Before anyone comes up with any weird guesses 😀 , I am talking about my waist size 🙂 . Yes, you read it right…..I am talking about my waist here which shows how happy I am. All these years I always wanted to put on weight and was never able to inspite of whatever I did. My waist size has always been 28 and it used to be always difficult to find many options for jeans. Now at last, my weight is 60+ (between 61 – 63) for almost 4 months now and that’s really an achievement for me 😀 . Today I went to get a jeans and surprisingly, waist size 32 was fitting fine….though 30 was kind of ok, 32 was more comfortable. So, finally I crossed the barrier of 28 🙂 .
Battery life of my macbook pro
Less than a week into getting my new mac, I am almost done now setting it up for my work. One thing I noticed is that I was getting just around 4-5 hrs of battery life whereas its supposed to be around 8-9 hours for the 15″ macbook pro. And this was without using any audio/video. This was kind of letting me down as one of the key points I was interested is the battery life.
When I checked my graphics card settings, it was set to automatic graphics switching. So, ideally it should be using the intel graphics processor and not the nvidia graphics card as I was not running any graphics intensive applications. Could not figure out the reason and sent a mail to our cisco mac users. Got a suggestion from one of them to use this gfxCardStatus app to check which graphics card is being used and to force it to use one of them. Was surprised to see that it was always using the nvidia one which explains the low battery life. Then checked the dependencies that this app lists showing which one is the culprit and it turns out to be google talk plugin 😯 . Never expected that to make use of the nvidia card. Anyways now I have forced it to use only Intel one and I am getting 6+ hours (almost 7) of battery life 😀 . I am going to keep an eye on the battery life to see if its going to be consistent.
And all this is with wireless always on, bluetooth off and keyboard & screen luminosity set to around 50%.
First cooking experience
Though I have been staying out of Hyderabad for 5 years now, first 2 years were in hostel. And after college, once I moved to Bangalore we had a cook always (even now) and never had to really cook. In these 3 years in Bangalore, I could only perfect making tea and cooking rice 😀 . Yes, that is how great my cooking skills are 🙂 . Somehow, I always hated cooking – One because if I start cooking when I am hungry, it will be at least an hour to be able to actually eat and two I always felt that cooking was not for me.
The cook I have now comes only for 6 days (dinner on weekdays and saturday lunch). I generally get a biryani or pizza/garlic bread with chicken wings or go out with a friend on the other days. Sometimes, when I don’t feel like going out, I just make rice and have it with a pickle. Now finally, I got so bored of having the same old biryani that I decided to make something myself at home. Inspite of a failed attempt at making egg burji just a few days back, this time I decided to give it another attempt. And not only egg burji, I decided to make some rasam as well 🙂 .
Went out to get a rasam powder and then called my mom for the recipe. She tried to make it as simple as possible for me 😀 and then I started out with her instructions. In parallel started making egg burji in my own way. Last time just for egg burji, I ended up using 2 kadai’s and still it did not turn out to be that great. This time after the previous experience, I was careful to make use of single kadai and complete it. It took me an hour to make rasam, egg burji and then rice.
The result – the rasam turned out to be horrible 🙁 but then somehow made some changes to it and finally it turned out to be great 😀 . Also the egg burji was much better than the one I made before.
Key take aways from this experience are –
– Cooking requires lot of patience.
– Always cook with the burner in sim and not high (if not you will end up using two kadai’s 🙂 ).
One thing that I could not understand is, just after half-way through cutting an onion, tears were dripping from my eyes but I see my mom or cook cutting onions with no issues. I am sure onions would definitely not know who is cutting them 😛 but then surprised what could be the trick 🙁 .
If I get bored again, I am thinking of making chicken 🙂 .
Finally the macbook pro is here
At last, after a long wait, I got my new macbook pro delivered to me. I have only one word to say……awesome!!!!……from the packaging to the actual 
hardware, eveything is so perfect…..I think I won’t look back at any other laptops now after using macbook…..hats off to Steve Jobs. The moment I saw the mail to pick-up my mac, I was jumping with joy 😀 . I took some pics starting from unpacking the box to powering it on for the first time….my friend even shot a video of it 🙂 . I was really mesmerized at how sleek the device was…..with the perfect all aluminium finish, it’s definitely the device to own. It isn’t that hard to move to a mac from pc…..though there are quite a few differences when coming to keyboard shortcuts, etc that we are used to on pc, I think its just matter of few days. On the whole, I am very happy with it and will keep posting updates about my mac here.
Initial few hiccups were related to page-up key, page-down key, home, end, forward delete, etc but google is always there to help 😀 .
I now think, adding a time capsule to my existing set of gadgets would be really good but its not that cheap here in india 🙁 . Nevertheless, once I am done with exploring it completely, I will think of any new additions.
Only sad thing that flashes in my mind is the news about foxconn suicides…..how can people be treated so badly at a place where such amazing devices are manufactured.