As in my earlier post  I had written that I would be creating and posting desktop calendars for each month. Again the word cloud for the current calendars is inspired by the words / activities which are apparent in the month of February. 

The following desktop designs are dedicated to the love of my life and my beautiful wife Monika as she was the inspiration behind the second version. Mona you make my life worth living & thank you for everything !

So here the wallpapers for your viewing and downloading pleasure. Please do leave your comments / feedback.

February 09 – Pink and rosy version

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February 09 – love is in the air version

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Please leave a comment if you want these in any other resolution.

Recently I stumbled upon a website which creates word clouds from the keywords or tags put in by the user. Word clouds seem to be the buzz word and used very often in this Web 2.0 era. For the non geeks, a word cloud (or tag cloud) is a visual depiction of related tags using corresponding weights. The most used tag will generally have the biggest size and the size of the other tags would depend on frequency of its usage in relation to main tag. Click here to know more about word clouds.

So while I was playing with Wordle to create random word clouds, I had this very crazy idea of presenting the different months of the year in this format. So I took each month of the year and started to gather tags / words/ activities revolving around it. After getting certain number of keywords, I started mapping them onto my personal word cloud while looking at the frequency of usage in that particular month. So presenting to you the desktop calendar for January 09. it comes in 2 flavors for your convinience

P.S. I know it’s too late but somehow I had misplaced the PSD files for this wallpaper and never had the time to recreate from scratch, now that I have found the files I am sharing the same with you. The calendars for the coming months would be published on time. Now for the downloads. Hope you like them.

January 09 – simple & sober version

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January 09 – heavy & grungy version

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Please leave a comment if you want these in any other resolution.

A digital makeover that is. All these years trolling on the web I have never used an avatar extensively. Somehow I felt all the avatar creators available online were never able to give me one which could live up to my expectations. I don’t know maybe it was due to my unique facial contours or my radiant personality that these creators were unable to get it right. So for all these years I yearned for an avatar which which showed the real me.

And after all these years I was presented with a present (hmm is this sentence making sense?). The opportunity was in the form of a  talented illustrator Kshiraj. After numerous shifting of appointments and loads of goodies, Kshiraj agreed to draw a caricature of me. And here I proudly present to you an avatar which exemplifies my personality to the hilt  ‘ THE DIGITAL MINIME’ !!.

So now the next step is to go to the zillion different profiles i have created on the web and update them .

P.S. – Kshiraj was really cooperative in this venture, the sentence about him avoiding me was all a sham. It was me who was not supporting him . Thank you Kshiraj and you are already aware of your next project.

To see more of Kshiraj’s work visit his blog and his portfolio.

Lately I have been using Twitter (shameless plug : follow me on Twitter) a lot to post a lot of stuff I want to share with others while browsing. And of course sometimes the links are too long for the 140 character limit of Twitter. It is this limitation which gave rise to various URL shortening services on the web. I have personally been using TinyURL for the longest time for this job but I have now shifted to tr.im for URL shortening needs. TinyURL is still a good service but the following feature by tr.im has prompted my shift.

Statistics – tr.im gives you a nifty statistics info for all your tr.im URL’s which tell me how many users have visited the link and from which sites.  Above all I do not have to log in to access the data. So now I know where the traffic to my tr.im url is being directed from. 

So here’s to tr.im for all the trimmed URL’s.

Other URL shortners which I have tried.

• TinyURL
• is.gd
• SnipURL

All these past years I have read in many blogs and articles that freelancers and web workers choose various coffee shops as their makeshift offices. Starbucks is kind of a rage among designers in the US for this reason. I have been thinking how would it feel to work in such a bustling and busy environment. Ok writing a blog post or creating a document is one thing but creating layouts/logos etc. in such environments. Is it possible?

Couple of weeks back I had an opportunity to find out. I had a meeting scheduled with a friend of mine to talk about his personal website in a Coffee shop. I of course had my laptop and all my stuff with me but when I reached there my friend called up and said he would be delayed by an hour or so. So here I was, with almost an hour at my disposal with nothing to do. I was not carrying my data card with me and the coffee shop had no Wi-Fi, so I was without internet (To think of now it was a good I had no internet).  

So I though why not catch up on some of my backlog of work. So I ordered a Café latte and popped open my laptop. Since a past few days I had been stuck on this layout which I was unable to focus and complete. So I started working on that layout. The first thing I did was to crank up the volume on the iPod and I was able to block out all the noise around me. With a regular intake of caffeine and music I was able to finish the layout before my friend came (although he took around 90 minutes to reach there).

I was really surprised by the outcome of this experiment. I was in new place with lot of people and noise around me but still I was able to focus on what I had to complete (and without the internet).  I guess I would try to do this more often

I saw this really moving video in one of my bookmarked websites. It give a very  moving reminder of the problem of Global warming and the importance of not stopping the fight against it. 

The video was created by McCann Erickson Portugal for Portugal’s Association for the Conservation Nature.

View the video at FWA theatre

Somewhere down the long path of the career of an IT professional, is a milestone which is called an all nighter. Almost every other IT professional has spent some nights in front of his computer or laptop to catch up to meet impossible or difficult deadlines. I have had a share of All Nighters myself and I have somehow started to get through them without much difficulty. Tonight is again one of the nights when I have to be up the whole night to meet some deadlines.

