Sunday, April 4, 2010

Indian beliefs and their roots - Belief 1

Indians have weird beliefs. Sort of superstitions. Here I intend to come up with the true reason (or similar one) that probably gave rise to such beliefs. Here we go...
Belief: Dont clean your ears at night

Someday I was feeling so itchy in my ears that got a earbud and started cleaning it. My mom was for a minute frozen to death. She said "dont clean your ears at night". Promptly I asked her why? She said thats the rule, dont ask why. I argued with her for a while not to believe in all these things, but in vain. Then I started thinking, there must be a reason for introducing such a rule. Indian civilization has been around for a long time and were far more advanced than other parts of the world. There must be a reason to have such a saying. So I thought for a while. Here is what I came up with.
  • The time when these rules were written, they didnt have electricity or light bulbs; they had lamps at the most
  • they didnt have ear buds from Johnson & Johnson. they prepared their own from a stick and cotton hopefully, but mostly primitive.
  • groping in dark is never good, especially if the path is so constricted as your ear canal
  • if anything goes wrong, you would directly puncture your ear
and hence dont do anything that can harm yourself in dark. This must be the reason (or in similar lines) for them to have introduced such a rule.
I got back with my mom to discuss this. Thankfully she was open to discussion on such a topic and agreed that something like that must be the true reason. But most moms in India would just brand you as a spoiled child if you argue with them about the blind beliefs.
I intend to write more about such superstitious beliefs. If you have a question, write it in the comments and we can try to come up with the reasoning.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

HTML editing for emails.

I was disappointed with all the free email clients when it comes to adding html code in between the email. Yes, they have the simple ways to add bold, italics etc but what I want is to have html code added in the middle of email and the result should be just what it would be if I had inserted that html on my website. For example, here I am inserting html code to point to an add banner. And you could see the image, and if you click it will take you to the destination.
LinkShare_468x60v2
But if I want to do the same through an email, it doesnt seem like a possibility. First, most of the email clients dont allow inserting html (google doesnt). I found thunderbird does that. So I inserted html and from Thunderbird it shows the image etc as long as you are in the composer. Once the code is sent out to google mail, the image is gone when you receive the mail. I guess this was expected, but I am disappointed. How do we compose emails and make them behave just like a website? Is it a possibility?