Category: General Moan!

Which alcoholic drinks have the most calories?

Which alcoholic drinks have the most calories?

I recently had a bet with some friends as to whether beer or wine would have the most calories by volume. So I did some research.

It turns out that pure alcohol is surprisingly high in calories on it’s own.

So there are 3 ways  we can break this down.

  • Calories per 100ml (per volume of liquid!)
  • Calories per serving (how many drinks you have?)
  • Calories per unit of alcohol (how drunk you get for each kcal?)

Continue reading “Which alcoholic drinks have the most calories?”

Comparison of Caffeine content in Coca Cola Coke products

I was just curious as to what and how the caffeine content of the various Coca-Cola coke products differed. Especially the difference between ‘Diet Coke‘ and ‘Coke Zero‘. So I did some research and put together this little chart. Continue reading “Comparison of Caffeine content in Coca Cola Coke products”

How do I get over my bad habit of procrastinating?

Answer by Suresh Rathinam:

I was a very bad Procrastinator for a very long time, until I really understood the basics of why I procrastinate.
In order to understand why you procrastinate, first you should have a strong desire to eliminate procrastination in your life and following the methods mentioned below will be helpful.
I. Track down your everyday activity

When I first started writing down the list of activities that I do everyday, it felt like a waste of time. But later while analyzing the one month data I clearly understood why I don’t have enough time to do the necessary activities and it narrowed down to the bad habits that i had created over time.
I was spending most of my time in Facebook and was affected by the “Chain-clicking curse” where watching a video from Facebook will lead to YouTube in-turn to Twitter to see the trend and it goes on and on into loads of unnecessary browsing wasting your precious time

II. Understanding why we procrastinate

We procrastinate because of the habits that we create over time. When we work some random thought strikes our mind, it might be as simple as, where to go for the next vacation?
and I go to online to check details of it.  It doesn’t stop there, then to Facebook to see where my friends went and something else catches up my eyes and the clicks goes endlessly.

III. How we create Habits

I have been following this routine every day which let me do overtime to complete my work and had no time for the essential things in life. All of these made sense to me when I read the Power of habit by Charles Duhigg.
Understanding the basic of habit was big help to me. I starts with a cue/Signal in my case it was the random thought and my routine was to search about it and reward that I get is leaving a stressful work for that moment/satisfaction by answering my random thought which sucks my time endlessly leaving only a very short period of time to do the necessary.
Now the trick it to replace the bad routine with a good routine which will lead to greater productivity in life, which could be understood by looking at how runners reward themselves

Here the cue is the Running shoe and it lets you to the routine of running which was created over time, running leads to the reward which is sense of accomplishment on completing a run also satisfying the Endorphin craving that you get by looking at the running shoe

IV. How I cured myself by changing my routine

1. Keeping myself distraction free
a. Turn off internet: Most of my work doesn’t need internet so turned off my WiFi whenever i work
b. Note pad: Whenever some random thoughts strike rather than searching it online I started recording them down in a small note and researched about them later
c. Setting Time limits: Started setting a duration to complete my work which helped me to focus more on my work, Even had set time on socializing with my colleagues spending not more than 5 minutes on unnecessary talks
2. Sustaining the habits

a. Tracking your activities: Its quite tough for me to write every activity now and then, so I spent half an hour every day before sleeping to write down the activities of the whole day splitting into hourly activities and do a quick analysis on where to improve next day. It looks something like this:
9:00 – 10:00 : Forecast Meeting
10:00 – 11:00 : Project#1 – Prepared the procedure

b. Prioritizing activities for tomorrow: This summary helps me in prioritizing the activities that i should be concentrating more tomorrow and I write down top 3 things that should be completed tomorrow

c. Monthly and Quarterly Review: then I started analyzing my monthly and quarterly data’s to continuously improve my productivity

The methods mentioned above worked perfectly for me and I started finding more time to do the necessary things in life. Hope it will be useful for you as well, Let me know if it was helpful. 🙂

How do I get over my bad habit of procrastinating?

Would you want to give away more than 50% of you earnings to the tax man?

Would you be happy to give away more than half your salary in Tax? No…of course not, no matter how much you earn!

I find it amazing that politicians and the media continue to mislead people in the UK about how much tax richer people pay. Even if there was not a tiered tax scale a percentage of salary…means you pay more tax the higher your salary. Simple!?

However, as the UK has ever increasing tax bands, people who get paid more…get taxed even more!! These pie  charts (thanks to http://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk) illustrate this.

Remember, this is just the tax we all pay before spending our money on VAT ‘able item. Which will add another 20% tax. As wealthier people generally spend a greater percentage of their earnings on VAT ‘able luxury items, (i.e. basic groceries and non-VAT ‘able items are a smaller fraction of their spending than less well off people) again the percentage of salary paid in VAT is greater.

Put simple anyone earning over about £100,000 is looking at forking out half their earnings in Income Tax, NI and VAT!! No wonder people try so hard to find ways to get out of this.

Not to forget all the other taxes, such as alcohol (~48p per pint of beer), petrol (~58p per litre), insurance premiums (between 4% and 20%…yes you get taxed when you insure your car or dishwasher!!!) etc..

Low Salary

Total Taxes: 8.5% of salary

UK average Salary

Total Taxes: 21.4% of salary

Member of Parliament Salary

Total Taxes: 31.5% of salary

Prime Ministers Salary

Total Taxes: 39.6% of salary

Seriously Rich Guy

Total Taxes: 44.8% of salary

RBS Chief Exec

Total Taxes: 46.5% of salary

Footballer salary

Total Taxes: 48.8% of salary

VC_RED.cab, VC_RED.MSI, install.res.1028.dll etc.. Can be removed!

If you are wondering how or what all these funny files (more listed below) are sitting on your c:\ or other drive, then you will be please to know that they were generated as temporary files by a Visual C++ redistributable install package. Unfortunately the package does not clean them up afterwards.

If they are not on your c:\ drive, that because the installer actually looks for the drive with the most available space or something like that!

Any of the following files can be safely removed.

install.exe
install.res.1028.dll
install.res.1031.dll
install.res.1033.dll
install.res.1036.dll
install.res.1040.dll
install.res.1041.dll
install.res.1042.dll
install.res.2052.dll
install.res.3082.dll
vcredist.bmp
globdata.ini
install.ini
eula.1028.txt
eula.1031.txt
eula.1033.txt
eula.1036.txt
eula.1040.txt
eula.1041.txt
eula.1042.txt
eula.2052.txt
eula.3082.txt
VC_RED.MSI
VC_RED.cab

For Microsoft’s article see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950683