Chennai Marathon 2010 & Marine Engineering

This happened in Feb 2010. I went to support my friend Elanchezhiyan when he ran the Chennai Marathon 2010. He is a tough marine engineer who completed the half marathon without any practice whatsoever. I was really amazed by the stamina possessed by the Marine Engineers.

He used to tell me how he and other engineers used to work whenever there was a problem in the ship's engine room. The engine room temperature is around 50 degrees and they have nothing but re-hydrating water to drink, come out of the room once every half an hour just to have a breath of fresh air. One has to be physically, mentally and emotionally fit and also have their knowledge in material science, thermodynamics, electrical engineering, electronics engineering at their practical best to work and fix that problem.

I have come across few production issues in office, but still I have troubleshooted them whilst working in AC rooms with proper food. Whenever anyone complains about working late in office, I used to tell them my Marine friend's story.

Coming back to the Marathon, I was really taken aback by the sight of some of our Indian runners over there. Lot of them had come from villages and competed in it. They were running with their bare feet. I couldn't believe my fellow Indians ran half marathon on their bare feet. Lot of us have lot of resources but we never realize that we are gifted unless we see others' plight.

Hats off to my friend Elan for completing the Half Marathon without any practice and Hats off to my fellow Indians who completed the marathon and half marathon in their bare feet!!!

Chicken with Shallots

This is a very good chicken recipe that my mom tried just yesterday and it turned out to be really terrific. The moment I tasted it, I knew this recipe is going to be on my blog and here it is. Oh and for my vegetarian friends - please try the same recipe with something other than chicken and let me know how it turns out because the vegetarian version of this recipe does not exist yet. Sorry.

1. Pre-Cook the chicken separately:

• 1/2 kg Chicken - Either Bone or Boneless - cut into medium sized pieces
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon Turmeric
• 1 teaspoon Black Pepper Powder
• 1 teaspoon Ginger Garlic Paste
• 1 teaspoon Garam Masala

Marinate the chicken with the above ingredients for 15 minutes. Place the marinated chicken in the pressure cooker on a medium flame and cook for 3-4 minutes - Just add a little bit of water. The chicken should be around 75% cooked.

2. Make the Semi-Gravy:

• 1.5 to 2 cups - Shallots or small onions - its skin peeled & washed (Don't substitute regular onions for shallots - you will be compromising on the taste the shallots bring to the dish)
• 2 Medium Sized Tomato - Diced into pieces about the size of shallots
• 2 Medium Sized Capsicum - Diced into pieces about the size of shallots

Take a pan and pour 4 teaspoons of cooking oil into it. Add some 15-20 curry leaves and 4 dried red chillis. Add the shallots and saute them till they become glassy in appearance. Now add the capsicum and the tomato. Also add -

• 1/2 to 1 teaspoon salt - depending on taste
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder
• 1/2 to 1 teaspoon chilli powder - depending on taste
• 1/2 teaspoon ginger garlic paste
• 1/2 teaspoon garam masala

Saute the above ingredients till the raw smell of the tomatoes are gone. Now finally add the cooked chicken and continue to stir and saute till mixture becomes thick paste. If you want your chicken to be dry instead of a semi gravy - saute even more till all the moisture evaporates.

Mon Cher Amis - Bon Appetit !

PS: And I am terribly sorry that I don't have any pictures of this chicken with shallots, because it too yummy that I have forgotten to take pictures. It's so hard to remember to take pictures when the food is very very good.

Nice java based rich text editor

Hi there,
I am sure a lot of us are fans of Editplus, Notepad++, Textpad, etc. because we all want something better than notepad; and clearly wordpad is not something better!!! The problem with the popular Editplus or Notepad++ is that they are evaluation software and we need pay to use them. Lets face it, we are not going to pay for text editing software in the near future. And here is one cute java based open source alternative that I found recently - Jedit.

Link: http://www.jedit.org/

A few plus points I found for the editor -
1. Supports Multiple Views - You can basically clone/spawn multiple windows from the main window. Works great!
2. If you need to work with large text files say over 100 Megs, just start the Jedit with a larger jvm heap size like this - C:\Users\Arun Thilak>java -Xms64M -Xmx512M -jar "C:\Program Files\jEdit 4.3.1\jedit.jar"
where Xms and Xmx are the initial and final JVM heap sizes & modify them as per your requirements.
3. Supports Regex searching and also provides multi-color syntax support for different file types.
4. Although I haven't explored it myself - there is a large amount of plugins' support for the editor

Do check it out and let me know how it works!
Happy Scripting :-)

What to do when one gets the cold

Well, its that time of the year when the cold and flu viruses are out in the open and trying to migrate form one body to another. And we build our forts by taking in lots of vitamins and sometimes they are just not enough because that damned virus finds a way to break it year after year. So how do we deal with the virus? Here is an idea: -

Take your hardcore meat-eating friends (vegetarians will work too) and eat a lot of chicken in your favorite restaurant. Check out my typical menu when I fall sick –

1. Chicken clear soup / Chicken Manchow Soup with extra pepper
2. Pepper chicken masala
3. Spicy fried Chicken
4. Chicken friend rice or briyani
5. Chilli chicken

And after reaching home, if my head is still not clear, I take milk with a pinch of turmeric powder in it. Turmeric powder is a very effective antibiotic. The only other thing that may beat this above feast of food is the home made chicken soup (Tamil Nadu village style). And here is the recipe for that … do try it in case you get sick. It helps !

Chicken Soup from the village

1. Preparing the magic paste

• 50 grams shallots (small onions - around 10)
• 2 cloves of garlic
  
• Small piece of ginger (around ½ inch)
• Curry Leaves – around 10
• Cumin seeds (Jeera) – ½ teaspoon
• Whole Pepper – 1 teaspoon
• Turmeric powder– ¼ teaspoon
• Coriander powder – 1 teaspoon

Grind all the above ingredients in a Mixer/Blender with a little water.





