Kapileshwar Temple Functions

The Dog

The Dog is just sleeping.

A View from the Class

Kapileshwar Temple View

Another View of the Famed Kalpeshwar Temple form the Bus-stand

Suggestions on Education

Quick Facts:

• Population of India: 109 Crore or Say 1.9 billion
• Literacy: 59% (Male 70% and Female 48%)

Resonable Assumption:Functional Literacy Less than half of the literate population. What is Functional Literacy? Less than half of India’s population that claims to be literate, can use the education that they have received in the school.

English as the Primary Medium of Teaching:English should be taught from 1st standard onwards together with the vernacular language. Further education should be either in English or in the vernacular language of choice of the student from 6th standard onwards. The politicians will put forward the following claims against introducing or teaching in English:

• First hurdle in implementation of this suggestion would certainly be the claims of such a move being unpatriotic: Well I wonder, how I become unpatriotic if I studying in English.

• 2nd claim will be that the local languages would become extinct: English has survived last 70 years in India, therefore the local languages would also survive if they need to. Should they become extinct, let them, so have lot many. Only those languages will survive which have the utility to the common people. In this age of Information highway, where all people live in a global village only few languages will survive.

• The history of the people would be lost: We live for the future and not in the past. The requirement of the future is that we learn the language that will provide us employment. English sure has lived upto that requirement. India is now the world leader in the BPO.

Change the way: The education system in India is highly subsidized, how ever the people do not get the benefit of the money spent by the government. Nearly the entire amount spent by the government is lost in the way and do not reach to the intended destination.

• Instead of the government spending the money through its conventional ways, each school should be funded directly from a Nodal Agency.

• Ever school should have a board of Trustees made up of Teacher/Parent association who would govern the school management. The Trustees should have not more than 3 year terms and should not be able to be re-elected to the board. There should not be any participation from any political leaders.

• Every school should submit an annual Zero Base Budget fully justifying the amount to be spent on various activities. The account should be audited.

Let there be no Free Lunch: Only a handful of children in rural India go to the school. One of the main reason is that they are required to work in their parents farms. One more reason is that they see no justification in continuing the education which will not help them in earning a lively hood. And even those who did go to school grow up to swell the vast Indian educated unemployed.

• What we need are schools that are self reliant and would survive on their own. The students need to be taught how to earn a livelihood apart from the regular education.

• The children should be paid for their work in the school and they should pay themselves for the education; then only they would have a sense of self reliance and also would grow up to be educated. They would have a reason for being educated.

• The money paid to the children would encourage the parents to send them to school rather than making them work in the paddy fields.

• These schools should also be funded by the government as discussed in the 2nd point.

Let sports be remunerative:We are a county of more than a billion but we do not have a gold medal in Olympics in last 27 years. The reason for the same is that sports is not remunerative enough for the anyone to seriously pursue it as a carer.

• What we need is a national ranking system for sports persons. Something like the board exams in the 5th, 7th and 10th standards. Based on these rankings the children should be given stipend.

• The stipend should be more than just peanuts; that is, the stipend should be able support a sports person and his family. If the family is not supported, the family would not encourage the child to pursue sports as a career option; specially where the child is from a poorer background.

• Training in sports is expensive. There should be Sports Universities providing World-class sports training. The ranking should continue till one reaches to the University and should continue there also.

• No one should be allowed to have a free ride and continuous competition should be encouraged so that newer sports people can be discovered and to prepare wold-class sports persons.

• Sports should be made compulsory in every school. Govt. recognition should be given only to those schools which produce a specified number of state and district level sports persons. For example at least 15% of the pupils in every school should have participated in the district level sports events and at least 10% should have participated in the state level.

Mayajaal Bowling Arena

The Bowling Arena


Missing all the times


Final Score for Kaushik is 80 Mine a respectable 120

Mayajaal out site Chennai Town - the Bowling Arena here is faulty. All the pins are not put properly.

Women on the Road

Women in Chennai are far to open to come out and I noticed that the Buses carry more women than men. That goes to show that the women feel safe in this city and are comfortable to come out.

The Hanuman Temple

Faces

These were Pumpkins being sold with faces painted on them. In India we believe that hanging these faces painted pumpkins avoids bad influence on the house.

The Broken Chair

The Cat II

Cats are the only animals though live with humans were never domesticated.

At the Restaurant - Rangoli

Today is Makar Sankranti, end of the harvesting season and also winter. People wear new cloths and eat well. So since my mom insisted a lot i went to buy some cloths for me and tried Rangoli, a Gujurati Restaurants part of the Sarvana Bhavan at Pondy Bazar, Chennai. I had Thali, because when I asked for the menu the guy brought me the menu for the Thali - contents of the Thali only. Any way based on my previous experience I figured out that it would be very expensive otherwise to have separate dishes.

