Lab 7 8 customize or write simple scripts

Are you tired of the default look for search results at Google? If you want a different and customized pleasing look for them, then join us as we look at the GoogleMonkeyR User Script.

Note: User Style Scripts & User Scripts can be added to most browsers but we are using Firefox & the Greasemonkey extension for our example here.

Before

Here is the standard look for search results at Google…not bad but it really does not stand out that well either.

Installing the User Script

You may be asking yourself what makes this particular user script different from others. Take a look at the list of goodies that you get access to and you will understand:

• Multiple columns of results
• Removes “Sponsored Links”
• Add numbers to the results
• Auto-load more results
• Removes web search dialogues
• Open links in a new tab
• Favicons
• GooglePreview
• Self updating
• Can be configured from a simple user dialogue

To get started click on the Webpage Install Button.

Once you click on the Webpage Install Button you will see the following window asking for confirmation to add the user script to Firefox. Click Install to complete the process.

GoogleMonkeyR in Action

Refreshing the same search page shown above shows a noticeable difference already. The light blue background makes the search results stand out a bit better. This is an improvement from before but you will definitely want to have a look to see just how far you can go…

Right click on the Greasemonkey Status Bar Icon , go to User Script Commands , and select GoogleMonkeyR Preferences.

Once you have clicked on GoogleMonkeyR Preferences the search page will be shaded out and you will have access to the user script’s preferences. This is where you can really make your search results unique looking!

Here are the changes that we started out with…

After refreshing our search results things looked even better.

A look at the entire page of results with our browser maximized and set for two columns.

If you have the Auto load more results Option enabled new results will be added very quickly as you scroll down.

Our set of search results after adding Favicons & GooglePreview Images.

Conclusion

If you have been wanting a more dramatic and pleasing look for the search results at Google then you can not go wrong with the GoogleMonkeyR User Script. Change as little or as much as you want to get that perfect look in your browser.

Link

Install the GoogleMonkeyR User Script

Download the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox (Mozilla Add-ons)

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the vice chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told Breitbart News exclusively that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cover-up of the origins of the coronavirus pandemic reminds him of Chernobyl.

Rubio’s office recently released a several-hundred-page report, the product of a years-long investigation, detailing findings about how the virus seems to have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and he appeared on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125, the Patriot Channel, to discuss the report and more this weekend.

LISTEN:

“Clearly, there had already been concerns about the biosafety of those facilities within China, and then the alarms really start to get louder over the summer and into the fall of 2019, and then you have these things—is the fact that they take down their research and results on virology in the middle of the night in and of itself anything? No. But when you put it together with all these other things, and drills at the airport and discussions about things like ‘novel coronavirus’ months before anybody else was using that terminology—I mean, if I had said to you, ‘there is a novel coronavirus’ in September of 2019, no one would know what I was talking about,” Rubio said.

“People would think you’re talking about something that came from a beer bottle like a Corona or something—they wouldn’t know what it was. So, the fact they were already talking about these things months in advance and the reason why it didn’t get out is very simple—the Chinese government did not want it to get out. They did not allow it to get out. To this day, they do not want it to get out. They don’t want to be blamed for something that they caused. It reminds me a lot of Chernobyl.”

View of the Chernobyl Nuclear power after the explosion on April 26 1986, in Chernobyl, Ukraine. (SHONE/GAMMA/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

West German custom officials closely screen goods, cars, and people coming in from East Europe on May 5, 1986, after the Chernobyl nuclear power disaster. (Patrick PIEL/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

An image of the evacuation and radioactivity check of people after the Chernobyl catastrophe in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

A photo on display at the Ukrainian National Chernobyl Museum in Kyiv, Ukraine, showing workers during the clean-up following the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. (Francois LOCHON/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Rubio said the reason why the origins of COVID—and the Chinese cover-up of it all—reminds him of Chernobyl is that “totalitarian regimes do not reward bad news.” Rubio also said Western counterparts—he specifically named Dr. Anthony Fauci as one—were working “in cooperation with” the Chinese to silence anyone who raised questions about the lab in Wuhan. He said the Western collaborators seem to have engaged in this activity because they want the funding streams and partnerships with labs like the one in Wuhan to continue.

