Blood Donation Experience

I guess it's been almost a week since I wrote last time. Yeah, for the first time in my life I donated blood. Always wanted to do it though. During my engineering days I got one opportunity but blood group didn't match. For whatever reasons could never do it.

In my first year here in US I went to give blood after seeing an email request for blood donation. Funnily, I wasn't eligible as the rule says one should be here at least 3 years before donating. Crazily, after that 4 years passed and never got chance again.

Finally, yesterday I got another email with the same request. This time evrything went well and they took one pint of Manchu bloodline. After giving blood the one thing I absolutely didn't understand was the fear of some people about donating blood. Anyway, it was nothing. It took exactly 5 minutes for me to draw a pint of blood. By the way one pint is almost 500ml. If you don't know the amount of blood in human body would be around 6 liters.

People asked me whether I was feeling dizzy, etc. To be frank I didn't feel anything. Overall, it was very good expirience and for a good cause. I have decided to donate blood at least 4 times a year.

By the way, I forgot to add something. They give you some snacks along with some juice in case that helps. It seems in America 60 percent of the people are eligible to give blood, but only 2 percent donate. I guess it's social responsibility of everyone because in the end we are helping ourselves but not any other species. More over, there is no replacement for human blood and platelets.

Sent from my phone.

CC and BCC fields in Gmail

I'm not sure how many of you use these fields regularly when emailing people from Gmail. Being a user support specialist I got to use this very often.

I can always use the To field it self. But there is a purpose for CC and BCC fields. They stand for carbon copy and blind carbon copy respectively. To field is used for people who you intend to send. CC field is used to make other people understand you sent the email to the intended. For example, you can cc the emails to your boss to let him know that you are doing the duty. BCC is used when you don't want the person to know whom else you are sharing the email with and hence blind.

Coming to the point, like I said a while back I need to cc the emails to my group when ever I answer users' questions. I always use Apple mail client as I work in Mac environment. Recently, my university switched to Gmail. I don't have MobileMe subscrption with Apple. Which means I can't synchronize my mail clients on office and home computers which is a big nuisance. It costs $99 for year to have this subscrption. In a way it was a blessing in disguise that university switched to Gmail. Since it is a web interface I don't have to worry about synchronizing my laptop and desktop unless I want to store the emails for offline use. Even then it works but with some complicated setup which I will explain later.

In Apple mail CC field is always open. Where as in Gmail interface it's not. Which means I need to click everytime I want to cc the email to my different groups. I amsure you might be thinking what the heck. Right? Believe me you'd feel the same way if you are used to using keyboard all the time. You can do things fast if you are used to keyboard. So I wanted to have my Gmail compose window open up with cc field open whenever I want to write a new email or reply people. Fair enough. Unfortunately, it's not easy. Since Iike using keyboard I opyed for keyboard shortcuts in settings. Then if you press d the compose window opens up with cc field open. Great! But this shortcut doesn't work when you want to to reply to some email that's been there inyour inbox. Frustrating.

The next solution would be using some javascript. It's a nice solution since Gmail heavily uses javascript it is highly customizable. So before I started writing my own script with my not so co siderable javascript experience I wanted to google for it. First thing that came up was the solution I wanted. How exciting. Ha! Except that itdoesn't work with new Gmail user interface. So now I am determined to write it onmy own. I don't know how long it's going to take as I'vegot million things to do at my work.

I will definitely post it here as soon as I finish it. In the mean time I got to get off the bus before it goes beyond my place. Home sweet home.

Sent from my phone.

PATH's response

Yesterday I sent an email to PATH managememt about path cars not showing the time change. I was very surprised to see the prompt response. They wrote they had a software glitch because of which time change never updated. Fair enough as I can see that happening. Few years back time change used to be on the exact date all the time. Not anymore. Now it moves a week or two depending on some weather factors. I guess their software wasn't ready for that. Sounds silly but I do see a lot like this.

Anyway, they said they had been trying to change time manually. Even then it shouldn't have taken more than a week. At least, I am glad that they know the problem and accepted it and trying to fix it. That's what I call professionalism at work. They asked me to send the car numbers if I didn't see the time update. I will I see one. The coach I got off just now was showing right time. Over all felt great.

Sent from my phone.

Hazy New York

Every day I get to see New York from the other side of Hudson river during my commute. It always amazes me. For some reason it never gets bored.

Today out of no where it snowed after a while. In fact, it is still raining here. From the bus just like I do everyday I looked at New York and I was in awe for a while. I couldn't resist from taking a picture. It's not a great pic as it doesn't depict how I felt and what I truly saw. Anyway, thought I should share it with you guys.

Sent from my phone.

Zoo: Prison for wild animals

I don't think any humanbeing would like to go to prison. I just don't understand the fascination of people to visit wild animals that are kept in the zoo. If you think about it straight you would feel sick. How would one feel if some other life comes along from some other planet and keep him or her in their zoos for others to see. I wish there was something like that. Please think twice before you going or taking your children to zoo. It just doesn't make sense to keep wild animals in the zoo as it takes off the meaning of being wild animal.

