Workaholic parents - boon or bane ?

Been mulling over this issue for a while and I have found clarity finally. How much time do parents need to spend with their kids ? Do they need to work to fend for the family and spend time witht the kids or should they work on making the world a bed of roses for their kids. Thankfully, my parents have been a blend of both. When parents spend time only on their kids without contributing much to the society they are doing probably anything a good parent should do. But is this what we want from the world in general ? Imagine a scenario where all parents in the world live only for their kids and they have a job not a career. This would mean that scientific/economic/academic progress is going to be very slow. Well, the kids of course study and excel in whatever field but once they have their own family everything is for their kids. uman beings in such a situation will only be productive in their 20s to the 30s assuming that the kids don't arrive until then. They will be learning in their formative years and then teaching their kids what they learnt. When are they going to use what they learnt ? Even if they do, how will they give more than they can if they concentrate only on their kids.

So, we do need a balance between the two above mentioned kind of parents because the kids who have learnt a lot because their parents spent a lot of time on them should give more to the world. I now know why my Dad should have been the way he was because may be in a small way he has made the world a better place for everyone. Now I am no longer biased by needing his hand to lead me and am in a position to understand him better. Also, there is such a thing as paying too much attention to your offspring ... they need to be thrown in the the water to learnto swim.. you can not always be the lifejacket right ? I sign off by voting for all workaholics !! whoopee ....

Tagore's Dream.... Miles to go before we sleep

Most poets are idealists ... not only do they use their poetic license to over rule the grammar rules in the language but also work towards making the grass greener and the world a better place to live in. I happened to come across Tagore's poem today and how he pictured his country post the English Rule. Here is the poem:

My Country Awake

Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

by Rabindranath Tagore

Analysing this....

In today's world the country described by Tagore does not exist. We are a democracy and so are a number of countries ...but most of the world is ruled by fear. Fear need not just arise from terror but it we fear many other things. Fear of society is what has engulfed the world. Amongst the population I think Indians rank number one in this area. We do not carry on our daily tasks without worrying about the way we appear to our fellowbeings. Our "mind is not free" and will never be. Knowledge is never without a price thats not being debated. I am not sure why Tagore even thought this would work but the concept of "Guru Dakshina" has always been there. Of course, I smile as I write this because I work on open source "free" software.
All of India united before we got our freedom and we were broken into states, castes, creeds and races the very minute we got our freedom. The world atlas has changed much since I studied my Geography. Maybe one Gondwanaland would have been best ;). More later...

Software component recipes for the culinarily challenged

A recent read of mine was about how software components are similar to prime numbers. The paper dealt with the reusability of software components. To some cooking is absolutely impossible.
While pondering over the above mentioned paper over preparing my dinner, I started to wonder about how cooking also has basic building blocks similar to the kind of components we reuse in our programs. So, it is simply a matter of putting together these building blocks to make a wholesome and tasty meal. I will elaborate on this sometime soon.

The art of living ... alone

I seemed to have realized after talking to numerous friends of mine that it seem to be men that crave marriage more than women do. Of course, my observations are limited to the indian population alone. The men never want to stay alone for some reason, they feel that it would make them too lonesome and having a roomate will alleviate that fact that they are still single - neither engaged nor dating. They always need comforting of some sort or the other and I can't still understand why it is that the popular notion of women requiring some emotional support still exists. I do agree that women are more emotional but they don't require emotional support as much as men do. Anyway, I didn't mean to diverge from our discussion but was an important thing to point out. Having said that, men might benefit from learning about the art of living alone - what I have learnt - the do's and don'ts - the ups and downs. Maybe this might help the men out there to finally get out and try to have some fun and live independently.

My clamour for independence began at a young age which perhaps was the greatest motivation for me to stay by myself. I entered my own apartment, something I went around and picked enjoying the perks of being an adult ;) (well, there has to be something). Bought some household appliances(which these days includes a wireless router) and setup a wireless network jumped around on the bed that I had carefully picked after bouncing on several mattresses in various stores. They come in various sizes and number of coil springs matter, the sales people at the be store told me. Being an avid do-it-yourselfer decided to buy furniture that would satisfy my urge to play with lego blocks and still be an adult. So, this resulted in the building of a bookcase, a chest of drawers, a dining table and chairs, an easy chair, a futon cum lounger and a table for my TV. This of course takes up sometime and keeps you from feeling bored. Of course, for the most part, work did keep me busy but that would result in being burntout from too much work.

Anyway, and then came the bike. Biking to work started off and it was passionate for some days and then slowed down as it got colder. One could still go to the gym or go for runs. Sometimes, the creative enthusiasts, could go to a music or dance class. I am currently in the pursuit of a dance teacher myself to continue my dancing. There are numeous shows to go watch and you could round up some people from work. Climbing is another passion of mine and I applaud the person who came up with an indoor climbing gym idea because its so much fun and you can spend hours in one without even noticing it. With some friends, sports would be good like Tennis, Racketball or even cricket :) . Of course, for the days you dont feel like doing much there is always the library and there have been books that have taken me on journeys that I could not even dream of. Kudos, to all the writers. I am yet to explore the audio books and I hear they are a lot of fun. Ok .... theres a lot more....

Now after reading this do any of you guys or if there are girls who had doubts about staying alone have any now ?

