"When Sachin Tendulkar travelled to Pakistan to face one of the finest bowling attacks ever assembled in cricket, Michael Schumacher was yet to race a F1 car, Lance Armstrong had never been to the Tour de France, Diego Maradona was still the captain of a world champion Argentina team, Pete Sampras had never won a Grand Slam.

When Tendulkar embarked on a glorious career taming Imran and company, Roger Federer was a name unheard of; Lionel Messi was in his nappies, Usain Bolt was an unknown kid in the Jamaican backwaters. The Berlin Wall was still intact, USSR was one big, big country, Dr Manmohan Singh was yet to "open" the Nehruvian economy.

It seems while Time was having his toll on every individual on the face of this planet, he excused one man. Time stands frozen in front of Sachin Tendulkar. We have had champions, we have had legends, but we have never had another Sachin Tendulkar and we never will."

This was posted on Quora under "Who is Sachin Tendulkar?"

Though I couldn't trace it in TIME's archives, it inspires none the less. 

As a coder, it has always been a dream to develop my own blogging/CMS platform. Something where you can plug-in anything - anywhere.

I am finally moving from Tumblr to my own blogging platform. Though it is nowhere near to complete, releasing it would at-least keep me going. So here is the version One.Dot.O.

Stay tuned, lots and lots of interesting things are queued up!!!

[Going back to work :P].

Thanks to Matt for this beautiful essay - “1.0 Is the Lonliest Number.”

We didn’t know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much together and here we are right back where we started 20 years ago - older, wiser - with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground.

Page 293 of “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson

(via Motivation Summary)

AWESOME!!!

via WebTrickz.

For any given month, all the multiples of 7 fall on the same day. I usually have memorized what day that is for the current month and the next few months. So October is a “[F]riday month” and November is a “Monday month” and December is a “Wednesday month”. You only have to memorize a new one every month.

Now when somebody says, “We should get together one Saturday. Say… December 12.” you can snap back with “That’s a Monday. Do you mean December 10?” All you have to do is find the nearest multiple of 7 and work from there. So when they ask about December 12, that’s close to December 14 - which must be a Wednesday (since December 2011 is a Wednesday month).

via LifeHacker.

Hahahaa, that is a simple handy trick!!!

microlife:

RIP! 

Steve Jobs by Richard Davies 

Either of those can come first. What is important is that the other should follow. You might read an interesting quote, be told about a good investment, develop a liking for something, want to take an impulsive decision…; since these all are controlled by left brain, it is necessary and helpful to support it with proper logics.

On the other hand, you might have finished with lot of theory, attended an interesting talk, read a news article, read a good book…; these are processed by right brain. To get accustomed to them, one needs to apply them practically and develop it as a part of left brain.

To summarize, if a new thought / idea comes, then develop logics. And if a new thing is learnt, then try to develop a mental model for it.

As popularly said�: if you ASSUME - you make an ASS of yoU and ME.

Whether it is about acceptable ID card, flight timing, dress code, location of something… if you have even a slight doubt then it is better to confirm it. These things are few of those trifling ones but can cause high impact.

Save yourself from an embarrassment - clear your doubts!

Want to respond to letters - complete the report - read a book - spend quality time with family?

Try turning off the router for an hour. Handling impulsiveness is easy, you just have to:

Throw away the key: Close off tempting alternatives.

Setup a couple of Pomodoros to complete the job; or talk the matters with your complete presence. Don’t let your impulsiveness distract you! Your job will end up better and your clients will be happier.

Similar “tempting alternatives” might include: phone, television, tickers, IMs etc. When work starts expanding, turn these off - focus, and you can happily return to them after that.

You can stay afraid forever of:

- a subject (taxation, particular disease, English grammar, politics),

- a term (SQL joints, standard deviation, VLOOKUP, Piotroski score),

- a method/framework (organisation manuals, guidance notes, new technology, Gmail, Linux), or

- an activity (swimming, public speaking, driving)

or get into its depth, learn about it, practice it and become its master. It might take some time and patience to learn something new (especially when you fear it), but you will soon realize that you have removed a bottleneck.

