Aladdin Factor

Book is interesting. Authored by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. There are many things to learn from the book. A sudden awakening, that most of us don't know, is what to ask in life. The barriers in asking are discuss in detail with lots of samples.

Systematically analyzed fear and tips are provided to overcome. That part is very useful. The narration in the book is definitely positive and will help anyone to bring themselves up. Handling change, the beginner's difficulty are discussed well.

Lots of cartoons, quotes, life incidents all over the book made the reading live, easy and comfortable. However, the Aladdin story didn't stick together with the topic. Also I felt the later part of the book kind of redundant (the chapter from 'Ask at Home'). There are many narration from salespersons' diary. Talks about how they cracked some of the difficult deal or situation. Many seemed to be 'yuck' and beyond normal people; may be that is the extra skill acquired by salesmanship and the author suggest others to learn.


Can be read once.

Demystified the other road

Yesterday I went through the 'other road'. It was thrilling experience to go through it as I had created such a curiosity and hype in me. The other road had a big electrical transformer!

New place

I felt working from home causing some side effects. Wanted to have a office setup and worked towards it. Got it done after running around for office space, net, electrical equipments were challengeful tasks of their own. In spite of things going smooth, running around was stressful.

Felt wonderful once things were set and to relax comfortably.

Medical file

Branded, hi-fi, multi-functional corporate hospitals use file system. It is the physical file cover which holds all the patient records, results, observations. If a patient request for a treatment, his/her file is retrieved from the record storage room and passed to concerned dept. Depending on many factors, this process of moving the file takes a happy 30mins to 60mins. Sometimes the staff have a happy hours of playing 'treasure hunt' in order to trace the file.

The patient need to wait in a lengthy queue in the dept for some doctor to analyze. Then n number of tests are expected. Each test will be greeted by a lengthy queue again .. no, ur relative cannot reserve a seat for you in the next test room. If the number of tests tend towards one, then there is a hope for getting treated on the same day.

The big, posh hospitals that charge $$$ follow a different process. They create a five star environment for their A-class patients and take care well.

However, the branded hospital handling middle and lower group of people adapt the same process of file system we saw earlier. I was puzzled to notice the same process in these hospitals. The real surprise was that, why is that a hospital never learn from the bottle necks observed in another hospital system? Atleast the later hospitals could have written smart software to handle the crowd and manage better. Why they didn't?

Suddenly it struck! .. the sales guys!!

This could have been the conversation between the hospital management and sales guys from a software company.

HM: we would like to have an efficient system that would smoothen the process. It should help us keep track of records and refer back easily in a secure manner.
SG: Sure, sir. We will be able to do that. It would take 8 months to develop (and hospital wil have test it), and cost approx 2 million rupees. On the other hand, we have an industry tested solution, which costs 0.3M and can be installed within 2 weeks.
HM: oh, I guess we will go for your solution.



Such primitive system not only punishes the patients who are in the last rung of the ladder; but also the staff, the doctors and the management. Instead of having a smooth process and channeling the crowd thru time management, the current system opens the gate for chaos.

Overcoming Monday blues

It is Sunday early morning. I feel energetic and fresh. Going through the task list for Sunday, which will have special assignments like riding to scenic places.

I feel if we don't laze on Sunday, we will have a fresh Monday morning. See Sunday as any other day, Monday will also be like any other day.

System crash

Ever heard about a person fainting immediately after passing urine? You would hear water flushing and a thud sound of the person falling down. This case has a funny medical name too .. Micturition syncope

Till now I thought only windows os does things like this.

optimal teeth

Is the material by which our teeth are made is the right choice? They seem to corrode easily. Doesn't seem to regrow as it ought to have. Are there any alternative that nature could have tried out?

Could the corrosiveness be aggravated due to modern eating habits?

A family in the train cabin

While traveling in the train, a family got into our cabin. The silence got down. The man came for a send off of his wife, wife's parents. He was getting in and out of the train. Once the train moved, the two kids took turn in getting the attention. Even deciding the dinner time took its own time and discussion. I just reflected if any one of them travelled alone, they would have had dinner without a word and slept by now.