I was served with Dhokla and some other Gujju snacks (are they snacks?), and Jaljeera. The Thali had around 8-10 types of dishes, and Rotis etc. Well I did not go thru the menu what I was being served, so no idea what were there. Any way, food was very typical, and ok sorts. A little too many sweet tasting dishes. As I don’t like sweet, did not have all. Further I was not feeling hungry as well. So 80% of my plate was still full when I was full as well (what a waste of money). But I have decided to go there once more, when I am little more hungry so that I can eat properly and decided how was the food.

Sarvana Bhavan have good reputation for service, and this place was no exception. Crowd was mostly Northies.

London Citi

The Golf Course

The Wimbledon and the Dreamer

The Wimbledon+ Renault



The Wimbledon+Renault + Dreamer

At the Restaurant - Sangri La

Today is Saturday, and it is my weekly filmy day with my friend Kaushik. We went to a place called Sangri-la, which is a Chinese Restaurant near Besant Nagar bus stand in Chennai. There were not many people at the time we went to dine, may be because it was late, but on a Saturday Night, how late it could be at 2230 hrs? Food was good, authentic Chinese, service was also pretty good. I like the Chinese Tea that they served complimentary. Price was a bit upper side, but as i have found out in Chennai, dining out here is expensive, so it was ok.




This is Kaushik, trying his hands at chopsticks.

What is Marriage?

Source: E-mail forward

1. Marriage is not a word. It’s a sentence (a life sentence).
2. Marriage is love. Love is blind. Therefore marriage is an institution for the blind.
3. Marriage is an institution in which a man loses his Bachelor’s Degree and the woman gets her masters.
4. Marriage is a three-ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring and suffering.
5. Married life is full of excitement and frustration: In the first year of marriage, the man speaks and the woman listens. In the second year, the woman speaks and the man listens. In the third year, they both speak and the NEIGHBOUR listens.
6. Getting married is very much like going to a restaurant with friends. You order what you want, and when you see what the other person has, you wish you had ordered that instead.
7. There was this man who muttered a few words in the church and found himself married. A year later he muttered something in his sleep and found himself divorced.
8. A happy marriage is a matter of giving and taking; the husband gives and the wife takes.
9. Son: How much does it cost to get married, Dad? Father: I don’t know son, I’m still paying for it.
10. Son: Is it true Dad? I heard that in ancient China, a man doesn’t know his wife until he marries her. Father: That happens everywhere, son, EVERYWHERE!
11. Love is one long sweet dream, and marriage is the alarm clock.
12. They say that when a man holds a woman’s hand before marriage, it is love; after marriage it is self-defense.
13. When a newly married man looks happy, we know why. But when a 10-year married man looks happy, we wonder why.
14. There was this lover who said that he would go through hell for her. They got married, and now he is going through HELL.
15. When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.
16. Eighty percent of married men cheat in America, the rest cheat in Europe.

Pondy Bazar

This is the most happening market place in Chennai.


This is Sarvana Stores. All Chennai is Sarvana Bhavan, they are one of the largest shops in here. They have 3 buildings huge ones.



This place is called Pothy's. there is a bus-stand named after it.

Creating Simple Macros

This is the extracts of an presentation that I had prepared for an Training on Creation Simple MS Excel Macros.

Link to the file: Excel Macro Training.ppt

Introduction

• We do a lot of repetitive tasks like copy pasting, formatting etc.
• A macros help us to automate tedious or repetitive tasks with ease of a click of a button or shortcut key.
• A macro is a set of instructions that tells Excel to perform one or more actions for you. Macros are like computer programs, but they run completely within Excel.
• Macros can carry out sequence of actions much more quickly than you could do yourself.

Agenda

There are 2 ways to create a a macro: You can record it, or can build it by entering instructions in a module. Either way your instructions are encoded in the programming language MS VBA.

• You’ll learn how to rerecord and execute a simple macro.
• Then you will learn how to view the recorded macro and make it more useful by doing some simple editing.

Overview

The overall process for recording a macro consists of three steps.

• Start the macro recorder and supply a name for the macro.
• Perform the actions you want to record
• Stop the macro recorder.

Using the Macro Recorder

Rather than type macros character by character, you can have Excel create a macro by recording the menu commands, keystrokes, and other action needed to accomplish a task.

Lets see how to create a macro to draw a boarder around a selected area.

1. Select the small area in a blank work sheet
2. Choose Tools>Macro>Record New Macro. Excel displays the Record Macro dialogue box.
3. Assign Name to the macro.
4. Assign a key combination to the macro by entering a letter.
5. Store the macro in the currently active work book.
6. Enter a description for the macro in the description box.
7. To begin recording click OK. Excel displays the message Recording in the status bar and Stop Recording tool bar.
8. Press Ctrl+1 and draw borders in the borders tab.
9. Click the Stop Recording Macro button on the Stop Recording toolbar.

