My friend finished a marathon
Monday, February 21, 2005
I am never too busy to plug a friend 
My close friend Santhosh (Eli) finished the Asha Austin Marathon, which is commendable acheivement. Not many survive a full length marathon. He did it for a cause. You can read his story at his Runner Page. The point of the marathon is to show that he is a really dedicated fund raiser and that he is will to show his sincerity to the cause. You can read more about how fundraising is related to the Marathon. ASHA is a non-profit organization working for social and developmental cause in India, primarily in education and child development.
All this would be meaningless for him if he’s not able to meet his fund raising target of just $5240. Please donate generously and help keep his spirits and chin high. I don’t know what more one could do to get the attention of people like us. Santhosh was my classmate for four years during my bachelors - a close buddy if you will, and he’s now working at AMD at Austin after doing his Masters from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
I have never got to doing a fund raising activity myself, but I find it in me to support my friends who do.
Filed by Carthik at 10:38 pm under General 
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links for 2005-02-17
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Incorrect, or just careless?
Tuesday, February 8, 2005
Anil wrote about bankruptcy relating it to medical bills. The article Study: Health costs spur bankruptcy at CNN has some interesting points. What intrigued me was the following:
The average bankrupt person surveyed had spent $13,460 on co-payments, deductibles and uncovered services if they had private insurance. People with no insurance spent an average of $10,893 for such out-of-pocket expenses.
(emphasis mine)
So is it cheaper to not have medical insurance. The average difference seems to be a couple of thousand dollars! Maybe CNN was just careless here, or maybe Reuters was, since it’s a Reuters report, or maybe I “read” it wrong.
In any case, nothing can beat how I was puzzled when I heard the local WMFE (an NPR member station) announcer said, “Pick up your phone and dial xxxx now, it only take about a minute and ninety seconds to make your contribution.” Hold it right there - a minute and ninety seconds?
Oh, and by the way, I finally donated $20 to WMFE - I figure it is worth it since it’s the only station I listen to nowadays while I am driving. The music is good, the news is unbiased, and the specials very interesting. Sometimes, some of the pieces they play lifts me up on wings - like the Invitation to the Dance they aired yesterday on my drive to school. I originally intended to donate $36.50 - ten cents for each day in the year, but then I figured I don’t drive everyday 
Filed by Carthik at 5:54 am under General 2 Comments
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Map of where I live
Here’s where I live and here’s my daily drive! Thanks to maps.google.com.
On a side note, I have been thinking of biking the 5 miles daily - should be a good exercise, and could save a little gas money, like about $0.75 a day
It’s easy to look up a map given the latitude and longitude as an ICBM coordinate pair.
Here’s 28.553101, -81.193150 for example, which I got by entering the text I used in link, in the search box.
It seems like it is limited to the US /North America now, though, ’cause I get nothing for 76.958333, 8.437500, which is somewhere in Kerala, India.
Filed by Carthik at 5:01 am under techknow 1 Comment
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Phishing, IDN, and Gecko Browsers
Phishing flaw a danger to alternative browsers is interesting, to say the least. Internationalized domain names were introduced so we could have URLs in all languages - not just English. The modern browsers, especially gecko-based ones, like Netscape and Firefox support IDN already. Users of these browsers could be fooled into beleiving that www.pàypal.com is www.paypal.com, for example. It’s called a “homograph attack”.
The articles says :
Microsoft has not implemented support for IDN yet, so its IE browser is not vulnerable to the flaw.
Microsoft hasn’t implemented support for many standards, so that’s no surprise, really.
Filed by Carthik at 3:40 am under techknow 2 Comments
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No Name Yet
Sunday, February 6, 2005
Who would have guessed that http://www.no-name-yet.com would lead to http://ubuntulinux.org now? That is a good “working URL” (like one has “working titles”). I noticed no-name-yet.com when I visited http://www.no-name-yet.com/patches/ .
The Hindi word for anonymous (or literally “the one without a name”) - Anamika (A = No + nam = Name + ika = “qualifier meaning ‘the one’ (or something of that sort)”, always sounds good to me, whenever I hear it. Wouldn’t it be nice to name your kid “Anamika”, now? The hypothetical kid could then be called “Ann” or “Anna” in the U.S.
How many of you know that I had a nickname “Cash” during my undergrad days, fairly popular among my friends? “Cash” is a shorter version of “Carthik Sharma” in case you’re wondering. I hesitate to say, “You can call me Cash” in the U.S. only because it seems to make folks believe I made it up, and ’cause I hate it when people adopt a new nickname after they get here, like the many “Zhang”s who become “Shawn” and “Rajendar”s who become “Roger”s.
By the way, why are almost all the Indians who work at gas stations called “Nick”? I may know the answer, since in one particular gas-station they only had two name tags, and both said “Nick”, and whoever’s working the shift would just pin it on, regardless of what their real names were. But why “Nick” everywhere? Why not “Jack”? I am thinking that maybe all the Indian gas dealers of Central Florida got together and worked out a bargain deal for 100 pieces of identical name tags or something.
Filed by Carthik at 9:27 pm under Ubuntu, General 9 Comments
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