Where's my money?

A simple exercise: Calculate how much you have earned till date (including your salary, gifts, return on investments and all types of income). Just an approximate amount would do. Find out how much money you have in your savings (SB accounts, any other investments like stocks, Mutual Funds, etc). How do you find your savings with respect to your earnings? Are they substantial or very meager?

To drill down, calculate how much you have spent till date. Start with all your major expenses (like education or buying a vehicle/house/site). Find out how much you approximately spend monthly on other things like fuel, snacks, dining, clothes, telephone bills, etc. Put all of these together and get an approximate amount of how much you have spent so far (after you started earning).

Then do the math, "Calculated Balance" = Earnings - Expenditure. Are your actual savings same as the "Calculated Balance"?

If yes, congratulations! In most cases there will be a noticable big difference between the two. If so, where did your money go? Hard to explain!

I was in the same situation about 3 years ago. I had worked for over 2 years and I had a relatively small balance in my bank account (equivalant to about 2 months of my salary). My father helped me realise this. I started wondering where all my money went. I calculated all my major expenses and did the same exercise I explained above. I could account for about 60-65% of my expenses. Where did I spend the rest? I had no idea!

In order to prevent such accounting anamolies, I started keeping tabs on all my transactions, income and expenses. I started using a personal finance manager and found it very helpful in managind my money and accounting for it. In the past 3 years that I have been using GnuCash and KmyMoney I have been able to account 98-99% of my money.

Distro Hopping

I'm somebody who gets bored pretty soon. This is very true with the different Linux distros atleast. I keep on hopping distros every now and then. I take a lot of pain to install a distro, then tweak and install the programs I want and everything. But once I feel everything is installed and the desktop is good enough for my daily uses, I get bored and want to try out some other distribution. Maybe I just like trying out new distros, installing and configuring them. Or maybe I'm searching for that perfect distribution for me.

For the moment, I have puppy linux and 2 different installations of arch linux (on different hard disks) on my desktop. I have Ubuntu and Debian on my laptop. My previous (very recent) distributions on my desktop are - Gentoo, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian, LightHouse Pup, Sabayon, etc.

I don't even remember all the distributions I've tried (installed and used) in the past 9 years. There are just so many. Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake (these 3 have now changed to Fedora, OpenSuse, and Mandriva), Caldera, ELX Linux, Slax, Elive, DSL, Vector, Slackware to name a few. And I have a huge collection of CD/DVDs of most of these Linux distributions over the past 9 years. Linux has truly come a long way since then.

Out of so many distributions, I keep coming back to 3 of them - Arch Linux, Puppy Linux and Ubuntu.

Arch Linux does everything right. They follow the KISS principle and an arch system is really very simple and elegant. It is the perfect distro for anybody who knows a little about linux, is not afraid to use the command line and has heard of config files. It allows you to build a very minimal system with no bloat whatsoever. You can (and will) build YOUR perfect system using arch. The package manager is great. And their wiki is excellent. It is one of the best I've seen.

Puppy Linux is something I would recommend to everyone, not just newbies to Linux. It is just about the perfect system which has everything but the kitchen sink. It's minimal footprint, ability to run in RAM, support for everything (browsers, IM, multimedia, doc/image viewers, and just about anything you can name), excellent community, make it a perfect choice for everybody. It has applications for just about everything. The CD/DVD recording/burning software is the best I've ever used. The downside to puppy is it's package management (something that Barry is already working on. Check out puppy 5.0 / dpup).

Ubuntu is the community's favourite distribution. I keep coming back to it because of the apt package manager. It is THE best out there. But I always feel Ubuntu is very bloated.

