New things on the block

'You live you learn'. So the saying goes. Couldn't be better said. I have come across a few new activities in recently. New and wonderous and addictive. Stuff that becomes part of ones life.



Youtube for one. It all started when I wanted to show dinosaures to Naqiyah. The picture book had a picture or two, but I decided to try and show her some more pictures online. So we sat at laptop and I fired up google searching for dinosaures. Ofcourse found a lot many pictures, but non were very satisfactory. If you've sat with a 2 year old and tried to browse the net, than you realise how painfully slow the process is. She kept fidgiting and it was difficult for me to find sites which would actually have names of the dinausers so that it would be learning experiance for both of us. In a while though, clicked on a link for dinosaures video, hosted on youtube. The immersive experiance for Naqiyah of watching Dinosaures, Monkeys, Lions and any and every animal we could think of visually with sound was priceless. Now on we can spend hours with a computer just looking at cats, or other various animals or even listing to nursery rhymes by other kids captured by dotting parents on Youtube. There have been times that Umaima gets annoyed at me and insists that its past Naqiyah's sleeping time, and we have to stop surfing :)
Naqiyah showing me 'Cat' and 'Dolphin'


Another nifty thing I started using was PGP. Although I'd known about public and private key encryption a long time hence. However I'd never used it before. Requirement was posed by Irdeto to send them my public keys to enable them to send me the lib files. I started looking and found a nifty program GNU PGP, sponsored by German Goverment, on Zimmerman's PGP code. PGP public/private key encryption really puts a whole new twist to sharing confidential data. Should become a life long habit now.

Second Life is something I came accross just today. An online virtual reality world where you can make aavtar, buy/sell things, make dwellings etc etc. Its even a place where now a days people haev online confrences, radio programs, product launches etc etc.

More on these later!