Ankur Shah’s random thoughts!

Yes, I’ve taken the leap into the big 3-0! Time sure flies. Seems like just yesterday that I was in my mid teens and was horribly spoilt as a kid. By the time I was 22, I was a full-time student working on the final year of my Master’s degree, I was a resident assistant at college, AND I was doing a full-time job as a software engineer. All while trying to maintain a healthy social life. It wasn’t exactly the easiest life to manage then, but fortunately I made through all of that unscathed. Forwarding a few years to the present day, I’ve been blessed to have learned a few things over my professional and personal life that I figured I’d share here. Take it for what it’s worth:

1. Rule number one: Never lose money. Rule number two: Never forget rule number one.
2. Motivation comes in short bursts. Act while it’s hot.
3. Do not demean anyone, no matter the situation. It might be sooner than you know when the roles might reverse.
4. It takes years to build a reputation and seconds to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
5. Follow your own advice.
6. It’s all about delivering. If you think you have a “vision”, but can’t deliver fast enough (remember, timing is everything!), surround yourself with people who can.
7. No matter the consequences, those who are honest with themselves get farther in life.
8. While it may not be so easy at times, always try to have a positive attitude towards everything.
9. It’s not what happens to you, it’s what you do about it.
10. People you care most about in life are taken from you too soon.
11. Bad things do happen to good people.
12. You should not compare yourself to the best others can do, but to the best you can do.
13. It’s not what you have in life, but who you have in life that counts.
14. No matter how much you care, some people just don’t care back. And it’s not the end of the world.
15. Love has nothing to do with looks but everything to do with time, trust, and interest.
16. I’ve learned that greed will bury even the lucky eventually.
17. Chance is a gift, so act on chance when given the opportunity.
18. People deserve a second chance, but not a third.
19. Your actions now create memories you will reminisce and talk about in your elder years.
20. Taking ownership of failure builds the foundation for success.
21. If you never act, you will never know for sure.
22. Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.
23. If you don’t know jewelry, know the jeweller.
24. You cannot make someone like you. All you can do is be someone who can be liked. The rest is up to them.
25. There are people who love you dearly, but just don’t know how to show it.
26. It takes years to build up trust, and only seconds to destroy it.
27. Our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we are responsible for who we become.
28. Just because two people argue, it doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other.
29. Two people can look at the exact same thing and see it totally different.
30. Talking can ease emotional pains.

Exxon Mobile, the world’s biggest publicly traded company (no offense, VW) today announced their biggest US quarterly profit EVER. With the way the economy has been working it’s course this year, as the biggest banks are either going under or are being taken over, thousands are being forced to evict their foreclosed homes, inflation doubling while the GDP is shrinking, and so many more things going wrong with the economics of this country, am I alone to think that there’s something grossly wrong with the Exxon’s apparent “accomplishment”?

I mean, really. I want to hear someone spinning the current oil/gas price situation as an artifact of supply and demand, which, as far as I know, fundamentally are the backbone of a market or a country’s economy? Either that, or Dr. Moliver and Dr. Aslanbeigui did an aweful job in teaching me the concepts of micro and macro economics back when I was in college, respectively.

On the contrary, I don’t believe it’s speculation, or market correction. But instead, it’s sheer price fixing by the Exxon’s and Shell’s (OPEC?) of the world. They have their balance sheets to show for it, too.

I came across this rather cool analogy of our economics elsewhere, but since that link is now password protected, I figured I’d “mirror” it here while still giving credit to the (original?) post:

Our Tax System Explained: “Bar Stool Economics”

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten
comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go
something like this:

The first four men (The poorest) would pay nothing.

The fifth would pay $1.

The sixth would pay $3.

The seventh would pay $7.

The eighth would pay $12.

The ninth would pay $18.

The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the
arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. “Since you are all
such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily
beer by $20.” Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the
first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free.

But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they
divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ They
realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from
everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up
being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be
fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded
to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).

The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).

The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).

The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).

The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).

The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to
drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare
their savings.

“I only got a dollar out of the $20,”declared the sixth man. He pointed to
the tenth man,” but he got $10!” “Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth
man. “I only saved a dollar, too It’s unfair that he got ten times more than
I!” “That’s true!!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get $10 back
when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!” “Wait a minute,”
yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The
system exploits the poor!”

