Technology, Money & Questions

Teaching is one of the highly acclaimed and noblest profession on the face of the earth. Teaching is such an important profession because teachers shape the future of a society and thus, the country itself. In my opinion, teaching is a little more than any job available in the market; teachers do not only work to earn their living, they also carry a moral responsibility with them. They are not only responsible for their students academic education, they truly hold responsible for the moral and ethical values of their students. Of course, its their job, isn't it? Once you start your schooling, you spend one third of your day at school and that's where you pick up most of your values and belief system.

A good teacher [Of course, everyone of them out their in the teaching profession are good, at least, all of them are good at heart] can easily mend their students at their will. Students will follow their teachers if they really like them, if the teachers really mean something to them. But, tell me earnestly, how many such teachers have you had? In my almost eighteen years of schooling, I could recollect and remember only three such teachers out of ?!?!? I leave the math to you guys. So, why do not we get quality teachers?

As I said earlier, teachers should not work only to earn their wages. They have to look beyond that, they should understand the kind of responsibility they hold in the society. But, I'm not sure how many teachers out there actually appreciate their work. Most of the time, they end up teaching only because they didn't get anything better to do or simply with a notion of leading an easy life. Blimey, how in the heavens can shaping up a child for a better future could be a simple job?

Teachers should understand their himalayan responsibility and wholeheartedly dedicate themselves for the cause. In the very first place, they should know how to lead the students. Students are like a herd and they need someone to guide them. They do not need some i-only-do-it-for-money junkie.

How many teachers actually upgrade their knowledge to keep with up the changes happening out there? Of course, many of them, but still for a country like India, many is not too many. We need teachers who can motivate students to do great things; teachers who can inculcate humanity into the young generation; teachers who can improve the creativity of their students; teachers who can imbibe morality and ethical principles to whoever they teach.

If education helps us to be civilized, teachers should help us to remain human as much as possible.

"When god created humans, everyone of them were good people. They did not have any problems between them. When time went by, a group them separated themselves and called themselves the bad guys. This two group fought with each other eternally. And then, good and bad people started living together. They were not two different groups anymore, they became more cunning. But, now-a-days, every human being personifies both good and bad qualities. They are not totally bad or totally good. What they feel defines what they are at that moment."

In this 21st century, I believe, teachers have a greater deed of infusing more good qualities to subdue the bad guy within every human. It's the job of the society and the government to give all the sophistication to these noble professionals. What say people?

I'm an avid reader and a great fan of J. K. Rowling's master piece "Harry Potter Series". I should say that I re-invented my reading habits through J. K. Rowling's books. According to me she is the next best imaginative person to Leonardo Da Vinci. Of course, no one can best Leonardo Da Vinci. I should write a separate article on him, now back to the topic. I don't think we need any introduction for the Harry Potter series. So, I'd right away get into what I want to write here, the lessons I learned from reading the Harry Potter series.

1) You are what you are because of the choices you made. Chances doesn't dictate your destiny, rather choices do. When it comes to proficiency in magic, Tom Riddle, the Villain is as good as Dumbledore, the teacher. But Tom Riddle chose to be the bad guy, very simple.

2) If you are gonna wait for you to be prepared to act, you are going to wait forever. Because, you are not gonna be fully prepared at any point of time. We age daily and with that, we improve our knowledge base too.

3) Do not be judgmental about anyone. Prejudice is preposterous. Keep your opinions nimble enough to change them at will if necessary.

4) Find what you are best at and try to work on improving it. Know your strengths, more than that know what you are weak at.

5) Give everyone their due respect. No one is inferior to any one. Everyone have their fair share of dirt with them and all of them are as good as anyone else.

6) Always do your best to help others. It is the best happiness you can earn yourself.

7) Stand up to fight for everything that is worthy enough. If you do not stand up for yourself, probably you are not going to stand up for anyone or any other thing in your life.

8) Love your friends as much as you love yourself. And learn to forget their misdeeds because no one is perfect in this world, including you. Always give them a chance when they come back and buy yourself a chance when you need it.

9) Always try to keep your head on your shoulders. Do not let your attitude rule your mind. Think before you act. Never let your principles die, because they maketh what you are.

These are the nine golden rules I learned from my much favorite Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling.

I just can't imagine I was once a kid with unwavering doubts and questions almost about everything. I'm pretty much sure that you were also a child with curiosity and eagerness towards every simple thing life threw at you. Why wouldn't you be? Our thoughts were pure, our ideologies were not skewed, we had a really broad acceptance range; mainly we all had a burning curiosity that is not judgmental and we're not afraid of being wrong.

I've always marveled this peculiar characteristics of children, the ability to come up with an answer never worrying about the relevancy towards the context. Indeed excellent. Though we surely know the child wouldn't know the answer for a question, we still ask. Just to marvel the beauty of the child's handy work.

It is the annual day celebration of Sophie play school. Three kids, dressed up like fruits, slowly ascended the stage with a timid look on their tiny fish eyes. The first kid wore a bright yellow banana dress, the dark red apple dress made the second kid ravishingly beautiful and the third one had a plump orange dress. Too afraid of the crowd, they tried to stand as close as possible in vain because of their larger than life fruit costume. All they have to do is to speak two lines about the fruit they depict. Mr. Banana is slated to start first and the bell rang, yes that's the cue.

Mr. Banana took a step forward, looked at the crowd, smiled and happily said, "I'm banana. I'm very yellow and I'll make you a strong fellow."