A rescue worker sets up a flag signaling radioactivity in front of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant during a drill organized by Ukraine’s Emergency Ministry on November 8, 2006. (SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images)

A sign warns of radiation contamination near a former apartment buildings on April 9, 2016, in Pripyat, Ukraine, near the Chernobyl nuclear power. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

“They do not reward the underlings who report problems up top so they try to cover up, they try to obfuscate, and obviously, in the case of China, there is reputational damage that they don’t want to be a part of—and unfortunately, I think they had cooperation with researchers in the west who didn’t want to believe this stuff and didn’t want anything to endanger their ability to work closely with these guys,” Rubio said.

“That’s why you see a guy like Fauci out there for months effectively trying to silence for months,” he continued. “There was a time when if you said this was a lab accident you would have been censored on Facebook; you would have been called a quack by the press because these guys used their positions of credibility of their scientific position to participate in a political exercise which is ‘we need to smear anyone who questions us and ensure there are not more eyeballs on it because if the eyeballs come on it they’re going to realize that we knew this research was going on, and to some extent, we cooperated in this research, and we want this research to continue and this kind of collaboration to continue and not be endangered by any such revelations.’ So, the fact it didn’t come out earlier, in September, October, November—the Chinese Communist Party would not allow it to come out, and people here who had reason to suspect it had reason in not letting it come out either.”

White House Chief Medical Adviser on COVID-19 Dr. Anthony Fauci listens to President Joe Biden as he tours the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, February 11, 2021. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

Rubio’s report, as Breitbart News has reported , is arguably the most in-depth product from an official source delving into what happened in the lead-up to and early days of the pandemic, explaining how the virus spread out from Wuhan to the rest of the world.

“None of it relied on any intelligence work. It did rely on some staff who had an understanding both of the Chinese system and of Mandarin and were able to go and find all kinds of interrelated pieces, some of which were no longer available online,” Rubio said. “Look, it’s—people talk about no smoking gun and circumstantial evidence, but I think there comes a point on something like this where the combination of an overwhelming mountain of circumstantial evidence combined with just common sense leads you to some conclusions.”

“What is pretty clear here, and you can see it very early on, well earlier than any public discussion of it, as early as July and August that something was going on in Wuhan and in these institutes. There was a lot of nervousness about the safety of this facility. There were people beginning to report about, and you can see it in some of the things released—some of the upper echelon leaders in their healthcare system and in their party were taking a great interest in the safety and security of that facility. There were people who started missing work in those facilities that were related to some of this research.”

Researcher Shi Zhengli, known as the “bat lady,” works in her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China on May 24, 2020. (Chinatopix via AP)

Rubio’s report connects a number of dots and presents facts in a clear way that had not been previously done, including detailing the extent to which the CCP’s most senior officials, including Xi Jinping himself, seem to have been involved in these matters—and just how extensive the CCP’s investments in such research truly are.

“When you piece that together with everything else, it’s clear this pandemic started much sooner and much earlier than they have publicly disclosed, that its epicenter was somewhere in those labs, not just the Wuhan Institute of Virology but the Wuhan Institute of Health, which is also located in the same city and is another place that had a lot of noise and static coming out of it,” Rubio said. “When you piece all that together with unlike the fact with SARS and MERS, they still have not produced the animal. China has still not come forward and said here is the animal that caused the outbreak. To this day, they have not produced that, and there is a reason for that: It doesn’t exist.”

“So, I think now we have enough to say it is very likely, more likely than not, that this began as experiments that were going on in these institutes, and somebody got infected—irresponsible stuff—and they spread it to the world,” he continued. “They didn’t tell anybody about it. They didn’t tell anybody about it. They didn’t share information. They tried to contain it within their totalitarian system, and the world has paid an extraordinary price. It’s also a reminder that, even as I speak to you now, there is all kinds of research both in virology and in the genetic field happening inside of China—oftentimes with the cooperation of U.S. researchers and even U.S. public and private dollars in the past—that’s equally if not more dangerous in terms of what it could mean to the world if it were to spin off in the wrong direction. This is a real 21st-century problem we’re going to continue to confront, but it all begins with establishing fundamental truths and that is that dangerous things were being done over there, and they were very likely the cause of this global catastrophe.”

A migrant worker has his temperature taken on February 25, 2020, outside a factory in Zouping, in China’s Shandong province. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Staff members line up at attention as they prepare to spray disinfectant at Wuhan Railway Station in Wuhan, China, on March 24, 2020, during the COVID pandemic. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

What is more, the first major Western country slammed by COVID after it first spread in China was Italy—which had less than a year prior joined China’s global influence-peddling scheme, the Belt and Road Initiative. COVID rocked Italy as early as late January and early February 2020—well more than a month before the virus spread to the United States—and Rubio noted that workers from Wuhan who were living in Northern Italy but had traveled home for Chinese New Year celebrations as well as tourists, an increased relationship between the countries seemingly as a result of the Italian decision to join Belt and Road, seems to have contributed to the spread of COVID.

