David Brooks Column: Amy Chua Is a Wimp

I do not often agree with Brooks, but boy, does he sense here. I am starting some projects at my work with several disparate teams and his points about participation in a group and the collective intelligence of a group ring so true.

Also, I can now explain why my grades sucked during my first year of college :)

Unmuting comcast DVR

Yesterday, my comcast dvr suddenly went mute. I can see the picture but there is no sound.

Instead of calling comcast which will first make me go through dumb 101 troubleshooting procedures, i googled: comcast dvr unmuting

And I found this fix in 1 min:

1. Press the "Cable" button at the top of the remote to put it into Cable Box control mode.
2. Press and hold the "Setup" button until the "Cable" button blinks twice.
3. Enter code 994. The "Cable" button will blink twice.
4. Press (do not hold) the "Setup" button.
5. Enter code 00141.
6. Press whatever button you want to map the mute function to.

from: here

Almond Breeze, Silk Pure Almond Spark Fight in Dairy Case - WSJ.com

Singing the virtues of Almond Milk...

Almond Breeze, Silk Pure Almond Spark Fight in Dairy Case - WSJ.com

CAN 35MM SLR LENSES BE USED ON DIGITAL CAMERAS?

If you take a 35 mm SLR lens and divide it's focal length by 1.6 you get the equiv dslr lens focal length. For example, if you take an 80mm lens of 35mm SLR, the equiv DSLR focal length is 50 mm.

The conversion table is at:

http://www.porters.com/LENS%20COMPATIBILE.pdf

Russia in color, a century ago - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Russia in color, a century ago - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Absolutely gorgeous color pictures recalling a different time and a different place (or is it really?)!

First book of the new year

I persisted and finished through Patrick O'Brian's 4th Aubrey-Maturin Novel: The Mauritius Command. Once I got the time to read it, the book was such a page turner. But being a historical novel and as it was written by Patrick O'Brian, the book was fairly complex to read. Patrick uses a lot of complex and somewhat obsolete words and expressions and ofcourse there are a lot of nautical terms. But once I got over those issues and got used to reading these books, the humor, the plot and the action kept me completely hypnotized.

Here is the review of Patrick's Aubrey-Maturin series in nytimes book review:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE5D9113CF935A35752C0A967958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Here are the highlights of that review that made me hooked on to these Novels:

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On the foundations of this friendship, Mr. O'Brian reconstructs a civilization. The Royal Navy at the beginning of the 19th century was a world of extraordinary breadth and complexity. Its hundreds of ships, the larger of them regular floating cities with close-packed populations of 1,200 souls, allowed Britain first to survive and then to prevail in a struggle whose cost and size would have been unimaginable only a generation earlier. These sailing ships -- today reduced to quaint and soothing images on wall calendars -- were in their time the most complicated machines on earth, and the deadliest.

Patrick O'Brian presents the lost arcana of that hard-pressed, cruel, courageous world with an immediacy that makes its workings both comprehensible and fascinating. All the marine hardware is in place and functioning; the battles are stirring without being romanticized (this author never romanticizes); the portrayal of life aboard a sailing ship is vivid and authoritative.

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