Sunday 29 January 2006

Avian visitor

When I woke up today (at my usual Sunday wake-up time of 1:00 PM), I had a nice surprise waiting for me. An owl sat perched on a beam in our verandah, and it was quite a sight to see. Apparently, it'd been there from last night. About one-foot in height, it was quite a magnificent-looking creature. I learned later from a friend that it was a spotted-owl. I’m not sure the status of the bird, as a species I mean.

Anyway, I took some snaps on my SLR camera, which is not a digital one (unfortunately). So, I’ll be posting the snaps of our avian friend as soon as I have the pictures developed.

The owl flew away soon after sunset.

Creating PDFs on Windows

I've written a howto document on creation of PDF documents from other files on the Windows platform.

It's available here http://symonds.net/~chiranth/technical/pdfWriter.html

Sunday 22 January 2006

Religion vs Ethics

What does religion give us? Faith
Faith in what? An unknown force/a known force/a recognisable force
What else does religion give you? A moral sense of direction

Hold on! Let's go back on the last one. Do non-believers not have any moral sense of direction? I don't think so. I've known athiests who would gel very well with society and be up to all the socially acceptable norms. Their definition of "right vs wrong" could very well be derived from religion, but it isn't. In fact, one wouldn't come to know that they're atheists unless they said so themselves.

Check out the article Ethics Without Gods, especially the section titled Back to Ethics. The section quotes Plato's argument about there being a standard of "goodness" that is independent of the God who's preaching it.

Sunday 8 January 2006

Heading to Hyderabad

I've been selected by the Indian School of Business for their
year-long MBA course.

I shall be heading out to Hyderabad in April this year.