1. Laugh every now and then and you will feel young at heart. Your stress will vanish and you won’t have any health problems, as laughter boosts your immune system.

2. With laughter, you can easily make friends. You will be seen approachable in a party if you sport a constant smile.

3. Laughter improves your self-esteem and gives you confidence and relaxed. Your problems will seem trivial to you and you can tackle them well.

4. Laughter can spark your creativity levels and help you to produce fresh ideas. It can sharpen your memory skills.

5. With laughter, you can strengthen relationships. The one you can’t laugh with won’t be a good life partner for you.

6. Laughter is a good way to exercise your facial muscles. It is proven that laughing more will keep your face fresh and young.

7. By laughing often, you will spread a good vive around you which will effect everyone surrounding you. Whether people understand or not, they will feel better if you are around with laughter.

8. Laughter is associated with romance. Girls always like a boy who can make them laugh and face any problem with humour in heart.

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Follow these five tips.

1. Plan well in advance
If you want to host a successful party, then plan it well in advance. How many guests you would like to host? Who should be invited? What food should you prepare? You should also consider dietary and special needs of guests. Prepare your home by tidying it well and having spare towels, bed sheets ready. Buy some drinks and snacks (more than you may need) so that you don’t run out of them when you need them most. Clearly communicate the date, time and address to your guests, give your phone number in case if your guests need to ring you for anything.

2. Make your guests feel at home
When guests arrive, offer to take their coats and handbags and store them in safe places. Offer them a glass of water or drink. Show the guests where the toilets are, designated smoking area in your home. Explain house rules if you have any. You can play some music but do not switch on Television. Television may reduce the interactivity between guests as they might glue themselves with the TV screen.

3. Introduce your guests to each other
Make sure you introduce your guests to each other. Let no one will be left alone standing unattended or feeling lonely (especially the singles). You need to go around each one and share a joke or two. Don’t pay attention to one group alone. Circulate along your house constantly asking if your guests need anything.

4. Thank you guests if they bring some gifts or drinks
If some guests have brought drinks, gifts or food, thank them for their kind act. Make sure those who haven’t brought anything are also not offended in anyway. During inviting, you can even mention if you do need some drinks or not. In countries like Australia, if someone says ‘Bring a plate’ it means that you are requested to bring in some food to share with others.

5. Thank guests for coming
This is a very simple but most essential part of hosting a party. After the party is finished, when the guests are leaving, make sure you show your happiness for them coming to your home. You say that you look forward to have them again at your home soon.

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On the other side of the river, determined people have lost their extra fat, which proves that it is not impossible. But, what works for everyone? That’s hard to tell – but, if you are determined to lose weight and take actions (small but consistent steps everyday), you will achieve the goal sooner than you imagine.

To achieve this successfully, you need to follow these seven steps.

1. Set a measurable aim – Measures such as waist length, weight are the concrete way to measure if you are succeeding or failing.

2. Visualize Success – Yes, even before you begin, visualize how happy and healthy you would look like in your new ’slim avatar’. Practise visualizations combined with affirmative words such as ‘I am determined to lose weight’, ‘I love my body and I would keep it healthy and young’.

3. Get help from others – Ask friends and relatives to hep in the process. Ask them if they can join with you for a walk.

4. Take massive actions – Go for a walk, jog or climb stairs or simply jump – do something everyday and do consistently.

5. Compliment your diet with exercise – Eat healthy foods, drink water, eat only when you are really hungry.

6. Stick to a plan that works – Try different activities, foods and stick to a combination that gives the best results.

7. Celebrate the success – This is very crucial because success alone breeds success. Treat yourself with a massage, holiday whatever appropriate (please no junk foods).

I have gone through over 50 weight-loss programs and diet plans, these are the five essential things they tell you again and again (I have cut the 80% of craps).

Here’s a quick summary of one-liners “Top 5 genuine tips for successful weight loss”

1. Fruits and veggies: Why? they fill your stomach, they are easily digestible and you will feel light and fresh after a bowl of fruits.

2. Do a physical activity regularly: Anything that interests you, but do some thing physically – yes get up now and do.

2. Starving will mess your diet: If you starve yourself, you will tend to lose your energy and may overeat next time. So, do not try this.

