Technology, Money & Questions

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.

Alwyn started his day very well, with high spirits. He had properly planned the tasks for the day as he does everyday. He started with his work and never cared to keep an eye over the time. He was totally engrossed in his work, when his telephone rang in a very high pitch making everybody around him to look at him sheepishly. Embarrassed, he picked up the receiver and he didn't expect the caller to be his manager.

"Alwyn, can you meet me in my room in another ten minutes?"

"Sure, Naveen. I'll be there!"

He put the receiver back in its place and started pondering about why his manager would want to meet him. Anyway, he walked over to Naveen's room.

"Ah, Alwyn. Come on in!", greeted Naveen. "Nothing serious. I'm just wondering, will it be possible for you to prepare the annual transactional document for Irvin & co before you relieve for the day. Is it okay?"

Alwyn, thought for a moment and it didn't take a long time to understand that its a laborious task. "I already have a lot of stuffs to do, and this is such a time consuming task. It's already 12 noon now. Its highly impossible to finish it off by evening. I should tell him that it could not be done", he told to himself.

Alwyn looked up at Naveen, thinking of saying a no but said, "Sure, Naveen. No issues."

"Good Alwyn. I'd really appreciate your efforts. I'll catch up with you in the evening."

"Sure, Naveen." Alwyn came out of the room wondering why he does this every time. He cursed himself for letting himself to fall into the same old trap once again. He knew, there are no other options available now. He has to finish it off whatever it may take.

The ability to say a NO when it is highly appropriate has a tremendous impact on many a things in one's life . Lets take Mr. Alwyn's case. Alwyn is very good in keeping up time, a goal based, career oriented, high spirited person. Alas, he is an I-Won't-Say-A-No maniac. Though he has many good qualities, his inability to confront people with a denial doesn't allow him to be what he wants. It doesn't takes a genius brain to understand his problem. All you need to do is to sit back for a while and think about it. You are sure to find a bit of yourself in my friend Mr. Alwyn.

Being bad at saying NO is an universal problem. Every single human being around the globe faces this issue and those who master this specific skill always have a clean conscience and a better lifestyle.

Time to hit the grapevine. Read carefully.

Why do most of us hesitate to say a NO?

Because, we are human beings and we've been accustomed to live in a society. The answer is just that simple. Remember, more often we say "yes" to someone in order to please other person. We do it many a times in a row, we increase the expectation of the other person and also, with that the dependency level. And one fine day, we may not be able to do it and we will feel guilty, leaving the other person fuming over us. Both of us will suffer.

Why is it important to say a NO when it is necessary?

1) You should be able to stick to your plans, goals and strategies.
2) Helps in better planning and finding out alternate solutions.
3) Avoids eleventh hour surprises.
4) Helps in establishing proper expectations.

How and when to say a NO?

1) Be polite and explain the reasons properly, but only if it is necessary. You need not explain yourself to every one.

2) If the other person is persistent, so you be. Be persistent and polite.

3) Analyze and understand before you respond. Understand the implications, and the amount of work involved before accepting a schedule.

4) If need be, ask for some time to do your homework. Its no bad to spend some time before hand to come up with a proper schedule.

But, saying a "NO" is not always possible. Yes, you heard it right. You may not have the liberty all the time. So, what would you do then? Just accept it, say "YES". But make your stance very clear. Make sure, the other person understands that they owe you one.

Our actions contribute only a 10% of whatever happens in our life, rest whopping 90% happens due to our reaction. So, think before you react.

"Okay, honey. I gotta go. I've a very big day tomorrow. I love you, bye!", I ended the call with my girl Natasha and sheepishly looked at the watch. Oops, I did it again, the time is well past 3'O clock in the morning and I'm gonna be royally screwed tomorrow. It's okay, after all work-life balance is more important, isn't it?

