Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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I read multiple experiences on the web about canceling service with Vonage. Thought, I will put my own experience up as it was vastly different.

I have had Vonage service for about two years now. Today morning, I called up Vonage to cancel our phone service. This was early in the day, around 8 am, They said they were experiencing high call volume, I entered the options to cancel complete service, the wait time was about one minute.
The representative after taking my information, did try to give me options, I said I was not interested in any variations and will use only my cellphone and after his second try, he went ahead and told me, He can only cancel my service immediately, not in the future. Which I did. Also, I need not send the equipment back as it was about two years back when I subscribed to the service.

That’s it I was done Total time, about 5-7 minutes. It was totally painless and one of the easiest customer call interactions.

Over the past, the Vonage call quality has been pretty good most of the time. So, if you are not worried about the uncertainty due to the patent lawsuit and potential bankruptcy, I would recommend Vonage.

I have been doing Bikram Yoga for about two years, on and off and have seen from very good practitioners, but few as good as Tony Parrish, who is part of NFL’s San Francisco 49ers.

• The main article on Tony Parrish and his path to recovery using Bikram Hot Yoga.

• The Bikram Hot Yoga Pose slideshow

Here are few of them with links to the pose into the slide show.

I noticed a trend among Colleagues and Friends who have been or are doing Part-time aka Executive MBAs, after working as an engineer for a number of years. Atleast one I know, who left work for a fulltime MBA course which costs more, directly in fees ($100,000 is typical.) and in loss of income.
The whole path should take 3-5 years including the GMAT preparation and the courses typically cost U$50,000-80,000 in fees, plus maybe U$10,000 in expenses and lots of study and hardwork in the middle.
I tried a reverse path to see if some current CEO have reached through that path and I found one, interestingly, he runs a people search company.

Jaideep Singh is CEO of Spock, a People search website & company. From Linkedin Profile, I would get the following which kind of shows the path, my friends might go through.

• Engineer & Manager at WindRiver systems for around 8 years, from 1994 to 2002
• Did his MBA at Wharton (I would guess the program they have in San Francisco, see link below) from 2000-2002.
• Changed to Product Management and Business Development at WindRiver from 2002 to 2006 as well as consulted with Clearstone Venture Partners as Investment Professional
• Did a stint as EIR(Entrepreneur In Residence) for six months from late 2005, again at Clearstone Venture Partners
• Started Spock in 2006 as Co-Founder and CEO.

Definitely a pretty good career path so far. I would calculate, nine years from decision (say 1997 to 2006) to CEO.
If you are in the San Jose aka San Francisco Bay Area aka Silicon Valley, some Executive MBA options are

• Wharton in San Francisco
• Haas School, Berkeley
• Leavey School, Santa Clara

PS: Marc Andreessen, Founder of Netscape mentions Sales and Finance among skills to maximize your potential in his career guide.

Benjamin Franklin in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, mentions the Socratic Method as a method of Inquiry and to use in Dialog (Highlighting is my own.)

While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood’s), at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur’d Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm’d with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter.

And being then, from reading Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine, I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took a delight in it, practis’d it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions, the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved.

I continu’d this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed

Incase you would like to read up more,

• The Wikipedia article:Socratic method

• the book Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates is available online at Project Gutenberg or as the in-print book: Conversations of Socrates by by Xenophon (Do skip the editor’s notes and just read translation as they are distracting, opinionated and caustic)

• A more general book on Socrates is Socrates’ Way: Seven Keys to Using Your Mind to the Utmost by Ronald Gross

• Nothing is ordinary or not useful, we just do not see it yet. Probably because it does not apply to ourselves yet.

• Quotes create a small ripple of good thoughts which in turn stay and many times increase in our day. This is no different than meeting a cheerful or upbeat person in the morning.

• Yes, there are things better than Quotes. Quotes are not doing, for example, Reading about clearing your mind does not clear your mind. After ways and methods which tell you “what”, come ways and methods which tell us “how”.