Quest for a (healthy) chocolate almond butter cookie

Nothing like a perfect unplanned weekend, well not the whole weekend (so far!) anyway, at least Saturday...

I once ate Kashi Chocolate Almond Butter cookie and when I woke up this fine (but gloomy) morning, for some reason I realized that there's a a big hole in my life... it wasn't until a few moments of deep self contemplation did I realize what it was... a hole inflicted by that very cookie I had devoured, something only a perfect homemade healthy chocolate cookie could fill.  And that's how began the quest to bake my own.

After some Googling I found a recipe that was closest to what I was looking for.  Best part was it was egg-less and didn't have anything that I wouldn't normally eat or couldn't pronounce, so very unlike the one I ate.  With tweaks of my own already playing in my mind I was swaying between: organize-n-clean the house(it's in total disarray!), clean the kitchen (barely any space on kitchen platform to work), cook lunch, go to office, oorrr.... bake a cookie!

I don't have to tell you who won... it was that chocolate crazed hound living inside of me, that's who!  (And to tell you the truth, it was totally worth skipping lunch for it!).  I had to go office though, couldn't skip that.

With mind set on the goal, I called upon my good'ol companion, Vividh Bharti.  Vividah Bharat was playing non-stop old melodies, a perfect setting for job at hand.  I needed no more encouragement, I knew I had made the right choice.

In the process, I discovered a few new (old!) songs that I hadn't heard before... that is the best part of listening to music on "real" radio, you always find a gem or two you haven't heard before.  And since this was non-stop gapless program, there were no radio jockeys, no adverts nothing, just pure unadulterated music.  Just me, my radio and cookie, perfectly Zen-like (though there was nothing Zen about it!).  My appreciation for behind-the-curtain engineers at the radio station who make this happen grew a bit today, but deepest heart felt thanks to people at AIR who finally made Vividh Bharti officially available over-the-web!

Just about to go into the oven

Let's not digress too much.

There was but one hurdle in otherwise perfect quest for a perfect cookie...  I was short of 2 very important ingredients: oats flour and buckwheat flour.  I wasn't in a mood to go out and shop, lest then I would have to finish other (boring) outdoorsy chores too.  I obviously had some buckwheat and oats at hand, so I put them in my good trust NutriBullet, for I knew she could handle it in a jiffy and indeed a few zaps later I had perfect oat and buckwheat flours!  Problem solved.
I followed the discovered recipe pretty much to the word, only change I made was to add molasses and almost double/triple the amount of nuts and cocoa powder.  'Nough histroy, let's get to baking...

First, My Personal Tips:

• Always roast the nuts.  Make sure you give enough time to cool them down, an hour maybe (you can always roast and keep some in airtight container for later use).  If you use them warm they become too soft and take away all the fun of having crunchy nuts in the cookies.  You can use almonds, peanuts, walnuts, hazelnuts or any other nut you love
• If the honey and/or coconut oil is solid (like it always is in the Pacific Northwest) don't microwave, rather just put the required amount in a small bowl, place the bowl in a larger one and add hot water to the larger bowl (on general principle, I avoid microwave if I can).  In a few minutes you'll have them nice and flowing.
• DO NOT, PLEASE DO NOT use store-bought run-of-the-mill cocoa/cocao powder.  For the perfect umph, use really high quality minimally processed raw cocoa powder.  Ever since I have discovered this ingredient, my kitchen-life hasn't been same again.

I know the list of ingredients looks a bit long for purportedly simple recipe, but trust me, this is a very very forgiving cookie (again very zen-like) and very simple to make.  Doesn't turn out bad if you don't proportion a few ingredients right.  You'll have to take my word on it for now.
Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup honey
• 2 tablespoons coconut oil, melted
• 2 tablespoons almond butter
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 3/4 cup rolled oats
• 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 1/4 cup each of: buckwheat, oat and whole wheat flour
• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons chocolate chips (I used way more than that!)
• 2 tablespoons almonds & walnuts, chopped and toasted (or any of the nuts you love)
• 1 tablespoon blackstrap molasses (optional)

Cooking Directions:

• Preheat the oven to 350F/175C
• Whisk together the honey, coconut oil, almond butter and vanilla in a bowl
• Add the next five ingredients, rolled oats, cocoa and 3 flours; mix until just combined
• You are not looking for the regular perfect smooth blob of dough, so don't try to mash it into one!
• Fold in the chocolate chips and (cooled down) nuts
• Scoop about 2 tablespoons of dough per cookie
• Flatten into a circle—they will not spread once they start baking but they will break, so you'll have to muster some skill
• Bake for 12-13 minutes, or until the tops look dry
• Remove and let it cool completely before serving, lest you'll burn your tongue from the still lava-hot choco-chips hidden inside (don't ask me how I know this!)

That's how mixed ingredients should look like

What would I do differently:

0. Add more blackstrap molasses
1. Experiment adding some more variety of grains
2. For a small batch I made, I would rather use a small counter-top oven versus the huge cooking range one

Out came scrumptious Chocolate Almond Butter cookie!

SwiftKey - The Worst Virtual Keyboard

I had heard a few raves about this new virtual keyboard (some even touted it as the best virtual keyboard on Android). So I wasn't very surprised seeing people go a little crazy when SwiftKey announced a free version for android.
I took the dive and installed it right away, fearing the offer was not going to last long.  The initial setup looked kind of polished and very welcoming.  The UI was certainly a notch better than stock/Google/Sammy keyboard, with a some amazing color/visual customizations.  Cool!
 
But it had one FATAL flaw... right from the very first sentence I typed, it would misspell about every 3rd word!  No kidding, I had to erase the word over and over only to find myself giving up on 4th or 5th retry and typing one alphabet at a time rather than swiping (or like I like to call it, Swype'ing).  Total disaster ~~~sigh~~~.  I thought I was typing obscure words, I toned down my vocabulary but SwiftKey's accuracy didn't improve.  It didn't even remember or learn that I'm constantly correcting what was interpreted of my swipe, or what I had chosen the last time on the same swipe pattern.
And if I ever wanted to spell out non-English words, then the feeling was nothing short of having entered the gates of hell!  I'm not kidding or exaggerating.  It is indeed that bad.  More than once I felt I would rather prefer the T9 Predictive Text of older feature phones from last decade (which, for the record was amazing for the time on phones).  After raving about swipe'ing keyboard when it first came and showing it off to friends, I started feeling sheepish and embarrassed in front friends when had to correct over and over AND over.  Not to mention the horror of adding an apostrophe(') to any word, you have to fight hard against SwiftKey to NOT add a space, and if you go back it often, due to mind of its own, change the word, auto-(in)correct (tm)!

But I wasn't ready to give it up yet, the critical self inside of me questioned me, I thought it was probably my swiping, or my words, or my usage, or something in me that was horribly wrong, so I kept using it for good 3 months.. But one fine day my patience crossed its threshold (not to be confused with Windows Threshold! Bad joke!).  But seriously, I reached a point where I said just !@#$ it, I don't want to retype every 3rd word any time I type a sentence.  I didn't want to spend enormous amount of time correcting or updating SwiftKey's dictionary, esp. when I knew my last virtual keyboard was awesome.

