Thought Garage

Yes, they are really available now. Yesterday I found an Apple Web Page that announced the availability of these Videos but none of us could access them even after signing in as registered Developers. And after a few minutes, Apple appear to have pulled out the web page itself.  Well, the wait is over. Finally, they are here. WWDC 2011 Session Videos are now available for all.  Really. Enjoy.

Thanks a ton to Blogger, I love the new Template Designer. In a few clicks, my ‘ The 365 Day Cooking Challenge ’ blog got a beautiful, delicious juicy red tomato garnish. I’m loving it.

What kind of a person you will be if you were to live just by your Intuition? This is the prompt from Trust30 for today. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands . – Ralph Waldo Emerson If you could picture your intuition as a person, what would he or she look like? If you sat down together for dinner, what is the first thing he or she would tell you?  (Author: Susan Piver ) Intuition is the ability to understand and make decisions quickly without conscious reasoning.  We normally refer to this as gut feeling or instincts as well. So the prompt try to reveal if you were to live by your true instincts what kind of a person you will be? Will you be any different? Totally different? or just the same? To an large extent, we can also paraphrase the prompt to “heart or mind” ? It goes without saying that heart represents the intuition, instincts or emotions and often the irrational behavior while mind represents the conscious reasoning and rational behavior. In my life, a major...

WWDC 2011 Session Videos are now available for all, for Free.

If you think Tina Fey had any influence in Democrats and Obama winning in 2008, Watch this Obama impersonator, there will be a tough challenge ahead for Obama and company in 2012. Totally incredible. It you put both on the same stage, it would be really difficult to say who is real.

I had long believed that Capitalism and particularly the Private Sector is a key to a country’s growth and economic well being.  But looking at what Private Sector has done to US, I started having second thoughts on the whole idea. Read the following excerpt from TIME magazine that reveals Private sector failed to create any new jobs in US while still reaping profits and expanding its markets. Myth No. 3: The private sector will make it all better There is a fundamental disconnect between the fortunes of American companies, which are doing quite well, and American workers, most of whom are earning a lower hourly wage now than they did during the recession. The thing is, companies make plenty of money; they just don't spend it on workers here. Half of Americans say they couldn't come up with $2,000 in 30 days without selling some of their possessions. Meanwhile, companies are flush: American firms generated $1.68 trillion in profit in the last quarter of 2010 alone. But many...

I was trying to watch the recent Presidential debate and selected the video from the list of videos, but the video title and the description continue to show the Anthony Weiner resignation event. ( CNN Politics, In case you missed it ) Is it just that CNN skipped testing of the video widget or just Weiner hangover that even their website love to cling on to.

Will be heading to Dallas Startup Weekend in a few minutes. This will be my first Dallas Startup Weekend event. The only other Dallas event I have ever attended was the Dallas Demo Camp back in 2007. Quite excited and fingers crossed.

The best way to Predict the future is actually by inventing it. This is Trust30’s prompt for today. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his . – Ralph Waldo Emerson My favorite quote of all time is Alan Kay: ‘In order to predict the future, you have to invent it.’ I am all about inventing the future. Decide what you want the future to be and make it happen. Because you can. Write about your future now. (Author: Cindy Gallop ) I am a strong believer in dreams and chasing dreams. For me, dreams are your perceived future even in your subconscious mind.  So, the best way to predict the future is by dreaming about that future and chasing the dream to make it true. And developing software is a great platform to model this habit. And by far the most flexible and inexpensive method to learn building things....

The following text has been extracted from my response in an email discussion thread around the current anti-corruption fight back in India and argument that if the movement were to survive, Anna or Ramdev must come clean and must be ideal and perfect citizens rather than just any other Indian fighting for a cause. “I believe in ideas rather than just people that spearhead or follow an idea.  By focusing too much on a person, we often get blinded, bogged down or loose our common sense by personifying ideas and fail to reason. Not to discount the people and leaders that brought those ideas into life. But more often than not, ideas outlive those leaders, just for the reason that even those leaders are human beings and imperfect. Getting a consent by threatening to go on fast unto death is stupid if Ramdev does it. Anna does it. Or Gandhi does it. We could only reason if we could separate the idea from the person. Otherwise, for instance, whatever Gandhi did will be considered alwa...

Undoubtedly there is a huge gap between what is being taught at Schools and what we need to learn.  More so when it comes to Mathematics. One foundation want to change that and teach Mathematics with computers at the core. computerbasedmath.org is a project to build a completely new math curriculum with computer-based computation at its heart—alongside a campaign to refocus math education away from historical hand-calculating techniques and toward relevant and conceptually interesting topics.

Perhaps not, particularly on older fleets. But why take a chance. Better just shutdown when we were told to. Safety can be statistical, but life is not. Like most airline passengers, you probably have serious doubts about those pre-flight announcements asking you to turn off your cellphones, blackberries, iPods and anything else electronic. But a confidential industry study obtained by ABC News indicates there really could be serious safety issues related to cellphones and other PEDs. Shared from : ABC News

If you ever got interested in Silicon Valley and wanted to visit to learn more, just like me, this may help you understand what it is all about a little better and well, plan your visit better . This post at StartupDigest has some links to learn more. I haven’t gone through all of them myself yet, but something I read on this post changed the whole perspective of looking at it. Silicon Valley is not a specific place : “ Silicon Valley ” is much more a state of mind than any one physical location. You can be in San Francisco, San Jose, Palo Alto, or Berkeley and still be in “ Silicon Valley “. Source : http://startupdigest.com/2011/06/09/welcome-silicon-valley/

Crave for ingenuity as imitation is suicidal.  That is the message from today’s prompt from Trust30. Imitation is Suicide. Insist on yourself; never imitate. – Ralph Waldo Emerson Write down in which areas of your life you have to overcome these suicidal tendencies of imitation, and how you can transform them into a newborn you – one that doesn’t hide its uniqueness, but thrives on it. There is a “divine idea which each of us represents” – which is yours? Like the idea I shared the other day , I believe that each one of us are born unique for a reason and we have every right to be that one in a billion with our own views and expressions.  However I believe imitation is one of the best ways to learn from your master or any other source of inspiration for that matter. That is how as kids we learnt literally everything. By imitating others do things and say things. That is how most of us learn even today. Some may call it, ‘inspiration’, but Imitation in its purest form has a...

