Credit Card VANs

This was the question I was asked on Aadvark. This was the explanation I found on Citi Banks website.

By using Virtual Account Numbers, you get peace of mind knowing that your actual credit card number is never revealed to merchants, so it can’t be stolen from their files. Plus, each number can only be used with a single merchant, so it will be void if someone tries to use it elsewhere.

How does it work?

With this service, you never have to give out your real credit card number when shopping online. Instead, a substitute credit card number is generated to take the place of your real account number. Every purchase you make with Virtual Account Numbers will appear on your card statement, just like any other transaction. It’s the safe way to shop online.

How to use?

Step 1

First, you’ll need to log into your credit card account online. Most credit card companies put their virtual account number option in their “Tools” or “Services” menu.

Step 2

Click on the “Tools” menu and click on the link to “Generate a Virtual Account Number.”

Step 3

Most companies offer two options. Users may download a program that runs from their computers and is stored for later use or they may use the browser option, which runs directly from the credit card website.

Step 4

Choose whichever option suits your needs, then run the program following the instructions on the website. You may need to disable pop-up blockers to see the account number.

Step 5

The next window will display a virtual account number, an expiration date and the CVV (Card Verification Value) for use online. Write this information down.

Step 6

Now go shopping! When you are ready to checkout, enter the virtual card number at checkout instead of your actual account number. Be sure to use the expiration date and CVV assigned to the virtual number.

Step 7
If you are finished with the account number, you can log back into your credit card account and delete it. If not, check the expiration date provided and keep shopping!

Source: eHow

Types of Cheeses

Everytime I go to an Italian restaurant, I find the menu card full of different varieties of cheese. Mozarella, Chhedar, cottage cheese, parmesan and what not. This post is to figure out the differences between these and if possible, the usage.

Mozzarella: Favored for its mild, milky taste this type of cheese is more of a cooking cheese than a cheese board cheese due to its good binding properties, moist texture, and ability to melt. It absorbs the flavors and juices of the ingredients surrounding it and is perfectly designed for cooking. Mozzarella is also low in fat, therefore, it is ideal to use even when dieting. Mozzarella is the perfect cheese for Italian dishes or melted over tomatoes and garlic bread.
Cheddar: Cheddar can have a diverse selection of tastes that range from mild too sharp. This is dependent upon the age of the cheese. Mild Cheddar is perfect for sandwiches because it has a mellow balance of flavors. Sharp Cheddar is great for cooking because its flavor is released when heated and it shreds well. Sharp cheddar goes well in salads and sandwiches. It is a favorite for deli, and snack trays.

Brick: It is a mild, but also pungent, sweet tasting cheese. It is a semi-soft cheese that slices well without crumbling. Brick has a reddish-brown rind and its inside is yellow-white in color with many small holes. Brick is delicious with fruits and vegetables. It also goes well on sandwiches and snack trays.

Cottage Cheese: It is an adaptable source of protein for table use, snacks, salads, and in baking. The flavor goes well with fresh vegetables or condiments, such as peppers, olives, or pimientos, as well as with fruits, such as pineapple, peaches, or berries. Low-fat cottage cheese can be used to replace higher-fat-content cream cheese in desserts such as cheesecake and Danish pastry, and it’s good in savory baked dishes such as lasagna. Found in salad bars, it stands alone or goes well with fruit or as a side dish.

Parmesan: This is a hard, grainy textured cheese varying in shape and size. It’s used mainly as a grating cheese on many different types of foods and is a good cooking cheese because it does not form threads as it melts. Parmesan cheese will keep for years when it’s whole and will continue improving with age. A perfect topper for pizza and Italian dishes.

Read this for more

Chatroulette

Heard about chatrooms, heard about social networking but this is an interesting concept. Chatroulette (chat-roulette) is a website that pairs random strangers for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website randomly begin an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection.

In early November 2009, shortly after the site launched, it had 500 visitors per day. One month later there were 50,000. The site has been featured in The New York Times,^[2] New York magazine, and on Good Morning America, Newsnight in the United Kingdom, Tosh.0, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Chatroulette was even parodied in the South Park season 14 episode “You Have 0 Friends”. In February 2010, there were about 35,000 people on Chatroulette at any given time. Around the beginning of March, Ternovskiy estimated the site to have around 1.5 million users, approximately 33% of them from the United States and 5% from Germany.

My office website blocks chatroulette as Adult/Sexually explicit content. And there are reasons for it. Any website like this would be massively abused for spreading pornographic content. Approximately 1 in 10 of feeds from Chatroulette were either users exhibiting themselves in the nude or masturbating.

