The Arsenal Obsession #COYG

Despite being raised in India, there has pretty much been only one sport which always appealed to me. It's football (ugh, soccer). And ever since I was a kid (before moving to the states), I have been a fan of one team and one team only. Whenever i describe myself (even on online forums like Twitter Bio, etc.), I always take pride in being an Arsenal fan.

So much so that it's part of our living room!

Life on the Pacific Coast

I moved to the states about two and half years ago and the Arsenal fan in me had a very interesting situation ahead. European football games typically happen on weekend and kick-off is usually somewhere between Noon and 5PM local time. For Arsenal, local time happens to be London time, which is 8 hours ahead my local time, thereby making the US west coast to be the worst possible region to live in for a European football fan. For a game starting at noon in London, i have to be up by 4AM. That's right, 4AM!

Because of this, my typical weekend looks like this:

Say the game is on Sunday at 1PM London Time.

• I'm usually out on Saturday nights pretty late (either a movie or something else).
• Back home around midnight.
• Spend some time playing games or watching something on TV.
• It's around 2PM or so at this point and dilemma ensues. Do i stay awake for 3 more hours and watch the game, or should i get some sleep (and risk missing the game by oversleeping)?
• More than often, i end up staying awake the whole night.
• Watch the game.
• Sudden existential crisis for the rest of Sunday. What now?

Twitter Effect

When i was in school, we watched games as a group. Always as a group. When i moved to the states, I have been meaning to go to a sports bar and enjoy the game with a supporters group. But i have not managed to do so even once (usually because of the ungodly hours).

Twitter came to the rescue. I usually tweet a lot during the game (and annoy the crap out of my non-football friends) and i have made a lot of new friends (living on various parts of the world) because of that. I now really feel that watching the game with Twitter feed open is as good as watching it with friends. And there's always casualties (TV Remote being the worst victim).

Live

I'm slowly getting towards a point where i might be able to afford to fly to London once or twice during a season. I am really looking forward to making it a habit of attending one or two games every season in person.

And by the way, for the uninitiated, #COYG = Come On You Gunners.

Happy February Everyone!

-Vignesh

Tis The Season - 2014!

Hola!

This is me with another attempt in vain to remind myself that i should write more.

2014 has been wonderful. Lot of memorable moments. First full year as a married person. A wife who loves you more than the world. A job that, well, i really have no words to describe it, it's that good. I could not have imagined a better life.

The year started just like any other. The first big moment was in March where we celebrated our first anniversary.

And then along came a pretty sweet moment at work. I got an opportunity to give a recorded-talk at Google I/O, Google's annual developer conference. It was a big deal as developers from all over Earth tune into it.

Then thanks to my girl we got to spend the summer in Seattle as she was taking up an internship there. It was three awesome months that encompassed a wide range of cool things like living across the street from Space Needle, flying on a sea plane, an awesome trip to the island capital of British Columbia. Not to mention, getting away from the heat of California's summer.

Along came October where there was a really fun filled party for her birthday.

Then came the holidays where we did crazy things like reaching 130ft beneath the Pacific Ocean on a submarine.

126ft beneath the Pacific Ocean!

I am writing this as we pack our stuff headed to celebrate the dawn of 2015 in random parts of the California West Coast.

Until then, Mahalo & Happy new year 2015!

To end this post, a random quote from Phoebe that always makes me laugh - "If you wanna receive email about my upcoming shows, please give me money so that i can buy a computer".

-Vignesh

P.S.: I cheated in this post by including more pictures than words. Although, i really hope that i will write more in 2015!

The story behind Seattle's floating homes!

In Seattle, there are a lot of people who live on the waterfront (in Lake Union). There are two types of floating life shelters: Floating Homes and Houseboats.

Houseboats are one of the most ingenious ways i’ve ever seen of gaming the system. It’s a pretty long but very interesting story. Read on.

Back in the early 1900s, people who could not afford a house on land in Seattle started building simple house-like structures using some logs and put them on Lake Union and started living there. Since the lake was open to the public, anybody was allowed to build such a "floating home" free of cost and live there.

People who lived on such floating homes did not pay any property taxes. On realizing that, a lot of people who lived on land started moving to the lake and naturally it started getting crowded. Since these floating homes did not have proper sewage system, people started to dump all their waste on the lake and hence it started to become a mess.

