Mr. Aggarwal

Indeed, tragic is he who can never have enough. But worse is he who knows he has enough, yet he cannot bear helping. – Ashok Aggarwal

These people know their audience.

By the way, at the end, the translation for the Hindi voice-over is:

[the woman texts the husband]: “It’s been 25 years, but you still don’t understand anything about women.”

I don’t judge the nature of the problem or solution as much as I do the depth of their respective complexity and simplicity. – Ashok Aggarwal

This quote isn’t as much an epiphany as it is just trying to find a way of describing what I really like to do…every day. This notion of finding simple solutions to complex problems also describes the kind of people I enjoy working with. Are you with me on this?

I have summarized the 10 dimensions as described by the video and interpreted by me below:

1. Length – a line
2. Length + Width – an impossibly flat object
3. Length + Width + Height – every object we can perceive; our world — an example is a human
4. Introduction of Time – imagine a single perceivable object in the 4th dimension is of indeterminate size and shows your entire life span
5. Introduction of Possibility – we introduce all the possible life spans you could have led in the 5th dimensional object
6. Our universe’s Infinity – all possibilities from the beginning to end of our entire universe accessed at an instance without travel; as an example, even in the 4th or 5th dimension, you would have to “travel” an indeterminate “distance” (though there is no such notion distance as we know it in dimensions that encompass time) in order to access a place in one of your possible life spans — in the 6th dimension, they would all exist at once
7. Introduction of other universes – imagine other universes with different laws of physics and altogether different foundational beginnings
8+9. Ability to travel “instantly” between different possible universes (similar to 5+6)
10. As our universe’s infinity became a point in the 7th dimension that allowed us to branch to other universe’s infinities, so all the infinities of all universes became a point in the 10th dimension. However, it is unclear what that could possibly branch to. So, in my mind, the 10th dimension is not well defined.

You may want to watch, think about this for a few days, and then come back to watch it again. It is just one way of describing 10 dimensions in layman terms, but I believe it will help formulate a thought process you can engage your mind with. I think you will find that you have already postulated some of these concepts during your own personal contemplation.

This was a nice introduction of Indian culture onto the Ice Skating scene:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended her decision not to close the borders with Mexico, saying it “would be a very, very heavy cost for what epidemiologists tell us would be marginal benefit.”

Where was this logic with the handling of the economic crisis? That approach has really just been “spend as much as possible, as quickly as possible, without waiting to assess the benefit.” I always thought people working with numbers were supposed to be the most logical. And in a time when we are at the cusp of an epidemic with the “swine” or “Mexico” flu, I am more likely to accept questionable and conservatively irrational decisions.

I guess, something about reading that quote just got me thinking.

I am fed up…completely.

iMovie doesn’t work natively with AVCHD files…that’s garbage. When you import files, the resulting, encoded files are 3-6 times larger than the .MTS files. Even with their expensive time capsule, I would have to buy multiple ones to keep my memories.

Vegas doesn’t have skimming and takes longer to edit.

Figuring out the right settings for posting online vs. DVD vs. is a mess…I just want to specify a simple calculator that tells me resulting file size, video length, resolution, and video quality.

Why is video editing such a pain when technology has come soooo far?

• Cat Power – How Can I Tell You (never fully recorded — was done only for a diamonds are forever commercial — but still one of the best ever)
• Dave Mathews Band – Remember Two Things album (basically, the whole thing)
• Brad Paisley – Little Moments)
• Old Hindi Music (Kishore Kumar, Rafi, Mukesh))
• Bob Marley – Legend album has most of his best songs)
• The Beatles, Coldplay, and James Blunt (just about all of their stuff))
• Dispatch – The General)
• Adam Sandler – Grow Old With You (Don’t be turned off by the artist. Just listen to it and I bet you’ll like it if…especially if you are married))

Honorable Mention:

• Eric Clapton – Wonderful Tonight and an instrumental for which I don’t know the name
• Nirvana
• Some “old school rap” (you know, the ones that every one of us knew the words to growing up)

We have all been touched or hurt by the emotions we envision someone else has gone through. At what point, if any, is this taken too far?

