And we say food prices are going up

And we say food prices are going up
Originally uploaded by Parvinder Singh

This picture actually reminds me of Hammy in Over the Hedge, when he actually shows all the other characters the amount of food the human beings conserve. There is so much food around the human beings but it is still never enough for them. If they have had enough food they try to get rid of it (exercise, etc)

I wish we all could be a little more responsible when it comes to food wastage. Off late this issue hurts me a lot especially with the food crisis. In addition, we have innumerable human beings, across the world, who sleep without a nutritious meal

There are so many ways in which we can counter the wastage of food

1. Parties : We often have parties at our house and generally we tend to overestimate the food consumption and end up cooking a huge quantity of food. The other reason we tend to overestimate is because we want everyone to have enough of everything, they should over fill their stomachs and go home so that it leaves a good impression on the party host and we gather our cookie points. A caterer once mentioned to me that a normal human being doesn't eat more than 200 gms of food. If we probably stick to that figure its rare that we would over cook anything. Even if we have left overs from the party we should make sure that its not being wasted. Pack the food and give it to the guests, if you think that you cannot finish it later in a considerable amount of time. Yes very important that you estimate it correctly. Normally you wont eat the left overs more than twice a week and then if it still remains you are bound to throw it away.

2. Serve/ Take Less When you take the food in your plate make sure that you take the right quantity and finish it. It is really important for parents to inculcate this habit in children. Indian parents normally have the habit of finishing up the food left by their children. Sometimes we as adults too commit this mistake. When we are hungry we tend to take a good quantity of food in our plates, (the psychological effect) and end up putting half of it in the garbage. If we are serving the food, make sure we serve a little less quantity and come back later, if they still want some more. Don't try to impress them by serving more food in the plates, it aint worth it.

3. Community : Often in gurdwaras the langar gets overestimated too. The responsible gurdwara members should put up a guestimate of the langar quantity on the gurdwara websites. Also make sure that if there is langar left over, pack it up and give it to the sangat.
I remember a lot of historical gurdwaras in India wouldn't allow the sangat to leave if they didn't finish eating the complete langar. You probably will eat a little extra the first time but later on the discipline of finishing the food gets installed in you and you become more responsible as a result of it

4. India Marriages Woohooo...what do i say here ? Being a part of the north indian community i have witnessed the extravagant marriages and the money going in drain on all sorts of unnecessary things like tons and tons of variety food for dinner/lunch. Woof, cant even imagine how much of the food made during marriages/reception parties get consumed.

5. Shopping Don't go out hungry to do your groceries, you end up buying a lot of extra things. Also keep a very watchful eye on the expiry dates, make sure that you have a plan to finish them off before they get expired, especially fruits and vegetables. Go through all groceries when you do your check out, that is your last chance to make sure that haven't over-shopped.

These are just a few little things by which we could avoid the food wastage and contribute in some way for the hungry and the homeless. I am pretty sure you guys have many more such useful tips to reduce food wastage

First Marathon of my life

The sports genes don't run in my family. I have never excelled in sports (whatever form). If look myself in the mirror i find myself a jack of all trades and masters of none.

But finally I have something to talk about. With god's grace I ran my first marathon of 13 miles on 2nd March 2008. I took 3 hours and 12 minutes to complete it but this is all what i wanted. Alpharetta Marathon is conducted once a year and has 2 flavors

1. Half Marathon - 13 miles
2. Full Marathon - 26 miles

It just a week before when Trilok veer jee put forth the idea of participating in the marathon. My first reaction looking at 13 miles (forget 26 miles) was "hell no" but then he, with his calm and composed nature motivated me and I agreed, thinking If i can't complete i will run as much as I can.

1st day - I started practicing in the apartment gym. The first day i was barely able to reach 3 miles.
2nd day - I took some rest
3rd day - I comfortable ran 2.0 miles at the speed of 4.7 miles per hour. After little breaks i made it till 4.0 miles
4th day - I was little more comfortable now and wasn't tired or pain of any sort. I could complete 5.0 miles with the first non-stop stretch of around 2.5 miles
5th day - I managed 6.0 miles
6th day - took some rest
7th day - took some rest again , wanted to practice but because of some other commitments I couldn't make it

After these many days of practice I knew one thing that completing the race is just a mental game. I can even complete the race by walking 13 miles. I had noticed during practice that even brisk walking kind of gives you a 4 mile per hour speed.