For now, it's Arch and puppy for me. Who knows, next week, I could try out some other distro. :-)

One line reviews of different distros

I was reading this "Debian vs Arch" thread that was posted on both Arch Linux forums as well as Debian forums. The following comment by "julian67" in the Debian forums was the most hilarious:

I run Debian stable and know it's the best. Slackware is for Luddites, Arch is for bug eyed Ubuntu kids with misplaced aspirations to kewlness, Gentoo is for maniacs, Ubuntu is for people who drool but are happy with that, Fedora is strictly for Americans with an entire LUG to help fix it, OpenSuse is for Germans with proprietary fetishes, special accessories and a paying controller, Puppy is for people with 2.4 GB hard drives, Zenwalk is for people who are not quite sure what multimedia might be....

The gender debate

Well, the gender debate is going on for a looong time now. Let me not talk about things like "who's better than who?" or "are women equal to men?". Instead, let me focus on some facts that I have been observing for a few years now.

I'm sure you have all read headlines like "Girls outshine boys in SSLC exam" and "Girls fare better than boys", etc. These headlines appear in all the newspapers every single year, without fail. I haven't seen one single year where the pass percentage of boys was greater than girls in 7th or SSLC or PUC exams (in Karnataka, atleast). Does this mean boys are all dim-witted? Do these figures indicate that girls are overall more intelligent than guys?

Well, before you answer those questions, just take a look at a few other facts. Have you ever analyzed the CET results? Have you seen the gender ratio for the top 10 ranks in engineering or medical? You'll see that there are hardly one or two girls in the top 10 or even top 20 ranks in both engineering or medical streams. And this is not just one year, you can verify this every year. What do you think is the number of girls in top 100 ranks in engineering or medical. It's mostly single digit (very rarely touching double digits). What about top 1000 ranks? How many girls do you think are there in top 1000? Again they are a whopping minority!

[Offtopic: Why don't you hear about these (CET) numbers and facts in the media? Well, that deserves a blog post on it's own, but to summarize, did you ever notice that if a hindu criticises a muslim (or his religion), the media people will have a field day with it, blow it out of proportion, call it communal and somehow link it with BJP. But if a muslim or a christian criticises a hindu (or his religion), it becomes protection of minority. The press will write all good things about that or at the least ignore it. It is the same case with the gender debate. If there is any news that portrays ladies or girls as good, the media are all there to put it in headlines and publicise it. But when they fail, it goes ignored. :-)]

So, what do you think happened? All those girls who outshine boys in SSLC and PUC, why do they fare so badly in CET? It's not just the CET, take any entrance examination, or for that matter any examination where you have to apply your knowledge, overall, boys will outshine girls. But in any exam (like the SSLC or the PUC), where you need to mug up text books and spit it out in the exam hall, girls will fare much better overall as compared to guys. It's not just the pass percentage, I'm sure the girls will do better in the average marks obtained (in a mugging exam).
This theory has been proven time and again. Just compare PUC results with CET results or the Engineering average marks (percentage) with the average pay. Have a look at the CAT results or the IIT-JEE results. You'll find this pattern everywhere. Girls are much better at mugging up, where as guys are much better at applying knowledge. The guys have better analytical aptitude and reasoning.

So, just because you see this pattern, does that make all guys smart? Or does that mean all girls are muggers? Definitely not. I know girls who are smart, have good analytical skills and who have really good knowledge and know how to apply them. I also know guys who are lazy, have bad analytical and reasoning skills, have really bad knowledge in their domain and are even bad at mugging up. But they are only exceptions to the rule.

Disclaimer: This is just a collection of facts and my reasoning for these facts. If you are offended by this post, well, I apologise.

Unpacking my neo

It's been about 2 weeks since I got my Neo Freerunner. I've been busy playing with it. Here are some pics of unpaking my neo.



This is the package I received. The cloth pouch and the 2.5mm headphones were a bonus. I wasn't informed that the package included them.



Nice quote from LaoTse.



These are the package contents. The freerunner phone, wall charger (with 3 different kind of plug attachments; the round 2 pin one works in India), USB to miniUSB cable (to connect to computer), a stylus, 512MB microSD card (with SD adapter) and couple of batteries (I ordered an extra battery, just in case).