Carnival Cruise to Mexico

Going on a Cruise was one of those curious things that I wanted to explore ever since couple of my friends went and were very excited about the whole experience. Of course the friends experience is more than 4 years old and I did try booking back then itself only to be cancelled multiple times due to Carnival Ship issues.

Guess the saying goes, third time is the charm but in our case we succeeded the 4th time. After much deliberations and discussions we booked our cruise for middle of December and were very excited about the whole prospect.

• Boarding the ship is probably one of the slowest things one can imagine, park the car, take the luggage, then the first step of document verification and next stop for one more document verify and boarding pass issued
• They claim to have done staggered boarding but still the boarding time takes a while, so be patient
• Once on board at around 3:30PM they will have the emergency drill at around 4:00PM which is mandatory and all need to attend, no exceptions. It is one of those “what you resist will persist”, they will make sure everyone shows up and no exceptions
• Once the drill is complete, you are free to roam around and on your own
• Neither the adults only pool nor the all access pools are heated, if the weather is warm then bearable else utterly cold (specially when docked in Galveston)
• We didn't get to try out much of the entertainment portion much for our daughter was happy being in the water and they had something or the other going on on top deck
• May be different in other ships, in ours the only place to cross across the ship end to end was on floor 5 (deck with casino and bar)
• We went with the ship onshore excursions for both Progresso and Cozumel, so no comment on off ship hiring
• Progresso has some sandy beaches and somewhat reminded me of Port Aransas, water is neither blue nor brown (like in Galveston) and somewhat in between.
• Cozumel is a totally different story, crystal clear blue waters, the ocean looks like one gaint swimming pool. If you are into swimming then definitely try snorkeling while there.
• The support staff on the cruise were from all over eastern Europe and Asia. Did meet a bunch of Indians in the support staff and one couple from Bangalore
• The staff were very kind and courteous.
• Food was great, even the oily burger and burritos were great tasting
• We could have potentially used room service but didn’t find any menu to order from and the suite itself was small that we were discouraged to use room service
• For Dinner out of the 5 nights we had Indian option on 3 nights ( one night we ate in the buffet)
• The best thing for me on the ship was being off the grid, I just put my phone in the locker and kept it there for all the 5 days.
• The vastness and calmness of the ocean was to a large extent therapeutic
• Be careful of the wind gusts specially in the night
• The passengers on the cruise were all sorts and kinds
• Did I say embarkation was painful, de-embarkation was even more painful. It took us almost 4 and half hours to get off the ship and start driving
• It is not the ship facilities but the terminal to check us back into US was the slow process
• Self checkout by carrying all our bags would have saved us around 30minutes of our time
• Everything costs ~1.5X on the ship that what it would cost on land, I have to mention the duty free shops at Cozumel port was beyond joke
• They had a big sale of watches on the ship on the last day and lot of people were buying too, may be Christmas time or they did see a genuine value in those watches.

All in all it was a fun experience and definitely recommended. We did not have any seasickness to any extent, I did learn a trick that a green apple a day can keep seasickness away (may be that explains the lack of red apples on the ship).

History brings perspective

Growing up as a kid, I hated Social Studies and specially history. Looking back I blame it on the teachers who refused get us fired up about history. Thanks to my dear friends for getting me hooked up with podcasts and I am becoming a history buff. Granted I still can’t remember the exact dates of events and I am now listening for fun instead of an exam.

One should study history and not just once own country’s history but world history or at the least the major events that shaped the world we live in. I have been listening to this podcast on crusades back in the Middle Ages (1100-1300 ad) and I think it has added a new dimension to my view of the world.  

Before the crusades podcast, my interest in history had been either Indian history or the biggest event of modern times the world war II and to some extent world war I. While listening to the podcasts on ww II I was mind boggled by the scale at which the war took place and finally got to appreciate the fact that  our (Indian) then leaders like Gandhi and Nehru supported the British against the axis forces, that's a separate blog post in itself. It made me believe human consciousness evolves to an extent in parallel across the globe irrespective of the distance.