On the race day, all I did was Ardaas and went to the race along with Trilok veer jee. Vijaya cautioned me that don't stress yourself else you will face adverse effects. We arrived just in time and therefore couldn't do a lot of stretching. After the US national anthem the race started and i started remembering my childhood days of sports events. Usually whenever such events happened during my school days i use to feel disappointed since everyone would go past beyond me but this time it was different. I started at my medium pace and allowed everyone to go ahead without disturbing my mind, remembering the Tortoise and the Hare fable. The initial 2 miles were very tough (lack of stretching) but then after taking some water i felt a bit comfortable and got into a good pace. It went fine till 6 miles smooth and steady. the ahead thing will be though i knew that and whatever distance i cover, its going to be a bonus.
I was at the same pace with a fellow runner, Chanda Provost. She accompanied with me till the last and probably only because of her i could finish the race.

Last 3 miles were brutal. I was taking my liquids on regular intervals and didn't feel famished but my knees (specially my right knee) was hurting the most. Although i was just jogging (people who were walking, went beyond me :-)), I felt as if i have tied a 10 kg weight around them. I just hoping that i don't spoil my knee ligaments or any tendons. There was one thing i said to myself "2 steps before the victory and you loose the cup". Your cup is participation and completion :-) and you don't want to loose the cup, coming this far.

It was such an awesome feeling going past beyond the finish line and wearing that medal. Trilok veer jee were waiting for me all smiling and happy. He completed the half marathon in 2:20 minutes.
I attribute my success to lord almighty who helped me through his creations, fellow human beings helped me finish the race. Its his win and not mine.

kbIr myrw muJ mih ikCu nhI jo ikCu hY so qyrw ]

kabeer maeraa mujh mehi kishh nehee jo kishh hai so thaeraa ||

Kabeer, nothing is mine within myself. Whatever there is, is Yours, O Lord.

qyrw quJ kau saupqy ikAw lwgY myrw ]203]

thaeraa thujh ko soupathae kiaa laagai maeraa ||203||

If I surrender to You what is already Yours, what does it cost me? ||203||

Childhood:The Care-Free Season

I want to jump I want to fly
High, up in the sky
No tension No worries
No rush No hurries
who is worried of stocks or pound
who cares earth is square or round
Rain or Shine we will play
eat chocolates, forget tooth decay
studies, school, homework ?
these things, will make you jerk
Spiderman is my latest hero
Don't bother me he will make you zero
pizza, ice-cream, coke please
everything digested with utmost ease
All are friends, so close and dear
I have no foes, I don't fear
If you choose, the season will forever stay
all your life it won't betray

Here come's another

In the gushing flow of social networking websites, here comes another one. started by a bunch of "geeks". Similar to the boom of e-commerce sites in around 1999, this seems to me mini boom of social networking websites.

A few things about pownce

1. They have a desktop version developed in Adobe AIR. Coming to think of it do I really need a desktop version of a social networking website? Anyways the desktop version did not work for me but it at least gives Adobe another proof of concept for their AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) framework.
2. It charges you 20$ for a pro account and with a pro account you can design your own custom theme, ad-free, send more files (i can use my gmail account to do that) Huhh ??
3. You can create links of other profiles like orkut, facebook, myspace, 43things, etc and they are visible on your pownce profile.
4. You can create events and inform your friends about it. They appear as a separate note(s) on your profile (your profile is combination of profile and your scrabook (orkut) / wall (facebook) )so when someone hits your profile he can notice all the notes. Between these notes there will be advertisements which will help pownce to run till the mini-boom lasts :-). I think the interesting thing here would be if some share of the ad revenue is shared with the person who helps generate the revenue with his/her notes.
6. They say that everything is developed to solve a problem, so what problem is Pownce trying to solve? According to pownce folks.

Pownce is brought to you by a bunch of geeks who were frustrated trying to send stuff from one cube to another.

This definitely sounds to me the most unresolved problem of IT and yes now the desktop version of the Pownce is some what justified so that i can drag and drop files, etc

5. Right now it is available only through invites. So if you need one, let me know. I have 6 invites pending :-) (reminds me of the early gmail days when we went around asking everyone for gmail invitation)

Good luck Pownce !

Still behind ?

Indian Ambassdor's Message

When everyone is driving on information superhighway the indian ambassador in his latest letter (informing about the outsourcing of visa process) invites for suggestions by means of postal mail or fax. Looks like email is still a naive entity for him.

