Happy Holidays

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, after a long time i’m going to celebrate new year with my parents in India. My musings will resume after Jan 10^th 2009. Have fun friends…

New Year Resolutions

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 

1. 200 hits per day for my blog http://ibloggergeek.blogspot.com and 200 more posts.
2. 20 subscribers to my YouTube not yet created music channel.
3. 50 followers for my twitters and to follow 50 people.
4. Create 2 best tools for social networking sites. One was already work in progress (http://www.tamilscrap.com).
5. Loose weight by at least 1%, that is, from 210 lbs to 208 lbs
6. Buy a home in Naperville as soon as possible, after the real estate mess subside.
7. Spend more time with family at least productive 30 hours per week.
8. Visit yellow stone with family (this was my trickle down one from 2008)
9. Teach Ram how to play baseball or football in summer.
10. Teach Meha how to ride bike and how to beat her brother.

Blagojevich – A Case Study

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 or faced some kind of corruption charges. What one will do? If he/she is in a seat which is already corrupted, he/she had inferior childhood and bloated ego because of unbelievable growth. Any one would decide, let’s play the same game rather than play by book, which is, cut short budget to pay debt or declare bankruptcy etc. Everybody do mistakes, bad judgment and wrong decision, if we try to cover up those by doing more wrong doing is bad. Here Blagojevich also simply fell into the same trap.

Did i sound like supporting Blagojevich? A big NO, he was just betrayed millions of people in Illinois and U.S. But my focus is, what we learnt from here. I believe corruption is because of social and peer pressure. A man or woman not born with corrupted mind but society and peer group, history is responsible for corrupting one’s mind.

Here are some points to how to live with dignity.

1. Friend’s selection: Selecting friends is really important. We don’t need 100 friends but some real good friends are more than enough. But when you are growing faster, we can not control whom should we friendship with. That’s why grow as per age and maturity.

2. Addiction to money: Addicted to money is worse than heroin addict, it was well analyzed and documented. This is i think because of fear, fear of rejection from society and lack of individuality, most of the people addicted to money. Money is a tool created by human to exchange goods, it was not meant to increase one’s dignity or save for future use. If we ignore fear and society then addiction to money would gone forever.

3. Inferior/Superior: This is really important and sole responsible for many crimes and violent behavior. As i said in previous point, if one take an account of overwhelmingly society point of view then they are prone to inferior/superior complex. Society is made with group of people and their judgment is not 100% right and we should not give more important to negative aspect of society view. At same time one should not treat themselves as superior also, being in middle is really tough and required numerous self-realization, meditation and yoga are the best to over come inferior and stay at middle. I think i need to write a post about it
   

I think Blagojevich case is best example of Narcissistic Personality disorder(NPD), his attorney going to use this as an escape point. Even after he knows that Fed was taping his phone, he couldn’t stop what he was doing is the great point of NPD. I’m not very sure about this but i believe sudden growth and eager to make quick money might contribute this disorder. i have to do more research about this.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Blagojevich

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122904253463000251.html?mod=igoogle_wsj_gadgv1&

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferiority_complex

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_complex

http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Addiction-Philip-Slater/dp/0525477047

JavaFX

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-desktop-turns-1-million-steve-jobs-likes-meat-and-potatoes-ebay-iphone-app/

I think struts2.0, JavaFX or Flex, Ruby on Rails or Groovy and iBaits or Hibernate are the great combination of technologies to build or enhance

E-Commerce, content based, web 2.0 and transactional based web sites. This all improve development time as well as quality and rich user experience.

Last week, December 4^th 2008 Sun released the first version of JavaFX, here is the press release.

“December 4, 2008 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today unveiled one of the most significant advancements to the Java(TM) platform with the release of JavaFX(TM) 1.0, a new platform that merges form and functionality for building rich internet applications (RIA) with immersive media and content for Web browsers and desktops. The announcement signals a broad expansion of Java software's ubiquitous reach to a wide range of Web developers, content authors and visual designers, and marks the next big innovation for the Java platform, extending its capabilities to include rich applications for all the screens of life, from desktops and browsers to mobile devices and TVs. Developers can download JavaFX 1.0 at: http://www.javafx.com.”

Please note that this release of JavaFX 1.0 only supports browsers and desktops. The mobile and TV support will be release on spring 2009. Now JavaFX is tightly integrated with NetBeans IDE, since I haven’t found any good plug-in for IntelliJ for now, I think Net Beans option is monopoly now.

JavaFX download page: http://javafx.com/downloads/windows.jsp

JavaFX step by step guide: http://javafx.com/docs/gettingstarted/javafx/create-first-javafx-app.jsp

Happy digging…

Ouch!!! Headline Hurts

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 hyping. 

