Living life out of a laptop

I am currently living a good part of my life out of a laptop.

I use the laptop for

• work - priority, of course, and uses up good 10-11 hrs of my weekday
• entertainment - music, movies, news practically everything
• information - google maps is quite popular out here, I am wondering what people did before google maps came into existence. I cannot imagine finding my way in a paper map.
• cooking - Yes, I use it to search for recipes and english names for some desi ingredient.
• communication - email, chats, scraps.........u name it.
• Online transactions - order phones, pay bills

So effectively my laptop never sleeps..................or it does only when I sleep.

Anyone out there who can stretch the scope of a laptop, please let me know. I'll be more than glad to explore.

First impressions!

I landed on one of the most developed countries in this world last weekend as an "alien with a valid immigrant paper". I stepped foot on 2 international destinations en-route to the DFW airport at Dallas,TX.

As any new experience would have it.........here are my first impressions of this land.

• Highly process oriented..........there's a lot of process and order to everything around.
• Almost everyone here seems to own a car.........the number on the road probably exceed the 2 wheelers back home.........therefore you hardly see anyone on the road.
  
• People's notion of "vegetarian" food is wrong. Fish, chicken etc are considered vegetarian.
  
• Public transport is practically nil. Whatever little exists is excellent in terms of service but lacks network to drive people towards using it.
  
• Every area that has a few high rises is referred to as downtown.
• Everything is huge.......each onion is of the size of a coconut, coffee mugs are the size of a pet bottle, juice cans come in gallon portions.
• When you sit in car.....u seem confused coz of the reversal of directions.
• Lack of poverty and undernourishment has it's share of problems.......As I sit in the plaza area and watch people around me I observed that a large share of people are obese. The situation looks scary.

till I add to the list............Bye.

Story behind the tissue culture!!

Out here in USA the area around the bowls are meant to be dry........which means the only way to clean up is to use tissues. Well some adapt to this easily while others find it quite difficult. I belong to the second category.

The first time I had to decide to break conventions made me think........... I was trying to analyze how the tissue culture came into practice.

And here is my analysis..........

Well this country experiences cold climate for most part of the year. In the early years technology was not good enough to provide hot water in the pipes. So it must have been extremely difficult to clean up using cold water after answering nature's call. So that's when the early man must have decided to use paper instead of water!!! And it just caught on as a "best practice".

Another interesting observation with the same context is the use of cutlery to eat food. Back home in India our hands are considered the most convenient option. The cold climate over here must have forced people to wear hand gloves which makes using hands to eat a difficult option.

Well these thoughts confirm my belief that every custom has a reason for the way it's evolved and is mostly an effect of man's attempt to solve a problem on hand.

If you come across any such interesting observation, I'd love to hear from you.

Signing off..............

Experiencing change!!

The subject line in one of my earlier blog was about how my life was set for a change.......and now I am experiencing the change. It seemed all of a sudden though I knew at the back of my mind that it was coming............

Here I am in another part of the world trying to adjust with everything around me............the people, the place, work....almost everything.I hope this experience adds value and another dimension to my personality.

For those who didnt know.........I flew to Dallas, USA from Bangalore, India last weekend. It's been a week here and I'll try and reserve another blog for a list of my interesting experiences with the aliens out here.

Till then adieu.