Dare to be bold. This is the prompt from #Trust30 for today. Our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born. – Ralph Waldo Emerson “Next to Resistance, rational thought is the artist or entrepreneurs worst enemy. Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thought comes from the ego. Instead, we want to work from the Self, that is, from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious. A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. Its only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.” - Steven Pressfield, Do the Work This is always puzzling to me, whenever I think of.  Its true, Children have no trouble believing in something. And its true that some of us have no trouble in believing in something even when nobody else. But there is a ...

Today’s prompt from Trust30 is to figure out whether we are preparing to live or living the life we always wanted. Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live. – Ralph Waldo Emerson If you had one week left to live, would you still be doing what you’re doing now? In what areas of your life are you preparing to live? Take them off your To Do list and add them to a To Stop list. Resolve to only do what makes you come alive. Bonus: How can your goals improve the present and not keep you in a perpetual “always something better” spiral? There are many things I can easily identify that fall into the category of ‘doing this now, so that I can do that tomorrow’ with an endless rat race of preparation.  Wrote down all of them as far as I can gather and moved them out of To-do list and inserted activities that I really enjoy.  Now I have a healthy dose of preparation still in place, which I think is critical and required and a set of activities introduced into daily life. As ...

Today’s prompt from Trust30 challenge is about a place in the world that you would like to visit before you die. Not everyone wants to travel the world, but most people can identify at least one place in the world they’d like to visit before they die. Where is that place for you, and what will you do to make sure you get there? I haven’t been an avid traveller, though I love the enormous natural beauty in its vastness, subtleness and equally vividness.  I loved Grandcanyons more than anything so far. Watched the movie, ‘ The Home ’ umpteen times. The one travel destination I have been dreaming for a long time is the Alps . I do not know how I got this fascination about something I never even seen. But this is what comes to my mind, whenever I think of if there is one destination I must visit before I die.  I have certainly made plans. But every other detail must be secret, as it will be a surprise treat to someone.

This was the prompt from 1st of June as part of Trust30 initiative, by Liz Danzico . If ‘the voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tracks,’ then it is more genuine to be present today than to recount yesterdays. How would you describe today using only one sentence? Tell today’s sentence to one other person. Repeat each day. Carpe-diem. Not even one sentence. Just one word that exemplify the concept I believe in.

This was yesterday’s prompt from Trust30 Challenge by Buster Benson. The world is powered by passionate people, powerful ideas, and fearless action. What’s one strong belief you possess that isn’t shared by your closest friends or family? What inspires this belief, and what have you done to actively live it? Though there may be more than 6 billion people in this world, each of us are born unique. Whether we believe in God or in Evolution, each one of us are born unique.  That says something irrespective of what you believe in. However in search of social acceptability and likeability, we tend to explicitly plan to do things and say things that are acceptable by most though we have conflicting arguments at the core. We think too much about what others will think about it or talk about it if we do something or say something. Some of us even fake stuff to look good. Over the time, we loose true distinct selves and become something that people talk about but we hardly could identi...

Today’s prompt from Trust30 Challenge from Jenny Blake is to identify the biggest challenge at the moment and turn it in to question to face it and journal all ideas that come up in next 48 hours. Identify one of your biggest challenges at the moment (ie I don’t feel passionate about my work) and turn it into a question (ie How can I do work I’m passionate about?) Write it on a post-it and put it up on your bathroom mirror or the back of your front door. After 48-hours, journal what answers came up for you and be sure to evaluate them. One of my biggest challenges at this moment and the one that is literally wearing me out is about scaling up. I have been working on a lots of different ideas for some time and have been searching for opportunities to realize them. Thanks to a friend that believed in me and invested on the project last year that became a huge success. And call it snowball effect or just sheer momentum, found opportunities to realize a whole bunch of others.  It’s...

I believe in dreams, for dreams are essentially those thoughts, ideas and wishes that we have been thinking all the while, that kept chasing us every moment.  We are what we dream about.  One of the best ways to achieve a dream is to set a date to it. A date forces me to get more focused. Pushes me to action right away. And magically sets up priorities. Once a date is set, it takes a great deal of discipline to pursue it. Many of us start very well but quick to search for excuses not to go through it. Some pause, some put it on the eternal back burner and some just quit. Keeping a journal or taking up a challenge would greatly help maintain the streak. I am on my way to taking up a one year challenge next week and will be keeping an online journal to push myself towards the goal. And to get started with the habit of keeping a journal and maintaining a streak, I am joining a 30 days writing challenge, Trust30 , an online initiative that encourages to express yourself for 30...

You must have watched those brilliant animations Hans Rosling of the world of statistics to understand the deeper meaning of numbers and various issues.  If you are awestruck and inspired by his talks, you may love this 1 hour documentary on ‘ The Joy of Stats ’. Hans Rosling says there’s nothing boring about stats, and then goes on to prove it. A one-hour long documentary produced by Wingspan Productions and broadcast by BBC, 2010.