A Tricky Digital Examination ...

Do not be fooled if your doctor says you need a "digital rectal examination"....

there is nothing "DIGITAL" about that examination...

thats doctor's language for saying he/she is going to use his/her DIGITS to exam your body part in question......!!!!

"Sticking" with the old....

tired of your non-stick pans?

tired of being "gentle" with them ?

tired of using the soft side of your kitchen sponge to "gently" clean them? really feel like using the HARD side and scraping their bottom clean?

left it on high heat and returned to see the non-stick surface disappearing in smoke??

tired of getting a new set every year to replace the last years because they are now super glue pans?

back home and back in time, mom used to have one flat cast iron DOSAKALLU to make dosas,fry fish, fry eggs, whatever...and another deep dish "cheenachatti" for appams, curries and other stuff...

she has gone through a lot of non-sticks, but still has and uses the two iron ones...and i checked with her and found they were gifts she got during their wedding...so the two really are OLDER than me !!!

couple years bk, we got ourselves a real heavy cast iron skillet....and so far, we are loving it more every day....

its been through heavy use, daily fried eggs, almost daily fried fish, and weekly dosas and appams....

and it looks as good as new.....

and you use it right...nothing really sticks...waay better than non sticks....

and even if something does, you can scrape its roots out with a HEAVY METAL spatula...not the soft feather touch ones you need for the non-sticks...

and if you forget it out on the hot stove...it just sits there, like its the best place on earth.....

and best of all...when its your turn to do the dishes...you can scrape its ass clean like there is no tomorrow....

so its been 2 years...and we did go through a couple less non-sticks in this time than normal...but get back to the cast iron...coz this now really feels like a step forward...not back...

:))

a test match of a hiatus...

watched a one day game after a long long time....maybe 4-5 years...

was browsing around on espn360.com and i noticed india vs. sri lanka idea cup available. put it on....

and i had to note these down along the way....

:)

it is 8.5 hours long, but you can do whatever you want while the game is on...read, work, check mails, just look at the screen when you hear the shouts...either the crowd, the players or the commentator....the game really does not mess with your day at all...

very odd watching the game without any advertisements between overs...you are not used to seeing replays of a boundary hit on the last ball of the over, or the start of strides of a paceman's first ball....

umpire drew a circle above his head after a no ball, and "free hit" was displayed on screen - googled that one immediately.... :))

ravi shastri seems to have taken over from siddhu....

"that really was a biriyani over.."

"that ball found the boundary like a tracer bullet.."

i dont know which commentator it was but yuvraj was looking at the bat quite often and he said "what are you doing bat? you are not making that sweet sound with me!"

dhoni somehow looks younger and fitter??

the espn feed continues right through half time break...there was laxman sivaramakrishnan on the pitch doing a mic test...he was singing "one two three......" in carnatic music....and then shouting at someone in tamil "nee soupaa? naan maggi noodles da..."

the only guy i knew in the sri lankan team was sangakkara....and for good reason...they showed the number of matches each guy on that team has played, sangakkara was close to 250, next one was 89, followed by 30.....

Unsharp Mask !!

The command in photoshop to sharpen an image is called "unsharp mask" - interesting name for a command - I had to google and find what it meant...pretty interesting history behind it too...

In the "old" days, to sharpen a film image, during developing, they used to first faintly expose another negative with the same image, but a bit blurred (the end result of which is a faint positive

!!). This blurred negative carrying the faint positive was called the unsharp mask. Then a combination of the unsharp mask and the original negative was used to develop the final print. This appeared sharper to the eye than the original print.

Today's software uses the same logic behind the scenes, creating the mask and applying it over the image....and hence the name !!

Top Story of the Decade

Interesting top story of the decade - not sure which show it was on radio - my best guess is "the giant show" on project 961 radio atlanta...

They were counting down the top 10 stories of the decade (2000-9), and 9-11 came in No.2

what was #1 ? It was america's obsession with celebrities - and with good reason...

People are more interested in knowing what britney did to her hair, or how anna nicole or MJ died, or the girls that tiger had....than knowing what evidence did america have to go to iraq or what caused the subprime crisis....or even where bin laden is....

This interest drives the news channels to have almost 24/7 coverage of the latest celebrity buzz....and that is just perfect for the government and corporations...as long as celebrities keep dying or screwing up...they can do whatever they want....

so this obsession deserves to be the top..not 9-11...not anything else....

Holdability

This has nothing to do with the "drinkability" of beer - which to me means how close has the brewing process got the end result (beer?) to taste like the water they started out with.

This is about the "holdability" of a magazine. Can I fold it and hold it and read it the way I want? If yes, I do end up reading more of it for sure. All those thick glossy ad pages, half page thick inserts ads, all reduce my holdability. So what do I do when I come across a mag with these? Tear all those pages out and make it more holdable.

Don't know how many others do the same, but if you are an advertiser planning on a thick glossy page, you have a better "chance" of getting these eyeballs if that ad is on a normal page....

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French menu

If the americans were to follow the example of the french, and start listing food as it is on the menu, maybe people will eat less of their favorite meal. It will probably be listed on the menu as

Enormous greasy grilled beef patty with lettuce, tomato, pickle, smothered in mayonnaise, served in a refined flour bun, deep fried sliced potatoes dunked in salt, and a gargantuan glass of artificially flavored sugary carbonated water.

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