Now back to crusades podcast, after listening to almost 90 odd episodes each 25 minute long spanning from 1st crusade to king Louis crusade I have learnt the following things

• Back in those days the whole world believed in pillaging and looting of conquered territories
• Back in those days mass killing of captured population was part of common culture
• No empire or kingdom lasts for ever, Rome got destroyed by the barbarians from Europe and Byzantine empire got destroyed by crusaders, the Muslim empire got destroyed by the Mongols and so on
• Intolerance towards practice of other religion was truly up to the whims and fancies of the kings/rulers and their needs.
• If I think Hinduism has too many castes/sects, Christianity and Islam have their own with each one claiming superiority over other
• Infighting and Traitors aren't patented to India alone they exist all over the world
• Destruction of property or materials that are sacred to other religion or conversion of their place of worship to your own was also a common practice
• Feudal system and practice is not a patent of India alone, it existed all over the world
• Money and trade always and mostly trumped religion
• Catholic church in the middle ages was corrupt beyond my imagination, I never truly comprehended this till I started hearing the podcasts

In short, I have been blaming the Islamic invasion of India for destruction of property and looting and killing of innocents and I have to an extent come to terms that the world was like that back in those days and I do feel we have come a long way since then.

Venue hunt - some learning

While searching for a new location for our weekly follow ups (Art of Living) in south Austin, I learnt a thing or 2 as with my tradition if it is worth sharing then it is worth writing.

• Google and Yelp were my best friends to find the space, there were days when I used to peruse craigslist but this time around it seemed like so old
• Cold calls always helps, mostly leaving a message or through email, if they are really interested they will come back in a day or 2
• There are way more number of independent yoga studios in Austin than one can imagine. Also, it so happens most of these studios run on sublease by the hour to different instructors
• Corporate structured studios like Barr3, Todd Pilates, Yoga Yoga don’t entertain renting to outsiders
• I did come across some yoga studios who refused for they were concerned about us competing with their philosophy
• Churches were my first priority to check but most of them said no for they would be busy with their youth ministry activities on Sunday evenings.
• School gymnasiums are nice but the rates are pretty high
• From my experience the going rate for a ~800 SQFT open studio space is somewhere between $25-$35, depending on duration and hours of the contract
• What sells is the pictures of the location both inside and outside. To a large extent Google takes care of the outside pics and it would become business owners responsibility.       

The best part, in the process of searching for a venue I did learn a thing or 2 about marketing our own Art of Living center. Let me see how much I can impact that in the last 3 months as secretary.  

Proud of you Kapil Sharma

To say I am a huge fan of Kapil Sharma is an understatement, I just love his sense of humor, timing and creativity. Ever since he transitioned to Sony I have become a regular audience for all his episodes. 

That said, the episode I saw yesterday increased my respect towards him for the first time he had the para-olympians as guests on the show. Considering the show is mostly used by starts for their movie promos and most of the guests are very closely related to entertainment industry, this was a great refreshingly welcome change. 

How old is too old for a car

My beloved Volkswagen Passat just completed her 14.5 years of life with me and has been a great and very reliable car to drive around. Now with 140K+ miles on the car there is always the thought that lurks in my brain, how many more days with the same old car? the question became even more relevant couple of months ago when the mechanic told me that the solution to fix a check engine light would cost $1000 to fix (it ended up being ~$1600) to fix. Can I not keep the money and dump the VW and buy a different one? my mind said may be but my heart said vehemently no. 

My problem was 2 fold, I need to spend the money to fix the check engine light on the car or else whoever willing to buy the car would negotiate the price of the car as though it would be sold for parts. Secondly, since I am already paying for a car loan I didn’t want to add one more car payment (if I can avoid it). I guess this is the first time in the 14 years I have owned the car I did a compilation of how much I have spent over the years (last 5-6) in maintaining/up keeping the car, turned out in the last 6 years on an average I have spent $1,200/year on maintenance including brakes, tires and battery. So, technically the costs were in favor of keeping the car.   