3. Yes to Fresh juices: Yeah, say no to Coke or Pepsi – even if it is Diet version. Squeeze some fresh juice and drink instead. No bottled juice, even. Invest in a juicer from this month salary (instead of spending on another miracle-diet-ebook).

4.Understand your body: Maintain a diary of what you are eating daily and note what does good for you and what doesn’t. Trust me, you need to understand your body first, if you want to control it.

5. Act now: There are genuine plans and methods out there that will work. But, you need to stick the teachings and act on them. ACT, TAKE ACTION.

That’s a world of difference.

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1. Find a PhD

FindaPhd is the lucky place where you find fellow geeks and nerds, a pretty busy Postgraduate Forum provides advices and opinions on your queries about research life and how to find funds, scholarships. Upon the success of this site, two new sites FindaMasters and FindaPostDoc have been started and serving the student researchers actively busy exchange of advice and opinion on PhD life.

2. Google Book Search

You know Google book search exists, but have you tried citing from those books. Often, I had to produce a write-up, essay or the last-minute paper for a conference. When I dotn have enough time to pull out a strong reference from books, I issue a Google book search, up comes the results from book with snippets view showing paragraphs and texts that I were exactly looking for. I paraphrase them and correctly reference them. Neat hack.

3. Book Finder

If you are looking for any kind of book, whether it is rare or out-of-print, specific edition – You will find it at Bookfinder. Over 125 millions book titles to search, you can actually buy new and old-books from this site. They achieve by doing a search through every major catalog available online.

4. Free Note-taking

Mynoteit is a web service that you need to manage all writing works at uni. With mynoteit, you can upload office documents, scanned notes and audio lectures at one place. Yuo can access them at will with even with your mobile.You can join groups of students who are taking the similar subject all over the world. You can bookmark your assignment dates, deadlines at one place.

5. Re”Search Engine”

Scirus is a popular search engine among research community. Scirus searches for scientific information with its comprehensive trusted network of article bases like Science Direct, PubMed and other journal databases. The results are highly relevant and you can choose the keywords used by authors to search for relevant scientific domain. You get the results in three categories, journal results, preferred web results and web results. If you try Scirus once, you will stick to it. It saved me lot of my research time.

6. Digital Theses Networks

Australia is probably, the only country where every research student is asked to deposit a digital copy of their theses to a national database for a common cause. The Australasian Digital Theses Program is very popular among the researchers as every university in Australia is participating in it. A similar initiative is being carried out at the international level, which is PhDData.org – a 5 year old program which aims to collect the research theses from the universities around the world. There is also another initiative named “Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations” that looks promising as well.

7. Bibliography made easy

It’s a pain to follow the style guide of various journal styles when you are writing a paper. Tools such as EndNote help in maintaining your database of references. If you are looking for an online tool, then Ottobib is a really useful. You can store, organize your references, and Ottobib will format it to a style when you need. There is another web service that does a similar job , which is Easybib.

8. Job portals for researchers

Monster has a special site Phd jobs that lists research oriented jobs. There are sites where you can find Policy jobs, Political jobs, Ethical jobs, Market Research jobs, Museum jobs, PostDoc jobs, Law jobs and Human Rights jobs. All these sites provide world-wide listings of opportunities specific to researchers.

9. Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations

The benefits of Google Docs are obvious, you can maintain your documents and edit on the run. Particularly useful when you are traveling for field visits and you do not have access to your favourite Desktop Office applications. I used to upload a copy of my thesis chapters in Google Docs and share it with my supervisor. He would comment and add suggestions. If you are thinking of developing a document with your peer researchers – across boundaries, you have to use this. No more copying drafts, final versions and confusions on which one is what. With the added spreadsheets and presentations, it is a cool collection of tools for storing documents on the move.

10. List Sharing

Tadalist is about having a to-do list on the web. You can share between your supervisors to track your progress and communicate with your fellow researchers to meet the research deadlines or to organise a holiday.

11. Phd Comics

We are researchers, so what. We need fun, right? I have seen no other humour site that caters exclusive to researchers and PhD students life. PhDComics is awesome because, the site was started by a student and has plenty of cartoon strips on any conceivable aspect of Phd life.

