?DURNK

Read very fast:

Once again, I was reading AbsUrd and wanted to write a comment there. Comment became way too long. So am posting it here and linking it to her blog :) Payal my sweet heart, you are my inspiration! :P

Now read slow:

Remember those drunk nights? The kind of things you did... You probably wouldn't even have dreamed of doing anything like that in your complete senses. Those mornings when you wake up and have to go over pictures to trace back the previous night! That's what we are talking about... Let's just list out few of those crazy moments here. Payal has a good list oh her blog - The things you can do on pretext of being drunk. I am just adding some more points there:

- Flirt with that cute guy and get away with it next morning 'Oh man last night was so fun, I don't even remember what I did'

- Kiss the bartender/Bouncer

- Scream your lungs out

- Pour your heart out, laugh, cry, hug, or any other BS

- Slap that guy you absolutely hate, or be a bitch to the guy who doesn't pay attention to you otherwise

- Just pass out. Where ever, when ever! And have a good night's sleep

- Have a life changing conversation with a complete stranger

- Have a serious conversation with friends on "How to save the world?"

Feel free to add to it. I know everyone has their drunk moments :)

P.S. This is no confession!!

My dear laptop,

I know this e-mail might piss the crap out of you, but I couldn’t hide it anymore. There are some things I want you to know…

By how I have been treating you from last few days, you should have a fair idea that something is going on in my mind. The time when I picked you, you seemed to be pretty strong and reliable. That’s why I went ahead and let you be a part of my life – an indispensable part indeed. But only after one year you have changed. So much so, that I am sitting here writing this letter to you.

You have lost all the things that attracted me to you. Your nine cell battery is dead now. You don’t even have back up for a minute. So you are no more portable. I can’t take you anywhere, cz you need to be plugged into the wall all the time. Not only that, you don’t even look the same anymore. The cover for the dvd player has come off. It looks like you have lost a body part. Even if I ignore that, I still miss other things about you.

Like, I miss pressing your left click button! I still remember the day when I pressed it for the last time and it got stuck – never returned to its original position after that. Even today my eyes become teary when I look at that stuck button. I also miss the days when you didn’t have mood swing issues. Do you remember the time when I could just do what I wanted to, run several applications at the same time, and visit ten different web pages? And you… you never had a problem. You were fast and capable of handling all the surprises. But now – you PMS! You throw random bloodhound detection warnings on me. And how can I forget your rude “Out of Disk Space” warning?

And what was up with temporarily effing up my ‘F’ key last month?

What is your deal?

All I want to say is that I still love you. And I want us to be happy together, once again. Just like how we were in the beginning. Tell me baby, what can I do to fix it?

Love.

Let’s call it a reading challenge!

Confession time! I have been wanting to improve on my reading habit from a long time. Back in the days... (High school days I mean :P) I loved to read. All kinds of stuff – classics, fiction, non-fiction, good bad, short, long, sad, happy, inspirational and everything else. And slowly I just stopped reading. And like everyone else, I found a million things to blame it on. School, friends, family, time, newer hobbies etc. And I always promised to myself that one day – one fine day – I will get back to reading.

I guess now is the time. I have decided to start reading for pleasure again. And since I have a very short concentration span, I will have to have a plan. So let’s do this – From now on, every time I pick up the book, I will read at least twenty pages. Not too much I know, but may be a good start.

Some calculation –

I am reading The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama - Its 415 pages in total. So if I read twenty pages every time I pick up the book, I should be able to finish this book in about twenty days. But since I am on a vacation, I can read more, or may be twice. So let’s say forty pages every day. And that way I can finish reading the book in ten days. Not bad!

Wish me luck :)

P.S. Feel free to be a part of this challenge, cz it's like challenging yourself to read better stuff more often :)

How to strike the work-life balance?

All of us have been struggling to strike a balance between our work life and personal life. And obviously it's not easy, else it wouldn't have kept the entire world on toes, trying to hit it. Balance can never exist as a fixed point in life. It is a state of juggling efficiently between the several important things in life, and making time for all. This dynamic state of being, makes it difficult to achieve.

The truth is - there is no perfect balance. Like what former General Electrical chief executive, Jack Welch, once said "There's no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences." So how do we make the right choices?

1. Set your priorities right - We must figure out what really matters to us in life. What is that one thing that our life should be focused on. And what comes next and so on... It could be family, career, health, hobby or anything else.

2. De-cluttering your day -Some unnecessary activities take up a major chunk of our lives without us realizing it. And eventually making us less productive during the day. For example, checking and replying to e-mails instantly. It interrupts the on-going process, and we spend time arranging the mailbox folders every time we get an e-mail. And we end up spending five minutes every now and then. The idea is not to procrastinate, but to set aside 15 minutes or so every two hours to check, reply, arrange the e-mails. Watching T.V., too frequent coffee breaks, long lunch breaks come next in the list.

3. Never bring work home - We often tend to bring work home, or spend extra hours at work when it's not required and this significantly reduces the personal time. Bringing work home is like invading your own private time. Make sure you finish your work before you come back. Even if it means putting in that extra hour in the evening or cutting your lunch hour short.

4. Don't over-commit - Especially Indians tend to promise delivering more than what they can. And then we tend to compromise on our personal time. This eventually burns us out. Don't be hesitant in being realistic and setting realistic goals. If you do end up over-committing, ask for help!

5. Force vacations on yourself - Take some time off to avoid the burn out. Talk to your boss, and book tickets in advance. Vacation is important (and it has been medically proved). This will give you more time for family and will rejuvenate your energies so that you can perform better at work once you come back.

