Papillon – definite endurance and will power

Tags

Books

Do not give up and settle for anything less than you deserve. Sometimes, the society with kick you in the groins and throw you in the gutter. Fight back. If you feel society is selling shit to you, don’t buy it. Fight as hard as you can. Fight till you succeeded or die trying with your head held high. It’s a far better end than rotting yourself to death while cursing the whole society.

Papillon had to withstand very harsh circumstances to even have a chance of getting his freedom. Papillon had a rage of punishing the ones who sent him down the drain. That rage kept him going. He was ready to face the consequence of trying and failing rather than succumb to the fear of failure.

He tried, failed and suffered, tried again, failed again and suffered again, yet again and again until he succeeded.

There is something very important to be learned from this story that applies to even out daily lives in the current advanced society. Do not settle for anything less than you deserve or doing anything other than your hearts Desire. Don’t follow to herd. Don’t listen to your parents, peers, teachers, if they don’t listen to you. Define your motive and chase it with all the rage that you have. Don’t be afraid of failing. By not doing what you want you have already failed. There is only success in your way. You have to find your peace, and it doesn’t necessarily come with wealth.

It’s very important to be able to respect yourself and the only way of doing it is to achieve what you truly desire.

Chinese new year eve and morning

Tags

Tea

After 5 rounds of brewing


Jessie put it correctly – literally squeezed the last bit of tea juice from the leaves. In the end it was barely leaving any color at all.

This is my way of making most out of coffee bean and tea leaf or any other joint charging 4 bucks for a tea bag

The best work I do, I do it in Cafe’s. With just a laptop, a notebook(paper one) and a pen. Anything more is just a distraction

The CBTL at Forum mall is one of the absolute best place I had discovered. The location is nice. A lot of outdoor tables with good low seating cushion chairs. Cosy enough for working, but not too comfortable that I sleep off

The place has absolutely largest variety of tea flavors to choose from and all actually available! The staff is very friendly and fun. The wifi connection is solid.

I spent around 5 hours working and managed to do quite a good heap of it. I was quite please by the time I finished and was not feeling guilty of watching movie last night I refilled the cup with hot water once every hour and checked if I was making any progress.

Just as a note to self – always start work first with a pen and paper before touching the laptop. Specially for presentation. I feel stuck when staring at a screen fiddling with keyboard. The ideas start flowing as soon as I take a pen and start scribbling. From there the job is easy

PS – the day started with a good 2+5 rounds of jogging and long catch up session with rahul at bukit gombak stadium. We discussed a wide range of topics like how different type of employers manage their team and keep them together while others just let it wither away, pride and respect of engineers, true engineers vs copying machines, and finally salary and increments according to me 10% increment is bullshit while rahul feels its good enough. My logic asks what is the net after inflation!! We Couldn’t discuss the last point further.

Uneasy

Sometimes I just feel uneasy. Np particular reason that I know of.

A novel after a long time

Tags

Books, Life

Now that I have realized that I have more free time than I thought, it’s time I get back to stuff I love. I love reading once in a while. My friend bachha and Mamme have convinced me long ago that books are way more fun than just movies.

Besides I enjoyed reading. I can take my time and read it again if I don’t get the point. Earlier I used to read just to finish the book and be cool. In time, I started actually understanding and loving it.

The book l loved the most is Tuesday’s with Morrie. The book I enjoyed the most was adventure of sherlock Holmes. I have read them twice.

I remember my friend IDR reading papillon in my first year of college and I was like – dude, Can you finish that thick book!!

It’s for those memories that I bought this book from the NUS bazaar for a real bargain. Books are expensive in singapore and I didn’t really enjoy reading in iPad. NUS bazaar is cheap and second hand books are gonna save the day.

Few notes on weight loss

Tags

fitness, Life

I was diagnosed with extremely high cholesterol in November. Something like 80% above average for my age.

