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