The City of Seattle then decided enough is enough, and drew up some regulations on how many floating homes will be allowed on the lake and designated certain spots in the lake to be for the exclusive use of floating homes. Since the number of homes were limited and they were always docked, they also decided to hard wire them into the city’s sewer and electricity systems. Thereby, floating homes were started to be considered as regular homes and people needed to pay property taxes on them.

The floating home used in the movie Sleepless in Seattle

When something becomes “limited edition”, obviously the prices go up. So all of a sudden, what was once the home of people who could not afford a house became a limited edition floating home that started to go for millions of dollars. Also, sewage and electricity were no more an issue.

Now, there were this new class of people who couldn’t afford a home on the land, and obviously not the waterfront as well. So they just started to put a roof on their boats, and started living there. Since they were just regular boats, there was no restriction on how many such boats could be in the lake as long they are registered vessels. It gradually evolved and today’s “boats” look like this:

You see what they did there? It’s a lake and obviously the city cannot put a limit on the number of boats allowed on the lake. These “boats” are registered as vehicles to the DMV and are authorized to be in the lake wherever and whenever they want. The only restriction being, “they should be able to move on their own”. So all they need is to have a motor underneath that will help them achieve that criteria.

If you look closely at the above photo, you can see a Honda motor attached to it on the bottom left. It’s very impractical for the city to enforce that rule on a day-to-day basis. So most of these boats, even though they self-propel at the time they are registered to the DMV, they hardly remain so throughout the year.

So today, you can find a lot of such "Houseboats" on the waterfront of Lake Union in Seattle.

P.S.: This was a story that was told to me when i took the Rode The Duck in Seattle. It’s really an awesome tour and i highly recommend taking it if you are visiting Seattle.

P.P.S.: I originally wrote this for this Quora question: "What are the best examples of people gaming the system?"

-Vignesh

Use your Chromecast/Roku on a Hotel WiFi

Chromecast and Roku are really wonderful devices which allow you to take all your media with you where ever you go. Especially, if you travel a lot, it's definitely way better to watch something on your Netflix subscription rather than paying exorbitant rates on the hotel's pay-per-view.

But there's a problem. Hotel WiFi's usually use web based authentication (i.e.) their wireless network is usually open and anyone can connect to it. Only when you try and open a webpage, they send you to an authentication page that asks for a username/password (which the hotel will provide you) and/or asks you to accept the terms and conditions.

The problem is that Chromecast and Roku do not have native support for such authentication. But fear not, in this post, i am going to write about a few ways in which you can work around this limitation to enjoy Roku/Chromecast on the hotel's WiFi network.

Find out your device's MAC Address

2 of the 3 workarounds that i mention requires you to know the MAC Address of your Chromecast/Roku device. Here's how you figure it out:

Roku

• Switch it on
• Navigate to Settings->Network->Wireless
• On the bottom right, you can see the MAC Address of the Roku

Chromecast

• Switch it on
• Connect your phone to the hotel WiFi and authenticate it
• Open the Chromecast Setup app on your android phone
• Tap on devices and wait for it to scan
• Tap on your Chromecast device in the list
• Tap "Set Up"
• Tap "I see the code"
• Tap "Set Name"
• The MAC Address of your chromecast will be displayed on the screen now. 

Workaround 1 - Call the Tech Support

Most hotels give you a small sheet of paper with your WiFi username and password. That sheet usually also has a "tech support" phone number. Here is what you can do: Call the tech support number and tell them exactly this: "I would like to use the roku media player device over the hotel WiFi. I wanted to check if you could whitelist the MAC Address of my device to by-pass the authentication page".

Depending on the mood and knowledge of the tech support person, he/she might say okay. But nevertheless, it's gonna take some time before the whitelist happens. And once the whitelist happens, you can enjoy Chromecast/Roku over the hotel WiFi.

Workaround 2 - Spoof your MAC and authenticate from your laptop

The whole web authentication system works around MAC addresses. Once you enter your username and password, your MAC and IP addresses are going to be whitelisted for a certain amount of time (about 24 hours) and your device will be allowed to access the internet in that time period.