12. Tracks almost everything

An easy way to track all the favourite blogs / research web sites in my subject is to use Google Reader. I use the ‘Star’ function to mark the essential posts, and use them later. A thousand eyes are looking for me and blogging things that are important and I follow them at one place with my reader. Great help – is it not?

13. Research Channel

Research channel is a site that offers videos on various research topics. Research Channel functions as a nonprofit media company with a mission to connect the world research community with latest developments, insights and discoveries across the globe. Anyone can watch the videos for free. But, if you are a researcher or research organisation who wish to contribute video content, you have to apply for a membership to the research channel. All the video submissions are strictly moderated.

14. Wikipedia

Often, the power of Wikipedia is grossly under-rated by the research people, who dismiss it based on the credibility. Well, that is an acceptable fact but from Wikipedia, you will get to know about a human view of a topic. You may get to know the latest happenings or the first hand information on a cutting-edge technology in your field (equivalent of gossips in the film industry).

15. MIT Web

Massachusetts institute of technology maintains a comprehensive web portal on the current research happenings at MIT and covers news and research events that affect humanity. The research covers any conceivable topic under various categories .

16. Eduforge – Free software for education

Just what Sourcefourge did for a programming and application development, eduforge does it for research community. It provides a free, open access to share ideas, form collaborative research groups, content and software development to solve specific research problems.

17. SuTree – Watch and learn

SuTree is a YouTube stye video site for Do-It-Yourself projects. You can watch videos and learn rather than reading plain texts and procedures. You can learn something new, every day. SuTree does not host your videos, users host them on youtube or google videos and provide a link and embed the videos here. These videos are voted by the community and the editors hand-pick them and monitor to keep the scum out of the site.

18. Wridea – Free ideas

Wridea is the place where ideas get into shape. You can record your ideas, browse others’ ideas, rate them, improve them and what not. The design and performance of the site is awesome and you can create unlimited pages for free. Liberate your ideas and watch them grow.

19. World Lecture Hall

World Lecture Hall is the place where you can find course materials developed by the teaching faculty around the world in almost any language. Some courses are only available online, but most of them can be downloaded for offline use. It is a great collection of lectures – a good bookmark.

Academic Materials can also be found at this blog post – 134 free academic podcasts organised by topics.

20. University Channel

University Channel is another directory of lectures (videos, audio and text presentations) developed and hosted by Princeton university. it not only lists the academic lectures and presentations, but also some of the key public affairs lectures, panel discussions and events from the best industrial conferences and academic institutions all over the world.

21. Backpackit- organize your life

You have to experience Backpackit to believe it – this site will be tremendously helpful for keeping track of your research developments. You can track your tasks, references (who said what – over phone / email), appointments, action items etc. If you are looking for an efficient organizing tool, this is the one for you.

22. FreeMind – Free mind maps

If you are looking for a tool to create and organize your thoughts and ideas, mind maps are the best way. With freemind – a java based open source program, you can develop complex yet, easy to organize mindmaps.

23. Free Data and Texts

Freelunch.com – Free economic data for you to download
Geographic Data – Free geographic data (worldwide)
World Bank Economy – Data collected and organised by the World Bank
Project Gutenburg – Free literature (almost any subject)
Bibliomania – free literature online
Literature collection – free literature
Citeseer – Massive resource for papers related to Computer Science.
Algorithms Base – Over 250 algorithms at one place
Tree of Life – Large Biology project that aims to organize the evolution of life.

24. Free Newspaper Archive

Paper of Record is the largest newspaper archive on the web. You can get snapshots of news articles from leading newspapers of the world from pre-1600 era to the current date. You can search through the archive and download the clips as images (gif). You have a quota of 250 mb every day.

25. Citations Database

Refbase is the place where people are sharing their citations and organising them at one place. You can download a copy of the refbase on your PC and connect to the server periodically to update them. Also try CiteSeer for searching through millions of citations.

Bonus Resources:

1. Find quotations

With ThinkExist, you can find a nice quotes for your thesis and papers. The quote is accompanied by the essential information about the author/speaker which will be useful to reference.

