Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Quick Update

It is been so long since the last time I wrote something for here. I have been thinking about writing a lot though but….. Let’s just say I wasn’t in the mood! ;)

I am done school; got a job back in September; and cut my bangs! He he he

I thought I feel better when I am done with school and have a job but I don’t think that helped me at all. I feel even more discombobulated than ever before…

Sometimes I wish that I never had any feelings…. then I take my wish back right away. My emotions and feelings are like a rambunctious little brat kid!

Escaping from reality may not be a good thing but I certainly believe taking short cuts once in a while IS.

Lastly, my new fixation is music….. Haven’t watched any of my favorite TV shows for about a month!

Tuesday, July 4, 2006

Questions

I hadn’t seen my friends for the longest time. During the long weekend I finally got to see one of them. We caught up with a lot of things. She asked me two questions which has got me thinking since then. She said:
Are you sure …..?
Do you think …..?

These questions might seem very trivial but very very important ,,,,,,,,,,,, to tell you the truth after all the thinking I have to say “No, I am not sure” & “ No, I don’t think so”.
Never expected myself to say that but that is the truth and I have no choice but dealing with it. Well, not right now. I don’t want to deal with it :$ I will do it after school is done,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Marking

I have been marking midterms since yesterday. My whole body is sore. I never knew marking is so hard.
Just writing the grade at the end of each question in red, contemplating on whether I am being fair or not….. it is just too difficult.
In the beginning I was so indecisive…. I wanted to call Carla, the prof. I am TAing for, all the time. But that is not appropriate, is it? I had to be more independent and responsible. So there, I decided to put my marks on the papers and I kept going till now…
It kind of feels good :)

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Boston Trip

Boston Trip was awesome! Here are few highlights of what we did and the places we went:

Monday: New England-Canada Business Council and later MIT Entrepreneurship Centre
Tuesday: Visit General Catalyst Partners for breakfast General Catalyst Partners
They invest in early stage companies and help them grow. General Catalyst has approximately $1 billion under management and is headquartered in Cambridge. Deep pocket, eh?
Then we went on a tour of the following companies which General Catalyst has invested on
JumpTap (245 First Street)
To BrightCove (1 Cambridge Center)
To ChoiceStream (210 Broadway)
And at the end we had barbeque dinner at Charles Hotel which was nice!!!

Wednesday:
Very bad weather, rainy and windy.
Breakfast at Choate (Centre of Boston – 2 International Place for a seminar titled "Start-ups 101" (which they normally present to the MIT Entrepreneurship program).
They have a very nice view of harbour. We took picture but since didn’t turn out good due to the storm outside.

Then 4 of us who work for Infusion at this time went to Fidelity Ventures, one of Infusion’s clients, and had a meeting with Stephen Jenvey, an associate in Fidelity. He demoed the solution for us and we got to ask whole bunch of questions in regards to future opportunities in this space. It was very informative.
Then we got a cap to Genzyme's corporate HQ. It was still raining and umbrellas were not helping!

Genzyme Center: This building is one of the first and biggest scientific research laboratory to receive certification under the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED(R) (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System(tm). Genzyme has received certification under the LEED system, which was created to define "green" building by providing a common standard of measurement. Very nice I might upload some picturesJ

Then we walked to MIT and got all soaked up! It worth it though the event was great. To be completely honest I don’t think I learned that much from this event. They basically talked about Angel investors and how they are different from VC firms which I already knew most of it.
MIT Enterprise Forum "Talk to an Angel" talk – Cambridge near the centre of Boston. – MIT Kresge Auditorium.
This event was broadcast globally. Panels consists of John May, Cynthia Fisher, David Friend, and Bob Greene and was moderated by James Geshwiler.
And that was it for Boston the next morning we left Boston and came back to Canada. I liked Boston a lot and I would move there if I get a chance. so far I would like to NY and Boston!

Friday, June 9, 2006

The Strength Of Your Beliefs

I watched “The Insider” while I was in Boston. Wow, what a good movie. I really really liked it. I was so immerse into the movie that in few instances I didn’t even hear my roommate talking to me.
"The Insider", director Michael Mann's ("Heat") fictionalized account of the events leading up to the long-running news programs' darkest hour. The story starts in 1993, and the ex-tobacco executive is Jeffrey Wigand (played by Russell Crowe), the Vice-President of Research at Brown & Williamson, who is fired by the CEO for 'poor communication skills'. However, before he is shown the door, he is ordered to sign a confidentiality agreement in order to receive his severance pay and continued health benefits.
I don’t want to tell you more about the movie and ruin it for you but what I want say is that it takes a lot to do what Wigand did. I also watch V for Vendetta the day before yesterday. Both movies had the same theme in my pinion.