So, that very instant, before steam would start coming out of my ears and nose, I switched back to my good'ol Swype (Google Play, official page)!  Boy did I miss you!  With tears in my eyes (of happiness, of course) I whispered into her caring ears, I missed you so bad, I really did!  Glad to have you back in my life! ~~~hugs and kisses~~~ (yes, I'm known to sometimes talk to inanimate objects in cases like this)!

I'm now re-experiencing the joy of fast and error-free typing, Swype'ing!! ~~~muah~~~
I highly doubt the claims that SwiftKey is the most popular virtual keyboard out there, in my opinion it's the worst virtual keyboard I have ever used. Adiós SwifyKey!  At this point, I don't feel like checking out the blogsphere as to why SwiftKey wasn't good for me, esp. because I know a perfectly great virtual keyboard is sitting right in front of me!  The rational part of my self is hating me for sticking with it for so long and wasting so much of precious time, but the un-rational(uhh? what?) part is happy I gave it a good shot.


If you haven't tried SwiftKey, then don't worry, you haven't missed a thing.

Movie Review: Transformers-Age of Extinction

It's been a while here... intense work coupled with good weather is keeping me away from blogging.
So I thought I will post a quick review on the something... something that was supposed to be a movie I saw a few days back... Transformers: Age of Extinction.

If you don't care to read my elaborate and detailed review of the movie, I'll offer you something that perfectly summarizes the whole movie in a single line and you can then decide what you want to do next...

 Watching Age of Extinction is like watching two drunk junkyards having wild-wild sex in the fit of love in your backyard.

Plot wise, if you can say one exists (which doesn't!), it is strikingly identical to all the other 3 movies in the series that preceded it:

• Everyone searching for that one that thing, spark, seed, fruit, flower... that will tip the scale in Autobot wars, Check
• An underdog (Mark Wahlberg), Check
• Barely-Legal hot chick (Nicola Peltz) who, no matter what, always has a perfect makeup with pink luscious lipstick on, ALL the bejesus time, Check
• Secret Government Organization, Check
• A villain hiding in plain sight (Megatron aka Galvatron), Check
• A hero hiding in plain sight (Optimus Prime), Check
• Plain sight hiding in plain sight... WAIT! What?? That doesn't make sense! Check!
• Lots of shaky shots, fire, destruction, mayhem, explosions... Check, check and Check!
• Incoherent story line, Check
• Predictable, Check
• And it is unbearably long, Check

(For the record, the first original Transformers was enjoyable, with just the right amount of special effects and not unbearably long).

First off, it looks like the movie was made by someone (and FOR someone) who loves to masturbate to violent explosions and destruction of things.  And every iteration of the "act" then demands for a bigger and larger explosion to get the fix.

There are so many explosions in the movie that it makes all of the 4th of July fireworks combined (to date!) look like a mere spark from striking a matchstick.  If Michael Bay were ever looking for an alternate profession, I think he can really give even the most contemporary Pyrotechnians a run for their monies.

Age of Extinction basically is the exact same movie as the first one, just with more cheap and racist shots at humor, more noise (or the explosion), more robots (or car thingies, because you can't tell what's what anymore).  Once the autobots start fighting (or start making violent love, because no one can really discern what's happening!) you can't figure which are the good guys and which are the bad ones, which makes it orders of magnitude more annoying, because you want to root for the good guys, right?

To top it all off, the movie is incredibly long, 160 minutes, which is well over 2 and freakin' half hours!  2 freaking half hours of mind-numbing noise, mind-bending explosions, mind-@#$ing action and all this to no end, or the same "we must save humans(~~~imagine Prime's voice~~~)" sh!t.  That's torture, not entertainment.  If you want to exact a revenge on someone without him/her realizing it... take them to this movie, IN 3-freaking-D!

And most certainly NO, I haven't missed the juiciest part, Michael Bay's penchant for staring barely-legal female characters is only a notch higher in this version compared to previous movies.  While looking at the hot 20-something year old Nicola Peltz may make you overlook a few flaws in the movie, more than average flaws might I even add   ~~~wink wink~~~, even 100s of her in this movie cannot make you overlook the lameness of everything this film has thrown on the screen.

I believe I have now been permanently marred by this experience and I've decided to ban all future Michael Bay films from my life for good.  I wouldn't have watched this one either, had it not been for my buddy insisting on watching it.  At least he agreed to my one condition when I retaliated; I'm not going to watch it in 3D, even if you pay me a thousand dollars! (A lesson I learned the hard way from the experience of watching the last Transformer movie in 3D, Rise or Fall or Revenge of something).

But, in all fairness, the ideal audience for this movie is not the demographic of USA, but it is other parts of the world, parts where the movie industry just doesn't have the technical know-how of creating such mayhem of special effects.  Let alone being able to afford monetary expenses of creating one.

So, I said it in the beginning and I'll say it again...

 Watching Age of Extinction is like watching two drunk junkyards having wild-wild sex in the fit of love in your backyard.

