Watches

In my school days there were very few of the students who used to wear watches. My dad had gone to US in those days and he had got one electronic watch. I was one of the firsts to wear an electronic watch in the school. I was searching of the important things that happened in the history of watches.

1500s=The first pocket watch was invented in Germany

1884=GMT recognized as the basis of time zones in England.

1956=Rolex has the first day-date display in the watch.

1962=First Quartz watch (Swiss made). Battery Operated.

1972=LCD. Liquid Crystal Display (Electronic) Watches.

Since then we have variation in the models. Essentially there are mechanical watches, automatic watches, quartz watches, Kinetic and electronic watches (battery operated and solar). Some extra features like FM/AM Radio, Temperature, GPS, Bluetooth, MP3 Player, Remote control, USB connected watches have been launched. I have yet to see any watches with integrated mobile phone. Watches in Phone are so prevalent, but phone in watches not yet. Or is it that I don't know?

How can we discuss watches without talking about HMT and Titan. My father is still a HMT fan and wears an HMT, I on the other hand wear a Titan.

Guru Nanak Jayanti and Children's Day

Optical Illusions

In many email chain letters and many presentations, I have seen these two pictures/

How many people you see, How much time you took to find out, where are they etc etc.

Do you see an old woman or a young woman and what did you see first, and seeing front or seeing back etc etc. I think thousands of presentations had the speaker impressing the crowd with these photos.

Basically all this means that the presenter itself had been disillusioned with these images. And he or she used these images to understand more. Next time you see these images in emails or presentations, ask the sender/presenter. What did these images bring a change to their lives? And you will be surprised on listening to their stories. I use this a gauge to judge presenters.

Computer Memory

Decided to write some technical history today.

Computer memory can be broadly classified into 3 categories

a. Based on Vacuum tubes. 

b. Based on Ferrite Ring (called as Core memory). This was invented by Jay Forester.

c. Today's, semiconductor based LSI (Large Scale Integration) chips.

The revolution in memory technology came from Jay Forester. For a period of time, the core memory was used in 90% of the computers. No wonder we have the "core dumped" , the famous message we see during compiling C programs.

So what about SDRAM, EDORAM, DDR, DDR2. Will clear this mystery in the next post.

Suresh

BR Chopra Passes Away

BR Chopra was one of the top film makers of Bollywood Movies. Masala, Masti, Magic, Epic, he tried and succeeded in everything he made. Mahabharat, the epic TV serial on Doordarshan was his defining entry into the small screen. We were glued to our TV sets those days.

Top Movies by BR Chopra (Must SEE)

A Happy Diwali

Wishing for Peace and Prosperity and Stability.

Diwali Greeting

It is Diwali time. Brightness wins over Darkness.

Righteousness wins over Cheating. World needs peace and the message of Diwali is relevant today as it has been all these years.

Wishing you all a Happy Diwali. This picture is from my brother Mukesh.

Nobel Prize

US is on the lead for the Nobel Prize.
Chemistry they have it all. (though one scientist is from Japan)
Physics is shared between USA and Japan.
Medicine is shared between France and Germany.
Literature is French.

Peace and Economics are due on 10th and 13th October respectively.

I searched the site (www.nobelprize.org) to find the Indians or at-least those born in India who have won the prize.

Among the nominations Gandhiji, Nehruji and Sanjib Chaudhary (CJ Supreme Court) were nominated. Surprisingly Gandhiji never won the prize. It puzzles me to this day.

In 1913 Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore won for Literature.
In 1930 Sir Venkata Raman won the prize for Physics.
In 1968 Har Gobind Khurana for Medicine
(He took US Citizenship in 1970)
In 1979 Mother Teresa for Peace.
In 1983 Subramanya Chandrasekhar for Physics
(He became US Citizen in 1953)
In 1998 Amartya Sen for Economics

Bright Minds.

Trip to Ayuthaya.

Last Sunday, I decided to go to Ayuthaya. There are many ways to go there. But I decided to take the route that is taken by common people. A taxi would have cost any where near to 2000 Baht or more. And would be going-seeing-coming back.

I took the BTK train to Moh-Chit station. The train ride with good AC is really refreshing. Next I got down and took a bus number 77. I should add here that, one of the security personnel there was very helpful. He told me to take either 77 or 3, which will take me direct to the Bus Station. Any way, the bus ride was nice. It cost be 16 Baht. Once in the bus station, I took the Bus to Ayuthaya. It was again AC. Ride was nice, and in 90 mins I was there. Once in Ayuthaya, I took a motorcycle and went about seeing the place.

You can read some information on Ayuthaya here.
1. Amazing Thailand. Tourist Web site. (http://www.amazing-thailand.com/Ayuthaya.html)

I took many photos on my Casio-Exilim. But I am posting those I took on my Nokia 6300 camera phone.

Enjoy.








Peace in world.

Shoes

I had gone to buy shoes yesterday and wondered, that what is their history? Who wore the first shoes. Since when did shoes become a fashion from a necessity? What are the materials used to make them?
I my home town in Rajasthan, India, shoes are made of camel leather. They are quite different. We call them mojri. And during old times, the shoe or mojri as we call it, would eat into the legs. We had to oil it.

Mojri looked like this.



Picture has been borrowed from rediff. Also it is interesting to read the history of shoes here.

