Life in Balance: Amit D. Chaudhary’s Blog
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Two poems, yes I have read a few from the book, One Hundred and One Famous Poems by Roy J. Cook, with links to where I got them from on the web.
Not in Vain by Emily Dickinson

If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in Vain.

The Builders by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

All are architects of Fate,
Working in these walls of Time;
Some with massive deeds and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme.

Nothing useless is, or low;
Each thing in its place is best;
And what seems but idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest.

For the structure that we raise,
Time is with materials filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build.

Truly shape and fashion these;
Leave no yawning gaps between;
Think not, because no man sees,
Such things will remain unseen.

In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods see everywhere.

Let us do our work as well,
Both the unseen and the seen;
Make the house, where Gods may dwell,
Beautiful, entire, and clean.

Else our lives are incomplete,
Standing in these walls of Time,
Broken stairways, where the feet
Stumble as they seek to climb.

Build to-day, then, strong and sure,
With a firm and ample base;
And ascending and secure
Shall to-morrow find its place.

Thus alone can we attain
To those turrets, where the eye
Sees the world as one vast plain,
And one boundless reach of sky.

One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they’d ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there’s this other possibility we have to consider against it.

   So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn’t repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who’s the chairman, would say, “Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it’s true that Compton’s argument is t he best of all, and now we have to go ahead.”

It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best - summing it all up - without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.

Noted from the audio version of “Surely You are joking Mr. Feynman” by Richard P. Feynman, copied from this Russian website.

Success

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

-Winston Churchill

Doing Things

We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.

-Southwest airlines CEO Herb Kelleher

Keep pounding

Most people are going to tell you to give up, to just be normal, to quit being a dreamer. I want you to never listen to any of them and keep pounding away at your vision.

-Greg Prow, VC at Mobius

A way to arrive at your grave
The object of life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting, Holy shit, what a ride!!!

-Mavis Leyrer, age 83.
The above quotes are from the book, My startup life by Ben Casnocha.

TED started as Technology, Entertainment & Design and is now a very broad conference covering talks about Life and the World in general, this has included insights into the Human Mind, notes from Africa, World changing Ideas, Adventures, on Designs and Visualization and many more. TED speeches are typically 15-20 minutes and a lot of them are available for viewing online or can be downloaded at http://www.ted.com

I first got a glimpse of it when I watched the documentary, The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED It was a great experience, and I learnt about many things outside my current world.

So this year when the TED 2008 was going on, I attended a virtual TED conference of my own, watching speeches from previous TED conference.

Here are the Top Presentation Videos from TED, The Life and World Conference:

• Ben Saunders: Three things to know before you ski to the North Pole

To explore the limits of our potential. The title says it all, he did it solo.

• Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do

Very practical, loved it. Few worth noting, let kids dismantle appliances and learn to handle fire

• Dan Gilbert: Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?

Insights and experiments into synthetic happiness(being happy with what you get) and how it is same as real happiness. Too many choices will reduce your chances at synthesized happiness.

• Burt Rutan: Entrepreneurs are the future of space flight

On why Joy is defendable and what inspiration for kids changes a field.

• Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen

Outstanding visualization of changing status of developing countries like India over the previous five decades.

• Majora Carter: Greening the ghetto

On a project to create a park in New York.

• Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce

Why there is no perfect spaghetti sauce and what it teaches us about creating products

• Neil Gershenfeld: The beckoning promise of personal fabrication

Making things

• Jeff Han: Unveiling the genius of multi-touch interface design

The idea for new form of interacting with computers that we see in the iPhone.

• Jeff Bezos: After the gold rush, there’s innovation ahead

Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos on what Internet industry is like the Electrical one.

• Seth Godin: Sliced bread and other marketing delights

When creating something, when working for somebody, target it at people(customers) who care and it just might take off.

• Jonathan Harris: The Web’s secret stories

Projects on datamining and visualizing people interacting on the Web

• Rives: “If I controlled the Internet” (a poem)

A humorous poem

• Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Motivation talk. Some points. Seek to create and thereby get to achievement. Then up the ante and do it faster, better. Grow or stagnant. Use uncertainity to stay out of boredom.

• Jeff Hawkins: Brain science is about to fundamentally change computing

Using the human brain’s prediction methods for computing

• Roy Gould, Curtis Wong: WorldWide Telescope

A telescope controlled by anyone.

• Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes

Ideas such as Freedom, Capitalism, Religion are Memes. Memes are viruses, spreading, affecting everyone, changing the world, killing scores of people.

• Moshe Safdie: What makes a building unique?

An architect and his buildings including Exploration Place, Wichita, Kansas, Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem, Israel and Khalsa Heritage Memorial Complex, Anandpur, India

• Ray Kurzweil: How technology’s accelerating power will transform us

On how technology grows at a increasing rate.

• YouTube - Frozen Grand Central

Do watch a few which call out to you.

Toastmasters International is an organization of clubs around the world which help members in public speaking. The clubs tend to be small in size to ensure everyone gets a chance to speak.

Late Jan 2008, I went ahead and attended the Yahoo ToastMasters club in Sunnyvale, called Yapsters as guest. It was definitely worthwhile and I became a member and have delivered my first speech.
It is obviously about public speaking, however it is useful in many ways:

• The core approach is to do a series of 10 speeches with each focusing on a certain aspect of speaking (Speech organization, Body language including eye contact, Vocal variety)

• You will automatically find your own areas which need focus, be it planning for a speech, english language, fear of being in front of an audience.