I pretty much discussed with every one I can think of about the car (to fix it or not to) and I think the best answer came from a colleague of mine. Its not the money spent alone but also the time the car needs to spend in the mechanic shop and the inconvenience it would cause and how much of it can you bear and endure, there are advantages of keeping the old car for you don’t have to worry about car payments and if the car is sufficiently old enough you can save on the insurance too and in the end if you can find a good mechanic you can trust and bear with the car’s absence for a few days in a year then longer you keep the better off you are financially.

After going through 3 different mechanics in last 7 or so years, I think I have found a good mechanic in Brink Motorsports and true to their ratings on all websites (Google, Yelp etc), I recommend them in a heart beat for VW/Audi repairs.

Yes I did make my car street legal and have to decided to run it for another 2 to 3 years or longer if possible :).    

The industry of pet food

While talking to a friend of mine, the conversation steered towards "when so many people are dying of hunger, shouldn't the world address that first.before addressing pet food needs and organizing fund raisers for pet foods". 

Fair question, at that time I put it off saying each person has his/her own passion that they are free to pursue, some like to drive human cause while others like to drive animal causes. After a few minutes a thought occurred to me that most of the pet food sold in the pet stores are made from meat/part of the animals that are considered not fit enough for human consumption.  To my knowledge there is only 1 company called honest kitchen which has been approved by FDA that the meat used is human grade in their pet food. 

To elaborate, the meat industry in the USA and I am guessing other developed countries is so huge huge and organized and have found an answer to the question of what to do with all the left over's after taking out the meat fit for human consumption?, Convert to pet food, after raising Daisy for a year and half I am convinced that not a single part of any animal used in human food will ever go wasted, everything from bones to hide to cartilage and intestines are used in some form of other as pet food. 

I am not here trying to take a stance and saying right or wrong but this connection boggled my mind. If I stress myself further the same is true for vegetarian food cycle too, the husk the grass is all used to feed the animals, I guess I didn’t notice it back in India for it was never that organized and not commercialized like the pet food industry we have here in the USA.

Farwell dear Rajima

It is hard to believe that she is no more and she has said her final good bye, when I heard the news last night for a few seconds I became numb. Yes farewell my dearest teacher Rajima. She was a firebrand, intellect of highest order, devotee of the highest order, a true saint, kind hearted and one who knew how to effectively use carrot and stick.

Her sessions let it be Art of Living courses or the sessions of Bhagavata or Yoga Vasista were divine. She was one of those personalities which either attracted people like a magnet and kept them devoted to her or repulsed them from the get go, I don’t think there ever was an intermediate level. 

I still remember the day back in 2008 when she looked me in the eye and asked “why are you not writing down and where is your notebook?”, in the same course when I had asked a “hypothetical question”, she had shunned me off and pointed towards action. A true yogi who really understood the 7 layers of existence.

Here presence was enough to change energy of the place. I would not be an exaggeration to say that she transformed people for better, she believed in action and always lead from the front. One teacher in my experience who made no exceptions for the rules, including herself. 

May her soul rest in peace, we miss you Rajima.

Te3n – Hindi Movie

There are “thrillers” and real thrillers, Te3n movie belongs to the category of real thrillers, I would qualify it in the same league as Kahani or Drishya if not higher. Going by the title I had presumed the movie has got to do with game of cards and was pleasantly surprised when that was not true.

The movie kept me and Sandhya on the toes from the start to end.  Sandhya, who usually is good in guessing the plot half way through the movie was also thrilled by the movie.

The story line is simple, a desperate grand father wants a closure to the kidnap and eventual death of his beloved grand daughter. For everyone including the police department it is a closed case for despite their best efforts at the time of incident they couldn't solve it and there is no new intel that can throw some fresh light. To top it off, the kidnapping/death is one such unique case and such a case has never repeated again. For the police it is a case file and for the grand father it is his grand daughter. What happens next is the story. All the actors (Amitabh Bachan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Vidya Balan and few others) have given very real controlled performances, no item songs or fight scenes. 

