Defining Life in BHP : THE XBHP

Something which should have been done in the past, but no one did and these guys are giving a new dimension. Need Lots of Courage . The Guys @ XBHP proved themselves to be different.

I have been tracking this blog for past few weeks and I felt there is much more in life than job, money, work, TV on weekends, Friends. Its called passion.
Everyone knows there is passion. Who follow that passion. Not even a handful.
Parents teach there children that you have to become a MBA, Engineer, A doctor. Why? Get a good job, Take business to new heights.

The blog would say everything http://www.xbhp.com/gir/blog ........Keep Rocking Guys

Yet again it reminds me of Steve Jobs : Stay Hungry, Stay foolish.
And You have got to find what you love

Google Factory Tour

Google Factory Tour event on 5/19/05 at Google's Mountain View headquarters. I love Google. Trying hard to be with it someday

London - Sounds Good

Finally I have some time to update my blog.
Right now I am in worlds one of most busiest city. LONDON.
Fortunately or Unfortunately I am in worlds one of most expensive city. Lucky to be living in Company apparment in luxary. I would describe this city to be truly cosmo. I think I have been a lucky chap to be living in Delhi->Mumbai-> London. Seen lot of cultures around. Guess New York, Sydney and Tokyo is left. I must define its a world hub(everyone from everywhere).
Its just 1 year of my professional life and so many things I have come accross and would agree to the fact that sky is the limit.

To end with.. I still havent found what I was looking for. And I have got to find what I Love..

What Younger Brother has to say

There is a long gap I have not posted on my blog. Too much busy with work and other stuff. But these days right now I am in world's most cosmo city LONDON!!!. While talking to my younger brother a suggestion came from him. His pet name is Rubal..
Here it goes:-
"no stategy no tips if it has to click i can click"

New Gagdet in my Pocket Sony NW-E 507

Yeppie Got a new most wanted object of desire.
A Amazingly Sexy sweet little thing i must say
See it urself

So From now on there is going to be section on wats playing on my WalkMan(copyrights Sony).

I never knew before buying this one that Walkman term is sony properitery term and cant be used for any other device playing music.

Check it out urself on Sony:http://www.sonyindia.co.in/sonyindia/products/DisplayProduct.jsp?modelNumber=NW-E507

New Blog Voice Against Reservation

A New Blog is been Started. I will be posting any new voice against reservation in this blog from now on. http://voiceagainstreservation.blogspot.com

Reservation in Indian Universities

News Came to a shock.. 49.5% reservation in indian universities(IIT/IIM). Is Govt talking s**t or wat. I would never have thought this much of reservation for categories, a.k.a ST/SC/OBC. If this happens i wonder future of india in research, decision and strategy side. Ignoring the best brains of country and relying on non merit basis even develop hate for the indian education standards for majority students. Those who has big dreams and confidence to do things and a little money to support will never be able to work out in situation. Already in this merit selection basis there is very fine line that u get to a college or miss by a margin.

As far as my knowledge goes I cant recall a incident where reservation for ST/SC/OBC is decreased. So one thing is far sure once this happens it will not revert. There will be 100 more political pressure for not doing it and it STAYS FOREVER.

This further inviting more Brain Drain. A person would love his/her own country to a limit where atleast country policies are not against his aspirations n goals. Present scenario is where i read about IIT/IIM grads not accepting offers abroad(This might also get affected). Infact most of parents in order to make there children have best of education will put everything on stake they saved so far. Panic Situations. Performance pressure will be much much more.

Take a scenario - Indian cricket or Hockey Team having 49.5% reservations. Atleast 49.5% should play in International Cricket or Hockey Matches. Why players are chosen on basis of merit(performance). I sports is pretty much a education.

I do not see any reason when i myself have seen IAS son n daughters getting into engineering college throught Quota n coming by Ford Ikon.

Five Point Someone - My Alma Mater of Book Reading

Finallly, Officially i finsihed my first book of career till date. To brief you with my background i am a engineer thankfully first Class from a C grade(thats my rating) plz dun argue. Since class 8th i have PC @ home. Thanks Papa its cuz of u i m here. Day one PC came home. Career option was decided- got to be computer engineer come wat ever. From that point onwards i have been a above avg student i would call one who is scoring 75% approx. never been able to finish course(my Studies). got thrashing from parents. Teachers always loved me. Sweet cute sardar boy. No Longer. Only thing i could digest have to be related to computers. Though wasnt tat gud at programming but still was among dudes in school.

