Business business

I've always wanted to be a businessman and have tried a few things on a pretty small scale, and have been extremely successful. After a few months on job right after graduation, I've been thinking hard to setup my own business in parallel, but haven't tried at all.

This urge is getting to the point where I think I'll just start something on a very small scale (this time the time-scale won't be small). According to my analysis and imagination on an initial level, I have arrived on a few tips for a person to start a new business, specifically speaking of those who are on a paycheck and don't have much finances to invest. I am the rookie of rookies in business, so it's pre-mature to list down the points now, but here I go, hoping to get some comments:

• You have to have a very vague starter vision
• Try a smooth transition from job to business. Setup the business in parallel to your job, don't quit your current job to start it
• Try to cover finances with knowledge & talent, try starting from something which doesn't need much financing
• Consider starting something from a very small scale, but which can be scaled lower or higher as the need arises e.g. service provider business
• Find references among your family, relatives, friends, colleagues, etc. who can guide you towards anything, ranging from advice to clientele to suppliers

Plus, you need to have the following positives to start something:

• Motivation
• Time Management
• You should have a thing about numbers
• Effective Communication Skills
• Thinking in terms of customers & finances
• Long term planning skills, yet having short term planning skills for bonus seasons/events

Have a look at Life without a paycheck, I've read it, so I assume anyone can read it :)

Is everything Balanced?

How many times have you experienced that you don't do anything wrong and still something wrong happens with you? Now imagine how many times have good happened to you, even if you don't deserve it? If consequences were dependent on actions, then logic implies 180 degrees from what happens, sometimes.

This leads to a question: Whether everything that happens is the consequence of what you do or it's just discovery of what's already been decided and written down as your fate?

Too complex, but hints are everywhere. Relating to my post Luck vs. Details, is it just the lack of detail that we call it or we put it into the category of luck? As I move ahead in the dimension of time, this fate thing is making more sense to me and it feels like the action/consequence thing is just there acting as a decoy. But it might be the state of mind which also comes into play e.g. a batsman might be in some good form one year and in a really bad form in the next year.

In any case, what I have conceptualized since 10 or so years back and still believe is that everything is balanced instantly or some time later. A small example is that I cheated in one of the exams during my studies and I got away with it. Some time later, I was caught by an invigilator for something I didn't do, and I was speechless. At that time, I thought something wrong which I did earlier, was balanced.

Time after time things happen, opportunities come and are availed, bad times come and pass by e.g. you might be having conflicts with your family, but you might have a good reputation at work. You might be physically weak, but mentally tough. You might be financially poor, but religiously rich, etc.

Summary is that if you sum up all of your negatives & compare with the sum of your positives (after assigning weightages), everything might just come out to be balanced!

Words and inside..

So, long time no post. I finally got some time out from work and got some motivation as well. It's been over a month since I have been managing this new simulation project, handling a team of around 14 people including programmers, graphics designers, testers, etc. The team is very good, mashaAllah, alhamdulillah. It's gonna take some intelligent hard work for 3 more months or so. Here's another piece of abstract theory which I would like to share related to comprehending and understanding what other people say to you..

At times, you are being fooled by someone and you regret it after you have been manipulated. Instead of finding out afterwards, you can be proactive. There's something you can do about it and that is to judge whether what's said to you is the truth or a lie. For that you need to know the driver behind the person's words.

Whatever you comprehend about something that other person says, depends on how you interpret and process the information. If it doesn't make sense to you, it doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense to the person saying it. This means that you are missing something which that other person is thinking about.

So, you have to find a reason as to why that other person can think or not think about something. You might want to use your own head as well along with the other person's words, because it can be true and it can be false or it can be somewhere in between. Why he might lie is something which you have to think about e.g. he might lie because he might have superiority or inferiority complex or he might be a status conscious person or simply a psycho. Psychos are abnormal about something, but otherwise normal, so you can't really tell. But, it's not necessary that a negative reason is behind it, always.

Suppose a person is over conscious about his intelligence. He would always try to prove himself to others and hence sometimes he might lie about something. You can't simply go on believing what he says, you have to process the information correctly. Why he does that? Because he wants other people to recognize him as an intelligent person.

