Hang in there, it gets better...

At around 60 page views a day, I must have reached a 100,000 page views for the site about 10 days ago - December 27th, 2012.

It has been a crazy few months, but the blog has been churning out page view on autopilot. I was not even paying attention as this milestone crept up on me and the site.

Hang in there, it gets better - is the constant encouragement I've heard over the last few months. And it does, in some ways. And one of those signs of getting better is me thinking about this blog again.

But this time, I am planning for this to be a little less social - not private, just not broadcasting. And towards that end, emails subscriptions are shut off and the Twitter updates have been put on hold as well.

Over the last few months, I have definitely missed checking in on the site. But more importantly, I am missing keeping a log of some of the things I have been able to sneak in on the side. Hoping I get enough time to get back to this again.

And a Happy New Year to all!

Slashdot Effect

When I woke up this morning, there were three surprising emails in my inbox, informing me about three comments someone anonymous had left on my blog. The surprising part was not just the three comments, but the fact that they actually seemed helpful.

The answer was in my list of http referrals. They were all from hardware.slashdot.org. Turns out there was this article about inscrutable logos on the back of devices, and someone linked to my article in the comments.

So well maybe that was not the real slashdot effect, but it was great to have a traffic spike that was 10% of my total traffic in a single day.

Apparently the slashdot effect follows a double peak - the first when the link was posted, and the second at around 8am EST when east coast comes in to work.

The effect seems to be petering out now, and the visit rates are falling back to my regular. But it is leaving behind a graph where the scale is stretched so bad that the usual seems insignificant. Maybe the real effect of the slashdot effect is not on the server, but the fact that it leaves you wanting for more.

Float images using Lightbox JS

Every blog post on the site is now 13 kilobytes heavier, thanks to a very nifty script created by Lokesh Dhakar. The script is called Lightbox JS. It is now part of the template.

When I had chosen the template for blog and site, the focus was to ensure readability. So the width of the main text area is limited to about 450 pixels. Unfortunately 450 pixels is not much of a size for pictures and photographs. So I needed a way to quickly show a larger picture in the same page, without just making the full image open in a new window.

Enter Lightbox, the script is a quick and easy way to display images in a layer on top of the page, without changing anything underneath. And all it needs, in addition to setting up the script, is to add a rel="lightbox" to the anchor tag. Love the script - no wonder it has a wikipedia entry as well. Not much of a fan of the V2 though, that uses the Prototype Framework and Scriptaculous Effects Library. Loses one of the biggest selling points - unobtrusive size.

Multi-blog blog

Recently I added a new section to the site - reviews. Turns out, we do a lot of watching movies, TV and other media. And I wanted to have a standalone place to document all of it, separate from my blog which has become a sort of a melting pot without too many filters.

This is a quick tutorial on the process I used to add a second blog to my site, and then make sure that the look and feel remained consistent across the two blogs and my original website. If this goes well, maybe I will move my writings over to a blog as well.

Create a new blog

The first step, of course, was to create a new blog. Since my last one was on blogger.com, I created the new one using the same service. There are a number of tutorials on creating a new blog - but it is as simple as clicking "create a blog" on the blogger dashboard and supplying a name and description. Turns out, blogger does not allow you to start a blog hosted on a custom domain, and instead you need to host it initially on *.blogspot.com. This added a later step for me to enable the custom domains.

Synchronize look and feel

Turns out there are three distinct steps to make two blogs look alike in blogger.

First Copy the template over from the old blog to the new blog. To get the full template, go to your blogger dashboard and click Design > Edit HTML and check the box that says Expand Widget Templates. Wait a little while to make sure that all the data has been loaded. Copy and paste into the new blog, making sure that Expand Widget Templates check box is checked in the new blog as well. If you do this right, you are 90% there already.

The second step is to ensure that the settings of both blogs are the same. The best way to do this is to open both blogs in two tabs and going back and forth between the two, sync the settings across the Settings tab. Do this for every page other than the Publishing section under Settings.

The third and final step to making two blogs look the same is make sure that code and settings of the various page elements are in sync. Every element in a blogger page has two components - the element itself (which is captured in the template) and the settings of the element (that are stored separately). Again, opening two tabs with the blogs open to the Design > Page Elements page and going element by element to synchronize components is the best way to do this.

