The last question

Life moves at its own pace. There are some people who keep pace with it and others who lose out. It is not possible for anyone to dictate the pace of life, but there is a way in which destiny can be chosen and not received.

Steve was once, attending a seminar. During the seminar, he noticed a pretty girl. He was immediately attracted to her. But like most people, he hesitated and didn't want to rush things since, it was an important phase in his career.
Then a thought struck him, he asked himself, "What if, this is the last night of life?"
Will I still live it in the logical way, or would I do something different? The next thing Steve did was go up to the girl and asked for a date. She did accept his invitation.

Steve Job's question is a great way to look towards life. It is the very instinct of 'no tomorrow' that compels us to live, our today, to the fullest.

It wasn't me!

As human beings, we are programmed to accept praise and repel criticism. Nobody likes to be blamed for another person's mistakes, but that doesn't mean he will be bothered if he gets another person's praise.
This can be seen extensively in group activities, where most often, one person walks away with all the credit. This just happens to be one of the cruel realities of life.
History is filled with people who have never been given their due.

Chinese Sailors were the first ones to discover the Americas, and Australia, but history favors the colonists and pronounces Christopher Columbus as the discoverer of America. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1421:_The_Year_China_Discovered_the_World)

Calculus has been explained in Indian texts dated back to 1500's long before a certain Isaac
Newton was even born.(http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/08/14/calculus070814.html)

Antony Meucci was the one who invented the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell only patented it.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_telephone)

Some of the above stories could be dismissed as urban legends but there's no denying the fact that not everyone gets rewarded for their work.

The emotions of denial

Stage 1-Something's fishy
No fingers are pointed yet, only the problem is examined and eyebrows are raised.

Stage 2- Why would somebody do it?
Everyone loves playing detective! Honestly speaking, one good crime drama series, is all it takes for someone to think their good enough to be the next Sherlock Holmes.

Stage 3-Whodunnit?
Now things start to get a little complicated. A lot of fingers are raised, and suspicious activities are followed all the more closely. Why the hell are you sweating so much?

Stage 4- It wasn't me
With or without evidence, someone is blamed for all the happenings, and his most likely reply would be...It wasn't me.

Murphy's Laws

What's that?

The laws have little to do with any individual and definitely nothing to do with Eddie Murphy. Murphy's law is a term used to describe something along the lines of "if anything can go wrong, it will."

Classical Murphy's laws:

1. If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway
2. If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something
3. Law of Probability: The probability of being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of your act.
4. Law of Variation: If you change lines (or traffic lanes), the one you were in will always move faster than the one you are in now (works every time)
5. Law of Mechanical Repair: After your hands become coated with grease, your nose will begin to itch and you'll have to pee.
   

Modern laws:

1. The cellphone will start to ring the moment you enter the bathroom.
2. If you are expecting an important call, your cellphone will ring and when you say "hello" vodafone's callertunes will start playing.
3. Any cool computer game will need more memory than you have.
4. Your hard-disk will crash the moment you finish your project.
   

New Website

After 2 previously failed attempts, I finally manage to put up my website together.
It took me over a fortnight to get it together and there are still some issues with IE. But I am still more than satisfied with the outcome.

It is being hosted on one of the free servers at 110mb.com and hence may be a little slow.
http://raulpinto.110mb.com/ or http://raul.co.nr/

Gates shut on Microsoft

Little Known Facts about Bill Gates

• William Henry Gates was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington.
• His SAT score was 1590. The top score for the test is 1600.
• By the age of 17, Gates had sold his first computer program, a time-tabling system for his high school, for $4,200.
• Gates told his university teachers he would be a millionaire by age 30. He became a billionaire at age 31.
• While at Harvard, Gates co-wrote Altair BASIC, which became Microsoft’s first product.
• He met his wife, Melinda French, in 1987 at a Microsoft press event in Manhattan while she was a worker for the company. They would go on to get married on New Years Day in 1994.
• In 2002, Bill Gates was considered more idolized than Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tungin a poll of teenagers in Hong Kong and China. The survey was conducted by the City University of Hong Kong.
• He is currently having a building named after him at Carnegie Mellon University, called the Gates Building of Computer Science.
• Bill Gates earns $250 every second; that’s about $20 million a day and $7.8 billion a year!
• If he drops a thousand-dollar bill, he needn’t even bother to pick it up because in the four seconds it would take him to pick it up, he would’ve already earned it back.

Another interesting write-up that I stumbled through yesterday, was one of his employees account on Bill's work techniques. It just goes to show, both the talent as well as dedication showed by the world's richest man.
Joel Spolsky’s tale of a technical review with Bill Gates

Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company’s software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He understood Variants and COM objects and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables—and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date and time functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.

I think...therefore I am

I happened to watch a documentary which went by the name of 'The Secret', an adaptation of a previously published book.
The first 5 minutes of the movie is very cluttered, it appears to follow the rendition of Da Vinci code, and understandably makes an effort to replicate it's effect. But once the narration starts getting clear, it starts looking more like Discovery channel material.
I did'nt intend to make this sound like a movie review, but thought it was worth a mention, coz I could really connect with the point of view of the producers.

The working of the universe is beyond any mortal's understanding, but that does not mean one cannot live in harmony with the other higher elements. In other words, it is possible to control the vistas of the future. Even though this may be apparent on a regular basis nobody pays attention to these things. Neither did I, till at least a week back. Two incidents that made me rethink my approach towards life.

I travel by bus daily, not just that I more often than not take at least two buses to college/classes. That means I will have to approach 4 bus conductors daily to buy a ticket, that makes it 28 tickets in a week and approximately 1120 tickets in a year. So after traveling for 3 years, and after buying tickets worth over Rs. 10000, I suddenly think, what the heck! why should I buy a ticket, the probability of me bumping into Ticket Examiner is not greater than me being eaten up by a shark. I don't buy a ticket but keep thinking about what if I am eaten by a shark caught by a Ticket Examiner. And yes, I was caught by a TC that day.


I wonder if I didn't think about the Ticket Examiner all through the way, would he still have been there at the bus stop. Does the way one thinks, really shapes the universe? , whatever be the case, I am a believer.

Quote of the year

"You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy,the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named Bush, Dick, and Colon".

-Comedian Chris Rock