Inspirational note from Teddy Roosevelt

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

(From his speech "The Man in the Arena" April 23, 1910 Sorbonne in Paris, France)

The Shopping Cliche

I love shopping, and it is not one of my husband's favourite activities.

When I say I love shopping, I am not an obsessive shopper, who shops 8 hours at a stretch, or demagnetizes the credit card with use. Every once in a while I love to stroll through the aisles, just looking at the interesting things out there, browsing if you may - but not necessarily online.

When something attracts my attention I alert the better half to take note. All I have to do is say is:
"Isn't this nice"
I can reel the reminder of the conversation in my sleep:
"Yes, it is....Why don't you buy it?" he quips.
"I only said it was nice, I never said I wanted to buy it!"
"Well, if you don't want to buy it, why bother telling me?"
"Because I thought of sharing my obs."

Oh well....I never learn, and he never learns. I may be generalising here, but when women shop and say something is nice, it is not always with the desire to acquire the article. There are times when the intention is to buy, but THAT, you can sense in the tone and eyes. (In such situations, regardless of what you say, we buy the article.)

Here is my theory with shopping: you have to browse around to see what you like enough to buy.
Here is my better half's theory: you have to browse around only when you know you like something well enough to buy.

My question is: how do you know you like something enough to buy, unless you spend some time aimlessly looking around?

RSS Feeds

Recently, I came across the term called RSS which denotes Rich Site Summary. All it means is that, you can keep track of websites for its contents without having to manually visit the list of websites that you normally read. You just log-on to this one site which keeps track of all the latest information from the sites that you are interested in. There are several feeder/aggregator software out in the web. Some of them run on your PC and downloads the feeds as and when you log-on to internet so that you can read the information offline. Some of the web-based software needs you log-on to a site which will contain the feeds from your preferred websites.

I tried Google Reader and it has a descent interface that is simple to use. The log-in is the same as your gmail-account. Try using it and I am sure you will like it...No more worries about missing a blog or news from your favourite website, unless you have too much time at your disposal and you insist that you like to manually type the web site every few minutes...:)... If others have suggestions/experiences about using RSS versus Atom versus XML, do share it.

A Moral Dilemna - Should I lead or follow????

Should I lead or should I follow? Sometimes this is a moral dilemma which we face. Consider this situation. It is your anniversary today and also a public holiday. You have promised to take your spouse out to a movie. If you defect on your promise a potentially unbearable cost is imposed. Hence you decide to go to the movie theater and buy tickets in advance rather than risk bearing the cost. Assume that the theater only sells 100 tickets (5 movies 20 seats each) a day of which only 25 tickets (5 tickets for each movie) are sold in advance. Also assume that you did not choose the movie you want to go to in advance. You do not have any information on the relative merits or demerits of a given movie. Hence one optimal selection rule could be to follow others making the choices. For instance if you find that people are quickly making a bee line for one movie, the likelihood of the movie being good is higher and hence you choose to go for that. Like you 50 others are also celebrating their anniversary and the same rules of the game as above apply to them.

Question: Would you want to wait for others to make a choice before deciding?

Obviously the answer is no. Given that there are 50 people and only 25 tickets, if you wait sufficiently long the likelihood of you getting a ticket (for any movie) is virtually zero. Hence this is a situation where leading seems to be better than following. But is this generally the case?

Now lets move to the later part of the evening. You decide that you like to delve into the wild west for the evening and buy tickets to watch the movie titled Crazy Horse. Leaving the cosmetics aside, lets get into the climax. The scene starts with the camera giving wide angle shots of this dusty lil town. People are lazing around with seemingly no work to do. The calm is suddenly disturbed as a fight breaks out between two people in the saloon over the barmaid. As was the case in the middle of the 19th century, disputes were settled with guns.

Let the protagonist be Mr. Sitting Bull and the antagonist be Mr. Crazy Horse. The two are staring at each other with murderous intentions. The townsfolk are scattered around watching. The wild west believed in fair play and there were rules for gun fights. A critical element in any gunfight is that both fighters should have a fair chance and hence drawing the gun too quickly results in foul play which in turn implies that the fighter who draws early will be lynched (implies death through torture of some kind in this situation) by the folks in town.

Now here is the dilemma facing Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The only way to survive is killing the opponent. But either of the fighters do not want to draw early and risk getting lynched. Consider the case of Crazy Horse, if he were to draw he needs some reason to believe that Sitting Bull is making the attempt simultaneously. This implies that there is a good chance that he might not make the first draw. But we know that the person drawing first has the maximum chance of success but at the same time also has the maximum chance of being lynched.

And now with the tension gripping, you turn to your spouse and ask her. So my lady would you follow or lead? Essentially the question is put yourself in the shoes of either Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse and then decide what would your choice be.

And so the answer is?????????????????????

Movies..one after the other

After being married for several years, you would think you know your spouse and what his tastes are. I thought our tastes were largely similar, atleast when it came to movies and food! I don't know whether it got to be similar after so many years of living together and watching the same movies?