Publish to custom domain

As I discovered, blogger does not allow you to create a new blog hosted on a custom domain. Since I already have a domain, I wanted to ensure that the new blog appeared as a sub-domain of anarchius.org instead of blogspot.com. This can get complicated pretty quickly, but the key steps are as below:

• To enable the custom domain, head over to Settings > Publishing. Choose Custom Domain, and then click on Advanced Settings. In the box that says Your Domain, add your full subdomain - which for me was reviews.anarchius.org. Ensure that the checkbox below is NOT checked.
• Next step is to add a CNAME to the recently created subdomain that points to ghs.google.com. Google has helpful hints on how to do this for a number of hosting providers.
• Wait a bit to ensure the DNS servers communicate the changes, and check the publishing page at Settings > Publishing for the message "Congratulations, your blog is ready!". If you see it, that means everything is good and the redirect is working well. You may still not be able to browse for a short while, while your ISP DNS servers wait for the new records to flow in. But, otherwise, you are up and running.

I had a couple more housekeeping activities to do before I was all done. I had to add the menu item to the menu bar of the site so that I can actually get to the newly created blog. Also, I had to update the RSS feeds to my Yahoo pipe to make sure that the updates from the new blog were also being consolidated. That's it! About two hours in, the new section of the site was up and running.

Post # CL (Post number 150)

I built my first website back in early 2000s. It was a photo homage to an actress, who, at the time, I believed to be worth the effort. Remember this was the time when there weren't that many sites around, fewer still that were that niche. Yet I racked up 55,000 hits on the photo heavy, IP-suspect site. But look at the thing, it looks ugly. Starting with just a notepad, and I am guessing, a badly calibrated monitor, I churned out the three framed monstrosity in double quick time.

This site died, finally, when Geocities shut down. The wayback machine has the only sign of this site ever existing.

Things moved on when I got my own domain. This contained the first version of the site anarchius.org. Not as ugly as the other one, but still a template built from scratch and lacking in any form of sophistication. Using almost no images, the template relied on colors to spruce it up. And over time, it had started to look more and more clunky. And dull.

It was around this time, in May 2002, when I published by first blog post.

After dabbling around in a super simple template for a while, this became my template of choice for a number of years.

Eventually the site and the blog unified, using a template that looks a lot better (having been created by someone other than me). And I still continue to build all my pages by hand - both my blog template and my site pages. Gives me something to work on - and keeps the code clean as a whistle.

Given that this is going to officially be the post number 150, I figured this was as good a time as any to go look for some screen shots from history of the blog and the website, and reminisce.

Circular Feeding

This is a good one. When I set up my new site-wide syndication service, through feedburner, I decided to redirect my blogger feed to feedburner as well. But about an hour later, I noticed, that I had over a 100 entries in my feed, with mostly duplicates and an increasing count. Something surely was not right.

The setup: So here is what I have. Two feeds - one from blogger, and one manually created. Both were sent to Yahoo pipes, to be mixed re-sorted. Feedburner then picked the final product up, and, well, burned the daylights out of it.

The problem: When I set up the blogger redirect, the yahoo pipe data request began to be redirected to feedburner. So my pipe began with data from feedburner, added my manual feed, and supplied data back to feedburner. A pretty little infinite loop. Good thing I checked an hour later.

The solution: First things first, I shut the redirection off. Then I began to search the Interwebs for a solution. I did not do so well initially. I found a few pages that described my predicament (almost), but none that came up with a solution. I almost gave up and began to draft a post on the mosh pit called Google's help groups - when I found this. Thanks Chuck.

Turns out, when you append the modifier '?redirect=false' (without the quotes, of course) at the end of any blogger feed, the feed, doesn't get redirected. Instead you get the original feed from Blogger. Woohoo! You'd suspect something like that has to exist, considering Feedburner does not tie itself into knots for every blogger re-direct out there. Beats me why this would be such a secret though.

Here is a message to all you Blogger RSS users out there. Look for a modifier. They do not seem to be documented anywhere. Nevertheless, look for one; that will fix your problem.

Templates to Layouts

Now that I was off FTP publishing, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade the other antiquated part of the blog - move from classic templates to layouts. Seemed to me, with the recent Google spurt of cleaning house, old versions of technologies were not going to be around for long, and it was best to keep up with the times.

Things did not get off to a great start. Blogger preview function started to fail citing:

The following errors were found:
securityToken: Your request could not be processed. Please try again.