On another note, don't bring your personal life at work. Don't forget you are being paid for the work you do. Try to be as effective as you can be during your work hours, so that you don;t have to put in extra time later.

With these little changes in your lifestyle you can also achieve a state of effectiveness and harmony in your life. Let's make living simple :)

I had to tell this to you...

Without giving you much background, let me just start with the highlight of the day –

I had to attend an online training today, for which I had to call into a web meeting. Since it was going to be a looooong one, I decided not to use my cell phone. Instead I called in via VOIP (Skype) – $2.95/month for unlimited calls within the USA. So everything was set, and just before the meeting started, I found out that there was a technical issue on my end… a VERY, trust me VERY, weird issue.

When I called in I sounded like a man! No kidding! That freaked the presenter out and he had to mute the phone. LOL

Let me know if any of you knows how to fix this problem… please :)

Top ten reasons why you should be happy that you don’t have a job!

1. You can sleep for more than eight hours, wake up late in the morning

2. You have time to enjoy your morning coffee

3. You can lay by the pool during the day, work on your tan and read when everyone else is at work

4. You can take an afternoon nap

5. You can post more often on your blog and have more time to read mine

6. You can listen to your favorite music, eat a heavy meal, read/write what you want to, facebook all day and basically do anything you want to do and no one would care

7. You can work out more regularly and attend the group fitness classes

8. You can stay in touch with your friends because you can shoot them e-mails, call them, or write on their walls

9. You can stay up late in the night without guilt

10. You can waste as much time as you want and enjoy every moment of it

About You, Yes You!!

My dear readers,

As you know that I love you so much, and write for you, and only you :) Let me write this blog for you, about you...

If you read my blog, you possess most, if not all, of the following personality traits:

• You are a good friend - to me or in general to all of your friends. Cz I assume 'most' of the people who read my blog are my friends (if I don't know you, I would love to).
• You are spontaneous and open to ideas. You appreciate observation and respect opinions. You like to know what some people think about things that most people don't even pay attention to.
• You like random thinking. You like to ponder upon things that don't matter to most of the population on this planet. And you also like to know about things that matter to most of the people in this world.
• You are too curious - about life, relationships, incidences, mishaps, things, places, people. And it's a good thing!
• You are awesome - Cz only awesome people read awesome stuff!
• You either like me dearly or dislike me totally (or just don't know me :P).
• You are interested to know what not to do in life. Cz I usually do it and blog about it. You love to have fun and are adventurous.
• Your life is full of those FML moments. And you can laugh about them.
• You love working out but don't work out enough. Or just want to be better looking. Or love shopping. Or food. Or are lazy. Or just simply love life. Or all of the above.
• You are not perfect and you love it that way.

Birthday Analysis (Yeah!)

Turned 24 today. And just like every year, I sat down to think about who I actually am/have become. Results were something like this...

Electrical engineer, daughter, sister, granddaughter, niece, cousin, friend, woman, dancer, photographer, thinker, talker, writer/blogger, dreamer, doer, problem solver, shopping addict, music addict, food addict, beach addict, future billionaire, Indian, North Indian, Delhite, liberal, traveler, carefree, idealist, fighter, lover, survivor, flirt, volunteer, fun, free spirit, adventurer, explorer, chameleon, celebrity-in-making, goofball, troublemaker, city-girl, optimist, partner-in-crime, extraordinary, funny, rebel, not just-another-girlie girl!

Feel free to add/comment :-)

Not a rant!

I am posting after a break and y'all know the reason - being busy hunting for a job, studying, traveling, maintaining two blogs... Basically just trying to survive each day. But I will NOT rant about it. And I will also NOT rant about my laptop acting funky. I will just mention it. Simply, plainly, casually just mention it...

So my dear laptop (read it with great sarcasm) decided to throw a message on me every time I try to open any program. Be it a word document, or a website, or a picture, or anything else. To get that most annoying "Disk out of memory" message, all I have to do is to click on something. It won't let me log into any websites either. What I don't understand is that what on earth happened to ALL the disk space? No, I am pretty sure I didn't use all of it. Has someone secretly been storing their stuff on my disk? Grrrr...

What's even more annoying is that I feel paralysed without this piece of technology. I have mixed feelings about technology. Well yeah, I am an engineer, but can we not ignore it for a moment? Good. So as I was saying... I have this mixed feeling about technology. As much as I love it and am fascinated by the new gadgets that keep adding to the already flooded electronic market, it makes me think about the days without the blackberries and the laptops. I totally appreciate the development and I promise that I am totally not from the old school. But I do miss the days when a computer was just a computer, and a phone was just a phone. And we had our personal lives, not dependent on or addicted to these super products encapsulated in tiny bodies.

I miss the days when we used to go out and spend more time with our friends and not just poke them on facebook while doing million other things side by side. (Puhleez... don't bring out the point of distance, time etc here). Those old days when the kids used to go out more often and not just play video games at home. When there were no facebook/orkut stalkers. When we actually used to call our parents more often and not just send them an e-mail. When we used to send real flowers and greeting cards on birthdays instead of the e-cards. For some reason we were not this busy. People who came up with the electronics claimed to ease our lives by doing everything for us, faster than us.. But don't you think we have become busier than ever before?

Eeeeesssshhhhhhh... So I just read above, and yes I agree I sounded like a grandma :-P But you can totally blame it on my laptop that is acting up on me. I get SICK keeping it under control... or at least trying to keep it under control.

P.S. I stick to the grandma statements I made. But I also admit that I am addicted to technology and I can NOT imagine a life without my electronic friends - laptop, ipod and their other cousins.