Bits and Bytes from my Life

Man does Pawar know how to play politics. Sharad Pawar is one of the best organizational managers around. He is great in managing people. He really knows how to play politics. How else can u beat Dalmiya who has ruled 21 years over BCCI. Amazing guy….:)

“We spend all of our time on people. The day we screw up the people thing, the company’s over”

-Jack Welch, former chairman of General Electric

One question everyone is talking about is Should US pull out of IRAQ? Last week Congress man Murtha came out and put forward his view and said its time for us to start planing to pull out our troops. So is it right time to pull out? When should we pull out? How should we pull out? President Bush feels pulling out or even providing a timeline for pull out will give terrorist a victory or embolden them. Hmmm it is a very tough question.. Here are my 2 cents on this issue.

We have to pull out. Now bigger question is when and how? Before I proceed on this topic let me say one more thing. One of the problems we as a society have, I think is, we don’t listen as well now. What that means is we shoud listen to people around us. So we should listen to Iraqis. The new Iraqi government will be formed soon. We should sit with their new president and plan for troops pull out. The whole thing should be presented to the whole world as if it is a joint plan of Iraq and USA. This way terrorists cannot say we left because of them. We are leaving because Iraqi government is ready to take over and they are confident about it.

Next we are not pulling out all the troops. We will do it in phased manner. This way if Iraqi government requires us we will have some troops on ground who are not going to perform day to day fighting but provide more of support to Iraqi troops.

Also we should start talking to Iraqi government about costs. They should start baring some costs for our soldiers. We cannot pay billions of dollars out of our pockets. We can give that to them as loan and they will have to payback the money for the number of soldier who will be on ground finally.(lets say around 20k or whatever).

We have to make sure Iraqi government gets everything they need to be successfull. We cannot let Iraq become chaotic. It is not good for our National security. So we have to succeed in Iraq at any cost. But we have to have aplan for success. We have to have a plan to define success. We have to have a plan to move out when we are successfull. I think formation of Iraqi government is a good milestone and we can start pulling out after that.

On this thanks giving let me thank our soldiers fighting in Iraq and elsewhere for what they are doing. Everyone should be thanking them. It is because of them we are able to sleep without any worries at home.

May god bless USA.

Iraq pullout

Everyone was thinking Lalu was invincible…But finally he has been defeated. I hope Nitish can do a better job as CM…

Author: A Contemporary Business Parable by Carol, Ph.D. Dunitz, Helen Gotlib (Illustrator)

“Louder than thunder” is about a very successful CEO who is going to retire. She calls her 3 vice presidents and asks them a question “What is louder than thunder, as highly charged as lightning, and more powerful than the fierce North Wind?”, whoever comes up with best answer to this question will succeed her.

The book begins some childhood stories of the CEO and lessons she learned from them like:
§ Know what you really want.
§ Listen and observe.
§ Think before you speak.
§ When there’s a prolonged pause in an offer, the person speaking first generally loses.
§ Speech is silver; silence is golden.

The three VP’s have varied backgrounds like manufacturing, sales and HR. They try to answer the question based on their own areas of expertise and talking to their own people.

This book is very useful for general managers as it talks about effective organizational and interpersonal communication. Book stresses on importance of listening in any form of communication.

Note: The book is just 100 pages and you can read it in less than an hour. Once I picked it I had to finish it. It was so good.

So finally opensource is entering into RFID space too. This is great news. Look out for this solutions. Maybe usefull for lot of small and medium size business who don’t want to spend lot of money on pricey software…

Today I started reading “The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman. This is a great book on Globalization. Great stuff. I think everyone should read it. I have just read few pages of it and I have started liking it.. Maybe I will write a review about this book.:)

Hey Raleigh has been named as one of the riches cities in the country…:) Thats good news. Enjoy…

http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/2005/10/27/richest-cities-US-cx_sc_1028home_ls.html

Hey this is another cool usage of RFID technology. You can use RFID for almost anything. Think out of the box. So many times in life I have been frustrated with the vending machines as I could not use my dollar bills in them because either they were too old or .,.. Now with this form of payment… Cool stuff…

http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/1963/1/1/

I found a great article on performance comparison of java and python. Here are the details.. Java is fast… Here is the link to the page and also the content…. You can access the original mailing list article at

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread
/thread/f7e8b7a2b4b533fe/ebf2a2f70e730eae%23ebf2a2f70e730eae?sa=X&oi=groupsr&start=0&num=3

I was worried the email list from the group maybe purged some day and this is really good stuff so I copied it here I hope this is not a issue….:(
—————–Email Details——————
Java vs Python Benchmarks: Java is faster
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Bryan Jan 31 2002, 10:08 am show options

Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
From: Bryan - Find messages by this author
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 09:06:52 -0500
Local: Thurs, Jan 31 2002 10:06 am
Subject: Java vs Python Benchmarks: Java is faster
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