Sauna: the sweat bath

My new gym, at the basement of my current office building, has a sauna. It's nice and calm to sit there for a few minutes after a brief workout, so I thought I should read up on it's benefits, and feel even better about myself. What if the sauna is more beneficial than the dreaded treadmill? That's an easy way out right there!

Given my short attention span, I didn't read too much - just enough to know a little bit about it. If you want, you can start from the article right here. Follow the links to Sweat, a wonderful site with way too much detail about saunas than I ever saw or cared about. Most of the information here is quoted from Sweat.

In brief, a short 15 minute sauna time will cleanse your body of toxins that takes the kidney 24 hours (duh!), lower your blood pressure by dialating the blood vessels and letting it flow easily, open up all the pores that get clogged by anti-perspirants and pollution, cleanse the skin and keep it soft, and generally keep all your internal organs ship-shape.

If you trust the Finnish way, douse yourself in cold water right after the sauna.

Last note: as mentioned here, the correct pronunciation is sow-na, not saw-na.

Google Maps!

Haven't been writing for a while - been busy. Honeymoon in Florida, the new job in Manhattan, and an upcoming move (to Jersey! :( ) have kept me busy. Well, since the move has not happened yet, technically that has not taken up any of my time, but then I feel tired and exhausted to think that I have to move out of the City. It'll probably be a lot of fun to read that line again some 30 years from now, and wonder what I was thinking to have written such a mad line!

I digress.

Google rocks. There's simply no better way to put it. Snigdha pointed out the maps feature yesterday, and I gave it a spin last night and this morning. As always, weekends bring forth insomnia attacks - so much fun to catch up to, and so little time- so the spin was a rather slow paced, detailed one.

For starters, played around with names, after Kanishka pointed it out. Zooming into Manhattan and typing "Kundan Sen" has a very funny result (for now, that is) - here is a snapshot, so that I freeze the result in time. It does not show where I live, but it shows a lot of the places where I have eaten :)

Of course, as with everything else google, this is just about the coolest looking map online right now, so I thought why not try updating the maps on the restaurant blog. Considering each change results in a complete re-generation of all the index pages, and a heavy upload to the server, this took a good 2.5 hours before I could sit back and think about the rest of the day.

As of now, there are a few hiccups - complete name and address pairs sometimes prompt you to look at something else instead of the queried location (based on popularity, I guess), and some quoted restaurant names garbaged out. But then I am eager to see what else is in the bag!