Waamax

I would be really pleased if i have a 50% chance of seeing a bright buld on switching on. But with 8/24 the probability of getting light at any hour and 4 of those precious hours i would be sleeping, I am left with 4/24 chance of getting the power.

Ok here’s a normal day. When I wake up either there will be electricity for an hour (if I managed to wake up at 7 am) or one hour after I woke up.

So first things first. If I have an hour of power in the morning, the first thing I would do is to get to the kitchen and use my rice cooker for the meal (this will save some of my efforts). I would tap in all my appliance and gadgets. I will charge my notebook, my handy, my ipod and the emergency lights. It looks good to see all my gadgets feeding at the same time. Meanwhile my house owner would use the crucial power hour to pump the water up the tank so that we would have the running water (still a luxury here in kathmandu) for the next 24 hours.

Afternoons are ok. With the power generator in the office, life has been lot better. But afternoon sessions are also marked with frequent power cut off. And I feel that the generator is running for every minute of the day. Its consistent noise and smoke never seems to disappear. At the end of the day i always have a mild headache due to the constant smoke from the power generator.

Lunch time. We, the employees of the two companies sharing the power generator, usually go out for lunch at the same time so that we could give the generator a much needed rest. The evening schedule is, either i have the electricity from 4pm to 8pm, or upto 12 pm from 8 pm.

If it’s the former, I should make home before 7:30 pm so that i could use the 30 minutes of power for my rice cooker. [Phew]. If its the latter, i won’t mind staying at the office as late as 8 pm so that i can savor the power.

The toughest part is pumping the water from the supply pipe to our tank that happens once in every two days. From the combination of the power schedule and the water schedule, we only have a day with electricity to pump the water to our tank. That leaves us with manually pumping the water at 3 am in the morning. Can life gets any tougher?

Usually when I have a complete darkness at 8 pm i am left with very few options. I work in my pc for about an hour, use my energy back up light for next hour. Then no power.

Candles? Yes. How long? Until I start having burning eyes.

Moral: Live with the rules, and your life doesn’t get that worse.

It’s really very tough (surprisingly). I never thought it would be that difficult. This experience was painful coz’ I wasn’t at all ready for it. At 6 pm we left our office [and our bags and notebooks] for a movie. When I returned at about 9:30 for my notebook, i realized i don’t have a key for the entrance door (thanks to the one who changed it recently). I went home all alone.

The first question “What am I gonna do before I call it a day?”. As there was no notebook, there was no internet. what about some music, movies, may be a bit of work, a short article, some good reads in pdf??
Damn! Then I realized that all the alternatives I had, they are all tied up with my notebook. I felt terrible lack of resources.

It’s too romantic to say but “I won’t last a day without you”.

One of my friends at Bikalpa has the busiest phone around. Yeah he receives about 15 to 20 calls every hour and  that too from the same number. and Yeah he is in love. When I tried to find out the actual transactions of his romantic talks, he gave me his cell phone recharge history.

Well love does cost some money.

Good for him that he is getting married next month . and that might not have anything to do with his future phone calls.

It’s been about a year I read this book. Influential. I make little summary while reading and that helps to gain a quick idea about the pages read in the past. i did the same with this book. Today i found that page in one of my old files and i felt that this should be digitally saved not to repeat the same mistake.

- Practice the ‘Heart of the Rose’ at same time, same way every day (umm i forgot what heart of rose means. some kind of yoga may be. have to go through the book once again. see that’s why summary is useful)
- Garden -> Mind -> Filled with dellightful treasure
- Lighthouse -> Power of goals and the imp. of discovering your calling in life
- Kaizen: constant & never ending improvement
- The only limit to your life are those that you set yourself.
- Practice:
- Rest Break: Healing power of silence, come to know who you really are
- Physical: yoga
- Deep breathing: not just to survive, but to thrive
- Vegetarian food