Grab a bucket of popcorn, find the movie and watch it without fail, you can thank me later for recommending it. 

ps: it is available on einthusan.com 

Praise the trainer :)

It is not new, I have been with Camp Gladiator for almost 6 months now and my trainer has always been the most awesome Julie Burns.

Last camp after her trainer refresher program she introduced a new work out on Tuesday of week 4 known as CG Fight Gone Right, it is a series of 5 exercises done for a duration of 1 minute each and repeated 5 times, of course there is a 1 minute break between 5 minute sets. In total 30 minutes. 

The idea apparently is to repeat this every camp that way there is a benchmark to compare against and see how we are progressing, last camp when we did it for the first time I had made fun of it saying “if I don’t see any improvement, I can blame the trainer” and Julie had laughed at it.

After doing the exercises again today (2nd time) and recording the numbers I have come around to praise the trainer.

Julie Burns, you simply rock.

Here is a piece of great news, Austinites you get to train the next camp for $8 as part of a CG promotion.

Second International Day of Yoga celebrations

They say everything is big and better in Texas, so why should our yoga day be an exception? you read it right, Art of Living foundation in collaboration with HSS and ISHA foundation along with ~45 partners celebrated the International Day of Yoga on July 30 2016.  Did I tell you there were ~800 people in attendance doing yoga. 

Back in May 2016, when one of our teachers raised the point that we need to celebrate international day of Yoga and it will not be done on June 21st when the rest of the world celebrates but on July 31st, I admit, I was one of the few who was some what disappointed and didn’t want us to sign up to lead the effort for I didn’t see us becoming another event management  organization.

Thankfully they didn’t listen to me and took it up in a stride to organize the event, soon enough we had a Facebook page, a website,  few collaborators and lots of partners which kept on growing over the next month or so. In the end we had over 40 partners and 3 other organizations which were actively collaborating with us.

Within the limited budget we were able to flyer, conduct TV interviews and unlimited sharing and advertising on Facebook.  The only avenue I think we left untapped was Twitter. In the end, all of these created enough awareness amongst Austin crowd that we had ~800 people showed up to do yoga on a hot summer Saturday evening. Needless to say we are thankful to all those who showed up to do the yoga.

The event day truly saw each organization bring out their expertise to the game. We from Art of Living brought our expertise of overall organization and had our hand in every single aspect of the event, be it on stage with yoga, music and meditation or the ground work of  crowd management. HSS and ISHA had the man/woman/student power to handle the masses of people who were heading to the capitol  (on a side note, volunteers of HSS had come from Houston and San Antonio to help out/assist the event), Agni the dance studio handled the whole stage setup, microphones, speakers, the yoga dance and the other logistical side of the event, last but not the least our yoga partners who spread out on stage and all around the capitol grounds leading the Yoga.    

Yes we did it, the second ever yoga day celebrations was a grand success beyond all metrics. We do have a lot of people to thank both inside our organization and outside and more importantly he Counsel General of India, Houston. 

Keep an eye on this area for I will be posting the pics and videos as and when I receive them.

Refilled printer catridge update

A friend of mine said "a blog just is someone's opinion and may not always be a well researched truth", being a blogger I have to agree with him. For I myself am guilty of posting something on my blog and not providing an update to the same when the information I know about the matter changes. I can quote numerous examples, but I do take the credit for one case that of Lance Armstrong where I did come a full circle.

Anyways, I started this post because I wanted to update about the ink cartridges, remember the cartridge refill post? 

I followed the instructions from the website and was printing every week without fail the "printer status report" only to notice at the end of 3 months one of the cartridge went empty and promptly I got it refilled, only to notice that the other colors went empty within a couple of days. The surprising part was they went from all good to no good in more a binary transition than an analog one, as I expected them to be. 

One small thing I learnt is, just because the material I am printing is black and white doesn't mean the printer is using the black cartridge unless I specify to print black and white it would rarely use the black. 