1. Last month job report suggests that we had job cuts ranging from mining industry to jet engine manufacturing. It is the clear indication that we are having a domino effect, that is, employers fear that credit market is frozen so they have to cut some expense to preserve cash. If that is the only reason, what will happen if government unfreeze credit market, will they hire all back? http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/business/economy/06jobs.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

2. I was under impression that this job report only includes adults, but after reading detailed report i found out that this includes teenagers also. Obviously they all went back to school, and the unemployment rate for teenagers is 20.4%, most of the cut come from temporary jobs. So before getting jump into conclusions, have this in mind and read detailed report. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

3. “Statisticalphobia”, I don’t know how to coin this but we are now affected by this new kind of phobia, all the numbered were compared with 30 years ago, 35 years ago and so on. 2-3 weeks ago, Steelers game ends with the score 11-10 and headline was, this is first time a football game ends with 11-10. why bragging about it? Steelers won and game ended, that’s all. The same happened now also, some one in press ran a query to found out when employer shed 533,000 jobs last time to hype about it. I like comparing situations but not this far apart. 35 years ago, German was not a single country, there was no European Union, USSR and U.S had cold wars, Larry didn’t invent Oracle database, Gates was at school and most of the web 2.0 CEOs and I was not even born ;-).http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081205/ap_on_bi_ge/financial_meltdown 

4.CNN.com, I believe they are most negative hype news organization, they just appended all negative things (as a year, as a month) into one and reported in there front page. See the headline…

“Lost: 1.9 million jobs

The 2008 tally soars after payrolls shrink by 533,000 in November, the biggest one-month decline in nearly 34 years. Unemployment soars to 6.7%.” 

 See the choice of words double “soars”, and just took all 2008 job lost in to account, we have one more report pending for 2008 as whole year. Why can’t they account for since 2000 or 1990, this is called manipulation of data to substantiate some specific objective.

I’m happy that most of the investors agree with me, they didn’t take media’s hype seriously, because market was not crashed today,matter of fact all indexs went up. As always market was already predicated this and now calm bull investors are busy with bargain shopping for both stocks and Christmas gifts for their dear ones.

Recession: Really??

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 some discipline with spending habit and reality check. In other words, people flying high 30000 feet above earth and thinking that is normal. But after coming down to earth (reality), feeling depressed and recession and all pain.  

Greatest example is Google,where free 3 times food, free dental, free medical,free massage, free car wash, 20% free time for thinking, free laundry, free movie tickets, free weekend games ticket, free yoga, free meditation, free internet, free phone connection and free gas. Now the name of recession Google going to cut all and people is going to scream and complain about recession. I don’t know for how long they want to enjoy free stuff in a public traded company and high capitalist country and 97% of revenue still come from online ads. It is laughable and illogic. 

But as a country this negative hype is not good. It creates reverse brain drain and reverse migrations. For example, during last recession in Silicon Valley, the same negative hype created some panic with in immigrants and they just left the country to Canada, Australia and to their own country. The major benedictory of this is India, because after the last recession, India boomed a lot because of available experienced returned Information Technology man power with fresh pool of youngsters. But this phenomenon was not well studied or documented. 

808s & Heartbreak: A Solace

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 decision.

Songs with ranked as my most liked ones

1. Robocop
I liked this song most. The use of 808 drum was apparent in this song. His usual trademark of wordplay, hi-pitch vocals and more importantly music with mix of usual Kanye West’s rhythm makes this song a unique piece.

2. Love Lockdown
The hi-pitch “love lockdown” repetition with high 808 drum beat is something new for pop song. I would say that make some difference for this album. Again 808 drum beat was excellent. I think here he used auto tune a lot but not sure.

3. Heartless
Written for his ex fiancee about his love breakdown. He used his frustration and jealous, ego everything in this song. Very emotional song.

4. Street Lights
Soothe high emotions with high 808 beats and mild melody.

5. Welcome to Heartless
Featured Kid Cudi, I liked this song very much.

6. Coldest Winter
Sad song again about love failure.

7. Amazing
A soul song. I believe he written this song from his heart. Good song to hear. Featured Young Jeez.

8. See you in my nightmares…
Again soul song, presumably he was indicating that he was over with all heart broken. A song of seeking new direction. Featured Lil Wayne.

9. Paranoid
Featured Hudson. A classical pop song.

10. Bad News
Mild beat and melody. I could not recognize the different beat towards end, in fact last 2 mins.

Overall 808s & Heartbreak is an emotional, pop album from Kanye West with overwhelming 808 utilization and going to be another success for him.

PS: I don't know why but thinking due to hi-tech instruments, 808 and auto tune, all songs should be listen from Bose speakers/headset, iPod headset okay. Normal speakers/headsets no good.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/808s_%26_Heartbreak