Monday, December 31, 2007

Ever wonder why wedding ring should be on fourth finger?

In Western cultures, a wedding ring is traditionally worn on the ring finger. According to tradition, the wedding ring is worn on the left ring finger because the vein in the left ring finger, referred to as the 'vena amoris' was believed to be directly connected to the heart, a symbol of love.

In medieval Europe, the Christian wedding ceremony placed the ring in sequence on the index, middle, and ring fingers of the left hand, representing the trinity — God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The ring was then left on the ring finger. In a few European countries, the ring is worn on the left hand prior to marriage, then transferred to the right during the ceremony. A Greek Orthodox bride wears the ring on the left hand prior to the ceremony, then moves it to the right hand after the wedding.

In Norway, Russia, Poland, Germany, Austria, Denmark, countries of former Yugoslavia and in Spain (except in Catalonia) the wedding ring is worn on the ring finger on the right hand.

In the Jewish wedding ceremony, the groom places the ring on the bride's index finger, and not ring finger; the ring is usually moved to the ring finger after the ceremony.

In the Indian tradition, the right hand is considered as auspicious. Hence the wedding ring is worn on the right hand. However, despite tradition, some believe in wearing the ring on the left hand, matching western cultural practice. But wearing it on right hand is the appropriate method.

In Chinese tradition, here is an interesting story that tells significance wearing wedding ring on fourth finger.

Thumb represents parents
Second finger represents brothers & sisters
Center finger represents own self
Fourth finger represents your partner
Last finger represents your children

Firstly, join your palms as shown in photo below, center finger bend and put together back to back
Secondly, let the rest of the 4 fingers touch tips to tip
Game begins, follow the instructions below for all the 5 fingers but only 1 pair can split.



Try to open your thumb, the thumb represents parents, it can be opened because all human being do go through sickness and death. Whoever may be, our parents will leave us one day.

Please close up your thumb, Then open your second finger, this finger represents brothers and sisters, they do have their own family which is the reason that they will leave us too. Now close up your second finger,
Open up your little finger, this represents your children. Sooner or later they too will leave us for they got they own living to live nevertheless, close up your little finger,
Try to open your fourth finger in which we put our wedding ring; you will be surprised to find that it cannot be opened at all. Because it represents husband and wife, this whole life you will be attached to each other

Real love will stick together ever and forever..

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Thursday, December 27, 2007

Akshardham - The World's Largest Hindu Temple. Its Official!!

In 2004 Spring, I participated in a quiz program which was conducted for all TCS-USAA employees and one of the questions put forward was “Where is the world’s largest Hindu temple in the world?” Everyone came up with some place name in India such as Madhurai , Puri etc. But, the quiz master turned down all of them with I-know-you-cannot-tell kind of smile. Finally, he told that a temple dedicated to the Lord Vishnu at Angkor in Cambodia is the largest one. Pictures of this temple can be found here(site is Japanese language).
I was very much surprised how come India, with thousands of temples in it, did not have the distinction of having the largest Hindu temple. But, what I was not aware then that there were around 11,000 people building a marvelous marble temple in the capital city of India that would become the largest temple one day. Yes. I am referring to Akshardham temple which made it to Gunnies book yesterday for being the largest hindu temple in world. Below are few statistics about the temple.


* It consists of 234 ornately carved pillars, 9 ornate domes, 20 quadrangled shikhars, a spectacular Gajendra Pith (plinth of stone elephants) and 20,000 murtis and statues of India's great sadhus, devotees, acharyas and divine personalities
* The monument was built after over 300 million man hours of services rendered by 11,000 volunteers, sadhus and artisans
* The ornate external wall (Mandovar) is the only and largest, intricately carved structure with dimensions of 611ft x 31ft that is built in the last 800 years
* The Gajendra Pith stretching for 1,070 ft and weighing 3,000 tons, has 148 full-sized elephants, 42 birds and animals, 125 human sculptures!
* The Akshardham parikrama (circumambulatory path) consists of 1,152 pillars, 145 windows and 154 samvaran shikhars; amounting to a total of 53,956 stones.
* It is entirely composed of sandstone and marble. No usage of steel at all.

Watch this stunning video about the temple.



Few magnificent pictures taken inside and around the temple.

Update: Launch PicLens to see the slide show.

















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Monday, December 24, 2007

Free Podcasting Tools

Audacity


Audacity is a free, audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Audacity offers
- Recording live audio.
- Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
- Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files.
- Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together.
- Change the speed or pitch of a recording.



