Soma Purana

Watched on DVD. This is a beautiful movie on hard, honest life in inner Mongolia. Nan Yu has acted wonderfully. It is a bittersweet story of heart. 

My interest in wealth building and investing, in general, has peaked. I have read in later 2017 several books on Finance and Investing. Appreciated some critical theories of investing economics such as efficient frontier, modern portfolio theory, risk estimation measures. I now have learned the names of big theorists in this field such as Markowitz, French, Fama, Malkiel. Several of these are Nobel prize winners. I am also fond of using a part of money for quick trades - in and out, not necessarily like day trading but buy-sell in weeks. I like this basically because it keeps me engaged and so far I have made appreciable money with this technique. However, I do not think this is a way to build huge wealth or any thing like that, but primarily keeps you engaged. At one point one will reach a stage when 100% equity portfolio is OK. My own risk profile and financial networth allows me to take this approach. However, I do have a small portfolio of about 5% in bonds primarily as a so

I signed up through 23AndMe. https://www.generationprogram.com/#Main

Vidya Sinha or Durga Rani Singh? Interesting story and very good performance by lead actors.

"If you think you can, you are right." May be this is originally by Henry Ford.

Several years ago Srinivas (Samhita and Anagha's father) told me he traded in options. I don't know what type of options he did because I had very little knowledge about options. I had heard of calls and puts but I had no clue what they meant. Fast forward several years, I am fascinated by options trading. I just began education and investing in options in a very conservative manner. I applied for and got only Level 1 options trading which limits me to essentially write covered calls. This is fine with me since this is (1) conservative, and (2) allows me to build knowledge. Writing calls seems like an excellent way to add regular income. So far I have only sold four calls but have begun serious homework to extend to most of my individual stock holdings and ETFs. This is exciting. I admire Srinivas's keen financial acumen to figure out how he could use his time to trade options to increase his income.

Watched "Killa." What a beautiful movie! It is in Marathi. The acting is superb. The story is I think common and easy to relate to. The sights and scenery are superb. I wish I could see this place!

Leo Eisenstein, my Bikram yoga teacher, says so many profound statements when delivering his dialog. One I heard this morning "if you will change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change." It is difficult to remember all his sayings. When I remember I will post.

My own take on yoga at Bikram yoga is there is plenty of yoga, no need to hurry. Be very slow and controlled as you move into the posture and as you come out of the posture.  You must be conscious of your body as you move through the posture. There is no need to please anyone while doing yoga, not your teacher, not the others doing yoga with you, not even yourself.  The last part means don't have any expectations. Do less. Less is more. But go to yoga more often. If you can do only half as many sets, do half as many. If you cannot stay too long in a pose, don't stay too long. Yoga should not be painful, it is not a punishment.  Yoga requires patience. Perhaps yoga teaches patience. Don't shoot for improvement in days or weeks or months or not even in years. If it takes ten years to improve i a posture let it.

Especially, in a bull market! Watching net worth grow several times higher than the yearly salary is exhilarating. I have been watching my numbers every week (at least once a week). This year, through November 31, the returns are like 20%. This is astronomical in US market particularly, since, the inflation is pretty much non-existent and interest rates are very low. I just observed the returns in 2016 was ~7%, 2015 was 0.7%, and 2014 was 8%. 2016 and 2014 were kind of normal but 2015 was abysmal. But I don't remember such poor returns showing up week after week. I guess memory is short.

Saw "Wonder" a heartwarming movie in theater. Saw at home two very interesting movies. A Bulgarian movie "Glory" A movie about Alzheimer disease "Away from Her." This is the best Alzheimer movie I have seen so far ("Separation"is a very good movie but other themes as well).

At ITI; I tried for the first time in ITI Predetermined Motion Time System (PMTS) to determine labor required to perform assembly tasks. I also designed safety improvements for machine tools to prevent injury. At AT&T: Primary Rate ISDN (PRI) provisioning and Maintenance. ISDN D-channel is the control channel for the entire ISDN and therefore it's health is critical. I designed systems to monitor the D-channel and perform in-service testing. In data network design organization, I started with ATM network design. My most significant contribution was developing deployment of GX550, an ATM switch. I did a very thorough job in designing the cabinet for hosting the switch and optical fiber cable management. In the VPN area, I elevated Capacity Management as a serious discipline to manage the workhorse in the initial VPN network, the RPMs. I extended the same concept to GSRs which later became the critical VPN router. 

