In search for plants

...

I searched and asked lots of people for recos but seems like no one had any clue. Found this book - got the pdf version by the author himself.
Good and practical read for Indians.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_dgmMwooSjeMWY1ZmNjNTEtNTc5ZC00NDk0LWEzZjEtZmRhNGVlMTYxNzQy/edit?pli=1

Ghar se door Seattle mein

As I get a call that one of the closest friends leaves Seattle, talking to him, I get filled with nostalgia (sort of borrowed nostalgia). I guess there is always this age when you are single and crazy and you are lucky to meet people crazy enough with whom you get drunk, walk on the empty roads, celebrate birthday near a lake or throw surprise parties at a garage. They are the first people you call when you crash your car or drag to hospital if you have a broken back or discuss about your marriage plans or for whom you click pictures they can upload on shaadi.com. Suddenly I feel I am in my autumn years and wonder if all of us from the desi gang of "Ghar se door seattle mein" will ever be together again. What the heck - I even have the abandoned link of our super-flop blog:http://gharsedoor.blogspot.in/ with the older posts (http://gharsedoor.blogspot.in/search?updated-max=2006-09-22T10%3A34%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=20&start=20&by-date=false) containing where we first met each other. P.S: How cheesy were we ?

Web Designing for non-web designers

Now - I am not a web designer. But actually web designing is not tough. When we wanted a simple site up -  I started talking to web designers and they started quoting outrageous rates.

The curse of being a software engg is that you know how much work it requires to do a thing (everyone takes advantage of information asymmetry). So I thought since I wanted to make a simple website and I had a day off, why not do it myself. It took me half a day(6 hours - but non-stop and full conc) to come up with something nice and decent (and lot of that half a day went in taming photoshop). And yes I have subscribed myself and every person I care with a online Adobe Photoshop course as nothing is frustrating to have an idea in the mind and not being able to do it. Even if you hire someone to do it - it is good to know the complexity.

So anyways I used Kompozer a source forge WYSWYG html developer (which actually purges out neat html codes that you can edit yourself if you want) and I was done with the html part in less than an hour including installation. A lot of time went in testing the website in various devices - ipad, phone, galaxytab, mac, small tablet (last thing I want is a broken site).

However, though I was gloating with my simple website (yes I am a big big fan of simple websites). Clutter free- tells you what you want, loads in 1 sec - doesn't waste people's time. But my teammates vehemently opposed a simple site. They wanted anim, they wanted php. Initially I told them - it's not democracy. Secretly I don't have the budget to fund that. But anyways till I have the budget, I could jazz this even more. Here are some links to cool website designs that might trigger your imagination.

http://www.instantshift.com/2010/05/05/77-latest-examples-of-creative-single-page-website-designs/
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/beautiful-enticing-designers-websites/
http://creativedesignmagazine.com/30-elegant-minimal-web-designs-for-web-design-inspiration.html

And here is the simple site I designed:

http://www.tangelo.in



Also for new website developers and domain registerers - do submit url of your sites to google and bing.