Life in Balance: Amit D. Chaudhary’s Blog
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Interesting personality quiz for fun

The What D&D Character are you? Test

Note from the quiz: Ok geeks, listen up! We all have our favorite characters. Some of us pick the character who can do the most damage; others choose to play a character they can roleplay really well. So, come on, see who you really are in the fantasy world.

My results as a gamer though , it is atleast partially off the mark, still was fun and worth trying

Fighter! Victory! You scored 41!

The clash of steel, the heat of battle, the chaffing of your chainmail bikini. Looks like you’re the fighter. You are tough, strong and have cool head about you. You’re disiplined and tactical. You tend to think with just your muscles though and sometimes you have to get a little help from your more scholarly friends. But don’t worry; somebody’s gotta knock down the door later and smashing’s what you do best. So layeth on the smackdown good warrior and may thine boot find thine opponent’s ass verily.

My results as how I look at life are below, though again it off the mark

Monk! Victory! You scored 3!

“It is time for you to leave Grasshopper.” You travel. Work. Sleep when you can. You’re a monk. You are contemplative, simple and quiet. However, the second anyone gives you shit you fly into a furious whirlwind of martial arts mayhem. Your friends give you the space you need and you only speak when neccessary. However, you’re a mystery to most. You’re most likely to end up wandering the frontier, barefoot with the sun beating down on your ragged hat and on the run from someone. It’s all good though. With any luck, you can get into one of Quentin Tarantino’s films.

• A co-founder is critical, he\she gives suggestions or pushes an idea in a different direction than you would, recommends changes to approach, and will ideally complement things (If you rush to implement, she\he would explore more) and finally is the first person to sell a concept to.

• Ideas do not matter that much. Somebody might be doing or has done what you start with and things will change.

• Remember it is a for profit venture, you should at least plan to ensure it quite useful to many users and maybe some plan of making money. Otherwise it is a personal project.

• A startup will require a lot of focus, time and energy to do it justice. It should ideally be the only thing in your life, the Frog if you may.

Lavender’s Hormone Havoc
Lavender and other fragrant oils may cause breast growth in boys. Pediatric endocrinologist Clifford Bloch of the University of Colorado at Denver diagnosed three otherwise healthy boys–ages four, seven and 10– with prepubertal gynecomastia, a rare condition that leads to breast growth in prepubescent males. They all had used lavender-scented soap and skin lotions, or shampoos or styling products that contained lavender oil and tea tree oil… From the Scientific American, Apr 2007 issue.

The condition went away when the lavender treatment was stopped. Lavender is quite popular in many products due to it’s superb smell and known effects on stress reduction, this was my first reading on any adverse effect. This was surely surprising to I read\learn.

And here is another article for contrast on not getting too cautious when raising kids: We Protect Kids From Everything But Fear

My thoughts on What to look for in a Startup co-founder. These apply to Technology startups and assumes the life cycle would be bootstrap(3-6months)->angel(1 year)->VC

• How to find a co-founder: Your first list should be everyone you have worked with or studied with.

• Role: For most firms, the ideal co-founder would be an Engineer or Product Manager, if selling to the corporate world, a Channels (Sales) persona is also a choice.

• Personality match: Will your co-founder both pushback and yield as needed. This can also be put in under maturity.

• Interview: Take an interview and make them take your interview. Do these on different days and on neutral grounds, a coffee shop or hike. People and priorities change, this is a good time to get some clarity.

• Minimum Qualities: They should be good in their field, be ready to make some risks and someone you are comfortable with. Ideally you both should be from the same field. It is hard, though not impossible to move a Software Engineer or Product Manager from Storage to Internet or vice versa.

• Test Run: Work with the person for a small project or spend sometime brain storming. Two months might save you years of grief.

• Full Time: Almost always, be ready to start full time on this as soon as it might be needed.

• Minimum investment: If not plunging in full time (not yet needing a place & time as Don Shapiro said) right away, agree to a minimum time commitment per week from each.

• Backup plan: Consider keeping a vesting period for founder share and what would happen if only one of you decides to run with it.

Also on the same topic, Questions to ask about your startup or idea from TechStars

Triggered by Andrew Chen, EIR at Mohr Davidow Ventures: How do you find a badass co-founder?

Need Humility: There is somebody better than you

Yahoo Pipes allow modifying feeds (RSS, ATOM, RDF) to filter or merge them and perform other operations. It is a pretty nifty and useful way of modifying feeds that you do not own.

Here are a few I created for some practical needs.

Filtering out certain entries

• Penny Arcade Comics only

Filters in only comic entries.

• Seattle Bubble blog articles

Filters out “open thread” entries

Merging different feeds

• Rediff India Business Feeds

• Men’s Health blogs

• Comedy Central Videos Daily Show and Colbert Report

Flight
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return.
Leonardo da Vinci from Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu’s
Want to find out what it is like to experience flight on the cheap (U$8 in 2007), try out and do loops and rolls in the X-Pilot flight simulators in the Museum of Flight, Seattle

Free Time
In my humble opinion, the best thing about living in time and space, is having free time.
AND, of course, always remembering that all of your time is free.
Yeah, big AND.
From Notes from the Universe by TUTs Adventures

Moving moments
Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words.
Marcel Marceau from the Lent Daily thought.

River to Ocean

A spiritual journey is like water in a river heading towards the ocean, it might take detours and go through different paths, but will eventually get to the ocean. A dear friend quoting ancient Sanskrit book.

Ancient Shiva “Borandev Temple” in Chhattisgarh, India

Java is the defacto language of web development. A friend who is a programmer is learning Java at the same time as I am.

My suggestion, use the quite through Java tutorials by Sun which are better than any Beginner or Intermediate book including the nicely written, but too much time consuming Head First Java. I would recommend the later to someone starting programming or willing to trade “speed” over “having fun” while learning and you can only have one.

As Mr. Linderman said in the Heroes Episode Parasite: You can either have a life of happiness or a life of meaning, not both.

Product design methods from IDEO for Entrepreneurs, Engineers and Product Managers.

IDEO Method Cards which are available for $49 and allow product designers to use various angles (Learn, Look, Ask, and Try) and methods related to the same to help in brain storming,  gather more information, better design products and in general empathize better with the potential users. These can be useful for anyone creating or designing something including in Technology: Entrepreneurs, Engineers and Product Managers.
FastCompany has an article on using IDEO Method Cards for fictional product ideas: Out of the Box

For more on IDEO and it’s methods, consider the book:

Amazon.com link: The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm

The book’s official page: The Art of Innovation

The final step in learning Ruby and Rails I would suggest is on the same lines I have started. Go long. Go deep.

• Learn Ruby

Use the following resources:

• Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

This is a quirky online mini book on Ruby with a fictional story and cartoons running with the guide and I cannot recommend it enough. A detailed review by me is in another blog post.

• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide, First edition

This is the complete first edition of ‘The’ Ruby book also called the PickAxe book which is available online. The second edition is available for purchase as a pdf from the publisher, paper book is cheaper at amazon.com.

• Learn Rails

• Agile Web Development with Rails, Second Edition

‘The’ book for Ruby, written by the Dave Thomas and buy a pdf edition from the publisher, paper book is cheaper at amazon.com

Then go ahead and write that killer web service.