How to quit smoking

 

It’s never too late to quit smoking and there are many benefits to be gained no matter what age you are when you give up. Here are some quick tips to help you kick the habit:

1. Believe in yourself: Believe that you can quit. Think about some of the most difficult things you have done in your life and realize that you have the guts and determination to quit smoking. It’s up to you.
2. Write down why you want to quit: Live longer, feel better, for your family, save money, smell better, find a mate more easily, etc. You know what’s bad about smoking and you know what you’ll get by quitting. Put it on paper and read it daily.
3. Plan ahead: Plan ahead for situations in which you are likely to be tempted to smoke, such as parties, drinking or going out for coffee. Try to avoid these situations in the early stages of your quitting program, or try sitting in the non-smoking section at restaurants, drinking your coffee standing up or with the other hand, or keeping something in your hand when you’re talking on the phone.
4. Cut back on cigarettes gradually: Ways to cut back gradually include: plan how many cigarettes you will smoke each day until your quit date, making the number you smoke smaller each day; buy only one pack at a time; change brands so you don’t enjoy smoking as much; give your cigarettes to someone else, so that you have to ask for them each time you want to smoke.
5. Know the triggers: Learn what triggers your desire for a cigarette, such as stress, the end of a meal, arrival at work, entering a bar, etc. Avoid these triggers or if that’s impossible, plan alternative ways to deal with the triggers.
6. Find another smoker who is trying to quit, and help each other with positive words and by lending an ear when quitting becomes difficult. Visit Forums and Chat Room on the internet to find a "quit buddy".
7. Ask your family and friends to support your decision to quit: Ask them to be completely supportive and non-judgmental. Let them know ahead of time that you will probably be irritable and even irrational while you withdraw from your smoking habit.
8. Do Not Skip Meals: Each puff of nicotine was your spoon releasing stored fats and sugars into your bloodstream. It allowed you to skip meals without experiencing wild blood-sugar swing symptoms such as an inability to concentrate or hunger related anxieties. Don’t add needless symptoms to withdrawal but instead learn to spread your normal daily calorie intake out more evenly over the entire day. Don’t eat more food but less food more often.
9. Drink lots of water: Water is good for you anyway, and most people don’t get enough. It will help flush the nicotine and other chemicals out of your body, plus it can help reduce cravings by fulfilling the "oral desires" that you may have.
10. Begin an exercise program: Exercise is simply incompatible with smoking. Exercise relieves stress and helps your body recover from years of damage from cigarettes. If necessary, start slow, with a short walk once or twice per day. Build up to 30 to 40 minutes of rigorous activity, 3 or 4 times per week.
11. Reward Yourself: Set up a plan for your rewards. Definitely reward yourself after the first day, and the second, and the third. Make them good rewards that you’ll look forward to: CDs, books, DVDs, T-shirts, shoes, a massage, a bike, a dinner out at your favorite restaurant, a hotel stay, whatever you can afford.

If You Fall, Get Up and Learn From Your Mistakes. Yes, we all fail. That does not mean we are failures, or that we can never succeed. If you fall, it’s not the end of the world. Get up, brush yourself off, and try again.

The mood of inspiration

The Y2K38 BUG

Ashok sent me this from his blog.

Y2K was met… Now Year 2038 stands as a Challenge…

The Year 2038 Problem……………………..

Test it now…
steps…
1. login to yahoo messenger
2. send instant message to anyone – fine its working…
3. now, change ur system date to 19-Jan-2038, 03:14:07 AM or above
(as mentioned in mail)
4. Confirm weather ur date is changed
5. again send instant message to anyone…
Your YM crahes….

* * * YES ALL NETWORK BASED APPLICATION WILL NOT WORK NOW * * *

Why…..??? What is it???

Starting at GMT 03:14:07, Tuesday, January 19, 2038, It is expected to see lots of systems around the world breaking magnificently: satellites falling out of orbit, massive power outages (like the 2003 North American blackout), hospital life support system failures, phone system interruptions, banking errors, etc. One second after this critical second, many of these systems will have wildly inaccurate date settings, producing all kinds of unpredictable consequences. In short, many of the dire predictions for the year 2000 are much more likely to actually occur in the year 2038! Consider the year 2000 just a dry run. In case you think we can sit on this issue for another 30 years before addressing it, consider that reports of temporal echoes of the 2038 problem are already starting to appear in future date calculations for mortgages and vital statistics!

In the first month of the year 2038 C.E. many computers will encounter a date-related bug in their operating systems and/or in the applications they run. This can result in incorrect and wildly inaccurate dates being reported by the operating system and/or applications. The effect of this bug is hard to predict, because many applications are not prepared for the resulting “skip” in reported time ? anywhere from 1901 to a “broken record” repeat of the reported
time at the second the bug occurs. Also, may make some small adjustment to the actual time the bug expresses itself. This bug to cause serious problems on many platforms, especially Unix and Unix-like platforms, because these systems will “run out of time”.