- Be the student of life: You can much utilize from the classroom of existence
- Read for at least 30 mins daily
- Every evening after a full day of productive work, retire to a silent corner of your home and reflect on your day
- The only way to improve tomorrow is to know what you did wrong today
- Rise with the sun
- nothing to extremes, everything in moderations
- If you do anything for 21 days in a row, it will become a habit
- Live eveyday as if it was your last day
- Listen to music; it is a solace at all times
- The ritual of spoken word: mantra; man (maind) tra (freeing)
- You sow a thought, you reap an action. Reap an action, you sow a habit. sow a habit, you reap a character. Sow a character, you reap your destiny.
- Thought -> Action -> Habit -> Characters -> Destiny
- The power of simplicity
- One must never live in the thick of the thins
- Unless you reduce your need, you’ll never be fulfilled
- When the student is ready, the teacher will appear
- Life gives you what you ask of it, it’s always listening
- When you control your thoughts, you control you mind. When you control your mind, you control your life
- sotori: constant awakening
- I am more that i appear to be, all the world’s strength and power rests inside me
- Live with discipline, will power
- Discipline is built by consistently performing small acts of courage
- Enlightened people are power driven
- Don’t let other steal your time (this i must practice very often)
- Be ruthless with your time. Learn to say ‘No’
- The quality of your life will come down to the quality of your contribution
- Cultivate richer relationships
- Happiness is a journey, not a destination
- Embrace the present

I can immediately feel the positive vives just by going through it. Good words can make good life.

Incident one:

We have regular load shed. Last month it was seven hours a day (Yes you heard it right, seven hours). It has already been tough time tapping the electric power in home and office.
Recently there was a light of hope to reduce this severity. A new 70 MW hydro power project finally start to operate and it was expected to reduce the load shed time. Hope.
But a couple of days after the announcement and the inauguration made, the load shed increased to ten hours a day.

Sub incident one: Now it’s 16 hours a day. Crazy.

Incident two:

Dr. Rijal has been my mother’s doctor since her operation some 10 years ago. I don’t know whether he was such a popular figure then, but today I am sure that all the Gyno patients (all over the country) only want to consult him. Popular. However, it’s not his popularity I am complaining about. It’s about the management of the doctor appointments. The hospital is really taking for granted the patients for its most popular doctor.
Some four months ago they have the system of registering patient’s name in person or by phone. Needless to say it would take about 2 months to get the appointment.  It would take time but it was easy calling from some 500 kms away from the capital and fixing an appointment. However, there has been a slight change in the way the patient appointment is made today.
You have to be there (at hospital at Chabhil) at about five am in the morning and you better be twenty five early birds. What a shame! The pity is that they only start confirming your appointments at about 7:30. I wasted about two and half hours of my precious morning time being in the queue like a fool and listening non-sense hospital talks.

Incident Three:

We (my company) have an account at Himalayan Bank. It’s ok. But we have some issues that are of concern. Distance, average wait time, account flexibility etc are some of the things I find not as I expected. Any way it’s almost been 2 years we have been with them.
Last week we got an offer to be one of the esteem clients of Laxmi Bank (just another bank). As it was lot closer to our office and as they promised (they actually did) various additional services and customer care and satisfaction, we decided to give it a try.

Well I went to their office. The interior was ‘Wow’. But that’s what I was not looking for. I was looking for how much they value their client. Just after half an hour talk with one of their supervisors I figured out that Customer care was one of the things they have in the bottom of their preferences.
Thank you. See you in next life.
Well it’s hard not to expect.

Now be honest with this. I know all of you have listened to the song “Hotel California” by Eagles (it would be shame if you haven’t). I am pretty confident that most of you liked that song really very much for obvious reasons. But have you ever tried to ponder on what this song really meant?

I know you can enjoy songs without even understanding a percent of it. But have you ever given a
thought about the wording in this song?

Don Henley (the singer) in his own words. This is about materialism and excess. California is used as the setting, but it could relate to anywhere in America. Some of the wilder interpretations of that song have been amazing. It was really about the excesses of American culture and certain girls we knew. But it was also about the uneasy balance between art and commerce.