I sometimes worry about my memory given I have two copies of APOE4 gene. Last night while in bed I was trying to recall all my bosses at workplace. I had a struggle with a couple of names. Let me try to write them in chrono order. All this should be of interest only to me. ITI: CIE: SK Ramanna, SIE: AV Krishnamurthy, my boss EE was HN Ramanna. Late,r I became an EE but still worked for HN Ramanna. The last year I was in ITI I was transferred to Strowger switching division and my boss was Chandrashekarappa. Good friends: Vasanthakumar, Vithal Shetty (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vittalshettyvxl17ec/), Yuvakumar, Prasanna, Shridhar AT&T: I was campus interviewed by Frank Judd at the U of Utah for Bell Labs. At AT&T Bell Labs I was interviewed by Vi Smith, Joyce Roberts. Later, I was hired by Armida Macri (department head) to work for George Roguski [It was Armida's name I had trouble remembering). But when I was hired he was hospitalized (brain tumor). After his surge

A few years ago I started vigorous MOOC activity taking numerous MOOC courses on varieties of topics, genetics, chemistry, cosmology, physics, ethics, and so on. I completed successfully more than fifty of them. One most important benefit for me was learning a good deal about genetics. This has helped me understand science articles that involve health, health policy, evolution, drugs, etc. At that time, I focused on quantity more than quality. Now my approach is quality and complete understanding. I am dedicating my nexr one year or so to just learning more deeply differential equations. I have registered for two MOOCs. I also want pursue learning Spanish (from Duolingo ).

I have been going faithfully every year for my annual checkup. There is not much for the doctor to do. He looks at EKG, blood test reports, listens to the heart, does the physical, and says "everything is fine, keep up your yoga." As I approach 65, I am wondering whether annual physical is really necessary. When I read the  article   it triggered this post. At this time, I am further reminded by another wonderful article " Why I Hope to Die at 75 ." I like the author Ezekiel Emanuel's approach to health care as he ages. last colonoscopy will be at 65. no screening for prostate cancer at any age. AFTER 75 no treatment for cancer developed after 75. no more routine doctor visits or routine tests and blood work no cardiac stress test No pacemaker and certainly no implantable defibrillator.  No heart-valve replacement or bypass surgery Flu shots are out. no antibiotics a do-not-resuscitate order and a complete advance directive indicating no

I had written a post on this subject before. While reading it, I thought I needed to update it. I wanted to suggest what type of experiences a US visitor should plan to acquire. My brother's family will visit us in West Windsor, NJ some time in the future. So I started making my list below what experiences I would arrange for them. This list is not in any particular order. I will continue to update this list. Annual Reenactment of the Battle of Monmouth June 18th and 19th http://www.friendsofmonmouth.org/reenactment.html Take them to a Trenton court and see how a trial is conducted. We all see court trials on TV and movies, but that does not reflect reality. Depending on time availability see both a civil trial and a criminal trial at least one full day each.  Take them to Mercer County community college and let them sit through an entire class period (either my class class or another professor's class). This will give them an experience of how students interact with eac

Since I have completely stopped watching TV (all Trump) I have plenty of spare time. I have been using it to learn differential equations more fully and watching movies. I see some good movies but don't record them and then I forget them. Good movies deserve to be recorded and cherished. Even if I don't write a lot about them just listing them and saying or word or two is sufficient. If one wants one can find complete reviews on internet (Wikipedia, NY Times, Roger Elbert, etc.). So, the two movies I saw this week are: The Court - an Indian movie. It is fictional but ask any Indian they will say they will believe 100% that this happens in India all the time. The movie is believable because the director doesn't try to exaggerate anything.  This is worth watching again. Dukhtar ("Daughter") - Pakistani movie. I liked the music, the cinematography and the grit of the mother to save her daughter from a child marriage.

A major transforming event in our lives. Our son Raghu got married to Syl Marie on Saturday 1-21-2017 at Glen Island Harbor Club. Events leading up to the wedding. Raghu's upanayanam on 8-21-2016 Devara Samaradhane on 1-16-2017 Reception dinner 1-20-2017 Wedding on 1-21-2017