This time around I am trying to keep the status reports more sporadic than fixed, so far 3 months over and the cartridges are still alive. Will have to see how long will they last. 

I personally don't have a feel for how long will the brand new ones last, will try that experiment just to see if the refill route is the cheaper way to go. 

The age of innocence

Most nights before going to bed, Avni and me read a story or two. Off late our favorite has been "Brothers Grimm fairy tales", we have the complete collection and I usually pick a random story and depending on the length we complete in 1 night or push it out to couple of nights. 

Last night we picked a story in which there was a war declared between land animals and all flying ones (including insects) and the pretense of the war was some bear had managed to insult some chicks. So, the birds (in my view smart ones) decided to spy on the animals to find out about their battle plans and managed to find out that if the red tail of the fox, animals commander in chief is high they will fight and if it is down they will retreat. With the advantage of this information the bird army used their hornets to attack the fox's tail which in a short while gets tucked between its legs and hence causing animals to retreat and hence the birds won the battle.  

For me it was a nice and funny story but for Avni it was otherwise. She declared that what the birds did was cheating and it is wrong and should not do it. She added to begin with why did they fight and not talk. I had no answers but to tell her it is one of those pretend stories and just a funny one to imagine the fix running with its tail tucked in. 

What it took for Google to fix our address

When our Art of Living Austin center relocated to a new location one of our over enthusiastic volunteer created a point of interest and in his/her enthusiasm entered the wrong address. Only a couple of days later we realized the mistake and I don't know what that person did but Google started to call our place as permanently closed even though we have been thriving and operating since February 2016. 

Every one searching online used to complain that our address cannot be found. As secretary it became my job to get it fixed. First I tried the crowd sourcing approach and requested multiple people to suggest to google that the place address needs an edit and also indicate that the place is open for business. I can't say that this approach was a complete waste of time and effort for Google had fixed our address and called us open (for couple of days) only to revert back to wrong address and close again.  

It was mind numbing to say the least, I was clueless. Google answered itself and pointed me to mapmaker.google.com and I started proposing edits there only to be rejected in a couple of days after suggesting the edits. But unlike other places, this one has a regional lead and whom you can contact by posting on a forum, the process led to some revelation. 

Per Google guidelines any change to an address would mean that they would call it permanently closed until they some how completely verify the new one and apparently that was what was happening to our location. 

They suggested I remove the present location and create a new poi,  I couldn't get that to happen and again went back to forum. This time the regional lead took mercy on me and looked through the history and after verifying with me that the first entered address was wrong and all we were trying was to get the right address in, he made the change happen and in less than 24 hours after that both Google maps and Google search had our place as open and we were in business. 

The other interesting thing I noticed was that Apple maps uses Yelp for its poi (luckily for me Yelp was an easy beast to handle). 

Camp Gladiator - 1st camp

There is a general understanding that exercise is a must and everyone must spend a few hours a week on exercise. Some prefer to hit the gym, some like running and some do like to have exercise machines at home and some crazy ones like me try out Camp Gladiator.

I had tried all the above mentioned before giving the camp a try and I admit I am not the first crazy one in the family, I took motivation from the fairer one.

So what is Camp Gladiator or better known as CG amongst it's ardent followers, in my thinking it is a boot camp but without the boot camp structure of trainer yelling in your ears, instead you will be doing exercises to nice loud music and constant encouragement from the fellow campers and the trainer itself. Of course the sound track varies from trainer to trainer (in my 8 classes, I have heard from GNR to macarena).

CG claims you can get unlimited workouts but in my 4 week experience, I was happy to get 2 in a week. Each workout is an hour long with non stop activities for the whole duration, be it running, jumping, walking side ways or backwards and so on. To an extent it reminded you of all the games we played as kids, only difference being, then we used to do in the name of playing and now in the name of exercise :). From what I could gather the trainer's aim is to keep you moving every single minute of the full hour. 