A video introduction to chatroulette could be found here.

The Sun

Found this beautiful pic of the Sun on the web. This one’s recently captured by SDO (Solar Dynamics Laboratory).

SDO: The Solar Dynamics Observatory is the first mission to be launched for NASA’s Living With a Star (LWS) Program, a program designed to understand the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth. SDO is designed to help us understand the Sun’s influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously.

SDO’s goal is to understand, driving towards a predictive capability, the solar variations that influence life on Earth and humanity’s technological systems by determining

• how the Sun’s magnetic field is generated and structured
• how this stored magnetic energy is converted and released into the heliosphere and geospace in the form of solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance.

Some more interesting pics and videos here

The Paradox of Choice

Had seen this TED video last weekend. Was something that convinced me to not have too many choices. We are exposed to just too many choices and which probably makes us unhappy too. The video gave some striking examples. The basic fundamental behind the theory is that eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers.

Schwartz describes that a consumer’s strategy for most good decisions will involve these steps:

• Figure out your goal or goals
• Evaluate the importance of each goal
• Array the options
• Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals
• Pick the winning option
• Modify goals

Schwartz finds that when people are faced with having to choose one option out of many desirable choices, they will begin to consider hypothetical trade-offs. Their options are evaluated in terms of missed opportunities instead of the opportunity’s potential. Schwartz maintains that one of the downsides of making trade-offs is it alters how we feel about the decisions we face; afterwards, it affects the level of satisfaction we experience from our decision.

sweat equity

It featured in the news that Sunanda Pushkar had on her own surrendered the sweat equity offered to her by Rendezvous Sports World, a member of the consortium that won the Kochi Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise.

So, what is sweat equity? Here is what Wiki has to say:

Sweat equity is a term used to describe the contribution made to a project by people who contribute their time and effort. It can be contrasted with financial equity which is the money contributed towards the project. It is used to refer to a form of compensation by businesses to their owners or employees. The term is sometimes used in partnership agreements where one or more of the partners contributes no financial capital. In the case of a business startup, employees might, upon incorporation, receive stock or stock options in return for working for below-market salaries (or in some cases no salary at all).

Church and Cathederal

Was roaming around in Bangalore sometime back and I was trying to figure out the name of the church. Whcih is when I stumbled on a church and a cathederal almost adjacent to each other, which made me wonder, what is a cathederal and how is it different from Church. From a lay mans point of view, a cathedral is much bigger than church. Lets find out the difference, if one exists.

Wiki Answers says

A church can be of any Christian religion, whether it be non-denomiational, Protosant, Catholic, etc.
A church is basically, no matter the religion, is a general place of worship where sacrements can be proformed and where (atleast in Roman Catholicism) the bread and wine become flesh and blood.
A cathedral, on the other hand is the (usually) the biggest church in the diocese. It is the seat of the bishop of that diocese, and usually in the biggest city or part of that diocese.

So definitely, a Cathedral is bigger than the church and probably holds more powers.

The sinking of Titanic

We’ve all heard about it, we’ve all seen it (in the movie). And hence I remember Apr 14 as the day when Titanic sank. But then why is it such a big deal? Simply because it was supposed to be an “Unsinkable ship” and it sank in its first journey. . One of the other things that makes the Titanic so fascinating is that she represented the best of technology when she set sail on her ill-fated voyage in 1912, and it took the best of technology in the form of sonar, satellite tracking, and deep-dive technology to locate her grave 73 years later. Here’s the story.

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic, largest ship afloat, left Southampton, England on her maiden voyage to New York City. The White Star Line had spared no expense in assuring her luxury. A legend even before she sailed, her passengers were a mixture of the world’s wealthiest basking in the elegance of first class accommodations and immigrants packed into steerage.

The Washington Post announces the disaster

She was touted as the safest ship ever built, so safe that she carried only 20 lifeboats – enough to provide accommodation for only half her 2,200 passengers and crew. This discrepancy rested on the belief that since the ship’s construction made her “unsinkable,” her lifeboats were necessary only to rescue survivors of other sinking ships. Additionally, lifeboats took up valuable deck space.

Four days into her journey, at 11:40 P.M. on the night of April 14, she struck an iceberg. Her fireman compared the sound of the impact to “the tearing of calico, nothing more.” However, the collision was fatal and the icy water soon poured through the ship.

