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...