I don't remember where it happened but when people tried to send wild animals born in zoos back to wilderness those animals had no clue on how to survive. Most of them died. It's just like the way it works with people. You just can't teach language skills to some one who is never exposed to any language before. In fact it happened with some one in California.

Just a while back read something about zoo and thought of writing this. If someone is curious to see wild animals then in my opinion he/she should go to either safaris or watch documentaries like the ones from BBC. Please don't support zoos. If is just not humane.

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Leap Year

For me when I was child or for that matter until I got into engineering leap year was the year which was divisible by 4. This is what I was taught in my school. Everything was fine until one day I had to write a C program for finding whether a given year was leap year or not. In my exam I thought I wrote the program well and expected to get full marks. I think it was first mid term in my first year of engineering at JNTU, Hyderabad.

When I got back my answersheet with half mark out of 3 ( or 5, I am not sure), first I was like what the hell and then felt happy to think that I would get full marks. Then I went and asked the instructor to give me full marks. I still remember his expression on his face. It was a huge ridicule. He announced it loudly in the class that definition of leap year was not just divisible by 4. I felt very embarrassed. Definitely not because he ridiculed me but because I didn't know it.

Anyway, here is the actual definition. You might or might not be knowing it. Even if you knew it I'm not sure whether you know the actual reason behind it. So the definition goes like this.

The given year should be divisible by 4 and shouldn't be divisible by 100 or should be divisible by 400. So the logic is simple. In any programming language you can use logical operators to define this. As an example I wrote the C program and put it in one of my previous posts. Check it out. So in a way you can say that any year that is divisible evenly by 4 and not evenly by 100 or evenly by 400 are leap years. For example, 2004 is evenly divisible by 4 and not evenly by 100. So 2004 is leap year. How about 2100. Even though it is evenly divisible by 4 is not leap year as it is also evenly divisible by 100. So 2100 is not leap year. How about 2400? It is leap year even though first half of the logic fails. Because the second half of the logic works here. Logical operator OR comes into picture here. 2400 is divisible by 400 and hence it is a leap year.

Up to this point it was just academic stuff. But the good stuff comes now. At least for me the most interesting part was why we do follow something of this critical to find out whether the given year is leap year or not. There is a brilliant reason behind this.

These days thorough out the world we follow Gregorian calendar. In this calendar we have 365 days per year. Right? In reality this is 6 hours shorter than solar year. Solar year is nothing but the amount of time it takes for earth to finish one revolution around sun. So to compensate this lost 6 hours per year we put 4 of these 6 hours together to make one day and put it in the month February every 4 years. Which means February in that year has one extra day and a total of 29 days. We call this year a leap year. This explains the first of the leap year being divisible by 4. How about second and third part. Let's go to next paragraph.

Ok. In my previous paragraph I said the time of 365 days is 6 hours shorter than solar year. Right? Let me take back those words. The exact value is slightly smaller than 6. In other terms you can say every year we are going little bit ahead of solar year by considering 6 hours in stead of an exact value which is slightly smaller than 6. So people found that after 100 years the little bit extra time sums up to become one day, i.e., 24 hours. Now you can say how much extra time we are going ahead every year? Got it? yep it is 1/100th part of day, which is nothing but 14.4 minutes. So you can say solar year is 365 days + 6 hours - 14.4 minutes. This explains year not being divisible by 100 in the logic. It is just that we don't consider leap every 100 years so that we lose one day we went ahead by taking leap years every 4 years in those 100 years. Ok let's move onto next paragraph. It's not over yet.

In my last paragraph I calculated the solar year as 365.25-0.01 (6 hours is 1/24=0.25 days, 14.4 min=14.4/60/24=0.01 days). So the number is 365.24. Not exactly. It seems the number is slightly bigger than this. How big? It is big enough in a way every 400 years it equals one day. So by taking this number and not considering the exact number we are a day behind the solar year every 400 years. So you can say that solar year is 365.24+1/400 (it takes 400 years to become 1 day. So in one year it is 1/400 th day which equals 3.6 minutes). So the solar year comes to 365.2425 days.

After all this if you think you have got the right number for solar year I say you are wrong. It seems the solar year value keeps increasing. It never stays constant. For now the exact value for solar year is 365.242374 days. You can see that it is slightly shorter than our value by 0.000125 days. Which means in another 8000 years it becomes one day. So in 8000 years we got to come back one day to sync with calendar. Which means the year 8000 should not be leap year. Again there is another catch though. Like I said the solar year keeps increasing. The time it takes for earth to go around the sun is increasing little by little every year. So in a way in another 8000 years the solar year keeps increasing and this way both the calendar and solar year sync.

Overall the way calendar system works is amazing. Don't you think so? Best part is people figured it out. Always amazes me. Anyway, got to go. If you are interested in knowing more go ti wikipedia and they have wonderful stuff.