“A couple of interesting points about this is the new Prime Minister of Italy is actually much better and much better aligned on the issue of China and is more realistic—but at the time, you’re absolutely right,” Rubio said. “The Chinese and Italian governments had created a very strong commercial interlink—and also tourism. Italy was a place where there was a lot of Chinese tourists coming. So it’s logical that that would happen, and you would see that sort of impact happen in places like that. The linkage is pretty clear. I don’t think anyone can dispute this virus originated inside of China. We now know for a fact that most of the people who got COVID were either not symptomatic, or most people don’t die from COVID—although it’s a very dangerous virus, most people don’t die from it, and a lot of people didn’t even get sick from it, but you have it, and you’re traveling.”

“So, if you have all these people coming back after visiting China—a place where by now this thing is probably spreading like wildfire, and they’re bringing it back over with them, it’s only logical,” he added. “Logic tells you—and I think it would be an interesting study, I haven’t done it—but to see all of the countries that have that kind of inter-relationship, not just Italy, but others, and link their outbreaks to those ties because there’s no doubt that the more people you had coming from mainland China into your country during that time period the faster you are going to have an outbreak in your country. Eventually, it spread everywhere, but the more of those links the faster that happened. Again, an example of what we’re dealing here: They didn’t care. The Chinese Communist Party didn’t care about whether people were going to die halfway around the world. They cared about protecting their reputation at the expense of what we now know was a global catastrophe that to this day is still impacting us and look at the learning losses in America—all of that is linked right back to the decision they made to try to cover this up to this day.”

Now, though, the new prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, is reportedly taking steps to remove Italy from the CCP’s Belt and Road Initiative—a withdrawal that could happen as soon as this year. Rubio praised Meloni for the move, and said it “makes all the sense in the world.”

“Look, I remember when she won—when her party won—and a lot of the global press and U.S. press was freaking out ‘oh my God, an ultra-right-wing lunatic,’” Rubio said. “But what’s happening in the entire Western world is millions and millions of people across political spectrums who have been, for lack of a better term, hurt or screwed over by globalization and you’re having this pushback against it. It’s worked out great if you’re in the financial industry or financial sector, or maybe even technology to a certain point, but if you’re someone who used to work with your hands or used to work in a factory, globalization has taken my job and sent it to China and created a middle class halfway around the world at our expense.”

“So, now you have leaders that are not socialists and are rising up to this and saying we got to have our economic policies reflect the national interest,” he said. “Nationhood matters. Place matters. It always has mattered. It has always mattered to the Chinese. It obviously matters to the Russians. And it should matter to Italians and it should matter to Americans and it should matter to everyone. We are not, at the end of the day, citizens of the world or consumers of a global market—we are first and foremost from the place we live in: community, city, country. You have that reflected in Italian politics now, as you did to some extent with Boris Johnson in the U.K. and certainly in the United States with Donald Trump and the change you see inside the Republican Party becoming a working-class party. So I think that’s just reflective of an important correction that needs to happen, not just in the U.S., but in the industrialized world in the 21st century. This 20 or 30-year experiment with global citizenry has not worked, and in fact, it has only worked to the benefit of places like China that never bought into it in the first place. They took the benefits of it, but they didn’t give up their national interest.”

Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, on February 3, 2021. (HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)

Rubio, who ran for president in 2016 but lost in the GOP primary to now former President Donald Trump, has been one of the leading voices inside the GOP, steering the party away from corporate special interests and back towards working-class populism. Rubio has offered a number of different legislative proposals and plans and helped with others like the rail safety plan from Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) in the wake of the East Palestine derailment in Ohio. Asked about all of this, and the shift in the GOP in recent years, Rubio said it is definitely real and definitely happening.

“It comes down to the approach. I think Americans, for a long time, have been given a false choice—the choice between socialism, which is a disaster, and this sort of unbridled, laissez-faire, the market-is-always-right capitalism at the expense of the national interest,” Rubio said. “For 30 years, what we’ve basically been told is ‘look, we have to serve the market’ and sometimes to serve the market means we’re going to have to do things that are not good for our country, but they’re good for the market and the global economy and that’s what we should be for. I think that became sort of a bipartisan consensus, but some of it became dominant. So what’s happening now is people are saying, ‘look, I believe in the market, but I believe the market exists to serve the country, not the country to serve the market.’ I believe the market is always going to give us the most efficient outcome, which is usually the right outcome. But what happens in those instances where the most efficient outcome is not good for America?”

