Image/Article Source: Oh no They didn’t

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Food: If you’re a vegetarian, prepare to cook. There are very few options for you when it comes to eating out. If you live in a college town, finding Indian places to eat is going to be even more harder. The important thing is find an Indian grocery store and stock up on all the spices that are required. If you’re living on low cash, then cooking at home can save you a lot of money too.

When shopping for food you will quickly notice that peas are sweet, the milk is like water, all the vegetables are huge and largely tasteless. If you buy eggs, I suggest you buy cage free organic eggs. These will cost a dollar more but they taste more like Indian eggs and smell less. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have the money to buy everything organic but get used to the fact that peas, corn and some potatoes and onions will be sweet so prepare to add an extra dash of spice wherever you add them. All the crops are genetically modified therefore, they will not have the same richness of taste as the desi vegetables. If you want good milk, don’t buy skimmed/fat-free milk. Organic whole milk is my preferred choice but I’ve seen people be happy with 2% milk. Yogurt in general is expensive so buy buttermilk instead. Buy white/red onions they are better for cooking and are not sweet like yellow onions. If you’re buying potatoes buy red potatoes they are closer to the taste of desi potatoes. Americans have an obsession with sweetness and a lot of the potatoes that “look” like desi potatoes are actually very sweet tasting and take a long time to cook.

Cooking: YouTube is your friend. If you need a quick recipe. You just have to type the name of the dish in the search box and you will have a video with clear-cut instructions instead of a text recipe. I found it very useful because you could see how the dish is being made and how it looks in the end. My favorite people to go to are Vahchef. He has his own site vahrehvah, where he encourages people to post their recipes. The cool thing about vahchef is that Sanjay (the chef) has an enthusiasm for food that is incomparable to anyone else out there. You can tell from his face that he loves cooking and his tips in general are very useful for desi cooking abroad. Showmethecurry and Sanjeev Kapoor Khana Khazana are also a couple of other places I really love.

Keeping in Touch: Make sure you use an online calling card service like Rebtel, Jaxtr or Airtel Call Home to keep in touch with your family. In general Airtel is very reliable and recommended.

Lifestyle: If you’re a gadget enthusiast, you will quickly realize that there is something new coming out every year that you would want. There is always the temptation to get the new and shiny gadgets but make sure it fits the budget. It would also help if you could get into the habit of saving a few dollars every month whenever you can. It would help in the long run because there could always be some kind of a surprise expense or an emergency and a few hundreds of dollars of savings will help you in the long run.

Accent: It is a given that if you’re born and brought up in India, you will have an accent while speaking. Some people are conscious about it and some are not. Americans themselves have accents depending on the region they are from. Make sure you speak slowly and if they don’t get it, be prepared to repeat yourself. This will be especially painful during calls to customer service. I have spent 5-10 minutes just spelling my name which is not very long by Indian standards. Make some American friends, so you can practice your skills on them.

The lifestyle in USA is not very different when compared to the metropolitan lifestyle in India. The difference is however in having to manage everything by yourself. Cooking, studying, research work and having a social life can be tasking in the first few years. It also depends on how cool your professor is really. So don’t worry if things are crazy in the first couple of semesters. It will get easier with time and if you have any questions, leave a comment. I will be glad to help you out.

Image Source: PhD Comics

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What happened to all the nice guys?

The answer is simple: you did.

See, if you think back, really hard, you might vaguely remember a Platonic guy pal who always seemed to want to spend time with you. He’d tag along with you when you went shopping, stop by your place for a movie when you were lonely but didn’t feel like going out, or even sit there and hold you while you sobbed and told him about how horribly the (other) guy that you were fucking treated you.

At the time, you probably joked with your girlfriends about how he was a little puppy dog, always following you around, trying to do things to get you to pay attention to him. They probably teased you because they thought he had a crush on you. Given that his behavior was, admittedly, a little pathetic, you vehemently denied having any romantic feelings for him, and buttressed your position by claiming that you were “just friends.” Besides, he totally wasn’t your type. I mean, he was a little too short, or too bald, or too fat, or too poor, or didn’t know how to dress himself, or basically be or do any of the things that your tall, good-looking, fit, rich, stylish boyfriend at the time pulled off with such ease.