I could do little but wait, while finally Google solved the problem. When I finally had my preview function working, I decided to take the plunge. Saving a copy of my old template, I went to Template > Customize Design and hit the "UPGRADE YOUR TEMPLATE" button.

The key with the upgrade for me, was to get the layout pixel perfect with my existing template. My blog is tightly integrated with the rest of the website. I had customized the original template to work with the same CSS as my site. Now I had to make the layout publish the same HTML or customize CSS locally to mimic the original.

I chose the simplest of the templates to begin with, hoping the HTML would be the closest to my original code. It took a few seconds for the upgrade, and then I was presented with the new layout screen. I headed over to "Edit HTML", and began.

The first thing I did was to get rid of existing CSS, called the skin. The blogger layout requires the skin tags to be in place, but I deleted everything in between the opening and closing tags.

<b:skin><![CDATA[
... /* Delete everything in between */
]]></b:skin>

Then began the hacking in earnest. First - the basics. The layout is made up of sections. A section contains widgets. When a section is expanded, it shows up as a <div> tag in the final HTML code. A section looks like the below.

<b:section id='header' class='header' maxwidgets="1" showaddelement="no">
</b:section>

Every *thing* in the layout is a widget. Like a section, a widget expands into its own <div> tags when the final HTML is generated. A widget however, encapsulates a ton of additional code. To see the actual code that makes up a widget, check the box that "Expand Widget Templates". And that opens up all the code that makes up the widget.

<b:includable id='main' var='thiswidget'>
[widget code found here when expanded]
</b:includable>

Widget code is made subroutines called "includable"s, presumably because they produce code that is included(?) into the final HTML. One of them, with the id "main", that is the default subroutine, which is always executed (included?). Other subroutines (includables, with a different id) are called ("include"d) as required.

<b:includable id='main'>
 <b:loop var='i' values='posts'>
  <b:include name='post' data='i'/>
 </b:loop>
 <b:if cond='condition'>
  [content to display if condition is true]
 <b:else/>
  [content to display if condition is false]
 </b:if>
</b:includable>

The final thing to note is data. Information available from the blog can be accessed using data tag. A bunch of such data is available; play around with the conditional tags and the data tags to discover everything that is available for access through code.

<data:title/>
or
<data:photo.url/>

Hacking the code took about half a day - alternating between the code, the generated HTML and the original HTML code, trying to align the them. All extra HTML (the menu code for example) was included inside widgets, so that they are included directly into the final HTML. Tracing through the code, I customized a bunch of the original HTML to ensure the correct ids and classes were included in the final HTML, allowing my standard CSS to render the page correctly. Then I added some CSS skinning to counter the effects of the default <div> tags included for the sections and widgets.

Viola: we are done! Now I had access to a ton more widgets, and a lot more blogger code to hack. Ah the bliss!

Google hosted

This used to be an FTP published blog. Until Google decided to shut down the FTP service.

Migration wasn't much of a problem. Waiting for the migration tool, however turned out to be a waste of time. Since I was moving within the same sub-domain, they wanted me to use the manual process. Which was little more than setting the CNAME, and changing the publishing method. Had to do it a couple of times to make sure the servers got it right - first off I was getting a 404 error. Anyway, this is the first post to test if this is indeed working as promised.

Talking to myself

When I re-started the blog a few days ago, one thing that played on my mind was the audience or lack of it. Over the last few years, I had been indoctrinated incessantly over the need to line up messages to an audience. Writing without an audience, as with this blog, seemed to be a hark to the old days and the old ways.

It took a bit of an effort to shake that feeling. What helped was the time I spent re-designing the website, hosting the blog on my domain, and learning a bit of XHTML, CSS and Javascript to jazz up the place. Nothing is better than a bit of creativity and mental challenge to drive clarity.

That is when I realized that the joy in what I did on this blog was for me and me alone. Writing is something I liked to do, and this provided a means for me to instinctively fulfill that urge. The website provided me with a means to basically bring together stuff I did over time to one place. There was a definite satisfaction in seeing a project come to fruition, the beats having to pander (!?) to an audience.

As Krishna says in the Bhagwad Gita:

To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction.

It is the joy of writing and working on my website that is my biggest gain. And thus I go, talking to myself.

