Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world
– Albert Einstein
Trekking and Hiking Gears
Proper gears are absolutely necessary while trekking, hiking, mountaineering, or any type of adventure sports. These gears make your journey comfortable and safe. So it’s very useful to know about each gear you are using, what are their benefits, how to use them properly, and how to take care of your gears. So I’m trying to list some very common and basic adventure sports gears and their utility, ergonomics, material, usage etc.
Gone Fishing – Tips and Tricks
Do you love fishing? Cool! It’s a great hobby. But suppose, you planned fishing in the weekends, arranged fishing rods, tackle, bait etc. and then went to bed in excitement for the next day, rise early morning, gone for fishing, spent 5-6 hours in scorching heat, and at last you catch 3 tiny fishes 🙁 oops!!! Bad things happen in life, but lesson to be learnt. First thing is first, plan a fishing and get properly prepared for it.
Steamed chicken momo recipe
Momo (dumpling) is a native food originated in Tibet and Nepal. It’s also popular in China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia etc. north-east Asian continents. Momos are very popular in north-east India as well, like Sikkim, Assam, Manipur etc. It’s basically a steamed flower bread filled with stuffing and served with natural sauce and hot soup. Stuffing can be made of many things like chicken, mutton, pork, vegetables etc. But among these, chicken, pork, and veg. stuffing are popular.
I first tasted momo many times in Shilliguri as Shilliguri is my mother’s homeland. Then I got chance to taste momo with lamb meat in Manali. I’ve trekked many times in Sikkim and Nepal and tasted their native momo as well. I think I’m in love with this food :). So tried at home and was a bit successful as well. Sharing the recipe here, though customized my own way.
Healthy Diet Plan
Majority of us live very fast and busy life. We earn money and spend it to live a quality lifestyle. Office, colleague, home, family, friends, party, eating, outing, day end and loop. Hey, wait… where’s me and my health? To support all the other things in our life, we need to take care of ourselves and a part of that is maintaining a good health. Good health helps to keep the wellness of our body and mind. It is not such an easy thing to maintain. It should be a part of our daily routine.
To maintain good health, there needs to have proper planning, preparation, and enough dedication to maintain those. Along with regular exercise, good and healthy food habit is also necessary. First we need to understand some basic concepts on which health of body is determined. Health is nothing but a level of functional efficiency of a living person. It’s not only applicable for body , but mind as well.
Altitude Sickness
Definition: Acute mountain sickness, also known as altitude sickness or soroche, is a collection of non-specific symptoms which quickly transforms to illness (e.g. HAPE or HACE) that can affect mountain climbers, hikers, skiers or travelers who climb too fast. It usually occurs when people rapidly reach a high altitude, typically above 2,400 meters (8,000 feet), or in very low air pressure.
Causes: Acute mountain sickness occurs from the combination of reduced air pressure and a lower concentration of oxygen at high altitude which leads to higher rate of water vapor loss from lungs and fluid loss from brain that further leads to decreased mental and physical alertness.
Symptoms: Symptoms can range from mild to life-threatening and can affect the nervous system, lungs, muscles and heart.
In most cases the symptoms are mild. In severe cases fluid collects in the lungs (pulmonary edema) causing extreme shortness of breath, which further reduces how much oxygen a person gets. Brain swelling may also occur (cerebral edema). This can cause confusion, coma and if untreated, death.
The chance of getting acute mountain sickness increases the faster a person climbs to a high altitude. The severity of the symptoms also depend on this factor, as well as how hard the person pushes (exerts) himself or herself. People who normally live at or near sea level are more prone to acute mountain sickness.
Quote from the great enthusiast in my life!
Here is another favorite quote from one of the great enthusiast in my life – Bear Grylls from his auto-biography Mud, Sweat and Tears
If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.
– Bear Grylls
Some useful htaccess rules
htaccess is basically a directory level configuration file for Apache based web servers. It allows you to set different decentralized configuration directives per directory and all sub-directory wide. You can say it an access control configuration file. htaccess works differently in CGI, fCGI, and Apache Module modes.
Below are some useful htaccess rules that we need frequesntly.
Prevent directory listing:
<IfModule mod_autoindex.c>
Options -Indexes
</IfModule>
Specify directory indexes:
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
Re-write base path:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
</IfModule>
OR
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /live/
</IfModule>
Follow / Un-Follow Symbolic Link:
Options +FollowSymLinks
OR
Options -FollowSymLinks
non-www to www:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
www to non-www:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
Trekking Safety Tips and Guidelines
Many accidents occurred in mountains, many trekkers died in those incidents, many returned ill, some programs failed too. If we try to find out the reasons of accidents in mountains during the last 20-25 years, the interesting fact, that will come out is, that among these incidents only 10%-15% were caused by adverse nature and the rest are due to human error. The main reason of an accident in mountains is: the team members do not focus on those points which need most attention during a trekking program.
A large number of accidents are caused by over-confidence; limitless courage and silly mistakes on the part of the team members. While trying to find out the reasons, differences are found between the actual incident and the description of that incident, differences are found between speeches of two team members also. It is quite embarrassing that we don’t even know about the actual description and reason of many accidents, because the team members have denied releasing the facts and tried to stay safe by blaming upon natural disaster. If they had described the actual fact, may be other teams could have taken proper precautions to overcome those calamities.
It is very much necessary for the participators/team members of a trekking group to know why accident happens during a trekking program.
Blogging Content Guidelines
Blog (truncated form of Weblog) is a webpage or website containing regularly updated write-ups called posts or articles or entries typically shown in descending chronological manner, i.e. the most recent write-up appears first. Blogs can be authored by a single person and can be multi author blog as well. Now a days, blogs contain photos, videos, audio (music and podcasts) etc. To increase the visitor engagement, modern blogs allow users to comment and give review on the posts, provides the ability to share the article links to popular social media networks as well.
There are lots of handy tools, website builder, online blogging platform (e.g. Blogger, Tumblr etc.), and CMS available to setup a blog. WordPress is a very good choice for beginners to setting up a blog quickly. It is an open source CMS vastly known for its simplicity and expandability. WordPress also provides lots of inbuilt SEO facility as well.
Blog is used as a medium by business marketers to influence inbound traffic and more customer conversion. Many people use blog to express their talent, as a daily diary, or just for casual write ups. Whatever the purpose is, one thing we should keep in mind, that the readers of the blog should not feel they are deceived. That’s why the content of a blog should be transparent, unique, and valuable to readers.
Google categorizes contents by something like Vital, Useful, Relevant, Slightly Relevant, Off-topic. So you need to follow some best practices to not to fall under lower categories which are less effective for SEO.