Freecorder toolbar

Freecorder Toolbar is a revolutionary new browser-based audio recording program. Its features include

- Records what you hear from your PC's speakers.
- Supports all Windows versions, including Windows Vista.
- Works with any sound card, even those that don't support recording (like RealTek and SigmaTel).
- Records from the microphone or line-in inputs on your PC.
- Unique Sound Separation Technology eliminates background noises.
- Automatically removes silence from start and end of recording.
- See recordings happening with the cool Visualizer.
- Saves recordings as MP3 or WAV files.
- Includes a powerful Google-based search, and optional browser enhancements like a radio player, weather bug, pop-up blocker, search highlighter and more.

Wavepad



WavePad is a sound editor for Windows that lets you make and edit voice and other audio recordings. You can cut, copy, and paste parts of recordings and, if required, add effects such as echo, amplification, and noise reduction.

Features that Wavepad boasts of are
- Supports a number of file formats including wav (multiple codecs), mp3, vox, gsm, real audio, au, aif, flac, ogg and many more.
- Batch processing supports up to 32000 files allowing you to apply effects and/or convert your files as a single function.
- Tools include spectral analysis (FFT) and speech synthesis (text-to-speech).
- Recorder supports autotrim and voice activated recording and more.
- Audio restoration features including noise reduction and click pop removal.
- Includes its own CD ripper with 'ultrafast 'rip mode and cddb music database lookup.
- Links directly to the Express Burn CD Recorder to burn your sound files to CD.



iTunes


Want to listen to your favorite radio shows and audio and video programs anytime? The iTunes Store offers over 100,000 podcast episodes from independent creators and big names like HBO, NPR, ESPN, The Onion, CBS Sports, and The New York Times.



Juice


Want to listen to internet audio programs but can't when they are scheduled? This program lets you create your own custom online audio anytime, anywhere. .
Supporting more than 15 languages with multiple media players, managing podcasts, accessable for blind and visually impaired users(windows only) are some of its striking features.



Talkr


Provides a service that allows you to listen to your favorite text-only news sources rather than read them. Talkr also converts an RSS or Atom feed (a machine-readable version of favorite blog or news source) from text to speech. Talkr can also provide users with a podcast of their favorite news sources.



Podsafe Music Network


This site provides podsafe music to be used within podcasts. This site also enables you to broadcast your own podcasts.



Feed For All


FeedForAll allows users to
- Create RSS feeds & podcasts
- Edit RSS feeds & podcasts
- Manage and publish RSS feeds
- Create iTunes compatible podcasts

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Friday, December 21, 2007

Top photo organizers

Media manager is software used to organize digital content viz. photos, audio and video files in a computer. Few media manager also provides basic editing features. There are tens of such software available on the net for free but difficult to evaluate each one of them and recommend the best. Here is a list of top 15 photo organizers,compiled by techlicious, explaining their features, drawbacks all in one place. Most of the utilities mentioned primarily work in Windows platform only. My choice is Picasa but definitely wants try CompuPic sometime in the weekend.

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Monday, December 17, 2007

Zcam 3D Camera - is a challenger to Wii?

Nintendo Wii - We all know how popular Wii game become these days. In fact, it is one of the top 10 great holiday gifts of the year. But Wii is going to have a serious challenger in the name of ZCam 3D Camera. The ZCam is the first low-cost, consumer videocamera that can capture video with depth information and probably the first real challenger to Nintendo's Wiimote: with its 3D capture abilities it will allow you to play Wii-style without using any controls, console or whatsoever. In fact, it is so precise that it will even recognize your finger gestures to fire a weapon or manipulate your computer like in Minority Report, but without gloves or any other external device.
Don't you believe it? Then, see see yourself here in this demo here.

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Thursday, December 13, 2007

Left Brain vs Right Brain

Are you more left brained or right brained person? In other words, are you more logic oriented, analytical, look at 'parts' of whole picture or more imaginative, intuitive, holistic, look at 'whole' picture? One of the most popular way of determining what part of brain we use, is looking at a dancing girl and figuring out if she is moving clockwise or anti-clockwise. If you think she is turning clockwise you are right brained and vice versa.
brain test
And, there is one more way by answering few simple questions here. So, go ahead and test yourself.

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Tuesday, December 11, 2007

How to green your life?

Having known and seen the impact of climate change, is there any way we as individuals can do to reduce green gas emission and lead a greener life?
How do we know our carbon foot print?
MorganStanley has compiled a list of 50 things in this small guide to make our life greener and help tackle climate change. The world is in our hands. Start making a real difference today.

BTW, my carbon foot print is 8.0 tons of co2/yr a bit less than avg american foot print which is 9 tons of co2/yr.

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Sunday, December 09, 2007

Water Reservoir of 'Arctic Ocean' size in China

Scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.

The discovery marks the first time such a large body of water has found in the planet’s deep mantle.

The finding, made by Michael Wysession, a seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and his former graduate student Jesse Lawrence, now at the University of California, San Diego, will be detailed in a forthcoming monograph to be published by the American Geophysical Union.

Read on more here

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