Phoenix

It has been almost three years since the last post. There is a reason for it, three years long. The bottom line is that for the last three years I had opted to let work take over all my time, choosing to put the rest of my life on hold. Virtually, pressing a super-pause button

That is all over now. Now it is time to move on, revive some of the old and start some more of the new. The world has changed tremendously in these last three years. I have too! Three years ago, blogging was fringe. Today it seems everyone does it. Three years ago, social networking was a fad. Today it is mainstream - threatening to make television a fad. A few years ago, doing a new post, meant an outside chance that I would get an audience. Today the audience seems stretched too thin.

Within that context, it seems I am back. To continue to make this a sort of thought-blog with ideas, rants and opinions across a wide-range of topics.

To kick it all off, we have a new blog name - blog@anarchius.org as opposed to the old quaxzarron.blogspot.com (That old name is now more or less defunct). It is now hosted on my own domain and website. And finally the website and the blog now share a new, common look and feel. The site now sports a new template, cleaner XHTML, css based design. The aim is, at some point, to achieve XHTML document compliance.

Here's to welcoming myself back!

New Blog templates

It is wonderful how a company makes a difference to a product. For all that dilbert says about companies, which I am sure I almost always agree with, it its own way the company is an indespensable part of getting something done. Yeah, it will always be slower than a motivated individual, but it will always be better than the majority of us randomly spending time who might effectively cancel each other out.

And I slowly start to believe that companies actually have a character of their own that rubs of very explicitly on its employees. Just a few days back I was writing to a groups of friends from way back in college. And they commented on how different I think. They asked me if my educations had anything to do with it. No. The company did.

Eerie, unacceptable, grossly unappropriate but true.

You might be wondering how this ties up to the heading. Well, I was looking through some of the options of blogger and somehow I felt that google was behind some of them. It may be the layout, the style, the wordings I really dont know. And additionally when blogger came out, it gave an awesome set of tools to make your own template. But a majority of us out here dont have the patience nor the expertise to make good templates for ourselves. We would depend to a great extent on templates given by blogger. And check out the awesome set of templates that are available now. I *think* google has something to do with it.

holding on to the me in the company

- ravi

Nothing works like praise... does it?

Check this out. I am sure a lot of you know about dmoz right? In their own words, it is the largest human-edited directory on the web. Which mean, in simple words, that people, not machines or algorithms, make the entries in this directory. Which also means that quality, has no proxies in this directory. What people feel they say. This is what dmoz says about this blog - "It will be intelligent, and it will make you think."

I have been smiling like an idiot ever since. And know what, I am going to be back - with a vengence now.

There is actually someone out there, who took the time out to read my blog, and put in a kind (read awesome) word for me. Well, this is how praise starved idiots react I guess.

I sure hope I can live up to that - "It will be intelligent, and it will make you think."

GAWD

Bring forth the end of the post for the season begs to end.

Wish you a happy new year - 2004

- ravi

Waiting

Still waiting for that elusive domain name. The site says 48 hours before it is accepted. And processing will start after they receive and accept my payment. Which considering the timelines for the realisation of a cheque might well be long.

I am not doing a lot of work on stuff which mattered a lot to me once. Wondering what the reason might be. The only thing which is continuing is the speed at which I type. I dont think it is pretty remarkable, but I think it is nice.

regards to knowing why I am here, I dont have any,

~!nrk

Know What!

Something Amazing happened yesterday. I signed up for my first domain name :) yup, I did.

Well, the domain is anarchius.org. Kewl huh? Well, I have not been allocated that as of now, but I should be soon, considering that I completed the formalities of paying for it and all that. So well, once that allocation is done, then I will be the proud owner of a domain.

In a way that sounds so powerful. I am the overlord of the domain. Har Har. Will post a whois as soon as I get one myself.

That is about the only thing happening in the last few days. Slashdot is doing nothing new. Started jogging and working out in the morning. Too much of time in front of the keyboard and the monitor have started taking their toll. Have a small little paunch hanging out. Looking to check it quick. Tried to jog today. And man was it painful!! Guess, it is going to be a long road out of hell, as Manson so eloquently put it.

lets see how tired I get walking it,

~!nrk

Uh..Huh?

Basically was caught up the last few days. So did not post. Ah! well, that must be obvious. I mean there is little precious that can happen right? Well so here I am back after the break, with a bang.

Okay.. i found this comfortable position for the keyboard by keeping it in my lap. And believe me it is really good considering that I dont have proper furniture for working on the computer. And it does show. I mean, i have been feeling my hands go numb after typing non stop for a long time. And my speed also gets affected. And this position is really good as I can type fast and at the same time I really dont see my hands paining. It is really a win-win.