Other notable disappointments have been Man of Steel and the latest Spiderman (the name of which I refuse to Google), 300-Rise of an Empire (my review here).  And I'm sure I'm missing a movie or two.
~~~sigh~~~  Good movies are so hard to come by these days.  Until last week, I was pinning my hopes on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  As a kid I adored that cartoon series, but I heard even TMNT-2014 is rated as drearily dull, even at its best.  But I might still watch it, just for the sake of it.

Links:

0. If Michael Bay directed movie UP
1. Transformers, 2007
2. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, 2009
3. Transformers: Dark of the Moon, 2011
4. Transformers: Age of Extinction, 2014

Movie Review: 300-Rise of an Empire

300-Rise of an Empire, or in simple terms, 300 Part-2...

One of those other weekends, I had nothing better to do (in retrospect, I was so wrong!) so I went to catch up on a movie with a buddy, it had been a really long time since I last watched a movie in theater.  To say that the movie was boring, would be a gross understatement, cinematography was good, but only at times and only to a certain extent.

And here's my take, the movie, surprisingly can be very accurately summarized in mere 3 short words/phrases:

0. Water! Lots of it! In fact it wouldn't hurt to blame California's water shortage entirely on this movie!
1. Blood! Even more plentiful than water!  Take that Mel Gibson for Apocalypto or even Quentin Tarantino for Kill Bill(s)
2. One lousy half-a$$ s3x scene (s3x scenes are quintessential part of _every_ American movie)
3. Slow Motion (ok, I lied, there are 4 items, not 3).

The movie is nothing more than a hodge-podge of dismemberment of body parts (hands, legs, head, anything) that fly everywhere with blood splattering all around in extreme slow motion under a gloomy-n-internally overcast semi-black-and-white environment.  When nobody's hacking bodies, the dialogues in the movie are banal, at best.
Compared to the original 300 (my review here), this movie is almost entirely shot in slow motion. I was afraid even the dialogues would now start appearing in ssslllooowwww mmmoootttiiiooonnn and to tell you the truth, I wouldn't have been surprised if that had actually happened! So much so, that if we played the movie at normal rate then the entire movie would be over in 15 minutes flat!  The time part is a bit of an over statement, but you get the idea.

Good Thing: The only silver lining, watching it in 3D didn't induce a head-ache (and that's only because of the movie being in slo-mo), unlike Superman-Man of Steel, which gave me a splitting headache after I watched it in 3D, TW-freaking-ICE!

Verdict:
Life could only be better if you skip this one.

See Also:

• Movie Review: 300

Spring Is Here

Long time no see???  Well, been sunk in life's shitty boring problems knee deep too long now.  Not a good excuse to not post, but hey, that's the best I've got :(
Anyway, I thought posting some beautiful photos would be a good way to say "hello" to a few fellow readers I have left...

Lately, work-life has gotten a tad boring, mostly as I don't have my discuss-everything-under-the-sun lunches with buddies at work anymore; instead have chosen to watch Youtube videos while I gobble down food at my desk, at wildly irregular times.  But all's not lost, or so it feels...
 
Sun was out for two straight days and skies were clear bright blue, almost made me feel lucky for being alive and be able to see this day (note: this is not an exaggeration when you live in Seattle)!  But my skepticism that Spring is upon me, didn't budge.  That is only until I cared to look around my office while I parked my car and walked towards my building: Cherry Blossom buds opening up!  So the very next day I brought along my camera (luckily it was sunny again!) and went on a stroll after lunch to shoot some pictures around the campus.  And here's the result: Spring is upon us guys!
Time to break out of winter clothes!  Gear up for some hiking, photography and camping!

Yes, if you let her have it her way, Nature does have a way of uplifting your mood on occasion, trying hard to make you re-believe that life is indeed beautiful.
These are just a few shots from around the campus, full album here on flickr: Spring 2014!
 
Equipment:
    Body-Canon EOS 6D (full frame)
    Lenses-Canon 100mm F2.8 Macro Lens & Canon 70-200mm IS F4L

Note: Weather turned sucky the very day after I took pictures and went only southwards for even worse on the weekend.  You know, that's the typical Seattle weather, awesome and great while I'm holed up in my little office but crappy on weekends when I have time to explore the outdoors ~~~sigh~~~ That's the finicky Pacific North West weather we all love so much :-)

Full album with many more photos here on flickr: Spring 2014!

Galaxy S3 4.3 Jelly Bean Update Annoyance

If you are looking for steps to stop that annoying download complete notification, skip to Instructions section.

There have been a lot of issues with the 4.3 Jelly Bean update pushed out so at some point Samsung decided to pull back the update and work on fixing them.  But I was surprised when AT&T pushed the 4.3 update nonetheless.  I didn't want to be guinea pig or spend hours fixing annoyances, so I delayed the update, but, not very unlike Windows ~~~aarrgghhh~~~ it kept insisting every few hours that I update the darn phone.  The only respite being God-sent postpone button that allowed me to postpone the update for up to 1, 2, 4 or 8 hours, I selected the max duration, 8 hours.  After doing that 2-3 times, today morning, to my horror, when I got up and checked my mobile I noticed there was a subtle difference in my lock-screen's appearance.  Even before unlocking it dawned upon me that I have gotten the dreaded upgrade.  Instead of my early morning routine that helps me shake off the slumber, it was this squeamish feeling of being violated that jolted me back from sleepiness.

I haven't used it more than an hour, so I can't say what I like and what I hate about this update, or what are the annoyances, except one...  There's one that's breaking everybody's resolve to NOT swear and that is: randomly showing notification that a file has been downloaded.  Now, this file, in all the cases is either not recognizable or was downloaded years ago, actually in mobile-years, eons ago! So, of course when you tap on it, you get back an error something to the effect of "Cannot find this file".

After Google'ing, I figured this was a very common annoyance and people suggested "Clearing Cache" to get rid of this.  But no one actually shared detailed steps how to do so.  Or more importantly, "which" cache to clear!  After some trial and error I figured how to do it.  And I thought of making a quick post to help others rid themselves of this irritating behavior.

Instructions to Clear Cache:

0. Pull down the notification center when you have an icon notifying you of some download
1. Tap-n-Hold on the filename that appears
2. An "App Info" menu will pop up
3. Tap on that "App Info" menu
4. It takes you to Android's standard interface from where you can manage the applications
5. Just hit "Clear Data", it will warn you, just say ok and proceed with clearing data
6. Voilà!  You will not be bothered with this again, unless you REALLY download something

I couldn't find this app whose data I cleared from Application Manager, so I take it must be some system internal app that's hidden from Application Manager.  And I didn't know if what I was doing was the real solution, so I didn't even take any screenshots to help, but at least I remembered the steps.

Edit: The app is called "Download Manager" and actually is visible if you are patient enough to scroll through "All" apps tab in application manager.  Here's the screenshot.  Blogger is not letting me upload images, so here's the link to screenshot: Screenshot-Clear Download Manager's Cache.

Edit: The BIGGEST annoyance so far has been random battery drains, just yesterday it dropped off from 100% to 85% in less than 5 minutes, the phone's back went warm AND this was while in "power saving" mode!  I fired up Elixir2 and noticed most CPU has been hogged by Samsung's wretched KNOX.  My battery is lasting less than half a day in power saving mode (and I don't have any bells-n-whistles enabled, aka FB, Twitter, Email notifications, etc.).
This is just pathetic. 

