random musings...

We have had an exceptional 2008, so many changes, both positives and negatives including Obama’s successful campaign to White house, Capitalism’s usual constructive destruction (Lehman’s brother and other banks’s collapse), painful job losses, melting housing market, government’s bail outs, Mumbai’s terror attack and finally Madoff’s fraud. Good news is none of the above was caused by natural force, all are by human. Our greediness caused all this, and some extra-ordinary human required to clean up this mess. For me, personally 2008 was great year learned some new things and found some new friends. As an acme of 2008, my dad’s kidney transplantation is scheduled on Dec 28 th 2008. Looking forward, 2009 will be another ebullient year as usual for all of us. Normally the year after recession will be excellent for growth, with the combination of new administration and rock bottom oil price, i’m imagining a paroxysm growth. Again Happy Holidays and Happy New Year 2009, af

Again it is the time of year, we are thinking about our usual New Year resolutions. For me, last 15 years my favorite resolution was to quit smoking but this year there is no need for that because i already quit. But i was addicted to web 2.0 world so my next year resolutions are   200 hits per day for my blog  http://ibloggergeek.blogspot. com  and 200 more posts. 20 subscribers to my YouTube not yet created music channel. 50 followers for my twitters and to follow 50 people. Create 2 best tools for social networking sites. One was already work in progress ( http://www.tamilscrap.com ). Loose weight by at least 1%, that is, from 210 lbs to 208 lbs Buy a home in Naperville as soon as possible, after the real estate mess subside. Spend more time with family at least productive 30 hours per week. Visit yellow stone with family (this was my trickle down one from 2008) Teach Ram how to play baseball or football in summer. Teach Meha how to ride bike and how to beat her brother.

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is facing an uphill task to clear his name from FBI charges. He is booked under almost all possible corruption charges. He is classic example of "Power Corrupts" and transforming "superior from inferior". He was from a working class neighborhood from Chicago north side. His father and mother both worked very hard to raise him and his elder brother. Based on his childhood history, he was a straight A student. He worked hard himself to stay in college, he even worked as dishwasher. After he was arrested by Feds, rumors twirl around Chicagoland and local media that he is a gambling addict, or drugs or some high level illegal activities, that’s why he needed more and more money. But the truth is he has enormous debt to pay back for his houses, campaign legal debts etc. As per one report his debt is almost $1.5 Million. Surprisingly, here Illinois is most tolerate state of corruption, because 6 of the ex governors from Illinois are in jail o

Many technology pundits predicated that Rich Internet Application (RIA) is the product of this year 2008, but it was not taking off this year as expected. I think this is because of tough economic conditions and most of traditional companies were delayed to start new projects. But there are several web 2.0, mainly content based sites are using RIA. The results are awesome and definitely RIA going to rule internet in coming years. Just see a full expressive, rich content site  http://www.scrapblog.com/ , this site was developed by using Adobe Flex RIA technology. Excellent don’t they? Another one is  http://dsc.discovery.com/guides/discovery-earth-live/discovery-earth-live.html?dcitc=w99-502-ah-1051 , just roll over mouse to GM ad on right side of the screen and see what happens? This all can be done only in RIA. EBay’s desktop application was a huge success and it was downloaded more than 1 million times just after 5 months of initial release.  http://ebayinkblog.com/2008/07/17/ebay-de

Again today morning flashing headline was 533,000 jobs vanished in November month alone. And the revised job report for September, October also very deep. As soon as flash news showed in CNBC , as usual some of us pressed panic button and affected with negative emotions. This event is not new to us, we are experiencing this since 2007 summer. As I said before, don’t jump into conclusions by reading headlines. Yes, we are in trouble right now, and all government’s engine started fire to resolve it. Patience will prevail.    Even though employers cut job for last one year, unemployment rate was holding up between 5% - 7%, I agree that anything above 5% is not good for developed nation like U.S, but because most of the people left job market to find an alternatives, some left for long vacation to explore the world. A piece of advise is this is good time to go back to school and enhance our skills.   Here are the points I have here to justify that we are not in deep recession as media hypi

It looks like people are really spending money freely, and malls are again packed with foot traffic. Are we hyping about this recession? I think say last 6-8 years we have a tendency to hype negative news, especially after Sep 11, 2001, I think now also we are hyping about this recession. As per  comscore , this year cyber Monday was second heaviest sales on record. May be NBER come back probably on December 2009 to declare that we are not in recession since December 2008, because it took one year to find out that we are at recession since December 2007.    As of Stock market, it is going up and down like bi-polar disorder, with in minute’s changes from south to north. But clearly unemployment rate is soaring(mainly construction, manufacturing, finance) and house price is keep on plummeting, since both of these affecting people directly plus usual media’s negative hype, we are feeling more recession pain than reality. Sometimes I feel that this is the way it should be, we have to have

