Josh makes a drink for Christmas

By Ananda Mahto | Published: January 7, 2006

Check out this video to see Josh make Puncha-Crema at Axle’s house for our traditional Christmas drink. For those of you who know me, I don’t drink… with this one exception….

Josh comes over to our house and Axle puts him straight to work mixing the holiday Puncha-crema. He describes the process (even though he can’t really remember what he’s even making) and makes some typically funny Josh-type comments.

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Josh makes a drink for Christmas

This is the my first video made with my new Casio camera, and my first real attempt putting something online at Google video. It’s pretty cool that they let you upload as much stuff as you’d like, and that they let you embed it into your own pages. This means I don’t have to have a flash server to help pre-load all my videos… Pretty fun stuff.

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Happy New Year 2006

By Ananda Mahto | Published: January 1, 2006
Happy New Year!

Wow. 2006 already. Time for resolutions and so on, if I did those sort of things

2005 was pretty good for me. Amy graduated from her master’s program, and we wrapped up our short stay in Cambridge, Mass., to return to Santa Barbara. I was lucky enough that Peoples’ Self-Help Housing took me back onboard as an employee, and allowed me to work with a somewhat undetermined date of termination. I got a chance to practice my web-design skills in a professional setting, and I think this helped me improve a lot. I learned how to build cigar box and cookie tin guitars, and how to make my own hand-drum with a goat-skin head. Lots of little things throughout the year, so that was pretty cool….

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Yearbook Memories

By Ananda Mahto | Published: December 27, 2005

Part 1: Nostalgia?

This last stretch of time living back in Santa Barbara has been a really nice break. For a while, SB was somewhat dry and dead…. Then came Amy’s acceptance to Harvard, leading us to pack everything we owned into a huge rental truck and drive it across the States to set up new temporary residence in Cambridge, MA. We lived there a while, but once her program was over, we packed everything up again, took it all to Pittsburgh, PA to store it, and flew back to SB to set up temporary camp until we figured out where life would take us next….

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Holidays

By Ananda Mahto | Published: December 26, 2005

So, the holidays are almost over. And I’m already pretty burned out by them—but at the same time, they have been pretty good….

The biggest downer for the holiday was not having Amy here… and that’s a pretty huge downer. But, with being able to call her over the internet and so on, things were a bit better. Hearing her stories of what it’s like being in India for Christmas was pretty funny too, and got me to think back on the various Christmases I’ve been away for…. Hers was much worse than any of mine though…. From one of her emails, “My coworker current roommate is driving me crazy with her Christmas obsession. I hear the word Christmas like every five minutes…. We were in an Indian restaurant last night… and then the food arrived and she said, ‘maybe we should pray?’ and she was half serious. And she asked the French guy if he wanted to go to church, and she was serious. And I think I pissed them off because I was not into it at all. I like Christmas because I like being around my family, but it’s just another day for me if I’m not with the people I love. I just miss being with the people I love, so celebrating it with a bunch of strangers makes no sense to me.”

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Stylin’

By Ananda Mahto | Published: December 21, 2005

CSS is fun.

Really…. It’s as simple as that….

I first started playing around with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) when I was doing the second major revision of 2657 Productions, but the application for that site was pretty basic. I pretty much used it just for defining the colors and fonts of the headers and the paragraph sections of the text. Other than that, I really didn’t do anything fancy. It wasn’t until I started working on the Peoples’ Self-Help Housing website that I really started exploring the abilities of CSS even more.

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Baking@2657

By Ananda Mahto | Published: December 12, 2005

I’m not much of a Christmas person. I’ve never been particularly big on the day for several reasons, but there are also some things that I do like about it. Most of those things revolve around food—or more accurately—desserts.

This weekend was the cookie-making weekend. My mom and I started mid-morning, and went for several hours making batch after batch of cookies. We made two batches of greasy cookies, two batches of vanilla sugar cookies, and a couple of loaves of chocolate bread. It was good times….

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“Checking in”

By Ananda Mahto | Published: December 9, 2005

Well, it’s been a few days since I’ve checked in here…. A lot has been going on to keep me quite busy. I’ve bought my ticket to India, and I’ve enrolled myself in an online master’s program so that I have something to keep myself busy with when I’m in India.

I also just spent most of last week scanning in about 100 news articles and cleaning them up, and most of the week this week converting them to FlashPaper and embedding them into the web pages. Quite a task…. Describing the repetition that goes into that would make this article qualify for inclusion in the “geekiness” category, so I won’t go there.

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Experiments

By Ananda Mahto | Published: December 2, 2005

Still playing around with themes, which is cool, because it gives me a chance to play around with slicing images in Photoshop.

Image slicing is kind of cool, although it puts me back into the same “tables” issue that I was trying to break out of using CSS and so on…. Basically, when working with images within Photoshop, you can “slice” the image up and have Photoshop automatically generate the html table colde for your image slices. Thus, if you sliced a square image into nine equal square sections, Photoshop would create a table with three rows and three columns, and automatically insert the sliced image parts into the correct cells. You can then go ahead and do things like rollovers and so on….

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Lunchtime@2657 (re-visited)

By Ananda Mahto | Published: November 30, 2005
G'pa at dinner
Dinnertime with my theatric G’pa….
Lunchtime was much of the same….

A long time ago, I wrote this story called Lunchtime at 2657. It was about my relationship with my grandfather, which has more-or-less always been positive. I wrote it while I was in Cambridge, MA—far away on the other side of the country. Everyone in my family was talking about how lousy things were with him—that he wasn’t seeing properly, he didn’t eat right, he wasn’t talking to anyone…. So I really had no idea what or who to expect to see when I returned to California earlier this year.

G’pa definitely isn’t quite the same person I remember. I remember younger eyes. I remember more sarcastic, clever comments. I remember more creative culinary creations than “peanut-butter, butter, and onions on white-bread.” But I didn’t expect him to be the same person that I had left two years prior either. And there is a lot of truth to what everyone else was saying, but, I guess, maybe it’s also just a matter of perspective….

I’m getting ready to leave again, for an indefinite time period, and with G’pa definitely much slower than before, I’m honestly not sure how much longer he’ll be around—and definitely not sure how much longer he’ll be around as his old self… which there is still a lot of left. In the meantime, I’m enjoying myself watching horrible TV with him (even though he can’t see), trying to get him to tell stories (even though he can’t remember them very well anymore—meaning fewer clever remarks) and eating lunch and drinking coffee with him on the weekends (if he manages to find the energy to get out of bed). And I’m still having fun with it and enjoying the time we’re getting to spend together.

So, here’s the story of the lunchtimes at 2657… again….

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Template Time

By Ananda Mahto | Published: November 29, 2005

I’ve been enjoying playing around with PHP-Nuke, and I think I’m getting the hang of how to implement my own template designs. I guess that means that I ought to actually take the time to design some templates so that I can upload them and test them out.

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