Measure your happiness, How your face looks at 60?

We all want to be Happy. Do you agree? Then read this and it will make you happy.

In this digitally connected world we are  becoming heavily busy and miss the opportunity to analyze and introspect ourselves and  what makes us happy .  Most of us are so busy checking our emails, socializing with friends on Facebook , twitter and other sites, spending time in movie halls or working towards our goals and don’t have time to take a snapshot of day’s events and judge how we reacted to each event or situation that happens to us during the day.

We have a choice to be reactive or be creative,  but most of the time we spend days, months and years in a reactive mode by attending to our daily chores. We don’t think much about the routine we perform everyday and get used to the daily grind. Due to that we slowly stop thinking that things can be done in a much better way and our day can be more productive by questioning our daily routine and how we perform it. We just need to become more creative and focus on improving our daily routine. The net result of improving our quality of life leads to some spare time so that we can use the same  to reflect inwards and check what actions, incidents and events during the day makes us Happy and which ones makes us Sad. By introspecting about our selves deeply,  helps us to improve our happiness levels for the rest of the life.

We have technology to assists us to monitor our day’s events, happenings , our moods and experiences towards such events and happenings. By tracking our everyday living we can get rid of things that makes us Sad or ignorant and improve and strengthen our practices that makes us Happy. Introspecting and self analysis of our behaviors helps us tremendously in improving our mental abilities and physical fitness.  Make sure you spare an hour everyday before sleep to analyze the day’s events and how you reacted.  Which action of yours made you feel happy , helped in enriching you and which one is neutral and which one made you Sad. By doing that everyday you will start finding a pattern about how well you are shaping your life.  Remember the saying

“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.” -Charles Swindoll

In order to help you monitor your day i’m giving you the links of some great self  data mining tools. Enjoy and remember that you can always have a “better life with best practices ” (Skillsnest tag line) and  a quote from Ben frankling to motivate you for a good life.    “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.” -Ben Franklin

https://www.rescuetime.com/signup/solo/lite

http://runkeeper.com/  to measure how many calories you burnt during your workout

http://www.realidata.com/cgi-bin/rTracker/iPhone/rTracker-main.pl

http://www.quantified-mind.com/

http://quantifiedself.com/2013/07/ashish-mukharji-on-three-years-of-tracking-happiness/

http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/

http://quantifiedself.com/2013/04/konstantin-augemberg-on-tracking-happiness/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOETUvaOxDA&feature=youtu.be

http://anniemurphypaul.com/2013/07/how-daydreaming-can-help-you-pay-attention/

Want to know how you look when you are old?

You can also make your choices to be happy as you grow older. But no one gives a serious thought about aging until we reach a stage where the symptoms of oldness shows up in the form of body becoming weak and vulnerable to diseases.  There are websites that would show you how you look when you are 60 or how many calories you will gain in the future with your present life styles etc.

Click here to know how you will look at age 60 and beyond http://faceretirement.merrilledge.com/

http://www.futureme.org/

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/

As you build your career you may want the world to know about you and your experiences , skills and expertise. There are couple of good websites that allow you to promote your selves such as follows

http://www.expertfile.com/

https://about.me/

http://zerply.com/about

Checklists regarding passwords

Many websites requires us to register in order to use their services or products such as ebay, amazon, ticket booking sites etc. Many of us already registered on various social websites such as facebook,  linkedIn, youtube and the list goes on depending on what websites you go. Most of us already have email accounts such as gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail. In all these cases you have to remember the passwords that you used on each site. After some times it becomes difficult to remember passwords. So let’s see how we can simplify this problem. Many of us also use the same password on all the services we access online. This makes easy for hackers to go into our important accounts. Avoid easy to guess passwords such as “password”, 12345 , your names etc..

1. Select a word that you can never forget. Some examples are your close friend”s name,  singer name,  actor names or color or parent, or lover or something that you like the most. For example let me select a word  ‘SoftTouch’ . Then let’s say you want to register at www.nature.com. Now what I can do is add the first or last three digits from nature to my most remembered word. Now my password will be ‘SofttouchNAT’ or “SofttouchURE’.. To make it safe from hacking or stealing by others now I might add a special character to the password. In the above example I can make my password as ‘SofttouchNAT1?’ by adding a ‘1’ and ‘?’ mark

Remember to select your most memorable word to be of length more than 6 digits so it will be safe from hacking.

2. Another simple way to remember password is jumbling your word with numbers or special characters. Let’s say from above example ‘Softtouch’ I can add 123 in between such as ‘S1oft2touch3’

This makes it difficult to predict your password.

3.Let’s say you love a song so much that you know each word of it so well.  If you have to change password every two months or so this technique will help you to keep going by using a word from the song as your password with a mixture of other characters to make it safe as above.

4. Use two level authentication so that when someone access your account from other computers the service ask you for verification. Here are more details about it for your gmail account. Step 1. Your password. 2. Using the Google Authenticator app available for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry, 2) via SMS, or 3) through a voice call (meaning you could even use a landline if you didn’t have a cellphone—basically the call would read off the code to you).

Even facebook allows you to have two step authentication to protect you from hackers…

5. You can use password generator services such as Lasspass , keepass, 1password

Remember there are other ways of remembering passwords. You just need to make use of your creative brain.’

http://idtheft.about.com/od/preventionpractices/a/Passwords.htm

Good luck with passwords.

Career planning : Apps, Big data, visualizations

For those who are planning Career moves , below are the links to some hot start up ideas that are attracting venture capital. There is a tremendous opportunities in the health area.  Pay attention to the design of these apps.  Design, ease of use with minimum human interaction is the most important factors of a successful app.

