Harsh's Blog

Back with Sania!

2008-07-26T18:07:00.001-07:00

Hey everyone!
So I must apologize for disappearing again - I figured those 45 entries would keep all of you occupied for 2 months lol Anyway, so this last week was interesting because I finally got a chance to see Sania Mirza play! For those of you who don't know who she is - she's India's tennis superstar, and she made it to the finals of the Bank of the West tournament last year (for singles and won the doubles)!

I got complimentary tickets to the game (thanks to R) and it was great seeing her play. It was a close game, but I don't think she was playing to the best of her ability (probably because of her wrist injury), but fun nonetheless. She lost in the singles and the doubles in the first round, so I guess I won't be seeing her for another year atleast, but it was fun while it lasted.

Archives and Wordpress

2008-05-12T00:20:00.000-07:00

After a long hiatus, I'm back and with 45 blog entries!! I just created a blog on wordpress which is an archive of all my blog entries in freshman and sophomore year of undergrad. You can check it out here: http://freshmanyear.wordpress.com/

They should keep you busy for a while. My experience with Wordpress has been good so far, and if things go this way I might convert to Wordpress, but then again I have faith in Google. Let's see what happens.

Blingo - Search and win ?

2008-03-09T04:41:00.000-07:00

So what is Blingo? I was first introduced to Blingo in the summer of 06 and I have to admit I was pretty skeptical about it. Time went by and soon enough I had completely forgotten about it. But one of my random stumbles across the internet led me back to Blingo. And so, I've decided to give it a 2nd chance. But what is it? Apparently a way for you to make money for searching the web. Seems to good to be true? Well it is because most probably you're not going to win anything, and if you do, then the odds are that it will be a $5 Amazon gift card or something along those lines. But in the odd chance that you get lucky, you could win anything from an ipod to a car or even $10 million dollars. Thats probably incentive enough to give it a glance.

Most people recommend adding Blingo to your browser and using it as you would google - the only problem being that Blingo's search results page is a lot more cluttered than that of Google and that might not bother you but for someone who's been raised on Google it gets a little frustrating. Even though Blingo is powered by Google and the search results are the same - its still different (for me atleast). But I suppose that's a compromise I'm going to have to make to see if this works. The friend system on Blingo is interesting - if you click on that button on the top of this post and join Blingo as my friend, then whatever you win, I win too! (I dont think it works the other way around). Its a interesting concept and I definitely want to know more about their business model. Enough said, here's a link to Blingo: http://www.blingo.com/about.

Check it out and tell me what you think and if you win!

Go Habs Go!

2008-03-04T13:45:00.000-08:00

My first ever NHL game and three goals scored in the first 3 minutes - what are the odds of that? I was supporting the canadiennes (probably because i was with a canadian group and probably also because they were outnumbered in "shark territory" i.e. san jose and finally because the canadiennes are just way cooler). The sharks played really well and they deserved to win - the habs on the other hand had some problems with their goalie - but such is the stuff of life - you win some and you lose some. Overall, a great game! Definitely need to go watch some more NHL games!! Check out the pictures/videos in my gallery...

Pimp my bike!

2008-02-29T19:09:00.000-08:00

So its been a while since the last post and even though a lot of things have happened since then, probably the most interesting has to do with this last week being entrepreneurship week. It was only last friday when we thought about doing something - it wasnt until Sunday that we decided to go through - and not until Tuesday that we set up shop and started doing what we wanted to do - we wanted to paint bikes and attach rubberbands to them to increase the value of the rubber bands (that was the goal of the innovation challenge) - but it turned out painting bikes was wayy more successful than attaching rubberbands and so we stuck to painting bikes and came out with some pretty nice pictures that you can check out here - http://picasaweb.google.com/menon.harsh/PimpMyBike

We also had to make a video which you can see here - (kinda cheesy, but oh well) -

Even though we didn't win, it was a lot of work and a lot of fun - which makes it really hard in deciding if I want to do this again next year. Feel free to complement/criticize our work - any suggestions will be appreciated.