What causes it?
Time_t is a data type used by C and C++ programs to represent dates and times internally. (Windows programmers out there might also recognize it as the basis for the CTime and CTimeSpan classes in MFC.) time_t is actually just an integer, a whole number, that counts the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 at 12:00 AM Greenwich Mean Time. A time_t value of 0 would be 12:00:00 AM (exactly midnight) 1-Jan-1970, a time_t value of 1 would be 12:00:01 AM
(one second after midnight) 1-Jan-1970, etc..

How can a news daily get so CHEAP?

While browsing through the online edition of "Times of India", i.e indiatimes.com, Yesterday i came across the small icon showing Kareena Kapoor and a post with title "Draped desires". I clicked and went into the following page:

http://photogallery.indiatimes.com/articleshow/4502576.cms

The text below the image read (as also seen in the Pic Below):

It’s not a pair of jeans, not a gown, not even a saree! It’s just a breathtaking silky robe, a silhouette, that enhances the seductive curves of Bollywood babes in the most flattering manner. Check out the wonder of the drape…
After showing off her perfect curves and flawless skin tone by flaunting her toned up body in bikinis, here’s Kareena draped in a silky robe.

9 May, 2009

Now just for curiosity I did a reverse Image check on tineye.com and what I found is this: The picture taken is originaly of Jennifer Lopez.

I just dont have any words, if world known brands like Times of India use morphed images to gather visitors.

Court asks techie harassing women to sweep hospital

Now.. this is a different story Community services has been a very well accepted punishment in many counties for firs-time petty crimes..

A young software engineer will sweep the premises of a government-run hospital here for one month, in a novel punishment announced by the Andhra Pradesh High Court after the man was convicted of harassing two women.

M. Dinesh Kumar, 21, a software engineer working with Dell Computers, was Thursday ordered by Justice B. Chandrakumar to sweep the hospital. The order came when the court was hearing Kumar’s plea for anticipatory bail.

Asking the accused to surrender before the police, the judge told him to sweep the premises of Gandhi Hospital for one hour daily. He is allowed to choose the hour according to his convenience.

However, to ensure that the court order is complied with, the judge asked the superintendent of the hospital to maintain a register for Dinesh Kumar to mark his attendance daily.

What angered the court was the act of the techie in pulling the ‘dupattas’ (scarves) of two girls. Dinesh Kumar and his friend Balarngasai, while going through Gautamnagar in Malkajgiri area here on a motorcycle March 21, harassed the girls.

While locals caught and beat up Balarangasai, Dinesh Kumar managed to escape. On a complaint by the girls’ escort Venkatakrishna, police registered a case against the two under sections 354 (assault or criminal force to a woman with intent to outrage her modesty) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of Indian Penal Code (IPC) against Kumar.

The techie’s plea for anticipatory bail was dismissed by the district court and he then approached the high court.

The judge directed the accused to surrender before the police within seven days and asked the police to release him on conditional bail.

Facebook Poll: 94% Of Users Don’t Like Redesign

 

My take?

What’s the F%$#king difference? Folks…. Go out and get a life!!! Why would you be so concerned about a website’s design??? It’s a website!!! You are not married to it! You do not go to it’s high school graduation! You use the site to network with people! As long as it’s user friendly, learn to live with it instead of bitching about whether it looks like twitter or not!!!

 

A Facebook application is polling users on the the new site layout . So far, just over 5% of the nearly 800,000 respondents give it a thumbs up. The rest go the other way.

Users can also leave comments with their thoughts. Recent user comments include “Missing so many features I used to adore. I am saddened,” “Please change it back to the way it was,” and “I hate it and if it doesn’t change I will only check it once in awhile.” Ah, the fickle user.

Until January users and advertisers could create polls directly within Facebook, and the company used them extensively at the Davos World Economic Forum. It would be great it they brought that feature back directly.

Failue: The Secret to Success

Inspiring…

 

Failure. The mere thought can paralyze even the most heroic thinkers and keep great ideas off the drawing board. But is failing really that bad? We get an inside look at the mishaps of Honda racers, designers and engineers to learn how they draw upon failure to motivate them to succeed. From poor color choices to blown race engines, these risk-taking individuals provide an honest look at what most people fear most. Watch the film and discover the upside of failure.

 

Bottom Line:

Its ok to fail. Its not Ok not to learn from your failure!

Is Gmail tied to IE?