It became obvious that many would not find safety in a lifeboat. Each passenger was issued a life jacket but life expectancy would be short when exposed to water four degrees below freezing. As the forward portion of the ship sank deeper, passengers scrambled to the stern. John Thayer witnessed the sinking from a lifeboat. “We could see groups of the almost fifteen hundred people still aboard, clinging in clusters or bunches, like swarming bees; only to fall in masses, pairs or singly, as the great after part of the ship, two hundred and fifty feet of it, rose into the sky, till it reached a sixty-five or seventy degree angle.” The great ship slowly slid beneath the waters two hours and forty minutes after the collision

The next morning, the liner Carpathia rescued 705 survivors. One thousand five hundred twenty-two passengers and crew were lost. Subsequent inquiries attributed the high loss of life to an insufficient number of lifeboats and inadequate training in their use.

The remains of the Titanic were found in 1985 by Dr. Robert Ballard, an oceanographer and marine biologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. When he located the Titanic, he saw that, as some survivors reported, the ship had broken apart. He believed the weight of the water-filled bow raised the stern out of the water and snapped the ship in two just before it sank. Debris falling out of the ship was strewn over a 1/2 mile across the sea floor. The bow and the stern were found nearly 2000ft. apart.

Keeping her location a secret, Bob Ballard used GPS to find theTitanic again when he returned the next year. He hoped to prevent treasure seekers from finding her and plundering the ship for booty such as coffee cups inscribed with RMS Titanic. On this second expedition, he visited the ship several times by submarine. On his last descent, he left a plaque honoring the 1500 victims and asking that subsequent explorers leave their grave undisturbed.

Power Doors

This article was triggered by a read that one can unlock the car using a mobile phone. The mobile signal frequency might just match with the frequency of the “unlock wave” and hence. Lets see how they work.

Here are some of the ways that you can unlock car doors:

• With a key
• By pressing the unlock button inside the car
• By using the combination lock on the outside of the door
• By pulling up the knob on the inside of the door
• With a keyless-entry remote control
• By a signal from a control center

In some cars that have power door locks, the lock/unlock switch actually sends power to the actuators that unlock the door. But in more complicated systems that have several ways to lock and unlock the doors, the body controller decides when to do the unlocking.

The body controller is a computer in your car. It takes care of a lot of the little things that make your car friendlier — for instance, it makes sure the interior lights stay on until you start the car, and it beeps at you if you leave your headlights on or leave the keys in the ignition.

In the case of power door locks, the body controller monitors all of the possible sources of an “unlock” or “lock” signal. It monitors a door-mounted touchpad and unlocks the doors when the correct code is entered. It monitors a radio frequency and unlocks the doors when it receives the correct digital code from the radio transmitter in your key fob, and also monitors the switches inside the car. When it receives a signal from any of these sources, it provides power to the actuator that unlocks or locks the doors.

And if one can replicate this signal, this frequency, things can work!

The Susu Dolphin

This one has long been on my list of prospective posts, fortunately, I stumbled upon this topic again today. India’s National Animal – Tiger, India’s National Bird – Peacock. Making an animal a National mascot is a way to prevent them from extinction. India’s National Aquatic Animal is the Susu Dolphin.

The Susu is found exclusively to the river systems of northeastern India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal. There are five different populations, but each are separated from each other due to dam construction along the Indus River. It cannot be determined exactly how many live in each of these “groups” as the murky, dark waters camouflage these dolphins.

When looking at the Susu, most would say, “This animal doesn’t look like a dolphin,” and this statement is correct. The Susu has not only a different appearance, but also a different way of life.

The Susu has a thin, long snout, which allows for the rows of sharp teeth to easily be viewed. The head of the Susu is much shorter and fuller than other dolphin species, and there is no apparent dorsal fin. The flippers, both lateral and tail, vary in ways of their own. The lateral flippers look more like “paddles” then like actual flippers and the tail fin of the Susu is longer and wider when compared to species such as the bottlenose or common dolphins.

The most distinctive feature of the Susu is the eyes. Due to its habitat, the Susu is nearly blind. The eyes are used only to determine direction and intensity of light rather then actual site. So how do the Susu hunt, feed, and reproduce? It appears that with the loss of sight the Susu has intensified their echolocation capabilities. The Susu is capable of swimming on its side and scanning the water horizontally by moving their heads up and down while communicating, and searching, by emitting “clicks”.

The IUCN Red List of Endangered Species lists the Ganges and Indus River Dolphins as “Endangered”.

This is a nice read on Susu Dolphins.