Saturday, May 02, 2009
Summer Delight (mmmmmm.....)
Mmmm..... A nice way to celebrate the warmth of summer..
Here is a special little recipe that I concocted last night.. Perfect for those evenings when you want to sparkle things up!
Aptly titled 'Summer Delight' it is a rare combination of homely cooking and a touch of magic..
Ingredients
1 Bowl of American Corn kernels.
50 gms paneer (cottage cheese)
50 gms raisin OR black grape
25 gms cashew
5 leaves of pudina (mint)
1/2 Tablespoon Jeera seed (cumin)
Cooking medium - ghee or butter
Salt and Pepper
Preparation time - 15 minutes
Serves - 2 people
Preparation
Remove the corn kernels from cob and wash under running water.
Cut paneer into small pieces (roughly 5 mm each side)
Shred pudina leaves.
You start with a bowlful of juicy, nutritous american corn..The kind in which each golden kernel beams a sort of radiance.. Boil the corn for a couple of minutes till it is soft and munchy..
Place the paneer pieces in a bowl of hot water for a couple of minutes. This softens it and eliminates the extra chewy texture.
In a frying pan, pour 1 teaspoon of ghee and jeera seeds and heat.
When hot enough, pour the boiled corn and paneer pieces and fry for 4-5 minutes.
Add salt and pepper to taste.
Pour the corn and paneer into a plate or serving bowl.
Garnish with raisins, cashews and finally shredded pudina.
Summer delight is ready to serve!
ps 1 : This goes very well with light mosambi juice.
ps 2 : Summer Delight can also be served slightly chilled.
ps 3 : Add honey and cornflakes to give it a new twist (contributed by mom)
Thursday, March 08, 2007
(Heart) BREAKING NEWS in amchi Pune
Its time to become alert and shrug off the taken-for-granted safety of home.
PUNE January 4, 2007
DIRECTOR General of Police (DGP) P S Pasricha on Thursday admitted that Pune was firmly placed on the national crime map. “Pune is the eighth largest metro in the country on the lines of metros like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Baroda and Coimbatore where crimes like economic offences are on the rise. The crime mafia is finding Pune and its suburbs to be a safe haven for their nefarious activities,” Pasricha told the policemen at Shivajinagar police headquarters on Thursday.
PUNE April 8, 2005
THE cyber crime cell of the Pune police has arrested four former employees of a BPO centre in the city, for duping four account holders based in New York. These people were earlier with MsourcE, the BPO arm of MphasiS-BFL Ltd.
Including the four, the number of arrests have gone up to 12, for illegally transferring close to $3,00,000 (or Rs 1.32 crore) from the accounts of customers of a New York bank to a bank in Pune, according to the Police.
PUNE March 5, 2007
Five more people were arrested on Wednesday in connection with a rave party held near this city over the weekend and a large quantity of prohibited drugs and cash were seized from them.
Seven kilograms of cannabis leaves and four kilograms of marijuana, besides Rs 350,000 in cash and five mobile phone handsets, were seized from the three held in Yervada. The prohibited drugs, albeit in a smaller quantity, 10 china clay cigars and two mobile phones were found with the women.
PUNE March 8, 2007
An illegal money transfer racket worth Rs.350 million involving a trader from this Maharashtra city has been unearthed, Enforcement Directorate (ED) sources said late Wednesday.
The ED Wednesday froze seven out of 10 Swiss bank accounts of the trader operating from a six-storey building in Koregaon Park area here, they said.
Money used to be deposited into the trader's accounts from Britain via havala or unauthorised money transfer channels, the ED sources said, adding that the investigations began in January this year with a raid on the trader's office following a tip-off.
The raid yielded unaccounted cash of Rs.10 million besides some incriminating documents.
PUNE March 7, 2007
Since the past two years, the Pune division of the Central Railway has been winning the ticket-checking award, given to the division that achieves the highest revenue through checking tickets. This year, the division has managed to achieve the revenue target before the stipulated period.
The Mumbai headquarters had given a target of collecting Rs 2.39 crore for the fiscal year from ticket-checking activities.
However, the Pune division achieved this target on February 27 — 32 days before the fiscal year ending March 2007. Till February 28, the revenue collected from ticket checking was Rs 2.43 crore.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
I voted
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Suggestions to IMDb
Most online folks must be aware of IMDb, the world's largest online database of all movie/TV show related information.