Moral: When will these idiots (the ones defining upgrade/update experiences) realize that there are some of us who DON'T want to be forced to upgrade, especially when there are many known unresolved issues with the update.  And if you MUST annoy with hourly reminders, at least don't FORCE upgrade while I'm asleep and can't baby-sit your f!@#$ing notifications! ~~~sigh~~~ There's no dearth of idiots in this world, none whatsoever!

Is Samsung becoming the new Yahoo!/HP, refer to my previous post: Stop Writing Crappy Software

My Dirty Secret: Wettest Dream of My Life

Today, I'm letting you in on my real dirty dream, wettest of wet dreams I would LOVE to experience, vividly comic'ized by the great artist at xkcd...

All the nerds-n-geeks out there are experiencing a nerd-boner as... .. ... ~~~aarrghh~~~ I'll be back shortly!

Healthful Spinach Smoothie

As I promised in the last post, here's the recipe I promised.  First things first, fret not, as I have told you earlier, I'm not going to convert this blog into a store house of cooking recipes, people have already done wonderful job all around the blogsphere.
But in my quest to improve my eating habits, I will share a few health-filled recipes once in a while.

Making this Spinach Smoothie (Palak Smoothie) is so astoundingly easy and simple, that it really defies the commonly held belief that you have to spend hours in order to cook a healthy meal(*conditions apply!).  Not to mention it would be outrightly criminal NOT to make this regularly!

This is enough to make about 3-4 glasses of smoothie, scale it per your needs:

0. Banana - 2
1. Pineapple - 1/4th
2. Slice of Whole Lemon - 1
3. Spinach - approx. 3 handfuls
4. Peeled Oranges - 2
5. Papaya - 1/4th
6. Condiments: Black Pepper
7. Optional: Almost any fruit you want, esp. berries, avocado, Cinnamon, Honey
8. Water, to get the consistency you prefer

If you don't want to read rest of the boring interesting commentary, then here's your skipping-to-the-best-part...
Quick Recipe: Grind them (0-5) all together, sprinkle freshly ground pepper and top it off with a mint leaf!

If you have time, patience and zest to endure my boring (but not totally useless) commentary, then here you go...
The key idea here is gathering the ingredients, once you have them, it is just a matter of putting them in the mixer and making a smoothie out of it, there's not too much more to it.  But if there's one thing I want to point out is, do not skip on the slice of a whole-lemon, the lemon's grind (thick outer skin) is what gives this smoothie its unique deep flavor.  If you don't have one handy, DO NOT expect spectacular results when you substitute it for that lowly chemical-laden lemon juice from your fridge.  I recommend running out to the nearest grocery store, instead and picking one up (note that running will also up your appetite for a healthful drink!).  My 3-handfuls of spinach measurement is approximate, keep adding till you get nice vibrant green color.

The trick is to grind all of these properly, putting Spinach in first will make the mixer's motor run on near-zero-load with leaves sitting there almost undisturbed!  Don't curse me when this happens, because it means you haven't read the full post ;-) Luckily for you, you will almost instantly start getting the burning smell, so you'll know something's amiss!  (Note that I have a very cheap 4 year old mixer, so I have to be creative how I grind things in it; chances are you might have better luck with yours, or coincidentally, have a cheapo one like mine!).  Always put juicy fruits first, the juice helps form the base of the smoothie, a thick paste.

Once ready, top it off with freshly ground pepper and a flavorful mint leaf!  That all there is to it!

You can experiment the base recipe in many many ways, the above is a good reference of what all goes into this smoothie, a good starting point, be creative with what you can add.  Like avocado, papaya and black-pepper are my own personal touch to this recipe.
If you want to keep this healthy, then there are a few things I strongly recommend against adding.  Also, unless you want your smoothie to taste like a slush, I recommend keeping ice out too.

Things to keep out of your smoothie: sugar (NO NO NO additional sugar or sweetener is needed, for christ's sake banana and pineapple bring enough sugar already), milk (doesn't go well with citrus fruits), Strawberries (will conflict with pineapple and citrus flavor).

If you have all the ingredients ready(*), it doesn't take more than a minute to whip a glassful of this smoothie, including cleaning time.  Use fresh ingredients, especially spinach leaves, frozen spinach will not get you anywhere close to what fresh ones can achieve.  I'm willing to bet it will not even taste like a smoothie.  I generally chop the fruits over the weekend and keep them in the refrigerator, that way I don't have to spend too much time gathering all the ingredients whenever I want to make a glassful. Chopping pineapple, especially, is a bit time consuming a task best reserved for weekend.

More Tips:

0. Bananas
Another trick I have picked up for making great smoothies over the period is using frozen bananas. I have had to throw away a lot many bananas for not eating them before they went black and rancid. So now I just peel all the bananas, put them in a nice ziplock bag and put them in deep freezer! They will stay there for at least a month, but I consume them within a week's time. This also means you will never have to use ice in your smoothie again!
1. Leftovers
Make sure you don't make too much, this tastes best when made fresh. But if you have leftover, then just put the smoothie in a nice air-tight mason jar, it will last for 3 or so days in the fridge.  Spinach is rich in iron, so naturally it will turn a tad dark, don't be scared, it will still be good for consumption.

I have been hacked!

Have you ever had a feeling that your brain is being hacked into while you are asleep? And by hack I mean programatically, of course, not physically. That's the feeling dream I had early morning today... while I lay half awake I had an unsettling dream that my brain was hacked into and someone was having fun while rummaging through it.  I bet I squirmed a bit, who wouldn't!

Was it not enough that I have, more than once, had recursive dreams, now somebody has to hack into my brain?  I lay perfectly still struggling with my part asleep-part awake-part confused state of mind without perturbing anything just so that I can understand what's happening, or lack hereof! Early morning brain hacks would so very well explain the slow mornings I have had! Stupid me, anything that will convince me I need to spend an extra 5 minutes in the bed :)

My mind then wanders off (hacker seems to have gone by now ~~~phew~~~) first worried about what has been deleted from my brain, not that you can backup a brain (funny, you can hack into one, copy it contents, delete some, but not back it up, attaboy!).  But as it goes, one never knows what has been deleted until the one actually needs it.  And then I get concerned about what inner thoughts the hacker might have tapped into.

I lay there contemplating (ohh.... in reality, here comes another 10 minutes of sweet sleep!), so I lay there contemplating, what would it mean in reality to hack into someone's psyche programatically, if and when it could be done, without the subject knowing it.  That's when I realized it was just a dream (but nothing is ever JUST a dream, never, is it!).  And no, I'm not talking about the stupid movie Inception and again no, neither did I see it before going to bed nor do I intend to see it in foreseeable future, I didn't even think of thinking of seeing it in foreseeable future.

It has been longest break on blog so far, somewhere around 8+ months ~~~sigh~~~ A few people asked me lately why have I stopped writing and I assured them that I haven't stopped writing I just have stopped blogging them for a short while (a popular euphemism for: am being a lazy bum!).  So this useless bizarre dream of today's seemed like a perfect post to resume blogging with, or a good attempt at the very least.

As to life...
It pains me to see that I haven't been making full use of the Sun that's blessing us Seattle'ites (residents of Seattle, not satellites!) with longer days.  Hope to get back on the saddle before winter kicks in and days start getting shorter where it gets dark by 4pm and it starts feeling day ended even before it started.

Coming up next: How to make a quick very healthy smoothie in under a minute! 

Stop Writing Crappy Software