Dont know why I am rambling like this, but basically I just love the way I can type fast. And I just saw swordfish. Okay, I really dont know how people can buy all this hacking bull shit. It is almost as if people write authentication code in standard html and expect every system to give one of two messages...
If (1) then the printf("Access Granted",green) else printf("Access Denied",red);
Almost pathetic how cinema can make people believe a lot of stuff. Just like timelines for a lot of other stuff gets compressed in the world of cinema, the timelines for hacking, security, for carefully laid systems all get compressed into a few taps of the keyboard. I know I will live to one day see "offline backup systems" being hacked using satellite technology. That day I will sleep in peace.

So what do I write about? There is a lot to be written, but dont really have the enthusiasm for that now. So I will call it a day now and retire, hoping for a better morning.

Bubbly bubbly bye...

~!nrk

Wassup!!

I have this door that leads into the small balcony outside my room. The door is a brown wooden one, with a cast iron latch and a aluminium handle to pull it shut. It has a door stopped which is a wooden wedge hinged to the door jamb. When the door is open, this is swung to fit into the gap between the door and the jamb. Now what often happens is that sometimes the door stopper is in place and I have a class to go to. So i hold the aluminium handle and yank the door, when it fails to budge giving out a small crunch as the screws in the door hingers are strained out of their sockets. I mutter "oh shit!", and un-stop the door and try to close it. And the act of trying to forcibly shut the door misaligns it and it wont fit into the frame without a lot of pulling and grunting.

And I am sitting here writing about it.

Well, just outside the door is the balcony it leads to, (wow!!). It is about four feet deep. And sitting here, I can see the wall in great detail. The bottom of the wall has the floor skirting to prevent it from gettnig muddy. And this skirting is not not only muddy, but also wet and slimey from all the rain water that fills up the balcony. The floor is a similar color. But the wall is white. Guess that is why the skirting was provided in the first place.

The top of what wall is relatively clean. But the sides bear impressions of the dirt that flowed down the sides every rainy season, and the algae that grew on it after the rains. The most important thing about my balcony is that there is a tubelight right next to it. And I can sit outside at night and read books by the light of this light. And what is even more remarkable is that, this does not hurt my eyes when i am sleeping. And finally mosquitoes are miraculously not attracted to the light, even in the rainy season.

Outside my balcony is the outside. Some trees, some bushes, some undergrowth. Cool wind always finds my room in its path.

hmm.. just smell that.

~!nrk

Wish I was a Camera sometime

This is a line from a song by Bon Jovi. But I dont wish to capture just her beauty alone, I want to capture ALL beauty. And I just dont want to be any camera. I'd rather prefer if I was a Nikon Cam, with an assortment of lenses, and a stand at that same time. Otherwise, being a camera is just not worth it.

And, of course, I also wish I and my camera were invisible. But of course that would lead to problems with the photonics of the entire process of photography. Light would be free to go through my cam, and a shutter would not really help. But then, I really want to be invisible, and hope my reel becomes opaque just for the exposure time to catch the light, and it goes invisible again.

*Grin*. Okay, the reason I want to be invisible, is that I want to capture moments, as they happen. I dont want people to freeze up because I am there. I dont want birds to fly off. I dont want animals to give me glances and slink away.

That probably is the reason that I rather stick to photographing, dead things and other things that cannot run away from me. But I really want to be invisible.

Did you ever sit next to that road. And looked at the myraid colors and images flash past you. The sights and the sounds. The smells and the colors. The people in their hues and colors, going about their business. Businesses, varied, moving, and incredibly fascinating. And you wish, you were a camera sometimes.

Someone looked at some of the snaps I had shared, and had written to me expressing his opinion that I was a nature lover. Hmm, maybe, maybe not. I think not. I am not a nature lover or anything. I am a photolover. I am just photophyllic. Just dont care a damn, what those photons bounce off, as long as they differ in energy in patters that i like.

Art and science.. Or is that art and crap. you tell me.

Why is it that the cheap food is always the best tasting. If it has too much of oil, cholestrol, and is probably cooked in unhygienic surroundings. And it just tastes yummy!

~!nrk

Points of View

Did you notice, that whenever you differed with someone, things never really go the way you imagined they would. You would have gone through the entire argument, and discussed it over and over again in your head. And it would have seemed so obvious then. The first word out of your mouth and you are on your own.

