2006 November | Women Blog (2)

We have covered hundreds of articles on Home Improvement and home appliance care in our women portal – Targetwoman. It dawned on us last week – when our front office lock jammed and held us captive inside for a few hours until an enterprising colleague decided to take matters into her hand and released the lock by unscrewing the lock’s outer bezel … that women can be very handy too as much as their male counterparts – only if they had the right knowledge and tools.

With that enlightenment, a consensus was arrived to the immediate effect that some kind of detailed information and steps to become a “handywoman” must be included in our repertoire.

Our Admin who has over 10 years of experience as an electronics bench service engineer in his earlier avatar was roped in to write about this series on – Handywoman.

We will cover some easy hands-on projects in this section as well to illustrate that anyone can attempt and complete successfully easy household tasks and home maintenance with the right information and right tools. It is not rocket science and all you need is a bit of patience to learn a few basic skills.

With that as the prelude to this section, we start with the basic hand tools.

Tools last a lifetime if you buy the right quality tools. Generally speaking hand tools are made of forged steel and should last for generations. Do not buy cheap quality tools. They can cause potential injury and invariably useless. Buy only the best quality tools and working with them can be a pleasure. And most importantly use a tool for what it was intended. Never try to substitute a tool for another most appropriate tool.

Any toolkit worthy of its name should at least include all of the following:

1. Screw Drivers - A set of straight bladed - slotted (old fashioned but still in use ) and cross slotted (Philips and Pozidriv). The most versatile for home use is the screw driver set with detachable head and various bits. Still you may need a long bladed straight blade screwdriver to reach inside some cabinets. Screw drivers come in all sizes – from small miniature jewel- makers screw driver set to standard sizes. Use the right size bit for the size of the head of the screw. A wrong bit can chip away the head and you will be stuck with it.

If the screw refuses to budge, leave a drop of penetrating oil to slacken it.

Some battery operated (electric) screwdriver sets are available which makes life easy when you need to fix many screws in a short time. For occasional use, you will be better off with a manual set of screwdrivers. Battery operated power tools, as we will see later in this series, pose some limitations. You need to keep the batteries in a charged state at all times. Nickel cadmium batteries or the heavier lead-acid storage batteries do not take kindly to long periods of discharged conditions.

2. Pliers – Cutting pliers or combination pliers and a long nosed pliers. Get the pliers with thick plastic wrapped handles for working on electric circuits. Comes easy on your hands too.

3. Hammer – A claw hammer is preferable over a ball-peen hammer. The latter which has a hemispherical head is more useful for tapping punches and rivets. A claw hammer comes in handy to pull nails. Check your hammers before you use them as any loose head or damaged handle can result in catastrophic injury to anyone nearby. Wear thick padded gloves and safety goggles when you use a heavy hammer to avoid injury.

We will add more tools to our kit as we go along ….

It is interesting to look back at Thanksgiving history and understand the significance of this uniquely American tradition. Thanksgiving history can be traced back to 1621 when the colonists reaped a bountiful Fall harvest after a harsh winter.

The Pilgrims that had set sail for the New World faced many a trial and tribulation. With the help of the local Native Americans, they cultivated corn and native vegetables to keep them alive. A grand community feast was held to celebrate this, replete with corn, barley, pumpkins and peas, mashed potatoes and gravy, fowl, deer and wild turkey. The Thanksgiving feast is in commemoration of the thankful community feast partaken by the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

But a couple of years later, there was drought and the Pilgrims fasted and prayed for rain. As their prayers were answered, they continued to follow the tradition of thanksgiving. It was much later in 1789 that President George Washington declared Thanksgiving as a holiday for all colonies. After much lobbying and debate, it was decided that the fourth Thursday of November would be celebrated as Thanksgiving Day in the United States. A national holiday proved to be one of the effective tools in promoting national unity during the colonial times.

Today Thanksgiving Day is a day of family togetherness, where the traditional turkey and the rest of the meal are savored with near and dear ones. Thanksgiving Day, as the name suggests is a day of prayer to thank God for his bounties. It is also a day to thank those who care for us and enrich our lives with their love. Prayers and church services are held for people to contemplate on their blessings and thank the Lord for them.