How much are you willing to sacrifice to stand by your opinions/beliefs? I have been asking myself since the day I watched these movie. I don’t know about you but I am not sure if I believe in anything or love something enough to scarify my life for it. But again I guess it all depends on your priorities. Sometimes I wish that I’ll be in a situation to have to test my personality but then I take my wish back.
Life is so complicated that I am sure I will be tested at some point down the road! I only hope it is not a matter of life or death.

The Ride to Boston:

We left Waterloo this morning at 8:30 and got here, Boston, around 10 pm. It was a long bus ride but it didn’t seem as long. I was actually very productive and got some of my readings done including the first chapter of “The World Is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman. As I was readying I remembered my undergraduate classes where I first got introduced to Friedman through “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”.
“After 9/11, Friedman says, he paid less attention to globalization. He spent the next three years traveling to the Arab and Muslim world trying to get at the roots of the attack on the US. Friedman later realized that while he was writing about terrorism, he missed an even bigger story: Globalization had gone into Globalization 3.0 which is about shrinking the world from size small to the size tiny. So he wrote The World Is Flat to explain his updated thinking on the subject.
Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt.
” Today, “individuals and small groups of every color of the rainbow will be able to plug and play.” Friedman’s list of “flatteners” includes the fall of the Berlin Wall; the rise of Netscape and the dotcom boom that led to a trillion dollar investment in fiber optic cable; the emergence of common software platforms and open source code enabling global collaboration; and the rise of outsourcing, offshoring, and supply chaining. Friedman says these flatteners converged around the year 2000, and “created a flat world: a global, web-enabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work, irrespective of time, distance, geography and increasingly, language.”

Even though I agree with Friedman but can not stop to think that the facts are a bit exaggerated. Now I don't necessarily agree or disagree with everything that Friedman writes but one thing is hard to refute: his understanding of innovation globally and the impact it is already having on the United States. And the pace will only pick up with time. This is an era that everyone can compete globally and collaborate on each other’s knowledge to innovate. Would politicians allow this? Would china and India be able to play catch up to US and Europe? As far as I understand so far only the non-innovative and routine parts of jobs are being exported to them. In previous versions of globalization manual labour was off-shored and now coding and call centers are exported to those areas. Is coding considered manual labour these days? Who would think!!!
What do you think?

I was telling one of my good friends about this and he sent me his soft copy of the book so now I get to listen to it when I’m driving ;)

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Discombobulated & Bored

Yesterday I was stuck in the traffic on the way back home for a long time. I think it took me around 2.30 hours instead of 1:30 hours to get home. So as I was sitting in the car I started to look for things to amuse myself. First I start thinking about what I was going to write for my blog about religion.

“I can’t concentrates these days, have too much in my mind but that is nothing new!
I watched “The Da Vinci Code” few days ago, and I have been thinking about religion since. I got to say before hand that I am not that religious.
What do you think of religion? There is one thing to believe in God and another to follow everything that your religion books/authorities tell you. I have always thought about religion. About what it means in general and what it means to me!
I believe religion is a tool. It is a tool to control people. There are so many horrible and sometimes nice things are done under the name of the religion. It is a tool to get people to believe in you and follow you. It is also a tool which brings people together and connects them. Maybe, it gives you a feeling of belonging to something beyond your secular world.”

Then I got tired of it and stopped. Then I saw a guy, who was driving in the lane beside me, readying a book. I thought such a good idea. So I took my finance readying out and started to read. This readying was actually interesting. It is a case on Google.

Then I start thinking of the conversation I had with a friend on Saturday night at my place. We talked about people and their hidden agendas! This person believes that if your income is more than certain amount then you have to pay a lot more tax than others and basically have to share your wealth with everyone. This person also talked about living in a socialist country and the benefits of it.

“If you are greedy enough to want to become that powerful then you can not, possibly can not, have possibly have good intentions, you can not have humanity in minds.
Any body who is in a powerful positions can not have humanity in mind, doesn’t have the welfare of humanity in mind, they only have money, power, greed in mind they only want to rule as they want, they only have their own ideology in mind. Someone who becomes the head of the state is because he/she has something in mind and they want to implement their own ideology to the highest level possible”

I got tired of that too. Then I start looking at the cars. Some of them are so pretty that you just want to look at them for hours. Some are new and some are very old and wrinkled. Just like humans. I’m not sure why but majority of the cars that I took my undivided attentions were black; Even though black is not my favourite colour in cars, but again what is my favourite colour for cars? I am not sure, depends on a car I guess.

