The glass is half empty.... or is it?

With innumerable books and webpages devoted to the type of attitude one should develop, the title shouldn't be unfamiliar to most. After all most of us know how important it is to see that the glass is half-full rather than seeing it as half empty. Now let me just take it a step further.

Consider a pessimist, not a hardcore, but somebody who just likes to sulk at stuff and see's things through a negetive perspective. He would consider the glass to be half empty. And on the other hand an optimist, or somebody who likes a bit more cheer in his life, would perceive the glass to be half-full wouldn't he? That is at least what most people would say. So even with the different ways to view a given predicament, the only difference one makes is to his state of happiness. Where a pessimist would always feel low about his shortcomings, the happy guy would be happy that his is not a completely empty glass.

Following the same chain of thought, which do you think is better. I'm sure you'd go with the pessimist, for who'd like a sad and depressed guy around? Just let me know if you differ in your opinion!

But hang on, what if the happy-go-lucky guy stays blissfully ignorant of his incomplete life? And, on the other hand, we have the whining pessimist working towards fulfilling his capacity. Who would you side with now? The satisfied-static "optimist" or the "diligently-dynamic" pessimist? I leave it for you to decide.......

In conclusion, I'd say that seeing the glass as half-full or half-empty is not as important. Of prime importance is what you do about it.

The Nokia Touch.....

I doubt that I have enough readers that might have noticed the absence of posts for the last couple of days. Well, I owe it to Nokia.

Th Nokia 5800 Xpress Music is a "first" from the Finnish major in that it is the first touch-screen phone to be launched by it. It is at loggerheads with Apple's I-Phone. Which is better is worth another post on its own, so I won't do it here. The 5800 is a great phone no doubt, but with hardly a month since I bought it, it is too new to be developing any kind of problems, which it is. I, for Nokia's sake, hope that this is just a one-off case and not a problem with the 5800 in general. That would be a disaster, not only for the 5800 but for the N-96/97 dunno which one exactly that they have lined up to be the successor.

Now, the problem may have arisen due to the fact that over the last few days I had used the phone to connect to the internet for 8+ hours. That's just exploitation, but isn't a device as expensive as that supposed to handle that kind of a work load? It is a problem with the display, which flickers when you make or receive a call or when you 'unlock' the screen/touch pad.

Its over to you guys at Nokia-Care, to which I'll have to schedule a visit pretty soon.

Murphy's Law!

Last year, a brand new Airbus A340-600 was parked at the Airbus assembly plant ready to be handed over to Etihad. I had just undergone its test flights successfully, when the engineers (either Airbus or Etihad, don't know which) started their tests.

To check the performance of the engines, all the four engines, with the parking brakes applied, are taken to take off power, on a virtually empty aircraft. The flight computer raises an alarm, since the aircraft hasn't been configured (with respect to slats/flaps etc) for take off although the engines are at take off setting.

To silence the nagging alarm, on of the engineers pulls out the circuit breakers for the Ground Proximity Detector. This fools the flight management computer into thinking that the aircraft is airborne. And hence, it releases the brakes. This, in fact, is a safety feature incorporated to prevent the pilots from accidentally landing with the brakes applied. With the engines running at full power, and no brakes, it hardly takes the brand new airplane to transform into a heap of expensive junk.

Just another example of the Murphy's law: If anything can go wrong. It will.