The girl and her mom had lot of things to catch up, hence the light was turned on for a longer time in the night. We had to remind them to switch it off. The small child woke up once in a while and cried with a rhythmic voice. The lady tried to put it back to sleep by threatening in a irritating mood. Her mom tried to pacify the child with an lullabic attempt.

Overall it was a difficult journey.

Drag and Drop class hierarchy

While working with gwt-ext library, I found difficult to understand the available set of classes related to drag and drop functionality. In order to demystify, I took a notes for myself and drew a flow chart. Sharing with others.

Also, if you are looking for useful info on the drag n drop classes, yui seem to have good documents.

Which college to go? None.

Couple of my relatives were sharing their dilemma about the colleges their kids should choose. I suggest them not to send to any college, particularly if the student is talented. Many couldn't digest this suggestion and repel away.

Off late colleges are open at every corner. Businessmen fund these college and their view will be obviously business oriented -- reduce the expense, increase the income. After paying heavy amount as capitation, what we get is poor quality education from incompetent staff.

Is there any alternate? I suggest talented kids to learn skills over net. This is by assuming computer job is what one aims for, which 95% of students aspire towards. The 5% should go to a very good college of their dream fields. Surely those seats will be available without competition and prosperity rate ought to be better.

Will students without world experience, job experience gain technical skills over net? Can they settle comfortably in say, over a year? I feel some kind of collaboration, guidance is needed - which need not be a college. If a college can provide such guidance, it is good.

In such skill acquisition mode for 2 years, I believe the person should be able to solve problems to an extend of matching the expenses to income. With 3+ years, real money should be pumping in. Believe me, there are so much work that needs to be done outside.

Any evidence that this is feasible? Yes, think about the top companies in the country hiring non-computer science students for their software development projects. They see the talented pool to learn things and start working in real projects. They give a 6 month training for them.

If 6 months is all the training one needs, y not we start that when we are out of school?
Many have the secure feeling with having a degree. Correspondence course is the answer.

PS: I went through colleges. My comments above are relevant to the current scenario where colleges focus on minting money in contrast to industry looking for quality engineers.

The other road

While travelling in the bus, I used to see some small village roads bifurcating from the main way. Many times I was curious to know about those unknown roads. Where are they going? Are there interesting things in those roads that I am missing .. like a beautiful scenic spot, or a massive bridge or a village trade show etc. Is that road dry n dull or pleasant n cool? Will there be many passer-by or very few activities?

Is that an old road or introduced in modern days? May be this could be the village road missed by a village boy gone very far, may be attracted by the glamourous city lights (sure the boy wants to come back to this road).

What are the people doing in those villages? Are they missing the village boy or happy with the money he sends?

adding a background grid

Ever wondered how to get a grid background like in some designer tools? Here is a simple way.

Decide on the cell size you want. You may choose 20*30 pixel. Create a image of that size in paint. Draw a line in the last row and last column. You should get a image like this :

Include this image as a background in your canvas. Allow the image to be repeated horizontaly and vertically.

In case of html+css, you may specify as :

.grid
{
background-image:url(../images/bluegrid.JPG) !important;
background-repeat: repeat;
opacity:0.1;
filter:alpha(opacity=10);
}


This should give out the desired result :

mono color picture

Never thought a mono color could give striking effect. Color image always brings multi-color to our mind.

Here is the drawing I did recently.

Who needs newspaper?

With all the stuff net provides us, I started wondering if there is a future for newspaper. Manually someone dropping at 5am, then the paper has to withstand rain, wind, dogs etc and reach my table. I will have to read thru carefully to find articles of interest to me. If I am lucky, I will get one or two.

Wait a minute .. these interesting articles seem to be read earlier! Ya, these are 2 days old in the net. The newspaper guys have conveniently searched in the net and cut n pasted the article into their paper moulding machine. What a cheap trick!

I register to different feeds so that articles of my needs arrive at a particular place easy for me to read. They reach my place as soon as they are written at the creation point. Good classification, searchable options, sharing facilities, preserving them for future use are few points I prefer net way of reading news.