Girl Geek Dinner @ Google

2008-02-01T14:20:00.001-08:00

So yesterday I went to Google HQ with a few friends (I'm not sure if they want to be named so I'll use initials - M, A and K) and it was interesting. This was part of the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner series. The food was good, there was an open bar and there was good company...Essentially there were a panel of 4 women talking about their lives and their experiences as women entrepreneurs -
- Irene Au, Director of User Experience, Google
- Rashmi Sinha, CEO, SlideShare
- Leah Culver, Lead Developer & Co-Founder, Pownce
- Sumaya Kazi, Entrepreneur & Social Media Manager, Sun Microsystems
- Katherine Barr (moderator), Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures

Katherine was asking the others questions while the audience watched. Each one of those women was unique in her own way- some were too young, some too arrogant, some very humble and family oriented and some just easy going and carefree. I went and talked to a few of them after the discussion was over but didn't really get too much out of it. Probably the highlight of the night was when Leah mentioned the computer science geek's pick up line - "Whats your language?" I have to try that sometime lol.

The time after the panel was spent trying to acquire as many google goodies as possible - the priority being a google umbrella since it was raining pretty hard last night. But despite our irrestible charms and dashing good looks, we couldn't get an umbrella. So much for that.

What kind of person are you?

2008-01-25T22:36:00.000-08:00

So I got an email today by Mr. P who decided to use my website to find out what kind of person I am (a decent idea) after which he sent me this email:

"Queried your s/ware on some questions

here is what it gave the answer for
Q) How is harsh as a person

Options
a) Good
b) Average
c) Bad
d) Worst than u can ever imagine
e) No comments

and volla the answer is d) Worst than u can ever imagine"

Now truth be told - generally people stand behind their websites/softwares until the websites/softwares decide to have a mind of their own and go against their creators - but I wouldnt blame my website for doing this to me - after all I gave it free will and this is what I should have expected from it!

News and Updates

2008-01-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

So I've been out of action for a bit - but ive got some news and new pictures! Check out my gallery to see days 1 - 3 of shrek's visit to stanford! I also stumbled upon this cool website for blogs - they have some pretty cool stuff for blogs like:

and

to name a few- check out more at http://www.justsayhi.com/bb

Website Facelift!

2007-12-30T01:35:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone -
I just completed giving my website a face lift - agreed its not comprehensive and I should probably have done more - but I'm on holiday!! lol Anyway, check it out and tell me what you think.

Movie:The Game

2007-12-23T18:57:00.000-08:00

So I saw the Game today and its an awesome movie - I totally loved the whole alternate reality roleplaying theme - kinda scary at times but definitely very interesting. Douglas is a great actor and this movie just proves it. Overall, 9/10.

I think I'm becoming a fan of David Finch's movies - I'm going to try and see Zodiac sometime soon.

Heres more about The Game on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(film)

Movie: The Last King of Scotland

2007-12-23T01:18:00.000-08:00

I saw the Last King of Scotland today and its definitely a thought provoking movie. In summary, its a story of a young Scottish doctor (Dr. Garrigan) who leaves the comforts of Scotland and goes to Uganda to help and have fun at the same time. The country is undergoing a political revolution at the time with Idi Amin taking over.

The story revolves around how Garrigan gets entwined in the political affairs of Uganda and Amin and comes out of his shell of innocence to realize things for what they are.

Overall, the movie was interesting in how it depicted life in Africa - where people with guns are in power and they do whatever they please - Amin wiped out about 300,000 people - those who dared to speak against him.

Heres a little more info about Amin on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idi_Amin

Overall, I'd give it a 7/10. The movie is very graphic, thought provoking and definitely one that'll make you appreciate a lot of freedoms you take for granted.

How to deal with rejection...

2007-12-23T00:44:00.001-08:00

So, I've decided to add some philosophical babble to this blog to give some food for thought to the abstract minded. Also partly because I like to think I'm a philosopher to some extent,...maybe...Anyway, rejection is definitely one of those big things that all of us deal with at some point of time in our lives in one form or another. However, there is no prescribed method to deal with it and different people have different ways to deal with rejection. I'm going to attempt to set down some guidelines on how to deal with rejection, based either on experience or on purely abstract thinking (feel free to disagree)...

So what is rejection? From a pure feelings point of view, its something that takes us to an all time low - we feel bad, lose self-respect/self-esteem, become non-productive, antisocial and worst of all we continue feeling that way for a while. There are a few ways of dealing with rejection - all of them involving accepting what has happened and moving on -

1. Distract yourself, Escape from reality
You could sleep, watch a movie, play a sport, go work out, eat, swim or do anything to take your mind off the subject at hand and come back to it to deal with it later - when you're better equipped (emotionally). This has definitely been my way of dealing with rejection and it works - it just takes a little while to deal with rejection, but once you're beyond a certain point, you're fine.

