Ignored & taken for granted..

Being ignored is also not something anyone desires! And I am surmising that, being ignored is the reason the Internet Explorer on my laptop decided to call it quits a month or two back. I didn't bother fixing that because I never use IE in the first place. Firefox does very well for all my needs. The only thing I may have needed IE for was to access my Outlook Webmail. But incidentally I have been using Y! Browser (which sucks overall - a poor wrapper around IE) to check that. So in summary, IE was well and truly ignored.

Being taken for granted is also something no one likes! I guess that is why the Windows Explorer on my machine decided to make its presence (or must I say lack of presence thereof) felt when it decided to crash every time I called upon it. The error message said that some instruction was trying to access memory location 0x00000000! Oopsy daisy - that didn't sound good at all. As time slipped, I began to realize how essential Explorer was to many of my everyday tasks on the machine. My prime suspect was the Microsoft Antispyware that had been installed in the recent past. I was always suspicious of that piece of software. May be it felt that a working explorer makes a system vulnerable to spyware attacks! You never know....

While exploring & trying out the various solutions to get the Explorer to work, IE started to work out of the blue. Good for it! ;) Along the way, I hit about this feature that the Windows XP OS provides called System Restore. It works well, but unfortunately it didn't help me :( And finally help came from this advise from a similarly frustrated Windows user. I have my Explorer working and according to Microsoft, my machine is vulnerable. Yeah, but I prefer a vulnerable system to one that is so secure that it doesn't allow its owner to view its data!

All's well that ends well! I have made a System Restore Point when both IE and Windows Explorer are working. You never know when they will go on strike again! I suggest you too do so, especially if your machine is left online all by itself, free to scheme with other fellow softwares in cyberspace!

"Completely" sunny day...

View from the balcony of my home

It has been a "completely" sunny day after what seems a long while. And with days getting longer, the sun is still providing warmth & light at this hour. What more could one ask for! I wonder if it is having been born and spent 20+ years in a tropical country, that makes me yearn for sunny days. Would I have been different if I had grown up in a colder or rainier place? The sun seems to be bring with it enthusiasm & energy which makes me do a lot more in a day!

I am not sure whether to attribute this blog entry to the weather or to the fact that I am a newbie to blogging. After a lot of contemplative inertia to start a blog, I am currently dabbling with Blogspot & Y! 360. Am also trying to learn CSS to see how best I can customize my blog here. I intend to try and see how LiveJournal stands wrt these and then I will settle for the one that suits me best and do away with the rest! Sounds like a plan! :)

Signing off hoping tomorrow is another "completely" sunny day!

Elephant seals...

On Sunday, Shiv & me had been to Año Nuevo State Reserve, for a ranger guided walk to watch elephant seals. It was an extraordinary experience!

Año Nuevo is just off CA-1 between Half Moon Bay & Santa Cruz. We had booked tickets for this 2 months back - not because we plan that far ahead, but because that was the earliest time we could get tickets for when we booked back in January. A walk starts every 15 minutes and a group usually has 20 people in it. The walk is about 3 miles long and takes about 3 hours as a docent provides information about the life of the elephant seals.

Elephants seals spend the winters on the beaches of Año Nuevo. Males and females arrive in November every year. The males spent the first few months fighting amongst themselves in order to establish their supremacy for mating. Meanwhile, females give birth to new born seals and start nursing them. Then comes the mating period during which the best of the males breed with the females. After the mating, the adult seals slowly start to leave and head back to the sea. Females head west while the males take a north-westerly route. Once in the sea, each seal is on its own. They do not move in groups in the ocean.

Elephant seal acrobatics

The young seals (also called "weaners"), stay on for a longer time huddling up together. They leave around April. The mortality rate for these seals is not too impressive when they are young. Many even die on the beaches if they have been separated from their mothers or have not received the required attention from their mothers. On the other hand some of the young ones are significantly larger than the rest, possibly because they have been lucky to have been taken care of by more than one mother! They are called "super-weaners" :).

Another interesting fact about these marine mammals is that they eat only 40 days in a year! They starve through the rest of the year. I wonder how much they must be hogging during those 40 days in order to sustain a whole year and yet be so fat! And yes, I did wish we humans could also make do with just 40 days of eating!! (:D)

Overall, the experience was very memorable. Nothing can beat being able to watch a creature in its own habitat. It is very different from visiting an aquarium and being told the same facts.

Where do I begin?

I have, for a long time, been musing about starting to blog. Last week, I analyzed for myself what was motivating me to blog and what was keeping me from starting to do so. Thus emerged this set of positives and negatives (wrt me):

Positives:

• Regular exercise of thinking and writing. I write far less than I used you a couple of years back and blogging may be a good way to start writing on a more regular basis.
  
• Broaden's one's viewpoint / perspective when friends comment on your entry
• May help in gaining clarity (writing itself helps clarify and then others' responses may help too)
• I enjoy reading others' blog entries many times
  
• May help in networking and meeting new friends
  

Negatives:

• A part of me feels it is too public a domain to publish my thoughts and feelings. I understand blogging sites do provide one with a lot of control on who can see and who can't. But still, writing to an unknown audience seems daunting.
  
• Sometimes I think it is pointless. After all these are just arbit ramblings
• Starting trouble - getting a username that I like and also that first entry which will get things rolling

Today I finally seem to have gotten over the "starting trouble". :) And that's partly thanks to some friend who had created a blogger account for me back in Nov, 2003!

Finally I have begun blogging.. let's see how it goes!