That's all folks ... Deepti.....

Dashagrahas ... ?

Ok ... I invented that term and I did not mean dashavatarams. What I meant was that another new planet has been discovered. It has not yet been named though. It was quite unfortunate that our forefathers who very surprisingly judged that there are 9 planets in the solar system could not feel the existence of a Tenth as astronomer Mike Brown and his team from CalTech seem to have found. Note though that the navagrahas don't represent only the planets. They actually represent Surya, Chandra, Mangala, Budha, Brihaspati(oh now you know where the third of the Trimurthis sits in our Hindu temples),Sukra, Sani, Rahu and Ketu(like Dhuma ketu or comet). Anyway, it has been interesting to find out about this. and here is more information on this planet which unfortunately is called UB313 - http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/index.html

Debian Kernel issues for SATA drive

Finally figured this one out. There seems to be no standard documentation on why Debians' 2.6.8 Linux Kernel will not load with GRUB. But this works with 2.4.27 Kernel !! Apparently this is a common problem for those using SATA hard drives. So, I let the system run and detect my hard drive and stop at "Kernel panic !@#$%!" and it pointed to sdaX that it had detected while my system was booting at root=/dev/hdd2. I changed this to sda2 and woohoo then GRUB worked its magic. Now to get my wireless PCI card installed. This page has the info that I need :

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/answers.php?action=viewarticle&artid=500


More on this:
Everytime on startup I needed to set this to sda2 which wasn't convenient. To change this I changed the menu.lst file which contains the executed grub commands located at /boot/grub

Is too much teaching = spoon feeding

This is a question that will definitely divide the world into two warring sections. I have met many people in the past who refuse to give any information saying that it can be found in this website or that page. Although I understand the importance of time, I think its necessary for people to recognize the difference between a novice and an intermediate user. If you give basic information to a novice user and show him where he can get more info that would be a good thing to do. It makes their life a lot easier and in the long run makes them more productive. But giving them riddles to figure out wastes a lot of their time and yours too because in the end you are going to have a lot of explaining to do. But I am gullible enough to spend time with people who take advantage of me and use up my time thats the downside of doing what I do. There are certain instances when you have to learn to recognize parasites and learn to say no to them. Also, I try to find a balance between teaching and telling people what exactly to do. So, too much teaching is not equal to spoonfeeding because teaching enhances a persons' brain while spoonfeeding merely gives them knowledge and no meta-knowledge !

Bicycle Fun: Any substitues ?

I recently bought a mountain bike. Its a 24 speed, 15 inch aluminum frame bike with shimano gears and front suspension. I am still excited about it which is why I give the description. Today was the first test ride. As, I went off on the bike routes in the suburbs I realized how refreshing this was and how a bike at the gym could never make up for the real thing. That set me off thinking about how an immersive system such as a cave could help in this respect. There are two important things that are not available when you use a stationary bike - the cool fresh breeze that varies with your speed and the surrounding environment. If we could bring these two into the immersive system then that would be very close to enjoying a real bike ride. Hmmm... I wonder if someone has already designed such a system. Anyway... my ride was totally exhilarating. I was wondering why I had delayed buying a bike until now actually.

School System: (Highschool dropout != cool scientist /music director)

Looking back, all the cool (read as eccentric, nerdy) scientists etc have been high school dropouts or something like that. Of course that is not a "iff" (if and only if) relationship ;)

All I wanted to say is that "All high school dropouts don't end up as
cool people" But the vice-versa may actually be true. So, I don't
advise that people take that path ;) I was just wondering what is it
in the school system that kills any creativity present in human mind.
Any comments ? What is it that people don't like about school ?

Think about this ... look at how many great thinkers that India has
produced lately this is directly related to the conformity of the
school system. The more rigid our school system gets, the more of a
"mass production" factory of software engineers/programmers india
becomes. I see that this is again a consequence of belonging to a
third-world country where bread-winning or at least improving our quality of life is the prime goal for the average indian. So, I think when its only
when our economy improves and people get to choose any occupation they
like and still get paid for it will we start producing those free
thinkers. Not that we don't have geniuses its just that considering
our population we should definitely have more.

Reading Revival's Rivals

Nowadays, nobody has the time to read. For anti-social elements like me (as a former roommate put it ;)..) reading was and is the ultimate medium. Pick up a book and burrow away in your bed or where there are warm(hot in madras) sun rays landing on your back. Its been a while since I read a book too! I think e-books are a good solution for people who travel for about an hour to work. This would let you listen to something other than the same old songs on the radio. We have a lot of competing technology these days from the latest PSP- Playstation Portable to the earlier generation's Television. Well, as they say 'a picture is worth a thousand words' but how can a picture that provides the same information to one and all, surpass a book that can be interpreted in a million different ways. We visualize a book in different ways which allows growth of creativity and enhances our minds. Writing has also evolved into different forms - writing for soaps and sitcoms to games which have complex plots. I can understand that reading may have been sacrificed for other more active pass times like gaming where the session is interactive. But I can't seem to understand why people like watching movies better.

May be the explanation for the above behaviour is that the world is getting divided into 2 extremes - the active who like interactive sessions and the passive who are lazy to read also. There are of course cats on the wall like me.... Anyway something to ponder on.

Deepti