Thursday, September 21, 2006
Secured Wireless on a Infrastructure Network
I have always feel good when I do something related to technology. It had been a long time for me with a new association with something different in technology. Today was very interesting for me when I changed the networking of my house. Previously four of us friends used to share one internet connection through a peer to peer wireless network with my FRISKY (for those who don't know it is my computer, and the long story behind it, will write it some other time). For those who can not figure it out yet it is the one in the picture. I was the one
who was the most tied up with this set up. I could not take Frisky with me to all places and specially to Barista.
So finally I de
cided to change everything, With the help of my friend I managed to acquire a Netgear WGT624 wireless router. An awesome piece, which I configured today with a friend and I finally managed to establish a secured wireless connection, through an infrastructure point(I know this is nt rocket science, but its good to be doing something related to networking amidst of an MBA it is MORE LOGICAL. The device works fine, my frisky is free of the shackles of being at home at all times. NETGEAR ROCKS!!!! And I am happy that I have a new kind of gadget and some extra set of wires and gadgets right under my bed. Another set of LEDs would be blinking when I would be sleeping in my room. The light in my room would mean a lot of things the outbound bandwidth availability from my house and also the bandwidth and traffic inside my house. Gadgets are soothing, aren't they????
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
ScRaMbLeS
I was the one who has been long in the city pent,
Life in days years and month it spent.
Over materials and matter there was a reef,
Vacant sometimes, emotions at others the heart plead.
Everyday fighting with my own attic to survive,
Usual days and the struggle to keep the spirits alive.
Pestering the soul with hopes to revive,
Reliving the past kindling the old delight,
Imagining the victory of self over thy might.
Yearning from past filling roars in shambles,
Another meek spectator ready to face world's scramble.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
A Passing Thought
Another of a passing thought which came in my mind, just leaving for anyone who would like to say anything about it...
Hum unko yaad to aye, yeh humari kismat hai,
Kisi aur main aap humein dekhen yeh humara asar hai ya uski kudrat hai
Monday, August 28, 2006
Questions of a Senile Mind
All this fun, mockery, humor and biggest of all, insult still I am here every evening to go through the same set of routine. Yes I can feel it, all of it, but what I can not feel is how I manage to tolerate everything and still be at the same place everyday. Has the sense of indulgence grown bigger than the self esteem I carry? If no, then why I allow myself to be treated in this fashion? All these question haunt me day and night, and even at the time when I set my foot out to take my daily trip. Everyday I go through the same torture and everyday I decide to for go my ego.
I have stopped believing in reason and logic long time ago, but still whatever little I am left with I feel that the sense of loneliness has overpowered me to an extent that I go through a daily dosage of humor, mockery and insult just to have some people around me. So what if they hate me, so what if they despise me, they are the only few who have some time to give a thought about me. Life has an uncanny ability to force me to learn lessons which I never wished to. Never in my thoughts I thought that I would search companionship in loathe, disgust and insult. Never believed what gratification people around me were, never thought that the feeling of being alone can be so haunting and scary. I never thought that I would let go my ego for a mere streak of recognition from some strangers. Sometimes this stupid mind thinks that I have traveled ages to be what I am, but I forgot to carry the map which told me who am I!!!!!! May be its too late or may be NOT!!!!!
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
I want to thank all my friends and other unknown people who have forwarded chain letters to me in 2003, 2004 & 2005.
Because of your kindness:
* I stopped drinking Coca-Cola after I found out that it's good only for removing toilet stains.
* I stopped going to the movies for fear of sitting on a needle infected with AIDS.
* I smell like a wet dog since I stopped using deodorants because they cause cancer.
* I don't leave my car in the parking lot or any other place and sometimes I even have to walk about 7 blocks for fear that someone will drug me with a perfume sample and try to rob me.
* I also stopped answering the phone for fear that they may ask me to dial a stupid number and then I get a phone bill from hell with calls to Uganda, Singapore and Tokyo.
