The number of the beast

Better Prothom-alo site

Since prothom-alo launced their site in unicode, I try to visit their site once in a day. But the flashy ads are so annoying, I decided to write a simple greasemonkey script to hide all those ads.

A few observation in firebug and some time of mine yielded the following result. If you are a firefox user and use greasemoneky and read prothomo-alo.com site, then please give it a try.

http://code.google.com/p/better-prothom-alo/downloads/list

In short, it hides the banner ads and some unnecessary portion from the prothom-alo site.

Please leave a comment if you liked it.

Mission peak trekking

Last sunday (10/25/2009) me and shishir vai went for another (we did it the earlier week as well) trekking on mission peak. This time we started to ascend at 5:35AM and reached the top by 7:05AM - one and half hour in total. So after a long time I had the privilege to enjoy the sunrise again. It was beautiful - just beautiful. Though it was pretty early, there were a small crowd of people on top. And I overheard this conversation :D

I was a bit reluctant to take my camera with me (it weighs a lot) but had no regret when I reached the top. Here are couple of pictures that I took -

Kids conversation

I went to Mission peak again today. While resting on the top a group of kids (6/7 in total) came up. One of them was very interested in knowing how long it took for them to come up. So he asked the other kids about this. The overheard conversation:

kid 1: How long did it take to come up?
kid 2: one hour.
(Doesn't believe his answer.. turned to another one)
kid 1: How long did it take?
kid 3: (sarcastic) A looong time.. (chuckles)
(Now getting annoyed by this answer turned to another one)
kid 1: How long did it take to come up?
kid 4: We started at six and now its eight o three. Umm so one hour..
       Oh wait.. two hours
kid 1: two hours!!! can't believe it.

I have no idea why I liked this conversation - but hell yeah - keep asking questions as long as you don't get the answer (possibly the one you want to hear) :)

Waiting for my Galileoscope

Got mail from the Galileoscope that my one will be shipped end of next week and I can expect it by end of October. This is quick compared to all the reviews I read before, people waited for more than two/three months to get this in hand. I ordered on September 15th. I am so excited! Cant wait!!




Update:
Got my Galileoscope on 16th Oct. Just assembled the parts - No moon so no viewing.

Disappointed at Blood Donation Center

Today after a long time I went to a Blood Donation Center. But there I came to know that I am not an eligible donor. According to FDA rules I have to stay here in US for three consecutive years to be eligible. That sucks. But I think FDA is right. They seems to have lots of different restrictions based on donor's previous geological, medical, habitual history. Well I don't think I won't be staying in US for three consecutive years. So no luck on donating in US.

Note to thyself - Donate when I visit my home country.

Modifying Flickr feeds through Yahoo Pipes

Flickr api provides rss feeds which I think is really awesome. I can get all my friends updates right within Google Reader. But there is a caveat, those feeds comes with only small size images. So I searched around flickr api to find feeds with bigger size images - but there were none. But luckily there is yahoo pipes. As the feed already has the image url, I can just change the width and height of <img> attribute and get better images in the feed.

So here is what I got. If you want feeds from one individual, then you can use this pipe (or this pipe) to get feed with larger images. Here is my flickr stream feed. And when I ran through yahoo pipes I got this feed.

I liked this pipe very much. Its simple and basically it can set any flickr stream feeds images to larger images. Now you can pipe feeds from your contacts or from friends & family.