One key weakness about this authentication mechanism is that MAC address is easily spoof'able. So we are going to to assign your Roku/Chromecast's MAC address to your laptop and perform the authentication like usual and then make use of that whitelist to access the internet from your Roku/Chromecast. Here are the steps (follow them precisely to the word):

• Find the MAC address of your Roku/Chromecast using the steps above. Note it down.
• Open the terminal (assumes linux).
• Run "ifconfig" and note down the MAC Address of the laptop. [1]
• Run this command: "sudo ifconfig wlan0 down".
• Disconnect from the WiFi network on the laptop.
• Run this command: "sudo ifconfig wlan0 hw ether <mac address of roku>".
• IMPORTANT: Turn off the Roku/Chromecast by unplugging it.
• Run this command: "sudo ifconfig wlan0 up".
• Connect to the Hotel's WiFi network on the laptop.
• Open the browser and navigate to google.com (or any other website).
• It will ask for authentication, provide username/password that the hotel gave you.
• Type google.com again and verify that you can access Google.
• Run this command: "sudo ifconfig wlan0 down".
• Disconnect from the WiFi network on the laptop.
• Run this command: "sudo ifconfig wlan0 hw ether <mac address of your laptop from step [1] above>".
• Run this command: "sudo ifconfig wlan0 up".
• Now you can plug your Chromecast/Roku back in and connect to the Hotel's WiFi network on that. It should now be connected to the internet!

You will have to repeat these steps after the whitelist expires (usually about once a day).

Note: The above two work arounds will connect your Chromecast/Roku directly to the hotel's WiFi 

Workaround 3 - Set up your own WiFi network

Buy a portable WiFi adapter and use that to share your Hotel's WiFi through your own access point.

Hope this helps!

-Vignesh

Chromecast URL Player

I was annoyed by the fact that the Chromecast SDK has been out for the public for quite a while and yet googling for a simple URL player for Chromecast did not yield satisfactory results. So I sat down to create my own simple web app for playing back any http video or viewing any still image in Chromecast.

URL: http://movies.foamsnet.com

Source Code: https://github.com/vickyg3/UrlPlayer

Would love to hear feedback. Feel free to fork, send pull requests.


-Vignesh

Introducing Super Secure File - One File, Completely Secure, Access Anywhere!

Super Secure File gets you a really secure password protected file that you can access anywhere with an internet connection. Smartphone, Tablet, Laptop, SmartTV, anything!

To cut to the chase and create your Super Secure File, go to: http://secure.foamsnet.com.

How does it work?

Super Secure File basically uses Google Drive to store your encrypted file and does all the encryption and decryption locally in Javascript. The key never ever leaves your computer. Once you close the tab, boom, the key is gone. Nobody knows the key but you (and probably your spouse if you are married).

Motivation

This is not a big feat or anything, this is merely a mashup of a few libraries to prove a point to myself. The motive behind this app is to build a secure mechanism to store my passwords and credit card numbers on the cloud so that I can access it anywhere. I do not trust anyone who links me up to a server when it comes to information like this. Which is why i wanted a completely static HTML page with no server access whatsoever to provide me with this functionality.

Feel free to examine the source code here (and please let me know if you find anything utterly stupid): https://github.com/vickyg3/super-secure-file

Hosting and Links

Since this is a static page, I have not hosted this on my server. This is merely hosted as a github page (if you look at the repo, you'll see the default branch to be gh-pages and not master). Hosting it as a github page also proves that it has no server interaction whatsoever and cannot steal your key by any mean.

So, all you need is to remember your password and one of these URLs (they all redirect to the same Github Page): http://bit.ly/securefile or http://bit.ly/supersecurefile or http://secure.foamsnet.com or http://vickyg3.github.io/super-secure-file/super_secure_file.html

Get your Super Secure File and make your life a little easier! :-)


-Vignesh

Open sourcing Social Photos

I have been working on a lot of open source projects lately (chromium, AOSP, ffmpeg, etc.) and I have had this tremendous change in the way i look at software projects now. I am all the more convinced that open source is the only right way of doing software.

With that in mind, I've made a pledge to myself that no matter what I do, I am going to put the source out there. As a first step, i'm open sourcing the one big project of mine, Social Photos.