And moreover when you are giving a point of view, observe your audience carefully. The main question they will be airing is not - what? But why? Not, "what" is the opinion and what are its merits and demerits. Rather the focus will be on why you are taking that point of view. Sad, but true. So the next time you listen to a differing point of view in an argument, spend your time thinking about the what and try to let the why for a later date. Then look how much you will benefit and how many potential arguments will immediately peter out.

Gotta do some submissions in the next few days. Oh how I hate this!

~!nrk

No post yesterday

Not because I was busy or anything. In fact I did write a good post. And then I hit the post button, which immediately resulted in a 500 server error. Phut... The entire post - lost in electronic space. Funny right? We are building networks, to keep things under greater control, and make them work for us. And what is happening? Things get more mysterious and inexplicable. For example, where did my post go. Okay you will trace it to some web server. Then to some RAM space, which subsequently got de-allocated. So? Where did my post go?

Today, I made that heavenly drink again. Soft. Take some peppery mixture, and jet some aerated drink into it. It is heavenly, especially if the receptacle is an earthen pot.

We went to this place. It is called poilon. This is a dead giveaway about me for some 5000 people in this country. The rest of humanity wont know about it. Well, it is this place someway further down on the highway next to my Institute. It is a small, unkempt place. Basically an eating outlet - cheap and affordable. And the food there is incredible. You go there, and sit cross-legged on these wooden platform things. Then you order the stuff you want. The stove is almost next to you, and as the cook prepares your order, you can writhe in the sweet agony of the delicious auroma of your order. And when you are sufficiently famished, on the verge of mental breakdown, the food arrives. Piping hot and delicious.

You just cannot help stuffing yourself. Even as the tears pour down your cheeks due to the hot food. Then we made this heavenly drink. Oh god, it is almost as if you died and were standing in front of the pearly gates.

I just hope this post is posted and does not result in a 500 or a 404 and quietly comes as a 200. Amen

~!nrk

Sphere of eConsciousness

I had defined a term in my post on Tuesday, August 20, 2002. The term was Sphere of Perception. I had said that it is the sphere which a person identifies and understands. It defines the region from which inputs are used by people for learning.

There is a related term, I want to talk about. eConsciousness. Offline, your entire perception is defined by your senses. Your sight, hearing, feel in addition to smell and taste. So what are your online senses? What part of the online life are you attuned to? What is your source of information from the online world? To round it off, what part of your online presence are you attuned to? What is your eConsciousness?

We shall define eConsciousness loosely as that part of the online life you are attuned to. This basically consists of two parts. The first part is the part of the online life you actually know and identify. What exists on the World Wide Web. The answer to that question is the first part of eConsciousness. The second part pertains to that part of the online life, which you truly understand. What is the part of the life online you truly know. What part are you comfortable with. What part of the online life you know makes sense to you, and is not a source of fraud waiting to happen.

Why did I get this idea? Well, it goes like this. I got this message from SmileyGram for an E-card. This was basically from a friend of mine, who apparently had given my email address. I had to go and check out what was happenning there. So I checked the URL and pointed my browser to it. It took me to a page which needed 5 names and email addresses to show me the page. And nothing was optional. Of course i filled it with ****@****.com to get to the page.

I then mailed my friend asking her not to put my email in such forms again. I have been long enough on the web to have my name in a decent number of email databases. I really dont want another one getting hold of mine. The reply was along the lines that this was a 'good site' and that it 'just' needed 5 friend's names and the card is 'worth it'. My friend is showing remarkable eConsciousness of the first kind, not much of the second variety.

This I think is the case with a majority of the users. These are the users who click on the funlove messages. These are the people that download and run cute screensavers with trojans and backdoors. These are not people who are exactly alien to the online world. In fact they know of more free email sites, more free ecards sites than the first 3 pages of google. But they dont really understand the net. If we are to make the net a more secure place, it is this set of people we have to target. It is this set that must be told that not everything on the net is what it seems. Educate them, and we just might become safe in spite of all that Microsoft has planned for us.

One day I am going to develop an eConsciousness quotient.
Should help. Dont you think. tell me if you think so, or if you dont. [of course after demungle the email id]
Hmm, the winter is coming. Things are becoming cooler, and I have started skipping the baths. :)

~!nrk