Rubio noted that, for instance, while it is more efficient to buy certain products from China, doing so is not in the national interest.

“It’s more efficient to buy medicine from China,” Rubio said. “They do it cheaper because it’s subsidized, and they have cheaper labor. But is it in our national interest to depend on China for our medicine or rare earth minerals or electronics or anything else? The answer is no, it isn’t. That’s what you’re starting to get. You had a lot of corporate interests that are invested in that status quo, right? Because that’s their factories over there that’s making these things at a cheaper cost, or they’ve been given the promise that ‘if one day you behave, corporate America, we’ll give you access to five percent of the Chinese marketplace, and your shareholders will be very happy, and your share values will go up.’ So that translates to a lot of issues.”

On the rail safety plan, in particular, Rubio said that sometimes what is best for the bottom line of a mega-corporate interest like a railroad is not what’s best for the American people.

“You talk about the rail issue for a moment—that’s one of America’s core infrastructures. We transport a lot of really important things on rail in America,” Rubio said. “That’s an industry that moves toward efficiency. I’m not against efficiency. But efficiency cannot come at the expense of the national interest. Some of that efficiency will come down to things like well, ‘we should try to do as much as we can with the least amount of workers.’ When that leads to accidents, that’s not just bad for American workers—but when it leads to accidents, I think we have a role to step in and say, ‘okay, how can this be brought under control.’ Yeah, it’s the most efficient outcome, but it’s not a good outcome for America to have these derailments simply so you can save on labor costs.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) questions witnesses during a Senate appropriations committee hearing on May 26, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Sarah Silbiger-Pool/Getty Images)

The shifts happening inside the GOP are slowly but surely swinging away from the special interests and towards what is the national interest, he said, adding though that he thinks, “that is still a work in progress.” Rubio said even his personal history came from the failed old way of doing things, but having the experience he got from running in 2016 for president introduced him to all sorts of new people and issues nationwide he had not before been exposed to. Rubio thinks the full transformation of the GOP will take another few election cycles, though, even though is clearly already underway.

“There is a tremendous amount of infrastructure built up in the sort of right of center built around this outdated consensus which has failed us that needs to be taken on,” Rubio said. “Look, that’s the school of thought I was raised in politically. I can’t say I was 100 percent adherent to it, but a lot of it framed my thinking for many, many years because that’s sort of what dominated the right-of-center discussion. For me, running for president introduced me to a lot of people and places and things I had never sort of seen before being from Florida, which is a state that is not a sort of large industrial state. It forces you to think about it and to work on it, and you come to the realization that the number one objective of American foreign policy and domestic policy should be the best interests of Americans and America. I think every country in the world should be governed that way, and most of them do.”

“But for whatever reason, we thought we didn’t have to do that anymore,” he continued. “We were wrong. So, I think it’s a work in progress. I think we’ve made progress. I think there are some people who are more open to things than they used to be. But we still have a tremendous amount of donor power and intellectual infrastructure built around a traditional status quo of what’s good for the global economy is what we should be for type politics and it’s going to take a few more cycles to continue down and reorient. But it’s happening, and it’s happening at the grassroots most certainly.”

Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.

For the last few months, I’ve been tracking my activities, location, happiness, sleep cycles, among other things, using fun tech gadgets (such as the Fitbit ) and smartphone apps. I had to trade my Blackberry in for an Android, since most apps are designed for that or the iPhone — no complaints here. The tale of what I got out of all this appears in the next issue of Forbes, along with (embarrassingly) some photos of me, including a shot that required the photographer to get into bed with me.

Of course, Forbes is one of those wonderful magazines that provides all of its content online, so you can get the story here, too, below. The magazine title is “Taking My Measure.” My significant other has taken to calling it the “My Data Tells Me To Dump My Boyfriend” piece. I think of it as “How I Learned My Bedtime is Midnight.” Hope it’s an enjoyable read:

A woman entrepreneur, who wishes to remain anonymous, drinks her first stream of urine every morning as a “natural form of tracking” in order to remind herself of what she ate and drank the night before. A help-desk analyst at a corporate law firm started monitoring his spending after racking up five figures in debt on iTunes and buying CDs. Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell keeps an audio recorder running all day and takes digital photos every 30 seconds–with the idea of outsourcing his memory to a computer. Psychology professor Seth Roberts eats a half stick of butter every day because, he says, it speeds up his ability to do simple math problems by 5%.

