Little Realistic...

Do you remember saving as little as 25 paise to get rented bicycle for half hour ride. I do. It was the time when owning television was a privilege. So Bicycle didn't come as a play accessory but a necessity in day to day life. My father rode his Hercules cycle whole his life to work. Now it is a matter fashion and sense of being friendly to environment and to ones own body ;). Coming back to renting a bicycle, it was a business back then. Cycle shops would keep small bicycle that a 10 year old could rent on hourly basis. It was a simple business, but to me concept seems rather vast. It might be an outdated business now, but i think there should always be tiny businesses floating around so all classes of the society can do business. Small towns might not make great place for the work force but women explore opportunities of their own to earn their pocket money. That might not be completely true now. Times might have changed with extended tv invasion into homemakers lives. I wond

There is much to this commodity. Colorless, odorless, universal solvent or simply elixir. You know what I am talking about. Yes, it is water. A worrisome fact is that it is becoming scarce, hence costly. When it incurs cost, there comes a plan to cut the cost too. I came across this organization called GiveMeTap in a magazine that works towards one such people pocket friendly cause. It is not just pocket friendly but environment friendly too. GiveMeTap says Give me tap water. It is an organization started by Edwin Broni Mensah in the UK. Concept is quite simple. Instead of buying bottled water, you buy a bottle from GiveMeTap that you can refill at the cafes that are linked with GiveMeTap free of cost. This way you are saving environment of plastic bottles and you help somebody in Africa get clean water as the money made by selling these GiveMeTap bottle goes there. Sounds a good deal. I always hoped air and water are the two resources should always be free. Be it rich or poor, f

Though not excited, am definitely looking forward to see where  Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) is gonna open its first store in India. My bet is on Bangalore and Mumbai. H&M is the second largest fashion retailer in the world. It might offer some good deals and have advantage on its side as India is pretty closer to China. My observation so far is that material supply for H&M is majorly from China, Bangladesh and some cotton clothing from India. I wonder if one has to go ga-ga over this store? Apart from H&M, there is one more Swedish giant trying to land in India. It is IKEA. Definitely a "watch out" outlet for cool home and office decor.

Food is something you can put in a lot of creativity. My husband, being a researcher never agrees to it.  With my creativity it is impossible to reproduce the same taste. Well, am less bothered by those comments as I am not trying to produce some data or results to prove any theory as he would in his lab. All I am trying to do is to get something cooked for good health. So my voyage through kitchen and cooking is usually random. I stick to no rules and my ingredients basically hang around what is required to be eaten in terms of protein and carbohydrates. If you try a hundred times, you are bound to strike the target at least a few times. With all my random experiments I too succeed to get an incredible combination of ingredients that produces mouth watering taste. Schade, I can hardly reproduce the same as I forget what I had used after a while. So I thought of a solution that could help me reproduce the recipe when I want to. The solution is that I can post my trials on my blog. D

Whenever I read K&R's C book or Bach's The design of Unix Operating System, I wished there had been a bit of creativity and enthusiasm in the way the concepts were explained. For a beginner it was a super hard walnut, though the inner nut was healthy, crispy and yummy. Cracking the outer shell was brain draining. It had taken quite a few studies for me to understand Ritchie. Complains apart. I won't say complaining, lemme say, i am sharing thought of plenty of those who take-up something new to learn.  Learning never stops, and the need for books to teach us how to do things. This time around am learning a hell lot of new things and in bad need for something simple to make understand quickly. I started to learn Android app programming. I had a stint of Kernel and device drivers in the Android stack but App was a distant concept for me. So some strange turn of events made me do Android apps and I liked it. Maybe because it tricked visually active part of my brain.

I liked my visit to a region of Eifel last week. Eifel is the kind of place you wouldn't regret losing way in. Oh I forgot to say, "in summer" :).. The place we went for treakking was Vogelsang. Vogelsang came as a bit of surprise as we didn't expect a Military training camp there. The camp was build during Nazi rule. After 1946 used by the British and then by the Belgian. Yet, it made quite an interesting day trip. We took a guided tour of the place at 2pm and later walked into the woods. The tour that lasted for 90 min gave an overview of the place. Vogelsang is spread over 100 hectare, doesn't fail to bewilder you in many ways. The training camp has a big theater to show movies(only war movies), football stadium, swimming pool and lot more. Best of all, it was surrounded by the beautiful Eifel forest which was cut through by rivers, the Rur and the Urft. View of Eifel forest from the Training Camp Rock Solid building,a part of the Camp Place to