Check the website links thoroughly and understand what kind of opportunities you can explore in the country you live.

 http://uchek.in/   You can get your Urine analysis right in your home with this app.

http://www.bodymedia.com/the_science.html 

http://www.mybasis.com/ 

http://www.striiv.com/

http://www.gadgetadvisor.com/mobile-apps/iphone-apps-to-check-your-eyesight

http://www.appszoom.com/android_applications/hearing%2Btest

http://www.appaddict.org/view.php?trackid=564936523

Monitor your car performance with this apps

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.prowl.torquefree

http://www.automatic.com/

A US venture capital firm 500startups http://500.co/ provides early stage money for global start-ups. From India they choose the following firms to give each $50,000.

http://credii.com/  Allows you to find the right software for your business

http://www.tushky.com/

http://seat14a.com/

There is a tremendous demand in Big Data (Data analytic s and Data mining), Mobile security and Data visualization areas. Those who are aspiring for career in the above fields should start equipping yourselves with the required knowledge and skills.

One nice article on Big data is as follows.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/29/want-a-career-in-big-data-youll-need-more-than-a-degree/

Another good website for big data http://www.periscopic.com/

An example of Big Data mining  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PECOTA

For those who want to create images for data visualization can use the following link

http://processing.org/

Here is news on Android.  http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/07/developing-for-android-is-much-easier-now/

A new app service that is much better than Skype is making its mark in the market. It is much more flexible and feature rich than Skype. Take a look at and try it if you are interested.

http://www.viber.com/

For those who are interested to file patents and want to search whether your product/service patented already here is a link to Patent filings

http://wbam2244.dns-systems.net//EDB_Welcome.php

There is a service to know how much your influence is on your social network.

http://klout.com/how-it-works/klout

There is a interesting service that can identify webcams, routers, power plants, wind turbines and many other utilities connection to internet.  http://www.shodanhq.com/

For those who are brainy and can identify new uses for an existing product here is the inspiration

http://www.creax.com/

Simple steps to protect your online and mobile privacy

The following simple steps should protect your private life in public places such as Facebook, twitter and in your mobile phones.

1. If your mobile phone is not password protected it is easy for anyone to check your text messages and your contact details. Protect your mobile phone with a password.

2. Put a Google alert on your name. It is very easy to get a alert if someone is searching on your name. Use this link for it. http://www.google.com/alerts

3. Signout from your Facebook , email etc when you are using computers in  internet cafe’s. Also make sure there are no web camera’s that are recording you and your keystrokes at internet cafe’s.

4. Have one private email account for your close friends and one for public use and don’t register to all kinds of job portals etc. They only result in more spam. Don’t give away your phone numbers or email address in malls, shopping complex lucky coupons  or promotional events  etc. It will result in more marketing calls and spam

5. Encrypt your computer from unlawful access when you are online. Use this link to know more about how to do it. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766295%28v=ws.10%29.aspx

6. Gmail  users should use 2 step authentication to ensure their emails from hacking while using mobile phone for gmail access

7.Don’t use your credit card at every place. There is a possibility of  identity theft  while your card is swiped  . Try paying in cash for your purchases or services where ever it is possible. Monitor your bank transactions and alert messages to make sure your card is not misused.

8. Change your Facebook settings to “friends Only” in settings. https://www.facebook.com/login.php?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fsettings%2F%3Ftab%3Dprivacy

9.Clear your browser history and cookies on a regular basis to protect your email and passwords etc. Go to your browser options and tell it to never remember your browsing history. For Mozilla firefox users you can also use the following add on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/targeted-advertising-cookie-op/ 

10. Whenever you visit a website your Computer address (IP) is tracked. To avoid being tracked you can hide your IP (your computer address) by using  the following tool. https://www.torproject.org/

 

Web resources for learning, teaching and doing projects

I’m back now to present  you with more resources, websites, teaching tips, free software code and web tools for daily use.

http://www.khanacademy.org/ For learning subjects such as Maths, Physics, chemistry, GMAT,SAT etc thru videos. Very good for students Beginners to advanced

http://www.webmonkey.com/  Learn software code here

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ Find free course ware resources here

http://www.academicearth.org/  Watch free lectures here

http://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-18-002-introduction-to-matlab-spring-2008/  Learn matlab course here

http://lifehacker.com/ for making students do projects

http://singularityu.org/about/overview/ for learning online courses

https://www.dropbox.com/ store all your computer files here . 2GB free space will be given to you for free.

http://www.evernote.com/  A website for daily things to remember, store files, Store favorite website info, plan your next trip etc.

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ Open source NOTEPAD With good features.

http://www.skype.com/intl/en/home Skype for free chating , calling people and video chats

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ To watch anykind of video on your computer

http://www.7-zip.org/ Free software to unzip all the kinds of ZIP, TAR, GZ and some more format files

http://www.teamviewer.com/hi/index.aspx connect to any PC remotely

http://www.weekendhacker.net/  a place where cool projects are published, people meet potential cofounders and the network becomes strong enough to build a launch pad for the projects

https://github.com/ software code and collaborative development environment

http://www.spotify.com/int/about/what/ To listen to for music you like

http://handbrake.fr/details.php DVD ripping tool

http://www.gimp.org/features/ Free Picture editing software

http://filezilla-project.org/index.php to transfer files thru FTP (File transfer protocol)

http://keepass.info/ have too many passwords. Here is a master password to unlock all.

http://www.launchy.net/ search tool for searching everything on your computer with key words

http://simplenoteapp.com/ easy way to keep notes and other info.  A Free software for HTML5 and CSS3 rapid application development click here http://www.modernizr.com/