It was described like a slow killer if I don’t do much about it. The immediate advise was to reduce cholesterol consumption, fatty food and reduce weight.

I thought of doing exercise but my routine was not cut for it. I read a book Jessie bought a while ago about dieting to weight loss. Simply put increase consumption of fibers and proteins and reduce consumption of fats and carbs.

I found my daily consumption requirement for sedentary lifestyle to be 2400 cal and set the goal for carbs to 1800 cal everyday and avoid the fatty good as much as possible.

Nothing else really. I had been going out and eating whatever I felt to be honest. Just reducing the amount of bad stuff drastically. I stopped eating the prata and switched with dosa. I had been eating a lot of Pratas before that. I reduced panner, cheese, chocolate and ice-cream. Moved to diet coke. Switched to low fat milk. Started drinking more green tea and lot of water. switched to olive oil at home and stopped eating rice and replaced it with chapati.

If there is no choice I still eat whatever is available. if I feel like eating something heavy I do it. Just watch the quantity. Coffee and tea is fine. Once a day if you drink more, do the math and eat less later.

Results : lost 6 kg in 2 months. No jogging. Had a few days of site work. Other than that all sedentary.

Conclusion : Weight loss is perfectly possible Without huge diet changes. Just plain bloody reduce your diet.

Don’t eat more just because you spend half an hour jogging or in gym. Mostly you will not burn 200 calories also.

I am trying to add some more exercise to routine now.

Basically reduce the

Week 1 – 2012

Tags

Life, updates

It’s the first week of my experiment with the personal management system. I have seen decent progress in the amount of stuff I am getting done. There is generally a reason behind when I am doing what. Also, there is a track of what is being put on the waiting list due to some other urgent tasks. I fill my calendar everyday as a record of what I ended up doing and for how long. It took a lot lesser time to do most things than I initially planned. This is good.

It’s still Tough to schedule things and forget about it. The attitude to say NO or I will do it later will take a while to develop. I hope to stick with the plan until that happens.

It’s also tough to get rid of email checking habit. I am trying to check once in 4 hours. But the office mails ruin the program. Have to tell people that talk directly for urgent stuff.

I have caught up with fitness routine again. I am keeping it modest at the moment. Twice a week. One hour session.

I met a good friend Ewen Mac Donald. He loves to travel and fell in love with Japan. He finally made it there as an English teacher and totally loving the place. It feels great to be meeting friends again.

Looking forward to better weeks ahead.

Happy new year 2012

Tags

Organization

Happy new year 2012 to all my friends. Thanks for making my life fun and this blog an interactive place. I haven’t been active for the last 2 years and it have upset quite a few of you in that period.

Well It’s not that I didn’t have time to blog. The problem was I didn’t knew when I had that time. Unorganized!

I had always been like that. Commitment to almost anything had been an issue. I was getting distracted easily and in the process doing nothing really well.

I have been working on that for last two weeks and managed to put together a system for myself. I will be working in slots and defining what is to be done in these slots every morning. Each slot is 2 hours long and there are five slots every weekday. I am still figuring out the weekends. Each slot is an undivided attention period to the task. There is 25% buffer time in every slot, because I am human

I will be using astrid task for managing tasks and google calendar for all things time, meeting and appointments.

I have put aside 2 slots and traveling time for blogging every week. That equates to about 6 hours every week. Good enough to put together one quality post or two updates.

Hoping that this proven and tested system works out for me its called GTD and based on the fact that our brain is just not meant to mange time and information together.

If I am not blogging I have messed it up please Kick my ass back on to it please will ya, my friend

Cheers,
Hula

Simply Happy :)

Tags

eatout, fun, travel

What will make me really happy right now?

I don’t really recall asking this question to myself.  Sometimes the answer is right there in the moment.