Fruits, flowers and vegetables are used to decorate churches. Homes may have a traditional cornucopia, to symbolize the abundance of Thanksgiving. Even today, the turkey finds pride of place on the Thanksgiving dinner menu. You can find corn in some form of the other, be it as bread or side dish. Thanksgiving meal also includes breadcrumb stuffing, cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes. Traditionally pecan pie or pumpkin pie finds it way into the Thanksgiving menu.

In keeping with the thanksgiving spirit, our special articles on decorating your home with Thanksgiving crafts and planning the Thanksgiving meal are sure to find favor with you!

The definition of fuzzy logic might appear as fuzzy to most, but fuzzy logic forms the basis of control parameters from your washing machine to making movies like Lord of the Rings. We are not going to look too closely at the mathematical fuzzy sets and their operations as developed by Prof. Lofti Zadeh.

What we will see in this blog instead is how the concept of fuzzy logic helps us to submit more effectively to internet directories. To start with, let us chip away the theory bit from this logic and view things in a practical light.

In microprocessor-controlled appliances/applications, you cannot define all variables with precise quantities all the time. You need to allocate certain parameters as dependant on other variables, which will loop back to the earlier ones. Things are not always in black and white – some can come in shades of grey too. Accept this and factor in these in to your overall scheme of things.

That sums up albeit briefly what the fuzzy logic is all about in simple terms. Your washing machine’s microcontroller chip ‘estimates’ the load quantity and calculates the resources (water, detergent and additives if any) based on sensors. It decides the best washing option using fuzzy logic and issues commands to electrical components accordingly.

Fuzzy Logic plays a major role in computer software too. Most of the applications in real world will need to adjust to real world situations. The software must factor in unknown and unpredictable situation in order to be stable. For example, our own Athena health engine uses pattern recognition and uses past accumulated data to arrive at the essence of what the user wants.

Some of the techniques and logic used in many computer algorithms are too fuzzy to be described as anything but fuzzy.

Most webmasters know that getting quality IBLs (inbound links) is essential to make their sites visible in the search engines. To some extent, it also adds to the traffic as you get thematically grouped links under each category. By their own right, many niche directories offer decent amount of targeted traffic to the sites linked.

Most would also know that it takes quite an investment in terms of the time needed to identify, read the guidelines, search for the right category and submit your site. However, always some who look for a quick way out of this. There is no short cut to this process of directory submission. The bottom line is the editor of the directory goes through a painful process of weeding out thousands of spam submissions every day. For a volunteer editor, this unfortunately takes away the time required for editing and adding many useful submissions.

All editors of human edited directories face this problem. Targetwoman directory gets a ton of useless submissions everyday. Unfortunately, the few tens of useful, carefully submitted genuine websites are drowned out in the sea of spam.

A singular solution to the long-suffering editors needed to be found and someone suggested that some fuzzy logic concept is roped in for this. So we decided to implement a bit of this into our ‘add URL’ page.

The whole idea itself is a bit fuzzy. It is all based on our observation of so many thousands of spam submissions.

Point No.1 - A typical spam submitter hardly ever reads the submission guidelines. Many people embed a hidden secret word somewhere in the copy of the submission guideline as is commonly done by some Awards site.

But it takes more time to hunt for the word for the normal genuine submitters.

Point No.2 – A typical spam submitter almost always submits many URLs at the same time. So send the submission page to limbo when the page is loaded with more than one URL.

Point No.3 – A typical spammer types or copies and pastes several lines in the description column. Raise a red flag if such signs are detected for any other column.

Point No.4 – Another trick of a spammer is to type superlatives. Our guidelines strictly forbid using hyperbole or superlatives in the description. Most directories edit out your descriptions if they contain marketing hype. So raise a flag if this point is detected as well.

Point No.5 – Some spammers test the water by submitting gibberish at first. Good thing is check for gibberish.

So we will implement all the above points in the scripts handling the directory submission as soon as we make sense of the logic which is so fuzzy.