For me personally, as I stated earlier I got motivated to try it out from Sandhya and secondly my home machine workouts were getting boring at some level as I couldn't incorporate new exercises and in turn I was losing my motivation. Thanks to Sandhya, she got me a free 4 week camp to try out and loaded me up with all tips and tricks that I needed to be successful. 

I wouldn't say it was a breeze of 8 classes but it was well worth it when I surpassed my own benchmark (set during the 1st class) in the last class. I could see a big improvement with just 8 classes.

I would be doing injustice if I don't thank Julie Burns our trainer for keeping us motivated, following up after the workout, giving us tips on stretching and other exercises we could be doing to help ourselves during the recovery between workouts. 

Building a kids lego table

Avni is a big fan of Lego, such a big fan that if we ever need to got to the mall, one and only way to convince her to join us is a promise of Lego play time at the store and a promise of Lego bricks. Over time we have bought enough and more and have been thinking of providing her a platform or a dedicated table where we can store all the bricks in some form of "order" that she can play and build.

We explored lot of commercial possibilities and even spent money on a few, they either turned out very expensive or too small enough that they didn’t meet our needs/specification.

After some brain storming and internet searches, we narrowed on a plan to have multiple storage drawers and mount a big thick wooden panel on top and make one of our own (credit goes to Sandhya). The storage drawers were readily available in our favorite container store and we bought 6 total, 3 for each side. The wood was the tricky one.

Being a novice in buying lumber, I had no idea what to ask for when I went to Home Depot to buy the wood board. All I knew was I need to buy a board that is about 4ft long and about 20" wide and about 0.75" thick. When they asked what do I have in mind to do, I said "I am building a Lego table for my daughter", that almost threw them off balance. In the end they were helpful and showed me the available boards and I picked one of the decently expensive ones (don't remember much).

The board dimension was 2' X 4' and as per suggestions from the internet, it was supposed to be cut to 20” width which is the size of our drawers, I would have gotten it done but the saw at Home Depot was broken and I picked the piece intact, I am glad I did that for the 4” extra space is pretty nice to have. 

Then came the challenge of priming the wood and painting the wood, by Avni’s choice we had to paint one side pink and another side purple (considering it would be mounted on drawers, I could have saved myself time and money by using 1 color of paint, oh well hind sight). the tedious part was waiting for the paint to dry before applying next coat and the spillages from 1 side to another and those touch ups, all said and done it took more than a week to get it all painted. Few things I learned were that to get quality paint on the wood use the smallest possible brush that your work can permit and  use painters tape to save time (most importantly, apart from spilling of paint to other side it would prevent paint accumulation along the edges).

The last step was mounting to the storage drawers, per recommendation from the Home Depot Gorilla glue, here is where I should have listened to the experts. I should have put really low amount of glue instead of spreading copious amount for the glue did expand over time and it started spreading everywhere, I had to go with a knife to cut out the unwanted glue. I did manage to get most of it out but for some areas I just had to make up my mind out of sight mind.

One thing we did was to use electrical tape and taped all round the corners and the edges to make them smooth.

  

The finishing touches came from Sandhya who did awesome stencil work. One thing for sure, after the table and all blocks in 1 place Avni seems to be playing with her lego’s  more than before. All in all it was worth the time and effort in creating it.

Below are some pics, from concept to finish and the fun in between. 

Podcast on Creativity

I am a recent convert to podcasts, turned to them specially after my good friends visit from California. Anyways, off the many things I subscribe to now one thing I am regular with is Ted Radio hour from NPR. The podcast runs for an hour or so in which they combine multiple ted talks on a particular topic, in essence it is a superset of ted talks. 

One such Ted talk that I recently heard were on Creativity, they covered few different aspects for creativity

1. Not being selfish, no me and mine 
2. Ability to fall on your face and make mistakes
3. Frontal cortex of brain or as we call Ego which monitors me and mine to be off
4. Practice a lot of it also helps
5. Creativity needs to be nurtured
6. Showing up every day and being consistent about the process

All good points, one thing I really loved if they had covered was aspect of meditation. For a good meditation more than a few criterion listed above are to be met and in my experience more and more creative ideas flow right after a good meditation. As Shri Shri Ravishankar says for a good meditation, you want nothing, you are nothing and then sit with that attitude and meditation will happen. 