• There are stories to hear and things to learn from other’s speeches. I enjoyed one about the Mexico desert where the stars touch the ground at the horizon and look forward to others.

• You become part of a highly motivated and ambitious group.

• There is a leadership track with 10 activities, which you choose to go on that instead of or in addition to the public speaking track.

I would recommend it and am glad I added it to my todo list when Steve Pavlina mentioned it in his blog. It has become one of the things I look forward to.
If you would like to find a club near you, please use the following link: http://www.toastmasters.org/find/default.asp

This year, if you would like to have a different way to send a holiday greeting, post it on any yahoo webpage.

me2u.yahoo.com allows you to create a greeting or any message as an ad and send it to a yahoo.com user (sorry no international users rights now.)
They will see the ad on any *.yahoo.com page when they login next.

If it is displayed and not ‘viewed’ (incase it was missed), they get an email mentioning it and it will be displayed again a few times.

Pretty nifty stuff!

SiliconValley.com has an article on a bootstrapped startup, which shows the otherside of creating a startup, hardwork and a tough climb: Tech startup life still tough years after dot-com bubble burst

She and her boyfriend, Wan Hsi Yuan, 27, run the business, 8coupons.com, from their 500-square-foot studio apartment, meaning headquarters is, effectively, their couch. The business, which text messages discounts to users’ mobile phones, keeps Yuan and Ung, who is 28, up until 3 a.m. most nights. Then, Ung said, she sometimes finds herself lying awake, worrying.

“I need to watch a little National Geographic special on the rain forest or something before I go to sleep,” she said.

…

Welcome startup life in 2007.

…

“The Aeron chair is out, the Starbucks latte is in,” Shipley said.

…

“We don’t go out anymore,” Yuan said. “For the past two years, all we do is work.”

…

At home, they sleep in a queen bed and their workspace/living area is roughly the size of a king bed. They have Internet-only cable; their flat-screen TV shows their Web site, and Yuan works from the couch on an arrangement of pillows they call “his shrine,” typing braces on both wrists, a serving tray with a wireless keyboard on a pillow on his lap.

…

At the startup camp, a partner at a venture capital firm ran through a PowerPoint slideshow on what VCs are looking for: Companies doing things competitors can’t with technology that’s either patented or incredibly challenging to create.

As he went on, it was clear 8coupons lacked nearly every attribute he listed, but Ung and Yuan shrugged that off.

Ironically enough, it is people who work long hours specially need Ergonomic Furniture like Aeron or Soma Biocomfort chair to avoid long term pain.

Here are two methods to keep learning Maths and keep in focus.

• Maths Calendar

Thanks to someone at work, I found out about excellent Math Calendar, every month has a writeup and every day a short Maths problem. The link at Amazon:

The Mathematics Calendar 2008: Exploring the Ever Evolving Worlds of Mathematics by Theoni Pappas

• Understand the Math behind the TV Series Numb3rs (Numbers)

There is a wikipedia section and two dedicated websites which cover this and both are pretty good and sometimes cover different aspects of the same episode.

• Wikipedia: Numb3rs episodes and mathematics used
• Numb3rs at Wolfram(started with Season 4)
  
• We all use Math everyday by TI.

Frugal, writer of the blog My 1st Million At 33 wrote Help in Finding a Good Charity

So, here are some Charities we donated to over the past few years. I check all for fund misuse, percent spent on actual charity, etc.
Local (Used to be WA) & USA

• Youth For Understanding USA: a US -International student exchange program.
• Special Olympics of Washington
• HopeLink
• First Book: give books to poor kids
• PBS: The informative TV station with programs for Kids and Adults.

India

• Association for India’s Development
• Multiple ones through Giveworld, a charity exchange:
1. Atma Nirbhar: Sponsor a years education for a disadvantaged workers child for $60
2. Vikahar Paribar Bikash Kendra: Sponsor a destitute child’s education for one year $33
3. PREED: Sponsor 1 child in a Balwadi Rate $24
4. Sahara: Adopt a destitute Aged for one month $13
5. Sai Kripa: Education fund
• Asha for Education. You can also donate to Asha through these Extreme Runners.

I do not recommended the ones below, primarily due to the spam (email, phone, mail) they start sending after a donation, Unicef though in particular is a good organization. IRC was an exploration on my part on trying out indirect help.
Global

• U.S. Fund for UNICEF, UNICEF Programs
• International Rescue Committee, Darfur

Somehow long trips have appealed to me, the chance of seeing new places, meeting people, really have deep, new and different experiences.

Aha, what an idea.

I will blog over the next few days about some from other people’s lives that stood out.

Around the World… with kids, 28 countries in one year

The Highams, a Silicon Valley based family traveled with their two children, aged 8 and 11 in 2005-2006 around the world. The trip was one year in duration, 10 years in planning, with a minimal budget of U$120,000.

The Countries they visited: Iceland, England, France, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Dubai, U.A.E, Tanzania, Mauritius, Singapore, Japan, China, Thailand, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Panama, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Belize. The children kept up with their school work during the trip.

The above link is to the San Jose Mercury News article, the Highams also have an informative website called Armageddon Pills which includes an FAQ, Some stories, Pictures in a gallery or on a map, How to plan your own trip and the book they are writing.

Here are some pictures from their trip: