A - MUSINGS

Thats it for me!

2005-11-08T09:28:00.000Z

I just cant get myself around to blogging anymore. Its a combination of me being quite busy off late and an increasingly apparent inability to get personal in my blog.

i tend to blog about general issues.. and any personalish blog reflects my attempts to try and get personel.I just dont feel the need or maybe dont feel comfortable with writing personal stuff. Dont mean to sound sexist, but it really is not so much a guy thing to get personel on blogs.But i have to admit that I enjoy reading other blogs, blogs where people are comfortable with being personal and I will never stop reading them.

Strong feelings on general issues surface like once a month.. and its more event dependant. I mean , I cant seem to feel strongly about any issue right now.

Im not gonna say bye.. cos ill be visiting and commenting on all your blogs.. but i really dont think ill blog again.. unless I suprise myself.

Adios

Zapped!

2005-10-15T05:42:00.000+01:00

Its been close to three years now that ive been obsessed with this game. It just keeps getting better!. Somehow.. I dont think there will ever be another Quake 3. Video-gamming is getting more and more realistic and my fear is that the game play that these relatively simpler games have will be lost.

- The Physics of the game are quite brilliant, not as realistic as counter strike (CS)maybe.. but brilliant
- Its fast .. in a decked up comp with a frame rate of 400 fps, bloddy hell.. its fast!
- The Game play rocks
- Intutive response
- Not too many keys

I can see many amateur gammers moving over to CS and now WarCraft. Yes Ive been cheating on Q3 to .. with my recent fascination for CS... but hey I will never ever.. say no to a game of Quake!

But I must admit that the people who game at Zap(The gaming centre) are kids .... obbsessed kids who spend their lives doing this stuff. Calling each other by their screen names..
Hey 'Python' watsup.. where is 'Anthrax'.. lol..!!..

But hey what the hell... I LOVE IT!

MY Q3 PROFILE

Name : Feral Rage

Bot : Anarki

Strengths: One on One

Favorite Gun : The Rail Gun

Favorite Map (Current):The Very End of you

Least Favorite Gun : The BFG

Least Favorite Bot : Tank Jr. (Yo S.. any comments)

Im glad that some parts of me still stay young!

Another one of my idols - Brilliant Speech!

2005-09-30T09:11:00.000+01:00

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

A Leader of Men

2005-09-17T08:17:00.000+01:00

Its time I wrote about Cricket.. it may not appeal to my blogging circle but its too big a part of me to ignore!

The Prince of Calcutta

In response to overwhelming critisicm that Sarav Ganguly is facing ,as an ardent fan of his ATTITUDE ,I am forced to speak up. Just look at him.. dosent he look like another average Indian.. but funny enough this man is anything but average.

"A good leader inspires others with confidence in him; a great leader inspires them with confidence in themselves."

Sarav Ganguly was God-sent to India, its almost like one of the million Indian cricket fans,prayed to God one day..

"God... Save Indian Cricket
Send us a leader of men ..
A man with arrogance..
A man who can look the white man in the face..
and show him the finger..."

Cricket is a wondeful sport, for those of who who havent experienced the excitement of playing a competitive cricket match, Its too hard for me to describe the feeling.

The prematch excitement ..
when you dont eat or sleep the previous night..
when you discuss bowling strategies and batting orders..
When you let your mind fantasize crucial match scenarios where you make a difference..
And the reality you face when the game is actually played..
The suprises .. the dissapointments..
The post-mortem that never ends till you win another match..

Dosent it sound all so familiar.. dont we go through this every new assignment life throws at us.
To lead a team of talented cricketers with more that a billion people waiting for you to take one wrong step is not an easy job.

Saurav Ganguly relishes that pressure. he almost seems to treat the team as his family.He gave India the much needed aggression which saw India through the uncertainties that the game has to offer.His arrogance is noted off the field as well, His family is infamous in Calcutta for their arrogance.. its needless to say that Saurav changed that with all the success he lead India too.

Have we forgotten the days when Ganguly brought so much glory to Indian cricket.His trademark reaction at Lords after Indias memorable victory.India has never seen a leader which so much passion.

His teamates affectionately refer to him a dhadha.. a leader, someone who has the courage to fight any opposition. His arrogance has rubbed of on the Indian team.. and always will stay as long as DHADHA! is our leader. He is the Kingpin of Indian cricket and a true leader for a country as passionate as ours.

India should stand by Sarav through this bad patch for all he has done for Indian cricket. Indias success depends so heavily on his leadership and the selectors should not forget that.

Long live the Prince.. you will always be in my list of idols!