Kanye West’s fourth album released on November 24, 2008, my initial reaction was “wow…excellent”. For first time Kanye West tried with pop, yes this is his first pop not hip-hop. First time Kanye West tried something different style of songs, auto tune and new instruments. I like Kanye West because of his depth of wordplay, rhythm, hi-pitch vocal and trying always something new and most importantly, typical artist’s fearless outspoken, well tamed bloated ego. This album was obviously out of his heartbreak after his mom’s accidental death and his relation breakdown with his longtime fiancee, and increased media scrutiny after his Graduation album’s huge success. He didn’t want to go with his usual rap because he said that he can’t do rap with broken heart. 808 is Hawaii’s area code because most of the songs were recorded at Hawaii but Kanye West suggests that 808 is the new tribal supposed to invoke emotions drum used for this album’s songs and he named this album well before Hawaii’s d

Anish is from Trivandrum, Kerala, as usual he was one of many hard working kerala’ties in Gulf to run their family. He is young 24 years old and a best friend of my brother in law and my wife family’s friend. He is from lower middle class and he want to go again and again to Gulf to make money to support his family, he has a huge responsibility to support his 2 sister’s marriage expense. He and his dad went to Mumbai for Qatar visa’s medical test on last week, after completing it, they were waiting at Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminal for train to back home, 2 terrorists storm into the station and start shooting the at crow d, our friend Anish got hit and died on spot and his dad died at hospital. His family now with out any support. We offered our hearty condolence to his family. This is crazy, what did Anish did with Mohammad X (I just named terrorists as Mohammad X), Why this Mohammad gone “mad” at Mumbai. There is no demand, there is no personal vengeance, and there no discrimination aga

Bunch of cowards again carried guns and bombs, this time for a change, they came from sea route persumably from Karachi. This was very terrible situation and our police, army unable to stop this because of hostage issue. I believe this is something planned for years and each move was well co-ordinated. This kind of co-ordination can not be done by local groups, this is definitely a foreign group. This cowards don't like India's growth of last 8-10 years and India-Pakistan's improved relationship. I hope all this cowards will be killed and Mumbai will return normal soon.

When ever a new framework got released, first questions from developers are, A) Will this make my life easier? B) more documentation? C) Is it easy to understand and intuitive? As soon as, Apache released initial details about Struts 2 , I got a sense that it is the framework for next generation. Now after reading some good books and documentations, I can strongly say that yes, struts 2 is the next generation framework for web development. Now we are in the position of talking about less configuration, and less coding, struts 2 is the answer for that.   MVC Shift: A fundamental change from Struts 1 is, constitute of Model-Viewer-Controller pattern, beans/EJBs are no longer a model rather the action servlet itself act as a model and action. The filters, interceptors are the controllers for Struts 2.   Controller – Dispatcher Filters, Interceptors Model – Action Servlet View – JSPs   Configuration Changes: As per Struts 2, Filters and Interceptors can act as controller, this is really go

I was always in favor of alternative energy, mainly wind power. May be my home town back in India is famous for high force wind. When i was kid, in our town, power cut normally ranging from 30-40 hours per week. But after private companies installed wind turbine through out our area, power cut reduced to 4-5 hours per week. It was excellent growth for under developed places like us, Indian and our state politicians don’t even notice us because we are 3000 KM away from Indian capital and 650 KM away from state capital (pun intended, but truth is we are like many other place in India, under developed,under utilized and mass migration to cities are happening in large scale now). I was closely observed our Western Ghats Mountain’s (Sahyadri Mountains) rocks and they are shaped based on wind direction, the sea facing rocks are flat, because of high wind force from Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean wind was very strong because no obstacles from Antarctica to my home town, just open ocean water.

I want to write about it a long time ago, but decided not to, because now in this advanced progressive growth of India and Tamil Nadu , anti- Brahminism is a myth. But there is something we have to write/talk for researching and shocked to know that still there is some anti- Brahmanism going on conjunction with Sri Lanka issue and what happened in Chennai law college (my wife cried for 5 minutes after seeing video from you tube please don't see unless absolute necessary, it was really brutal, no pun intended), it is clear that still there are lot of caste feeling in Tamil Nadu . As my dad always say, don’t talk the following with your fellow country ( wo ) man A) About Reservation (affirmation action in India ) with anybody B) About Periyar with Brahmins C) About Brahmins with atheists D) About money with anybody (causes belly fire) E) About sex with anybody (piss/shit in public place is okay but not kiss in my country ask Richard Gere ), F) About minority with m

