I have come far in life

From 16 MB of RAM on my first desktop PC to TBs of Hard drives.

From a bike to a car to an office bus.

From failing VHDL exam to debugging HW bugs (I am a SW guy).

From waking up at 2 PM to leaving home at 6.50 AM for work.

From spending all I had in my pocket before the end of the month to saving 90% of my salary.

From hogging on Butter Chicken and Coke to mocking people who take two servings of dessert.

From waist 28 (60Kg) to 32 (75Kg) to 30 (65Kg).

From Friends to The Big Bang Theory.

From an Apartment with a view to a work cubicle with bugs and rodents.

From Janak Puri to 3 continents (3 more to go, not interested in Antarctica)

From Hangovers to Protein shakes.

I wish someday I could justifiably write a blog entry "I have come higher in life".

Confessions of a lucky son

Mum - It's Friday night, we are having a beer night, right?

Me - Moooooommmmmmmmm, I am not really in the mood tonight. I have to go to the gym too.

Mum - But you had promised for today.

Me - I had promised for Sunday, Sunday is when the gym is closed.

Mum - Sunday was shopping and dinner out day, today was Beer night.

Me - Mummmmmyyyyyyy.

Mum - Get it from the shop on your way to the gym and let's have it after gym.

Me - Ok (reluctantly)

15 Minutes later at the liquor store I see a board with the notice that the liquor store is closed over the weekend for three days due to municipal elections in the city and I am like YESSSS, god listens to me :)

Sounds so made up but this really happened to me today at home with my mum, and no my mom is not even an occasional drinker, she drinks like once in six months. Once in a while mum is really cool about everything in life. Lucky me :)


Ciao

Hell has broken loose

Mark Zuckerberg is a genius businessman. I admire him for his business acumen, you don't get to be a billionaire in less than ten years without business acumen (ahem deceit). Though I must say it aloud I hate businessmen simply because in the world of business even more so in the capitalist world of business everything is driven by the fundamental principle of greed.

Instagram for 1,000,000,000$?
It is just an application for phones, till two minutes ago it worked only on IOS. I am of the opinion that MZ did not really make this purchase for the right reasons, FB does not really need Instagram, Instagram in itself is not worth even 10% of the price actually paid for it, Instagram was taking pictures to FB anyways so facebook din't need it so badly either. Even as an application Instagram is so ordinary, personally the only thing I find great about it is its name. Kudos to the creators for coming up with the name, I think the name has won them this lottery of countless zeros after that 1.

Coming back to the point of hell and breaking loose, MZ has made this expenditure just to eradicate all innovation and competition in Social Networking (Computer Science of this decade) in the swiftest possible way. I say Social Networking since sadly as of today almost 80% of all innovation and development in Computer Science is either Social Networking itself or directly related to it. All this deal has done is made that bubble the biggest it possibly could get, now it just needs a prick from the outside and entrepreneurs, VCs and the rest of the business world will be running scared to recover their investments, hell they would want profits too. No matter how many diamonds you find in the valley the number of $$$ bills is the same in the treasury. I am too young and amateur to make such a statement but I think in 9-18 months from now Silicon Valley will be at its feet begging the government for a bailout, bulls will have made their money, MZ would still be the king of his empire but thousands of Engineers will have lost their jobs and inflated salaries. Hundreds of Comp Sc fresh graduates will be staring at a horror of a beginning to their careers and once again the gold rush of San Francisco will come to an abrupt and untimely end. This one will not just only be about money, this will be a big setback to Engineering and technology as a whole, every innovation in the world of software engineering will come to a halt for at least a year, and this is 21st century, time moves faster now than it did in the days of Da Vinci, one year of wasted time will be a setback to a complete generation of technology and people.

I sincerely hope for all the selfish and personal reasons that this does not happen but I cannot see how it will not happen.

Ciao

Table Tennis

After years, i don't even know how many i played table tennis today and that too with Mark 5 rubbers, havent felt so great in months.

