It’s a never ending quest

Today, now, as any other weekend evenings; I’m ly-ing partially arching my back on the warm sand in the beach comfortably. My mind feels clean, must be this gentle breeze coming from sea towards the beach and the moon light. It’s around 7.30 PM now. No sun, but moon is on night shift. Beach side lights complaining moon’s job. Unusually few people for Sunday.

I don’t remember thinking anything when come and sit here, but then as I start to look around, the people walk, talk, lights, dogs, coconut trees, bars, restaurants and hotels; looking at these, little-little ideas/thoughts/judgments/comments start to pop inside my brain. Tomorrow is full moon day, so today; moon’s bright and beautiful lighting up the whole beach and the sea. The people are truly blessed to be here and experience this.

Mostly these chains of thoughts make me paranoid and leave me with a million questions. Why am I here? What am I doing? Who these people are?  What are they doing here? Why some are happy and some are not? Why some are rich and others are not? Why some drink a lot, shout and laugh to a point they bother others? The questions list is usually very big that I get frustrated not being able to answer any and feeling petite.  Most people seem to be comfortable agreeing with whatever the religion they follow to answer these questions somewhat irrationally and blindly. I have a need to make sense when I tell myself something. If I tell myself that I’m here because god created me, I know I will really get angry at myself easily. So, I can’t try to answer myself any of these questions relying solely on religion.

Some of the questions popped in my head are in and around the area where I’m comfortable answering.

1. What programming language should I choose to excel on and why?
2. How to keep me up-to-date with the current technologies?
3. iOS or Android and would I need a tablet?
4. Where I want to settle down?
5. What are the things I badly want to change in my personal life?
6. How I want to change the world?

Most of the time when I think about these things, I add a note to my “any.DO” app in my iOS, which is awesome BTW, and remind myself everyday to make them a routine or to complete them or make a decision on. Since I don’t have anything nice to write in my blog, I’m thinking of picking some of the things I noted in my “any.DO” relating to the some of the questions I have been asking myself and answer them in future posts. I’m typing this on my iPhone blogger app as I’m listening to some quality Jazz. It’s not something I find easy to do. I’m still struggling to acclimatize to mobile-computing; I’m still more comfortable typing on a computer.

So, I’m going to switch to Microsoft OneNote and note down the things I want to write when I post separate blog entries answering the above questions. Talking about OneNote, if you’re using any iOS devices, please try Microsoft Office OneNote. …….. ahhhhh… Also,  It’s a bit dark here and my camera doesn’t do a good job in low light conditions yet I shot some ok pictures to post along with this blog entry to give you guys a sagacity of what I’m talking about.

I would really appreciate guys, if you could email or comment your answers to the questions I talked about. I badly want to get interactive with the bloggers community and learn art of writing, but so far I couldn’t find an easy way to do that.

I’m doing so many things thinking one day or another these things are going to make sense. Hope I’m right and thank you, if you want to say to me “Hey! Who knows what’s going on? Do what you feel like doing.” Life seems to be a never ending pursuit of answers to so many questions we have and as we experience new many things every day we get the answers and forget the questions.

Discovering - Finding the real me.

Finding the real me is an enlightening experience. I believe knowing ourselves are very important in order to know what we can do with ourselves. I become self-sufficient and do things for myself, for once. I'm no longer needy and become utterly grateful for all the things people have done for me in the past. Finding the real me is a time of harmony because I develop the philosophy or belief system that will carry me throughout the rest of my life. From the day we remember being as a kid till now we have gone through a lot, processed a massive amount of information, judged a lot of incidents/people and dealt with many problems.

How do I know that I found myself or I know me. Well, I don't; as a matter of fact I don't even know how much I know about me or how much more there to know about me. I would make a guess that no body can' t, unless you're a religiously crafty person making others fool, I don't think anybody can.

So, why am I writing about this at this point of time or what made me write about this today. Today, I found myself getting up early, took a wash, eat, cleaned my place, did the washing and many other things without any tired or any frustration as to how many thing there to be done. Today, I'm just keeping myself calm by some miracle and doing everything I had planned one by one without pushing myself much.

When you become more aware of yourself, know about your habits, know things around you better and getting used to dealing with things of similar nature, everything becomes so easy and less challenging. Basically, we become experienced in one routine of life, that routine becomes easy to follow and less challenging.

I feel like I'm so comfortable with my current life-style that things get done on its own. Which is something I don't think takes me in a good direction. I'm one of those people like challenge and like to have goals. I have not reached my goals, but in a narrow sense I neither see any challenges. I feel like I should change some things around to keep me challenged. Could be a new project or new job or something new that should make my head spin:)

Knowing oneself, is kind of a confusing subject to think about. What I really mean by knowing myself is that Now I feel like I know what kind of situations makes me happy, what make me sneeze, what makes me sick, what should I do to make me healthy, how I should plan my Sunday morning to keep me happy. Many other things I was doing so badly and learnt to do better. Just one another example is, recently I met with an accident and I should now be able to deal with a police case without much stress. It feel so much better when you know how to do things.