Smallest

I was surfing the net to find the world's smallest countries. I found a link here.
If you add up the population of the 17 countries listed here, it is still less than a medium sized Indian town. I am surprised how people feel and live in such small countries.
The link is here.



Next I started to look for the smallest people. I found a site about Primordial Dwarfism. It is essentially a rare case where people grow very slowly. Much better than me I think the video shows it all. I searched further and found this site. There was reference of an Indian there. This caught my attention. His name is Aditya "Romeo" Dev. He is a body builder and recognized as the smallest body builder both in Guinness and Limca book of records.

A picture is attached.

Jodhpur - Stampede

It is indeed a sad day in Jodhpur.
Reading news reports, the toll of the people who have died has already crossed 100. For Jodhpur this is a very big number. There has never been such a tragedy. The Chamunda temple is on one corner of the Mehrangarh Fort. The route to the temple is narrow. The temple itself is not so big. On the first day of Navratri there is anyway a very large rush. 20 years back during my college days, I too used to go to the temple. There used to be quite a large crowd on the first day.

20 years on, devotees have increased ten fold, but the temple size remains the same. Everyone wants to rush. Ever one wants a glimpse.

Thailand - Beautiful Temples

Thailand has some of the most beautiful temples I have seen. The Buddhist temples are just breath taking. So is the river. The size, the flow, the people, the boats everything. Where ever rivers have flowing water, culture has developed. Temples, places of culture, literature and fine arts have all evolved around rivers. No surprise, in India, rivers was where civilization flourished.



The picture on left is of "Wat Arun". In Thai, temple is called Wat. Arun means Sun in Sanskrit. The above is temple of dawn. During Sunrise, it looks just marvellous.



The picture on left is Wat Rakhang. Rakhang means bell in Thai. Legend says that during excavation of the site to build the temple, a large bell was un-earthed. That's how it got its name



More updates later.

Human Calculator

If you have access to you tube, this is nice, and entertaining.

Lehman Failure

I never like to write on such issues. But the failure of Lehman raises a lot of questions. The issue of financials does not interest me. What worries me, such a big corporate house how can it collapse. The people working, so well qualified, PHD's, from prestigious management institutes of the world (In India from IIM), all management tools, best brains everything was there. Then what went wrong. Was it wrong Policies, wrong direction, or aiming at just profitability, lack of decision making, lack of check and balances, lack of looking into future.

Is it that our educations is not complete, is it that all the quality initiatives, management principles, economic theories, certifications just for name sake. All companies in the world have to start thinking.

Companies have three components to look into. Its business principles and ethics, its employees and customers, and shareholders. The importance should always be in this order only. The image of the company should be build on principles and ethics it demonstrates and not just states, money should be treated secondary, decision making should be distributed, and checks and balances should be effective. Without which such news will keep coming up. A small search on google will give you a financial firms list that have collapsed or fainted in the past.

The impact on countries like India cannot be ruled out. Where are the economists, political thinkers, university professors, politicians, new channel reporters etc doing? How come none could ever think of this? How come none read reports, analysed data and yet allowed their students/peers/friends etc to join? It creates a big doubt on their analysis skills. Can such thing happen to our banks, financial institutions, corporations. How much are we impacted. Do we have honest figures?

It worries. The good old advice fits. Invest in what is worth the investment. Nothing better than gold.

Related Articles.

New York Times

Network World.

Firefox Add ons - 1

Firefox 3 is very nice. Since it was released some time it has become my favourite.

The Add-ons in firefox are nice. Here I will keep discussing some.

a. Stumble is one. Click on Tools->Add-ons->Browse All Add ons->From the site look for stumble!.

b. Now create an account and select your choice.

c. You get a tool bar. Click on Stumble and enjoy the sites.

d. Vote "I like it", if you like/dislike a site.


Enjoy.

India - Eat Variety of Food

My cousin Mukesh Ranga has send me this in the email.

Click on the image to see it in full size.

Safety Pin.

Walter Hunt (re)invented the Safety Pin. I was thinking the other day to search for all those things that are so common around us, that we have been using since childhood, and find out, who invented, who made it famous and surprisingly the invention has remained the same for so many years. Safety pin has very little improvement in both design and complexity. Only it has been used in so many places, it has gone way past that being just a safety pin.

Do send some photos of usages of safety pins.

Sources.

Read here, here and here.

Google has a browser. CHROME

Google has a browser finally. It has been a long wait. It was surprising that this net company which has become famous with its no-nonsense products, was lacking a browser. Firefox somehow filled the gap all these years. The browser is still in beta. Now GMail is also in beta, so don't know when the beta tag will go away from Chrome. Yes the browser is called Chrome. As of now only the windows version is available. I tried it on XP and Vista, and it worked fine on both. (It is meant for these two OS only). Just to extend my luck, I tried to download it on Windows 2003, but it failed. Linux, Unix versions are yet to come. To download you can go here.

Ganesh Chaturthi

Today is Ganesh Chaturthi. 3rd September 2008.
Wishing all of you with lots of blessings and fortune, peace of mind, good health, and peace in society and the world at large. Hope Lord Ganesh removes obstacles from as small as those in our lives to as big as those between nations.




For those who want to know more.

1. A good site for Ganesh Stotras in Telugu. The Ganesha photo has been borrowed from there.

2. Wikipedia on Ganesha.

3. Wikipedia on Ganesh Chaturthi.

4. Ganesh Stotras in Sanskrit.