My diatribe today is aimed at recent (unpleasant) experiences with:

• HP Printer Deskjet F4400 series
• Yahoo! Mail

I know that ranting is NOT the best'est way to resume blogging, but hey, I'm surprisingly disgusted!  Appalled! Sad! Furious! Irritated!  And yes, you have every right to ask how can you feel so many things at one time!  What happened?
Well, rest assured, I (miraculously) still have my all of my mental faculties ~~touchwood~~
Let me lay it down upon you...
I had returned after a long day's work, went on house hunt right away, picked up a few groceries on the way home for dinner, helped prep up the dinner and had just finished dinning.  So far so good.
It was right then that we got an email asking us to send out a few documents urgently.  It was a race against time, literally, come to think of it.  I printed them, we filled them up and then came (what I could only recall, in retrospect, as the SCARY) part: Scanning them!  No biggie, I said we have that all-in-one copier I just printed these on, don't we!  Having unsuccessfully tried scanning a document last time, I was not too hopeful.  But I was (hopelessly) optimistic.  You know, it is not uncommon for software to have failed you the first time and it works the next time you try it out again.  It is as if software has healing powers and miraculously fix themselves over time or something.

So, I set out to scan.  I put the first paper on the glass, flipped the cover... Tick-Tick, and the copier starts grunting, sucks in a blank paper and makes an exact hard copy for me.  Tcch... entirely my fault, I hit "copy" button and that is NOT what I wanted.  It turns out, in that incomprehensible maze of buttons, there isn't a "just scan and don't damn print it!" button.  So I fire up "Print and Fax" from my OSX, it connects to my printer promptly (relatively speaking).  And lights up the "Scan" button on the software, which I promptly hit. Poof!  After grunting for good part of few minutes, the scanner was making multiple pass over the document (am guessing once for each of the 3-4 primary colors it can deal with).  Each time pretending to be enhancing the preview on my macbook's screen.  And then it just stuck there, scan completed at 100% but "scanning..." dialog still showed it was working on something.  I let it set for a while but then after too long I killed it.  I checked the destination folder...  No scanned images.  I repeat the process, only this time I don't hit the copy button but the correct "scan" button.  Exact same behavior, but this time I did see a scanned copy of my document.  Got me a bit excited there for a minute.  +1 for optimism!

One down, 4 more to go!  I swap out for the next page.  Repeat, no luck. Patiently I do it again, no luck.  And try it again!  Still no luck.
Every time I had to kill the darn program because it would finish a 100% and then never budge from there.  But this time I didn't get any scanned copies as a byproduct.  As it turns, there are multiple ways to scan a doc on OSX, so I fired up "Preview" this time.  No luck with that either.  But I noticed Dropbox stopped sync'ing, the icon turned red.  It complained my disk was full.  Scanning also stopped throwing a "Disk is full" error.  "#@~! Yes right! That is all I needed at this time!" I was starting to loose my cool by now.  I could swear I had plenty of disk space to go around.  So I hit terminal and indeed the good'ol trusted "du" told me I was out of disk space.
I deleted a few large files and paused Dropbox syncing to free up some disk space.  I restarted scanning and pooff!  The darn scanning window complained I was out of disk space eff'ing yet again.  There's no denying this time I had few MBs worth of free space to begin with because I had deleted the files with my own bare hands (metaphorically) and checked free space with my own eyes (indeed tired and strained by now), but unfailingly I had noticed I had made some space available before restarting the whole scanning ordeal.  What is going on, by this time I was adorning my sentences a few verbal niceties!

All I needed was a few MBs.  I have noticed that sometimes rebooting OSX gets me back some disk space, I think that comes from reclaiming the filesystem log space, am not sure though.  But it was worth a try.  Plus it would kill any unwanted lingering programs potentially interfering with the scanning.  In parallel, I was trying to snap photos of the document with our phones in the hopes we could get decent photos rather than fight with the copier.  But that wasn't panning out well either.  After reboot, I back up 3 GBs worth of data and delete it off my macbook.  Ahh hhaa!  Now lets try this again.  This time I fire up "Image Capture" to rule out any software issues.  Maybe they all use the same backend to talk to the printer, implying same hung behavior, but it was worth a shot.

I hit "Scan" and lo-and-behold!  Still the same "hung" behavior after reaching 100% completion.  But... out of curiosity, I check disk space... And ~~~horror in my eyes~~~ Holy Spiderman's mad-cow crap!  It's depleting.  And depleting real fast.  Within few moments of Image Capture being hung, it had consumed nearly 2GB of disk space.  At this time I was more furious than I was frustrated or even tired and started turning red (I'm sure if I looked at myself in the mirror, my eyes were already bloodshot!).  I shot a few more verbal projectiles in the scanner's direction, cursed the software developers under my breath who made this crap and abandoned the idea of scanning altogether.  Two hours into it and it was getting on my nerves.
I can understand sloppy UI design, hard-to-navigate menus, unintuitive user controls, etc. even an occasional crash (though I would ask why, but say I gave it so much lee way) and I have seen a healthy share of those... but a scanner hogging on my disk space by GBs within seconds... that is taking sucking to totally new heights altogether!  Totally unacceptable. 
Something that was once a scanner, in my eyes was now an array of dysfunctional mechanical parts clubbed with even crappier software.

I were all so set to unleash the full wrath of my bottled up verbal abuses on that lowly inanimate object.  But just then Zen took over me: Atul, nothing good has ever come out of violence, you know.  I resisted that stupid inner voice of mine, "Sure as hell it has, you want to try (I almost got into my alert fighting stance)? Look around in the real world, one with the most fire power, rules everyone.  You really want to try it! Huuh!", I felt myself repeatedly muttering it under my fiery breath!  The only thing (thankfully!) missing was a visible flame coming out of my nostrils.  Long story short, cooler mind prevailed, but probably only because there were larger issues to take be taken care of later that night than fighting with the lowly copier.

Now I don't know if it is Apple's OSX who is at fault or HP, I would guess the driver comes from HP, but I could be wrong.  I would give Apple some benefit of doubt, just because everything else on my MacBook (including bootcamp'ed Windows) works flawlessly and drivers typically come from device manufacturers, so I say it must be HP.  Trying to scan and reproduce the experience on Windows would have definitely narrowed down the culprit, but I dare not scan from that piece of crappy copier again!  As a printer it is not too bad, but as a scanner, God save you.

Thank you very much however-is-at-fault here, for teaching a lesson (see morals below) here the hard way, I will never forget it!  If it was any consolation, I was reminded that I got the all-in-one crapper printer free with the laptop.  Wonder why, I laughed?  All the more reason to trash it to pulp with a baseball bat.
Well, that by itself wasn't enough to prompt this post... that last nail-in-the-coffin came in the form of online experience the next morning.

I have a yahoo mail account that had been attracting nothing but spams for the longest of time.  So I thought of salvaging it for sending craigslist queries.  So I went in and tried to edit my profile.  First off, it was an effort to find "WHERE" should I look for my profile and change it.  There were too many options: Should I look under "Hi, Atul" or should I look under the "Options" or should I look under the most promising "My Y!"??? 

Confusing Multitude of options

Well as it turns out "My Y!" is THE LAST place you should go to.  The thing I wanted is under "Hi, Atul", it gave me a drop-down menu with few a options, one of them being "Profile". Gotcha! Wait, not yet! That page throws an annoying 404 Page Not Found Error.