The source can be found here: https://github.com/vickyg3/social-photos

It is a snapshot of the one that's currently powering the live site: http://socialphotos.net (with API keys redacted). Feel free to fork and use as you please. Although i'd appreciate a link back, it's not mandatory. Also, i'll be more than happy to look at Pull Requests.

One of the main reasons that developers (including myself) don't post our code out there is that we are ashamed of our code. I was really ashamed by the number of hacks i did in this project that i couldn't even think of making it public. I'm over it. I'm ready to accept people fixing my mistakes.

Happy Coding!

-Vignesh

Bucket List of People to Meet in Lifetime!

We all love meeting celebrities. Because of the geography that I live in right now, I have had the opportunity to meet quite a few of them over the past year.

I always had this list of people to meet in person before I die in my mind. Until a year ago, It was mostly more of a fantasy list. But once I moved to where I am now, the fantasy started becoming reality. So I wanted to transfer that list from my brain to a document so that I don't miss out on anyone if an opportunity knocks on the door.

Here is the list (in no particular order):

Person	Who/What/Why?	Met/Been There?	Note/Souvenir
Thierry Henry	The person I respect the most in the world.	No	-
Don Knuth	Father of modern computer science.	No	-
Dennis Ritchie	Founder of C (The R in K&R).	Not possible anymore!	-
Brian Kernighan	Founder of C (The K in K&R).	Yes	2013-06-20: Autograph
Linus Torvalds	Founder of Linux and Git. Strongly believes in whatever he believes in.	No	-
Robert Love	A huge contributor to the Linux kernel.	Yes	2013-06-13: Autograph
Bjarne Stroustrup	Founder of C++.	Yes	2013-08-15: Picture with him & Autograph
Randall Munroe	He is a hero of mine and worship his sense of Sarcasm and Wit	No	-
Matthew Perry	My most favorite actor in the world.	No	-
Lisa Kudrow	My most favorite actress in the world.	No	-
Michael Schumacher	He was a huge inspiration as i grew up watching him win.	No	-
Larry & Sergey	My role models in life.	Yes	Every Fridays (now every Thursdays).
Matt Cutts	One of the early employees of Google and famous for his work on Web Spam.	Yes	2012-12-20: Lunch
Jeff Dean	The most bad-ass engineer ever.	Yes	2013-01-22: A walk around Charleston Park
Stade De France	My most favorite football stadium in the world.	No	-
Nou Camp	The holy grail of football.	No	-
The Corrs (Sharon Corr)	My most favorite band and most favorite violinist.	No	-
Felicity Huffman	Her character's attitude in Desperate Housewives resembles almost 100% that of my wife.	No	-
Jim Parsons	Who wouldn't wanna meet him?	No	-
Ramsus Lerdorf	Founder of PHP. The language i have written most of my code in.	No	-
Jeffrey Archer	Most favorite author in the world.	No	-
Paolo Maldini	I grew up watching him play. Perfect combination of style and class.	No	-
Arsene Wenger	I grew up watching him. One of the most inspirational people.	No	-
Vint Cerf	The reason why we all have a job. Founder of TCP.	Yes	2012-11-20: Said hi and shook hands
Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan	A person who can talk with violin.	Not possible anymore!	-
Ron Rivest	The R in RSA.	No	-
Petr Mitrichev	Has been Topcoder #1 for many years.	No	-
Mary Lynn Rajskub	Second most favorite actress.	No	-

I will try to keep this list updated mostly as a record for myself rather than for the world to see.


-Vignesh

Our Story!

Circa May 2005 - The Characters

Boy - A 10th standard student in Coimbatore, who moves to Madurai for higher secondary schooling.

Girl - A 10th standard student in Chennai. No prizes for guessing where she moves for her higher secondary schooling!

May 2005 to June 2007 - The Beginning

As many would anticipate, they both ended up being classmates in their new school. Despite that, sadly, nothing interesting happened in this period of time (we know, they were such idiots back then!). They just looked at each other on random days and barely spoke.

June 2007 - The Actual Beginning

The girl moved back to Chennai and the boy moved back to Coimbatore for college. As with most couples of this generation, they started conversing with each other in the form on SMS'es and phone calls. Few days after that, they felt they were really close to each other. Few months after that, they realized they can't live without each other.

