Transition to Mac

With the increasing popularity of MAC, more and more people are considering a switch to MAC but are still bewildered as to what this would entail. I wanted to share my own experiences in this regard.

First of all, most current hardware works with MAC with very few exceptions.


Also, most software products have their mac counterparts. The first thing to do is to get used to the MAC counterparts for the software that we use in windows. Here are some which I found very useful:

The iCal and Contacts applications in MAC are perfect for their intended needs. The ability of iCal to obtain different calendars even from the internet is awesome. I view my normal calendar with all my appointments along with a calendar of all US Holidays, another calendar that has my wife's engagements etc. all in iCal. When I look at the entries they are color coded differently so that I know which entry came from which calendar.

Many users of ipods are already used to itunes and hence it should not be a big deal to start using iTunes. However to play wmv files i have installed flip4Mac as a plugin to the Quicktime movie player.

Of course the command line tool is different for Mac. The Terminal which ships with MAC is pretty good especially since it is all bash!!! Woohoo! Love the UNIX command line environment. You can also download iTerm(free) for a better terminal. It supports multiple tabs and can be made more transparent. Cool!

Here is a list of software that works in windows and has its mac counterpart:

Yahoo messenger(free download) - which is almost identical to its windows counterpart except for the fact that it does not support yahoo chat

Microsoft Office for MAC (purchased software)- This was essential for me since most of us have standardized on excel, word, powerpoint and Microsoft outlook for documents.

Safari is good for browsing for the most part but you might want to go ahead and grab Firefox for MAC (free software) so that you can have a more "standard" browser. But there are certain websites that work better with Safari for me. Besides, Safari is a much more lightweight browser.

Google Picasa web album uploader (free download) is very useful to upload your pictures into picasaweb. I use it extensively.

Skype has a mac version.

Finally, there are some things that are exclusively in mac and are way toooo cool.

Download pixen(free) for a free picture editor. iPhoto(shipped with MAC) also has a very decent editor but pixen has some cool features like allowing you to work with layers. Picturesque(free download) allows you to decorate your photos with some cool effects such as adding a reflective pool below the picture etc. Very pleasing effect indeed.

The MAC dashboard is an awesome thing. It allows various widgets to be added to accomplish various activities. The widgets shipped with MAC are great. Check out their clock, stickies, calendar etc. One of the coolest dashboard free widget available is the one available at widget-foundry.com. This one allows you to download the album art for any song that is currently being highlighted in iTunes. It fetches the album art from amazon.com and allows the user to set the found album art to the selected song(s). Check it out. I think it is very cool.

Marsedit (purchased separately) is a great software to upload your blogs to various blog sites. Most of my blogs (including this one) are written using Marsedit.

Cyberduck is an awesome FTP tool to do en masse uploads into my website.

TextWrangler is a great text editor. The best feature of it is that it can edit a remote text file (from an FTP server) and save it when the COmmand + S button is pressed as if you are saving it locally.

Growl(free software) is great for notifications. It hooks with most softwares (iTerm, yahoo messenger, cyberduck etc.) to pop up tiny windows when significant events happen. For instance, growl gives you a notification when a user from your yahoo messenger buddy list comes online. It also notifies you when you have uploaded a file successfully into an ftp site using cyberduck.

There are more tools besides these. Will add them as I learn more.

Stock Market in India

The stock market has started captivating my interest of late. It all started when I went to ICICIDirect (one of the worst stock market sites there ever is by the way) and got myself a demat + savings + trading accounts. I then pumped in a little bit of money and started scouting for stocks that would generate returns.

I inevitably hit on www.moneycontrol.com which by the way is a fabulous site. It offers a great portfolio tracking tool with support for computing taxes, tracking profits/losses and of course the ability to update your portfolio with the CMP (Current Market Price - See I am already learning the lingo) of the stocks that you own. With the help of the great boarders there I picked a few stocks. I started trading in them and got hooked!! So as is my wont, I started to ruminate about the reasons why a person would love stock markets.

The first reason is obvious- this is a way for my money to make more money. So my money is working at least as hard as I am to create more wealth.

The second reason I thought is the fact that humanity loves trading by instinct. We love buying and selling stuff. When I lived in the USA, my instinct got satisfied by buying myself various cool gadgets. I took great pride in being called a "gadget guy" and surrounding myself with these things. I still do that even now. But the stock market has channelized my gadget-buying instinct into a money making endeavor. With this I found that not only my instinct to buy is satisfied, but I am able to make money in the process.

So I would advocate to those women who are busy purchasing jewelery and expensive clothes and the men who are off purchasing cool gadgets to channelize these instincts towards the stock market instead! It is really cool to make money and realize it works for you.

I guess i need to end this with the customary cautioning about mutual fund and stock market investments being subject to market risk.

