Abhi Yerra

I moved my blog to posterous. The new link is http://journlr.com

I have decided to leave Twitter. It is useful for some and I even got noticed due to the whole UHS data breach fiasco, but I just don’t find a utility for it. There is just something missing. I like writing down thoughts, but most of the time I don’t really care if people read that stuff. Actually most of the time I actually wish that no one would read it. I might want to write certain things that I just want to keep private and I think for stuff like that Tumblr fits the bill. I can post the random links, quotes, etc. I run into as well as post to a private tumblelog. Then again Tumblr allows you to post Tumblr posts to Twitter so I might use that… maybe…

Being a product of the web/mobile/text messaging generation, landlines are a bit of a mystery. They are phones people have at their homes, people call from them, but why are these antiquated things still around? In the land of cell phones why are those things even used. I decided to take a look and decided to put it on a diet at home, an extreme diet actually though not a diet that will lead to death.

So my parents had this $60 a month plan with AT&T called All Distance (meaning as far as the borders of the US… I guess AT&T has a patriotic meaning for all, false advertising suit anyone? I’m looking at you pre-law friends of mine) which provided all the wonderful features one would expect on a modern day cell phone on a land phone. But the pricing scheme is off the fucking roof especially since it’s only $20 bucks lower than the cell phone bill. Also, looking at the bills for the last 6 months (at least they got the website right… when it’s up) I saw that they barely made 40 calls a month on the service.

I told my parents to go basic and get the cheapest plan possible since we usually only get incoming calls not really outgoing. This automagically cut the cost of our bill by $45 bucks! So I was looking around their site and saw the “features” I could add to the phone line and was struck by how expensive it was. $15 bucks for CallerID! Are you fucking kidding me? I can get a fucking SIP provider who will not only provide a DID number with all the bells and whistles that these bastards are charging ridiculous amounts for less than they are charging for a basic plan!

My research continued a bit further. So what was the state of our cell phone? We have AT&T Wireless (I love my iPhone) and realized we were not using all of our minutes (hell we have about 10,000 rollover minutes with like a 1000 expiring every month) so I told my parents to start using the cell phone more. Your probably thinking, “You told them what? Are you mad?” Yes, I know it was unusual advice. Yes, I know I could have just gone to the lower tier rate and cut a further $20, but with almost $45 saved on landline bills and with how much my mom has her cell phone with her anyways on my parents long drive to their second store it was a fair call… no pun intended. My voice usage oddly enough coincide with the evening and weekends when calls are free so I don’t have many minutes used during the day (ah… college). Since we have enough minutes to last a recession using the cell phone a bit more is not a problem.

So what about the landphone why even keep it then? It seems a bit useless if I told my parents to just use the cell phone a bit more. Well since we did have it and local calls are free and I started liking Skype (ykabhinav… call me) so I got the $30 a year unlimited US & Canada subscription and setup Skype to Go on the home phone. Since my parents are used to the nuances of Calling Cards anyways it is not much of a hassle for them to call Skype and bridge the call. I even set it up so that it just dials through Skype in the address book.

So what did we do with the savings? Well my dad spend $5 bucks more to get faster internet at home and I spend $10 bucks more to get unlimited family text messaging, after all my sister is growing up and she needs texting as much as I do. And I figured might as well teach the parents a bit about modern day convieniences where not everything requires a call… (Sent some info to my dad about BofA which he was asking about yesterday, he replied, “Ok.” My father’s first text message…).

Update: After using Skype for a couple more weeks my parents have gotten rid of all but the minimal service at their store thus saving them even more per year. If people were to do this at this rate it would seem that the landline business is pretty dire.

I’ve started working on a simple project over break. Actually it’s a really simple idea, one which can be built in 15 minutes or so with any good screencast on a framework of choice. Then why I am I writing it? Because I can! It’s called Journlr. The idea behind it is simple, there are so many places where you can publish thoughts for others to see there is no place to just keep a plain old for my eyes only journal (or none that were astetically pleasing to me). So Journlr!

Though, it needs a lot more work especially in the departments of making it “official-looking” it is good enough for general use. I will release incremental updates to fix the sore spots. It uses OpenID so I don’t collect any information about you and is intended to get you writing as soon as theoretically possible, so just sign on with OpenID and you are ready to go. The only thing that is in the server is your identity url so if you use a service that obfuscates your identity url you are generally anonymous.

However, I feel this isn’t good enough for anonymity so I’ll be adding client side encryption in the future using JavaScript (especially since Firefox 3.1, Chrome and Safari-Nighly are kicking ass in performance. All I can say about IE, fuck you. your useless now and will be useless in the future… though I have heard Windows 7 is nice…).  But the gist of it is that data will be encrypted on the server and all encryption will happen on the client, so all data stored on the server itself will be encrypted. Hopefully, if I have money and this service becomes popular I’ll add SSL, but that’s a big if right now. This is in the works on a branch on git, but I haven’t gotten to it per usual.

You might be wondering, “What kind of half assed software is this? It doesn’t even have a damn edit button!” Well my angry friend there is a reason for that design. I don’t want the filtering of thoughts that are written. We filter too many of our thoughts, even though it is a good thing there are times when we should just write and be done with it: unfiltered, unbiased, pure stream of consciousness. That is what Journlr wants to be, a place where you just write and post once done. If you really need to edit it copy it and post again with all the nuances of reformatting the Textile markup (yes, I’m not going to make it easy on you).