Next it is Mr. Apple's turn. Panic struck him as soon as he saw the crowd. For his surprise, he felt good after a couple of hard minutes. He let out an audible sigh and said, "I'm Orange. I'm round like a ball and I'm good for all." Everybody laughed and clapped, which made Mr. Apple very happy without realizing his mistake.

Of course, Mr. Orange is in the line of fire now. Mr. Orange could not fathom what to do next, it's his turn and his friend spoke his dialogue. Poor boy. He moved forward, saw the crowd and loudly said, "I'm Apple, but orange in color." and looked at Mr.Apple, "I do not remember his dialogue." The hall was deafeningly silent and later everyone broke into an hilarious laughter after grasping what Mr. Orange had said.

This is what a child can do, face the situation without any fear of being wrong. As we grow up, we lose this ability because of our education system. Our education system teaches us how to be correct all the time and we get our due punishments every single we are wrong thus creating a mental block of aversion towards being wrong. We miss something terribly important, if there are no mistakes, there would be no new inventions.

All the education system around the universe advocates similar kind of preference over the subjects. Almost everywhere, Maths gets the highest priority followed by Science and then other subjects. Irrespective of the place or culture, mostly, art comes at last. Even in arts, music and instruments is preferred more than dance and drama. Why is this disparity? Is this what our current civilization wants?

All these education systems are the outcome of the Industrial age of the 19th century. The education systems prioritized its curriculum mainly based on the available demand for the knowledge. In the industrial age, Maths and engineering skills were in very high demand and hence, the importance for this stream. In the 19th century, all you need to get a job is to have a degree. If you had a degree, still you were unemployed, it just meant that you did not want the job.

We no more live in the industrial age, the requirements and demands have changed, but our education systems are not reflexive enough to grab the changes.

We are in a high state of "education inflation". With more and more people graduating year after year, college degree and the traditional subjects lost its value. Education system is designed based on the needs of the industry and the current information industries requirements are multi-fold. We need a change, a change for brighter future of the next generation.

Why don't our education system teaches dance as the way Maths is taught? Creativity and intuition are equally important now. Education system should not preempt the children, rather they should nurture their creativity and help them to take it to the next level.

Amazon provides several services over web and one among them is Amazon EC2 - Elastic Cloud Computing - Infrastructure as a Service. Amazon EC2 is a web service that enables you to launch and manage server instances in Amazon's data centers using APIs or available tools and utilities.

Using Amazon EC2 you can deploy hundreds of servers within minutes and you can also reduce your number of servers as easily without any hassles. And the best part is, you will have to pay for only what you actually use. Yes, Amazon charges these services on hourly basis. The main advantage in choosing Amazon EC2 is its support for instance types of various configurations. You get machines with configurations as small as a PC to a machine which can host a heavy database server. Also, you can enable security restrictions as per your requirements.

With Amazon EC2, you no more have to put endless hours of chewing enormous amount of data to figure out your peak usage. Also, you are relieved from investing a huge chunk of your capital investment in provisioning the hardware infrastructure. You are now at the door step of an enormous transformation in the computing world. You can provision hundreds and thousands of servers in no time during your peak hours. Also, you can just get rid of those extra additional servers when you are no more in need of them.

Moreover, you get complete control your virtual PCs in the Amazon EC2 cloud. Once you create your instance in Amazon EC2, it is certainly like your pretty plain old traditional host. You will given root access to it via SSH on Unix based machines or Remote Desktop for Windows machines.

Most important, the Amazon EC2 is built on top of a highly reliable environment. Also, you can distribute your instances over various availability zones in order to keep your service up. In this case, the failure in an availability region will not affect other regions. Individual regions are well engineered to be insulated from other failures.

You have a variety of instance types to chose from. Different platforms configured with multiple vendor products. Everything at a very cheap price. No matter what, Amazon EC2 will be boon for small and medium sized players in the information industry. They surely need not worry about the capital investment needed to build their hardware infrastructure when Amazon EC2 can provide the world class infrastructure at very affordable price.

Amazon EC2 allows you to configure your security firewalls as you need them to be via web services. All your transactions and data transfers between your EC2 instance and the cloud are encrypted. Your machine in the Amazon cloud can't be anymore endangered than when it was physically present in your organization. And when it comes to vendor durability and reliability of service, the ability to survive depends totally upon the monetory base of the vendor. I do not see any reason to worry with a big player like Amazon.

Verdict: Amazon EC2 is a real good deal.

By the end of every month, if you end up thinking that you do not have enough money then this one is probably for you.

1) You are not earning enough MONEY, it is just that. If you do not have enough in-flow of money, obviously you will not be left with enough money.

2) You are living above your means. By that, I mean your lifestyle. Your expenditures to maintain your highly sophisticated lifestyle goes well beyond your monthly cash in-flow.

3) You are not frugal in your expenditures.

4) May be, you are in a deep debt trap. Chunk of your monthly income goes towards your debts.

5) You have not started your investments to build assets which will get you money and make you wealthy.

What should you do increase your MONEY in-flow?

1) Start leading a life with expenditures controlled well below your means.

2) Live frugally.

3) Do not depend on only one source of income. In this information age, there are a lot of different opportunities available to establish a passive source of income.

4) Pay off your debts. Prioritize your debts, concentrate on one debt at a time and pay it off fully then move on to the next one. By this way, you would be debt free in fairly less time compared to paying some of all the debts every month.

5) Understand your cash flow pattern, take full control over it and avoid unnecessary expenditures. If there is a flaw in your cash flow pattern, no matter how much you earn, you will still be in need of more money.

6) Learn to pay yourself first. Start investing at least 10% of your monthly income.

No body would want to work all their life time to see paycheck after paycheck. Make hay while the sun shines.