Some conversations I had with (e:Paul) yesterday sparked off a series of thoughts about my inherent resentment with the whole gift-giving culture that exists around weddings, birthdays, baby-births and all sorts of other sundry milestone "occasions". It made me recall one of the numerous reasons why I rejoiced in my move to buffalo and left my "mandatory gift-giving" baggage behind.

When I was in Rochester, it seemed that everyone except me was getting married, having kids, throwing kid and pet birthday parties and ALL I was stuck with was trying to appear decently interested by getting them, their spouses, their kids, their pets (yes, their pets!) and their extended family some decently priced gifts or just writing them cheques for hard cash.

You might argue that I had free will in these matters. But I don't think free will ever factored into the mandatory-gift-giving culture at all. Deviation from it was often viewed as an equivalent of me saying that they could go to hell with their milestones because I couldn't care less about them. I don't think that was true.

I sometimes genuinely felt happy about their milestones when they told me about it. However, I am not sure that my elation at their having achieved that milestone translated into voluntary gift-giving. I often faced unwritten pressure from my fellow-students/acquaintances to get random department-mates mandatory gifts. It reflected the insidious face of consumerism that most of my "friends", coworkers, acquaintances assigned to my relationships with them.

It was never enough to wish them well, enquire after the well-being of their loved ones, donate my time to help them out in random everyday situations and continue on without my relationship without being weighed by the price or grandiosity of my expected gift or favour to them.

So I am very thankful and super-glad that I am not in such a terribly awful position anymore here in Buffalo. I genuinely like around 98% of the people I know and interact with here. My "gifts" come from my heart and are not always about a price-tag. However, it was never the case where I was before (read: parent universities and workplaces) so I know the oppression of forced gift-giving all too well.

In my case, I just took the step of walking out of such relationships before the undercurrents of gift-giving resentment and unequal expectations undermined them completely into open hostilities. Looking back now, I sometimes think this is why my quality of life in Buffalo is heads and shoulders above any I have ever had elsewhere.

PS: And yes, the worst was Rochester. I have very few fond memories of the duration of my stay in my parent uni and almost every single of my sparse favourite moments came from what I did with people completely unconnected to my academic life. I disliked that place for so many reasons and in so many ways. Every day I spend in Buffalo highlights the wide abyss between my experiences in Rochester and my polar opposite experiences in Buffalo.

And since I am thinking about it now, out of the 500 odd people I interacted with on a regular to semi-regular basis during my stay there I guess the ONLY real person I miss from Rochester is my landlady who was like my second mum and unconditionally gave me her love and help all throughout my stay in that wretched "city" right up to my last day. It was probably my only relationship in Rochester that was completely devoid of any pressures or even convention...

Have any of you had non-trauma-related ear bleeds before?

I had some minor bleeding yesterday from my right ear. I am a bit concerned. It did happen immediately after I turned up the volume on my headphones to drown out some annoying noise in my office. So that gives me a clue that my tympanic membrane might have ruptured a bit.

However, apart from a ruptured eardrum, the second most common cause of ear bleeds is malignancy... I need a consult soon. (e:Paul) suggested the Buffalo otolaryngology group on Delaware. I wonder if they take Aetna.

PS: I now absolutely hate Rochester accents. :/

I have not been able to sleep for more than 2 hours at a stretch for the past couple months. I was a very light sleeper to begin with but my insomnia has reached an abysmal low this month.



I now envy people who can sleep an unbroken 8 hours. All this lack of sleep is swinging a wrecking ball at my already feeble efforts to put on any muscle whatsoever.

I hope this phase passes soon. I feel like an unsatisfactory ghost of what I really want to be.

I lose my notes all the time and can never keep them in one place. I then conduct detailed unwieldy searches to locate them because I only remember having written a note somewhere with some specific content but never recall what I named those notes! I now have something that fixed this problem quite elegantly - Scratchpad for Chrome!!!

With Scratchpad, I can not only have all my notes sync silently with google docs but also search their full text from anywhere and everywhere. I think eventually, I will end up replacing the bland notepad entirely with Scratchpad.



I only wish I could embed Scratchpad and Google Tasks side by side on chrome's new tab page now.

More about this awesome App:

Nice idea - replacing the food guidelines pyramid with a plate instead.