I have started meditating lately as a way of self control, attempting to limit my desires and ego while striving to do what I need to do. I have been doing this after reading the Bhagavad Gita which goes into a metaphysical description about ones connection with God. However, what interests me the most is Chapter 6 about meditation.

Meditation as I do it involves the combination of a mantra and the breath. I attempt to follow the three stages of existence when I breathe: creation, preservation and destruction. Therefore, coorelating it with meditation: inhaling, holding the breathe, and exhaling. While doing this I have a mantra that coorelates with the different parts of these states.

My posture is that of a half lotus with my left leg above my right as that is the most comfortable for me with my back straight. I attempt to gaze at the tip of my nose as recommended in the Gita. It is a good spot to focus on as whenever thoughts come up there tends to be a waivering from this spot. When you realize that you have lost this spot just come back to it.

The point of meditation is to connect with nature, the oneness of all existence, so I like to meditate on the grass when possible.

Now the hard part in all this is following the breathe. The mind is like an ocean throwing wave after wave. Sometimes these waves are large and throughout the meditation calmness doesn’t exist, sometimes these waves are short allowing you to see the calm in short glimpses.

As a reminder for myself and anyone else who is striving for this goal the point of meditation is practice. Calm the ocean of thoughts letting them go one by one until you see the calm and your connection to existence as a whole.

I grew up on the internet! When the net was taking off it became my haven for information. As my generation grows up we are not going to be turning to printed newspaper for news. This is not a fault of the newspapers, but their inability to understand this change taking place.

The printed newspaper had been a fine way to transmit news and opinion in the analog world. However, we no longer live in a analog world and increasingly the death of the printed newspaper is imminent. My generation is tied to the online world in ways that people could not have imagined when the web becoming commonplace in the 90’s. We increasingly have short attention spans where the speed at which we get our information is limited to the speed of the internet connection that we have.

News and information, from gossip to business news, travels at such speed that the printed newspaper will not be able to weather it. The printed newspaper is a static entity: once printed we don’t see updates until the next one comes out. However, how do you deal with news in an ever changing society when news becomes obsolete five minutes after it comes out? Printed newspapers can’t deal with that.

When I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal I was hoping that the paper would be something I’d read everyday. However, there is so much information that I don’t digest in the paper that increasingly I feel like a large part of the paper is just a toilet for Stalin. I tend to read the paper online because it gives a convenient way to cherry pick the information that you want to read or feel interested in without feeling like your destroying the environment by not reading everything in the paper.

In the next 10 or so years the printed newspaper will largely die off in the form that it is now and will be a comodity that one goes online to find. The problem as it is now is how do you monitize print journalim in an online world where people are largely appatetic to paying.

If you want to see a crappy comedy with the camino of satire and history gone wrong, this movie will just do it. Seriously, it was agonizingly boring I mean the first five minutes before that movie started were great; saw the Batman trailer and it looks pretty sick. However, that was about the best part of it yes it sucked even before it started. Two hours of absolutely no plot development with elements of parts taken from different movies; Godfather makes an entrance. All in all, if you can get through this movie twice without feeling like an idiot I’ll give you a dollar.

It seems America has done away with the monopoly that religion once had, according to the Economist’s Religion column called Brand disloyalty. This is interesting in that churches now are basically run like a business. There is probably billions in untaxed profit (churches can’t be taxed) that is being generated in the name of God.

Considering that we are in a recession, according to a person I respect Warren Buffet, they will probably generate a lot more. People tend to look for a higher call when something goes wrong in their life, i.e losing their job. Because of this community will form, some religions will do s better job at serving the community than others, in churches and networking of individuals will begin. This will be one of the factors in the multitude of variables that will lead to a recovery in the economy.

In contrast, according to the article, there is a larger unaffiliated group which means that religion is not the only choice anymore for picking a social network to join.

I updated my design for my OCF website. I wanted to explore a different approach than my previous design. That is I wanted to get to the core of what I want to do. I want people to come to this blog, I want people to look at my photos, I want people to be able to access my resume, and I want people to email me. That’s it! Four simple things.

I know I could add a lot more, but by keeping it simple I get to the core of what matters.

#61 Bicycles « Stuff White People Like
5 craiggers

What’s the deal with bike helmets? Is it acceptable to wear one? I see a lot of white people who ride fixed gear bikes with skateboard helmets, but just as many people who ride those bikes without. Are there guidelines that outline the acceptable combinations of helmet style to bike style?

Also, what is the most acceptable way to avoid getting my pant leg caught in the chain?

Does comedy really induce questions about reality? Here the situation is that we are on a humorous blog in which a person asks about an actual question about reality. Is it then that things like Jon Stewart an Stephen Colbert are valid forms in which to ask questions?

I find it funny that in this site there are about 3 groups of people. The first are the people who agree completely with what the writer says, the second group is people who form questions based on the issues raised in the post, the third smaller group is the dissidents who actually talk from the other side of the picture. I assume a lot of the latter group stop reading early, or don’t really care much.