justtodolist.com is another side project of mine. I have now released it to the public. Go take a look, tell your firends, and I hope it becomes useful to you.

Okay, here's the best way to watch the Beijing Olympics(in the US):

1. On a Mac-mini that's hooked up to a 50" DLP Samsung TV or larger...
2. Go to nbcolympics.com and click on "TV & Online Listings".
3. Fill out some forms to go through which asks what's your TV provider... it's really BS. Don't choose Cablevision or From the Air and you'll be okay.
4. When you are through, choose the Online Listings tab, this will list by sport. Live events will show with the listing, so if there are live events you want to watch, just click on that. Otherwise, click on the sport that you are interested in watching and you will get a listing of the prerecorded events that you can watch, click on one and video will start.
   
5. The Video player requires Microsoft Silverlight, just follow the steps to install it. It works with Mac too.
6. Once the video player is working, and the main content (after the ads) is going, you can click the "Enlarge Video" button on the bottom right.
7. There is no fullscreen mode, but that's where the Mac's zoom function comes in. Do Cmd-Option-8 to enable zooming if it isn't already, and then Cmd-Option-=(or plus) to zoom in to the desired size, (Cmd-Option-(minus) to zoom out).
8. One last step to hide the mouse cursor by pressing shift-Cmd-4 and the moving the cursor away from the center. Curtesy of this article.
   
9. That's it! Perfect! Resolution is pretty good, I'd say on par with analog TV. The selection is MUCH MUCH better than on NBC's TV line up. There's no commentary, which could be good and bad, I personally like it. AND, MOST importantly, No Ads! 'nuff said.
   

I am proud to announce the first episode of my podcast: The Music Chair. I am now a podcaster! I have done two interviews so far. But, one of them is till not out due to technical issues. I am excited about this project, because I love the music, the personalities, and also I realized this will help improve my speaking skills tremedously. Please go and subscribe using iTunes, and give my suggestions and feedback.

OSSpinions.org has undergone a major update. I've been working very hard on this, but there's still a lot of work left to be done. Interested parties please take a look and give me some feedback.

Google Spreadsheet Forms is superly awesome! Try it out and add it to your repitoire if you haven't.

Good read here.

Amazon's Kindle actually looks pretty impressive(watch the 2nd video on the page). What impressed me most is that the store connects to the internet via satellite(not wi-fi) for free! Yes! Free! You can do the following things online: buy books, read newspapers and blogs, and search wikipedia. The idea is that amazon is providing you internet access for free because you are supposedly paying for it by buying their books. I already read tons of blogs and new regularly and I know reading it on an e-reader will be much more pleasant for my eyes, so this is something I might actually consider. I don't read books a lot now but that's mostly because it's so troublesome to carry a book around. There is a downside to this device though: it is UGLY! It's definitely not an iphone.

update: there are other negatives, actually:

1. the price $399 is pretty steep
2. you have to PAY to subscribe to magazines and BLOGS? I am NOT paying to read blogs if I haven't had to do it otherwise
   

My DIY laptop case! The idea is courtesy of Make Magazine.

Cool! Found some barcamp pictures on Nick Ali's blog. The flickr group is here. I actually got in a few of the pictures.

I was lucky to attend the first(I believe so?) barcamp in Atlanta. What is a barcamp? It is essentially a geek-fest. Geeks come together to have an ah-hoc conference on any topic that they want. At the beginning of the event, an empty schedule is put up, and anybody can fill it out by allocating a block of the time to talk about a specified topic, which is called a session. There are multiple rooms, so multiple sessions can occur at the same time. The Atlanta barcamp lasted from Friday evening to Saturday afternoon at the new Georgia Tech ATDC building, some camped overnight prepared with their sleeping bag(in door), others went home to sleep and then came back in the morning the next day(that's me), and some others still did not sleep at all.

This was the first such event I've been to and I enjoyed it a lot. Some notable sessions for me were: Stephen Flemmings talk on trying to privatize space exploration and his experiences... and the vomit comet, I learned about the availability of webcomics , saw a demo on and saw up-close the one-laptop-per-child laptop, and a talk about marketing for geeks. I hosted a session with Timothy Moenk(whom I only just met) on opening up social networking, or the "social graph". Also I learned to play the Settlers of Catan(a German board game) from Mikah.

Some take backs
I felt that most of the sessions were scripted(guy with ppt presentation), and also a bit too short(30 minutes) to allow any free form discussions since most of the time would be used up just going through the slides(sometimes not even). What ended up happening was that the topics that I attended with which I was already familiar would not teach me anything new(like the one on Javascript and code coverage, for example), what I would have prefered was to have another half hour at least for free form discussion about each others' experiences about the techology/methodology. So what ended up happening was I went to more talks that were about things I didn't know much about, and I got a lot out of those.

Another problem I ran into was that sometimes 2 of the sessions I was interested occured at the same time, which forced me to miss one of them, others have had the same issue as well. Don't know what to do really about that... maybe we all share the same gmail calender and use a chat feature to resolve any conflicts?

I met a lot of really smart and geeky people, and had some beers, pizza, and a good time. Cooper: I would have like to see your Gwittir session, but had to leave early on Saturday because someone's installing granite counter tops in our kitchen.

here is something interesting to read in order to lower cholesterol naturally.
http://www.solveyourproblem.com/lower-your-cholesterol/foods_and_diet_for_reducing_cholesterol.shtml

some points:

• there is evidence that points to lower cholesterol levels in people who eat several small meals a day.
• Eating about three ounces of walnuts a day is shown to decrease blood cholesterol levels by 10% more than an already low fat, low cholesterol diet. Walnuts are high in fat, but it is mostly polyunsaturated fat, which is the kind that lowers cholesterol. Another study shows that about three ounces of almonds which are rich in monounsaturated fat, lowers LDL by 9%
• You may have read about the low rate of heart disease in France. It led researchers to believe that the French habit of drinking red wine with meals contributes to this. Apparently some of the non-alcoholic ingredients in red wine raises HDL and suppresses the body from producing LDL.
• Purple grape juice works the same way. It will work like red wine to lower the fat level in your blood. The LDL lowering effect of red wine and grape juice comes from a compound that grapes produce normally to resist mold. The darker the grape juice, the better.

I tried out the Amazon online music store the other day. Ironically, I used it to buy the new Feist album which I learned about from apple's new ipod nano commercial(Ha, sorry Apple, whom I am a stockholder of, I kinda screwed you). In the Amazon online music store all songs are in the DRM-free mp3 format. The price 89 cents per song undercuts Apple's 99 cents per song. The price per album $8.99 also undercuts Apple's $9.99 per album...dang! The buying experience was ok, not much surprises. You checkout as you would as other amazon purchase, and you have to buy install their downloader to download the tracks. And then of course if you use iTunes you still have to import them to the library. I like it. Apple, you better do something quick.