2. Making the soup

Use a small pressure cooker and add some cut pieces of Chicken. (Around 100 to 150 grams of bone pieces rather than flesh pieces). Add the paste prepared already, 2 cups of water, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 tomato cut into medium sized pieces. Stir the mixture, place the lid and let the chicken cook. After the first whistle comes, simmer the flame and let the chicken cook on the reduced flame for another 5 minutes. Remove the cooker from the stove, filter the soup and add additional salt and pepper according to taste.

Bon appetite and lets show the virus that we can throw it out our system ...

Emirates baggage handling capabilities

Friends,
This is just a cautionary advice for you international fliers out there ...
Caution 1: Flying through the middle east is a high risk for your belongings in your check-in baggage. It seems that the ground staff are paid very low salaries and put up in very pathetic living conditions (Refer to BBC documentary on the same) that they need to steal items from baggage whenever possible. (Is this how middle east makes profit?)

Caution 2: If, your check-in baggage ever gets delayed, useful stuff in it is most probably stolen. Try to get to the airport to receive the baggage when they say your baggage has arrived. At least you can make sure that the contents of your baggage will not be in the destination airport

Caution 3: If you lose any personal belongings in your bag, the airlines is not going to pay compensation unless you slap a law suit on them. This happened to me in Emirates, one of the best airlines in the world and I lost a lot of my used portable electronics when my baggage was stolen. They wont pay me a single penny and they have rules and regulations to protect themselves.

Check out their reason for not paying me - this is an extract from conditions of the carriage -

Conditions of Carriage in particular Article 15.5.3, ‘the carrier is not liable for loss of or damage to fragile or perishable articles, money, jewellery, precious metals, silverware, negotiable papers, securities, or other valuables, business documents, passports and other identification documents, computers, personal electronic devices, mobiles phone, stored data, any medication or medical equipment which may be required in-flight or during your trip or which cannot be quickly replaced if lost or damaged, house or car keys, valuable documents (including, for example, business documents, passports and other identification documents, negotiable papers, securities deeds) or samples, whether with or without the knowledge of the carrier.’

Obviously, we are not aware of these conditions during the time of booking. Like any other sane human being, we would probably just book the ticket rather than read through 50 pages of conditions of carriage before booking any ticket. This conditions of carriage is Emirates defense in having an insecure baggage handling service and how to get away from any theft from it side without paying any damages.

Do a Google search for Emirates Baggage Handling and you would get lots of hits. This shows their credibility in baggage handling. And their inability to accept their mistake and provide compensation shows their corporate creed and their true customer service image, definitely well hidden in those ads.

Beware of Emirates my friends, and fly safe.

Bad economy makes bad jokes

Well ... ever since the economy is doing bad and also there are lot of management people losing jobs, it is in bad taste to still have the blog entry that has the funny slandering of my friends who are in management. I am removing certain portions of my earlier blog with references to my friends in management.

I am technically competent plus my skill set is not mundane and hence I feel I have job security even during a bad economy. However, bagging contracts in the bad economy is like climbing the Himalayas or swimming upstream in a river when water from a dam on the river is released. I applaud their mettle and mental strength during this tough economic conditions. Like they say, a calm sea never made a skillful mariner. I guess I have a zillion things to learn from my management friends. Hope everyone rides out this economic storm.

Cauliflower Manchurian

My dear friends,
Due to popular request and for all my vegetarian friends out there - am posting this recipe for Gobi Manchurian - the Indian way. After coming back to India I found out that one of my super good friends has turned into a non-vegetarian and another one of my super good friends turned into a vegetarian. I was happy that there was a loss and gain on both sides and the balance was restored in the world food chain. However, there was not really a balance in my blog with my pro-chicken attitude and I hope this post will bring out that missing balance between veggie and non-veggies.

Ingredients:
1. Cauliflower - 1 cup - cleaned and cut
2. Corn Flower - 100 grams
3. Maida (Refined flour) - 50 grams
4. Chilli Powder - 1 tsp
5. Soya sauce - 1/2 tsp
6. Ginger Garlic paste - 1/2 tsp
7. Salt - 1/2 to 1 tsp according to taste

Method:
Now if you dislike Soya sauce, ginger or garlic - both of them are optional. But if u add it, it brings that extra magic touch to the taste. Add all 2 to 7 ingredients and pour water, in small quantities, to make a good batter. If the batter is too thin, u can make more of the manchurians and if it is too thick, u would make less of it. You can figure out what thickness the batter should be yourself.

Heat the cooking oil for frying, dip the vegetable in the batter and deep fry it, till bubbling comes down.

This is end of stage one. If u r really hungry, you can eat as such after frying (make sure you drain the excess oil, otherwise you might burn your tongue). Or you can choose to take it to next stage.

Ingredients:
1. 1 mid sized onion - chopped up nicely
2. 1 chilli - chopped
3. Soya sauce - 1/2 tsp
4. Ginger + Garlic - chopped up 1/2 tsp
5. pepper
6. 2 tsp oil
7. add a little sugar , if u like ur manchurians to be sweet

Method:
Pour the oil in pan and put the onions, chilli, ginger + garlic chopped in and saute nicely. After a couple of minutes add the soya sauce and pepper and continue to saute. Now pour little water and let the onions cook for a bit. Once all the water is evaporated, add the fried Manchurians and stir till the mix gets even. The dry manchurians are now ready. And if you want to convert this to a gravy - just add a spoon of corn flour with water and add to the mixture.

Bon appetite ... Let me know how it turned out ...