I bought the Monk's Ferrari

The title of the book was catchy and made me to take a look inside (guess that is what author, Ravi Subramanian, expected to happen when he framed this title)

After flipping few pages and reading a chapter, I bought the book. Quite interesting thoughts. Particularly I liked the "work-life balance" topic - a different line of thinking than what is popular trend now. This ought to be interesting for anyone aspiring to climb up the career or establish a corporate empire.

Apart from that, the book is yash (yet another self-help) book. The word Ferrari is sprinkled artificially all over the book; and that was irritating. The last chapter throws some clarity for doing so.

Usually these kind of books drag us to Newyork or SFO, where we are alienated. The Ferrari story line happens at Hyderabadi roads and Mumbai buildings, and so makes us feel at home. Hope we get more books like this.

There is no connection between "Monk who sold his Ferrari" and this book, except the title and few places where author mentions about the earlier book. That was a disappointment for me. I was hoping a dramatic scene where Ravi meets Julian to negotiate the Ferrari and strikes a deal :-)

After watching the sequel of a movie, most likely we feel that the original was better. Same feeling I got with this book compared to "The monk who sold his Ferrari". (Not sure if I can compare). Said apart, this new Ferrari book is worth reading once.

mood-o-meter

Here is an observation I had while watching my mood. When I am in a bad mood, my productivity goes down. Down to the level of loosing MahJongg ! I start playing the game to distract myself from the bad events. While the titles spread in front of me, my mind distracts and wander off into the abyss. Once I loose the focus, the time ticks off. More than that, I find it difficult to match the titles. Sometimes I end up with frustration out the game. The probability of loosing the game is more in such state of mind.

If an interesting game is spoiled with such mood, think about the boring tasks like office work.

The male attraction

While watching discovery or animal planet, it is quite evident that the male species of different animals take the pain of developing skills and/or equipments to attract the female. They own tusk or facial hair or bright colored feathers etc. They have to fight against similar male counter parts who are competing for the same female.

However, there is a drastic difference in case of human beings. Seems like the roles are reversed. We see the amount of effort placed by female to groom up is considerably more than the male counter part. One reason could have been with the male female ratio. In days when war was frequent and dispute were settled over a fight, male population should have been very low, which would have lead to polygynous. In such a world, it made sense for girls to show up bright and beautiful, - not only for finding a guy but to keep him interested after finding.

The modern world is changing. The gender ratio is skewing towards the other side. In India it is very low that already we are seeing the side effects like 'buying the bride', polyandry. May be in the future, guys will get back their natural instinct of shinning up for meeting the girl.

Temple elephants

Had a thought wave about elephants at temples. Was wondering the association. Here is what I got, not sure if this is the right version. In olden days machinery were absent and only muscle power was used to accomplish most of the work. Ploughing, construction, fighting and in many areas, man used animals. Out of the domesticated animals, elephant served the most powerful role due to its jumbo size.

It also made sense to own such a beast at a common ground through common funding. This arrangement works out good for everyone because maintaining an elephant is a costly affair. The benefits out of the elephant was reaped by many.

In those days, temple took the 'common ground' role. Each town had a temple and utilized for many a tasks. Elephant also ended up in the care of the temple and the temple fund.

Other theory could be that the upper-class people required the elephant and instead of they pulling the money from their pocket, they divided the burden among all. In order to hide the dirty task, they popularized the belief that seeing/touching/hearing/smelling elephants are good omen.

Why should we marry?

Watched any action movie with 4 heros? one guy would be a married guy. Other falls in love with the village naughty girl. Third one is the comedian for the movie. The last guy is a bathelor with vigour but aimless. Now these guys join together and bash the evil empire.

The climax! One of the guy should die. That could add more masala to the already stuffy movie. Who shall be the sheap?

How about the guy with the girlfriend? He is the one brought in romantic songs and charm to the movie. Audience wont like the tragic end to him.

Then the married guy? Oh no! what will happen to the widow? We cannot reply that question in the remaining 5 mins and that would give away an incomplete movie.

The movie that kills the comedian will receive a curse. A comedian is seen as a good for nothing guy, but harming him is considered a serious affair. The blame will be placed on the hero (the guy with a gf) for not saving the comedian (who is timid and cant protect himself).

Ok, that leaves with the bachelor. Any objection? Nope. Nobody is waiting for his arrival back at his home. There is no unanswered questions if he dies.

Therefore, it is better to get married; if not atleast get couple of gfs.

Search for an orm

I had to write a small utility that will fetch data from the file system + environment and process them before depositing into a database. I thought of trying an object relational mapping tool to generate java code. That would reduce most of my work.

Avoided heavy weight tools like hibernate, toplink etc. I feel they are suited for complex, multi-tiered applications. I need a simple one.

Upon googling, I got lots of orm available for free. Had to scrutinize each of them and compare pros n cons. Few of them came close. Downloaded them and started checking them.

One worked fine for the sample they gave but failed to work against my db. Another had inadequate doc that I didnt know the step after downloading. Third expected me to write the java code and that tool will map to the db - this is not what I want.

Finally I got the tool I wanted. sql2java - available in sourceforge. Had to tweak the generated code a bit but finally got something to work. In this two days of usage, so far it is smooth.