So start taming your fears!

tvthomson:

Magical Circle.

Look at the red dot carefully. just keep looking at it. The blue circle will disappear and then reappear

Both, a new favorable idea as well as an opposing thought should be noted down.

You think of a new feature for your application; a more usable design for your website; a new investment idea; a new blog post; a seminar that your read about…the key to their execution lies in making a note of them.

Darwin wrote in his autobiography:

“I had … during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed by my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from memory than favorable ones.”

Darwin emphasized even more on noting down opposing or unfavorable thoughts. For a split moment, your mind might ask - can the hard-disk crash; do I have a backup of all my digital pictures; can the seats become unavailable; can there be down-time…if a note is not made of these thoughts then they might just escape, or even worst, you might end up satisfying yourself that it won’t/can’t happen.

WOW!!! This is fantastic.

Seth Godin’s post yesterday on Talker’s Block motivates me to give it a try. I haven’t been very good at writing and thus sometimes end up procrastinating jobs. Such as, after reading a good article, have often thought about writing an email to the author, but ended up procrastinating it to infinity.

This will be an interesting challenge to take-up and I will try to write some analysis, everyday single day, on the blog - beginning with this post!

Rules are simple:

Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.

…

Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something.

Thanks Seth!

[P.S.: Will also keep sharing other interesting things I stumble upon.]

Inspiration Squared

Nice backgrounds + awesome typography + amazing quotes = Perfect inspirational slideshow

[Have set some of the graphics from above as wallpaper :D].

P.S. The “Top Presentations” page on SlideShare is addictive.

(via Labnol - Understanding Hue, Saturation and Luminosity)

My favorite parts from interview:

He calls Rahman a ‘very difficult guy to work with’. “He never explains the beauty of what he is offering. He may offer you an uncut diamond on a platter. But if you fail to see it, he will not insist you look again. He will say - okay, chuck it, here is something else.”

…

Though their first discussion on Rockstar didn’t go anywhere, Imtiaz approached Rahman again last February. “He instantly went - Oh my god, I have no time! There is no way I can do this,” Imtiaz pauses and smiles. “But I will do it. I want to do it - Rahman said. I felt relieved. He was in the thick of a hundred commitments - recording in LA, performing at concerts, jamming with SuperHeavy, Hollywood, Bollywood and Tamil movies. But he said let’s do it. That was good enough for me.”

…

Imtiaz felt there was a need to demonstrate this craze with an anthem song. “Lyricist Irshad Kamil and I spent a lot of time just thinking of phrases, such as Ban jaa, Banjaara, before stumbling on Sadda Haq, Aithay Rakh ((It’s) Our right, keep it here).

At that point in the film, Ranbir’s character is asking for his right to be himself. A human being is nature and society has no right to make him plastic. That eventually became the hook. In no time, Rahman roped in Orianthi Panagaris, one of the zaniest contemporary guitarists who also performed with Michael Jackson. At his LA studio, Rahman recorded her loud guitars for six hours. I was on Skype throughout,” says Imtiaz.

…

With its dreamy guitar-work, Jo bhi main is probably the most scintillating track of the album. “Jordan feels - I have beautiful thoughts in my mind. But when I try to express them in words, it gets clerical and the beauty of the thought gets destroyed with the first word I speak. Irshad came up with - Jo bhi main, kehna chahoon, barbaad karey, alphaaz mere - and Rahman improvised on it.”

…

 “Rahman doesn’t inspire confidence in the conventional sense. You never feel - Arre yaar yeh toh Rahman hai, yeh sambhaal lega. You always feel that you better do the right thing, nahi toh yeh aadmi toh duba dega (laughs). What he does is he draws out the best from whoever he works with.”

…

“Rahman says, sometimes, you have to go against your grain for a greater experience, to experience life better than be bound by the limits of your personality.”

[These extracts are just for my personal collection. Please DO READ the complete interview if you want to know Rahman Sir and his style much better.]

ROFLMAO!!! Dedicated to Karan and Ruchit (for yesterday’s match).