Pay Per Post

The title may be misleading. I am not advertising. Since the genesis of blogging, the number of bloggers have soared. There are a plethora of blog types – Personal Online Diary. Corporate Blogs, Picture Blogs, Video Blogs, Podcasts. Blogs equip us to do things which will not be possible without it – It allows people to voice out their opinions, especially of politics SAFELY; it allows people to talk about their experiences; serves a travelogue and lot more… One aspect of it makes it suitable for online advertising, advertising in its highest form (like Test Cricket) – bloggers write about their experiences using a product. Why is it so interesting?

You will get paid if you blog – something that you were doing it in your leisure time.

Many people have scruples about getting paid for blogging, especially the guys who have lot of anonymous followers – Why should I commercialize my blog? (What’s wrong in doing?), Why should I advocate something which I don’t use? (What’s wrong in advertising?), I don’t say it’s advertising (oh… I can mention I am advertising).

These have made many people to start a new ‘Paper Post’ (pay per post) blog.

Visit http://www.payperpost.com for more info. You don’t own a ‘paper post’ blog and if you are an interested blogger don’t forget to visit the website. The more your pagerank the more you get paid. If you have good writing skills and can make your blog interesting enough to gain anonymous readers you are sure to get a good pay.

Many in my college earn through pay per post. It can make you good pocket money. Nevertheless, none of the blogs on my blog rolls is a Paper post – all are digital ;)

What do you mean?

I have not been a voracious reader and I need a dictionary often. These are my review on different online dictionaries.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org

I found this site, when I was reading Harry Potter books. It has many interesting features. It doesn’t use Ajax and for each word it loads a whole page. This may not be a problem unless you are looking up many words in a row. Nevertheless, it’s extremely fast. It has concise meanings for words and their various forms (noun, verb, adverb …). Unlike other websites which provide useless etymology that you can’t understand and definitions from several places, it’s simple with a usage for each form. There are some disadvantages too. It doesn’t have an audio and it doesn’t show related words (synonyms).

This should be the site you should look for if you just want the meaning of a word without caring for it’s pronunciation.

http://dictionary.reference.com

This site is not as fast as the previous one. It lacks brevity. You might have rummage through the pile of information displayed for what you need. But it has some advantages over the previous site. It clubs related words together as a thesaurus and it also has an audio pronunciation.

This should be the ideal site if you wanna build up your vocabulary using a dictionary.

update (Thanks to Amit Agarwal) http://mnemonicdictionary.com

This contains many words, techniques for remembering them, pronunciation, usage, etymology and much more. It has community generated content for usages. You can also add your contribution.

Other sites haven’t interested me much.

Another stupid way to keep my blog post count ticking. This is a question to you, if you had been reading through all that I have written (typed – suppress the mokkai, if you are of my kind) – What made you read this post about using dictionaries? This isn’t even a movie review. You are all time vetti, aren’t you?

Innocence again

This is a small incident that happened. Thought I would share it. I had to go to nearby shop a cute little Alpha kid (Alpha Mat. Hr. School :P) was there. He was a nerd by look and might have been in his third std. This is how it went. The English transliteration is without brackets and you will find its meaning within brackets…

• Kid: Anna, adhu evlo? (Hey bro, how much is that?)
• Shopkeeper: (some amount)
• Kid: pointing at some pouch adhu thanga.(show me that)

• He was pointing at some transparent pouch and asked for it. The shopkeeper was rummaging through the pile of pouches. This boy thought he would help and uttered..

• Kid: yen thambi vechirkamadhri irkla.. adha thanga.. ( I asked for the pouch that’s similar to what my brother has )

• This made the shopkeeper and me laugh. :))

• Shopkeeper: laughing yenaku yepdi pa theriyum? ( How will I know?)

If you didn’t find it mirthful, there is some serious problem with my way of describing things :P

Defying the laws of Nature..

It’s not about science. This is about a part of Indian Cinema. It’s common to find people compare regional movies against Hollywood and mock at theirs. I feel it’s bad because it’s not an even platform. They have so much to spend. But videos like this (below) will definitely make anyone feel why, sometimes, is Indian Cinema so stupid. I have seen some wonderful regional movies; I have also seen stupid Hollywood movies which aren’t screened in theatres abroad, but I have not seen anything as stupid as this.

Haha.. When I watched this video, I was thinking this: Why didn’t anyone stop the stunt man or the director. My assumption – The director’s imagination was so fantastic and he had something more amusing than this. The crew around him ameliorated it to this intensity.

Russel Dominique Peters

This blog is about Russel, a guy of Indian origin, born and brought up in Canada. He is a famous stand-up comedian out there. He tours around the world and has made lot of business. To get more info about this guy, refer wiki. All his works parody one race or the other. When I saw him first I felt he might be offending, then I started liking some of his works.

Here is a comedy that I liked.

Gmail Attachments

Gmail is against sending .exe files in attachments. It also discards script files even if they are compressed. The only well known option is to rename it using a different extension. This is a not an elegant solution but it works.

This is my recent experience with gmail attachments. This incident bugged me up. The mistake I made was I renamed it using .txt extension. So what’s the problem? I had several script files(tcsh) and source files in a tarball. I had to send the tarball to the linux box at college. It was created in linux but I was mailing from windows. Don’t ask me why I didn’t mail from linux. It was for some reason. You could assume I was in windows when the need came and I had the tarball in a fat partition. I renamed it with “.txt” and sent the file. After the download-rename procedure and untarring it, my scripts weren’t working. When I copied the contents of the script to another file, character by character, it worked!! It sounded as though the editor was buggy :P. The interpreter showed that the first line contained the error. I knew it didn’t have any logical or syntax errors since it was working in my system. Usually ascii files add problems when they are moved from one os to another due to line separators (windows uses \r\n and linux uses \n). But this can’t be the problem because both of the systems were using linux. Since there couldn’t be any other reason I tried replacing all line separators using a program and the scripts worked.

Phew! I found out. This could be the possible reason. It was gmail. When I attached the tarball (fake txt file), gmail allowed it because it wasn’t an executable file. But since a text file with line separators of linux and I was mailing from a windows box, it replaced all “\n” by “\r\n”. That’s why my scripts weren’t working. I am still sceptical about this. Although it’s not likely there might have been another reason: Windows automatically converting text files to its convention.

After this incident I used software specific extensions such as(.doc) which cannot be manipulated by gmail. It works!