So I thought it would be somewhat a different experience to document the current all nighter. First of all here some tips which have been helping me in pulling through the nights.

Motivate yourself - if your brains know its important for you then the body will follow. If you are not mentally prepared to not sleep, believe not even the best energy drink can help you do it. So make up your mind that you have to do it no matter what.

Plan and Focus – Make a plan for the whole night and follow it to the very detail. It is easy to get distracted if you do not have a plan it place. Avoid distractions like chatting, Net surfing and visiting your favorite social networking websites. You will get nothing done if you get entangled in all these distractions.

Preparation – A little preparation will help you a lot. Generally a shower before sitting down and a light dinner helps me stay awake longer without any help of caffeine.

No Power naps - This has never worked for me. These power naps turn into monsters that eat away all the time you wanted for work. The next think you find out that you have slept through the whole night with the task at hand unfinished.

Eat and Drink - Generally on the night that I have to stay awake, I eat a light dinner which keeps me awake. But that also results in hunger pangs during the night. So the best thing is to have a light snack, like munching on a apple or couple of cookies to cope with this. Also do not keep the food items close to you, as it always a good idea to get up, walk to the kitchen to get them. This way you also get the much needed respite from the back breaking work posture.

Also keep ice cold water with you. This tip was given to me by pixel master Shane Mielke (A.k.a. Pixelranger) and has help me all these years. If you feel sleepy drink a couple of glasses of ice cold water and watch yourself shiver off the sleep.

Music and Entertainment- I just cannot work without music and this surely helps through the nights . My iPod touch (generously gifted by my kid bro) is always with me to dish out all the fast paced trance numbers to keep me pumped up. Also avoid slow songs, they would work as a lullaby and make you miss your sleep. So its either rock or trance for me.

Sometimes I hook up my favorite movie on my second machine which somehow helps me cope up with the pressure and helps me loosen up a bit.

If all else fails its time to get some caffiene in your system – I am a caffiene junkie so I need small excuses to get it in my system. In times of crisis a cup of coffee or a Red Bull can help me stay awake for hours. There is a downside to this though, too much of it and I turn into a energised muti tasker who tries to do a lot of things at once, which of course takes away my focus and i waste lot of time. So 1 generally pace myself in such a way that I get the right amount of caffiene in me.

So this is how I pull off an all nighter, hope this helps somebody out there who has to catch up with his backlog of work in a single night .

I would ofcourse update this post throughout the night to report in my progress. Keep watching this space.

UPDATE I @ 3:15 AM
Status : Feeling fine till now. No signs of sleep.
Listening to : Linkin Park / Minutes to Midnight
Caffeine counter : 1 Red bull consumed
Tasks status : 80% of task one. two tasks queued.

UPDATE II @ 5:00 AM
Status : Feeling a little sleepy but still able to focus on the task at hand
Listening to : Paul Van Dyk / Politics of Dance (Disc II)
Caffeine counter : 1 Red bull consumed + 1 coffee
Tasks status : Task 1 completed. Task 2 40% Done. Task 3 queued.

UPDATE III @ 6:30 AM
Status : All Nighter Success !!! Surprisingly now I don’t feel sleepy at all but ill try to catch some ZZZ’s
Listening to : Above & Beyond / Anjunabeats (Volume III)
Caffeine counter : 1 Red bull consumed + 1 coffee
Tasks status : Task 1 completed. Task 2 completed. Task 3 abandoned.

After the must awaited launch of App store for iPhone, there has been a flood of new apps for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Today Wordpress also launched their app to manage wordpress.com as well as .org powered blogs. Though a little bit late than the Typepad app, it’s here.

Connecting to your blog is easy and fast. One can also post pictures but you cannot resize them as of now. I am not posting any images as of now as I am using the iPod Touch for this post.

I am now really waiting for the iPhone to launch in India.

P.S. – my thumbs hurt now after posting this.

Last night i was just going through some photographs i had clicked on my last trip. There is this one particular picture which has been liked by a lot of people, so i fired up Photoshop and see if i can come with a  wallpaper with that picture as a base. So here is the resulting wallpaper, not to fancy i might add.

Nature_Wallpaper_1024

Nature Wallpaper (widescreen)

I am also planning to convert some other pictures into wallpapers soon. Watch this space.

Sumit

Ok ! its still a big maybe. Since the past couple of years i have been thinking of getting some ink on my skin and have been saving umpteen designs from the net. I have dragons, hearts, pinups, skulls and of course Japanese Kanji. I have also been tinkering of getting my own design on my skin but have not been bal eto get something good.

Couple of months back i was in training and while in one of the lectures I pencilled some tattoos (of course not at the expense of the lecture). So here is plan of action.

• Convert the most liked pencil art into vector format.
• Improve/ modify the vector creations
• Think, Think and Rethink
• Decide which design to get inked
• Think, Think, Think and Think a little more
• Get it Done !

So here is the start of the process. I have finally taken pictures and captured the pencil art. Here they are. BTW this is my first time so you are free to laugh at the designs.

Now all i have to do is get the designs I like into vector format and then IM GETTING A TATTOO !

BTW did i add this before its still a big maybe.