Few Months (or years) Later

The boy was on a late night train journey and as it was always, they were talking over phone (despite the annoying train noise). He felt something spontaneously and popped the question. It took a while for him to get an answer, but it was an answer that he rejoices till today!

P.S. The time frame of the above paragraph is omitted intentionally. ;-)

September 2011 - LGTM

The girl told about her life choice to her parents and the boy did the same to his parents. Both of them were genuinely happy instantaneously. No hesitation, No fuss, Pure happiness. It was then they realized how gifted they were to have such wonderful parents!

September 2012 - Its Official

The boy and the girl got engaged on September 2nd, 2012. It was a small but wonderful ceremony with family and friends.

December 2012 to March 2013 - The Present

We are writing this draft over a video chat (damn you geography!). We are really excited about the brand new phase of our lives that we are about to step on to. So please mark your calendars and try to be there on our special day, as your wishes would mean a whole world to us!

By the way, the girl's name is Gayathri and the boy's name is Vignesh! :-)

March 2013 and Beyond

We are undergoing our "Happily ever after" phase. :-)

P.S.: I didn't write this now. I am just copying this from my wedding website. Since that domain expired, I wanted this to live somewhere on the internet.

-Vignesh

Announcing Social Photos v2!

I have been working on this side project for quite a while now and I am happy to announce that it is launch ready now!

Visit http://socialphotos.net to manage all your digital photos across Social Networks in one roof using a simple intuitive user interface.

Features Include:

• Transfer Photos
• Transfer Albums
• Download selective albums as a zip file
• View Slideshow of your albums
• Monitor progress in a simple pane
• And much more!

Please do feel free to give feedbacks/suggestions. Use it and Share it!

http://socialphotos.net

-Vignesh

The Last One by Myself!

Before you start reading, I really would like to warn you: Stop, Do not read. What follows is utter crap.

It has been almost 5 years now since i fell in love with this amazing girl. It’s almost time now. I am literally counting the last few days of my bachelor life. The 7 and odd years that i have known her has just swung by very fast. It just seems like yesterday that I was a small school kid. I honestly can’t remember how college life went on so fast. Here I am now, sitting in a totally different part of the world, still unable to believe that I am actually here.

When I look back at the past 7 and odd years, there are various wonderful moments which I would say have made my life what it is now. Not to brag, but not many people in life get almost everything they want, especially at such an early point in life. I am indeed one of the lucky ones. I am surprised at so many things that I do these days. It just seems like yesterday (literally like yesterday) that i went around nagging people for career advice. Yet here I am today, talking to many of my friends about building their career, etc. I really am surprised at the way I have turned out.

I am in this state where i ponder upon looking for words to express how my life has turned around to what it is now. There has been unexpected twists and surprises, expected happiness and so many other feelings which words cannot describe.

If I sit back for a moment and think about why I am writing this post, I honestly have no clue. I just felt like I should write something that will forever remain as the last post I ever wrote as a bachelor. Not that it is a big feat or anything, but blogging was something which, despite many resolutions and swearings, i could not keep up with. So, not to feel bad about myself that I hardly write anything these days, I started out writing this particularly pointless post.

I am flying out to India tomorrow. It’s gonna be the most #epic trip of my life. Loads of things to look forward to. Girl of my dreams, getting together with her. Life is fun. Hopefully I write something meaningful sometime soon (of course after I am back from the India trip).

-Vignesh

Last Day of Internship !! :-(

Today is the last day of my full time internship with my employer. Here is a small dedication to all my colleagues and friends who have made my past 7 months the happiest 7 months of my life. I will miss you all!



Excess..

I came here hoping to learn,
Which I've done in excess..
I came here hoping to have fun,
Which I've done is excess..
I came here hoping to gain new friends,
Which I've done in excess..
For i never thought,
This place would be excessive of excesses !!

Lunch..

There’s one thing that i ought not forget to mention,
The daily lunch..
We discuss minutes together where to go for,
The daily lunch..
And mostly end up changing the decision,
In the lift..

Supriya, Biriyani Express, Mast Kalandar,
Saravana Bhavan, Just Orient..
These are the places that i’d never would forget..
Thanks for all the memories..