Now, just to keep this blog post interesting, I'm going to give you some pointers or some of the things you could do and follow to find yourself.

1. Go to a place where there is no body. Sit there relaxed and loose yourself thinking about the current problems you have. Go through every detail of the problems you have. Just think about them unconsciously while you enjoy the peaceful surrounding where you're without anybody near to you. Do this at least an hour then automatically you will see some ideas/solutions to your problems popping in  your head. Think of the solutions you get consciously and choose the right ones to make-happen. Whenever I have problems or whenever I find myself alone peacefully, I do this.
2. It's also a good idea to practice to have a checklist checked in your head all the time. It really helps keep me focused. Whether it's a short term goal or a long term one, just add it to the list in your head and keep them checked all the time.
3. Write down all the major goals somewhere you can see everyday, big and clear. So you would be able to remember the things you have to do and you could keep track of the time as well. If there is anything I learnt in my university, it would be time, I got second class upper degree where I should have got first class because I gave an individual project a day late. So, time is very important for success guys and Now I'm very happy that I'm getting much better at completing things on time. 
4. Another thing is that when you want to do something or get something big done, start with a clean state of mind. Recently, I'm lucky to work on some interesting defects at work and every time when I start looking at a problem with a clean and clear state of mind, I find myself with a fairly good solution that fixes the problem without breaking anything else.
5. One of the biggest problems I'm trying to overcome is that I have this need to be accepted by all or liked/loved by all. I think, this is coming from the human need to be a hero. This is one of the biggest problem for most of our guys. I want to settle down on something once I'm OK with what I'm doing. Nowadays I keep remind myself that I don't need to be loved by everyone all the time. If I'm not quite sure then I seek help from some few people I trust. Not everyone is a saint and we don't have to seek approval from everyone for everything we do and I'm continuing to fail to understand this. Hopefully, I'll get better at understanding this when I meet more bad people:)
6. I feel that not depending on anyone for some crucial things in life is one of my strengths. This is purely because of my childhood in Jaffna. If you're born and brought up in Jaffna, you'll get this character automatically, you don't even have to try.
7. Help. I really only want to help the ones those who really need it. I hate to help the lazy ones. Also, I try not to disturb others to help. Some people say seeking help is as equally good as helping others. They must be right.

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others" - Mahathama Ghandi.  

8. One thing I learn from the accident I met with in this January is that we should expect everything all the time and we should kinda be ready for it, if possible. Starting with taking an umbrella before rain till having some money in the bank saved thinking in case if I loose my job. This is something I couldn't make happen in my life. I'm trying so hard, but mostly there is a bad word interrupts - ignorance.
9. Questing everything and Enjoying solitude are the two best characteristics of mine, however, I don't see  how that helps in Sri Lanka. I have heard people say those are good qualities though:)

That's all I got for today out of the excitement of discovering myself:) 

One more important thing, as I have mentioned earlier, I met with an accident recently and a lawyer truly helped me get through some of the problems in the process of claiming the insurance money. She takes part in an organization called "Business and Professional Women Sri Lanka" that helps people. I would appreciate, if you guys could help them raise money. Please visit: http://www.bpwsrilanka.lk/projects.html

My last post on blog.activj.net

This is going to be my last post on blog.activj.net and I'll be blogging on one of the blogging CMSs or on blogger.com as no longer Google will support my blog integration. That means, No longer I can synch my blog.activj.net with Google's blogger server. I have been doing this for a long time for lotz of reasons. Mainly, I thought having my blog with google will drive web-traffic to my website. I'm really sad that I can no longer do this, but I guess everything has a good reason to happen. I'm sure I'll find an alternative way.

Other than this, as most of you already know, I lost my last job and I'm looking for a good job. I think I mentioned this in my last post as well. And, now I'm in a nice new place where I can do a lot in my PC (Ah, by the way, I'm a PC guy - Not MAC :p). Besides the fact that I lost my job, last week was pretty good and busy... doing what?...mmm .. Doing some CSS corrections to my website. My web home page was acting funny on Google Chrome browser, now It's fixed. That was a CSS issue. And some of the problems with Adsense Ad placement is fixed.

Again Java's come handy after Google's app-engine allows everyone to start develop apps on appspot using Java. I don't really know anything about python, so I was worried when they introduce app-engine only works with pythan. I tried creating an app, works fine. So far I couldn't come up with any good ideas I can use Google app engine to my website. Whole new world of opportunities are opening up on cloud computing, but I don't really know where to start. Now my twitter is synched with all the other accounts I have, like google buzz, youtube, orkut, myspace, hi5, facebook, picasa, MSN, Yahoo and other da da ta ta daaaa.. And everything synchs perfectly.

