Thursday, January 29, 2009

Pigeon holes

Every student in my school gets allotted a locker area called a "pigeon hole". This is where the students gets their study materials, test results, etc from. The program assistants drop in the materials in these 'pigeon holes'. Latest phrase "Pick up your pigeon droppings". :P

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The worst place on earth

Surprise, surprise.... Well, the worst place on earth to live(or rather die in) is not in any of the developing or underdeveloped countries, but it is in the most developed country, the USA. The below will tell you what I am talking about... 

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The flash hard disk

http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Transcend_Launches_Portable_SSDs_in_India/551-98222-581.html
I had thought of this idea a couple of years ago. I had done some research at that time to see if this was possible and whether it already existed in some lab/r&d center. The main point I found out was that the number of guaranteed reads and writes (I am not sure whether it was only writes) in a flash disk is limited at some 0.1 million or 1 million times. This was the main reason why flash hard disks were not made. There was one company doing some serious work on this and they even had come up with a proprietary system to manage the data. Meaning: For a 1 GB data space, they had some 1.5GB space in it and as the limits of the reads and writes of some of the sectors of the memory got exhausted, the system started using the excess 0.5 GB internally. There are two possibilities: 1. One technology has further improved and the limits of the guaranteed writes has increased. 2. As people have now mostly adopted flash disks in almost all kinds of stuff in huge GBs (ipods, memory players), and almost all the people have forgotten about the risk of data loss(by corruption), this new flash hard disk may actually sell in the market. I would like to see an expert review/critic about the number of the guaranteed writes, before I think of buying one of these. Also, I will wait for a couple of years to see if these disks hold up by heavy users (teenagers transferring movies and games).

The 'G' drive

Song dedication

Well, this song is dedicated to one of my dearest and closest friends of mine :P "With Love" by Hilary Duff. 
"I don't mind you telling me 
What's been on your mind lately 
I don't mind you speaking up
I know sometimes I can be 
All wrapped up and into me 
I can be in such a rush 
Just slow me down 
Slow me down 
Tell me tomorrow everything will be around 
Just slow me down 
Slow me down 
You're the one that keeps me on the ground 
 Baby you can be tough 
Say enough is enough 
You can even be blunt 
Just do it with love love love love 
Tell me I'm wrong 
That I'm coming on way too strong 
Don't think I'll be crushed 
Just do it with love love love love 
Just do it with love love love love 
Just do it with love I can take your honesty 
All your words weigh heavily 
Listening to you all the time I want to be there for you 
The way you've been there for me 
Always help me walk the line 
 And slow me down 
Slow me down I know you will always be around
Baby you can be tough 
Say enough is enough 
You can even be blunt 
Just do it with love love love love 
Tell me I'm wrong 
That I'm coming on way too strong 
Don't think I'll be crushed 
Just do it with love love love love 
All this time we thought we knew each other 
Now that I am leaning on your shoulder
I can tell you baby that 
You're right when you're right and 
You're wrong when you're wrong and
I can be weak 'cause I know you are strong
Baby you can be tough 
Say enough is enough 
You can even be blunt 
Just do it with love love love love 
Tell me I'm wrong 
That I'm coming on way too strong 
Don't think I'll be crushed 
Just do it with love love love love 
Just do it with love love love love 
Just do it with love 
 Just do it with love love love love 
Just do it with love"

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Girls versus guys

At least in the Indian context, people say that most girls are more mature than the guys their age. And as I learn my lessons of life in life, I would agree. I think the main reason for this is this: In the Indian society, there are a lot of restrictions on what girls can do and can't do compared to guys. Some of them are based on ridiculous superstitions. Some based on perception of females in the society and some based on the girl's own security. All this makes the girls accept life's harsh decisions whether they like it or not. They become more tolerable to unfavourable results. But guys don't get to face so many unfavourable results. They face a few unfavourable ones and largely favourable results. This makes them want to fight always. But, given life's routes, no one can actually fight it. They can only accept the harsh realities of life or remain in denial mode for the rest of their lives. Only by accepting the life's unfairness and moving on, will a person be mature.

The most difficult people

I always considered close minded people as the most difficult people to deal with. Now I realise as I go a step further, rectify the thought and say that that the most difficult people to deal with are people with super sized egos. This thought was brought about by my prof. in the class. He also mentioned that the 2 varieties of people with supersized egos are the professors and doctors. I have to agree with him totally. The main problem with these people with supersized egos is that they will never accept the mistakes they make. They feel that whatever they do is right. If it is wrong, they believe that some other circumstance other than their decision is to blame. Worst case, even if they believe that they are wrong, they will ignore it and act as if they are right, show irritation or raise threats. But they will never accept their mistakes. And that is why all of us hate some of our teachers.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Of cartoons and characters

