I wanted to signup for the service offered by the Techcrunch 2011 Disrupt winner, GetAround (which by the way is a pretty cool service) and went to their website. And what do I see? I need a facebook account to use their service. I know Facebook is popular, but how fair is it to require a potential customer to have a Facebook account?? 
May 2011
Celebrating Ugadhi
Jhanvi and I visited India in April and were lucky to celebrate Ugadhi with our family back home. Ugadhi is the an important festival in South India and is essentially the celebration of the begenning of a new year (yep.. new year in April 🙂 ). One of the specialities of Ugadhi in Andhra Pradesh is something called “Ugadhi Pachadi”. It is a mixture of 6 ingredients (Neem Flower, Jaggery, Red Pepper, Green Mango, Salt and Tamarind) which designate the different “tastes” of life (bitter, sweet, hot, salty, tangy etc).
I haven’t been able to celebrate Ugadhi with my family for more than 10 years. So it was a special occasion. And mom went all the way to make it even more memorable. Here are some pictures.
Hanging Mango Leaves 
Garelu 
Ugadhi Pachadi : Ingredients
Ugadhi Pachadi : Final 
Thanking the divine ones 
RESOLUTIONS : 2011 : April Update
Another late update. I really want to post these updated in the first week of the month, but something or the other always stops me from doing it. Maybe one of my resolution should be to post updates on resolutions on a timely basis :).
- Lose the Gut
- This is the first month, where my weight at the end of the month was higher than the weight at the beginning. And I blame all of it on the yummy food I had in India.
- This was also the first month during which I didn’t measure my weight on a daily basis for more than 80% of the time.
- Here is how the graph looks like
- I feel like I have hit a plateau in my effort to lose weight. And I think I know why. I stopped exercising (whatever little I used to do 🙂 ). One small resolutions and so many issues :).
- Increase traffic to kudithipudi.org
- Another goal I didn’t do anything about in April. In fact, this is probably the one goal where I have consistently lagged behind. I haven’t been writing as much as I want to. Plenty of ideas, but at the same time plenty of excuses 🙂 to not write. But does it really matter? I just need to get it done.
- CISSP Certification
- I started preparing for the certification. I think I should just schedule the exam, so that I have a deadline to meet.
Vacation- With the recent vacation in India, I think this resolution has been met. One down, three more to go 🙂