ExpertDabbler

Got this while browsing Scott Berkun’s Website.
Got this in an another search.
Very useful for designers i guess.

For those of you who are fond of blogging / reading tamil blogs, make sure you have the unicode font latha.ttf installed in your machine.

I tried to write “nalladhoor veenai” yesterday and it looked perfect at home.
But it looked horrible in my office machine. The reason was my office machine did not have the latha.ttf unicode font.

for more info on blogging / publishing in tamil

please go to
http://www.tamilnation.org/digital/Tamil%20Fonts%20&%20Software.htm
http://www.jaffnalibrary.com/tools/Bamini.htm

more on this later.

An experiment with lens-reversal technique. 

The dry leaves close-up looks innocuous all right but the way it was taken was not exactly simple. Actually, the leaves are half the size of the index finger.
With that size and with the 18-inch minimum distance factor (for a 50 mm standard lens), you cannot possibly go close enough to call a close-up.

This technique does not require any expensive gadgets. All it requires is a ring to hold the lens with the camera body.

The basic principle is explained here.

This dry leaves was shot using the same method but without even that ring to hold the lens. The lens is hand-held.i.e I was holding the reversed lens in my left hand close to the camera body and I was operating the shutter in my right hand.
At extreme close-ups, there is not enough light reflected from the subject.
This translates to full apertures (shallow depth of field) and ultra-slow shutter speeds (typically ¼ sec or slower).

And since the camera is actually detached from the lens, there is no way to focus by adjusting the lens focal length. One has to move (yes, physically move along with the camera, lens) back and forth to find the point where the focusing is sharp enough.

Because of the tremendous odds, it is better to take 4/5 snaps for every shot you want.

Sure enough, the results will never be “professional”. But the essence lies in stretching the limits - your Self as well as the equipment. That is what a hobby is all about.

Coming to think of it, I might even start close-up photography soon – but this time with the reversal ring. Have to check out in photographic goods shops here in Chennai.

ENJOYMENT AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE

There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better. For instance, feeling secure is an important component of happiness. The sense of security can be improved by buying a gun, installing strong locks on the front door, moving to a safer neighborhood, exerting political pressure on city hall for more police protection, or helping the community to become more conscious of the importance of civil order. All these different responses are aimed at bringing conditions in the environment more in line with our goals. The other method by which we can feel more secure involves modifying what we mean by security. If one does not expect perfect safety, recognizes that risks are inevitable, and succeeds in enjoying a less than ideally predictable world, the threat of insecurity will not have as great a chance of marring happiness.

Neither of these strategies is effective when used alone. Changing external conditions might seem to work at first, but if a person is out in control of his consciousness, the old fears or desires will soon return, reviving previous anxieties. One cannot create a complete sense of inner security even by buying one’s own Caribbean island and surrounding it with armed bodyguards and attack dogs.

The myth of Kind Midas well illustrates then point that controlling conditions does not necessarily improve existence. Like most people, King Midas supposed that if he were to become immensely rich, his happiness would be assured. So he made a pact with the gods, who after much haggling granted his wish that everything he touched would turn into gold. King Midas he had made an absolutely first-rate deal. Nothing was to prevent him now from becoming the richest, and therefore the happiest, man in the world. But we know how the story ends; Midas soon came to regret his bargain because the food in his mouth and the wine on his palate turned into gold before he could swallow them, and so he died surrounded by golden plates and golden cups.

The old fable continues to echo down the centuries. The waiting room of psychiatrists are filled with rich and successful patients who, in their forties or fifties, suddenly wake up to the fact that a plush suburban home, expensive cars, and even an Ivy League education are not enough to bring peace of mind. Yet people keep hoping that changing the external conditions of their lives will provide a solution. If only they could earn more money, be in better shape, or have a more understanding partner, they would really have made it.
Even though material success may not bring happiness, we engage in an endless struggle to reach external goals, expecting that they will improve life.

Wealth, status, and power have become in our culture all too powerful symbols of happiness. When we see people who are rich, famous or good-looking, we tend to assume that their lives are rewarding, even though all the evidence might point to their being miserable. And we assume that if only we could acquire some of these same symbols, we would be much happier.

If we do actually succeed in becoming richer, or more powerful, we believe, at least for a time, that life as a whole has improved. But symbols can be deceptive; they have a tendency to distract from the reality they are supposed to represent. And the reality is that the quality of life does not depend directly on what others think of us or on what we own. The bottom line is, rather, how we feel about ourselves and about what happens to us. To improve life one must improve the quality of experience.