Came across this comment at digg over this old NY pic. God damn hilarious !!!

"Please, trade in your car for a horse. Do you realize the environmental impact of the entire nation or world owning horses. They shit 9 tons of manure each year, that's about 50 pounds a day. You also have to stockpile their shit and you can't have it close to any water sources, so anyone living in rural areas with a well wouldn't have a place for that, if the water source comes near the stockpile, all local water sources will be contaminated. Then you have to worry about feeding your shitting horse, which requires approximately 25-30 pounds of dry food per day and we have to clear out significantly more land for farms to accomodate for our 300 million new horses (there are approximately 5.5 million horses in the United States) which in turn will destroy the environment and ecosystem as it is. Not only that, but your dumbass shitting horse can only go about 9 mph for 25 miles before having to break, it would take me over 3 hours to get to work which is 30 miles away from where I live instead of the 30 minutes it takes right now. So instead of an hour of driving every day, I'd have 6 hours of riding and 2 hours of shit stockpiling and 2 hours of feeding my shit factory. Not only this but I have to build an accomodation so it can shit all day, and buy a ridiculous amount of feed and have more land... but I guess I wouldn't care about money at this point since I spend 10 hours of my non-working day taking care of my crappy horse.We have technology for a reason and the environmental impact of 300 million horses, and 300 million horse pens and 2.7 billion tons of horse shit every year would be absurd... "

No gotcha company creates the biggest gotcha

Today morning I received an email saying the sun rocket service is shut down and i have 2 options to switch my service. Man I was just at loss of words.
SunRocket was the cheapest and the best VOIP service, Clark Howard was recommending it from many years. Even I experienced an excellent service, friendly website, very good customer reps, The recently updated their website to J2EE, with AJAX and provided tons of options.
Moreover all eyes were on Vonage because of the law suit on it and I was recommending people to switch to SunRocket :). Man, they just made a fool out of me.

crazy kiya re

Last 20 days , in my RSS reader every 2 out of 10 news items would be of iPhone, the other day someone in AT&T asked me "are you working on iphone ?" I smiled back and said to myself "yea my 5 lines of code change are going to be a part of it",
So finally the much hyped iphone launch was over today, the launch of a new industry I would say, iphone accessories are already out selling on ebay, people have started making money on the *iphone* domain names, people stood in the queue for others and made around 200-300 dollars. I was lucky to witness the launch in the apple store, north point mall, alpharetta.
There were folks who stood/slept/sat in the lane for the past 2 days so as to be the first few lucky iphone buyers. Looking at them I remembered those ration lanes or the railway reservation lanes of India, the major difference being that here you can't bribe the police vaala and fix your number in the queue. Anyways this is not the first time people have gone crazy over any electronic device launch, pretty much the same thing happened with the play station launch last year.





































More pics at flickr

Cuatomize my install :)

- Looks like yahoo forgot to do a spell check ?, Came across this dialogue in one of the messenger upgrades

- a QA Slip ?

Google Calendar, still in its teens

A Month ago i added a calendar post for 14th November 2006 with a reminder set for 13th November. 13th passed, no reminder. 14th arrived, all of a sudden i remembered it (good for me), out of curosity i went back and checked my google calendar, couldn't see any event at all. Thinking that i must have forgotten to add the event i added another event and all of a sudden the event for 14th appeared like the hindu gods

bottom line - Google calendar, you still are in your teens, long way to go before you replace the Outlook Calendar

Macro Photos with S2 IS

Full credit to http://www.flickr.com/photos/blipfish/
Ah... I've been at this point - it's just a process of learning a new camera, so have no fear - you'll be photographing the socks on a flea before long. ;)

I suggest opening the LCD viewer rather than the smaller viewfinder as there's information onscreen you'll want to look at while doing this.

1. Dial in to "M" (Manual mode)
2. Press the 'flower' button on the front, side ring of the lens housing.
3. Press and HOLD this button a second time... gets you from Macro mode into Super Macro mode - your display will show it go from an icon of a flower at the top to a flower with an "S" in it. You're now in Super Macro Mode.

It's at this point the fact that you're in Manual mode will probably show up... your scene might look way dark or too bright. So, use the 4-way thumb button (the one with the up/down/left/right arrows on the right side) to adjust the speed and exposure settings until you can finally see something in the viewfinder decent.

