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Those who are close to me know about some of the tumult around me in the past 6 months. In various guises, I’ve been asked a number of times what I’ve been doing amidst the chaos? And in most cases I’ve made vague statements about my career and its direction (mostly about how I haven’t been sure about what I’m doing next).

So, in that chaotic period between October and late January, I was essentially …

I have a little over half a month before my job at 3M comes to an end. In October, the entire staff of about 65 people was laid off. Most of my colleagues had their last day on December 17, 2010. My team and I are among the remainder whose last day will be February 28, 2011.

So between all the trips I’ve had to make to Minnesota with my team mates, I’ve had opportunity to think about …

Weird way to come back, I know, but look: it’s a sought-after enough feature that there are a number of hacks to get it working. So the problem is this: I run irssi within screen on my server, and then connect to that screen session from my laptop, and I’ll add to the plethora of solutions for remote irssi + local notifications.

At work, I connected to the work IRC daemon from irssi running locally, and I had installed …

For the past 7 or so months (maybe more?) I’ve been in the mode of quitting Gentoo. At first, I wanted to make sure I had a new email address at which people could contact me. Since 2001, my primary and only email address has been my Gentoo one. And it’s still the one that appears on google searches of me. Now, of course, I’m me at this domain, so it should be a no-brainer. Anyway, as …

This recipe is great either grilled or baked. Pair it up with sauteed spinach, corn on the cob and wild & brown rice pilaf. Enjoy!!

• 4 salmon fillets or salmon steaks
• 5 tablespoons light soy sauce
• 6-7 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
• 4 scallions finely chopped (green and white parts)
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 3 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger
• 2-3 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
• 1 green chili, chopped
• 1/2 tsp salt
• splash of sesame oil

Combine …

These muffins can be made days in advance as they will keep for several days in the refrigerator. They make a perfect low fat snack or a quick breakfast.

• 1 cup all purpose flour
  
• 2 tblsp flaxseed meal
  
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
  
• 1/2 tsp salt
  
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves
  
• 3 ripe bananas (mashed)
  
• 1 egg
  
• 2 tblsp apple sauce
  
• 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
• 2 tblsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp ground …

Just to follow up on the last entry’s mention of django-tagging, I thought I’d paste the ebuild I created for it (that I have in my own personal overlay. I’m opting for not providing a download because the version could change and this ebuild code should be valid for higher versions. I named the ebuild django-tagging-0.1.ebuild and threw it into /usr/local/portage/dev-python/django-tagging. After that, just go into that directory and run:

ebuild ...

All of a sudden, more than a month has passed and I have not added any new entries. I’ve been working on and off on a markdown extension to handle abbr and acronym tags. So far it simply refuses to work (the code doesn’t even seem to get executed). For the curious:

import re, markdown, random

class AcronymExtension (markdown.Extension):
    def __init__ (self, configs) :
        self.config = configs

    def extendMarkdown(self, md, md_globals) :
        self.md = md

        ABBR_RE = re.compile ...

Coupled with our obsession of weight loss is the dream of achieving those sexy, well-defined flat abdominals. The question is, will exercise alone accomplish this?

To an extent, yes. Abdominal fat is tricky to melt away. Our cores are the centre of strength and as nature would have it, the hardest muscle to tone. Gaining belly fat has a direct relation with diabetes and heart disease.

Through personal research and trial, I found that cutting out foods that contain simple …

Very early on, when I was still playing with the look and layout of the website, I asked my friend Lisa. At the time, I was still just running the django development server. Anyway, Lisa has a great mind for web standards and the evolution of web markup. So she immediately picked up on the fact that my pages had a doctype of Transitional HTML 4.01 and gave me quite a bit of a lecture on things I should …

For as long as I can remember, there has always been a debate about which diets work and which don’t. The preoccupation, especially among women, to lose pounds and keep it off has resulted in a variety of diet pills, diet plans and work out programs. I believe that the secret to losing weight lies in understanding the basis of nutrition. Once we understand this, portion control should become a discipline we master. Unfortunately, our society lacks this fundamental …

The time came for me to start thinking about where to host my site. And although I have some experience with using dreamhost to host sites, I wasn’t particularly thrilled with that idea. Instead, I started thinking about using a VPS. That would allow me to use gentoo linux as my hosting environment, and it meant that I wouldn’t have to hack around and do clever things just to run django behind apache and mod_python. Added to that …

In one of my earliest blog posts, I wished my sister a happy birthday. Today is exactly two years since, so Happy Birthday to Sindhu :)

Edit: My sincerest apologies to all your feed readers — my blog programming skills are not good enough, apparently, to keep drafts from getting published. I thought I’d fixed the problem this morning, before getting on the plane in San Jose to return Boston, but apparently not. I don’t think I even fixed the …

Well, I just wanted to conclude the Subaru saga by sharing a picture of its damage. I should post a picture of it in its prime, to be fair, because that’s how I’ll always remember it. But anyway, here you go:

I did actually buy a new (not brand new, silly, a used car) car a few weeks ago, I’ve just been waiting to set up this blog site before I did, so I could show it …

One day, while searching for something Django related, I ran into a really nicely done Django weblog. What caught my attention here, is that he came up with a way to spiffy up his comments display by showing a country flag for each commenter. It looks really spiffy. So I decided to play copycat.

Well, it only took a few minutes to implement it in the testing version of my own blog, and I showed it off to a couple …