More prosaically, perhaps, graphic designer Nicholas Felton compiled various biographical data to produce a visually spectacular tribute to his father after he died. Digital diva Esther Dyson keeps an eye on her unread e-mails in order to measure her stress levels. Tim Ferriss, a former sports nutrition company CEO and angel investor in start-ups like Twitter and StumbleUpon, tracks his brain waves while sleeping; he has inserted a blood sugar monitor into his torso and biopsied his thigh to analyze his muscle fibers and endurance enzymes. The 4-Hour Body, Ferriss’ treatise on using tracking to lose weight, maximize efficiency and “become superhuman,” shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list in January.

Extreme navel-gazing is probably as old as staring at the stars. The Catholic Church gave us confession, which helped organize our thoughts about ourselves (how far we have fallen, how close salvation lies). Psychoanalysis flipped the paradigm, transmuting sin into unconscious desire. Now comes a phenomenon known as the Quantified Self, or self-tracking, which posits a sort of truth in numbers. Its adherents believe that gadgets can help organize torrents of personal data that can help turn us all into happier, healthier, wealthier and more productive human beings. Founded three years ago by two Wired magazine editors, the Quantified Self is an organization in San Francisco with Meetup groups in 23 cities around the world, including Europe, Africa and Australia. Its members obsessively track biometric, behavioral and environmental information with smartphone apps and body-monitoring devices, and perform experiments on themselves to try to improve their lives.

If this sounds weirdly narcissistic, consider that the movement has a forebear in a quintessential American: Benjamin Franklin, the founding father of self-tracking. To chart his progress toward “moral perfection,” Franklin kept a daily ledger in red ink of 13 virtues, from temperance to humility. Each day he dotted the virtues he failed to fulfill with a black lead pencil. After tracking for some time, he wrote in his Autobiography: “I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined, but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish.”

My name is Kashmir Hill and I am a self-tracker. I got into this a few months ago for a number of reasons. One, it raises intriguing questions about technology and privacy–my beat at FORBES. For another, I’m a social creature; I like to hang out with people online and offline, and sharing data is a great way to do it. I’m also a runner and learned the importance of tracking my runs while training for a marathon a few years back. And, I’m a life-long journal keeper — my “Dear Diarys” from elementary school to my infrequent journal entries now provide an interesting chronicle of my emotional growth and change. This is a story of the QS revolution told through my own experiences, and of the two kinds of trackers: those seeking to solve problems related to health, productivity and various incarnations of wasted time; and those who love gadgets, new ways of eyeballing themselves and sharing the data with their friends. I find myself straddling the two camps.

What do you learn from turning your body and mind into measurable machines? Some efficiencies, a few helpful insights, rarely an astounding discovery. The crusade is incipient: A lot of applications lie in the future. Some enthusiasts see QS as a new model for health care, with tracking devices displacing doctors. “I call it Homebrew Health,” says one angel investor, alluding to the Homebrew Computer Club of the 1970s, the group of electronic enthusiasts, including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, whose technology hobby led to the birth of the personal computer. Backed by venture capital, the movement has spawned a lot of startups with cool tech toys and services–though most companies are shy about sharing their financial data.

There are disbelievers. Science writer Jonah Lehrer has questioned the usefulness and validity of self-experiments. “The brain is a gullible machine,” he writes. “The very act of speculating about a causal relationship–say, for instance, the link between a pill and the ability to concentrate–warps the data, biasing our mind in a million little ways.”

Warped or otherwise, I decided to give QS a three-month test drive, downloading Android apps and outfitting myself with devices to track my mood, sleep cycles, calories, location, spending and productivity. A typical day:

6:55 A.M. The sensors in my Zeo headband detect from my brain activity that I’m in “light sleep,” so my smart alarm clock decides this is the optimal time to wake me up, playing soothing, xylophonic “daybreak” music. I disagree and hit snooze.

7:05 A.M. Music resumes. I obediently switch on my bedside lamp and remove the black elastic headband that pushed a grapefruit-slice-size strip with three silver-layered sensors into my forehead. (After a few weeks of wear, my forehead is a bit bruised.) Throughout the night the sensors collected electrical signals from my brain, eye movement and facial muscles to determine which stage of sleep I was in: restorative deep sleep, when the heart rate and brain activity slow considerably; the R.E.M. stage of vivid dreaming, which helps with memory storage and emotional processing; the light sleep stage that links those two (a.k.a. “trash sleep”); and, finally, the dreaded “wake” stage, restless periods that I often don’t remember in the morning.