2. Delve deeper into the reason why you got rejected
Think about the rejection - not so much how you felt at that instant of time - but why you got rejected and how you can avoid it in the future. This one is much harder to do - its much easier to shut down and not worry about anything, though this is the better way to deal with rejection. You know what you did wrong and you're ready to take it on again.

3. Express your rejection
Be creative and think about how you felt when you got rejected and express it - express how you felt. For example, write a poem about the nervousness, the anxiety, the disappointment - talk about the fact that it felt like falling off a cliff - tell people about it - go out and blog about it - throw it out for the world to listen to and that will make you feel better. Letting sad/unhappy feelings escape is liberating.

4. Do good things and be nice, help people
Go out and help people. Clean up your room - send people cards - just be nice. As hard as it might seem, doing good things will make you feel better and will automatically uplift you.

Thats all I can think of right now. A rejection isn't the end of the world - there's always tomorrow.

Cool things you can do on the internet (Part I)

2007-12-21T17:50:00.000-08:00

So, in response to the question of what kind of questions people would ask me - I've decided to talk about some of the cool things you can do on the internet with the hope that maybe I'll inspire you to do something cool....

1. Create your own website
This seems like a pretty basic thing to do - but surprisingly there are a lot of us out there who don't have a website and don't know where to start - well start with a basic css template and then go crazy with it. Here is a stockhouse of free CSS templates: http://www.freecsstemplates.org/css-templates/
If you're not satisified with that collection, google "free css templates" and you'll find many more templates. If you want a basic css template that you can completely develop yourself, I'd recommend: http://csstinderbox.raykonline.com/

For those of you who want to stay away from CSS, you can always go to googlepages or similar websites to build your web presence. Or you could just stick to a blog (blogger, livejournal...) and use that as your website.

2. Create your own custom search engine
So google has a lot of cool things - one of which is their custom search engine builder: http://www.google.com/coop/cse/
This is a cool way to index all your websites and if I understood it correctly, make some money out of it too.

3. Create your own products and start your own mall
This one is relatively new to me but I discovered it on digg as part of a larger article definitely worth reading for all you money minded bloggers out there:http://www.insidecrm.com/features/101-ways-monetize-blog122007/
The websites you can use to create your own products (shirts etc.) are:
http://www.printfection.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/
http://goodstorm.com/index.html

There are several other cool links on the inside crm link.

4. Integrate Google Maps, Google Picasa, Blogger and your website
The cool thing about Google is that they release APIs about their services - which to mean translates to some way to make use of those websites on your blogs. And more often than not, there are several help groups/discussion forums to help you figure out how to use them.
Just google Google Maps API or Google Picasa API.

5. Create a blog/website and track who's visiting
The easiest way I think to do this is to use Google Analytics. http://www.google.com/analytics/
Just paste some code in the pages you want to track and voila - you now know everything about your visitors from their location to their connection speed to the browser they use!

6. Watch TV/sports/movies online
I'm not exactly sure about the legality of some of these websites, but since they're still online, I'm guessing they're doing okay. The big storehouse of TV shows is
http://www.alluc.org/
http://www.dailymotion.com
I generally get my dose of sports by downloading sopcast and watching sports hosted via:
http://www.myp2p.eu/
You can download sopcast at:
http://www.sopcast.org/
As far as movies are concerned, alluc has some movies, but there are several other websites, one of which is:
http://joox.net/ (discovered by a secret source)
You can actually download movies at that website.
Another website collection of videos/movies:
http://www.start2enjoy.com/

7. Listen to your favorite music free on Pandora!
Pandora is a great way to discover music you like - I'll not say anything more and let you discover it for yourself - effort definitely worth spending:
http://www.pandora.com/
(The only sad part is that it doesnt work outside the US:( )

8. Create your own wiki
With wikipedia being the most popular internet encyclopedia, you can contribute in more ways than one. Theres a wiki which tells you how to start a wiki and redirects you to several websites which provide free wiki hosting (called 'wikifarms'). Enjoy:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wiki_Science:How_to_start_a_Wiki

That's all for Part I of cool things you can do on the internet. You can check out other cool websites I stumbled upon here: http://harshm.stumbleupon.com/favorites/

Welcome to my website!

2007-12-16T02:33:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone! So this is my first attempt at blogging. I was hoping to create a blog to complement my website so that the whole user experience could be more interactive. I've never really blogged before, but I will attempt to chronicle my important highlights/experience, talk about things that interest me (and could potentially interest you) and answer any questions that anyone might have for me.