“Poem”

And if it snowed and snow covered the drive
he took a spade and tossed it to one side.
And always tucked his daughter up at night.
And slippered her the one time that she lied.

And every week he tipped up half his wage.
And what he didn’t spend each week he saved.
And praised his wife for every meal she made.
And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.

And for his mum he hired a private nurse.
And every Sunday taxied her to church.
And he blubbed when she went from bad to worse.
And twice he lifted ten quid from her purse.

Here’s how they rated him when they looked back:
sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.

From Simon Armitage’s poetry collection Kid (1992)

Screenshot of extended menubar in Mac OS X Lion using SecondBar (click for larger image)

Its been a while I have written anything on technology, or should I say haven’t written anything at all. Anyway, I have been looking for a way to extend menubar on my Mac as soon as I got a second monitor almost two years ago. I had been using utility-apps like DejaMenu or MenuPop to get access to menu items on the second monitor, however, not having an actual menubar on the second monitor was quite inconvenient. Just a couple of weeks ago, while searching for ways to extend menubar to the second monitor, I came across SecondBar , although it is still a beta-app, it works great. My second monitor finally looks like it’s a part of an extended display, a part of my mac desktop! Occasionally, SecondBar has problem showing all the menu items from an application but it is rectified by relaunching the app. Its certainly a great app for its purpose, and I still wonder why there aren’t any app to extend menubar with full functionality on Mac as so many of us actually extend our display with a second or even a third monitor these days. Definitely worth a try!

At a time when even the volvos have started to look beautiful, her car bore an ungainly look – a maroon coloured hatchback that looked disproportionately large at the back with the front almost burying on the ground. Nevertheless, a volvo it was too, that famously strong and safe car regardless of how it looked. She parked the car with a perfect manoeuvre, without need for any adjustments, and positioning the car perfectly in front of the power box for the engine heater. The morning was not very cold and the day’s forecast was for a mild weather too. She got out of the car and slammed the door behind without looking back. With a handbag on one hand and a plastic bag probably containing her breakfast on the other she hurried towards the new office block just a hundred or so metres away. It was almost 5:30 in the morning, still very dark but time for her to start her shift. She had less than two hours to finish her duties – duties to make a whole floor on the office block ready for another day. There were twenty rooms, and unconsciously she allocated at most five minutes for each. Of course things were flexible, some rooms required double that time or even more, and some, a glance did the trick. For the latter types, it was as if her glance was sufficient to blow what little dust off the shelves and desks, and return things into their places even if they had been displaced only by a millimetre. For the former ones however, sometimes the inhabitants left the mess behind in just a few hours of work. She often wondered how could someone with a desk job make such a mess. Papers everywhere, dust everywhere, coffee stains on the floor and on the desk with a coaster lying just beside the stain! She had to get the stain remover and a mop for the floor.

By 7:30 she was already out of her floor after finishing all the rooms, and sipping coffee and biting on her home-made ham and cheese sandwich at her “office” with other workers like her. In the meantime those inhabiting the freshly made offices started to appear and made themselves comfortable on their comfy chairs and plan for the day’s work as if nothing had changed from the day before. They didn’t even notice the freshness of their office or the dust and stain-free environment, opposite of what they had left the day before. In the “ten minute” suite, a bulky middle-aged gentleman sipped coffee noisily, spilling some from the rims while placing the cup on the desk behind his computer mouse. The still brand new coaster sat beside the newly forming stain.

[Image source: wpclipart.com]

As the title of this post suggests, the Witts are in my thought tonight, and the first part of the title gives you the clue as to what triggered it! In fact I even googled the recipe for my own red kidney beans with garlic and ginger (which I remember the Witts had on their website) to make it exactly the way i used to when I was living in Vancouver. Sadly, I couldn’t find it, or should I say the mighty google couldn’t locate it, not even on its cache! Anyway, although it might have varied slightly from my Vancouver version, I am preparing red kidney beans with garlic and ginger tonight, and hoping it goes nicely with whole wheat chapatis (or tortilla if you will). And of course I’ll be thinking of the Witts and the potlucks we used to have at theirs in my Vancouver era living! This one to you Mr Witt & family, I hope all is well across the pond and beyond the mountains!

In the meantime I’m working in Nepal – couldn’t get SPSS for my number-crunching job so got and learnt STATA (still learning actually), and becoming fairly comfortable with it! Yet to write of the crunched numbers

Most importantly got time to read (still too lazy to write much though!) and have finished a few good books

Just finished Michel Peissel’s Tiger for Breakfast, and currently reading Solo by Rana Dasgupta (pic below).

Oh, did I mention I got married recently?!? Life’s well so far

1. I’m here because I’m in between jobs.

2. I plan to start my work remotely to begin with from here, hopefully from next week (after Nepali New Year)

3. In the meantime, I’m keeping low profile by going to quite high-profile football matches (see an evidence below – a lot more of the pictures here)

4. I’m also spending my time while I’m in the village (village only in name really – it has changed beyond recognition in recent years, definitely not the village I first left in 1999) by taking some macro snaps in the backyard – almost my favourite passtime – at least keeps me occupied when I’m not in the mood to read or write! (another evidence below – much more here)

…and that’s pretty much it thus far. Even if I don’t write here, I’ll be tweeting HERE. And will be uploading pictures whenever I can HERE.

So long…

note: just as I was ready to publish this post power cut struck again, so I’m finishing this from my mobile. hope this comes through fine.

Posted by Wordmobi

After spending years since leaving Nepal more than 11 years ago not really celebrating dashain, the Nepali festival that celebrates the victory of good over evil, now I’ve started looking forward to it every year. It gives me a very good excuse to visit my sister, and my two little neices. Despite being only a few hours away, the nature and pace of life in these parts of the world means I hardly get the time to see them much. Even the daily phonecalls can’t really make up for being with them in person. This year’s added bonus was that the main day of dashain fell on Sunday, so I had a great family weekend without having to worry about work, emails to respond to or deadlines to meet or to avoid missing.

Now on the Monday morning I’m hurrying back to home, and to work, experiencing my first ever “commute”, which I’m not liking at all. Living at a walking distance to work is certainly the best thing, sometimes I even go home for lunch from work

Finding it hard now to write much from a phone on a moving train so I’ll stop here. The image above is the ‘nelson’s ship in a bottle’ on the Trafalgar square’s fourth plinth.

ier than my ipod touch. The suggestion feature works well too. Besides I’m not going to make it much longer. Also I couldn’t be bothered to go to length to get a screenshot (needs you to install sdk on a computer and get screenshot from there!), so this post is now done

So here it is, my first blog post from an Android phone. Just to put an image on the post, I’m uploading a picture taken using the phone