This is not to say that money, physical fitness, or fame are irrelevant to happiness. The can be genuine blessings, but only if they help to make us feel better. Otherwise they are at best neutral, at worst obstacles to a rewarding life. Research on happiness and life satisfaction suggests that in general there is a mild correlation between wealth and well-being. People in economically more affluent countries (including the United States) tend to rate themselves as being on the whole happier than people in the less affluent countries. Ed Diener, a researcher from the University of Illinois , found that very wealthy persons report happy on the average 77 percent of the time, while persons of average wealth say that they are happy only 62 per cent of the time. This difference, while statistically significant, is not very large, especially considering that the “very wealthy” group was selected from a list of the four hundred richest Americans. It is also interesting to note that not one respondent in Diener’s study believed that money by itself guaranteed happiness. The majority agreed with the statement, ”Money can increase or decrease happiness depending on how it is used.” In an earlier study, Norman Bradbrun found that the highest-income group reported being happy about 25 percent more than the lowest. Again, the difference was present, but it was not very large. In a comprehensive survey entitled The Quality of American Life published a decade ago, the authors report that a person’s financial situation is one of the least important factors affecting overall satisfaction with life.

Given these observations, instead of worrying about how to make a million dollars or how to win friends and influence people, it seems more beneficial to find out how everyday life can be made more harmonious and satisfying, and thus achieve by a direct route what cannot be achieved through the pursuit of symbolic goals.

PROJECT MADURAI is an open world-wide initiative devoted to preparation of electronic texts of tamil literary classics, to archive them in public-access sites (web/ftp) and to distribute the Etexts free on the internet. For details visit the dedicated website for Project Madurai at
http://www.tamil.net/projectmadurai/

நல்லதோர் வீணை செய்தே - அதை நலங்கெட புழுதியில் எறிவதுண்டோ?

சொல்லடி சிவசக்தி ; - எனைச் சுடர்மிகும் அறிவுடன் படைத்துவிட்டாய்;

வல்லமை தாராயோ, - இந்த மாநிலம் பயனுற வாழ்வதற்கே?

சொல்லடி, சிவசக்தி! நிலச் சுமையென வாழ்ந்திட புரிகுவையோ?

விசையுறு பந்தினைப்போல் - உள்ளம் வேண்டிய படிசெலும் உடல்கேட்டேன்,

நசையறு மனங்கேட்டேன் - நித்தம் நவமெனச் சுடர்தரும் உயிர்கேட்டேன்,

தசையினைத் தீசுடினும் - சிவ சக்தியை பாடும்நல் அகங்கேட்டேன்,

அசைவரு மதிகேட்டேன்; இவை அருள்வதில் உனக்கெதுந் தடையுளதோ?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/

This experiment is designed to test whether you can spot the difference between a fake smile and a real one. It has 20 questions and should take you 10 minutes. It is based on research by Professor Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California.Paul is considered to be the world’s foremost expert in facial expressions and mindreading.

Oh btw i got 18 out of 20 right:-D

Completed BLINK by Malcolm Gladwell.
Surely, it should go down as one of the most exciting non-fiction books I have ever read.
Thin-slicing, Love lab, Silvan Tomkins, Warren Harding Error … boy o boy it was fantastic. The best thing about Gladwell is his amazing ability to put forth astonishing research stories in simple terms. There was never a moment where I felt the topic was too daunting or above my head.
For the content and the way of presentation, this is a remarkable book.
Chennai folks, if you believe Copyright mean ‘Copy as a matter of right’ you can get the pirated version in the roadside shops in Besant Nagar (towards BN terminus) for around 70 bucks.

Simple.
Keep telling her she can’t talk as well as the other kid next door.
Giver her marks everyday based on how much and well she had spoken and tell her how much she has to improve.
Make her compulsorily talk some nonsense for a couple of hours everyday.

If in spite of all this she manages to talk, call her the eighth wonder of the world and isolate her from all the other kids so that she does not learn anything other than that.

What makes a dish great to devour? Something that will be in our minds and the cooks’ long after its been consumed?

Minimalism:

The dish should be made with minimum ingredients. More ingredients mean more things can go wrong.
All the masala items, briyani items are ruled out at this level.

Reusability:

Should utilise the concept of reusability. We should be able to prepare the dish with the remains of whatever we cooked the previous day.:-). Also the remains after preparing this should be usable for other purposes too.

Repeatability:

The food should taste consistently great all the time no matter who makes that.

Taste:

Last but not the least, it should taste divine. Always. No excuses.

Maintainability:

Any body should be able to add/ modify/delete ingredients to the extent possible.

To me the only dish which satisfies all these criteria not to mention heavenly taste is our very own “Pazhaya Saadham“.

Mind you.
My mom is perhaps the best cook of her generation especially when it comes to South Indian vegetarian Chettinadu items.

What goes into our famous “Pazhaya Saadham”?

The way we do it at home is like this.

High quality rice cooked properly the previous day (Important -Pachai Arisi).
Water added before going to bed the previous night.

Potable clean drinking water (Chennai vaasis- Can water is deemed to be potable.)

Gingely Oil “Idhayam” from Virudhunagar.Nothing else works the way it does.

Salt.

Yesterday’s “vathal kuzhambu”

Pour adequate Gingely Oil and salt into the sqeezed rice of yesterday’s.

Mix it with your fingers thoroughly. The longer the better.

Add the required Vathal Kuzhambu for side dish.

Boy O Boy. In terms of feeling, this should come perhaps next to orgasm