What a waste!!!

There was one story that our physics sir at school would love to narrate.

There was this waterfall in Mysore and everybody admired it. Poets wrote pages on the beauty of the Kaveri river. But there was one man who saw it and exclaimed “What a waste!!!”  That was Sir. M Visvesvaraya. He said that because he saw the potential hydro energy being wasted and untapped.

He went on to become the chief Engineer of the Krishna Raja Sagar(KRS) dam, Mysore built in  1924. This dam remains an engineering marvel and one of the popular tourist attractions till date. It was the first dam to be built with ‘surkhi’  a mixture of limestone and brick powder instead of cement. He built many dams later which are still functional.

He also honoured with the Bharat Ratna for his contributions. It happens to be his birthday today(the 15th of September) that we celebrate as “Engineers Day” as a tribute to the engineering wizard.

Let us hope he inspires lot more engineers to acheive greater heights and come up with more viable and cost-effective solutions for the problems of the real world.

Happy Engineers Day!!! to all the engineers out there…

09/09/09

Hey guys, its a special day 09/09/09. Last 09/09/09 would have been 9th sept. 1909. A hundred years Aren’t we lucky to witness this? Yeh!!! lets celebrate

What have you planned for this auspicious day?  I am so sad I am not getting married today , no movie of mine is releasing today It is not even my birth day today sob, sob,sob…

But wait last year didn’t we witness 08/08/08 and next year we will witness 10/10/10 and a year after that 11/11/11 and 12/12/12 a year after that. Sorry no 13th month. And what about the 20 in 2009. Nobody is bothered about that. Probably that is unlucky

Well, for me it is yet another day in my office and at home. I am celebrating the day anyway. Life is meant to celebrate no matter what is the date What say???

Trust

You see THAT girl, yeah her.
She seems so invincible right.
but just touch her & she’ll flinch.
She has secrets & she trusts no one.
she’s the perfect example of betrayal.
cause everyone she trusted, broke her

- xanga

Standing on Giant shoulders

“If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of

giants” — Isaac Newton

At no other point of time would these humble words of a genuis mind

be more relevant than now. If the new generation boasts of acheiving

greater heights it is not because we are the most intelligent

generation but simply better equipped than our predecents. All the

acheivements that we have acheived till now are because we don’t

have to reinvent the wheel. It is already there we just have to use

it and build on it.

I realise this everytime I use technology as an aid. And what better

example than a google search. Anything under the sun and even beyond

the sun is available here. For example, if you forget some command,

searching for it wasn’t so easy. You needed to know where to find

it. If it is a book, is it a part of the library, is it available

currently. Or ask some resource person / expert/ peer. Esp. if it is

learning a new technology attend classes for it, travel half the

world to attend conferences or training sessions. Buy related books

and required equipment. Programs written in low level languages and

compilers took long to execute any program. Any error costed lots of

valuable time and money. All this was a costly affair.

Now it is just a matter of seconds. Type anything that might be

relevant to the command and lo! you have the thousands of pages

throughout the world giving you the answer. Visit any forum and you

have all the expertise dished out to you, that too for free. You

don’t have to waste your time and money doing the same mistakes that

somebody has already done. Just a PC and an Internet connection and

you have the world at your disposal. It is difficult to even imagine

a life without these facilities in our life. So if you are getting

things done in a record time. If you are able to produce excellent

results from a project. You also have somebody else to be thanked

other than yourself.

“If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” — Isaac Newton

At no other point of time would these humble words of a genuis mind be more relevant than now. If the new generation boasts of acheiving greater heights it is not because we are the most intelligent generation but simply because we are better equipped than our predecents. All the acheivements that we have acheived till now are because we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It is already there we just have to use it and build on it.

I realise this everytime I use technology as an aid. And what better example than a google search. Anything under the sun and even beyond the sun is available here. For example, if you forget some command, searching for it wasn’t so easy. You needed to know where to find it. If it is a book, is it a part of the library, is it available currently. Or ask some resource person / expert/ peer. Esp. if it is learning a new technology attend classes for it, travel half the world to attend conferences or training sessions. Buy related books and required equipment. Programs written in low level languages and compilers took long to execute any program. Any error costed lots of valuable time and money. All this was a costly affair.

Now it is just a matter of seconds. Type anything that might be relevant to the command and lo! you have the thousands of pages throughout the world giving you the answer. Visit any forum and you have all the expertise dished out to you, that too for free. You don’t have to waste your time and money doing the same mistakes that somebody has already done. Just a PC and an Internet connection and you have the world at your disposal. It is difficult to even imagine a life without these facilities in our life. So if you are getting things done in a record time. If you are able to produce excellent  results from a project. You also have somebody else to be thanked other than yourself.

This is just one example related to programming world but the same holds for all the other fields. Faster information dissemination, the way we  communicate and the ultra modern ubiquitous technology has enabled the modern day human beings much beyond our imagination and simply changed the way we live. Let us toast the technology and all those who made a better life possible.

This post was a part of my drafts from a long time. Since today is the 40th birthday of the Internet, so I thought this would be the best time to post this . 40 yrs ago on 2nd Sept 1969, the first test packets were exchanged on two computers in University of California. This eventually led to the birth of the Internet and the rest as they say is history.