Eventually, your Platonic buddy drifted away, as your relationship with the boyfriend got more serious and spending time with this other guy was, admittedly, a little weird, if you werent dating him. More time passed, and the boyfriend eventually cheated on you, or became boring, or you realized that the things that attracted you to him weren’t the kinds of things that make for a good, long-term relationship. So, now, you’re single again, and after having tried the bar scene for several months having only encountered players and douche bags, you wonder, “What happened to all the nice guys?”

Well, once again, you did.

You ignored the nice guy. You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy. You laughed at his consideration and resented his devotion. You valued the aloof boyfriend more than the attentive “just-a-” friend. Eventually, he took the hint and moved on with his life. He probably came to realize, one day, that women aren’t really attracted to guys who hold doors open; or make dinners just because; or buy you a Christmas gift that you mentioned, in passing, that you really wanted five months ago; or listen when you’re upset; or hold you when you cry. He came to realize that, if he wanted a woman like you, he’d have to act more like the boyfriend that you had. He probably cleaned up his look, started making some money, and generally acted like more of an asshole than he ever wanted to be.

Fact is, now, he’s probably getting laid, and in a way, your ultimate rejection of him is to thank for that. And I’m sorry that it took the complete absence of “nice guys” in your life for you to realize that you missed them and wanted them. Most women will only have a handful of nice guys stumble into their lives, if that.

So, if you’re looking for a nice guy, here’s what you do:

1.) Build a time machine.
2.) Go back a few years and pull your head out of your ass.
3.) Take a look at what’s right in front of you and grab ahold of it.

I suppose the other possibility is that you STILL don’t really want a nice guy, but you feel the social pressure to at least appear to have matured beyond your infantile taste in men. In which case, you might be in luck, because the nice guy you claim to want has, in reality, shed his nice guy mantle and is out there looking to unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you.

If you were five years younger.

So, please: either stop misrepresenting what you want, or own up to the fact that you’ve fucked yourself over. You’re getting older, after all. It’s time to excise the bullshit and deal with reality. You didn’t want a nice guy then, and he certainly doesn’t fucking want you, now.

Sincerely,

A Recovering Nice Guy

Source: Okay. I did not write this. Obviously, I am stealing this from somewhere. I would link that source but it asks for your twitter password annoyingly and I wouldn’t want people to fall for that. Also it does not link to the original source so I do not feel bad for stealing it. If someone points me to the original source (since I am too lazy to find it now), I will gladly link to it or remove it as per the author’s request. Thanks and hope you enjoyed reading it.

Picture source: Picture is Guy Sensei (or Gai) from Naruto in his nice guy pose.

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[album: http://idleblogger.com/wp-content/galleries/starwars-stuff/forceluggage.jpg]

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I googled “how to erase permanent marker from dry erase board” and viola I got 122,000 results. I clicked one link that sent me to Lifehacker (one of my favorite blogs) and it had a really simple solution (from Wikihow) involving 3 simple steps.

1. Get a dry erase marker (yes, you make marks to take marks away) and a dry eraser. The darker the color of marker you use, the easier the marks will disappear.
2. Draw over what you want to erase (make sure you draw slowly to fill it in better).
3. Erase what you’ve written over as you normally would. Surprise! It erases.

I actually just used a tissue to wipe it off and it all came out clean. Not even a spot or residue. I am completely impressed. This made me realize that I should trust the internet, no matter how stupid the idea is ) .

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Honestly, this is the funniest thing I have seen all day. Boing Boing has crazy stuff. Click the link below for a complete description

Kneeling Bench to Prevent Splashing While Peeing – Boing Boing.