Running a Macro without Using a Keyboard Shortcut

• You don’t have to know a macro’s key combination to run the macro. Instead, you can use the Macro dialog box:

• Choose Tools>Macro, Macros to display the dialog box.

• Select the name of the macro, and click Run.

• You also can use the Macro dialog box to view and edit macros, as you’ll see in the next section.

Behind the Scenes: The VBA Environment

• Now that you’ve recorded your macro, let’s find out what Excel did. When you clicked OK in the Record Macro dialog box, Excel created something called a module in the active workbook. As you drawn a table in the worksheet, Excel recorded your actions and inserted the corresponding VBA code in the module.
• The new module doesn’t appear with the other sheets in the workbook; to view the module, choose Tools, Macro, Macros. Next, select the “Border” macro, and click the Edit button.
• The Visual Basic Editor (VBE) starts up, and the module that contains the “Border” macro appears.
• The first and last lines of the code act as the beginning and endpoints for the macro you’ve recorded; a Sub statement starts the macro and names it, and an End Sub statement ends the macro. You’ll notice that special VBA terms, called keywords, are displayed in dark blue.

Adding Code to an Existing Macro

• Suppose you’ve recorded a macro that enters a series of labels, sets their font, and then draws a border around them. Then you discover that you forgot a step or that you recorded a step incorrectly—you chose the wrong border format, for example. What do you do?
• To add code to an existing macro, you can record actions in a temporary macro and then transfer the code into the macro you want to change. For example, to the “Border” macro a step that sets font and border options for the table, follow these steps:

1. Choose Tools, Macro, Record New Macro. Excel presents the Record Macro dialog box. In the Macro Name box, enter MacroTemp and click OK. Excel displays the Stop Recording toolbar.

2. Choose Format, Cells, and click the Font tab. Select Trebuchet MS, 10-point, and Bold Italic. Then click OK to apply the formats.

3. Click the Stop Recording button on the Stop Recording toolbar.

4. Choose Tools, Macro, Macros. In the Macro dialog box, select MacroTemp and click Edit.

5. A window appears that contains the original macro you recorded plus the MacroTemp macro.

6. Select all the code inside the macro—from the line beginning With through the line beginning End With—and then choose Edit, Copy.

7. Scroll up to display the “Border” macro

8. Click at the penultimate that contains this statement:

End Sub

9. Press Enter to create a blank line. Then position the insertion point at the beginning of the blank line.

10. Choose Edit, Paste.

11. Scroll back down and delete the entire MacroTemp macro, from the Sub statement to the End Sub statement.

To test the macro, return to Excel (press Alt+F11 or select the Excel button on the taskbar). Clear the company name and address that you entered earlier when you recorded the macro. Then press Ctrl+Shift+A.

Using the Personal Macro Workbook

• When you recorded the “Border” macro earlier, you placed the macro in a module that belongs to the active workbook. A macro that has been placed in a module is available only when the workbook containing the module is open.
• To make a macro available at all times, store it in the Personal Macro Workbook. This workbook is normally hidden. you can unhide it by choosing Window, Unhide and selecting Personal in the Unhide dialog box.
• If you don’t see the Personal file in the Unhide dialog box, or if the Unhide command is unavailable, you have not yet created a Personal Macro Workbook.
• To create one, begin recording a macro, as described earlier in this chapter, andselect the Personal Macro Workbook option in the Record New Macro dialog box. Excel creates the Personal Macro Workbook and places its file (Personal.xls) in the XLStart folder.
• Excel opens Personal.xls, as it does any other file in the XLStart folder, each time you start Excel.
• Because the Personal Macro Workbook is always available when you work in Excel, it’s a good place to record macros that you want to be able to use in any workbook.

Going On from Here

• You’ve learned how to create macros with the help of the macro recorder. As you learn more about the VBA programming language (a subject beyond the scope of this session), you’ll notice that the macro recorder often creates more code for a task than you really need. The recorder adds these lines because it didn’t (and couldn’t) know they weren’t necessary. You can edit them out without changing the functionality of the macro in any way.
• As you move toward expertise in VBA, you will probably find yourself creating most of your code directly in the VBE, bypassing the recorder altogether

Conclusion

• The best way to use the lessons learned today is to practice it. Use the macros in day to day office work.
• Try to innovate and experiment on the things you have learned.
• Share your acquired knowledge with others.

Spreadsheet Glossary

Source: J Walk.com

Audit: Annual event where CAs come in and officially point out mathematical errors in your spreadsheets.

Auto-Save: What your spreadsheet does immediately after you make a huge mistake and just before you press Undo. If you have a sound card, you may be able to hear your program laughing at you.