Carrom and Chess..

We aim at the black,
We aim at the white,
We aim at the red,
But all we hit is,
The one we never aimed..
Yet we never get bored..
We’ve had spectacular wins,
That even kieron pollard could not have done..
We’ve had spectacular losses,
That even a second grade child could have done..
This is the place where i learnt,
Even chess can be a team game..
It will be a sin,
If i don’t mention the place,
That gave all the laughter..

Farewell..

Though it may not be permanent..
Its really hard to say good bye,
To such an awesome place of work..
With tears in eyes, and lump in throat,
Adios.. Au revoir.. Farewell..
Life has really been Happier,
Thanks to Efficient Frontier !!

-Vignesh

Madarasapattinam and Me !! :-)

I was sitting all alone in podanur railway station (podanur is to coimbatore is what tambaram/perambur is to chennai) awaiting my train to chennai. I had arrived an hour early than the scheduled time just to know that the train was late by half an hour, leaving me a solitude wait of one and half hours. I really liked the peaceful environment with gentle breeze flowering across my face. If I was like before, I would have just been irritated that i would have to wait alone for one and half hours. But then, I had all the feelings about the past awesome six months rushing up to me. And I was involuntarily forced to open my blog and start sharing them. As the title suggests, people who aren't interested in me lamenting about stuff I like and stuff I'm gonna miss, please feel free to press Ctrl+W (frankly I know that you don't really care if I miss velachery railway station or not)

Long story short

Past six months have been awesome and I have really been at the efficient frontier of my life. But sadly, everything has to come to an end. The internship is about to end in a few days and I already couldn't stop feeling bad about the things I'm gonna miss. On the whole, I will miss chennai, I will miss efficient frontier and I will miss everything that has been keeping me going for the past six months.



Short story long

It just seems like yesterday that I stepped into the seventh floor of chamiers towers (well known as satyam building), but all of a sudden, six long months have passed in a jiffy. There have been many life cheering moments over the course of this internship.

I have had many wonderful moments. A bulleted list won't hurt after all:

• The daily bike rides to office! (13 kms one way)


• Breakfast at the near by mess!


• Velachery Sangeethas T20 (the offer still continues as T30 - velachery folks, dont miss it!)


• 5 working days = 5 different cuisines for lunch (Andhra, Punjab, China, Italy, Delhi, Tamilnadu)


• Heavenly mini noon naps in bean bags!


• Non-stop free flowing discussions about work!


• Non-stop fun in the entertainment area (more on the upcoming post..)


• Besant Nagar Beach with friends in the evening!


• Dinner daily at some random shop!


• Maintaining accounts (thinking before every swipe of the card and every rupee out of the wallet)


• And of course the work!


• Fighting online for tatkal tickets to and fro home for long weekends!


• Listening to songs almost 8 hours a day

Another such lamenting is coming up soon!

-Vignesh

Festival of lights is here !! :-)

Hey folks,

The festival of lights is here. We are all gearing up to celebrate the death of narahasuran in a high fashioned manner after these many decades. I just want to take this time off and wish you all a very happy deepavali.



Here is a small one for all the rajinikanth dudes!



இனிய தீபாவளி நல்வாழ்த்துக்கள். இந்த தீபாவளி தினத்தை உங்கள் சுற்றார் மற்றும் உறவினர்களோடு கொண்டாடி மகிழுங்கள்.

-Vignesh

Doodle it up - My first google chrome extension !! :-)

Google is really a part and parcel of our daily life. It has become so inevitable to our daily lives. I have taken a bit of my time to quickly develop a simple Google Chrome Extension to customize your daily visits to google. Wouldn’t you love to see your own picture instead of the boring google logo everytime you open google’s homepage? Yes. This is exactly what this extension does.

Here are step-by-step instructions for installing the extension:

• Download the extension from here


• Install the extension by clicking "Continue"


• Confirm the installation by clicking "Install"


• You will see the confirmation message


• Goto chrome://extensions and click on options under "Doodle it up" extension


• In the page that opens up, enter the URL of the image and then click on Save Settings


• Now, goto Google and Voila! you have your own image instead of the Google logo!

Please post your comments/suggestions as comments.

