger-start-entry.

There are still few loose ends to be tied up to make the webloggercomplete for my account. Still i am not able to specify the title and the category for the post. Hope to do that soon....

Test - Trying to post from emacs

Testing to blog from emacs. No idea about whether this will go
through fine. If you are reading this post, there will be a post
above this explaining the same.

Few funny phobias

Was reading through the list of phobias, and these are some which i thought to be funny or weird.

ablutophobia - fear of bathing
callophobia - fear of beauty
neophobia - fear of change
pantiphobia - fear of everything
xenophobia - fear of foreigners
polyphobia - fear of many things
musophobia - fear of mice
demophobia - fear of people
acoustophobia - fear of sound
lalophobia - fear of speaking
logophobia - fear of study
phronemophobia - fear of thinking
basophobia - fear of walking
plutophobia - fear of wealth
ergophobia - fear of work
cibophobia - fear of food
geliophobia - fear of laughter
venustrophobia - fear of beautiful women
Eisoptrophobia - fear of seeing oneself in mirror :D
Somniphobia - fear of sleep

Last but not the least, the phobia of many bachelors

Phalacrophobia - fear of becoming bald

The 100th post

This post happens to be the 100th post in wordpress, considering the posts in blogger this is the 151st. Started blogging before three years on seeing my seniors who themselves were active blogger when they were in college. Soon a there was a small congregation of bloggers who still hold on to the habit. If you are curious to know who they are, peep into the links at the side of this blog. Soon blogging became a habit, and if the blog remained without any updates for a long time, it certainly looked like a pending job. The most encouraging thing is whatever junk is posted there is atleast someone to read the junk you have posted. Example could be the Kanaa Kaanum Kaalangal post, it was overwhelming to see the replies for the post though the reason is the fame of the serial. After coming to office the rate of  blogging has decreased greatly. As bugs continue to bug the life, most of the time is spent in office and spending time on blogging has become difficult. Lot of things flash at times but posting in blog has become
difficult. But blogging has turned into a inveterate and think will not die just like that.

Posting from ScribeFire

Came across this plugin for firefox called scribefire. Scribefire is a blog editor that integrates  with the browser and lets you to easily post to your blog. So thought of giving it  a try. If this post gets updated in my blogsite, then i would say "Scribefire is cool". One more information that i found while configuring scribefire is, Scribefire seems to be using xmlrpc for communication with the  blog site, though i am not sure.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Guifications in Pidgin.

Had been using Pidgin very long time for both my office and personal IM accounts. One missing feature that i never noticed was missing notifications when a buddy comes online or goes  offline. Started searching  and came across Guifications, a plugin for pidgin that will show a popup for a number of  configurable events. Guifications can be downloaded and installed  from the following location.

http://downloads.guifications.org/plugins/Guifications2/

It notifies you for a lot of events but what i wanted was when my friends login and logout of their IMs. I default popup that notifies failed to impress me, so started searching some themes for Guifications and found a lot of cool and colourful themes in the  following link.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=676821&group_id=92888&func=browse

Installation of theme is easy, all you have to do is to unzip and  place the folders at the correct location. In windows it is the  following directory

<PIDGIN INSTALLATION DIR>\pixmaps\pidgin\guifications\themes

If you have the habit of displaying the song you hear as the status, musictracker plugin will help you in doing so in Pidgin. Check out  http://code.google.com/p/musictracker/ for information about the  same.

Kollimalai - Serene and Splendid

Visited kollimalai last week along with seniors, and it turned out to be a great one. Kollimalai was not a well known hill station in Tamilnadu. Not much visited by tourists i guess. Located at around two hours from salem, kollimalai remains undisturbed from tourists harassment . Serenity lends beauty to the place. No traffic, not many people around to disturb you. You are alone with your friends to enjoy the beauty of the hill station. You also have an opportunity to capture the untouched nature in your digicam. The most interesting spot in there is the "Athisaya Aruvi", the waterfalls. To enjoy the the waterfalls you have to climb down around 500 steep steps. The cool water drops falling from the steep rocks looks marvellous and so is the feeling when it falls down and splashes on your body. Few other places include

Arapalliswarar temple
vasalurpatti which has a small lake with boats
Semmedu where there is a small statue of Valvil Ori statue.
A small lake, i forgot the name.

There were few more temples and spots. The most interesting part of the stay in kollimalai is the early morning trekking which we had. Roamed around the gardens and hills there in kollimalai enjoying the early morning chillness. On the return trip went to Hoganekkal, the ride in the calm waters of the cauvery water was great. This happened to be the first trip with super super super seniors. The showed a lot of maturity in organizing the trip, and the trip ended with out any problems.

Snaps at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/sens2003/KollimalaiTrip

Crying Babies

Street cricket was one of my favourite game a decade back. A truly interesting game with out slight respect for the rules . A flat stick and a plastic ball or a rubber one was enough. The way in which the game was played is the most interesting part. Balls were thrown at full speed to break the stumps or if possible the players leg. Whether catch is taken or not, the wicket is never given without arguments. Even the stumps are broken into two pieces batsmen refuse to leave the field hoping the umpire may do miracle. At times umpires help them also. Run outs and stumpings were the worst part of the game. Remember matches getting abondoned unable to reach a decision whether the player reached the crease before the ball or not. If there was no way out for a team to win, the last possible attempt was to put the blame on the opposite team player that he used a really really bad word during the game and would usually end in omeone running behind someone to thrash him. They were the crying babies. One thing about the crying babies is that they usually win the match.

The reason why i am talking about this is that i could see all these in the australia-india second test match. After seeing the second test between Australia and India i was convinced that there are crying babies in international cricket arena too ;) And to see that the world champions crying was really funny. Still clueless why Ponting men resorted to a new technique, may be to continue the winning streak. Indians are always a big PITA for the aussies. Whether they win or lose, they make sure that aussies record is broken. Good to see that Indians have done it once again.  Hats off to Indians.  If you have any doubts why i have posted this without after the whole issues has subsided, the reason is i do not want to miss the opportunity to belittle aussies at any chance.