Ne ways I have never read a book in life. Except Shiv Khera You can Win! Dad wanted me type few extracts for his presentations so i liked and read it more. (till date havent finsihed it).

At school I was forced to read Hardy Boys write book review. I just hated reading books(By the way i use to copy what was written on last cover page) . While preparing for CAT was told by faculty to get into reading habit(something like Agata Christy or Richard Bach, i had never heard of there names) . And all i could digest was Digit, Computers @ home, DataQuest etc.

Just got hold of this book in pune bookshop so thought will buy it. But another frnd had a copy of it at home so i just managed to borrow it. I always used to laugh at people n think what is there in these novels that keep them sticked to it like magnet or fevicol. But i realized yesterday it is some power i couldnt wait to finsh this book "Five point someone" had journey of 3 hrs from pune to mumbai. then also i woke till 5 , got late for office . Until i finished i couldnt sleep. May be because it was all engineers life. I could understand wat they were saying. ne ways 1 thing is far sure i m going to write a book review myself on this one.
Cheers....
Congrats my english teacher ur student is grown up now.

What is Ampersand?

I was writing a small peice of code a normal if condition with multiple &. I just thought lets see how was it invented and how come its used for and condition in computing world.
Amazing Results produced by best WIKIPEDIA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand

The ampersand symbol has been found on ancient Roman sources dating to the first century A.D. During this period the symbol was a boxy-looking ligature of the capital letters E T.

More More google Talks: Google Chat History

Today i observed a Chats tab in my Gmail Beta.

This is definatly doing things differntly. What yahoo and MSN used our harddrives for storing chat history google they r using there own heavy weight gmail drive ( i must call it a drive only). The best is googlers keep up high the spirt of innovation for themselves and excitement for users. Cheers....

Hats Off To New Ideas - Wikipedia.

I always been loving people who do creative Stuff. Though its widely used now

I was Touched by article when I read about Wikipedia
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Personal_Appeal
Feel like promoting Wikipedia.

Amazing Lines which touched my heart.
"And I am doing this for my own daughter, who I hope will grow up in a world where culture is free, not proprietary, where control of knowledge is in the hands of people everywhere, with basic works they can adopt, modify, and share freely without asking permission from anyone."
Salute to such a thought
I too believee knowledge enriches when is shared. I guess there is great future for Blog's n wikipedia.
Defining the things differently now and then. Web is taking turns as never predicted. Only thing predicted is word "Web" defining new things linked to each other, tagged to each other, expanding in all direction.

I strongly appeal to everyone : Share cool stuff know. Let the data be redundant. Link to each other. If u know let the world know about it.

You've got to find what you love - Steve

It all started when AJ told me to read a new post on his blog. While orkuting today I was on SteveJobs community so thought to go through it once again. Though its worth is much more than a post on my blog. Still i m posting 1 copy of it. Well all i can say is stay hungry, stay foolish.

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much"

Wanna Move to Hotmail Beta

Wishing all the readers of my blog a very Happy New Year 2006.
Though I wanted to start with a creative post of my own, but what I saw on my friends blog Dhaval I couldn't stop it sharing with all of you.

I guess all those who r reading this must have heard about hotmail beta version which is on invitation only. But dhaval found a kewl trick to promote ur hotmail account to beta account. So here it goes:-

1 - Log In to your Hotmail Account
2 - GO to Options > Change Account Settings
3 - In a Personal Settings, Change your Country to United States and State to Florida
4 - Save it
5 - Now, dont sign out, and just simple copy the following link and paste it in a same browser window where your hotmail inbox is.
link - http://by101fd.bay101.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/BetaOptIn?page=option&curmbox=00000000%2d0000%2d0000%2d0000%2d000000000001&a=b9a426ebd4880ad9d
14db4b4c55a69f8bb8dea2282102422220030b2b6bb98c8
(remove the Blank space in the token)
6 - Now you will see a welcome to Mail Beta page, scroll down, and click on Join Mail Beta or Participate button, and you are in.
7 - Now simply go back to Account Settings, re-change your Country and State to original one and you can happily enjoy new Hotmail.

NOTE: This trick will work only on IE 6.
I or my ISP do not take any responsibility of the above act.

Source : Dhaval Faria