I would suggest, cutting those grains by half and assigning that half to add up to an eighth more of vegetables.

If I cooked and planned ahead like this woman wants us all to, I'd never cook anything.

My favorite way to keep grains, beans and herbs is labeled and stored in glass jars ranging in size from gallon to 1/2 pints. These same items, if stored in boxes or plastic bags, defy functional organization...

Yeah, and you never know when you might reach for rosemary and use cilantro instead.

Remember, if you’re hungry right now, it is not the time to start washing rice. Order a pizza for dinner and while you’re waiting for it to arrive, then determine tomorrow’s main dish.

Seriously? How long does it take for this woman to cook rice? 5 hours? I have never EVER had a hungry day when it took me more than 20 minutes to put a well balanced rice-based dish together from scratch. Such ridiculously pseudo-methodical articles about planning ahead and cooking is what makes simple cooking seem tough to people and encourages junk food consumption.

Cooking is meant to be unplanned, quick, improvisational and fun when you are doing it for yourself and your loved (or even unloved) ones. That is why it's called "cooking" and not "strategizing".

A few weeks into any of my fresh Chrome installs, my extensions and bookmarks start to get out of hand. I just try out most of them and forget to remove them. But a few of them are constants. Some of them can even be called useful. Yeah, apparently, I don't have anything interesting to blog about so I will blog about dull things now.

The 1st extension I install (and this reflects the sad state of my internet usage) is the creatively named OWA Chrome Companion which obsessively checks my work email every few minutes and pops up a wild array of small notifications everywhere if a new message (however spammy and random) comes in - at which point I have a mild anxiety attack and scurry about trying to unsuccessfully ignore the email. It kind of defeats the whole point of the extension.

Oh well... moving on, I hate filling forms and entering passwords repetitively so these two extensions just fill them in for me:

• Autocomplete = On
• Lazarus Form Recovery:

I guess if someone developed a way to hack these extensions, I could be in serious trouble...

And I hate new windows popping up all the time so this extension makes them behave and forces every single tab and page and popup into ONE window. By the end of the day, I have a million tabs, but still it a fair price to pay for ONE WINDOW!


It's kind of a vicious cycle, so I need this "Tab Glutton" to keep a check on my tabs. (Actually, I end up not managing them at all and sometimes accidentally close everything and re-opening everything again from scratch but let's not talk about it.)


Then of course, there is link grabber which helps me visualize all content on a page and the content that I am usually interested in (pdfs mainly) at a glance and grab them without having to wade through all the text.

Lastly, Readability Redux makes the web a better place:
I can get rid of most evil and awful ads and poor web designs and can read the content in peace. I just wish there were a spring green or vibrant orange background to the text...

And that's all I know.


Strangely, this summarizes my life@work right now.

I REALLY want to go on a hot-air balloon ride over downtown buffalo ->



If I can take one of the earliest balloon rides, I then want to dash to the city hall and watch the rest of the balloons and the sunset at the city hall sunset reception!!!

Who wants to do this with me? It's on Friday, June 24th, 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM. (e:matthew)? :-)

And OoooooH! Downtown-Buffalo made authentic Cheerio Breakfast on Sunday! Wooohoo! June 26, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM, Erie Canal Central Wharf.

A mass scale epidemiological investigation into the German e.coli outbreak spread over the past few weeks FINALLY identified organically grown bean sprouts as the source of the offending e.coli strain. People who ate these sprouts were nine times as likely to develop bloody diarrhoea when compared with people who didn't. From:

After wild allegations against the whole Spanish salad produce industry, the unmasking of the organically grown sprouts as the culprits comes as a bit of a eye-opener about the health risks of organic farming. Are we really sure that the human and animal refuse used as fertilizers in organic farms do not leave behind cysts and eggs of sundry virulent bacteria and parasites? Do we always make sure that we wash our produce well before eating it raw?

In the past, I have been guilty of trusting apparently fresh-looking greens and produce too much and eating them after a cursory wash. However it pays by the spadefuls to remember that cysts/eggs are hardy and can survive mild non-abrasive washing. It is up to us to make sure that our food sources are not contaminated.. and even if they are, that we do the utmost that we can to prevent superficial parasitic and bacterial cysts and eggs from entering our system.