2. Research webpages

Research pages at Major companies who likes to share their ongoing developments and trials:

Google Research Blog
Research at Philips
Sun Research
Microsoft Research
IBM Research centre
Yahoo Research Labs
Honda Research
GE Global Research
General Motors Collaborative research centre
Sports Research Centre, Canada

3. All Biographies

Find anyone’s biography here – you can search by a keyword, birth date or place of birth.

Did I miss anything? Which sites are useful for conducting researches?

There are many ways and resources through which one can get information about different online courses. There is lot of material available about 642-503 courses on Google. One can also check Wikipedia for PMI-001 course information. If one is looking for hardcopy or soft copy of 642-825 courses then one can get it on book finder website. Free material of 642-901 courses is also available on free note-taking site. People who are interested in smart business communication systems 650-178 course then they can get interactive test guides on Eduforge – Free software for education site. The world lecture hall site can give free lectures of different course like 70-272 and so on. If you are interested in 70-270 course then its helping guide can easily be searched on yahoo. So there are so any sites from where one can get many helping guide for these courses and thus make exams easy to pass.

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Social Network.

Wisdom of Crowds.

These are few buzzwords that have become obsolete because of their overuse. Welcome to isolation.

Isolator , a social  personal network anti-network for pure fun. The creator of Isolator will answer no more questions other than those found on their faq page.

There are more than 1000+ social network sites and applications available on the web and you can not easily differentiate between them. Here’s is a megalist of social networks and social web applications available on the web. Yep, you can download it as a spreadsheet.

But, on a serious note, do you know how many people on the internet actively uses at least one social network?

You will be in a shock to know this – just under 7% of all the internet traffic goes to social networks.

Looks like we are living in a bubble, huh? Come on people, join us – dont get left behind.

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Superman takes over!

SUPERMAN can do anything.

Don’t touch

A cat’s tail can be used as CD holder

Hello, is anyone speaking any secrets out there?

A pig that is trying to bite off.

A cute Honeybee hovering on the Escape Key

Yellow dog hangs over Mouse wire.

Yo yo…!

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How do you get hold of such free schwags. If you happen to visit the web conferences, tech fests and seminars, you will get a loads of such stuff.

If not, you can email them using their contact page and ask them. Not all the web companies encourage the users openly as the following few.

Flickr Schwags: FREE
For example, Flickr says in its blog page that if you need stickers, buttons, balloons – you could send an email to them. I did and got a pack of goodies which are really cool.

“When you are organising a flickr meer, if you let us know in addition to adding your event to the Upcoming Flickr group — we can send you some Flickr schwag: stickers, buttons and name tags. Please include your postal address and let us know as soon as you can, ideally, at least a month before the event.” – Flickr blog

Visit http://www.flickr.com/help/contact to let them know you want some flickr goodies. Within few weeks, the parcel should arrive you.

Feedburner Stickers: FREE

Taking a cue from Flickr, now Feedburner provides stickers, but you need to send them some pre-paid, self-addressed envelopes to their address.

Read this announcement on the Feedburner official blog.

Startup Schwag:
There is much an easy way, if you can shell some out some money ($25-$30), startupschwag will collect all such cool schwags (with one T-shirt guaranteed) every month to your address.

There was a startup named ValleySchwag which got shut down earlier because, they could not cope with the users demand. Now, the home page link leads to a 404 page.

Other FREE Stickers:

You can get a free 2007 Ferrari Stickers given away by Shell.

Have you requested such goodies from companies? Whats your experience?

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1. USB extension cord

2. USB Power point

3. USB Rubbish bin

4. USB Syringe

5. USB Plug-n-Play cable

6. USB Lock with Key

7. USB Phone Hand Receiver

8. USB Photo Frame

9. USB Belt

10. USB Kid’s Talk Phone

11. USB Wedding Rings?

12. USB Multi-threaded belt.

13. USB Stethoscope

14. USB Tie

15. USB Toolset?

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I did a bit of research – and found out this. The International Astronomical Union is the official body who can assign name to a star – they do their duty as and when a star is found in the galaxy. In fact, the IAU provides a technical number for each star – not a fancy name. So, none of the companies that proclaim that you can buy a star and name it after anything you like is technically false propaganda.

Here’s what IAU says in its website about the star selling companies.