Backup: Many spreadsheet programs will automatically create a backup of your current file. This gives you two copies of the same non-balancing file.

Cell: This is where you spend the rest of your life when your boss has made you spend several nights at the office until a large project is finished. The cell will have bars if you are a type A personality, and will be padded if you are type B.

CIRC: See Circular Reference.

Circular Reference: See CIRC.

Cursor: What one becomes who sits in front of the same spreadsheet that won't balance for more than 2 hours.

Cut, Copy and Paste: What you do with your printouts to get something intelligible. See Table.

Format: Visual enhancements to spreadsheets to draw attention away from inaccuracies.

Formula: Mathematical equations that display as ERR, DIV/0 or N/A.

Frame: What you do with your first error free spreadsheet. (Contact MENSA if you did this in less than 1 month.)

Goal Seek: When you know the answer (because you did it on your calculator in 10 seconds) but can't get the spreadsheet to work right. Also known as Backsolve.

GPF: What happens when you finally get your spreadsheet working correctly. But before you've had a chance to save it.

Group Mode: The ability to populate a group of worksheets with the same error, saving yourself lots of time.

Import: Ability to get huge amounts of data from an outside source allowing you to create hundreds and thousands of rows of seemingly meaningful data.

Invalid File: Error you get once you have finally perfected your spreadsheet and attempt to load it the next day to print. Only occurs if you don't do regular backups.

Link: Ability to get erroneous information from a file without actually loading it into memory.

Macro: Automated mistakes, made at the speed of light.
Print Preview: Lets you know if your printout will be Portrait or Landscape. Information on the screen bears no resemblance to what actually prints out.

Solver: Spreadsheet tool usually used by geeks who want to bring their computer's processor to its knees. No valid data ever obtained, but it makes you feel good that you forced your computer to think for more than half a second.

Sort: Fast method to randomize a column of formula references.
Table: Furniture used to spread out all of your papers and arrange them so they look like what is on the screen. See Cut, Copy and Paste.

Titles, Horizontal: Headings printing on the left margin you wanted at the top of your document.

Titles, Vertical: Headings printing on the top margin you wanted down the left side of your document.

Undo: Feature that enables you to revert from the current spreadsheet with 47 error values to where you were before you made your mistake when you only had 13 errors.

What-If Analysis: The process of automatically generating detailed projections for hundreds of different scenarios - not one of which has a snowball's chance in hell of being even remotely possible.

Window: Ability to look at multiple pieces of multiple files simultaneously. While this may sound attractive, you must have at least three hands to navigate these windows to successfully build formulas - unless you have a mouse, then you need four hands.

Wizard: Interface enhancements that enable you to create complex and sophisticated errors at unprecedented speeds.

WYSIWYG: What You So Intensely Wish You'd Got

How to Keep a Woman Happy?

Source: E-mail forward

It’s not difficult?

All you have to do is to be:

1. A friend

2. A companion

3. A lover

4. A brother

5. A father

6. A master

7. A chef

8. An electrician

9. A carpenter

10. A plumber

11. A mechanic

12. A decorator

13. A stylist

14. A sexologist

15. A gynecologist

16. A psychologist

17. A pest exterminator

18. A psychiatrist

19. A healer

20. A good listener

21. An organizer

22. A good father

23. Very clean

24. Sympathetic

25. Athletic

26. Warm

27. Attentive

28. Gallant

29. Intelligent

30. Funny

31. Creative

32. Tender

33. Strong

34. Understanding

35. Tolerant

36. Prudent

37. Ambitious

38. Capable

39. Courageous

40. Determined

41. True

42. Dependable

43. Passionate

WITHOUT FORGETTING TO:

44. Give her compliments regularly

45. Love shopping

46. Be honest

47. Be very rich

48. Not stress her out

49. Not look at other girls

AND AT THE SAME TIME, YOU MUST ALSO:

50. Give her lots of attention, but expect little yourself

51. Give her lots of time, especially time for herself

52. Give her lots of space, never worrying about where she goes

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT:

53. Never to forget:

* birthdays

* anniversaries

* arrangements she makes

HOW TO MAKE A MAN HAPPY!!! :

1. Leave him in peace

2. Feed him well.

3. Let him have the remote control.

Men …. what a demanding creature !!!!!!!

Kapaleeshwar Temple

This ancient Shiva Temple in Mylapore is a classic Dravidian temple complete with gopurams and a tank. The 8th century Pallavan architecture and inscriptions dating back to 13th century found on its walls are noteworthy. The streets and shops around the temple sell everything, from flowers and vegetables to silver and gold.
This picture was taken from the Bus-Stand opposite to the Temple.


This is the view of the lake in front of the Temple.