My Zeo alarm clock ($199) wirelessly downloads my sleep data throughout the night. In the morning its bright digital display offers a graph of the previous night’s cycles so that I can see exactly when I moved from light sleep into deep (11:35 p.m.). I can also insert a USB stick into the alarm clock to get my data and upload it to the grand Zeo database for easier desktop analysis. The company grants researchers access to that communal database, which now contains more than 400,000 nights’ worth of sleep (take that, Scheherazade).

The clock rates my night based on the percentage of my total sleep that was deep and R.E.M., giving me a “ZQ” grade of 89 out of 120. The goal is to figure out the factors hurting your sleep score. A friend says he gave up Ambien after his Zeo revealed he was getting only trash sleep after popping the pills. I discovered that my circadian rhythms are such that I need to get to bed by midnight, or I miss my first sleep cycle, in which I get the bulk of my deep sleep.

Zeo was started in 2003 by sleep-deprived engineering students at Brown University who wanted to feel less groggy. They started selling consumer devices in 2009. The company topped $26 million in backing in January with a $12.3 million joint-infusion from Johnson & Johnson and Best Buy, one of the stores that distributes the devices. Zeo cofounder and chief technology officer, Ben Rubin, 28, says that once you start tracking one thing, you’re invariably led to monitor and exercise control over other parts of your life.

Rubin calls himself a “body hacker,” breaking into his system to try to improve it. He averages an 85 ZQ but tops 100 when he chooses to “crash.” Slightly overweight for most of his life, he emphasizes that adequate sleep helps with heft maintenance. In order to slim down more, he started tracking his meals, his exercise with a Daily Run iPhone app and his weight with a Withings Wi-Fi scale ($159) that automatically sends the number to an online chart he’s shared with his social networks. Public shame is a great appetite suppressant. His account shows a yearlong drop from 187 to 167 pounds (though he’s now back up to 175 pounds).

“The Quantified Self started with uber-geeks, like the guy in San Francisco who has a laptop out at all times to record everything that’s happening,” says Rubin. “They noticed the huge benefits of quantifying their lives, but it was expensive and time consuming. Now there are all these easier ways for consumers to track, so they can just pick up a device and use it without being Quantified Self nerds.”

8:30 A.M. I return from a morning run on a path next to Manhattan’s East River. A gray elastic band presses a palm-size white plastic square into my left tricep. The BodyMedia armband ($249, plus monthly subscription) has a motion-sensing accelerometer to count my steps and sensors to measure how much I sweat, my skin temperature and the heat produced by my muscles to calculate calories burned. It also measures my sleep (based on movement, not brain activity) and has a Web interface and smartphone app for logging what I eat and checking calories burned. The company has a longer reach than most QS device makers, having started in 1999 developing armbands for use in out-of-lab health studies. Three years ago it changed focus to target a wider market: fitness-conscious consumers. Seven in ten clients are female, largely because of its partnership with Jenny Craig. BodyMedia CEO Christine Robins says the company has the world’s largest living database of energy output, activity and behavior change.

My BodyMedia armband is both a tracker and a motivator, as I strive to rack up active minutes each day, which, given my current schedule, can be challenging. Today’s 32-minute, 4,630-step run is a good start. On other days that involve just a 15-minute walk to work, then sitting in front of a computer, it’s much harder to meet my meager goal of two hours of activity. From wearing the device I realize how terribly sedentary my daily routine is. That’s led me to be more dedicated to my morning run or to lunch-time trips to the FORBES gym.

My behavior illustrates why angel investors like Esther Dyson are putting money behind self-tracking companies, such as GreenGoose, a startup that will soon sell kits with sensors that users can attach to their bikes, running gear or vitamin bottles. Applying a game-like approach to tracking, users get points when the sensors indicate that they’ve met goals for that day. “Everybody could be healthier,” Dyson says. She thinks the health care crisis will push the industry toward self-tracking “to reduce the amount of health care needed and the cost of it.”

Her bet is that employers and insurance companies will increasingly pay for these devices. Last October semiconductor maker Tokyo Electron America bought Fitbits –a $99 thumb-size step-and-calorie counting device men can clip to their waistband and women to their bras–for its more than 1,100 U.S. employees. Over a 12-week program, including Thanksgiving and Christmas, they collectively dropped 214 pounds.

