I lead 2 lives these days.. It has been helping a lot with bringing structure and sanity into my days..

First life (lets call it “work life” or WL) is roughly between 10-6 every weekday. Responsibilities include working on my startup. Building website and other miscellaneous stuff that keep popping up.

The second life (we ll call it weekend life or.. oh that wont work, so we ll go with “Second life” or SL) happens every weekend and during evenings on weekdays. Weekends in particular, where 

It is funny how Apple can do anything they want and get away with it. They have stomped on my nerves twice in the last 2 days.. 

All I wanted to do was to test my iPhone app on a real phone.. because I heard there was a bug in the emulator where you might not be able to edit a TableView.

I had an iPhone 3GS updated to iOS 5.1, and I had the new-ish XCode (4.2) i had paid for sometime back. Should be no problem, right?

‘Variety may be the spice of life, but monotony provides the groceries.’

Thanks to Rohan @ http://www.alearningaday.com/

I have been struggling to wake up before 8am. The days I do wake up, I usually go jogging before I have time to think about going back to bed. Or I have important work to do, and I get right down to it.

I have tried going straight for my phone to check email to get my brain ticking. It has worked reasonably well, because once my brain starts ticking, it knows I must not go back to sleep. But then the days werent as motivating as the days when I went jogging early / did lots of work early.

You might have heard this story from the Panchatantra (Translates to “Five Principles”. It is a very insightful ancient Indian collection of inter-related animal fables) in one some form or the other. If you haven’t, here it is:

Three fish lived in a pond. Their names were Anagatavidhata (which in Sanskrit translates to “future maker”), Pratyutpannamati (translates to “ready minded”) and Yadbhavishya (translates to “whatever happens”). We ll call them Future , Ready and Whatever for simplicity and humour. ;) Anyway, back at the pond, some fishermen were passing by and wondered aloud, “Hey, we have never seen this pond. It seems to be full of fish. It is now evening. Let us come at dawn tomorrow and bag as many fish as we can.”

Be superstitious. I am no one to judge. But please dont spread wrong information about things you know nuts about to justify your superstition.

Today evening, there is a lunar eclipse and I am at my grandparents house. As will be the case in any typical south indian brahmin household, there are umpteen number of rituals associated with the lunar eclipse. Interestingly, today is also Karthigai, (one of) the supposed birthdays of Lord Muruga. He is important in south India. So, there are the usual sweets and rituals that also have to be performed. 

I am bad at receiving help, especially if I didnt ask for it. I instinctively reject it. The rationale being, I dont want to owe anyone anything if I can help it.

Not all help is bad. Of late, I have found that helping someone unconditionally (without any expected returns.. even implicitly) gives me maximum satisfaction. I think it would apply to most of us too. And that satisfaction is further enhanced by a thankful receiver. So for me to help and be satisfied by it, the receiver should accept it. He/she plays a big role in the process. 

It is really funny the way he says it, but he has a very very good point.

(Got it from here : http://sivers.org/sharing - great blog. I love his simple style! :) )

Yesterday, I attended my last class in university without even realizing it. 

It was the Chinese oral exam. Well, that was not strictly a class, so lets see.. it was the Chinese class 2 weeks ago. (I stopped attending other classes).

And today I will be finishing my last assignment!

A close friend of mine graduated 6 months ago and left for the US to work. He was feeling.. sad I guess and emotional. The way you feel when you leave your parents to come to a foreign country. It was rather unusual of him but this was his first home away from home, and he would be leaving the place, the environment, friends… indefinitely for quite sometime. He was starting a new life. This was not an exchange. When he came back, he wouldnt be the carefree student, but a responsible worker!

A friend/lifehacher introduced me to this neat little app called RescueTime. I have been using it for a month now.. it sits in the background and observes what you are doing. then your activities are categorized into -2 to 2 points. -2 being very distracting and +2 being very productive. Then it shows neat little graphs on how your spend (waste) your time every day.

My biggest learning from the exercise was how much time was wasted in email. I knew I was spending more time that I should.. but when I saw I was spending close to 4hours per day at the email, it gave me quite a shock.