General Thoughts!

Yesterday, my colleague, a fellow Indian and a six sigma master black belt came closest to defining Hinduism in a way that engineers, esp. six sigma trained ones can understand and appreciate. Here is his philosophy, which I totally agree with.

He said "All people are created with a Cp equivalent to two (Indicates Six Sigma capability). Our Ppk (Indication of actual performace level) is much lower though. So essentially Hinduism says if you can raise your Ppk to Cp levels, then you become god". Beautiful eh?
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As an engineer, one of the things that immensely fascinates me are commercial jets. Especially Boeing 747's with the 2 engines on either wing. Seriously, one of the reasons I never get really tired of long layovers is because I could just sit in a coffee shop with a view of the runway and just watch flights take off and land all day.

All this week I was in Chicago. Our facility there is about 10 minutes drive from O'Hare Airport, which is one of the busiest in the world. During general commute I had to drive a bunch of times south on I294, on the part just adjacent to O'Hare. The freeway runs perpendicular to the 2 main runways in O'Hare, about 0.5 miles away from where the runway starts. As a result when you drive south, you can see huge (and small) planes, dip down really low, with its nose tipped up, wheels down and at a very low straight line speed getting ready to land. Its just such a beautiful sight. Infact today, much to the annoyance of my colleague, I almost ran into the car in front of me, gaping at a American Airlines, Boeing 747 touch ground.

To many, planes are annoying noisy necessities of modern life. To me they are generations of ingenuity, engineering excellence and man's (and woman's) persistence to attempt and do what normally seems impossible!
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I can't remember how long it has been since I saw a Hindi or a Tamil movie and came out of the cinema thinking Wow!!, that was a super cool movie. Its kinda sad that the supposedly second biggest movie industry in the world seems to be running out of ideas and creativity to keep its audience captivated. Especially ones like me with very low standards...seriously, I pretty much watch almost every movie unless my friends hit me with a hammer and ask me not to watch that movie.

So despite the warning of my friends (wish I was better at learning from other's mistakes or atleast my own mistakes), I spent $10 today and watched Dhoom II in a theatre. What can I say about the movie?...besides sometime after the interval, I got tired of watching Bipasha Basu and Aishwarya Rai's scantily dressed, tanned breas cleavage bodies. Okay I didn't get tired of watching them, but would have preferred if there was a storyline or something interesting in the movie. On the whole it was a pitiful waste of 10 bucks and 3 hours of my valuable Sunday evening time.

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Amores Perros and Embrassing Childhood

On a friend's recommendation, I rented out Amores Perros and am seeing it right now. I have to admit its one of the goriest, sad and melancholic movies I have seen in a long time. Its essentially stories of three different people coming together with an accident. Although it is supposed to be a critically acclaimed movie taken by a debutant director and not even badly taken, it just isn't my kind of movie. I have to admit, it has left a bad taste, got my mood down and made it a lousy start to a weekend.

On a lighter note, today while cooking I was reminded of a silly and embrassing incident that happened while I was in school. It must have happened when I was in third or fourth grade. I hung out with a bunch of great guys, but most of them were really rich, you know the kind that give each student a dairy milk for their birthday, while the rest of the class gave coffee bite (if you grew up in India, you would know what I am talking about). So I liked to show off whenever I could. So one day, I manage to steal a pair of shades my mom's brother had given her and bring it to school to show it off to my friends. The plan was perfect, I would take it school without my mother's knowledge, brag about it the whole day and then put it back in the evening and my mom wouldn't even know about it.

Everything was working as per plan, I went to school early that day so I could start bragging. Since I had dropped the shades earlier, I went on about how these shades were unbreakable and then dropped it on the floor to show it to my friends.

(Amores Perros, just got over....what a freaking relief!)

At that point one of my friends said, how much force can it withstand, to which I said, any amount. (If only I knew when to shutup!) I then got on top of a desk and flung the shades with as much force as I could muster in the floor. Guess what happened? The shades cracked...

Well...the rest of the day was hell. Not only did I look ridiculously stupid in front of my friends, I also had a heck of a lot of explaining to do to my mom, who fortunately or unfortunately is not fooled very easily.

Thinking back now, I had a childhood filled with so many embrassing events, mostly brought upon me by myself that I am not surprised that I no longer get embrassed that easily.

Oh well!! Have a good weekend

btw, Go Blue - Hopefully Michigan kicks Ohio State's ass tommorow. You know how excited I have been about this game...I blogged about it a month back in this post.