running away

I have often thought about it, running away from everything and everyone I know, just keep going and never stopping. I tried a small experiment once while I was working in Chicago, Instead of getting off at my regular on the green line I would just sit and get off at the next stop. Didn't happen, the day I wanted to do was a day we were doing a big code release at work and I couldn't be late on that day. What kind of a person can loosen his/her mental/physical attachments to the environment so much so that they can just leave their daily life and never look back? Jack Kerouac once said something like If you own a rug you own too much. I wonder what it would be like, to run away. I guess it would be very liberating for a few moments. I read a biography called "The Last American Man", the guy rode a horse all the way from one end of the US to the other end. I guess the heat in Riyadh (close to 50C) is getting to me. I need a vacation in some place cool. Some place nice where I can just relax.
In other news, I was accepted in Duke University for their Cross Continent MBA program starting this August. I'm still waiting for the loan information to come through so that I can make a final decision about attending, I really want to do it and I was pretty anxious about the whole thing till I remembered a Hadees that basically said " The pens have been lifted and the ink has dried" basically meaning our destiny has been decided. How does one reconcile destiny with free will? Bah... too many thoughts for one post, specially one written after such a long hiatus.

A good math review

It's been a while, 6 years, since I last played with vectors, surfaces tangent planes and extremas. In light of this I wound up going through this relatively simple but comprehensive review of calculas III, go through it if you need to brush up on these topics.
http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/Classes/CalcIII/RelativeExtrema.aspx

Why didn't I think of that?

Sometimes you come across a new idea or technology and your first reaction is "That's so obvious, why didn't I think of that?" These ideas range from the Google search engine to Velcro. The latest idea that found my ingenuity lacking was OnLive, TiVo for games. Actually I'm not really sure how Tivo works, never having owned it. I don't think it's available in Saudi Arabia but I read about how OnLive works and I think it's genius. Depending on their pricing models and the quality of service they offer they stand to make a killing. I wonder how they will eventually make it work, will they load the games into the PC's ram and then transfer data as needed or will it be more like a remote desktop thing where all the processing will be done on the remote machine and your machine will just be used to log in and view it. I think they should offer both models, higher end PC's should be able to share more of the processing load while lower end PC's will just act as portals accessing the servers processing capabilities. For more information go to
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2009-03-24-onlive_N.htm

In other news, I am reading up on Support Vector Machines & the Monte Carlo method, I don't know how the two would work together but I have some ideas on making them work. My next blog posting will probably serve as an intro to one of the two subjects.

Dirty Stratosphere

We Indians aren't known for our sense of hygiene, Let's face it, as a group we are not the cleanest. An example one pair of my gym socks, in college, were at one point so dirty that they were molded into the shape of my foot and could stand on their own because of all of the embedded salt in them.
So it comes as no real surprise that Indian scientists found bacteria and fungus growing on the weather balloon they sent up to the stratosphere. It's also heartening to know that they didn't name it after a deity, Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru or some other icon of India, and instead choose to name one of the newly discovered bacterium after the noted astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. It's good to acknowledge greatness in other parts of the world besides our own.
In other news, Singulariy University has started accepting applications. The concept of a university offering a graduate level course in future studies and planning seems intriguing. I would love to see what kind of solutions they come up with for the worlds problems. Things like rice that can grow without water in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, a cheap method to create electricity generating solar panels, a solar water purification system, a cheaper method for mass transportation, real time language translation devices, light sabers, personal relocation devices ("beam me up Scotty") etc. My opinion is, obviously, skewed by the fact that I am a techie and have a vested interest in two countries, India and Saudi Arabia. The former being one of the world's most populous and the latter being the one gifted with the most open space and the most potential for generating solar energy.

My First Excel Macro

Nothing to write home to mom about, but I have gone from programming in C++ to Java to VBA. My first VBA script does very little but it saved me a lot of time

Dim x As Integer
x = 1
For Each oRow In Sheet1.Range("A:A")
For Each nRow In Sheet2.Range("A1:A244")
If (oRow = nRow) Then
Sheet3.Cells(x, 1) = oRow
x = x + 1
End If
Next nRow
Next oRow
Dim row
End Sub

Basically checks if the the elements from Range A:A (i.e. all the elements in the column) in Sheet 1 were repeated in A2:A244 in Sheet 2. I could have exported the sheet into a csv file and written a perl script or something in java to do it. But it's always fun to experiment with a new language.

The death of destructive innovation

I have alot of things that I can write about in this blog including my sisters marriage, my new position at work, food poisoning and blood letting. But what I am going to talk about today is destructive innovation and how everyone is out to destroy it.
Fact is, we need destructive innovation. We need to see entrepreneurship at work and we need to see how we respond to adverse situations. If during our bleakest hour all we can think about is saving the rich then the bad guys don't need to win. The global economy will shrink, we all know that. The next couple of years will be tough for nearly everyone. I say nearly because someone always figures a way to make profits. Even now, the companies that sell canned, frozen foods are making a killing. Gun companies are doing really well and "Living off the land for dummies" will be on best sellers list shortly. So where am I going with all of this, My view on the matter is that you can't bail everyone out and if you are willing to bail out the big boys for making bad mistakes than why not the little guys? Little guys can be just as stupid as the big guys. There is something to the argument that if the big guys fall more people will fall with them, but even if the big guys stay standing there will be massive layoffs and people won't see things getting better if the monopolies stand as is. Bailing out the little guys will be harder logistically but it might be better in the long run. I'm not entirely sure where I am going with this rant but I believe that destructive innovation is a powerful force for the betterment of humanity in the long run, and just to be clear "I believe" is not the same as "I know", there are very few things in life that I know and alot of things I believe in.

100th post

With this post I will celebrate my 100th posting on my blog. I think a great business idea would be to offer people a hard cover bound book of all the blogs they have published, I know the plan will make money since most bloggers are a bit narcissistic and would love to have a book about themselves written by themselves. I know exactly what I would do with it too!, I would give it to some one as a gift on their birthday and watch their faces fall when they realize that it was a book about the other by the author containing his mindless ramblings :)
Anyways, I guess I should mention that my younger sister will be getting married this coming Thursday and that both her and my future brother-in-law are really excited. Another arranged marriage in the family, nothing exciting about it in my view. Exciting would be them eloping and getting married in Taif (think of Vegas but without the Casinos) But they both seem happy so I am happy for them, being the brides elder brother it becomes my task to take the groom aside and threaten him with bodily harm if he ever does anything to my sister that would hurt her, but I get the feeling that this is just elicit laughs from everyone in the family. So maybe I will just challenge him to a wii tennis match and consider my duty completed.
I ran 10 miles with the Riyadh Road Runners yesterday. It was a pretty good run I think, the weather was amazing and brunch afterwards was also good pretty good. I made good time I think, I completed the whole thing in 1 hour & 38 minutes, slightly better than 6 miles per hour which is my goal for the marathon. I also registered for the Dubai marathon yesterday, I had promised myself that if I got to November 31st without injuries I would register for the marathon, so true to my word I registered and without fail I woke up today with every muscle on my body sore. I think my body knows that by registering I will put it through a lot of punishment in training so it's getting back at me even before I start training seriously. Damn mind and body connection..
I really am glad I found the Riyadh Road Runners, gives me something to look forward to every two weeks :)