* I also stopped drinking anything out of a can for fear that I will get sick from the rat faeces and urine.
* When I go to parties, I don't look at any girl, no matter how hot she is, for fear that she will take me to a hotel, drug me, then take my kidneys and leave me taking a nap in a bathtub full of ice.
* I also donated all my savings to the Amy Bruce account. A sick girl! that was about to die in the hospital about 7,000 times. (Poor girl! she's been 7 since 1993...)
* I went bankrupt from bounced checks that I made, expecting the $15,000 that Microsoft and AOL were supposed to send me (when I participated in their special-mail program) would arrive soon.
* My free Nokia phone never arrived and neither did the free passes for a paid vacation to Disneyland .
* Still open to help someone from Bulgaria who wants to use my account to transfer his uncle's property of some hundred millions $.
* Made some Hundred wishes before forwarding those Dalai Lama, Ganesh Vandana, Tirupathi Balaji pics etc.. now most of those "Wishes" are already married (to someone else)
IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you do not copy this text and e-mail it to at least 41829137600 people in the next 10 seconds, a bird will sh*t on your head today at 04.00 hour 5 min 6 sec
Now Give me a break !!!
*This post is not an original creation of the blog owner.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Horses' Back
The US standard railroad gauge (width between the two rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.
Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons which used that wheel spacing.
Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses. Thus, we have the answer to the original question.
Now the twist to the story . . .
There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So, the major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a Horse's Ass!
*P.S. This was a forwarded mail from one of my friends and is not written by me, Posted it here as I wanted to share this interesting observation.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Slippers Over Books
Amazon.com has been a success story for all the supporters of IT & web based selling models from all over the world. In my one year of MBA I have heard a lot of about Amazon.com and was very appreciative of this company which is the hallmark of existence of a virtual world. Amazon.com has been a name which fascinated me for all these years and every time I typed the URL of the website I was greeted by a sophisticated interface.
For me Amazon.com was worlds’ biggest and the best online “BOOK STORE”. R
ecently an article in Washington Post made me realize and accept a change which was gradually happening and I never realized it. Amazon is changing its business model. They are no more a book store, they are aspiring to be a one stop shop. The title bar on my browser says “Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more”. The interface has changed; it no longer looks like an online bookstore. It is more of a general mart, a variety store or a hypermarket kind of structure.
I had strong inhibitions that this strategy of leveraging the brand, would succeed. As a consumer, Amazon for me does not relate to Online store, but an O
nline Book Store. The worst part is when I open the site the display greeted me with a display which was not books, stationary, DVDs etc but some pair of Slippers. I can’t believe that a person can have same associations with a place where he buys his slippers and the place where he buys his books. According to me the way Amazon is going it is headed towards doom. Because it contradicts a basic law of branding “The Law of Expansion” which says the power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope. That is trying to be all things to all the people undermines the power of a brand. The strength of a brand lies in being synonymous with a single category. Amazon is a typical example of an excellent brand violating the law of expansion and losing the brand value. The same can be evident from the earnings and stock prices from past one year which have seen a major drop. It would have been a more practical and beneficial solution for Amazon if they would have made a new brand from scratch. Amazon for customers relates to a category as an online book store and can never be a retail mart.
Even Amazon is now aware of the dropping brand equity and customer response. They have been trying hard to regain their positioning buy organizing online shows of Bob Dylan and now lately it has decided to make his f
oray into movie business by buying right to make movie on a best seller novel “The Stolen Child”. This comes in the light when Amazon’s stocks have shown a dip of 60% over previous year. I still have strong feelings regarding that will these kind of desperate measures be able to rescue Amazon, from the bear ride it is now on. Will the strategy of diversifying from books to a store of 34 different product categories pay off in a long run. All these questions remained unanswered and probably time can be the only teller to it but as of now the situation doesn’t seem to be in favour of Amazon.
