2014

I rode in an ambulance yesterday. I’ve been in a few of these in the last 3 weeks, but yesterday was the first time I had to give directions, so I was paying a bit more attention to the traffic. It’s remarkable how well Bangalore traffic responds to ambulances. Almost every single person gave way. (Not that this is easy. Merely slowing towards the left isn’t always effective if it ends up blocking the way. Many people were wise enough to give way at the appropriate place, and our flow was not impeded.) ...

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Miss Wormwood. Comments Suraj 13 Feb 2016 4:34 am: I pity his babysitter Rosalyn more!

Every few years, I review the software I use. Here are some of my earlier lists. Right now, among browsers, Chrome is my primary browser. What’s interesting is that IE 11 has overtaken Firefox in terms of usage. That’s partly because we’re working with Microsoft a lot, but also because Firefox has a number of weird bugs like IE6 used to have, and is slowly lagging in the race. Next to browsers, I spend most of my time on the command prompt. I use Console2 for tabbed console windows. Given the number of command prompts I open, this is often necessary. I use bash in Cygwin as the default shell. Haven’t had the need for PowerShell. ...

When you start typing in the address bar, Chrome suggests a link to visit, based on frecency. What do my recommendations look like? A is for airtel.in/smartbyte-s/page.html – the page where you can check your bandwidth usage. I used to check it infrequently until I upgraded to a 125GB connection. Now I check it every few days and feel miserable that I’ve nowhere near used up my quota. This has coerced me to watch many Telugu movies, of which I don’t understand a word. B is for blog.gramener.com – I blog there on data stories. The last month or so has been fairly active thanks to the elections. C is for calendar.google.com – which has become primarily a shared calendar. It was always indispensible to manage my time. Now it helps my colleagues pick when to call me. Right now, my calendar has events booked about two months in advance. D is for docs.google.com – for effectively one single purpose: shared spreadsheets. This is such a common and powerful use case, and I’m surprised it hasn’t become much easier to use. E is for epaper.timesofindia.com – some of our content has been published by The Economic Times, and I keep doing ego-searches in the print edition. But close behind is eci.nic.in which I’ve been scraping a lot, and election-results.ibnlive.in.com which we created for CNN-IBN. F is for flipkart.com – not facebook.com. I’m not often on Facebook. G is for gramener.com. Naturally. (It’s not surprising that it’s not google.com: I search directly from the address bar.) H is for handsontable.com – a library that I’ve been using a lot recently, followed by html5please.com that tells me which HTML5 features are ready for use. I is for ibn.gramener.com – another property we created, but it only just beats irctc.co.in. J is for join.me – a clean way to share your screen without the audience having to install anything (though you the sharer do have to install the software.) K is for kraken.io – an amazingly efficient image compressor. As you might have guessed, I lead a strange life. L is for learn.gramener.com – our Intranet. Sorry, you can’t access this one. M is for mail.google.com. I’ll probably be moving away from gmail as a backend this weekend to Mail-in-a-box, though. Google’s pulling the plug on Google Reader has shaken my faith. N is for news.ycombinator.com. When I’m bored and want to watch something while I have dinner, I don’t open YouTube. I open Hacker News. O is for odc.datameet.org – the Open Data Camp. I’m quite into open data. P is for pay.airtel.com, but if you ignore the number of bills I pay, it would be pandas.pydata.org, the home page of a remarkable data processing library. Q is for quirksmode.org, PPK’s remarkable browser-compatibility guide R is for reader.s-anand.net, my self-hosted RSS reader. It used to be reader.google.com, but Google let me down there. S is for s-anand.net – this blog. T is for twitter.com. Unlike Facebook, I don’t dislike Twitter so much. U is for underscorejs.org. Clearly I need to get a life. V is for visualizing.org. They have a number of interesting data visualisations. W is for webpagetest.org – it helps measure the speed of web pages. X is for xem.github.io. I’ve probably visited this page once, but it’s the only one in my recent history that starts with X Y is for youtube.com. I lied. I spend an order of magnitude more time watching Telugu movies on YouTube than on Hacker News. Z is for zoemob.com. Again, a page I visited only once, but there’s nothing else in Z at the moment. Comments Software I currently use | s-anand.net 9 May 2014 6:24 pm (pingback): […] course, some of my apps apps have moved online, and my earlier post on the A-Z of my browsing history covers that. But there are a few applications that I’ve hosted which I must talk about. […] chandigarh 13 Oct 2015 7:27 pm: you can delete your web search history through link https://history.google.com/history

My blog’s been through a number of phases. Between 1996 – 1999, it was just a website with a few facts about my and some of my juvenile ramblings. Inspired by robotwisdom.com, I converted it into a blog – except that I didn’t know what blogging was and just called it “updating my site every day.” It was mostly a link blog. In 2006, around the time when I moved from Mumbai to London, I reduced my link-blogging and started writing longer articles talking about my experiences. This was a fairly productive phase, and I was churning a few dozen articles every year until 2012. ...

A couple of years ago, my HTC Explorer’s screen died. I bought a Micromax A50. This triggered a series of reactions prompting this post. I have many defects. Like most men, I can’t tell colours apart – like the difference between pink and purple – and am constantly corrected by my six-year-old. I can’t hear two people at the same time – or even in-between each other. I can’t find things outside of my narrow field of vision. I can’t recognise faces, and need at least three one-on-one interactions before I place people. (If you ask me “Do you recognise me?” and I say “Yes, of course!”, I’m usually lying.) I can’t place voices on the phone. My memory is terrible – my wife’s learnt to make me write errands on my laptop. I cannot identify cars – in fact, I couldn’t drive until recently. ...

A few years ago, I ended up losting weight, mostly by dieting. That worked out rather well up to a point: I lost about 20kgs rapidly. But I ended up putting them back on almost as rapidly. What I learnt from this was that dieting made me more short-tempered. It also reduced my metabolic rate. My body would adjust to the hunger and enter a “starvation-mode”, using the limited food ridiculously efficiently. So I’d have to eat even less to continue losing weight. ...