The question now comes that whether this judging matters for you or not. When you want to judge the other person and when you simply ignore whatever he says? I suppose you'll know when to do it and when not.

You might not be able to fully understand the rationale behind this post, and I don't expect it either. You might find it helpful when the need actually arises.

Busy bee..

Not been able to write anything for the past few weeks, have been pretty busy at office. Working on this new gaming project, which will be built upon C++/OpenGL, seems like a dream coming true, inshaAllah. Might be the team lead for this project which is right now in its initial phases such as requirements analysis, resource hiring, technical research, etc. While hunting for resources I have found that it's pretty hard to get "all-in-one" resources, but fortunately we've found a few bright people matching almost the criteria set by us. Let's see how things work out.

Also went to Karachi last week, enjoyed every bit of it and stayed for 3 days, again seeing how time flies. Have been playing snooker and table tennis and that's all the activity after office apart from sleeping and relaxing.

A friend recommended this link http://del.icio.us Have a look.

I am aiming to write a lot of technical stuff on the technical blog, but still finding hard to get some time out. As far as general posts are concerned, I am looking forward to write the next part about Spiders plus something about dealing with people.

Controlled Outlaw

It's time to become an outlaw, to do whatever you like, not constrained by anything, not even laws or policies. The pleasure in breaking all the laws and nonconformity to the policies of the surroundings is awesome. Liberty, strength & control are the necessary ingredients. If you have these, why not do it? Yes, just do it..do it!

Man, it sure feels good to stand out completely for yourself and do what feels right to you and ignoring what others have to say about right and wrong. It's fun when you look at the astonished faces of other people, the expressions out of disbelief, surprise and somewhat envy. Just come out of the phase of dependency on others and being weak, invert the thoughts by becoming strong and making others dependent on you, you'll surely enjoy the benefits.

The people won't like you for that, but only those people who are the victims of you becoming an outlaw, but again it's for your ownself, you have to become a bit selfish for this, and you have to be mentally tough and need to have backup to take such an amount of risk. Once you have the entire skills and resources, then there's no harm in taking this risk and experiencing this phase, but in a controlled manner. Of course, somethings are wrong and shouldn't be targetted, here's where maturity comes into play.

This is what's going on in my mind these days, I am breaking many policies within the company I am working at and am really enjoying this phase, but I have set the limits first!

-Gunda Gard v3.0 ;-)

As architectural as a spider

There are a lot of things in this world, which can be interesting for people who like to give a thought on these and are in search of inspiration. Set aside the universe, an almost infinite number of God’s creations exist in this world only. One such creation is Spider, which is one of the most fascinating creatures of this world, simply because of its uniqueness of actions and the way it’s designed.

Spider is called Araneae in scientific terms. There are around 38,834 species of this excellent creation categorized into 110 families. A few categories of spiders are Tarantulas, Hunting Spiders, biting spiders, jumping spiders & web-spinning spiders.

I’ll be focusing on the web spinners and the discussion spans across two parts. This part covers the web construction, the material and its quality, and the 2^nd part covers how they hunt their prey and how they defend themselves, which will be posted soon.

Silk & Web
The silk is made of protein, which does not decompose by fungi and bacteria like all other proteins. The reason is that this silk contains three substances that are important for its durability: Pyrolidin, Potassium Hydrogen Phosphate and Potassium Nitrate. We conserve protein by cooking, salting, drying or adding acid so that it remains intact.

The construction of web is one of the most sophisticated natural mechanisms that exist in this world. Although all spiders produce silk but only certain types of spiders build webs. The style of web varies from one species to another. Interestingly, there’s also a connection between eyesight & web construction capabilities of different spiders, which will be discussed in the next part.

This is the internal process, which goes through in a spider while producing silk:

• Spiders have ducts for producing liquid silk, which solidifies on contact with outside air.
• The secretion is drawn into fine threads by structures called spinnerets on the lower side of spider’s abdomen. The spinnerets, which spin the silk, work like the fingers of a hand. A spider can stretch out each spinneret, pull it back in, and even squeeze them all together.