The annoying 404-Error

I try to keep it cool.  Moving on. I trace back my steps and then follow other lead, "Account Info".  That looked promising, shows my profile and besides my profile it had an "Edit Profile Details" link.

Jackpot???

But guess what, that link too takes me to the same 404 error!  What is even more @!#$'ed up is that all the links on that page are invalid links!  They all land you in the same "404-Page Not Found" world.  Even the f___ing Help link!  Seriously, are you eff'ing kidding me!  Does anybody ever test this crap?  All the links on that page were crapped out.  And this is NOT a transient error, I have been giving it a try for a week now, every single day of the week.  It is permanently damaged.

http://profile.yahoo.com/404/*http://www.yahoo.com
http://profile.yahoo.com/404/*http://help.yahoo.com
http://profile.yahoo.com/404/*http://search.yahoo.com/search/options?p=

So after that, I give up hopes and dig out the REAL Yahoo help page.  That is even more eff'ed up.  After selecting categories and sub-categories of my issue, Yahoo throws an error saying something to the effect of "We are too busy with other issues, try seeking help in  online forums".  Damn right you are busy, I said, with this kind of crappy web designing you better be busy either helping people or fixing up your shit.  I gave up.  With renewed energy I have been trying it day after day.  One fine day, night actually, it let me type the question after selecting categories.  But THE only thing it showed me were some pretty useless "Quick Answers".  None of them relevant for my problem. I can't actually contact the damn Yahoo engineers who wrote this crap!  Seriously, are you kidding me now? So there is virtually NO way for me to resolve this issue :( If I'm expected to post this on some forum and then wait eternally while some God-sent messiah answers the question, then sorry, I neither have the energy nor hope to do that.  Sorry Yahoo, you are off my list too :(  I can't say I will miss you, but I sure liked using your services in the past.

While I have some expectations from Yahoo now that the reigns are in the (seemingly able) hands of Marissa Mayer, (esp. after introducing that free food and now new iPhones for every employee), I'm not too hopeful of their online services improving anytime soon despite improved morale.

I intend to serve multiple purposes by writing and sharing this... 

First, of course is to vent out the anger and frustration, so that the crap gets out of my system ~~~phew~~~ feels sooooo good now.  Next is to show how rampant the distribution of crappy software/hardware/services is, even from well repudiated companies who are (or rather, once were) industry leaders (wonder why they slipped into irrelevance).  Third is a lesson to myself and other software developers is to understand how important it is to focus on the end-user experience and the quality of whatever we produce.  On which front, Apple is really a role model to follow.  No I'm not Apple fanboy and I hate iPhone, but there is no denying their uber attention to detail and uncanny polish in their products, that was once only afforded by Sony.

At this moment, Oatmeal's comic on Printers is spot on: Printers Are From Hell.  No, seriously, some really ARE made by Satan himself!

Moral 0: I have said this before and saying this again...
Writing good software is anything but a trivial task, it takes tremendous skill, practice, patience and time to write a functional and elegant piece of code.  As usual, my role-model has always been the ubiquitous all-round best-in-the-class editor: vi[m].  Oh God, there is so much to learn from vi, at least from a user's perspective.  More than a decade of using it on all possible platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOSX, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX) and it is yet to hang or crash on me!  That is something. You can err on the side that vi might not be as complex as, say a scanning software, but the sheer functionality it gives without breaking fundamentals of usability and stability stand unrivaled.

Moral 1: Never, ever, ever, ever in my life am I going to get another crappy HP printer. 

My request, an earnest'est request (if such an adjective doesn't exist then let's invent it!) my earnest'est request to the world is PLEASE PLEASE STOP writing crappy software and services.  It is crime against humanity and seriously it won't be long before it will be unlawful to write crappy software and shove it down users' unsuspecting throats.
I'm no Richard Stallman, nor can I call myself an avid RMS fan, but I do love open source software. And holy bajeesus apesh!t, today I swear I totally understand how frustration drove RMS to start the whole Open Source movement: inability to add code to improve printer functionality in the 1980s.

Moral 2: Either you sit and crib about your problems or fix what is broken.
Wait, why can't I do both, sure I can :)
So, now that I have cribbed about it, I will make sure the work I produce shall meet at least certain quality standards.

Anybody there?

Back Form Hiatus!!!

I'm not sure if you guys still come here anymore (I know some still do, just don't know which ones of you)... but hey, it is not like I will stop writing if nobody reads, I write because I love to write.

Lot of (good) changes have happened in my life in around last few months, some at a pace I could not easily comprehend, so I was busily absorbed into my own little world, taking it in, one bit at a time.  Slowly, at a glacial pace, I'm coming out of that hiding and planning on resuming blogging, amongst few other important things that got put on hold.  Top on the list being replying to emails!  Facebook'ing, if you are wondering, didn't make it to the list.

As usual, I have a huge cache of posts to make, so there is no dearth of stuff to write about, it is time that's the gating factor, always has been time, darn time ~~~sigh~~~ I don't know what I will post first, but if it is any consolation, let it be a pleasant surprise :)

Say "hello" (or "Hello World", for the nerdy audience) if you are eager to read my next post(s).

Keep Marketing Advertisements Out of Your Mailbox

For the people who don't want to entertain themselves with my stories, here's the crux of the matter: How to stop getting all the crap into your snail-mailboxes.  But before you get all Uncle-Skeptical, I want to add that it works! Yes! It effing works.  I was highly surprised when, after a week of registration, my mailbox was going very lean and mean!
Note: This is for US only, I'm not sure if this is a serious problem in India yet.

Quick Steps:

0. Go to DMA Choice page and create a login, click here.
   DMA is the most comprehensive do not mail list that most large list owners, compilers and mailers will bump their lists against.
1. You have 4 sub-categories to opt-out from. I recommend opting-out of everything: Catalogs, Magazine Offers, Other Mail Offers and the most annoying of all, Credit Offers (cards, loans, etc.).
The first three are simple click-and-be-done-with-it types.
2. To opt out of Credit Offers the website redirects you to OptOutPreScreen (link).
   This is a centralized service to process requests from consumers to
   "Opt-In" or "Opt-Out" of the firms that offer credit or insurance.  Fill out your information, and get rid of all the mail-crap that would have otherwise found its way to your garbage anyway.

Now, time for the long drawn story... (No matter what you say, I know all of you secretly love maal-masala, the spice! :D )

I was appalled seeing the wastage of paper (and a lot of other natural resource!) when I first came to this country. But nothing struck me harder than seeing pamphlets/offers/brochures after pamphlets finding its way into my snail-mailbox. I was like "who the heck even goes through all this crap". And indeed, EVERYBODY I know immediately throws it away into a dustbin conveniently placed just beside the mailboxes, without even as much of a second thought!  The dustbin is eternally full, esp. in the evenings when people empty their mailboxes (putting away more than 79% of it) directly into that bin.  I sincerely wish they consider this bin for recycling, for all you know since it is NOT labelled one it might end up in the garbage dump :(

