In Pursuit of Wisdom

We were in a fine mood while coming back from LA back to San Francisco Bay Area last Sunday (28th June) night through highway 5 before we encountered an accident. We all are alive with no major injuries apparently. The car rolled a few times to avoid a hit & run in the interstate 5 and ended up landing in the side of road breaking almost all the areas of the car except where Shusmita and Ahyan were sitting. We had our early dinner in Aladin sweets that night buying fishes, soups and after driving around 100+ miles on the way home, Shusmita took the car from me as Ahyan was already sleeping by that time. She has been giving me some handy breaks in long drives for last few months. This time also she took it as a routine and I don't think she could do anything better to avoid this accident. While we were 130 miles away from LA and 250 miles before San Francisco Bay area, the accident happened at around 10:30 in a dark night. I was in the navigator seat lying down instead of regula...

I am writing from Golden Grove Hyatt Regency North Tower which is adjacent to Disneyland, Anaheim. I, Shusmita and Ahyan started from Fremont around 6 PM Friday and it took approximately 6 hours to drive the 400 miles to here. Shusmita gave a very good break to me by driving around 2 and half hours of this chunk. Saturday (yesterday) morning I attended the Silva Method Basic Lecture Series (BLS) by Hans DeJong at the 2nd floor of the same hotel. Earlier in January I took the Silva Life Systems seminar in Sacramento under Steven Protopappas and hence this re-take course was free for me with a nominal sitting fee of $35. For those of my readers who are not familiar with the terms meditation, mind control, silva method - please have a quick glance at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silva_method . Meanwhile, Shusmita and Ahyan went to Disneyland with the Hyatt shuttle bus to avoid parking hassles. They enjoyed the whole day there although it was tough on her to handle Ahyan and the strolle...

Yesterday was amazing for me. Shusmita called me in the afternoon that my Kindle DX has arrived - it was supposed to reach me 26th but came 3 days earlier, so nice of Amazon. I immediately emailed my friends in Fremont that guys come to Starbucks tonight and I will give you a treat and show my Kindle to you! I rushed towards home and saw my beautiful gadget. It's less wider than hat I thought looking at the pictures aand videos earlier and it's very slim and book like. I copied some Bengali and English PDFs from my laptop to the Kindle and they were shown perfectly fine. Shusmita was not interested about this earlier, but yesterday after seeing it, she was excited herself and agreed that it's a great piece of gadget. At 9 o'clock, Ezaz, Shaki, Wali Bhai, Asha Vabi, Nitol, Hasinur, Sigma, Shahriar, Sachi came to Starbucks and we had some coffee from there and snacks from Chaat Cafe. Last night I also bought the tickets of NABC 2009 for me, Shusmita, Nitol and Amin. I als...

Today I, Shusmita, Ahyan and Nitol had lunch in Chunnu Bhai's new restaurant Tandoor House in the same complex in Fremont where we come to play bowling sometimes. I was so happy to see the spacious, neat & clean restaurant and eating the delicious shrip tandoori and tandoori lamb chop that I wrote a yelp review instantly after returning back home. While I was cleaning up my old papers yesterday, I found an old poem written by Saiful Karim in my farewell from Therap BD. I thought to write it down using my newly discovered Quillpad tool . So here it is. আশিক ভাই   কবি সাইফুল করিম রচিত   নামটি আশিক, বড়ই রসিক,  সে নাকি এক বিশ্ব প্রেমিক,  লম্বাটে মুখ, বাপ রে কী ঠাট;  রাখে আবার ফ্রেঞ্চ কাট|  মন টি ভালো, বড়ই উদার;  হেল্প চাইলেই করেন দেদার|  একটি যদি প্রশ্ন সুধাও  আনসারের সাথে কিছু ফাও|  বেড়াতে খুব ভালোবাসে,  যখন ফোনে কল আসে,  বান্ধবী কে সংগে নিয়া,  ফেন্টাসি বা আশুলিয়া|  [2005 এর মার্চ এ লেখা]

Quillpad is a free online typing tool for 10 south asial languages. Yesterday I was having time free time in office so thought of searching for an API that helps writing bengali. And I landed in http://www.quillpad.in/bengali which is more than what I was looking for. It's very easy to type in Bengali in Quillpad. For example, type 'apni kemon achen' in the Quillpad editor. Quillpad will convert it directly into Bengali script. If you write a word like ' bishesh ', first sh should become 'শ' and the second sh should become 'ষ'. Quillpad will intelligently do that for you. No need to use shift keys or to memorize any key mappings. So 'রাষ্ট্রপতি' can be written by typing 'rashtrapati' or 'raashtrapathi' . Quillpad can also predict if multiple words are possible for your input. You can click on the word to select from those options. In addition Quillpad allows you to type English words freely in between Bengali words. It in...

This June 2009 is a special month for gadget lovers. Yesterday Amazon's Kindle DX was released and 18th of this month Apple's iPhone 3G S will be released. While I and my wife Shusmita already have our iPhone 3G, I am particularly in favor of Kindle to consider as the best gadget I can ever have. Amazon's Kindle DX is an electronic book reader, the third of it's kind after it's successful debut in late 2007 with the first generation followed by early this year with second generation also known as Kindle 2 . Like I waited for iPhone to mature a little bit before I bought that, I also waited for Kindle platform to mature before I made up my mind to buy the latest generation Kindle (DX). I love reading books, both in English and in my mother language Bengali. My decision behind buying the new larger size Kindle DX is primarily because it has a native PDF reader and hence I will be able to read Bengali PDF books which I won't be in the case of Kindle 1 or 2. My onl...