Western Objectivity for Indians

Indians take great pride in assimilating with the locals - wherever they are. That is of course a great trait. It has proven to be extremely successful in establishing Indians as very successful across the globe. But the problem arises when this cultural adaptation morphs into a denial of your own greatness.

This "cultural grooming" sometimes metamorphoses into an acknowledgment of the superiority of the people that the Indians are adapting to. A simple examination of "American born desi kids" testifies to the veracity of this statement. Most kids of Indian origin in America take great pride in not knowing any other language except English. To add insult to injury, some of them great pride in learning "foreign" languages such as Spanish, French or German all the while oblivious to the glories of their own Indian mother tongue.

Nothing turns me off more than to see an America-settled Indian family with the kids coming in with their curt hellos, their insufferable loose Cargo shorts or Jeans that expose more body than they conceal. Many of them "tolerate" me pretty well but make no secret of their superiority. This is a typical western trait too. I was talking to a colleague at work in America the other day while we were traveling. She was quiet for a while. Then she got into a conversational mode and started inquiring whether I originally am from the middle east or India. She said that she likes different cultures because it improves her outlook. She is forced to become more global in today's outsourcing world. Of course without the outsourcing compulsion, there is no need to know about anyone else because she already has the best in her own country or probably even in her own gubernatorial neighborhood - she did not say those exact words but the implication was obvious. Why was it obvious? Because she kept using words such as quaint, "kinda cool and different", and euphemisms of that sort to cloak her feeling that it was all weird and not worth knowing but it is good to get that perspective so she can deal with her Indian cliente and understand their weird perceptions. The funny thing is that quite the opposite is true - Indians are the ones who understand Americans and are right at home with the American points of view even if they dissent from them. Anyways, I was wanting to tell this woman that her tolerance was more obnoxious than her ignorance would probably be.

But I guess that we have been trained well by our Feudal masters. Our history has been taught to us by the British. We learnt the ways of our forefathers from the Europeans. I goto a book shop and I see in the spiritual section all the great translations of Indian spiritual literature by Max Mueller. Max Mueller has been acknowledged as one of the greatest contributors to Indian spiritual tradition. But it has been forgotten that he was the one who said that “The Vedas are just a mixture of jumble-mumble”. Hence even our knowledge of ourselves has been taught to us by Westeners!! We learn their habits, ape them and feel superior as a consequence to our more native counterparts. This acknowledgment of Western objectivity as superior to the more Brahmanical spiriturality has thus been ingrained in us for a few generations now and it is hard to shake it.

The few people who questioned it such as the Great Aurobindo Ghosh have been relegated to the sidelights. It is more mainstream to negate our ancients and acknowledge the usurpers. I am definitely not a fanatic nor do I advocate violence for past deeds but I do believe that India can only raise and shine if she understands her own glory and takes pride in it.

We will talk about more in other articles.

On being mac'd

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever" said John Keats.

There is no better validation of this statement than an apple product nor is there a better illustration of a fusion between technology and beauty. Technology is the anti thesis for beauty bemoans Mr.Pirsig. (Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance) Apple comes close to proving his arguments exaggerated.

Anybody can create something functional. In this consumer dominated market most products stay afloat by providing the most needed features. However,it is reserved for a select few to provide them with grace, styling, beauty and technical brilliance. An apple product definitely aspires to be one of the select few.

And to be sure, I am far from being one of those MAC fanatics and a windows basher. I do use Windows quite a lot and like the thought that has been put in to some of their products. If we don't switch out of windows, it is due to the ready compatibility that it aspires to provide for different kinds of hardware and devices.

But a MAC blows you away. With its seductive looks which are even apparent in the packaging, it beckons you to free it from its confines and take a look at the treasures hidden inside. As you peel away the covering, you are smitten by the beauty of the machine.

I got a Macbook Pro and am still dazed at the detail that has gone into its making. From the nicely positioned Camera to the light sensing monitor and the skillfully hidden dvd drive it is pure joy to behold.

And the fun just begins. Even the fonts and normally drab looking web pages look better in the mac. It is as if there is some kind of filter that seamlessly ornaments everything in a mac and makes them exude a different aura. Think of a dirty looking car which has come out of the other side of a car wash .. perfect !!

And now with Macs becoming affordable and most important running on the UNIX operating system there is nothing to stop them.. You go mac!

Behavioral Merry go round

Wiser heads than yours truly have acknowledged that life goes around in circles. You might have seen "History repeats itself" or some such similar sentiment expounded from pulpits of varying degrees of reconditeness. What it all comes down to is that there are only certain sequences that occur in life. So if you hang around long enough, the same sequence is bound to show up again.