This is the everlastingly interesting high-level view of how the construction is done:

• The most difficult part seems to be the first thread, for which the spider releases a sticky thread that is blown away with the wind, of course if she’s lucky. Simple!
• If the breeze carries the silken line to a spot where it sticks, the first bridge is formed.
• The spider cautiously crosses along the thin line, reinforcing it with a second line.
• She enforces the line until it is strong enough.
• After this she hangs a thread in the form of a Y below the primary thread.
• These are the first three radial of the web. More radials are constructed taking care that the distance between the radial is small enough to cross.
• Then the adhesive spiral thread is placed and the web is ready to be used.

Re-engineering the Web
After a night of hunting the web becomes worn out (destroyed by bad weather and by the flying prey). The spider removes the silk in the morning only leaving the first bridge line. After daytime’s rest the spider constructs a new web in the evening. If the catch was low and the web is not heavily damaged the web may stay during the day and be reused after minor repairing.

A lot of orb weaving spiders even recycle their webs. The weaving of a web takes up a lot of the spider's resources. Since they need to renew their web regularly, they eat the silk. Only the main thread of the web is left intact. The cutting and the digesting of the web are done by special digestive juices that contain enzymes rather than by any mechanical cutting. These juices are also used to connect the strands of silk together. They usually weave a new web in the morning.

Material & Quality of Silk
Some spiders comb their silk to a wooly structure. To do this they have a comb like structure near the fourth legs and an extra silk producing organ just in front of the spinners, which appears as a transparent plate. There is no glue on the threads but the insect gets stuck with the hairs on their body in the silk. The thicker threads in the silk prevent the insect from tearing the silk.

Quite interestingly, the quality of the silk which she produces is an extremely strong material and is on weight basis, stronger than steel. This thread is not only strong but also very elastic. The thread of one of the orb web spider type is very elastic and can be stretched 30 - 40% before it breaks. Steel can be stretched only 8% and nylon around 20%. It has been suggested that a pencil thick strand of silk could stop a Boeing 747 in flight at full speed. Amazing! According to a study, we are still unable to reproduce such a material with all our technological know-how.

Applications of Spider Silk
The silk is utilized by the spider for a lot of different uses, which include constructing their webs, the production of egg sacs, wrapping in their prey, as a life line when jumping (just like spider-man), or dropping to escape, for transferring semen from the abdomen to the male palp, as a shelter in which it can retreat, etc. This silk has been utilized by humans as well e.g. for producing fishing lines, nets for the transportation of arrow points, tobacco and dried poison for the arrow points, cross hair in instruments, etc.

With this, I would like to add another perspective to all this information, that all this is done by a single spider and even much more. A normal human being with some intelligence can easily comprehend what type of intelligence is needed to come up with a design of such level. It’s even hard for a human being to come up with such a perfect design. Hence obviously a spider hasn’t invented itself or induced these capabilities with evolution. It’s simply the perfection of God; the perfect working system advocates that, an inch here and there in a spider can really mess things up.

The Great Wall of Constraints..

It's been a pretty busy month, this March, with some good things happening and some really bad days as well. I am finally getting home at workplace and starting to get as productive as I used to be previously.

Apart from work, there had been a lot of other issues which I had been handling all this month which have kept me too busy to write about things I wanted to e.g. Spiders and about some technical upcomings.

I have always found it pretty hard to keep in line with the constraints we are surrounded by, at least the constraints which have been built up by us, the humans. I feel that we should try to minimize the constraints, atleast find out alternatives and do that until and unless we have control on things and then accept the remaining constraints. But, I have not been able to find alternatives about some constraints and that had hurt me pretty badly in the past. And now, it's hurting someone else as well. But, what can I do? What are the possible options? I believe none.

So, I am better off accepting the constraints and not trying to destroy "The Great Wall of Constraints" because I know I don't have the power to do so. Also, I don't want to hurt some of the constructors of this great wall. But, this is not the end, these will remain forever and there will be other constraints in the upcoming years as well. This is one of the sides of life and we are just better off accepting at every point. There's no use crying over things we can't control, instead we should find "Good" in everything. Easier said than Done!

Oh yes, we had a training on IBM Rational Suite yesterday, it's simply amazing! The suite contains products which covers the phases of SDLC and all of the products are very nicely integrated. I'd be writing about this suite as well in the near future.