iBlog: Nishit Shah

Came across Buxfer in Rajat’s Blog and have been using it since then to track my personal expenses and it has done its job pretty well. Buxfer is short for ‘BUcks transFER’ created by 3 former IITians doing their PhD at Carnegie Mellon. And as they say necessity is the mother of all inventions, they needed some way to track their expenses while eating out with a bunch of guys. As scraps of papers and their memories were not enough to keep track of it, they came up with a small script and then they shared it on the web and the rest as they say is A New Dot Com on the Web

These are the 3 things that I can’t live without, not necessarily in that order ! Finally changed my ISP from Sify back to Exattnet for a fundoo broadband connection. Got a 128 kpbs unlimited download 24 hrs connection for just 3K annually including taxes dat comes to just Rs. 250/month…dirt cheap. Good enough for me to survive for a year. Was paying Rs 460/month with taxes to Sify for 150 MB download limit between 8am to 10pm n unlimited at night. But this connection is wayyy better.. I feel like GOD..

The movie is based on the bestselling book named Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser. Had heard about the book and had read a couple of but couldn’t get hold of it at Crossword however it was easy for me to get my hands on the movie. It talks about the amount of real SHIT that goes in the meat. The movie begins with some agents helping a bunch of poor Mexicans to migrate illegally to US and work in the abattoir of a fictional Fast Food giant Mickey’s where all the cows are slaughtered to make Hamburgers. What goes behind the scenes is really horrifying but they haven’t shown much gore in the movie except in the end where they show a cow being slaughtered and its kidneys removed. A must watch movie..or better still I would recommend the book, though I haven’t read it myself yet because it deals with more of Fast Food like what goes into the making of the French Fries, Pizzas, etc that we all eat with both hands.

Couple of articles worth reading: Unhappy Meals and The Bitter Truth About Fast Food

I have always been a veggie and now will try and cut down on pizzas and fries. In this world one can’t eliminate the amount of crap (junk food) one takes but can surely restrict it. Lets see how long I survive..

Switched over from Fedora core 5 to CentOS 4.4. Yeah I know FC 6 is out and has more features and eye candy than Core 5 but few things ain’t working like my Sify Dialer. Also, I had done a ‘Everything’ install of Fedora Core 5 and it was too cumbersome to work on it to first uninstall the server application that I wanted to work on and then install the new latest version and then work on the dependences. So finally I did a very basic installation of Centos 4.4 with X Windows and Gnome. Could have done with minimal install but need X for net.
Next week will welcome the new year by setting up a Quad boot system for Win XP Media Center, CentOS 4.4, FreeBSD 6.1 and Ubuntu 6.10. Lets see how far it goes.