I recently happened to run into a wall trying to do some simple (and rather obvious things).
Let me explain.
Some of you might be aware of the ongoing 37th International Film Festival of India being held in Goa. (http://www.iffigoa.org/)
So, the film festival has attracted a wide selection of films both from domestic as well as international productions. Being away from where the festival is taking place, I couldn't be there in person to soak in some of the interesting stuff being showcased. The next best thing would be to be there 'virtually'. I plan to keep up to some extent by watching some of those movies right here itself. Of course, I'm referring to rental DVDs from Netflix.
I painstakingly extracted and filtered the list of international and domestic feature films in a spreadsheet. Now I had the list of movies that are being shown. Next, I need to know what are their ratings/reviews so that I can prioritise my viewing.
Thi is where I thought of the world's largest online movie database - IMDb.
I registered myself on their site and looked around everywhere. But alas I couldn't find any way to search for multiple movies at a time. Now, with a long list of about 60 movies, it is too slow and tedious to search one at a time.
So, my first suggestion to IMDb is :
SUGGESTION 1 : Make it possible to search for a list of movie titles at a time.
Right, so now if I had the list of movies loaded, I would need to do the next step of ranking them. This feature is provided by IMDb. So, thats good. The next step is renting. This is where IMDb falls short once again. They have plenty of options there for me to purchase a DVD, VHS etc. but alas no way to rent the title.
This brings me to the second idea:
SUGGESTION 2 : Integrate Netflix's database of titles available for rent so that I can directly order from my favourite movies' list.
This case is special, since all the movies I am looking for have something in common. Yes, they are all being shown at the 37th IFFI. Now why doesn't IMDb allow me to search on this particular attribute?
SUGGESTION 3 : Provide searching on the basis of Film Festival where the title was shown.
Also should be able to search for foreign language film, prize winning films etc. at the festival.
SUGGESTION 4 : This is pretty obvious now. IMDb should not only show list of movies at film festivals filtered by some interesting parameters, but should also allow me to add those films to my favourite movies list with a single click. This will complete the integration.
So, I've emailed the good folks at IMDb and am hoping for a positive response. I am happy to give them this idea for free.
I recently happened to run into a wall trying to do some simple (and rather obvious things).
Let me explain.
Some of you might be aware of the ongoing 37th International Film Festival of India being held in Goa. (http://www.iffigoa.org/)
So, the film festival has attracted a wide selection of films both from domestic as well as international productions. Being away from where the festival is taking place, I couldn't be there in person to soak in some of the interesting stuff being showcased. The next best thing would be to be there 'virtually'. I plan to keep up to some extent by watching some of those movies right here itself. Of course, I'm referring to rental DVDs from Netflix.
I painstakingly extracted and filtered the list of international and domestic feature films in a spreadsheet. Now I had the list of movies that are being shown. Next, I need to know what are their ratings/reviews so that I can prioritise my viewing.
Thi is where I thought of the world's largest online movie database - IMDb.
I registered myself on their site and looked around everywhere. But alas I couldn't find any way to search for multiple movies at a time. Now, with a long list of about 60 movies, it is too slow and tedious to search one at a time.
So, my first suggestion to IMDb is :
SUGGESTION 1 : Make it possible to search for a list of movie titles at a time.
Right, so now if I had the list of movies loaded, I would need to do the next step of ranking them. This feature is provided by IMDb. So, thats good. The next step is renting. This is where IMDb falls short once again. They have plenty of options there for me to purchase a DVD, VHS etc. but alas no way to rent the title.
This brings me to the second idea:
SUGGESTION 2 : Integrate Netflix's database of titles available for rent so that I can directly order from my favourite movies' list.
This case is special, since all the movies I am looking for have something in common. Yes, they are all being shown at the 37th IFFI. Now why doesn't IMDb allow me to search on this particular attribute?
SUGGESTION 3 : Provide searching on the basis of Film Festival where the title was shown.
Also should be able to search for foreign language film, prize winning films etc. at the festival.
SUGGESTION 4 : This is pretty obvious now. IMDb should not only show list of movies at film festivals filtered by some interesting parameters, but should also allow me to add those films to my favourite movies list with a single click. This will complete the integration.
So, I've emailed the good folks at IMDb and am hoping for a positive response. I am happy to give them this idea for free.