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I was having a quiet evening on Tuesday chatting with my girl friend and I was disturbed by a phone call from my roomate. I was completely annoyed and hoped to God that he wasn’t calling me to open the door because he forgot to take his keys. I know its only a few steps away but I’m just lazy that way . It turns out that the reason behind the call was that one of my friends got mugged at gunpoint. Three black guys came asking for a nickel and just took everything he had on him including his cellphone and wallet, which had his atm card, a few credit cards, his university identity card and several visiting cards he had collected in conferences he attended all these years as a Phd student. They called me to find out the bank phone number so he could de-activate his cards.

The painful thing about being mugged is not just the monetary loss. The few dollars you lose can always be made in a couple of months but the trauma is just unimaginable. This guy was the funniest guy I have known, who was always cheerful and joking about everything in life but he was visibly shaken by this experience. He couldn’t think clearly and we had to make the calls to the respective banks so he could talk to them. It was horrifying to say the least. He had to get a new identity card which cost him $25, a new cell phone and lost a whole bunch of contacts because he took his wallet for granted. He has to get new credit cards and change the card numbers for all his services. Getting robbed is one thing but getting everything back in order after getting robbed is another headache everyone has to put up with.

The weird thing is that, my roomates nearly got mugged two days after this incident. They were walking back home at 230am in the night from a friend’s place. Its just a stupid thing to do, especially after what happened. They were chased by a black guy carrying a gun and they immediately escaped into a nearby apartment complex. They tried knocking on the door but nobody opened and they hid near the stairs until the guy just disappeared. They called one of the guys and he picked them up in his car.

Its just bizzare because Auburn is generally considered to be  a quiet place. Its a university town and there have really never been any instances of mugging or anything remotely violent (a few last year but far away from the campus). Even if it happened it was unbeknownst to the desi community living here. This has definitely put me on my toes and this probably means not going out to eat later in the night. Staying away from work late nights and generally looking out in the surroundings. So everyone out there, be careful. Do NOT take your streets for granted. Anything can happen. These are just bad times.

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Finally, I upgraded my blog from the stupid free hosting plan of godaddy to the paid plan. No more messy ads on the top. I nearly never see them because of the adblock plus extension installed in my firefox browser. I tried opening the website in Chrome the other day and I was swamped with ads on the top of the site. It was ridiculous. I decided to upgrade my hosting plan and I moved everything to the new host. Fixed all the categories, missing pictures and added tags to the old posts. Took me awhile to find the missing pictures because I was directly linking to the websites (which is very bad because you are stealing their bandwidth) and some of these websites have gone down in the past couple of years.

It took me awhile to find an appropriate theme for the blog too. There was another theme that I really loved but the green really turned me off. I think this is a good temporary theme. I will definitely need to look into theme editing some time in the future. All in good time. A few more fixes by tomorrow:

• Fix the blogroll with all my favorite links
• Find a newer and better theme for the blog. I love the colors but hate the font and style.
• Fix the “about me” page
• Add an RSS feed to the sidebar.

Update:  I think that basically fixes the laundry list of things to do for now. I will hopefully keep blogging as often as possible.

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It has been a long time since I blogged. Much has happened since my last blog. I am in a different country now. I am working harder than I used to and I am perennially busy. But I intend to get back to writing again and more importantly blogging. I need a creative outlet and I have been ignoring the signs of my stagnation for the past couple of years. Happy to mediocre and just dragging on with my mundane life instead of taking charge of things and living a good life. I want to bring change and part of that change is to incorporate blogging again into my life style again.
There are a few things I am planning to do:
1.    Be pro-active, establish daily goals and finish them.
2.    Get back to reading.
3.    Lose weight and get a flatter tummy.
4.    Spend at least one hour away from the computers. I call this “Digital Sanyas”
5.    Connect with the nature and enjoy the little things in life.
6.    Blog at least 3 times a week.
7.    Learn at least one new programming language (preferable php)
8.    Learn one more language (French, Spanish or some other fancy European language)
9.    Play one game at a time and finish all the pending games.
10.    Try to keep people around me happy by reducing my ego.
That’s my 10 point plan for success. Let’s see how it goes. Another update in a couple of days .

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I found this cool nerd test online. I managed to score 96 a . Click on the above image to take the test yourself. Post your scores in the comments .

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