I am sitting in a McDonalds on the orchard road of Singapore. Jessie and I love the twister fries served at McD only twice a year.  It’s a majestic location.  The whole place is decorated like a bride with beautiful blue and white lights hanging all along the road. It feels like the wallpapers have suddenly come alive and the sunlight is shining through snowflakes making them sparkle in the brightest colors.

There is another beautiful thing about this location, the chirp of birds. Leaving the bird park aside this is the only place I know where one can find the birds making this cacophony.  The only troubling part is that there is not a single drop of bird poop on the road underneath! It took me a few trips of the place to realize that there are no birds on the trees. Just some really well located speakers. But the effect is same. It makes me feel happy. Instantly.  I like to come here as often as I can afford to.

It’s a unique combination. Singapore is full of such details. They like to bring the world to the people. Just a while ago, I saw kids playing in artificial snow at Tanglin Mall. It was beautiful to see the smiles on the faces of parents there.  Tanglin is also one of my and Jessie’s favourite weekend breakfast locations. We like to go there for an early breakfast and enjoy their splendid Hummingbird cake along with classy scrambles eggs and delicious coffee served at Beviamo (An Australian restaurant in Brazilian flavour).

The kids do adorable things. There is a little girl trying to climb on the chair at the table next to me.  There is a tiny little fellow on the roadside taking his first step holding his dad’s fingers. Poor guy keeps falling and getting up again. Then there is the few year old who is having hard time understanding why mum doesn’t allow him to just Dig-in with all fingers in the ice-cream and use a Poke stick(spoon) instead! Kids are kids but one striking difference between the kids here and other places is that they are too damn silent. They don’t cry on the bus and trains which is in striking contrast from what I am used to from India! They just sit happily and quietly next to their mum playing with whatever they have (mostly an iPhone ).  The European kids are a livewire and like to talk and have fun. Not crying either. The parents don’t stop them from feeling the freedom and let them have their way (as long as it’s not reallllyy getting out of hands). The Indian and chinese kids cry. After observing it for so long I had to ask why?  I feel it’s all in the upbringing and culture. More on it in some future post.

Photo Credits : Jessie She loves taking pictures of everything she eats

the plateau of execution

Tags

ideas, Life, startups

Most of us who are enthusiastic about developing products and think of ideas while walking, sleeping, dreaming, waking up and especially when taking crap are very excited when we get something awesome.

We get ‘ol excited and put all nighters trying to find if anyone else have done it already. We tell our close friends about it, and annoy our partners with the awesomeness of it. This is the phase of high adrenaline. We put together the basic business concept, little math, big(niche) customer bae with a lot of plus points and few weak ones that can be taken care of(piece of cake!!). There is a list of things to do with a date(with a safety factor included) and we are casually sure that we will meet that proof of concept deadline with that great friend from college coding/engineering(etc) for me.

BAM!!

BAM BAM!!

Then comes in the walls and the roadblocks. The silly stuff have taken all the time. The platform of programming was all wrong! The cool college friend doesn’t have all the free time he though and it takes far more longer to write that silly check, the code doesn’t work on the cloud and the design is below average. Suddenly no one gets your idea!

All sort of mess. pocket money is almost over

Don’t give up. Don’t think of that new idea yet. Push through the walls.

Learn that ideas are worth balls. Products are worth millions. Good programmers are not so easy to find and staying motivated is about the toughest thing to do. Once you have learned that, REBOOT. There is a lot of learning from that last attempt.

Go back to the drawing board. Sketch a better plan. Find better designers, find better engineers, find a mentor(find two if you can), Share your plans with experts(they won’t steal, they have their own ).

There is a plateau and you don’t know how far you have to go until you climb. Don’t give up. Keep walking.

Simplification

Tags

Life

is about the most difficult task to do.

One of the greatest reasons I admire Steve Jobs is for his endless chase to simplicity. It requires great character and a very resolute and focused mind to achieve it. One cannot achieve it when he is trying to satisfy everyone from the beginning.

As of now I cannot even write a blog post simply