On November 25, 2007 Henley appeared on the TV news show 60 Minutes, where he was told, “everyone wants to know what this song means.” Henley replied: “I know, it’s so boring. It’s a song about the dark underbelly of the American Dream, and about excess in America which was something we knew about.
We were all middle-class kids from the Midwest. Hotel California was our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles.

Glenn Frey: “That record explores the under belly of success, the darker side of Paradise. Which was sort of what we were experiencing in Los Angeles at that time. So that just sort of became a metaphor for the whole world and for everything you know. And we just decided to make it Hotel California. So with a microcosm of everything else going on around us.”

Now this is interesting:
An alternative interpretation of the meaning of the lyrics is that the song is a description of the journey from Need to Love and Marriage to Divorce and ultimately to the impossibility of regaining the life and happiness of the pre-divorce state.

Initially the traveler is feeling the need of a relationship (“My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim, I had to stop for the night”). The traveler meets his love and gets married (“There she stood in the doorway. I heard the mission bell”). A marriage commitment opens up the possibility of happiness but also the traveler is aware and vulnerable to the possibility of intense unhappiness (“And I was thinking to myself, this could be heaven or this could be hell”)

Unfortunately the marriage dissolves and his love becomes obsessed with money (“Her mind is Tiffany-twisted”) where Tiffany” refers to the very expensive jewelry store, Tiffany & Co. With the divorce there is the division of property – she got the Mercedes Benz. After the breakup when he sees her with any guys she reassures him that the pretty, pretty boys” are just friends.” In this new world of being single the other singles he meets do their dance in the courtyard” of life. They generally fall into two groups: There are those who can’t stop talking about their Ex (“Some dance to remember”) and there are those who don’t what to say anything at all about their past marriage (“some dance to forget”).

Now in this world of being divorced he longs to return the pre-divorced state of happiness (“So I called up the captain, please bring me my wine”), but he finds that his happiness is now irrevocably in the past (“We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969″). Deep into the post-divorce single’s scene with “mirrors on the ceiling, the pink champagne on ice” he is reminded that “we are all just prisoners here, of our own device.” He and others want this divorce nightmare to be over, yet – “they stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast.” Now frustrated, he panics and is “running for the door. I had to find the passage back to the place I was before” But he is brought up short when the night man informs him that “You can checkout any time you like (commit suicide), but you can never leave” (become pre-divorced).

There are two choruses in the song and each mention the “Hotel California.” Around the time the song was written, California was experiencing the highest divorce rate in the nation. Each chorus has lines that remember his past marriage (“Such a lovely place”) and his past lover (“Such a lovely face”). The first chorus indicates that there can always be more divorces (“Plenty of room at the Hotel California, any time of year, you can find it here”). The second chorus points out that as a part of divorce you will always “bring your alibis.”

song facts from : Songfacts

Ye it happens. But this time it’s happening with higher frequency.

Incident 1: Oct 18, 2008.
All geared up for my Gmat exam. I thought I was well prepared for the exams. I was a little skeptical about my practice on the ‘Reading Comprehension’ of the verbal section. But for rest I thought I was solid. A score above 700 was well in the cards. Oct 19, 1 pm. Bang! The score was a mere 630 and all my high verves disappeared. I felt disappointed, low and very insecure. I was almost convinced for a retake when a chat with my friend at Viginia Tech (the primary college I have targeted) convinced me that it was a good score to rock in VT. Stable Again.

Incident 2:
I applied to VT and Katz MBA program. As a safe college I applied to Flores MBA (LSU). The interview was’Okay’ with all the colleges.
Result Time.
LSU result was the first to arrive. Damn! I got on the wait list. Time to go down again. It was particularly hard to take because this was supposed to be my safe college, my safest link that would never let me down. Well I can expect nothing from the rest.
A week later I got admission to VT. I was on a high for obvious reasons.

Well there’s definitely more to life.

For most of us (including me), it  has been a tough time understanding about the current global financial situation. Here’s something that will help people like us to understand it better.

How we reached the situation of today?

Once upon a time in a village in India , a man announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10.

The villagers seeing there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them.
The man bought thousands at $10, but, as the supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their efforts.

The man further announced that he would now buy at $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer rate increased to $25 and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now act as buyer, on his behalf.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: ‘ Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when he returns from the city, you can sell them back to him for $50. ‘

The villagers squeezed together their savings and bought all the monkeys.

Then they never saw the man or his assistant again, only monkeys everywhere!

Welcome to WALL STREET….!!

source: unknown

How often does this happen? I mean using your own application that is under the development phase. Reason: if you feel comfortable and convenient using it then only you can expect the same with your customers.

Our flagship product ‘My Desire’ (no, it’s not a porn site) is a Multitask/Multiproject management tool. And we have been using it for our own internal projects and task management. There’s no lying when I say that MyD was developed using MyD.

Our intentions behind eating our own dog food: Use it yourself even if it has bugs and limited features and functionalities until it frustrates you to the extent that you have to fix it or live with it. In fact it’s a learning curve. We have so many ‘Aha’ moments using it for our daily use. Many features were added as we felt the necessity of those things (yes we listen to our customers and client too).

Many of the features which we (programmers and developers) thought cool were confused by our clients. e.g.: in Myd we previously had this feature of displaying the internal panel window in three stages, minimized, maximized and normal view. For developers, minimizing a panel would create enough space for other windows. However it was not the expected behavior for the normal users as they have seen very few of those kind of minimizing windows.

Back to the dog food.  Now in MyD, we have various features which are the result of our own personal requirements that we felt necessary. Lately I accidently accepted a task that was assigned to a group of which I was a member of but the task wasn’t of my domain (this is the task assigning functionality of MyD). Mistake. Now I can’t undo it. That was one of the ‘Aha’ moments. We need the undo feature in the myd product.

Eating your own dog food indeed helps you to make you more aware of your product. Instead of client Mr. X complaining about the lack of the feature or a bug, it’s always good to find that within your team. So use your products to make it better.

Btw, when are we adding that ‘undo’ feature to MyD? .. Dev? .. Prashant? .. Klaus?

My Europe trip has left me wondering about how people think differently (or rather how we have to think) on things that effect ours lives daily. Back home we usually face a daunting task of getting petroleum and gas as we like. We need to be in queue for hours to get our bike refueled and it might take a month to refuel your gas cylinder. Obviously they matter to us greatly in everyday life. So if things get better and we get those daily needs without much hassle then these things excite us. We talk about how we managed to remain without being frustrated during 9 hours a day load shed. We inform our friends and relatives that life’s getting easier, or you can get those things at these particular places. If not we discuss how the fuel shortage problem has hit us hard again and how difficult and tiring it is to get to the office walking. We discuss about how long we waited in queue to get refuel or to what extent we went to get a bit of what we wanted. The monsoon is ending soon and the topic will now shift from fuel shortage to the daily load shed. We talk about these voids usually. It’s not a hobby it’s a necessity, you have to learn to survive. Wise men said “sorrow is divided when shared”.

These talks are a total shock in Europe. infact people there have never ever imagined in their worst nightmare that getting your bike refueled will take you hours or you have to wait a month to get your cooking gas cylinder or you have to face 9 hours a day daily load shed. They haven’t worried about those things ever and it’s likely that they won’t’ have to in future too. Infact I didn’t find anything they should be worried about. Perfect living condition, good income, healthy and happy people, clean and healthy surrounding, cheerful and friendly people, adequate resources, perfect weather etc…Did I say weather??Yes. The only thing I found them worrying is about the weather.

When I was there we have weekend’s plans to visit the Alps. But they were worried about our plan at Wednesdays as they already knew what the weather is is going to be in the weekends. It rained on both the weekends. They often discuss about what the weather is going to be in the next couple of days. I wouldn’t have worried about the weather a bit. Back home in Nepal it would have been a trivial to worry about the weather. why would I worry about the weather, I have to get a new cooking gas cylinder, my fuel is going to be finished in a week’s time and I don’t have sufficient petrol for my bike too.