Labels: film festival imdb netflix
Monday, November 20, 2006
Click to Connect
Jaduka (and Google, Yahoo! et.al.) are providing an interesting inter-connection between the web and traditional phone (land line, mobile).
http://www.jaduka.com/index.php
Their concept of clikc-to-connect bridges the communication gap which currently exists between the net and telecom technologies. It allows net surfers to instantly connect with others over telephone networks.
e.g. a business website would have a 'click-to-connect' button (powered by Jaduka etc.) which when clicked, asks for your telephone number. Then the service will connect to the business' phone and call you back thus connecting you directly to the company rep.
Isn't that interesting?
http://www.jaduka.com/index.php
Their concept of clikc-to-connect bridges the communication gap which currently exists between the net and telecom technologies. It allows net surfers to instantly connect with others over telephone networks.
e.g. a business website would have a 'click-to-connect' button (powered by Jaduka etc.) which when clicked, asks for your telephone number. Then the service will connect to the business' phone and call you back thus connecting you directly to the company rep.
Isn't that interesting?
Microsoft sponsored small biz idea contest
Microsoft is making inroads into small business accounting through its new Office Accounting Express 2007 software.
To promote the concept, they are sponsoring a contest with some eye-catching prizes (Retail space in NYC, $100,000 initial funding etc.)
So what are you waiting for? The next big idea??
Go check it out @ : http://www.ideawins.com/contest/
To promote the concept, they are sponsoring a contest with some eye-catching prizes (Retail space in NYC, $100,000 initial funding etc.)
So what are you waiting for? The next big idea??
Go check it out @ : http://www.ideawins.com/contest/
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Alternate search engines
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Business essentials
a la Warren Buffet and Bill Gates
From this most excellent blog:
Business Pundit
See the video (about 1.5 hours) and then read the quotes:
Buffet Video (Speech at University of Florida)
Buffett On Ethics: Imagine that what you are doing every day is being scrutinized by a smart, skeptical reporter who is going to write an article about it every day on the cover of your local paper. If you ever think you actions would embarrass you or your company in front of your family, customers, peers, etc., don't do it.
Buffett On Founders: I only buy a business if I can buy the managers with it. It is okay if the managers love the money, but much more important is that they demonstrate a true love of what they are doing.
Gates on Reading Vacation: Gates takes two weeks per year where he sequesters himself for a "reading vacation." He takes books with him and papers/proposals written by employees from all over Microsoft. [Dharmesh and I have been talking about doing one of these for awhile, but haven't got around to it yet]
Buffett on Decisions: Asset allocation is done by me only, not by committee or vote, I make those decisions. A committee/vote would tend to bring our decisions toward the mean and make the likelihood of finding a unique opportunity lower.
Buffett & Gates on Reading: I was surprised to hear how much they both talked about reading and how important reading was to their daily work. I read all the time and know many others that do so too, but I don't hear people talking about how important reading is in their daily lives like these guys did. When asked if Gates could be a superhero, what power he'd want to have, he said he'd like to be able to be the fastest reader in the world and Buffett agreed.
Buffett on most his important skill: Ability to focus. I thought that it was interesting to hear in light of the attention deficity disorder going on in our culture.
Buffett on the "ovarian lottery": Called himself lucky over-and-over again to be born in the US in this era where his natural gifts were well suited for our society. Made a comment that if born several hundred years earlier, he and Gates probably would have been some other animal's lunch because they did not see well and could not climb trees well.
Buffett on predicting success: He quoted an interesting study he had seen that tried to correlate "things" (i.e. business school, grades, athletics, etc.) with future business success. The study found that the thing that most closely correlated with future success was the inverse of the age at which you started your first business (i.e. paper route, lemonade stand, painting co, other).
Buffett on baseball: It turns out Buffett is a huge sports fan, especially baseball. He is an especially big fan of Ted Williams' book "The Science of Hitting" which is all about getting a pitcher in a position where he has to throw the batter a strike…He likens his investment decisions as "waiting for the right pitch."
Buffett on his schedule: Likes to keep it open and says "no" to as many meetings as possible. Reads 80% of the workday. When he goes home at night he either keeps reading or plays bridge. Schedules online bridge games on the weekends with Gates.