Suddenly, I felt an urge to go for a walk. Of course, not the best of an idea when you have an important consult meeting with your client. But, its 3 AM in the morning and I've this early-morning-idiosyncrasy, I just won't get sleep now. Oh, its not that I wake up everyday by this time. I just won't get to sleep that easily if I get to bed in the late hours of the night. And with all the consult meeting and stuffs, I'll really get hyperactive and wouldn't sleep in the end. So, I decided to take an early morning walk to the park in my neighborhood and I swore myself to be back in half hour.

The park is very near to my house, just about 5 minutes of walk. I locked my room, very much unnecessary. Even, if some burglar manages to get into my house, he would pity me and leave something for me. I do not stay in the same place for a long time or rather, I do not get to stay. Either I'd have to move to some other place because of my work or there will be one or the other reasons to move on. Not sure whether I fabricate those reasons, never tried to analyze them anyway. love something new every now and then.

I slowly strolled along the side of the road towards the park and got a glimpse of two or three stray dogs looking at me devilishly. I often laugh at people when they say that they're afraid of stray dogs. Now I see it very clearly. The dogs really seemed to have greater impact in the deserted road with deathly silence.

I should have brought my jacket, I could feel the chillness in my spinal cord. I envied everyone who is sleeping in their cozy bedrooms. I had a weird feeling of someone following me for quite some time now. When I turned back, I'm totally appalled by seeing my company, one of the stray dogs. It's eyes were glowing like red hot iron and I don't know whether it has any plans of tasting my blood. I had to beg myself not to run.

I started to walk briskly when already I reached the park. At least, the park is well lit, one less thing to worry about. I decided to go around the park once and leave to my room. The park is full of tall trees and the moon light formed a wonderful silhouette, just picture perfect. Just like my Natasha.

Natasha, we have been dating for the past one year. Thanks to my friend Ramya. Natasha and Ramya were colleagues. Natasha, is just perfect, a girl of my liking in each and every bit. I have felt many a times that we're indeed made for each other. Thinking about Natasha made me very happy as it had always been from day one.

But, something is not quite right for the past one week or so. We have been fighting a long time, of course its a part and parcel of being in a relationship. But, we never fought this much in our more than one year stint of togetherness.

I'm thinking about our last conversation over phone. It started off very well with a default discussion about our respective work day and slowly the talking drifted towards our marriage. Of course, I'm the one to start it. I wanted to get married , I do not wish to waste time any more. I knew that she is the one for me, and I'm pretty much sure that she also feels the same way about me. But still she is not yet ready for the big decision. So, I picked up the topic, she said no as usual and we fought for god only knows how many hours. Its 4'0 clock now and I felt very sleepy. I walked back to my room and just crashed in my bed.

I woke up on time in the morning, did not care for my breakfast and rushed to the office. It's a real big day. Suddenly, its seven in the evening and I'm not yet done with my work. My phone rand and went silent for the third time in line. I was cursing whoever invented the mobile phone and suddenly it doomed on me that I had dinner plans with Natasha. I told her that I'll pick her up from her office. It was her, she had called me thrice and I bet you that she is already waiting for me. I have no other choice, packed my laptop and started running to the parking lot. I called her on the way, she didn't pick my call as expected.

After a considerate amount of effort,I convinced her and we went to our favorite place for dinner. All went well until I asked to marry her.

"Ratheesh, I do not understand why would you want to get married so soon. I just can't imagine getting married now, we're together for just over an year and I've not got settled in my job either."

"Natasha, listen. For gods sake, I'm 29 years old now. Don't you think that your argument is quite baseless? I never told you to quit your job. All I'm asking you is to marry me."

She just gave me an disapproving look. And neither of us spoke for the rest of the dinner. Well, at least it was peaceful. I dropped her, reached my home, finished off my pending work and dozed off. The next morning I got a call from Natasha. She has got an opportunity to go to UK for an year and she has decided to take up the offer. Bang!!!

Just then I realized it. We're already in the expiry date of our relationship. That's what all the fuss is about. Great, didn't I tell you, I just do not get to continue with anything for a long time. Within a weeks time I bade her good bye and we parted away as good friends. Of course, I like her a lot, but I like this change too.