I very often come across some “jump to conclusion’ers” in my life. I think the following factors are contributing jump to conclusion. 1. Want to achieve something quickly and desperate, spontaneous and impatient. 2. Lack of experience, novice, immature, tyro. 3. Unable to see big picture, see things as half full or half empty. 4. Chimerical, impulsive and erratic. Jump to conclusion is any other psychosocial disorder can be cured but there is no medication. The only cure is Cognitive behavioral therapy, which changes the way brain digests the information and producing results. Here are some tips to avoid Jump to conclusion. Set the context. Jump to conclusion happen mostly after a conversation (formal or informal), but one have to use common sense to understand the context. For example, we are at some informal meeting and talking about American football, person A is saying “yesterday’s match between Bears Vs Titans, Chicago should used most of running game rather than passing game”, p

We witnessed an once in a life time event, that too we (me and my family) are at ground zero from Chicago. It goes like this, 1969 when U.S successfully completed moon mission, USSR started jealousy because of envy, all European countries lined up to get technology as friends, third world countries started in believing something, that belief now helped them to grow this level, so they looked U.S as role model .  Now the same thing happened again, there are millions of millions still at ground level, unable to overcome their fear and inferior because of prolong suppression, here a man from minority become president of world’s oldest and greatest democracy, which was largely segregated by race 40 years ago. Nothing is impossible, all we need is courage and ultra confidence like Obama.   Obama is a great role model for millions of millions people around the world for his will power, courage and ultra confidence, even though he is leaning towards protectionism for now.  YES WE CAN....

All set for election and Obama leading in all the opinion polls. His last night solo presentation on major TV prime time slot was great. His vision and articulative views are great, he is a clear next generation leader. But one thing he is failing on is Global Economy, he has shown protectionism from the start of this presidential campaign. I thought may be, i’m monomaniac with “One Human One World(OHOW)” concept, that’s why i disappointed with his protectionism and all others are agreed with his views. So i have decided to check with other’s pulse for this matter. As usual, i started my research with real person opinions, first target was my wife, as soon as i asked the question, she refuted immediately “what’s wrong with that, first their own country people and then others”. There is one more OHOW monomaniac like me across the country (California), we used to talk this kind of prescient matters a lot, i decided to call him, he also sounded like my wife, i felt like a thunder struck o

8 weeks completed since this football season started, as usual lot of interesting games and surprises. Titans came out as unbeatable team 7-0 so far, yesterday they beat Colts.   This team has all chances to win super bowl, they are fundamentally strong. It was great rejoinder to last 5 years continues domination of Colts.   Way to go Titans. But my favorite team for this season so far is Texans, what an offensive play by them. But they lost so many matches early, but last 3 games they are really good. Bears came back really good after the lost against Falcons.   Lions, Raiders, 49ers, and Rams are really wasting their fan’s money and time. Lions are playing like cats nowadays, may be bad economy really hurting them very bad. For a change, Dolphins started winning some games. 49ers fired their coach and again they promised to build a good team, the same they announced when they hired Nolan 4 years ago. Again NFL players started using steroid like substance, this time it was some we

“Thank god it’s Friday” is famous and happy phrase but not now, for bull investor it is “Save god it’s Friday” from bears.   All bear investors hibernating in first 4 days of week and collecting all information (I don’t know where are they storing information, but bull know source and why) and dumping stock like right, center and left on Friday. This Friday’s sell offs are very well coordinated, bears coordinated from all over world, it was happening very early in the morning. Most of the sell off are out of panic and with panic these bears loosing logic and thinking power, just take all news as literals and getting more panic. So for a smart bull it is good time to jump on, I don’t think so, this is tempting to jump in. Very low P/E ratio, major indexes lost almost 20% on average this month alone, all panic sellers are done with their selling (still they are out??), in other words bears are gone for permanent hibernating. All reliable technical indicators, fundamentals and theory, a

Excellent Story from  http://www.storiesville.com/content/view/1557/65/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- At one point in his life, Literal Man owned and ran a small 'fruit and veg' shop in a shopping mall. Like many other of his endeavours, this one was doomed to fail. One day a lady came into his shop. She was an older lady, about forty or fifty, who had a pleasant smile and seemed to be in the mood for conversation. Attempting to engage in small talk was one of Literal Man's weaknesses, for reasons that he never quite understood, yet nevertheless he tried his best to make the lady feel welcome in his shop. "I hope that you are having a good morning" he said as she walked towards him. She briefly looked confused at the unusual greeting. Not 'good morning'? Despite this she smiled and said; "The morning will be good once it's over, just kidding! I'm fine, How are you?" Liter