I got tired of that too. Then I start looking at the “stickers”! and trying to find out when the driver is born and then try to remember their horoscope from it. Then I start judging the drivers according to their horoscope signs and had so much fun with that. The ones I liked I let them get in front of me if they were signaling and the ones I did not like or I was not compatible with were stuck in their own lane and had to look for another person’s mercy….LOL. I got to say though it is hard to read the little sticker at the back of the cars.
I found this car whose sticker was from 2005!! God help him….. that is a big fine…
I was almost home by then. So stopped thinking for few seconds and turn into my parking.

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Religion

I can’t concentrates these days, have too much in my mind but that is nothing new!
I watched “The Da Vinci Code” few days ago, and I have been thinking about religion since. I got to say before hand that I am not that religious.
What do you think of religion? There is one thing to believe in God and another to follow everything

If u are greedy enough to want to become that powerful then you can not possibly can not have possibly have good intentions, u can not humanity in minds.
Any body who is in a powerful positions can not have humanity in mind, doesn’t have the walfare of humanity in mind, they only have money, power, greed in mind they only want to rule as they want, they only have their only have their idialogy in mind, ‘
U become the head of the state in mind just cuz they want to implement their own ideology to the highest level possible
Us is extreme conformity, people would move abit more to the left and become more socialist
Us is full capitalist. They want to dominate. They have their foot in every part of the world

Tuesday, May 9, 2006

Connected or Disconnected?

Have your ever paid attention to people outside? These days you hardly come across someone who is not listening to her music or talking on the phone while outside. I’d like to think that technologies were developed to keep us connected anytime and anywhere. Do they really?
We are becoming addicts, well at least I am. Addicted to being constantly connected to our circle of people! I get up early morning the first thing I do is to check my email before I even have a tea or get a chance to wash my face and I have watched few others around me and they are the same so at least I don’t feel abnormal.
If I go some where which doesn’t have internet I feel lost! Why do I feel like this? Few years ago I tried to get rid of my cell phone and go “CellLess”. How do you think that went? Well, let me tell you, not successful at all. I was partially functional. I could not even show up on a meeting/date or an event with out visiting few public phones. I needed my phone to call to check the address, the time or the location. It was horrible. Comes to think of it, I didn’t have a cell phone 6 years ago and never felt like this. Why can’t I just go back to old times!? Addicted!
Recently, I have expanded my addictions to other technologies such as laptop, iPod, and text messaging.
One question I ask myself constantly though is that are we really connected or disconnected. In my opinion we are disconnected more that being connected. Each person lives in her own “bubble”.
Have you ever tried to ask something from someone in the subway or in the street? First, you have to get their attention to bring the volume of their mp3 player down or take their headphones off so they can hear you and just then you might get an answer for your question. Usually the kind of look you get make you regret even thinking about asking them the question.
I have to confess I am one of these people, even though I just got an iPod but even before that I would always carry a book with me to read and not have to talk to anyone especially when I know I have to be on a bus/ train or a place for a long time. I don’t think I need to tell you how annoy I get when someone sits beside me and start talking!!
I believe we are becoming addicted to our “bubble” so much that we are becoming part of it. I am not sure how the future goes but looking at the current trends I am not sure I want to know!

Wednesday, May 3, 2006

Movies

I am not sure why but recently we have been watching weird movies. Last weekend I was at Hala’s house and we decided to pick a scary movie from Roger’s in demand (I think it called return of evil or sth like that). From the little description it provided we thought this movie was a good choice. So little we knew!! This was the most disturbing movie ever. It was so agitating that we stopped watching it. The movie was full of unnecessary and explicit violence and rape. I’m not sure why someone would make a movie like this. Not sure it was cuz of our own curiosity or the story line that made us watch the rest the next morning. I will ask Hala and tell you what the name of the movie was when she gets back.
Few days ago my sister rented a movie and we started watching it at nit, Sin City by Robert Rodriguez. I had heard a lot about this movie and was so eager to watch it. The movie was in black and while and again very weird!! This movie has got me thinking for a while now. I have been readying few reviews and interpretation of it online but still not sure what the story line is all about. I believe the movie is an adaptation of Frank Miller's stories based in the fictional town of Basin City. I know nothing about these kind of comics and never been interested in them; maybe that is the reason I couldn’t understand much. I think Robert Rodriguez was on some serious stuff when he was making the movie!
The whole time I was trying to figure out why there were only four colours in the movie; black, white, red and orange!
If I remember correctly, blood, some cars, and some women were red. Goldie’s hair and a little monster were orange. I remember a scene that one of the women in red turned to black and while theme and became part of the norm, if u think of the black and white as norm! I really want to know what was the logic and reason behind the colour selection! I read somewhere that the few colours were added just so the movie looks cool (http://www.shakingthrough.net/movies/reviews/2005/sin_city_2005.html) and to add accent to the black and white theme….
Anyways, I got to go and do some work. Just wanted to write about these two movies since they have been occupying my mind for a while now :)