Trigger Happy Cops

2005-07-23T21:40:00.000+01:00

Right now I'm too pissed off to say anything remotely nice about London.My British teamate just told me that 'the shooting of the innocent brazilian in London is perfectly justified'.He gave me a lot of bullcrap ranging from the heigtened sense of security the british people have to the feeling that there is somebody outhere who hates them.. so the shooting of an innocent man FIVE times in the head!.. Bloody hell!

- Firstly, the cops.. the famous Scotland Yard followed this guy all the way from is house to the tube station.

Question : If they suspected him , why dint they stop him earlier? Why the brutal killing in Public?

- Secondly,they never said the words 'Police' or 'Stop'??.. They were not even in their complete Police uniform (just a police cap).The ran behind him,said the words 'Get down' and when he did get down.BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.. in the head!

- Thirdly,The reasons for the cops suspecting him were.. firstly,He ran

Question : Yes,he ran and that was wrong.But what if he ran because he drugs on him or an expired visa(which is under investigation)? Does he fuckin deserve to die? Is'nt it natural to run from cops ?

The second reason they shot him was - He was wearing an unsually Large coat on a hot day,which could have potentially masked a bomb.

Question :What if he had fever dammit?

Wait,it gets even better.The headlines on the metro today read "MORE INNOCENT MAYBE BE KILLED"- Commissioner of Poice.Its a mess here really,The Scotland Yard claims to be the best police force in the world.Well,if you are the best dont make such mistakes and dont make statements like "More innocent maybe killed".Personally,I think the Brits are getting what they deserved for trying to 'Play God' in Iraq and Afghanisthan.

Oh and by the way,these are snaps of good times in London I was gonna blog about.Too bad!

London Beckons : Hello Loneliness

2005-07-12T11:10:00.000+01:00

For three weeks im going to relive my days in Pitt.. I'm goin to be all by myself in London.'Solitude' is often used with a negative connotation but Ive learned to love being alone and its not that bad.It's uncomplicated.. its very thought provoking.It triggers introspective as well as retrospective thoughts.The happy ones,at the end of which you are sad about life having changed.And the sad thoughts,which you otherwise dont have the time to come to terms with.In the end,life alone often does more good to you than bad.On the otherhand,Maybe its not the lonliness that I miss but the familiarity with being by myself for the last 12 months of my life.Either ways.. I am not sure if I want to have a 'BLAST' in London! ;)

What lies beneath?

2005-07-11T10:18:00.000+01:00

How many times have you set your alarm and woken up a minute before it rang ?

How many times have thought of someone calling you .. and they did it the next second ?

How many times have you known for sure that something is gonna happen.. for no rational reason at all and BAM!!.. it happens ?

We often underestimate the power of the subconscious mind.The number of events and conditional probabilities of events that influence our subconscious mind are infinite.Instinct is a feeling that results from computing a n-dimensional matrix of experiences and observations with a hint of genetics!.The Relationship between these matrix elements are conditonal probabilities that are ever so slightly updated every day of our lives.And yet we mock each other when this algorithm fails ever so slightly...

When someone misses a left turn.. they take everyday..

When someone throws the toffee and keeps the wrapper..

When my sister went all the way down to shut the lift door properly and came running back up!..(that was just stupidity actually)

I had one such freeky experience in this pub called MadMex in pittsburgh.After a beer I walked into the loo.. wiped my face with a paper towel,I threw the towel in the potty and started peeing into the bin!!.. All of a sudden I realized what I was doin and I freeked out..

What in hell can we do if our subconscience fails us ?

Well.. Absolutely NOTHING!!

GEN*IUS

2005-07-04T07:43:00.000+01:00

Another Wimbledon goes by with tennis fans hoping that somebody on the ATP tour would find something in them to challenge Roger Federer !!.. One set .. he just lost a single set .. in the whole of the 2005 Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis Club.

What makes Federer ... Federer!!
Effortless Stokeplay
Often you dont know that the champion is playing until you see the scorecard.It almost seems like he dosent hit the ball 1 mph harder that it should be hit to win the point.

Defensive Game
Federer is one of the best defensive players in the world today.. on watching his matches carefully you will notice how he converts the opponents advantage into his,by playing a good lob or a deep retrive.

Switching Modes
Being such an excellent defensive as well as offensive player is great,but more than that Federer switches between these two modes at will.Something that most other players find hard to do.

Temperment
As cool as ever,Federer never looks troubled in crucial situations.The fact that he has never been in a crucial situation for a while now is besides the point!.Like a Mercedes , when required he steps on the gas and takes his game to a whole new level.

Shot Selection
A player with the range of shots that he has,often has to decide between several options.His shot selection is bang-on.. A small example is...whenever his opponent rushes to the net,faster than he should,Federer always spots it and replies with an incledible lob!.

I wonder how long it will be until somebody can dethrone Federer at the All England Club.I cant see any top player in the ATP circuit doing it for the next three years atleast!...