When do other people’s joys and sorrows begin to affect you to the point where you are being “too empathetic”? What kind of person is prone to being/becoming “too empathetic”? Do you even believe there is such a thing?

I think there very well could be such a thing, and in a society where we feel that people are becoming less sociable, I tend to believe we will end up with some level of social “climate control” issues…where people cannot form the proper balance with many important social constructs, including empathy. I am concerned that people will begin to go to the extremes of feeling either too little empathy (I believe that everyone feels at least some small amount of empathy) or too much empathy. I believe there will be empathy balancing techniques that will be devised and training courses for the “social climate control” crisis we are already facing or will soon face in our technology-driven, impersonal world.

What are your thoughts? I know many people must be seeing this as it unfolds in front of all of our eyes. Maybe we can get to this and improve people’s quality of life in the current and future generations faster than we can find ways to solve the ozone issues or viable alternative fuel sources.

I know this may seem obvious to some people, but believe me…it needs to be said…

When you drive in city, highway, fast, slow…anywhere…

LOOK CAREFULY FOR THE LIGHTS ON CARS AROUND YOU, specifically, the signal and brake lights.

Here is a freebie tip…while on the highway, don’t just look for brake lights of the car directly in front of you. Be conscious of brake lights for a few cars ahead as well. You will be better able to anticipate any sudden stops, which is how many highways accidents occur.

Again, I know even you might think you do this, but this is all about training yourself to do it constantly and consistently when you drive. Thank you for keeping the roads safe all the time, not just when you have nothing better to do like talking on the phone, finding your favorite CD, plugging in your cell phone to the car charger, reading a newspaper, responding to SMS’s/emails, or something even more insane that I can’t even image, yet I know people can think of and actually do while they drive.

Better comparisons can be drawn once the Instinct is released, but I can comment based on what I know about each…

1. Instinct is slated to support Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync on day one — how Apply and iPhone could avoid this for so long is amazing to me, but I am glad to hear that even they plan to support Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync this summer

2. Instinct supports faster broadband speeds than iPhone (again, iPhone is coming out with a new version this year that supports similar speeds)

3. Instinct is being released on Sprint (and I’m not sure when they plan to release on any other network). I really dislike the idea of a phone only being available on one network. I hope Instinct does not pigeon-hole into Sprint for too long.

4. iPhone is releasing an SDK. Instinct programs are written with Java BREW. I guess we will see how many useful applications will be written for each in time. I assume iPhone will get the advantage on this because of the simple fact that it currently has so many more users.

5. iPhone incorporates all the iPod features. I don’t have/use an iPod, but so many people do and there is a distinct advantage in combining the most popular music and video solution into the phone as a single device.

6. Apple has marketing prowess and a general sexiness factor that Samsung can do almost nothing to compete with. I really like Samsung products (like their gorgeous LCD monitors), but I don’t see the overall market share tilting a great deal regardless of how compelling the phone features prove to be.

I am hopeful that the Samsung Instinct will be a viable competitor to the iPhone since healthy competition is only good for us consumers. As I mentioned, I don’t think the market share for this kind of device will shift too far away from Apple (reference the history of the iPod and the many viable competitors that came out before/after it), and this will be a large factor that continues to lands in Apple’s (and the iPhone’s) favor. Besides, in this case, Apple has quite a bit of time ahead of all other devices in this arena and the multi-touch was real innovation that was brought to the table (and it worked perfectly from the day it hit the shelves).

Apple has proven to innovate at a rate and with a quality better than others, but this, combined with their lead time and market share will make it very difficult for any other company or product to make a real dent. Of course, I remember another product (Palm Treo) that was considered the de facto standard “smart phone” in somewhat recent history; so I look forward to allowing our world’s business, marketing, and technology surprise me as soon as possible.