12:30 P.M. Trackyourhappiness.org pings me three times a day to fill out surveys to track my moods, requesting answers within ten minutes to gauge my exuberance quotient. It gives me a spectrum from “very bad” to “very good” for that question and then goes on to ask who I’m with, where I am and what I’m doing, as well as a variety of seemingly unrelated questions, like whether I’ve been sexually active in the past 24 hours or if I expect good things to happen in the future.

If I’m with people when the survey request comes in, it actually diminishes my happiness since I’m forced to ignore my friends momentarily. Affectiva, an MIT-spawned company, will soon release the ” Q-sensor .” Aimed for now at autistic children, it’s a wristband that tracks and measures “emotional arousal” and stress based on electrical changes in the skin. If linked to your phone by Bluetooth, it could send you e-mails telling you when you’re overstressed and need to chill.

After filling out 50 happiness surveys, the program spits out a report. I’m happiest when drinking at bars (duh); least happy on planes and at work (ahem); Sunday is my happiest day of the week followed by Wednesday; I’m just as happy alone as with other people, and I’m happier interacting with my ex than with my current boyfriend. I’m at a slight loss for what to do with these results. Does this mean I should spend more time in bars and less time at work to optimize my happiness? And should I rethink my relationship?

When I attend my first Quantified Self Meetup, I discover that other members share my excitement and perplexity: They don’t know what to do with their data. The monthly gatherings, organized through MeetUp.com, feature new techniques for tracking, invite presenters to explain how they’ve made their data more meaningful and let startups promote their products. The QS’ first national conference in May in Mountain View, Calif., with 400 attendees, has attracted more than $300,000 in sponsorships from the likes of Humana, Kaiser Permanente and Intel.

The conversation at one Meetup turns to the idea of devices that make decisions for us. Your Withings scale might decide to lock your freezer to deny access to that quart of Ben & Jerry’s. A team at MIT has designed a Bluetooth-enabled “proverbial wallet” with a mechanical hinge that gets harder to open as the money in the holder’s bank account dwindles.

Is the Quantified Self a cult? Members ardently believe in technology’s power to transform us; they embrace the Buddhist idea of mindfulness; and they proselytize. “This is a huge cultural transformation at the level of what happened with fitness in this country,” says QS cofounder Gary Wolf. “That’s where we’re headed with the Quantified Self. Not that everybody will be taking their own measure, but that everyone will have at least encountered it and that many people will be trying it.”

6:00 P.M. I log into RescueTime on my office computer for a rating of my productivity for the month so far (FORBES IT installed it at my request). The program logs everything I do, labeling certain activities (like writing posts at Forbes.com) as productive and others (like visiting Facebook) as distracting. It says I’ve been “very productive” for almost 44 of the 85 hours it’s been tracking me this month and “very distracted” for 19 of those hours. The biggest culprit for distraction is my personal Gmail account, where I’ve spent eight hours this month while at work. I now know what issue to attack–and, as of this writing, so does my boss.

Tracking has changed the life of Seth Roberts, a psych professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Roberts, 57, has been tracking himself since he was a pimply-faced graduate student at Brown University in the 1970s (and thereby discovered that cream worked better than pills in managing acne).

Roberts has specific goals when he monitors his weight, sleep, blood sugar, blood pressure and arithmetic skills. “Self-tracking allows us to find solutions to our health problems that medical researchers can’t find,” says Roberts. Sometimes it leads to serendipitous discoveries. When trying to discern if standing contributed to weight loss, Roberts learned that being on his feet eight hours a day improved his sleep and that standing on one bent leg for eight minutes had the same effect.

6:30 P.M. I get an e-mail from Mint.com , a site that aggregates financial data from my bank, credit card, investment, loan and savings accounts, and created a budget. Mint monitors my spending; this e-mail tells me I exceeded my monthly travel budget by $345 as a result of back-to-back weekends in D.C. and New Orleans. No more trips for a while.

Graphic designer Nick Felton, 33, isn’t so regimented. Thanks to media excitement around his ” Feltron Annual Report ,” a summation of his yearlong tracking with striking, colorful infographics posted on his website, he may be the most visible QS apostle. He wears a Fitbit for step counting and tracks his day in 15-minute increments using the calendar on his iPhone. His reports have included a heat map of New York City of where he spent time, and breakdowns of the music he listened to most (tracked by Last.FM) and how much he spent per mile traveled ($5.26 per treadmill mile, versus 5 cents on an airplane and 93 cents on the subway; oops–time to get to the gym more often).