But of late, his tastes seemed awry when he picked up movies from Netflix. I remember thinking after a couple of rotten movies, and I am very wary of watching (in my opinion) horrible movies, how he could have selected these movies. I questioned him on whether he looked at the movie description before he picked it and so on. He reminded me that I was the last person to go into our account and modify what was in our queue. I was quite amazed that I actually picked an Adam Sandler movie. Could I have been so careless as to not notice that? I could not remember. These are the times when you wish that you had better memory. I blamed it on stress. It was not an isolated incident. More movies came along that had a bad after taste. We wondered whether we ran out of movies in our queue and the movies that were delivered were Netflix own picks? But the mystery continued, our hypotheses continued and neither of us found the time to solve it.

The last time I dropped of a movie after we had watched it, things finally made sense. The very next day we saw another movie in our mailbox. Boy! Netflix is fast I thought. Why did I ever consider switching to Block Buster? But the timing was suspicious all the same as I had dropped off the movie late in the afternoon. I picked up the envelope and looked at the address, it was addressed to someone else, it was the same street number and same zip code, but a different street! The mystery was solved finally. I can now stop questioning my own actions, my failing memory (!) and my husband's taste. Atleast when it comes to picking movies.

Hammer and Tongs

Saw this more than 10 times. AWESOME power hitting. Yuvraj Singh rocks. Hope yall N Joy

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20827350/

Senator sues God. The news item states it is an attempt to show how frivolous the lawsuit culture is.

So, God is summoned to the witness stand, and you just feel a cool breeze. The judge is leaning towards declaring contempt of court for filaure to appear, and a huge voice thunders from above

"GOD IS OMNIPRESENT. YOU MAY PROCEED"

Well....okay. Please take an oath in the name of God

ON WHAT?

The Bible

If it is on one of the books written on me, shouldn't you bring all the titles: Geeta, Koran and anything remotely religious?

You have to swear on God

I am God.....what use would an oath on myself do?

You would die if you lie

I don't live and I don't die. I am God

Well... are you refusing to take the oath ??

At this point thunder strikes the courtroom, and God is held to task.

Did you make thunder?

Yes that was me spattering in exasperation.

And so it goes ..

Illusion of Understanding

Though the recent renewed acquaintances from shelfari did embarass me a little, it was furthered when I tried to list the books that I have read so far. I wasnt too worried about the fictional bunch which, in my opinion, had very little value addition to my knowledge, other than the entertainment it provided. I was looking at all the technical or scientific books that I have read so far. From a mere bookcase point of view, it was quite impressive. But, I stopped for a moment to reflect on what I learned out of all those books. Yes, I did read those books. But, did I really understand everything that was conveyed? Very questionable...

I have always wondered about how people perceive about what they know. Someone once told me that, you have to have the power of unlearning things in order to learn something new. Though learning, implicitly assumes that you dont know about the thing that you are trying to learn from, reality is, we just try to fill in the perceived gaps that we have in our knowledge base. Most of us, inherently think that our gaps are very small..including me...:)... May be, that is the way human mind behaves... In my opinion, the smaller the perceived gap you think there is, the larger the gap becomes as you learn on top of it.

If such is the case with learning, what about understanding? I think, learning and understanding are two different things. Until someone really understands what they learn, nothing comes out of it. In other words, learning, in my opinion, is closely equivalent to storage of information. It does have it's benefits in certain topics. But, if you think about it, ideas evolve out of you only on things that you really understood. So, if I have never had any new ideas evolve out of me, it probably means that I didnt understand what I read. The only exception to this rule, is the generation of flawed ideas...:) May be, I should get back to school and try out those subjects to really check how far fetched my theories are with respect to reality. Now, should I take that risk... Knowing my capability, I think that wont be necessary..:)

If you are late, you are late..

I was in a hurry. It was a little longer than I anticipated at the post office and everyone was leaving for home! I hurried as much as the relentless traffic would allow, but was still 7 minutes late to my dental appointment and stressing over it. As I made a mad dash from the parking lot to the building as though the short sprint would earn me a few seconds in the stop watch of the imaginary record keeper. As I ran I felt like I was 11, but sadly reality struck. My brain's calculation of distances and the speed of my feet were out of sync. I missed my step and gravity brought me to hug the pavement. I felt the pain as I got off the ground in hurry. As I have done in the past (and I know I am not alone), I did not look at the ground at the imaginary obstacle that tripped me. But unconsciously I looked to see if the people in the building or in the parking lot took notice. Nope, nobody around. Satisfied about that and ignoring the fact that the fall cost me some 2 minutes, I went in.

Every move was excruciating. The kind of pain that makes you want to cry, but you don't because you are an adult and you realize these are insignificant and not tear-worthy. Fortunately, the dental work was painless. I was done with a good report and happy to be leaving. As I was signing the check, the receptionist spoke some sentence that ended in "fall". Did she see me take the fall? I am clumsy, but I don't like others knowing that.

I said "Excuse me", and she said "I said have a great fall". When you are in such pain, the context does not come to you quickly. Now I got it. I smiled in my head and thought, "I just did", I said "You too!". The irony of it all!

Did you know

Did you know that
(a) The gas-station 76 was named after the fact the Brits got kicked out of the US in 1776?
(b) Route 66 used to be from Chicago to LA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_66)