Here is a guy called Scott Neely. Scott Neely has been a professional illustrator and designer for many years now. For the last ten years, he’s been an official "Scooby-Doo" and Cartoon Network artist (working on such licensed properties as "Dexter's Laboratory", "Johnny Bravo", "Courage The Cowardly Dog", "The Grim Adventures of Billy And Mandy", "Powerpuff Girls", "Ed, Edd n Eddy"and "Sheep In The Big City" and many more). He has also worked on "Pokemon", "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse", "Winnie the Pooh", "Handy Manny", "Power Rangers Jungle Fury", "Shrek The Third", and "The Li'l Learners Club".
http://scottneelyart.blogspot.com/search/label/Cartoon%20Network
Some of the sketches on his blog are awesome and there are no comparable ones to see and draw even in the google image search. The below article brings back the good times to mind. I love yogi bear, the flintstones and QuickdrawMcgraw among other nice cartoons. Too bad today's cartoons are much less intellectual, have less form and have too many characters in one show.
http://scottneelyart.blogspot.com/2008/06/yogi-bear.html

The most frequent and hardest question to answer

Well, this is a question that is being asked most frequently, and I guess to everybody, especially acquaintances, classmates(old and new), friends(who you meet once a week or once a decade). Unlike technical questions which have an answer option "I dont know", for this common question, the answer would be weird. The question I am refering to is "How's life?" Most of the time, it is equivalent to a "Hi" as the person who asks the question does not even really want to know the real answer. Other times, even if they want a real true answer, it is very difficult to provide it in 2 words or so. Life is as usual, complex. There maybe something to cheer about and something worth crying about in the same day at the same instant. Then they are tensions, worries, happiness, apprehensions, uncertainties among others. How can anyone ever put out this plethora of feelings in just a few words? And so however big a lie it may be, we give a standard reply "good" and move on....

Monday, January 19, 2009

A small world of finance

The more I observe, the smaller the world of finance seems to be. This week I have seen 2 new books - "My life as a Quant" by Emanuel Derman, "The black swan" by Taleb. The review of both the books has the author of the other book praise each other. The book "Traders, guns and money" (My all time favourite book) by Satyajit Das talks about both these books in it. Now, a blog I regularly read "www.financialrounds.blogspot.com" talked about an article written by Joe Necera about Risk mismanagement. The article starts by quoting made by Peter Bernstein, an famous financial commentator, on the book "The black swan". Also, "Traders, guns and money" has a mention about Peter Bernstein in its book. Now this takes the cake. I just found out an hour ago that my finance prof. has read all the 3 books "Traders, guns and money", "My life as a quant" and "The black swan". And last week he had given the whole class to read an article called Risk mismanagement(by Joe Necera). The world of finance is too intertwined and everyone seems to be refering to each other.

Philosophy meets Finance

Read in a finance book "Life, as in everything else, is full of arbitrage opportunities and about exploiting them."

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Yearly goals

It may sound the most boring yearly resolution if I say that I have had the same resolution for the last three or four years. But actually, my yearly resolution is one of the most exciting and varied things that can possibly be. My yearly resolution is both a reflection and a want and goes like this: "What new things did I do in the last year? I should do something new in this coming new year." I think about this usually 2 times a year- once during the new year and the other during my birthday. And I keep looking out for opportunities where I can get some new experiences under my belt and enjoy doing it for the first time.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Confusion is king

Over the last week, I met quite a lot of people (people I know over a decade or people I have known very closely). After all the meetings, I had a lot of confusions about a lot of things and about life in general. I even argued that confusion is good because it is the critical state where you decide that the current state is not good/stable enough and you are thinking of taking steps to a better tomorrow. So it is a way to become better leaving aside the present/past things. But confusion can also be bad. It keeps you in a state where you dont do anything towards either of the steps or directions as you are not sure what is it that you want to pursue. There is no certain goal or aim and without a goal or aim, implementation steps are useless. After seeing both sides, I was confused whether confusion itself is good or bad. As one of my profs. remarked about a theory which states that equilibriums are only momentary states in the dominant state of chaos.

Once bitten, still no shyness

In our "Human behavior in organisations" class, we were supposed to come up with values of each study group that we have. A girl from one of the groups came up and said something what our professor misheard and wrote it on the board as "coming good". The whole class was laughing and as she repeated herself, the prof again misheard her and wrote something more laughable on the board "come and go". Well, the actual words were "common good".

Families

Today in our class, as our group were presenting, my groupmate ends with this quote: "We are not a can group. We have evolved. We are now a family." This got me thinking - How many different families do I belong to? Starting from my biological family to the can group family to the dorm room family and the family of close friends. This is quite a number and I think the number of families I belong to will keep increasing with time.

Moments

During the last two days of classes, I have had some good time learning about quite a lot of things about life. And at last have found a name for those important instances in life, when we decide something really important in life. These are called "defining moments" of life. There are quite a few such moments in my life and I am now happy to call them with a name. It were these moments because of which I decided to do certain things and keep certain things as priorities in my life. It is these that will make you realise the importance of something and would at times be rude awakenings of life.