Our Art of Living center here in Austin do offer Meditation courses among others. Needless to say there is the Happiness Program which is also offered on a regular basis which helps one with the awareness of interaction between the different layers of existence.

On other hand people say, meditate on the issue that you want to solve and I believe that is the most useless thing to do.

The new super hero – MLK

Today my daughter enlightened me as to why we celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday. 

In her own words (translated from Kannada), long time ago before she was born and I was born or her grand parents were born there were rules that said only white people can play in the park and black people only play football and brown people only play basketball. Then MLK said everybody should play together and then on all kids play together in the park. That is why he is a superhero. Her follow on question was since he is called the king, does that mean he is the king of the whole world?

Anyways, I don’t know the answer to the question she asked but I am amazed that she was able to grasp the narrative at school (in English medium) and was able to translate and re-tell the story in Kannada (our native language) to both me and Sandhya.

On one hand, I was quite surprised that the teachers at CDC were talking about sensitive subject like racism to kids at pre-k level but on the other hand I am more than appreciative of them for engaging them at such early ages.

In the words of her teachers they could feel her like a civil attorney arguing a case. Considering she beats me up for disciplining Daisy (our pup), I am guessing we either have an attorney or an activist in the making. 

One world meditation

The title might seem off but no it was an actual event hosted by Art of Living foundation on January 17 2016. The event was a curtain raiser for the bigger event World Culture festival to be held in Delhi, India from March 11-13 2016. As you may already know we in Austin are also planning our own local curtain raiser and our folks decided a face to face meeting to be had right after the meditation.

My mind was completely occupied with the logistics for the event and how best we could make this event a grand success and so on, on top of it somehow we didn’t have the right link and when we tuned in for the meditation it had already started. This I believe was the first time that Facebook was hosting, unlike the previous times when youtube used to host and there were some delays in the audio. All in all when everyone else in the room was feeling wonderful after the meditation I didn’t pack the punch.

It was as though the universe heard my dilemma and on screen Sri Sri started talking again (we didn’t realize then but were re telecasting the meditation event) and out of curiosity the volume was increased and lo behold there was one more meditation to be done and this time with no breaks in the telecast and don’t know however many minutes later I opened the eyes and it was a peaceful and beautiful moment.

In case you missed the meditation and the Q and A that followed, don’t worry you can find it here. 

Refilled printer cartridges

For my hp inkjet printer at home, every time the ink dried up I used to buy brand new cartridges and some time along while printing some photos at Costco, I realized they have a service to refill the cartridges.

It was win win for multiple reasons, I hated throwing the cartridges away to a land fill, it was saving me some money and I could only refill the ink that had dried up (instead of buying set of 4 or 5).  As the saying goes first time lucky, first time I did it, it worked like a charm, printer recognized the ink levels and print quality was almost perfect and needless to say I was pretty impressed. 

A few months later  I realized the ink had dried up and I decided to go the same route, this time around the story went slightly differently. After refill the printer refused to show the ink levels and also refused to print anything at all. I tried the color and monochrome but no luck either ways.

I eventually made a trip back to Costco and there I learned a couple of things, first, they can actually measure the cartridge to determine if it has been filled with enough ink. Second, since the cartridge is now a non-standard it is fairly common for printers to show error for the amount of ink present.

Through the weighing process the good friendly Costco lady told me that the black ink for some reason hasn't gone through and she refilled it again. Of course my nightmare was still not over, for after coming back and repopulating the cartridges the printer still had trouble printing (it was printing blank pages or off color).

Then I came across this website inkjet411.com which suggested that I try electronically clean print head (in my printer, it's called clean cartridges) and voila it did the magic and the printer started working properly. One important suggestion the site had was to print a test print once a week to prevent ink from drying up.

Last but not least is that there is a limited number of times that cartridges can be refilled, I don't know that yet and will know soon.