Before I put an end to the misery, I progressed through a few stages and learned that there is a very easy way to put stop to this crap, and in the process also save precious paper, few bits at a time.

Phase 0. WTF!
Really, the first time I got keys to my mailbox it was already beaming with a lot of papers. Seriously, if you don't clear them every other day, you WILL get a notice from your postmaster saying to clear your box otherwise he won't deliver any mails! Because there is no place to stuff any more.  (I'm *not* making this up, this has indeed happened to me! On more than one occasion).  I was joyous when I felt so many people are writing to me, but then I was like, "Wait a minute, I just got here and none of my friends know my postal, soo..." ~~creep'ed out expression~~ My joy was short lived ~~sigh~~, but I diligently ripped open every single envelope, only to discard it.  After a few weeks, I was like, what the 'eff is this? I didn't even subscribe to it and I'm not even interested in any of them, why do companies like to waste so much of paper?

Phase 1. Wow! Credit Card Offers!
Over time I got a tad smarter (really?). As a student I had no credit history and the only bank willing to give me a no-annual-fee credit card was the PNC Bank who had a branch in my University (No! It was not out of bank's altruism, it was only because I deposited my tuition monies in their bank that they felt secure that I won't run away without paying off the card).  The limit was very low, but good enough to get started on building the credit. Only enough to buy month's worth of groceries and some misc expenses.  So I used to be all excited whenever I got credit card offers in the mail. I would discard all other marketing stuff and rip open only the ones with credit card offers. Invariably, every one of them had some annual fees associated with it. Disheartened, but still hopeful, I kept doing that for a while.

Phase 2. Meh!
Soon I discovered that credit card companies aren't interested in you if you pay off your dues regularly.  You are actually robbing them of the opportunity to charge you obscene interest rates on your balance and huge fines.  I then went into a phase of total ignorance. 'Whatever' is the word I muttered under my breath whenever I saw all this crap in the mail. By this time _every_ mail, other than the ones I knew I need to open (which were no more than 1 in 10s of them) found its way to recycle can.

Phase 3. Aggrrhhh !@#$!
Then came the sate of total frustration when the envelopes weren't a clear indicator of what lies within. I would either open then right away, but increasingly they started finding their way into a stack of 'to be attended later' bin on my table.  It was often weeks before I got to them while they kept piling up on my desk.  Half way through these various phases, I had read somewhere that there exists an option to disable all these mails. Half skeptical, half hopeful and half praying I wished the system was "Default Opt-Out".  Imagine opening a new email account only to find that 99% of emails what look legitimate are actually spam!  And you have to individually unsubscribe out from each one of them
Every time I ripped open an envelope and tossed them into recycle can, my heart ached. I can't go out there and plant a tree every month, but I can 'effing help reduce their falling.

Phase 4. Get up and be a man!
Then one fine day I had it enough. United Airways (in relation to some frequent flyer miles program I had signed up for) kept sending me a letter every freakin' week, it bugged me the most. Discover Credit Card offer came second with the same frequency. Then there was Chase 'Open new account and get $100 credit' nonsense, Clear internet service. Followed by car insurance offers, loan offers, etc.  I said I have to be a man and stand up to this. And the encouragement came to me in the form of a nice article in Reader's Digest I was skimming through just before my bedtime.  Voila! I said to myself, "Let's try this now!" I got up, spent no more than 9 minutes and I crossed my fingers before going to bed that night.  I will never forget that night, because in just about over a week I was GLAD that all the unnecessary mail I didn't want went down. It has been a solid year now since then and my mailbox is going very lean!  Much leaner than most VS models!  Now, 90% of mails I get are the ones that need my attention. A good jump from < 1% before!

I generally don't give out unsolicited advices (but heck, this is my blog, eerr... what I meant was) but I will still give out this once. Because wasting paper hurts me a lot (maybe second only to wasting food, water and time),
I urge you to...
0. Stop all the marketing, banking, etc. flyers by following steps on DMA website
1. Stop paper statements for all your bank statements, credit card statements, utility bills and use internet instead.

The only ones I have not been able to put a stop to are "ValPak" and some thick bundle of newspaper'ly blob that I have NEVER gone through to understand what it is.  ValPak is less annoying because its frequency is very low, but the newspaper'y thing is ANNOYING, a bundle every week!  I am thinking of confronting my postmaster one of the days and figure if there's a way out.

But all in all, this (do-not-distrubt like) registry indeed works like a charm.

I did my bit of going green, did you?
A quick recap...

0. Go to DMA Choice page and create your login
1. You have 4 sub-categories to opt-out from. Opt-out of everything:
   Catalogs, Magazine Offers, Other Mail Offers and most annoying of all, Credit Offers.
   The first three are simple click-and-be-done-with-it types.
2. To opt out of Credit Offers the website redirects you to OptOutPreScreen (link).  Fill out your information and save paper!

I promise it won't take more than 9 mins of your precoious time!

Save Paper, Save Trees, Save Your Time... Go Green!

You know you are a geek when...

This was sitting in my cache of posts-to-make for over 2 years!  Thought of giving it a finishing touch and putting it out.

I generally take it as a compliment when someone calls me a geek/nerd (and I trust most of us would), unless it is said with an obvious hint of contempt.  So if you take being called a geek in the right vein, then you might enjoy this post.  If you don't, then I mean no offense.  Also I don't imply to stereotype geeks, so take it easy guys-n-gals.

Most of this is from personal experience, some is from observation, a few passed down as second hand information and some might even be figments of my imagination. Don't hesitate to take this with a grain of salt if your diet allows for any more room for sodium, that is :)

Don't know if you are a (computer) geek?  Here are some tell-tale signs that will help identify a tech-savvy computer geek inside of you...

0. The first thing you do after meeting a new person is Google him/her out!
   (Note: Bing him/Bing her still doesn't sound right to me! Bing'ing is just too hilarious to even think of as a verb!)
   From there, you then check out every link there is referring to this person, particularly (strictly in that order): personal webpage, posts in mailing lists, LinkedIn profile, blog, Orkut, Google+, Facebook, and any other other (anti-)social networking websites you happen to be on. Of course, given the person must pique your interest to a certain extent.
   This doubles up for any unknown tech jargon, new words or technology you come across ... almost anything new you don't know about, animate or inanimate.
   Also, on your first date you are tempted to say "Tell me something that I don't already know from Google" ;-)
1. Looking at a resume, you can immediately tell if it was written in M$ Word, OpenOffice or LaTeX.
   Corollary: You are intolerant to resumes (and any documents in general) that you DO NOT have access to in pure text (or at least in pdf) format.
2. You can type your search queries on Google.com faster than it can suggest likely matches based on your partial input.
3. When you see someone's Windoze desktop the first thing reaction is that you have an insuppressible desire to clean the desktop, delete MB's worth of temporary files, empty Recycle Bin, run a Windows Update and rid the computer off the WinRot. If it doesn't have an anti-virus, you raise your hands in the air and silently swear under your breath, "[S]he doesn't deserve to own a PC!".
