Hi I am Prashant Danda and this is my blog. I am a software engineer from NH, USA. On this blog you will find some interesting posts about technology (not code), news which i liked, my day to day findings about stuff which impressed me.
All the tax payer bills are going down the drain. I could not believe my ears when i heard this in today's news. The state had nearly approved an estimate of $800,000 to fix a pot hole near a manhole near interstate 95 along hampton (when you drive to the hampton beach right in front of the liquor shop across the NH-MA border).
Here is the breakdown of the estimate,
$16,000 to pay to the state trooper for eight days, $97,000 for inflation (what ?????), $71,000 for consultant fees (I thought only lawyers, doctors, state troopers got paid well) and several other line items which add up to $800,000
When the person who prepared this was questioned here was his reply, "It is just an estimate actual figures can change and be lower too" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (They showed him on TV)
No it was not a typo in the estimate. lol
If there are several pot holes like this many countries would even go bankrupt.
Studying Masters in US was a dream which I never thought would come true. Since my will was stronger than my skill i was able to fulfill my desire today.
I completed my M.S. in Organizational Leadership from Southern New Hampshire University as a part time student while working a full time job.
It was a great moment in my life, the speaker for the commencement was Senator Barack Obama, yes the democratic senator who has announced his candidacy for the US President in 2008.
I have heard lot of Advani's speeches but this was the first time I was listening to an American politician live, politicians have some charisma in them which attracts people like magnets.
If you are interested to listen to the speech, here is the video clipping from the commencement,
Also I have uploaded two other clips from the event to you tube, and i am linking them here.
This is the first clip during the announcement, and i am sitting in the crowd of graduates,
and this is the last clip or the closing moment (when the pipers played and you can see in the video obama walking).
Also i was lucky enough to get a very very close picture of him while he was walking past me. (Taken from my cellphone)
During the speech Obama talked about his experiences as a community worker in chicago, there was once an instance when he had to organize a community meeting, after lot of hard work and with lot of expectation that many people would turn up (on his very first assignment to organize one) very few elder women came in to the meeting and they too asked "Where is the bingo gathering?" , if he would have been frustrated in his life then, today he would not be running for the 2008 US Presidency.
Also during the commencement, many speakers were again and again iterating the fact that today is not a day to show that learning has completed in our lives but it just marks the beginning of the initiative.
I should say it has been an overwhelming experience studying in US and if you are a student and if you are reading this never make the mistake of getting in to a job instead of pursuing higher education. Just go for your dreams, someday it will come true like it did for me today.
I was watching TV the other day and saw an ad for Chevy uplander and i could not believe my ears, it comes with a 40 GB harddisk, yes a car with a harddrive where you can transfer all your music, photos, maps. wow that was cool.
All along i have seen only hardbook laptops embedded in cop cars (don't ask me how i come to know about cop cars !!!!)
But the field of telematics is picking up very fast, the ability to have computers and cars together is telematics. It is not very easy as it sounds because cars in US undergo several climatic changes, severe cold and severe hot weather changes and the computer has to withstand all those. Even if we leave the digital camera in the dashboard it becomes severe cold during the night, then how are we to put a hard disk inside the car (that is quite a challenge, and lot of shocks to withstand during travelling in backroads and in highways).
But great chevy has done it, 40 Gigs of harddrive in the new 2007 Chevy uplander. The new cars have quite a lot of features like, 1) My friends new car has keyless entry (you may ask whats new, the new feature is, all you need is to keep the key in your pocket and just walk to the car and it automatically opens), yes i know what is your next question i too asked him the same, how do you lock it then , answer is simple you walk away with the key in your pocket and it automatically locks. 2) The Bluetooth is embedded inside the car, so if you receive a call on your cell you can answer it in your car speakers. (wow thats cool as long as you dont answer private calls in front of other passengers :) 3) Now hard disks inside cars, 4) Push button ignition.
Atleast it makes sense to have hard drives, otherwise burning 12 songs in a audio cd and having a hell a lot of cds does not make any sense, and if you have an ipod then you have to buy a FM transmitter for an ipod and then the ipod mobile charger, etc etc, after all it is so simple all you need is a usb slot to transfer mp3 to your car and listen it on the way. 40 Gigs is a good amount of space to have a good collection of songs.
Wait i want more, why dont we also put a wireless network card in the car, so that i can browse my home wifi from car and move all the mp3 files. (well this too is not so far and it would happen some day).
I got this video from a good friend and i could not stop laughing seeing the logic the baby uses, may be it is true, that is why women rule the world :)
I was eagerly waiting for the movie "Hot Fuzz", after reading the google reviews and seeing that it has an average rating of 4.3/5 (based on 22 reviews), i thought this action comedy would be very good and would make me laugh like "Borat" but i had to literally cry for every comedy scene from the movie. (Atleast vijaykanth action movies we laugh but this one no action no comedy).
I dont know why google movie reviews have become so bad, i cannot forget the reviews for bridge to terabithia (the guys who came with me did not kill me, thank god for that, since i had suggested to watch it after reading these reviews).
Here is the story for Hot Fuzz,
"Nicholas Angel (simon pegg) is a london top cop who breaks records in controlling crime and bringing everything under control, in this process he makes his colleagues and even his chief look bad, so everyone decides to transfer him to the village of sanford, a village which has no crime in its history of 20 years, so what is he going to do there !!! But it is not what it looks like, the head members of the village council have been hiding all the crime going on in the village inorder to get an award for the lowest crime village in london, so our hero angel finds the truth and reveals sanford to the world."
I would say there were just 2-3 good comedy scenes in the whole movie and the theatre was hardly laughing though it was crowded, i dont know why they called it action comedy since i did not see either action nor comedy.
I still remember few years ago one of my work buddies told me this story, he had created a new email address and sent this mail to every one saying hey guys here is my email, and here is my password, so do mail me. (no kidding that was when email was new), now the next generation has come blogging. We all were not born with a blog, lol everyone learns how to blog from someone else.
Nice to see every one is blogging, but one thing people dont realize is the negative impact it creates. Say an employee is blogging about something wrong with the company, it is being read by so many out there in the open world, that means a prospective candidate is not even going to think of applying to the company.
I was reading the blog of a frustrated employee, the point is every one has work life frustrations.
Blog is like mass email, you click the send button and it is gone no way to get it back :)
So it is good to keep frustrations within the boundaries of work life and discuss with the next reporting person in the food chain or the HR or look out for another employer rather than cursing on a public media.
Blog is like a diary, it may be interesting for someone to poke in to the secret diary of a person but does not make sense to expose your diary on the internet. (unless you are an open book with nothing to hide in your life).
By the way i did appreciate the thoughts of this person and agree 100% with him, but i just feel it is going to make things worse than raising his valid point.
Certain things just dont change since the foundation is all screwed up !!!