Some people may argue about 'local news'. I feel net is faster n better in that aspect also. There are thousands of social network groups, blogs which actively propagate local happenings. For professional touch of journalism, there are site like citizen matters come in. They cover the local news and keep the readers informed.

Do you think newspaper publication will roll out for long time? May be till rural folks plug in their laptops.

closing ceremony

While strolling in the neighbourhood, a small hardware shop caught my attention. The owner was closing the shop for the day. He had to pick the paint buckets kept in front of the store for display. The buckets ought to be packed inside the small shop. There were other assorted tools and equipments placed outside. His job is to bring them to safe and put down the shutter.

I was thinking about the way I wind up the work. All I have to do is press the shutdown button. At times I complain the machine is too slow while shutting down!

A gaze into future

Looking into the future is always a fun; we had been quite curious to know things will be as the time pass. If we watch early Science fiction movies, we could see what that era expected to happen around 2000+. It is funny to see that and compare with the surroundings now. We had out-pared most of the scientific expectations expressed by those futurists. Some of their imagination never occurred .. (in fact, many are still carried forward). When we think about future, we do have an image of people in bright colored cloth, wearing a electrical wired helmet, also that florescent drink.

Here are few of my thoughts on future:

• Unique identification number for people, at global level
• Tight security, surveillance and low crime rate
• High concentrated urban life style. Mega apartments and narrow path.
• People hardly need to go out as all facilities and work environment are available at their living room.
• Improved medical care but collapses once in a while with massive out burst of unknown illness which claims millions.
• Heavy amount spent on upgrading military, thou war never happens. (Everyone aware of the fatal blow to the planet)
• inferior leadership
  

Let us see if we reach there before hitting a total economic break down or a severe loss of population through political conflicts.

Our view of the surroundings

Other day a pizza delivery scooter entered my street. Being a blind street with just four houses, we rarely get outside vehicles. The pizza guy couldn't see the blindness as the street is too slope and the other side is an open field instead of a wall. He had to reach the end and take a U. Definitely he would have been cursing whoever designed the layout. It is haphazard, we can expect it in such hilly area.

I was wondering what kind of feelings, expression, frustration he would have had about this street. This is his first time in this street, may be in this area too. He might have registered this mistake and try out other paths. Or he might have been too time stressed with his pizza delivery and he may not have observed the street into his internal system.

While thinking about this, I recollected the first time I was in this street. It was different. I was very much relaxed. Being new to the town, I was curious to learn the surroundings, people, buildings etc. We saw the house from outside. I observed the neighborhood. It looked fresh, calm and nice.

After staying here for months, the views and the feelings about the house, street had changed. What a difference can acclimatization can bring in!

gwtExt panel to fill the page

While using gwtExt tools, I wanted the panel to occupy the entire screen. Found that Viewport is the component to use. However I didnt see the required effect in spite of using the Viewport as per the guide. I just got a small, shrinked panel as it used to be. After couple of trial and error, the culprit turned out to be an auto-height method called by the main panel. Commenting this statement cured the problem.

// panel.setAutoHeight(true);

Phone sex

Let us learn kamasutra positions throuh mobile.

Circles and squares

Most convenient structure for nature is to spin out a circle. The spherical planets, stars, galaxies, and tubular-cylindrical body cells, and the beautiful circular pot-holes .. the list is end less. What makes these forms prominent? Two things comes to mind: one is fluid dynamics which forms the pebble, pot-holes, to certain extend the moon and the planets. Second means is the central attraction force. This is the force that bring the atoms into spherical, a planet, star also as spherical.

My wife pointed out a natural square structure. When the body cells are tightly placed in a tissue or somewhere, they tend to form cubical and called cubic cells. There are rare incidents of such sharp shapes. Other area I could think of is, the cliffs and edges formed in mountain ranges when the mountains torn off due to violent quakes or other means.


When it comes to artificial shapes, man made structures are predominantly squares. The house we live, the computer screen, newspaper, this blog template .. goes on. The circular pattern is adapted either out of absolute necessity (wheel, motor coil) or for aesthetic reason (like a big arch in the hall, curvy furniture,)

Looks like it is easy for human to work with squares than circles. There are exception to this rule, like home made dosa :-)