In this entry, I am more interested in the repetition of ideas and way of life rather than a repetition of events itself. Time and again, many of us watched as some ideas materialize, get out of fashion and are again resurrected at a later point in time. Very reminiscent of Hegel's thesis-antithesis-synthesis postulate. A thesis comes along gets outdated and then is synthesized at a later point in time with better and deeper understanding. If an idea is good in its essence, it would surface back again even if it got temporarily dis-credited in the interim. But when it does resurface, it would be much better understood the second (or maybe the third) time around.

Recently, this recurrence theme struck me in a totally unrelated context. I was watching one of those science fiction movies in which the heroine is skimpily clad in synthetic apparel that can barely contain her abundant features. It looked very close to another movie that I watched elsewhere with its main theme featuring tribals in the pacific islands. What was interesting is that the heroine in the tribal movie reminded me of the one in the sci-fi movie both in mannerisms and dressing. Both were amazons, clad in bikinis, warrior like and laughed like hyenas. So I thought if the same woman were to act in both the movies, all she has to do is to swap one skimpy bikini with another one.

Looks like we haven't changed much with the passage of time!! Or maybe we just started with the thesis that clothes are only required to cover your most "vulnerable" parts and then wandered off into an anti-thesic tangent(if that is the word I want) experimenting with different varieties of apparels. Finally, we synthesized our understanding of dressing and realized again that a minimalist apparel is the way to go. That is why our vision of the women in the future is very close to "primitive" tribal women.

Interesting huh?

Cats on the cradle

I have always loved Harry Chapin's Cats on the Cradle song. It is a very touching song and takes me down memory lane to the happy times I had with my dad. It tells you to act on your noble sentiments - it is not sufficient to have them.

Another song echoing parallel sentiments is "Always on my mind". This also tells (of course in a totally different context) that the intention is there though the implementation may be lacking.

It has been fairly rough for me to follow these sentiments in real life. Many times I wished I could do something but wont get to do it either because of upbringing, environment or plain old inertia. But I try to get around to doing it some time somehow. Like this blog for instance, it has been there in my mind to do it for a long time but could never sit down in a placid enough state to pen down what I feel. Not that there is someone sitting on the other side eagerly awaiting for the next drop of nectar to fall so they can lap it up. But it feels good to get it off the chest.

It is especially true with my dad. I wanted to do so many things with him, get him to come and stay with me and involve him in multiple ways with my day to day life rather than having this weekly conversation on the phone (we never lived in the same city for the past 19 years) . I did spend time with him but not to the extent that I wanted. With his passing, I had this intense sadness. But somehow, I feel much closer to him. Everytime I see his picture, I know he is around in the room or in the vicinity. And it is not spooky either - just a plain sense of closeness.

So there it is in black and white - I love you dad. Feels good just saying it.

See What I am saying???

We went the other day to catch some music from Buddy Guy in Delhi. Of course, being the show man that he was, Buddy Guy was great. It was interesting that he kept verifying if the audience was following what he was saying which I guess is natural considering that we are from an "unknown" culture and language.

I kind of began to see why "See what I am saying" (which I would abbreviate to SWIAS) has become such a popular ebonics expression. Yeah if you spent half your life having to explain what you mean because the people were unable to follow your slang - I can quite see you making SWIAS your stock in trade.

Of course black comedy is full of SWIAS. I have seen a sitcom the other day where every second word was that. It went like "I see what i am saying went up the girl see what I am saying and axed her see what i am saying about her mom see what i am saying" - That was it.. I really could not see what he was saying.

Tourism & the !ncredible India mantra

I sometimes keep repeating to myself "!ncredible India" after the slogan that has become such a successful ad campaign to draw in tourists to our country. I have to do it sometimes with clenched fists and through gritted teeth.

Especially when I am standing in endless lines in front of a temple or a monument and see the filth in front of me.

Or look at the grafitti carved on the outside walls of our great buildings and structures. Invariably, it is etched into the stone of these monuments by some Romeo expressing his insatiable love to his Juliet. No doubt, it is nice to know that X loves Y with such passion that he had to go to great lengths to carve this out in stone. I wonder where he got the implements to do the carving. Did he plan it all out when he started from home that morning and get himself a chisel to do the carving. Whatever he did,the end result is that he has defaced a timeless monument.

Or see the ceaseless line of beggars harassing you in their quest for I dont know what. It looks like it is not just nourishment that they are after. We went to a religious place recently. We had excess food and when a beggar came in search of alms, we wanted to give him some of the food we had. But the man declined it. He said he wants money. For what? For cigarettes? For Pan Parag? Maybe for that fancy apartment? Na, I dont intend to be callous but it looks like beggars can be choosers after all.

As we approach modernism, our attitudes need to be considerably realigned before we become recognized as the potent power that we claim to be. And most of it starts by sparing a thought to others - to the people next door, to the town or to the country.

Once we do that, the dirt in our streets, the general cacophony of vehicle horns, the incessant spitting and defacing of our monuments will be things of the past.