Three years ago Felton created Daytum.com , a website that lets its 75,000 users track and display personal data. It’s all public, unless you opt for a $4-a-month premium account. “If you want privacy, you have to pay for it,” says Felton. “It’s interesting to see what people choose to share publicly. Bathroom visits, sexual activity, drug use.” Felton, who is turning Daytum into a full-time business, thinks most users aren’t searching for answers; they just want to turn their data into interesting narratives, like how much milk they drank in a year. “People are interested in observing their habits and understanding how they spend their time,” he says.

7:15 P.M. I use the Foursquare app on my Android to document my arrival at an East Village Japanese restaurant. Foursquare offers a chronicle of the places I go to most and an announcement to friends of where I am at any given time.

My location-tracking is simply recreational, but at UCLA researchers are using a phone’s GPS system for personalized health care. They’ve developed pilot programs that rely solely on smartphone technology to monitor, assess and treat participants. In addition to location, Androids and iPhones can track motion thanks to accelerometers (incorporated to sense the phone’s vertical or horizontal orientation and flip its screen). The team built a “stress app” to track the anxiety of new mothers: a button, coupled with geo- and time-coded data, to reveal exactly when and where new mothers’ stress levels soar–feedback that helps the women address their angst.

But that benefit comes with a trade-off: The app knows perhaps too much about the moms’ daily routines. The UCLA team agonized over this and is pondering the use of “personal data vaults,” a digital lock box run by a third-party intermediary (which would require passing state laws to give them special privacy protection). “With these wireless devices on us at all times, there will be no more meaningful distinction between being online and being offline,” says UCLA law professor Jerry Kang, who imagines a scenario of a divorce attorney using sleep data from a Zeo to prove one parent doesn’t deserve custody because she’s out partying and not getting sleep. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

11:00 P.M. I wish my final check of the day were a website combining all the ways I’m tracking myself so that all my accounts could live together–not to protect my privacy but to more easily reveal interesting correlations. I imagine it showing where spending money makes me happiest and which activities lead to the soundest sleep.

“That’s the holy grail,” says BodyMedia CEO Christine Robins. “Creating the company that figures out how to aggregate and collect a range of information in an automated way and apply artificial intelligence that helps you interpret it.”

Until then I’m left to my own interpretive devices. I’ve decided my happiness report doesn’t mean I need to break up with my boyfriend: The survey I took while talking to my ex was at a bar while drinking, which may explain the high level of happiness, while my current has been present for a far greater number of surveys (sober and inebriated), resulting in mellower (but still high!) levels of happiness. Hello, heart. Data don’t always tell the whole story.

Ketan Bhagat is definite to impress you with his debut novel. Though the name of the book Complete/Convenient seems strange, it is completely justified. It takes you to the journey from Complete level, which is India to Convenient level, that is abroad.

Story: The book is about a young IT professional, Kabir who always dreams big, his girlfriend, Myra, whom he later marries, and about both families. Kabir works in India, in Satyamev, earns salary of 10 lakhs, and dreams big. Life changes when he gets married to his girlfriend and shifts to Australia. He thinks that life abroad is wonderful, luxurious, but changes and struggles make him realise that life in India is far much better.

What’s Good: Few places in the book will definitely make you chuckle. The bachelor party, Punjabi wedding is definitely a fun read. How Kabir struggles to marry his girlfriend, impresses her family, and also how his family reacts to his love marriage is well written. The differences and difficulties between Myra and Kabir’s mother, and how Kabir manages, is also well written (after marriage). How Myra gets jealous, when Kabir had to deal with his lady customer, is described perfectly. Last but not the least, how Kabir realises that Indian friends are more emotionally connected than friends in Australia is touching.

Drawbacks: The first and foremost drawback is its length. Every scene is explained in detail. At few places the comparison of India and abroad may seem irritating. If the length was chopped-off a bit, it would have been good. Secondly, there are many Punjabi and Hindi words/sentences in the book, few of which have not been translated to English. Few scenes may seem filmy too.

Who Can Read The Book: The language in which the story is narrated is very simple, and any one can relate this story with their life. It’s not necessary that only an NRI can read this, it can be read by anyone and everyone. It’s a must read for those who think living abroad is amazing and without any complications. It is also a must read for those who think that people who live abroad are happy. This book always reminds you that life in India is complete and in abroad it’s convenient.

IMPORTANT: Note to all readers – Do not compare Ketan Bhagat’s Book with his brother Chetan Bhagat’s, only then it will be a fun read.

About The Author: Creative at heart, Ketan has done stints in Television (anchor, script writer) and Print (articles in national dailies) during his college days. Few years ago, he helped his brother Chetan Bhagat script a Bollywood movie.