Now all the social networking sites are chained nicely. My twitter account updates google buzz, Google buzz updates my GTalk status then that goes to my SIP clients. Everything happens nicely. So, now it's just matter of updating something on my ChromeBrid - That updates everywhere.

Summer, wonderful world to look at, happy part of the year, I'm just chillin applying for jobs doing some serious learning & meeting and talking to my friends. Check my new blog soon, till then a good bye to all of you.

2010 - Need an R & D Job - மாட்டு பொங்கல் வாழ்த்துக்கள்

Allo all & Allo 2010. 'Allo' is tamil version of Hallo. 2009 was good; actually It was great.

Let me list my

2009 achievements.

1. Jeyaram. BSc (Hon) [ Not a normal person anymore ]
2. Found a Job as soon as I graduated.
3. Met trillions of new people.
4. France VISA - [ Never wanna talk about ]
5. Labelled myself as a true Google fan. I love Google.
   The only thing makes me high, Checking Google's new product launches.
6. Completed my JAVA api - SMPSI fully (Tested 1000 times, Documentation is ready)
7. 3 "ACTIV" projects to fill my pocket.
8. Normal cook to Great cook.
9. Revamping THEACTIV.COM with Shiya _/||\_ & Ratha ( Pending )
10. Learned a bit of Flash AS3 and ASP.NET.
11. Earned some good friends at Platt halls. ( My uni hostel )
12. And many more small ones.... I mean, regular size ones

So what 2010 brought me? So what am I up to? Now, I need to find a Job somewhere in R & D even If I don't get paid much. I need a Job where I can think out of the box and use my creativity and do something amazing. I know I can do amazing things, but I need a better platform., I mean a better Job which allows me to be creative, allows me practise my own way of doing things and so on and so forth.. If I like or excited about anything, I can learn whatever it is quickly. That's why I always say my mates, I would pay Google, If I can get a Job in Google.:p It's a metaphor, Obviously I can't pay Google, but you know what I mean.

My lecturer told me "You can't get an R & D Job with out PhD". He must be wrong.. He is Jealous ...

I though of posting something on my blog on the first day of 2010, but I was deep inside my bed mattress. Then woke up on the 6th and made a test HD youtube video using my mobile. Check it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb9MMbekfFE

Now I'm trying to establish a habbit of updating my Twitter, Picasa, Youtube & blog regularly. So, In 2086, in my 100s, I can look back and say "Fellows! That was me."

I wish you a best மாட்டு பொங்கல் & my deepest sympathy to all those who suffer in Haiti. What can I possibly do to help my fellow Haitians?

Days pass by so fast

Now it's almost four months from my last post. Time passes so fast and I don't know how I get busy without doing anything. Organizing my time and finishing things as I plan is simply a pain, and In many occasions it doesn't work. I schedule things then something very important comes in and I reschedule everything all over again.

I wanted to update my website or post a new blog entry on every Sundays, but it didn't work. Always, something is there to puts this plan on hold. Last week, I had to do my laundry. Always something is there to put something else on hold. We do batch process. We process a very big queue of thing from the day we are born till the day we die weather we like it or not. I know, .... my dump philosophy, but I don't care, I like to look at things on a broad timespan. ERRRRRRR stop.. ok

Last week I happened to meet one of my favourite lecturers and got a chance to talk to him about a 15 minutes. We talked about all sort of things and finally he told me "You need to relax jeyaram., move things a bit slow. Think more. Do less". He's absolutely right. I start to do things immediately without thinking much. Actually, I'm scared of being late, so I start immediately which make the scenario worse. For an instance; If I want to design something, I start designing it without imaging/picturising in my mind how the end design going to be. I can take bit more time to think about it and finalize the design in my mind and put my thoughts quickly into the actual design and get it done, rather than designing it without thinking in the beginning, and get everything messed up.

Always this was the case in my life. When I start playing football, I just hit the ball the way I want, the way it's easy for me. Just hit, no matter where my team mate is or no matter where the goalpost is, just hit. Then I figured it out, always have a rough idea of where your team mates are, and take the ball, stop it, control it and pass it on to one of your team mates.

I learn things every sec. Things keep getting better and better. My mates around me helps me a lot to figure things out ; grow. I love the whole thing. As big cinema stars say, I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone behind the scene, but there is no scene here though. Some make scene, some are real; I just like the real part and just like to ignore the scene part.