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Woooowwwwwwwwww

I must confess being at home for most part of the last week had made me feel lonely in my bachelorhood. But GOD came to rescue me and clear all my doubts. :)


Girls Described in detail

Thank you God.

Ciao

Bedridden

Since Friday night I have had a terrible sprain in my lower back, to the extent where on Saturday morning it took me literally 5 minutes from getting out of my bed and reaching the door to the bathroom. In the process I had to crawl on my knees, hold onto anything that I could and use the strength of my thighs and arms to the limit to lift my body weight. Thanks to the support belt and pain killers it has got better since then but I still can only sit for 15-20 minutes in one stretch, can only lie on my side and it takes around twenty seconds to stand up from any other position.

I don't even know why I got the sprain in the first place, Friday in the gym was like no weights day, just free training and some sit-ups for the abs. But as soon as I bent for the first time in the shower I could not stand up again, I had to stay on the floor for some time before I was able to get up again. And then one hell of a night began where despite a pain killer I could not sleep all night, any orientation was aching like a b**ch.

Anyways now that I am at home for a considerable number of days I have decided that I am going to catch up on the umpteen number of things that were getting pushed back due to high intensity regime at work for the last three months or so. The list of things I wanna complete before I am fit and fine again are,

1. Update the music collection on my Iphone, I am using like 2 gigs of space on my 32GB device.
2. Perfect my use of vimdiff with files and folders and say bye bye to Araxis merge for the sake of honesty and integrity.
3. Read my FreeBSD text book, at least 2-3 chapters.
4. Read in part one of the pending novels from my bookshelf.


Ciao

World of Catch-up

The mobile phone industry has become a universe where every major vendor is playing catch up with at least one other competitor vendor, and of course every vendor is playing catch up with Apple and IPhone. For instance look at Google's hurried and shallow effort of competing with Siri, I admire Google for a lot of things but they need to stop with this tendency of launching and maintaining products in beta mode forever. Information technology industry is not in its infancy anymore, Google needs to realize that and change its Modus Operandi.

Companies like HTC and Samsung also need to realize that their time to market strategies will not win them market share forever, sooner or later they will need to come up with true innovations to maintain sales numbers in the long haul. That is how Nokia did it in the nineties, though they too were limited to innovating hardware and aesthetics, at least those were the innovations that were accepted by the market. Sure they tried Symbian, engage and what not but none of them were really worthy enough in the first place. One fine day came Apple and changed the rules of the game, it was no longer about the phone, what mattered most was the ecosystem. In one stroke of genius (years of R&D too) Nokia's dominance was reduced to a frightened and sinking ahip. Anyways all this was not my motivation when I thought about writing this post.

Has anybody noticed that this mobile phone boom has brought a new trend to the industry, the current flagship product is introduced by the company's CEO to the whole world, and my first reaction to this trend is " How can these CEOs be so damn stupid and naive". Yeah sure it worked for Steve Jobs but that is only because he was so good at it, he believed in his products and he believed only because he had such a big part to play in designing these products. I have seen so many product launch presentations in the last three years from various CEOs and each one of them (Barring Jobs of course) has stinked worse than a stale fish. Even Tim Cook's presentaion of IPhone 4S was barely a malformed shadow of Steve's cultivated salesmanship. Every time I reach the end of a product launch by a CEO I am already half demotivated of even considering the product. SJ gave a lot of good to the technology industry but I think this was his sly joke to get even for all the bad the industry did to him. As if he is looking from the heavens and saying "Right, top that", and he knows noone ever will since all these CEOs are not salesmen, they are rich and learned men trying to sell products they don't really believe in or care about, all they care about is sales numbers. Of course, they fail at it miserably, that is what happens when you imitate competition blatantly. You don't win a boxing match by wearing same trunks as your opponent, you win it by training harder than your opponent and using your head better than your opponent.

Don't try to imitate SJ, instead learn from his philosphy of never playing catch up with competition. Do your own thing and try to perfect it with each iteration.


Ciao