Plain Cake

For the first time, we tried baking a plain vanilla cake and here's how it turned out:

It was a little too sweet and felt the taste of raw eggs. In hindsight, maybe we should've used more butter rather than oil. But, overall, not bad for the first attempt!

Drive to Chitradurga - 22 Dec 2012

An impulse decision to drive to Chitradurga with Kashi and his father turned out to be quite a pleasant experience. A good way to spend a Saturday, indeed. We started in my Swift car at 4.45am and took turns to drive on the beautiful NH4. Had breakfast at around 8am and started the light-weight trek around the Fort - built to withstand enemy attack by way of seven levels of increasing robustness and strategy.

A good thing we did to hire a guide to get a gist of the history, including the Onake Obavva bravery. We then stopped over at a cave and hired another guide to dig deep below 80 feet. The cave was used by a monk to meditate and spend the rest of his life. You have to literally stretch and crawl to go down many levels and rooms, but amazingly built to have enough supply of Oxygen - so none of us collapsed. At the rock bottom, we switched off all lights and witnessed the meaning of pitch darkness.

We came back to Bangalore by 5pm.

You can read my friend's account of the day on his blog and view all the pictures at https://plus.google.com/u/0/106796492829299466767/posts/76GnEz5t4KA.

[30-day Challenge] Fitness

It’s been a very good day so far today.

Woke up early, went out for a 20-minute walk and then headed to the gym for a 15-minute workout.

The challenge is to go out of the house and do some fitness-related activity for the next 30 days. No matter what.

Hope is that it’ll become a habit, as someone said we need to do something consistently for 30 days to make a habit out of it.

Encourage me, and push me so this doesn’t become yet another start!

Karwar Trip

Part 1 - Karwar trip planning via +Karthik C S:

My dear friend Sridhar sent an email sometime in 3rd week of December proposing for a trip for year end or 1st week of Jan. At the same time even Sowmya and I were thinking to get out somewhere. It so happened that none of the other friends could make it. So it turned out to be both our families.

TED Talk - SuperBetter: Can Gamification Solve Your Problems?

I was meaning to watch a TED video regularly, hopefully this will be a good start.

I'm going to watch this brilliant talk by Jane McGonigal again, and frequently - it's about how you can introduce gamification to fix any kind of problems, and avoid regretting things when it's too late.

Here it is - The game that can give you 10 extra years of life #TED:
http://on.ted.com/lGxQ

Also on: https://plus.google.com/u/0/106796492829299466767/posts/Kdf7wjpGYK7