4. When you go to your friends house, and find his/her wi-fi router open (not secured), you spend the rest of the day re-configuring the router and all his computers to use secure connections. Chances are you will render at least one of the computers without network access, but you would have convinced your friend (against his will!) that it is better this way than keeping the router unsecured. Though, for the love of roller-blading computers, you can't explain him why has it _not_ caused a problem till now (that is until you proclaimed, without any proof, it was a problem)!
5. You get irritable when someone spends more than a fraction of second to find the right key on the keyboard
6. You have a craving to buy the latest and most sophisticated laptop there is. But the only thing preventing you from doing so is either you already have pile-loads of them, or you don't have bandwidth to keep all of them up-to-date with latest patches. Or your budget doesn't allow you to get one (strictly in that order).
7. You can still dig into one of your closets and produce a 5-1/4 or a 3-inch archaic floppy disks.
8. At any given point in time, you can flick out GBs worth of storage space in flash/usb drives from your backpack or pockets.
9. The first thing you think of on your perfect outing, date or any such important occasion, is how soon you can go back to your computer and blog it all out! And chances are you have already composed most of the post in your head already! Including layout, photos you will include and their captions too!
10. You don't necessarily hate GUIs, but command-line is still your way of life, and you root for root access.
11. At any given time, you have a total of at least 15 tabs open in your browser (most of them still unread).
12. You have almost all of your important documents GPG'ed and backed somewhere. Not to mention, you have a backup in at least 2/more places: external HDD and DVD.
13. You are paranoid about always keeping your personal documents encrypted
14. Your public key is published on some well known key server
15. You can remember all the different UserId-Password combinations by heart to all the tens of sites you visit regularly. Heck, you even remember exact URLs. And you are on your way to memorizing the IP addresses too ;-)
16. Given an IP address, you cannot suppress a desire to do a nslookup on it, ping it and even traceroute it! You just can't look at an IP address and not know what domain it belongs to.
17. When you look at something new, you are brimming with thoughts of how does it work. If you don't find a convincible enough theory, the first thing you do is Google it out on the first chance.
18. You look at yourself in a mirror only when:
    
    • you have to shave (doesn't apply to girls)
    • comb your hair (strictly not more than once a day! And some even consider that as optional)
    • something's gotten into your eyes and it won't go away by just swiping your bacteria-laden coffee/tea stained rough fingers through it multiple times
    • trying new clothes, which you buy STRICTLY only if you if HAVE to (for ex. I took out a new pair of jeans when the one I wore for a year and a half started giving way. For which I generally don't care, but I was worried the stitches around crotch region would give way to the cool breeze, and Seattle's pretty cold).
19. As long as the important body parts are covered with a clean and fresh clothing, you don't give a damn about what you are wearing, specially to work. Hell! You don't even bother if you wear the same clothes the whole year. And given you rarely look at yourself anyway, functionally, in my opinion, this is a very efficient choice. Mental faculties are best spent solving a bug, instead! Or creating one :-P
    But please wear fresh/washed clothes, don't want you giving a bad name to the rest of geekdom.
20. You know the technical difference between a password and a passphrase
21. You can understand, a majority of xkcd strips
22. You can key in your zip code at the gas station machine faster than it can accept it! And the delay it expects between each keystroke freaks the hell out of you!
23. You can see things only one way....
    
    • If it is broken: Rip it open, of course you can fix it!
    • If it ain't broken: Rip it open, how the hell does it work? You are sure you can make it work faster/better!
    Either ways, you end up with a non-functioning object but a satisfied soul. Hey, satisfaction counts, doesn't it!
    
    
24. You feel elated (have achieved nirvana?) when you have one of your pages (blog or homepage) turn up as the TOP hit in Google search (of course other than narcissistic searches i.e. searches for your own unique name)!
    
    • (try "gdb vi mode"). (-as of Fri 12/01/2011)
    • (try "review State Of Fear-Michael Crichton"). (-Fri 05/13/2011)
    Your search results may vary. Snapshots below:
    

25. You never delete an entry from your TODO list when done, you just comment them out with '//' or a '#':
    

        ...
        //  9. Reply pending emails - DONE
        10. Update the TODO list (with what?)
        #  11. Grocery list: Milk, veggies, cheese, bread - DONE
        ...
    

    One has to be particularly careful because you can't send emails with lines commented out in place of deleting them!
    
26. You know all the switches to give for all the commands you frequently use. But you have been using them for so long that you often can't tell which one does what :)
27. You have the know-how of tools such that you can transcode any audio or video to make it work on any of your video-playing devices: ipod, phone, music player or TV.
28. You squirm restlessly in your theater seat when you see one of these in a movie:
    
    • The lead actor/actress can hack into ANY damn computer by typing furiously onto the keyboard, without any regards to what operating system it is running! That too without even looking at the keyboard. Let me tell you, even the best of hackers can't do that!
      "Please be REASONABLE", you want to scream your lungs out!
    • People can do almost anything to a photo/video with just one or two key strokes.
      Imagine...
      Agent: Freeze the frame, right there, notice the little girl's eye (standing at least one football field away)... That's our number plate reflecting in her teary eyes, zoom in and show it to papa...
      ~~~click click~~ The agent hits no more than 2 keystrokes, and viola! Magic happens!
      But what worries more than the fact that there is no way a handful of keystrokes can do that, but the fact that the original photo didn't even have that much fidelity in it to begin with!
29. A new email, even if only occasionally, still excites you
30. More than a handful of unread emails in your Inbox makes you squirm with discomfort
31. You have a strong opinion about whether an opening brace '{' should be placed on the same line as if/while or the line after. And you don't even want to start on why 'space' is such a superior choice for indention over 'tabs'.
32. You know what a regular expression is and use them more than regularly.
33. You know exactly what processes should be running and not running in the background. It annoys the hell out of you if you cannot find out what a particular process does, even if it is a useless process.
    Recently I bought a bluetooth dongle for my old PC. After letting appropriate drivers to install, I noticed that it had installed at least 5 freakin' additional services (all auto-started on boot!) and at least 2-3 other supporting processes.  All of them were consuming a part of my measly cpu. I freaked out and have never used that dongle again. It is lying in the catacombs of pile of junk somewhere now.
34. If your laptop/pc is sitting idle and you happen to gaze upon its HDD activity LED (and I BET you will every so often!) and you notice any flickering, you will be fuming with rage and shall unleash your full wrath on the offending process. Tell you, it won't be easy to find the one, but you will make it your day long project, week long, if it comes to that, to find and remove the process from your life, forever!
35. You have at least one OCD that you are consciously aware of. And, of course, you are NOT ashamed of it :-)
36. Last but not the least, one sure-shot way of knowing you are a geek (as pointed out by one geeky reader who commented on the post) is if you noticed numbering started with a "0" and not "1"!  Don't worry, you are still a geek if you quickly hit a page-up just to check that :D

But, above all you know you are a (computer) geek if you could read through the end of the list and laugh out at some of them :-D
Feel free to share your idiosyncrasies...