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down
and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they
discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of
them for even half of the bill!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, journalists and college professors, is how
our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most
benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being
wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start
drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

The word on the street is that Google just opened up downloads to their brand-spanking-new web browser, codenamed Chrome. Head on over to their site and give it a shot. It looks clean and [like many other Google products] “friendly”. I hope the developer’s support is comprable to that of Mozilla’s and that plugins, specially the mouse gestures, get introduced as seperate modules for Chrome.  It does seem to work good so far — I’m using it to post this blog entry

The best of both worlds! I can’t take credit for coining the equation above, but I did always wonder if there was a way to combine powers of two of the greatest “web apps” out there, WordPress and Facebook. If you spend enough time on Mr. Gore’s greatest invention that we call the internet, and you haven’t heard of either of those two things, I suggest you change out of those caveman clothes into something more comfortable and read up!

But I digress. So yeah, I found WordBook a while ago, but couldn’t quite take it for a spin because apparently it didn’t work with my then-old-wordpress 2.0, but now that I recently saw the latest announcement of the WordPress release 2.6 (Congrats guys!), I felt rather compelled to upgrade and test out the new offerings by WP, along with what-sounds-like one of it’s coolest plugins, WB.

So, without further adeu, testing 1,2,3

One of the most inspirational videos I’ve seen on YouTube this week. My personal favorite quote in the video: “If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived!”.

Apparently Satya Paul is inspired by Google, as well. Not sure if it’s worth the ~$300 price tag. Pretty neat, nonetheless.

Never do you see Google and it’s “products” showing any signs of weakness. Specially in the technological arena. However, tonight at 11:37 PM EST on 3/31/08 when I logged into my GMail account, I noticed a new link appear in bold red titled “New! GMail Custom Time”. With my curiosity level spiking high, I clicked on the link and, get this, got a “Page Not Found” error or a 404 error for you HTTP junkies.

I was expecting to see something unique from Google, which I guess I did as I’ve never seen them make such a blatant error before. Let alone on a main page to one of their most popular products. I can’t help but wonder if Google is starting to lose it’s “oomph”, or if it is simply some sort of a Pre-April-Fool (pre for us US netizens, at least) gig.
Screenshot below:

I’ve been in India for almost a month and a half now (Happy New Year, BTW!), and every now and then I post pictures from this side of the world on Facebook. Check them out here if you’ve got nothing better to do.

Besides spending quality time with the family, I am trying to get some work done as well. Some of which relates to Ankur Lighting, a family ran lighting business in India since 1978. I’m proud to say that over the years, the company has been established as one of the biggest lighting manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers and exporters in the country. The company is participating in one of the most renowned lighting exhibitions in India, and so I would like to take the opportunity to insert the plug for it here (Click on the image to go to the main page):

First, the background. My lovely wife got me an iPhone for my birthday. Yes, I love her! Well, I was supposed to get it on my birthday — the 16th of Nov, if you were curious — but my “inquisitiveness” got the better of us and I ended up finding out about my present in the umm… present? Did I mention I loved her?

Second, a brief review. With a never-ending list of news articles, commercials and talks in social gatherings around the iPhone, to the point that many are sick of hearing it’s name, I can say that after having used it for a few days, all the hype around it is in fact true. I’ve used many smartphones in the past, including WM5/6, Symbian and Palm OS powered phones. FWIW, the HTC Hermes (Cingular 8525) with Windows Mobile 6 is my favorite combination. That is, until I got the iPhone. The phone is very slick with both the hardware and the UI (user interface) far superior than it’s competition. Not to mention, the many cool applications it offers out of the box — you can use it as an iPod, take advantage of it’s seamless integration with YouTube to watch your favorite videos on the fabulous VGA screen, and if you’re “curious” like me, run a ssh server or web server on it (!).

Finally, the issue that cajoled me into writing this post. Among other things, the biggest problem I had had with my iPhone was to make it work with one of my laptops, which was recently upgraded from Windows XP to Vista. Note that the phone worked just fine with other computers running Windows XP and Max OS X. So, after spending many hours of installing/uninstalling iTunes, monkeying with the system registry and everything short of duct taping the darn thing, I’ve finally figured out a way for iTunes on Vista to recognize my iPhone. Ultimately, the problem turned out to be the default drivers loaded by Vista (!). Because of which, the phone was actually recognized by the OS, but was in fact only usable as a camera to import/export pictures. I fixed it by going to “Device Manager”, right clicking on “Apple iPhone” under “Portable Devices” and selecting the “Update Driver Software”. The appropriate drivers are stored under “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Apple”. After the successful driver update, your iPhone will happily show up under the “USB Controller” indicating that the phone is ready for action. I’ve found many people having similar problems online so I’m hoping this post will save you some duct tape If it does, do not hesitate to leave a comment or two.
By the way, I’m still on a look out for a good exchange client so I could get my work emails (with push mail?) work on the device over the air, and a “task manager” so I can kill unwanted tasks/processes. Got any suggestions?