Gates on his schedule: Jam packed every day with meetings. He goes home at night to have dinner and then gets caught up on emails.
Buffett's career advice: It's platitude, but do what you love sooner, rather than later. Don't wait your whole life to do what you love like most people do.
Buffett on life: He advises people to make decisions based on their "inner scorecard" and pay less attention to the "outer scorecard" (i.e. what other people think). He says if you follow an outer scorecard, your life will be a little hollow when you get to be his age. …He advises people to reverse engineer their lives from what they want to be when they are 70 and map the steps needed to get there from today.
Buffett on friends: Buffet says that "real" friends are a referendum on your life. …Buffett also seems to reject the platitudes around working with friends as it appears many of his closest friends are people who work in his business.
Buffet on investments: His criteria are that he must fundamentally understand the business (often this means it is simple); the business must have an enduring competitive advantage; the business must have management he trusts, admires, and love what they do; and the business must be attractively priced.
From this most excellent blog:
Business Pundit
See the video (about 1.5 hours) and then read the quotes:
Buffet Video (Speech at University of Florida)
Buffett On Ethics: Imagine that what you are doing every day is being scrutinized by a smart, skeptical reporter who is going to write an article about it every day on the cover of your local paper. If you ever think you actions would embarrass you or your company in front of your family, customers, peers, etc., don't do it.
Buffett On Founders: I only buy a business if I can buy the managers with it. It is okay if the managers love the money, but much more important is that they demonstrate a true love of what they are doing.
Gates on Reading Vacation: Gates takes two weeks per year where he sequesters himself for a "reading vacation." He takes books with him and papers/proposals written by employees from all over Microsoft. [Dharmesh and I have been talking about doing one of these for awhile, but haven't got around to it yet]
Buffett on Decisions: Asset allocation is done by me only, not by committee or vote, I make those decisions. A committee/vote would tend to bring our decisions toward the mean and make the likelihood of finding a unique opportunity lower.
Buffett & Gates on Reading: I was surprised to hear how much they both talked about reading and how important reading was to their daily work. I read all the time and know many others that do so too, but I don't hear people talking about how important reading is in their daily lives like these guys did. When asked if Gates could be a superhero, what power he'd want to have, he said he'd like to be able to be the fastest reader in the world and Buffett agreed.
Buffett on most his important skill: Ability to focus. I thought that it was interesting to hear in light of the attention deficity disorder going on in our culture.
Buffett on the "ovarian lottery": Called himself lucky over-and-over again to be born in the US in this era where his natural gifts were well suited for our society. Made a comment that if born several hundred years earlier, he and Gates probably would have been some other animal's lunch because they did not see well and could not climb trees well.
Buffett on predicting success: He quoted an interesting study he had seen that tried to correlate "things" (i.e. business school, grades, athletics, etc.) with future business success. The study found that the thing that most closely correlated with future success was the inverse of the age at which you started your first business (i.e. paper route, lemonade stand, painting co, other).
Buffett on baseball: It turns out Buffett is a huge sports fan, especially baseball. He is an especially big fan of Ted Williams' book "The Science of Hitting" which is all about getting a pitcher in a position where he has to throw the batter a strike…He likens his investment decisions as "waiting for the right pitch."
Buffett on his schedule: Likes to keep it open and says "no" to as many meetings as possible. Reads 80% of the workday. When he goes home at night he either keeps reading or plays bridge. Schedules online bridge games on the weekends with Gates.
Gates on his schedule: Jam packed every day with meetings. He goes home at night to have dinner and then gets caught up on emails.
Buffett's career advice: It's platitude, but do what you love sooner, rather than later. Don't wait your whole life to do what you love like most people do.
Buffett on life: He advises people to make decisions based on their "inner scorecard" and pay less attention to the "outer scorecard" (i.e. what other people think). He says if you follow an outer scorecard, your life will be a little hollow when you get to be his age. …He advises people to reverse engineer their lives from what they want to be when they are 70 and map the steps needed to get there from today.
Buffett on friends: Buffet says that "real" friends are a referendum on your life. …Buffett also seems to reject the platitudes around working with friends as it appears many of his closest friends are people who work in his business.
Buffet on investments: His criteria are that he must fundamentally understand the business (often this means it is simple); the business must have an enduring competitive advantage; the business must have management he trusts, admires, and love what they do; and the business must be attractively priced.
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