Hold Open The Glass Door...Please

I was reading Nirav's post about becoming an Enlightened Worker. I particularly liked this point:

"Surround yourself with people you admire and respect. When you work with someone better than you, your performance will improve."

This is something my dad always told me when I was younger and I feel with each passing day. Working or socialising with smarter people helps retain a sharpness in the thought process, as well as building up a practical sense to resolving problems. Being the smartest among the pack may get you to the top, but like the full-moon, the only open path would be to wane and fade.


The other ones I liked from the list are:

First recognize that you are responsible for your own future.

Mission statements for your organization and life are key to enlightened work. The mission statement is a compass to guide your priorities and decisions so you do not become lost in day-to-day activities.

Your self-confidence increases when you know you have done good work. Good results come from healthy self-esteem.

Speak your mind and share your ideas. Do not keep them to yourself.

Under-promise and over-deliver. Keep all commitments.

Be flexible and learn to live with uncertainty.

Celebrate the successes of others.

Wealth and power won’t make you happy. Health, love, and peace of mind will.

"Peace of Mind" = Definitely

P.S: And yeah... am married to a smart guy too.

Tags: slash.me

Indigo answered my prayers and now I am off home, on their spiffy new Pune-Kolkata flight (via Ahmedabad of course). But much much much cheaper than the other airlines. So I shall be away from mail and IRC for two weeks. Meanwhile I am pretty much anxious, that I might return to find sankarshan opening a chocolate factory inside the house. See ya folks!

A bug related to the positioning of the ৺ (Isshar sign - U+09FA) was fixed by Rahul today after quite a bit of research by Amitakhya and me. The character was being positioned at-level with the other alphabets:



As far as everyone could remember, the dot within the sign would have to be at level with the matra - the horizontal bar on top of the alpbhabet, looking like this:



According to the Chalantika written by Rajshekhar Basu, this sign is used as a prefix for the following:

1. Name of a deceased person (শ্রী শ্রীমতি শ্রীযুক্ত etc. are used for living people)
2. Name of a deity
3. Name of a holy place

dd told me earlier that, since it was used mainly by printers there had been no standardization. That compounded the problem. It would be great to have an RFC on this matter. As of now the current positioning looks perfect in conjunction to all the shraddha chiti (শ্রাদ্ধ চিঠি) that I have seen over time.

Anyways, moving from the morbidness surrounding this entire symbol, its good to see so much activity happening with the Lohit fonts thats very much part of the Fedora Indic locales. It holds a special place in my heart because... I named them (shamless plug) 3 years back! :-D

I woke up this morning after hearing sankarshan speaking to someone on the phone. Turned out to be an interview for the OpenOffice.org Education project that he is working on. Cool stuff.

So we decided to try making something new for lunch today. Ended up making the very popular bengali snack called "Hing-er kochuri" - a puri stuffed with dal thats been grinded and lightly fried with asafoetida. Came out pretty well..but not as good as the shops-around-corner at kolkata. Not many recipes of it online and now looks like I used the wrong dal to make the filling. Got to correct that next time.

Post-lunch it was the usual CSI weekly re-runs that we catch. Some bits of the Bengali cinema Joi Baba Felunath that was being aired on Zee Studio as part of the "Tribute to Satyajit Ray" series. I heard another one of the Feluda movies released on Christmas Day last year. Nothing against the new bunch of actors...as a matter of fact I quite like Sabyasachi Chakroborty (the new Feluda), yet the two movies of the older series are more charming to watch.

As part of the lazy-sunday (and also due to the addition of cough to the already present cold and runny-nose), dinner is going to be hot-soup.

I see no reason why truckloads of firecrackers need to be burned to celebrate and generally usher in a very polluted first-morning-of-the-year. The housing complex next door was having a celebration of sorts with loud music and crackers etc. Right now I can hear the caterers wrapping up after the party and talking to each other in extremely high pitched bengali.

The last weekend I met up with a few friends from my school - the very first school I went to in Shillong. Its quite funny that we were meeting in Pune (a second time in the same year) and chit-chatting over coffee. I left this school in Standard IV. We did not go to school that year for more than 6 months (ethnic violence) and later that year my family moved to Kolkata. So I did not get to say goodbye to a lot of folks.

The picture below is a wikimapia grab.



Legend:
1. I was born here
2. My school
3. The house where I lived.

All in one frame :-)

Thanks popcorn09, svaksha, Tazz for the eye-care tips. Am feeling much better now. :-)

Wishing a year of good health and peace of mind for everyone.

Sometimes my eyes hurt a lot. I often get some sort of an allergy that makes me blink too much. Popping in the anti-allergic medication is not possible during weekdays as it makes me very sleepy. So until the weekend I have to blink away crazily and the muscles around the eyelids hurt. On other days (like yesterday and today), I get all bleary eyed and my vision becomes foggy. My eyes need to strain for a better vision and looking at the computer screen gives me a headache. How I repent the fact that I had ever wished (at the age of 6-7) that one day I'll get glasses. Just to ensure that the wish is fulfilled in every possible way, I am unable to retain contact lenses. Its a pain. The spherical corrective measurements have now stablized at around 8:50 but its a major mess at times. This week seems a bit bad, so probably might have to push back some of the pending work.

I quite like this picture of me taken by Karunakar

Was listening to this song from Taare Zameen Par...

Well...its been sometime but then miss her sometimes

Thanks to ramkrsna, I got a new hackergotchi too.