Cabin Fever

A few days back I watched Jack Nicholson starer, a 1980 flick, The Shining. Its one of those spine-chilling movies I ever watched. All Work No Play, Makes Jack A Dull Boy stuff was the best. Another one was the young kid uttering REDRUM in a sense of trance and writing it in the doors, the mirror image of which spell MURDER. Jack was driven crazy by the cabin fever or solitary confinement in the hotel. I often proudly say to my colleagues and friends that I can spend days and days inside the house, totally solo, like I did during the year end break last year. There is nothing called cabin fever which can affect me. But, lemme rethink now. I say, I can spend time in a solo state for days and days; but I get crazy even if my internet is down for more than one day or my TV subscription is over. But given a chance, I would surely like to experience a Cabin Fever, not in a scary place like the Overlook Hotel, but some place else, more decent. A TV with all sorts of channels, unlimited food supplies, some basic medicines, a dog (preferably a Labrador Retriever), lots of books (fictions mainly) and lots of DVDs should be enough to spend 2-3 months atleast, I suppose. And, the place should be a cold place and with snowfalls if possible. Hello.... wake up.. there is nothing called even a Free cabin fever !!!

Free Bird

I was watching a flick called The Devil Rejects, a so so type of horror, serial killer etc type movie. What I liked most is the back ground score. And I liked the musical score that was being played towards the end of the movie. Its Free Bird by Lynard Skynard. Awesome guitar. This song also featured in Guitar Hero - II.

 

remembering the perfidies...

To be born in a free country is a great feeling. But how does one define freedom ? Is it the state of not being under a foreign rule ? But how does one define a foreigner ? Difference in color, religion, race, caste, creed .... ? I don't know. For me freedom is just the freedom of thoughts and expression. I ask myself, Am I Free ? Oh Yes... I am free. I have the privilege of exercising RTI act. But I know I may be killed for doing so. Anyways, I woke up today at around 9:30 in the morning. I was woken not by my alarm clock or by my thoughts of "it's time for office". But someone in the neighbor was playing "Aye Mere Watan Ke Logo" (ए मेरे वतन के लोगों) ("O! the people of my country!") at the loudest possible volume and I realized that its Republic Day today and its a Holiday. I picked up the Times of India and it says its the 60th Republic Day. Good. At least this day can be celebrated as a betrayal day. How we betrayed ourselves, betrayed with the dream of our fore fathers for this country !!! The country was a child then. The child is grown now and the dream is gone. Lets all just wish for a day that there will be a time when India will be a country where people have the freedom to think and act the righteous things. I utilized the Republic Day holiday to clean my house and my clothes...  

What's My Type ?

As a part of mandatory learning and development trainings, I took the MBTI test some weeks ago. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment is a psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. Although, I was very much skeptical about the effectiveness of MBTI, but I was taken aback my looking at my assessment report today. It was almost 90% correct in saying what type of personality I belong to. I was surprised to see that I also think in the similar way about myself. So, as per the interpretation, I belong to ISFJ (Introversion, Sensing, Feeling, Judgment) personality type.

The MBTI preferences indicate the differences in people based on the following:

• How they focus their attention or get their energy (Extraversion or Introversion)
• How they perceive or take in information (Sensing or iNtuition)
• How they prefer to make decisions (Thinking or Feeling)
• How they orient themselves to the external world (Judgment or Perception)

         In general terminology, my personality type is something which is quiet, friendly, responsible, and conscientious. Committed and steady in meeting their obligations. Thorough, painstaking, and accurate. Loyal, considerate, notice and remember specifics about people who are important to them, concerned with how others feel. Strive to create an orderly and harmonious environment at work and at home. I believe knowing the personality type of the other person helps us in communicating in  a more effective way.

Belief Triumphs ...

People talk about Windows 7, MacOS X, Ubuntu... and what not. Although all my personal computing needs are fulfilled by Windows XP and Fedora Linux, but when it comes to doing stuff in larger scale, like my job assignments, I have a very deep belief and trust on the Solaris operating system by SUN. I think Solaris has the cleanest kernel among all OSes and all that is needed for enterprise computing. So, often I compare Solaris with other OSes like Linux, HP-UX or AIX and (try to) make fun of my colleagues who don't work in Solaris. Till now Solaris also never betrayed me. I never encountered anything for which I had to conclude with a remark that its a limitation on the part of the OS. It was just on last Friday, me and my colleague had to fix a kernel panic. The panic was preventing the machine to come up. At the first glance, it looked so simple. Just boot the system in a single user mode, do fsck on the corrupt file system and restore the kernel drivers or configurations which created the panic. But NO. Hours and hours of trial went in vain. No logs, system messages were of any help, nor we were missing something very obvious. It was frustrating. The other way was to take a backup of the stuffs and have a reinstall. But, it appeared to be a too average way of doing things. So trials and trials ... Finally the system came up cleanly, may be after 6-7 hours of our war on Panic :-). Something clicked the mind at the right time and it worked. What was done is beyond the scope of this post but concluding remark of the whole exercise will be "Belief Alone Triumphs" !!! It was indeed a great satisfaction.

2010 - 1st Post

My blog was lying stale for 17 days and this is the 1st post for this year. Before I realized, 2 weeks of the new year has already passed. Strange !!! It seemed like just a few days back when it was New Year's Eve. People make resolutions for the new year, but I don't. I find it difficult to adhere to resolutions. I just believe in making short time plans and trying to stick to it. I am keeping a record of movies I watched since the 1st of Jan - 2010. Nothing official about it, but thought it will be nice to post the list of movies I watched in the whole year, on 31st Dec - 2010. But only movies which I am watching for the 1st time. 2nd time view finds no place in my spreadsheet. And know what, I am using Google Docs for this.Updating documents in the cloud ? :-)