I hate when people ain't real. I hate people pretend to like you. The most annoying thing in this "English" western world is, you say "Hi, hello, how are you, you all-right, I'm fine.... " whether you like the person/situation or not. As many of you know, in Tamil or in any other Asian languages we rarely say, "Please". Once I went to a swim pool and asked the entrance ticket issuing lady "Two Adult-Swim-tickets". Then she got a bit angry and she was like "Please...." and waiting for me to repeat it. Then I said again the whole thing " Two Adult-Swim-Tickets Please..", humbly. Then she was happy...

All just drama. I want to just let go of all the pointless drama and the people. I just need real people and real things all around me and Of cause, I'm real , I'm real to everyone and I offer real things, not the fake ones.

Hopefully, I will post something interesting next week. I'm gonna listen to some new good songs and sleep.

Relativity

This is one of the subjects I think all the time. When I travel in the bus, when I cook my food, when I walk, when I’m in the toilet and even when I was in the Lecture hall. This is just not a word, this is a theory, this is a concept, this is very broad subject applicable to many day-to-day things in our lives, it's a philosophy and it’s even lot more to me. This is the answer to many problems in the world. Understanding this word will make us many times better, not because it’s giving us the answer to be happy, not because it solves our day-to-day problems, not because it makes us understand the things we never understood, but because of all that.

This is not only about the “Relativity” we study in our physics classes, but also about some other places where we forgot to think about it. How many of us buy a toffee in a retail shop? How many of those, who buy toffee think about toffee when it tastes good. For how many of us buying a toffee is as happy thing as buying a car or buying an aeroplane? When we have a bar of chocolate, a toffee does not matter to us. When we have a packet of chocolate and toffees, a bar of chocolate does not matter to us. When we have a motorcycle, a bicycle does not matter much. When we have a car, a motorcycle does not matter much. When we own a helicopter, a car is as cheap as a bicycle. We value things in terms of money. In other words, we relate almost everything to money. But in reality, having a bicycle is more important than having a helicopter when we need to go to our friend’s place near or to a shop next street.

What we had and what we have, the deference is the vital part of happiness. When someone really poor buys a toffee, the happiness he/she feels; when someone really rich buys a toffee, the happiness he/she feels; real deference. The poor person will enjoy the toffee most where the rich guy will feel nothing.

What we have – what we had ∝ happiness

What we have – what we had ∝ development/success

So we can’t just scale our development or success by what we have. Understanding these related things makes it easy to deal with hard times or problems. In fact, this kind of mechanical thinking on our day-to-day problems helps us reduce stress.

Relativity, in physics and in nature, helps us find the truth. If we look at an object with a naked eye, we would not know how far away it is. We may think it is 10 meters away, but it might be more than that or less than that. As we study in Kinematics, outer environment appears like moving in an opposite direction when we are in a train, although the outer environment does not. How we differentiate a three dimensional environment from a two dimensional film or computer screen, even though both of them screen as two dimensional in human eyeball’s “Fovea”? Human brain relates things and finds the truth. More related data we have, more nearer we are to the truth.

My final and third point is, recognizing the relationship between things is the best way to find the truth, solve problems and It should be the only way making Albert Einstein’s “unified field theory" or new “theory of everything” possible.

So what exactly am I suggesting?

Do not judge or define anything or anyone without considering the effect of other related things or people.

Practise to relate things/people easily.

I believe having maps of related things in our memory will help us reveal many spiritual secrets and scientific truths.

P.S: After I read this post, I realize that I have somewhat failed to materialize my thought on relativity. When I am alone and think about these things, thoughts flow naturally, but when I sit to write I loose the flow in the middle. I’ll try and do better in my next post.

I'm done. Got my first Degree

Words cannot express the happiness and joy I feel right now. I knew I was gonna make it finally, but there were just things that made it rather difficult to be happy about. I mean, how could I not graduate? Last semester, my final project and other courseworks made me worry about graduating this year. Finally I managed to finish those better than I planned with the help of my friends and family.

When I fail my A Level, I thought, my life is over. One portion of my life was closed, but the door to the rest of the world was opened to me. Now I strongly believe, there is always a way to get what we want. Sometime things are easy, sometimes hard. As one of my flatmates always says, everything has a reason to happen. We just need to accept it and work harder. This first degree will definitely give me more confidence to face my future, to get a good job and to develop myself more. Sometimes things go, not the way we expected them to go, but in the end everything turns out well.

As I blogged earlier, the musical God, A.R.Rahman had come to my graduation ceremony and our university honoured him with a doctorate. I finally got a chance to see him in front of me. Actually he looked at me. I never thought I will see him. The whole thing was unbelievable. I am really lucky.

So congratulations to myself, congratulations to my fellow graduates, congratulations everyone else who is graduating in Middlesex University and to everyone else who waited out side of uni and met A.R.Rahman!