TheAnand

My Alexa rankings were dropping like anything for the last few weeks without any kind of explanations or reasons. In a bid to increase my rankings, I decided to try the recently released Alexa Plugin for firefox. I was using the Search Status plugin earlier which was pretty nifty giving me a lot of informations about the sites I visit like WhoIs and other site details.

When I read the Privacy Policy of the Alexa Sparky plugin, here is what I found:

Just to clarify my status, I just wanted to tell a few fans (mainly myself ) of my blog and other readers that Anand is not dead yet! I was putting up posting to the next day all these days mainly due to laziness and pressure at college and other not so life threating problems. So what was I upto all these days?

• I had the first flight travel of my life on 18th Oct. 2007 to Chennai in Indian Airlines from my home town Cochin. And good things come in a big box, I had my return in the evening in Deccan Air.

Recently Yahoo! claimed that they have managed to stop all Ebay and Paypal spam emails sometime early this month. I always thought Yahoo! had a great technology for stopping spam and they have some cool technology like DomainKeys and stuff like that. Today I got a email saying that my Paypal needs verification. Here is a screenshot:

So, Whats going on Yahoo! ? Can I trust your emails?

Sometime back I unknowingly hid a member of my MyBlogLog Community from appearing in my recent visitors list. Later on, I felt bad about it and was looking for a way to restore/unblock that person’s face on mybloglog faces. But thanks to the great documentation of the MyBlogLog site and wonderfully helpful blog they have, it took me months to find out how to do it.

• First login to your account, and click on the home tab on the top.
• Then click the Edit settings of the site in which you want to unhide the user from.

The whole blogosphere is going through a redesign frenzy at the moment, so I decided to do one on my blog too. Though no earth-shattering changes from the previous blog theme, I changed the header and title of this blog to something that describes the blog better and how I want it to be. I am beginning to feel that this is my personal blog and what I share here will be in its archives forever, I want it to be more meaningful and help me look back at times in the future.

I can finally say that I have quit the worst habit that I had from my school days. Its been about a week or even more since I officially declared my hostility to the habit. I cannot really say it was a walk in the park or anything close to it. I was smoking more than once an hour until last week.

The desire to quit had been on my mind for sometime now, but I never gave it much of a thought till someone very special made me realize a lot of things and gave me hopes of life beyond 32.

<!–RANT starts here–>

Today I had a trip from my home in Cochin, to my family temple at Peruvambu, near Palghat. The trip was around 200Kms in total, a journey that should have been a breeze in about 5-7 hours took a gruelling 9 hours in total and my backbone is like the suspension of a fully loaded trucker, all bended up and sprained