Simple pleasures of life...

1· Waking up on a winter morning and realizing you have five more minutes of sleep and rolling back into the warm comforts of bed.
2· A warm shower.
3· Flushing a roll of tissue paper down the toilet and watching the roll struggle crazily for escape.*
4· Watching old episodes of The Popeye Show.
5· Humming “Jingle bells” to yourself at Christmas time.
6· Singing aloud your favourite song at top of your voice.
7· Hearing the sound of rain from your room.
8· Listening to your old favourite songs after a long time.
9. Listening to sound of ocean in a conch-shell.

* By this, I mean the entire roll. Put an end of tissue in the clean toilet and then flush. It's quite a fun to see roll unwind itself

The Orkut Crush

I have that feeling again, of being in love. It is pretty usual for me – merely a routine work, people say it’s because of the positioning of Venus in my birth-chart. The only unusualness in this whole affair is that I have seen my ladylove on Orkut.com and never ever seen her in real life. For all I know, she could be an impostor – a boy posing as a girl, though I am sure that this is not possible because I have been tracking her photo albums for some time and it does look like a genuine profile of a girl studying in Indian Institute of Technology – Kanpur, India.
I came across her while browsing through scrapbooks of one of my friend’s friend. I saw her photograph and the first thing which came to my mind was that this can’t be any real person – no one can be so beautiful and I was proven right. It was just a trick of light in that photograph, the extra shine which made her appearance completely divine. Yet, I have to admit that the girl was pretty, and the fact that she had so many photographs in her profile made me visit her profile many times and before I knew it, she became my first ever online crush. The only sad part is that I don’t even exist for her, and I am not one of those desperados who instantly scrap every girl they come across ostensibly to have “friendship” with them but covertly hoping to have sex with them at the first chance they get.
Such social networking sites can come out as a strong alternative to matrimony sites because people are being more “natural” while putting their personal information and not trying to “sell” themselves to prospective brides and grooms so the information is genuine and more extensive. The other factor is the list of common acquaintances which are listed out when you visit a profile, so your background searching also becomes easier.
I wonder if Google is pondering launch of “Google Matrimony (Powered by Orkut)”...

Electricity through Gymnasiums

I started going to gym around 2 weeks back, which is pretty cool. It has everything including power backup but I am particularly intrigued by those self-powered machines. They get powered on after someone starts doing exercises on for few seconds. They convert mechanical energy to electricity and these machines gave me this idea…

Most of the power generation converts mechanical energy to electric energy, if we could harness the mechanical energy wasted during exercises then some energy problems of India could be solved. I am not talking about them at large scale, though the solution is very much scalable.
For example, my own gymnasium must be consuming around a hundred units of power daily, with 5 AC to run and 3 high power amplified speakers, not to speak of the electricity consumed by light bulbs and treadmills. The cross-trainers and the bicycles we work on are self powered, cycle them once or twice and the display on them comes to life. I am sure the display consumes far less power than is generated at the time of exercising, if that extra power could be fed into a system for charging batteries and that power could be used when batteries are charged fully then a considerable amount could be saved on electricity and hence greenhouse emission.

Talking about electricity, in my housing society there are 300 flats, on an average one person per two household goes to gym which makes for around 150 persons. Each of them burn around 1000 calories per day which comes to around 150,000 calories which is 150,000 X 4.184= 627,600 joules (1 calorie = 4.184 joules) and 627,600 joules = 627,600/3,600,000 units of electricity = 0.174 units of electricity. This amount may look like too little but here is how to look at it, we have a power backup through a 0.5MW generator which translates to 0.138 units of power generation, get the picture now? We are talking of considerably higher power generation for free and all that while people improve their health!
If my own society had gym, which was free for its society members, which could harness this power, we would never need that generator! And the picture gets even better; because the gym will be free more people will join the facility which means more power generation. It does mean using humans as rats on wheels, but who cares, people will do it willingly.
Is anyone listening?!!