It is not customary for me to recommend services from the net to my readers. Usually I will state my case and bestow the opportunity of adoption on the kindred soul.

But today, I am recommending a service that I whole heartily would want you to get. It’s called Evernote and it has certainly made a huge difference in the way a compulsive note taker like me works.

It’s basically a service that allows you to sync all your notes from a PC, MAC, iPhone, iPod touch and even mobile phones together. The best part is it’s free. But the premium service which cost about 5USD a month or 45USD a year offers some nifty upgrades. The best of which is the Text recognition inside images.

All you have to do is snap a pic of a note you wrote or a business card and upload the data to Evernote and the next time you are looking for it, just search for the words within the image and poof the results appear.

Well since it’s free, there really isn’t a reason why you shouldn’t try it.

Website: http://www.evernote.com

This week we are going to have the final verdict on the Pirate Bay, one of the biggest websites that allows sharing contents in internet.

I came across this while I was browsing the net on pirates, and this is what I found out:

“Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O’ Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century.” They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.”

In a 1961 lecture, Aldous Huxley described a police state as “the final revolution”: a “dictatorship without tears [where people] love their servitude.” The goal is to produce “a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will, in fact, have their liberties taken away…but…will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing … enhanced by pharmacological methods.”

I’m thinking of going to Canada to do a VFX program.

If things turn out right, I might do just that.

See new faces, learn a thing or two and put my foot in the right place.

People won’t notice you’re bald if you keep yourself very fit. There I said it.

I recently saw an old friend and my first impression of him had been dominated by the fact he was so obviously fit. It was a brilliant case of misdirection. And it made me think about all the ways people mitigate their bad luck.

Generally speaking, a high level of fitness can compensate for whatever imperfect genes your parents gave you. Fitness is enough to achieve good looks if you bother to dress well, take care of your skin, and get a good haircut.

And fitness, along with a good diet, can also suppress the most common killer diseases that your genes might predispose you to. You can’t prevent bad luck, but you can keep it at bay.

If you have the bad luck to be born to a poor family, education can compensate for that. Some schools are better than others, but almost all of them, at least in developed countries, will get you where you need to go.

If you’re unlucky in love or business, your degree of effort can compensate for that. In both cases it’s a numbers game. If you keep trying, you’re bound to get lucky eventually. You just have to be willing to move on to the next attempt, and learn from your failures.

If you boil it all down, the only types of pure bad luck are the truly random disasters such as being struck by lightning, hit by a car, or falling into the MRT tracks just when the train is approaching or being born without the gene for optimism.

Optimism is what gives you the willingness to stay fit, eat healthy, and keep trying. You wouldn’t do those things unless you expected them to work.

So suppose science finds the gene that controls optimism. And suppose it can be manipulated. That would be enough to solve the healthcare problem and boost the economy. People would get fit, avoiding medical costs, and they’d work extra hard because they believed it would pay off in the long run, thus fixing the economy.

The optimism gene is probably the most important one in the universe. Someday we’ll find it. That will be interesting.