Hmmmmmm…maybe the oPhone will do it…

I am just at a complete loss as to why I can’t sort emails in Outlook by the sender’s domain name. As much as I use searching and search folders, as well as color-coded rules, I use sorting once I get to a point where I have a reasonable number of results to look at. And I am simply fed up after 7+ years of using Outlook everyday that I have never been able to sort by the sender’s domain name. I have even gone through the trouble of writing my own formula to display the sender’s domain, but I can’t sort by my own formula field…

So, I want to know 2 things:

1. Is there anyone else that finds this to be as annoying as me (and/or would find this feature to be incredibly useful)?
2. Does anyone know of a way to make this happen (yes, I will even pay money for code, instructions, or even to have an add-in built)?

I happen to think there is simply no better email client on the market, but this one little feature request has eluded me for years.

RAID used to be a topic discussed by only business, and even within business, only by a subset of folks within IT.  Now, I am starting to see it pop up as options in consumer desktops, and believe it or not, I had the option when configuring my last laptop.  Yeah, yeah, 5 years from now — actually, with the way technology advancement accelerates, it could be more like 5 months from now — this post will seem like I am just talking about the days when he walked to school uphill both ways.

But, since I have people ask me about this now-a-days, I thought I would shed some light on it — some “practical” light that I think almost all of you will find useful:

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives (or Disks), also known as Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives (or Disks).

RAID configurations can be achieved with hardware, software, or a hybrid of both.  I will focus on hardware, since that has been the most common, and is generally considered the best option since it does take away the same valuable processing power that would be used to run software.

There are actually more types of RAID than just 0 and 1, but I will focus on those for now since there are the only RAID configurations that can achieved with as little as 2 disks (and most consumers won’t have the option of their RAID configurations just yet).

RAID 0 – Striped Set

Fragments of data are written across both disks, providing higher throughput, and higher performance.  Since “parts” of the data are written to both disks, however — and this is the part most people leave out — your chances of hard drive failure effectively “double” since data from both drives is lost when either disk fails.  Sure, as consumers, we may not have high-end backup/replications, but we all have our external hard drives these days.

RAID 1 – Mirrored Set

For a consumer, which do I recommend?  NEITHER!  Here is the part that NOBODY tells you: forget your hard drive failures and the pain it is to get new ones swapped in place…if your motherboard fails, and you don’t have the same hardware RAID controller laying around (aka the same machine with the same specs), you can plan to spend the next few days/weeks:

• On EBay looking for the same machine to buy for as cheap as you can (which will be hard at this time, since RAID is so new for consumers)
• Spending a few hundred dollars/hours with the Geek Squad while they surf for porn
• Wondering why the he** you got RAID anything in the first place.

No, this hasn’t happened to me, but I think I have had at least one sleepless night just thinking about it.  The only time I dealt with RAID configurations on PC’s, it was for business, and we bought four machines with the exact same configurations (aka RAID controllers) so that we could minimize risk as much as possible.

Disclaimer: I am not, haven’t been in the past, and don’t think I ever will be (nor want to be) a system administrator.  I do, however, learn and do what my clients and business wants/needs, which does include hardware and software configuration.

Aside from hands-free talking on my cell phone (as long as I am within 2 feet of my phone), Bluetooth technology just hasn’t gotten me that excited. Take, for instance, syncing my PDA phone with Outlook…

Using my good ol’ USB cable, I am able to sync all my information in very short order. The same data transfer using Bluetooth takes OVER 10 times LONGER. I know PDA sync time isn’t all that important for some people, but it is for me, since this process can take over 1 hour for me with Bluetooth. It already takes around 10 minutes with the USB cradle. If I recall correctly, even my infrared transfers from computer to computer 8+ years ago would happen faster than Bluetooth transfers.

I’d really like to proven wrong and find more/better ways to use Bluetooth technology, but so far, Bluetooth has left me somewhat…well…blue.

When your troops are continuously being shot at and injured, you have two choices: fight like crazy or get them all out. – Ashok Aggarwal