Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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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.

I recently read Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby by Why the Lucky Stiff in my quest to learn Ruby and Rails.

These are some notes or a mini review , if you are planning to learn Ruby.

Why’s Guide is a quirky online mini book on Ruby with a fictional story and cartoons running with the guide and I cannot recommend it enough. You will have fun and some laughter along the way, as a matter of fact, learning rarely felt this good.

However I should warn as the chapters progress and the serial killer appears, the guide spawns multiple genres from Comedy to Black Comedy to Macabre Thrillers. The characters include among others the foxes, the elf and the ham and the serial killer and space traveler Dr. Cham. Also, I did find myself skipping some sections when I felt a need for urgency to get to the Ruby part of the chapter.

On the technical aspect, the guide covers basic syntax, objects, builtin data structures, file IO, user input, developer tools such as the interactive ruby (irb) and ruby man pages (ri) and advanced ruby features like ‘method missing’, modules and mixin, inspect, etc.

Here are some cartoons and snippets from Why’s Guide to Ruby to give you an idea:

Brain health.

Vitamin R. Goes straight to the head. Ruby will teach you to express your ideas through a computer. You will be writing stories for a machine. The language will become a tool for you to better connect your mind to the world.

We start off the book by getting along well in the Introduction. This togetherness, this synergy, propels us through the book, with me guiding you on your way.

So you’ve got to know that synergy doesn’t actually mean synergy in this book. I can’t do normal synergy. No, in this book, synergy means cartoon foxes. What I’m saying is: this book will be starting off with an exorbitant amount of cartoon foxes.

And I will be counting on you to turn them into synergy

…

I’m proud of you. Anyone will tell you how much I brag about you. How I go on and on about this great anonymous person out there who scrolls and reads and scrolls and reads. “These kids,” I tell them. “Man, these kids got heart. I never…”

And my heart glows bright red under my filmy, translucent skin and they have to administer 10cc of JavaScript to get me to come back. (I respond well to toxins in the blood.) Man, that stuff will kick the peaches right out your gills!

I am a believer in “Three distinct qualities in approximately equal measure: Common Sense, Skepticism and Openness” and yet explore methods as an experiential basis, these have included Law of attraction aka The Secret and Vipassana.

After sufficiently quoting myself as a friend pointed out some bloggers tend to do, I would like to recommend a Novella (kind of a long story, but much shorter than a novel) which is also a 2006 Hugo Award winner:

• Inside Job by Connie Willis

The complete online version is made available by the Asimov SciFi magazine and a book is also available from Amazon.com

It is a story of a skeptic meeting a channeler, a very nicely balanced work and has extra appeal to the science minded (Due to the puzzle, it is indeed a strange loop) and the supernatural minded.