-Vignesh

Happy Birthday APJ Sir !! :-)

Today is the 77th birthday of the people's president of India, Dr.A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. He is a dreamer and wants to see India as a developed nation by 2020.

You have really been a friend, philosopher and guide for the entire generation of youth in India. We love you sir!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!




Here are a few of his inspiring quotes:

• As a child of God, I am greater than anything that can happen to me.


• Be more dedicated to making solid achievements than in running after swift but synthetic happiness.


• Climbing to the top demands strength, whether it is to the top of Mount Everest or to the top of your career.


• Do we not realize that self respect comes with self reliance?


• Educationists should build the capacities of the spirit of inquiry, creativity, entrepreneurial and moral leadership among students and become their role model.


• English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.


• God, our Creator, has stored within our minds and personalities, great potential strength and ability. Prayer helps us tap and develop these powers.


• Great dreams of great dreamers are always transcended.


• I was willing to accept what I couldn't change.


• If a country is to be corruption free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are the father, the mother and the teacher.


• If we are not free, no one will respect us.

-Vignesh

Random Thoughts !!

Today has been a really depressing day and i thought i will feel better if i write about something. Its really odd hours and i am wondering why i am sitting and typing something which, most likely, no one might even bother to read. But still, ever since i started writing my blog, it is one thing that i have been really obsessed with.

I know this post will not make any sense as i just wanted to get over time and scribble something. Here are some random thoughts that i have had about my blog ever since i have started writing it.

• I first started writing the blog inspired by one of my college senior varunkumar. You can visit his awesome blog here


• At the first thought, there were a few questions within me that will naturally arise to anyone who wants to start a blog. At first, i answered these questions myself as follows:
  
  
  
  • What will i write about ? - Some personal stuff and some technical stuff and hence i decided the description of this blog to be “From geekiest to craziest”
  
  
  • Who will read my blog ? - I thought of targetting my twitter/facebook followers initially and since then, i have been updating about my blog posts in facebook and twitter.
  
  
  • What do i get out of writing a blog ? - I did not know the answer for this initially. But now, i have figured out that every time you keep the last full stop on your post, you feel the immense pleasure of being able to convey something that people will really read ( and also that you have written something that google will really show in its search results !! )
  
  
  
  


• The name of my blog, as many might not understand it. “Je L’ai Dit” means “I Said It” in french. I have described about this in the “who am i” page of this blog. Anyways, its just a small denotion that whatever the content of my blog is, i am totally responsible for creating it.


• My blog is powered by wordpress and i use the theme InSense.


• My bad (or good) luck, google started denying adsense for sub-domains a week before is started my blog. Adsense terms now states that you can apply for adsense only with a top level domain and not a subdomain.


• As many might have not known, my blog has an alias URL http://www.jelaidit.co.in

As i said earlier, this post really does not makes much of sense, but it really has helped me to get my mind of out other things and given me a peace of mind. I really love my blog and i really love writing. Thanks to all you guys who have been keeping my blog going.

P.S.: I am not posting a status update on facebook/twitter about this post as it doesn't make sense.

-Vignesh

Search Engines and Je L'ai Dit :-)

I was recently wondering whether search engines would be able to pick my blog up and decided to perform an analysis by egosurfing. First of all, what is egosurfing? It is a term that i have picked up recently, it means browsing the internet about yourself to see how famous you are online :-)



Here are the results from google. (Read it as "query - result")

• Je L'ai Dit - 8th result in 2nd page (17th overall)


• "Je L'ai Dit" (with quotes) - 7th result


• geekiest to craziest - 10th result


• "geekiest to craziest" (with quotes) - 1st and the only result


• from geekiest to craziest - 5th result


• "from geekiest to craziest" (with quotes) - 1st and the only result


• vignesh foamsnet - 1st result


• irctc tcp ip - 16th result


• google caffeine vignesh - 1st result


• "chennai and its laws" - 1st result

As my access logs say, yahoo and bing haven't picked up my blog at all yet. I strongly feel this is where google stands out. My blog doesn't get linked from anywhere apart from my facebook and twitter posts. Yet google somehow managed to locate and index it. For now, google is crawling my blog at a very low frequency rate. Hope it increases as i start posting regularly. :-)

-Vignesh