Blog Journals of Memory lane

The Paradox of Our Age - by The Dalai Lama

2010-07-08T19:28:00.000+05:30

Just something which caught my attention :

We have bigger houses but smaller families;More conveniences, but less time;
We have more degrees, but less sense;
More knowledge, but less judgment;
More experts, but more problems;
More medicines, but less healthiness;
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new
neighbor.
We build more computers to hold more information to
produce more copies than ever but have less
communication.
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods but slow digestion;
Tall man but short character;
Steep profits but shallow relationships.
It's a time when there is much in the window,
but nothing in the room.
- The Dalai Lama

Somehow this rung a very loud bell in my mind.

Changing perpectives !!!!

2010-06-11T11:46:00.000+05:30

In the faint light of the attic, an old man, tall and stooped, bent his great frame and made his way to a stack of boxes that sat near one of the little half-windows. Brushing aside a wisp of cobwebs, he tilted the top box toward the light and began to carefully lift out one old photograph album after another. Eyes once bright but now dim searched longingly for the source that had drawn him here.
It began with the fond recollection of the love of his life, long gone, and somewhere in these albums was a photo of her he hoped to rediscover. Silent as a mouse, he patiently opened the long buried treasures and soon was lost in a sea of memories. Although his world had not stopped spinning when his wife left it, the past was more alive in his heart than his present aloneness.
Setting aside one of the dusty albums, he pulled from the box what appeared to be a journal from his grown son's childhood. He could not recall ever having seen it before, or that his son had ever kept a journal. Why did Elizabeth always save the children's old junk? he wondered, shaking his white head.
Opening the yellowed pages, he glanced over a short reading, and his lips curved in an unconscious smile. Even his eyes brightened as he read the words that spoke clear and sweet to his soul. It was the voice of the little boy who had grown up far too fast in this very house, and whose voice had grown fainter and fainter over the years. In the utter silence of the attic, the words of a guileless six-year-old worked their magic and carried the old man back to a time almost totally forgotten.
Entry after entry stirred a sentimental hunger in his heart like the longing a gardener feels in the winter for the fragrance of spring flowers. But it was accompanied by the painful memory that his son's simple recollections of those days were far different from his own. But how different?
Reminded that he had kept a daily journal of his business activities over the years, he closed his son's journal and turned to leave, having forgotten the cherished photo that originally triggered his search. Hunched over to keep from bumping his head on the rafters, the old man stepped to the wooden stairway and made his descent, then headed down a carpeted stairway that led to the den.
Opening a glass cabinet door, he reached in and pulled out an old business journal. Turning, he sat down at his desk and placed the two journals beside each other. His was leather-bound and engraved neatly with his name in gold, while his son's was tattered and the name Jimmy had been nearly scuffed from its surface. He ran a long skinny finger over the letters, as though he could restore what had been worn away with time and use.
As he opened his journal, the old man's eyes fell upon an inscription that stood out because it was so brief in comparison to other days. In his own neat handwriting were these words:
Wasted the whole day fishing with Jimmy. Didn't catch a thing.
With a deep sigh and a shaking hand, he took Jimmy's journal and found the boy's entry for the same day, June 4. Large scrawling letters, pressed deeply into the paper, read:

Went fishing with my Dad. Best day of my life.

Web Hosting Horrors

2009-09-07T12:40:00.000+05:30

When I was first handed the task of designing a website, I thought why not. After all it is easy money. But once the site was designed the next question asked by my client had me totally stumped. He wanted to know where he could get a web hosting service. My mind went totally blank; after all it had only been a couple of months since I had been introduced to the complex world of the World Wide Web. The question intrigued me so much, that I decided to find out for myself what that elusive term –‘Web Hosting’ - meant. A search through the trusty Google search engine led me to various pages which kept throwing complex and alien terms at me. After sieving through a mound of pages pertaining to FTP, networks, server racks and for some strange reason a few pages on television hosting also, I had given up and was sincerely wishing that there could be some way that the entire concept was just served on a platter to me. It was at this point of time that a friend drew my attention to the numerous web hosting companies available on the Internet, which felt like a ray of hope in the tangled coils of the World Wide Web. Again stood before me a wide plethora of options to choose from, different websites offering up everything from email services, mail forwarding, storage services and on and on and on.

Simply put in a nutshell, it becomes a lot simpler to just let somebody else do the hard work involved in running a web hosting outfit. Hiring such a unit also leaves you with enough free time to concentrate on the designing facet of the web development business. The main thing to keep in mind is to analyze the offerings of each such hosting company. Though the prices being offered by some may seem surprisingly low, it’s the fine print where the actual story lies. Some will offer only limited space for uploading content or even may levy charges on services like mail forwarding or some other service .