Modi makes an impression

In the last couple of days Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been in the US and meeting Industry leaders. Yesterday and today he visited Silicon Valley and met with IT leaders including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sundar Pichai of Google and Satya Nadella of Microsoft. The New York Times wrote an interesting article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/28/technology/narendra-modi-prime-minister-of-india-visits-silicon-valley.html?_r=0

Earlier today Mr. Modi spoke to a large NRI (Non Resident Indian) crowd in Silicon Valley, a place where Indian origin engineers and scientists have been hugely successful.

People are hugely polarized over Modi and most people either hate him or love him. I strongly disagree with some of his strategies and policies, mainly his silence (and thereby tacit approval) of attacks by fringe right wing extremist members of his party. I hope he speaks eloquently and unambiguously on this subject as he does on most others.

Having said that I continue to admire Mr. Modi for what he has managed to achieve in such a short period of time. Do watch his speech. Its an interesting eye opener on Modi and India and how small changes can make a huge difference.

The 3 A's of Awesome

Author Neil Pasricha in this interesting TedX talk, discusses the 3 A's of Awesome. An interesting insignt on Life, Happiness and of course Awesomeness.

The 3 A's according to Neil:

Attitude

Awareness

Authenticity

His talk a definitely worth watching:

after which

Diceware - Creating strong passwords

Diceware is a method for creating passwords using an ordinary die from a pair of dice as a random number generator.

The concept of Diceware was created by Arnold Reinhold in 1995. At that point he considered five words (64 bits) the minimal length needed by average users. However, starting in 2014, Reinhold recommends that at least six words (77 bits) should be used.

For each word in the passphrase, five rolls of the dice are required. The numbers from 1 to 6 that come up in the rolls are assembled as a five-digit number, e.g. 43146. That number is then used to look up a word in a word list. In the English list 43146 corresponds to munch. Lists have been compiled for several languages, including Chinese, English, Finnish, German, Italian, Maori, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diceware

You can use the diceware wordlist and create your own.
https://grempe.github.io/diceware/

Or you can use an online diceware creator to help you do it
http://rumkin.com/tools/password/diceware.php


Or if you're really lazy, you could pay this enterprising 6th grader New Yorker $3 to create one for you. And it'll arrive in the mail.
http://www.dicewarepasswords.com/

Thank you for the music

Unbelievable as it may seem, the first time I heard an English song was an ABBA song. And like most things in life, your first stays forever. And ABBA has remained my favorite band. Possibly because it was also one of the few bands where I understood what they sang.

Last Wednesday my daughters took Ivy and me to the Broadway play Mamma Mia. And we had wonderful orchestra seats. Needless to say, we loved the play, even though all of us had seen the movie multiple times.

Interestingly they had a live band performing and the experience of a play with live singing is different from a movie.

The play brought back a lot of old memories and I began doing what I do best. Create a list. And so here goes my list my all time 5 favorite ABBA songs and my favoritest.

I hope you'll love them as much as I do.

Fernando

Money, Money, Money

Take a chance on me

The winner takes it all

I have a dream

To Freia and Reia, you'll made our day, year, ... and,
"So I say
Thank you for the music, the songs I'm singing
Thanks for all the joy they're bringing
Who can live without it, I ask in all honesty
What would life be?
Without a song or a dance what are we?
So I say thank you for the music
For giving it to me"