Now, let's say you're photographing an ink pen or pencil on your desk...

There's no doubt your camera needs to be right down there with it... your lens (now that it's fully extended since you turned the power on) can even touch the pencil... it can be THAT close.

Just turn the camera a little sideways now to begin looking down the length of the pencil. Notice how about an inch or so away from the lens starts to come into focus?

For a basic start - just press and hold the shutter button until you see the green box and beep - this tells you you've gotten a good focus.

If you were taking advantage of pushing the MANUAL FOCUS button and using the 4-way dial to focus (using that fuzzy square)... don't be surprised if all you have to do is dial it up to 1. This is super-macro, after all... it's close. You'll be able to tell this because a 'meter' scale appears on the rigth side of the display. It rises and falls as you adjust with the 4-way button.

Note: The way I found out that the S2IS has such a good SM mode is I had dust on the front lens and it was interfering with my focusing. I was actually focused on the dust on the glass itself! So, make sure your lens is clean.

This is basically what I did for the dollar bill shot that I took (linked above).

Manually Focusing would have given me more options as to WHERE the focal point would have landed on that bill (further away from the green emblem, closer than the emblem, etc.). So, you have a little latitude if you wish to use the Manual Focus feature as well.

Let me know if this gets you closer or not? It's a fun (and very nice) feature and there's no reason you won't be using it right away. :)

Girls in UK

Girls in UK doing bhangra. Pretty Good !!

Life's true meaning

It starts with...

One thing,
I don't know why,
It doesn't even matter how hard you try,
Keep that in mind,
I designed this rhyme,
To explain in due time,
All I know…
Time is a valuable thing,
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings,
Watch it count down 'till the end of the day,
The clock ticks life away,
It's so unreal…
You didn't look out below,
Watch the time go right out the window,
Tryin to hold on,
Didn't even know, I wasted it all just to
watch you go…
I kept everything inside,
And even though I tried,
It all fell apart,
What it meant to me
Will eventually be,
A memory of a time when

I tried so hard and got so far,
But in the end,
It doesn't even matter,
I had to fall,
To lose it all,
But in the end,
It doesn't even matter,

One thing, I don't know why,
It doesn't even matter how hard you try,
Keep that in mind,
I designed this rhyme,
To remind myself how
I tried so hard...
In spite of the way you were mocking me,
Acting like I was part of your property,
Remembering all the times you fought with me,
I'm surprised it
got so(far)…
Things aren't the way they were before,
You wouldn't even recognize me anymore,
Not that you knew me back then,
But it all comes back to me,
In the end...
You kept everything inside,
And even though I tried it all fell apart,
What it meant to me
Will eventually,
Be a memory of a time when

I tried so hard and got so far,
But in the end,
It doesn't even matter,
I had to fall,
To lose it all,
But in the end,
It doesn't even matter,

I've put my trust in you,
Pushed as far as I can go,
For all this,
There's only one thing you should know,

I've put my trust in you,
Pushed as far as I can go,
For all this,
There's only one thing you should know...

I tried so hard and got so far,
but in the end,
it doesn't even matter,
I had to fall,
to lose it all,
but in the end,
it doesn't even matter

My new passion

My new passion
Originally uploaded by Khalsa.

Finally after 3 months of long wait with endless driving of rentals, I finally got my sedan baby, my (Vijaya please read Our:)) my Passat GLS 18.T. Having driven Porsche Porsche 911 Turbo on NFS tracks, this in the first tim I am driving a real turbo on the roads of Alpharetta and Charlotte and truly its awesome. One of my criterias in selecting the car was it should be quiet to quite an extent especially on freeways. Passat definitely is better than Accord and Camry if not Lexus :)

tej 

parvinder 

parminder singh 

chote bache 

H.A.L Campus - place where i grew up

Kino Theatre 


H.A.L Community Hall 


H.A.L Stadium 


This use to be my playground 


H.A.L School 



H.A.L School, Jr , K.G Section



H.A.L School 


H.A.L board 


H.A.L School 

Natives Lie and Visitors Speak Truth

Came across this puzzle in one of the sites.
In an Island the natives lie and visitors speak truth. A man wants to know
whether a salesman beside him in a bar is a native or visitor. He asked him to ask a woman
beside him whether she is a native or visitor. He replied “she says she is a
visitor”. Then he knew that the salesman is a native or visitor. salesman is in which
category , native or visitor?"