“As an international scientific organization, the IAU dissociates itself entirely from the commercial practice of “selling” fictitious star names or “real estate” on other planets or moons in the Solar System. Accordingly, the IAU maintains no list of the (several competing) enterprises in this business in individual countries of the world. Readers wanting to contact such enterprises despite the explanations given below should search commercial directories in their country of origin.”

Forget these facts, people are not worrying about them at all. So far thousands of people have bought stars for their loved ones and named after them. Did Nicole Kidman actually bought a star and named as “forever Tom”?

Some star naming companies are honest in saying that it is ‘unofficial’, many are faking it actually.

Now, will you buy or name a star for your loved ones?

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1. Essential things, First
Now, flickr requires a valid yahoo account (username and password) to login to it. As a newbie, you may be disappointed by the less number of views, comments on your uploaded photos. Select 10 best (or at least near best) photos of yours and upload them to flickr. By default, flickr uses your filename as the title of your photo – like this one, ‘DSC4506′ for a photo that you shot using your Point and Shoot camera. After uploading, flickr will ask you enter a title and description for each photo. Add a catchy title and a small description to provide more information on the photo. Additionally, tags can be added to each photo describing the location where you shot this photo, objects, the way you describe the photo and the meaning (story) the photo tries to convey. Tags are the keywords with which people will find your images and so you will add more descriptive tags (no inappropriate tags, please).

2. Write testimonials
I know it is difficult to start with the first testimonial, but, once you start writing one for your close friend. Others will follow. Browse through the photos of a contact and genuinely take notice of their style and what you appreciate in their flickr photo stream (some photos, common theme or lighting style).

3.Take part in flickr community discussions
Ask genuine questions or provide answers, opinions. Get involved in the discussion. There are plenty of groups specific to your camera, subject, geography or culture.

4. Attend flickr meets – Find your local group and join them. Find out when they are having a get-together. Visit and get to know them personally, share your flickr story.

5. Browse the Latest Photos from your Contacts List – Make a habit to comment on the latest photos posted by your contacts. Do it once a week. If you have too many contacts, keep the option of showing one photo per user (in your Contacts List). If you have very little time, find good photos among them and add them as your favourite.

6. Publish your love
You can get a composite image (mosaic) of all your contacts on a single page by following flickr fun buddies page (you must be logged into flickr when you click on the link). Publish your favourite photos once in a while as a composite image. You can visit http://bighugelabs.com/flickr to get various flickr toys – but, you can get your mosaics of your favourites using this mosaic tool.

7. Use GreaseMonkey scripts
A collection of useful scripts for flickr users can save you time and bring in pleasure to your flickr experience. You can do lot in less time and these scripts installed with Firefox browser will increase your productivity.

8. License your photos
If I have to attribute one reason for my popularity (apart from my lovely flickr friends who leave beautiful comments), then it is the Creative commons licensing. Share your photos to the world – so that people can use your photos in their blogs and web pages ( of course with a link back to your photo stream).

9. Concerned about image thefts?
I always resize all my images to 800 by 600 pixels before I upload them to flickr – so, with that small size and 72 dpi, it is hardly any use for publication purposes. If people need high quality images, I can supply them.

10. Flickr swap
Swap your photos with fellow flickrites. Send a flickrmail if any of your contact would like to exchange photos with you. You can exchange postal addresses.

11. Take your flickr photos with you
With Moo cards, you could print 100 of your photos for US $24 and mailed to you. You can choose to include your address, flickr url on the back of the moo card to use them as your business cards.

12. Publish your flickr RSS feeds
With social networks, publish your photo feed. Orkut, Tumblr, Facebook and Ziki allows you to add your photo stream as RSS feeds. All you need to do is point your flickr RSS feed url that can be found on the bottom page of your flickr main page when you are logged in and it will look like this http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=46458074@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

Just use the RSS feed url at those services and forget it. As you upload new photos, they get updated in these places as well. Cool, huh?

Get famous in flickr with these tips. If you have got some tip, share here in the comments section.

Related Posts for flickr users:

How to get into Flickr Explore? (Revised)

Get Famous in Flickr: Killer tips for Flickr users

25 Useful scripts for Flickr users that make your more productive

How Flickr has changed since 2004:Screenshots Timeline

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