Something wierd happened today… I use both IE and FireFox on my laptop. Also, my office WiFi uses a proxy and Home WiFi doesn’t use one. So, everyday when I come home and try to connect to the internet, I have to uncheck the USE PROXY CONFIGURATION options in the network settings in the browsers.

Today I came home and unchecked the proxy option in FireFox and opened gmail and composed a message. So far so good. Then when I tried to attach two files to the mail, It failed. It tried multiple times using the RETRY link and yet nothing worked.

Then out of sheer doubt I opened IE and unchecked the proxy option. Then came back to FireFox and hit the retry link. Guess what? It works now!!

Question:

1. Is firefox using IE settings for file upload?
2. Or is somehow file uploading in Windows closely coupled with IE no matter which browser you use?
3. Or is this something that folks at Google missed or wanted us to ignore?

So much for ‘namma’ bangaluru

I truly regret to have faced such a situation in Bangalore; which has been my home for the past 8 long years. I know the roads of Bangalore more than what I know of Kolkata; my native. To encounter such an incident in BTM Layout(the so called POSH RESIDENTIAL AREA) where we have been staying for the past 4 years; left me dumbfounded.

On Sunday March 1st 2009, I had been to St. John’s Hospital in the morning. I WAS NOT WELL. I am stressing on it as to remind that I wasnt drunk nor had been to pub etc; so hopefully no controversies on that. I was with my HUSBAND. The hospital OPD was unfortunately closed so we were returning home. My husband had to withdraw cash so as he was waiting in the queue, I was waiting in the roadside parking lot in my kinetic flyte. Suddenly a Tata Innova which was standing beside me started backing without any honk nor any warning signal that it was backing. Before I could react the car was on me. I could not move as I was on my bike. It kept on coming back as he was talking over phone and couldnt hear me asking him to stop. At last, the others on the road asked him to stop backing. By that time I was already badly hurt as my bike had fallen on my leg and I couldnt get up unless he stopped his car.
My husband came to my rescue and he told them that they should have honked or looked back before backing the car. Two rowdies or I dont know who (dressed in white shirt and white pant with RED TIKA; typically looked like some political goons; but I have no clue who they were) came and started blasting Souvik(my hubby). I went there and they started abusing me in Telugu. Unfortunately I understand Telugu(thanks to Oxford) and I could understand what exactly were they saying. I retaliated and all of a blue moon they suddenly gave one punch to Souvik and then blows started on both of us with around 20 – 25 onlookers. To my surprise nobody out there supported us inspite of knowing that they were wrong and seeing us getting beaten. They felt hitting me a girl wasnt wrong but me protesting (when I was the person concerned who actually got affected) as a severe sin. Ultimately after receiving several blows in the middle of the street at around “10 AM IN THE MORNING”; we literally had to run away as the crowd said that it was a great mistake on our part to protest against them as they are BIG SHOTS(dont know how). So we felt wise to run for our lives as just the two of us couldnt have done much. Just to remind our residence and all our friends’ place was just 2 – 3 min away from the place of this incident.

I dont want justice as I know it will not happen. I couldnt note down the car’s no. It wasnt a situation where I had the liberty to do so. I just want people to know and thus create the awareness as to the state of Bangalore. I really love this place as this is where I grew up from an adolescent to an adult. But I never thought in my wildest nightmares that such a thing could ever happen in such a situation.

No comments. Just sad…

Rs.500 laptop turns out to be a joke

If it is just a glorified calculator, I don’t understand why it needs 2Gig ram… Sad, the original post is too abstract and lacks details/clarity…

Too bad… I thought that we had something ingenious done here in India that is going to set trends world wide….

Tirupati: Crushing all expectations, the presumed head-on-head competitor to MIT’s $100 laptop, the Rs.500 ($10) laptop was unveiled to be a laughing stock. The ‘prototype’ of the device with two GB RAM inaugurated at Tirupati was declared to be a mere computing device and not a laptop.

"How can just a computing device bridge the digital divide and make access to computer literacy affordable to the masses? Where will poor students get computers to jack this gizmo with? Will Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) provide computers and internet connectivity in rural and remote areas? There is no clarity among the officials themselves," a Professor from Sri Venkateswara University told The Times of India.

Designed by students of Vellore Institute of Technology, scientists in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT-Madras, UGC and MHRD, the computing device was nowhere near to MIT’s $100 laptop. It was a device that comprised of a hard disk with e-books, e-journals and relevant educative material through the ‘Sakshat’ portal.

The so called laptop even appeared to be smaller than the normal laptop with 10-inch length and five-inch width, making many heads to rethink on the definition of a laptop. There was also a buzz that it’s a ‘Nano-top’. Earlier, officials said the price was working out to be $20 but with mass production it was bound to come down to $10 (Rs 500) and thus become affordable for every student in India.