Nirenjan’s Space

The Japanese have always loved fresh fish. But the waters close to Japan have not held many fish for decades. So to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went farther than ever.The farther the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring in the fish. If the return trip took more than a few days, the fish were not fresh. The Japanese did not like the taste.

To solve this problem, fishing companies installed freezers on their boats. They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea. Freezers allowed the boats to go farther and stay longer. However, the Japanese could taste the difference between fresh and frozen and they did not like frozen fish. The frozen fish brought a lower price. So fishing companies installed fish tanks. They would catch the fish and stuff them in the tanks, fin to fin. After a little thrashing around, the fish stopped moving. They were tired and dull, but alive.

Unfortunately, the Japanese could still taste the difference. Because the fish did not move for days, they lost their fresh-fish taste. The Japanese preferred the lively taste of fresh fish, not sluggish fish.

So how did Japanese fishing companies solve this problem? How do they get fresh-tasting fish to Japan? If you were consulting the fish industry, what would you recommend?

Too Much Money

As soon as you reach your goals, such as finding a wonderful mate, starting a successful company, paying off your debts or whatever, you might lose your passion. You don’t need to work so hard so you relax.

You experience the same problem as lottery winners who waste their money, wealthy heirs who never grow up and bored homemakers who get addicted to prescription drugs.Like the Japanese fish problem, the best solution is simple. It was observed by L. Ron Hubbard in the early 1950’s.

“Man thrives, oddly enough, only in the presence of a challenging environment.”- L. Ron Hubbard

The Benefits of a Challenge

The more intelligent, persistent and competent you are, the more you enjoy a good problem. If your challenges are the correct size, and if you are steadily conquering those challenges, you are happy.You think of your challenges and get energized. You are excited to try new solutions. You have fun. You are alive!

How Japanese Fish Stay Fresh

To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks. But now they add a small shark to each tank. The shark eats a few fish, but most of the fish arrive in a very lively state.

The fish are challenged.

Recommendations :

Instead of avoiding challenges, jump into them. Beat the heck out of them. Enjoy the game. If your challenges are too large or too numerous, do not give up. Failing makes you tired. Instead, reorganize. Find more determination, more knowledge, more help. If you have met your goals, set some bigger goals. Once you meet your personal or family needs, move onto goals for your group, the society, even mankind.

Don’t create success and lie in it. You have resources, skills and abilities to make a difference.Put a shark in your tank and see how far you can really go!

Yahoo’s new AddressGuard feature is a pretty useful thing. It allows you to create disposable email addresses that you can post just about anywhere. And if any of those email addresses begin to collect spam, you can just delete it and forget about it.

It came as a bit of a surprise to me when Yahoo! enabled the AddressGuard feature for me, when they’ve clearly mentioned elsewhere in the site that it’s supposed to be a paid feature. But I guess they’ve taken a form of payment already, by not converting my 6 MB account to 100 MB. Not that I really need it with GMail, Rediff and Spymac. But I think people will still have to restrict themselves to 3 MB attatchments as other providers have to support 10 MB attachments, like Mail.com and other free email providers.

Plain old Coke with vanilla ice cream dissolved in it? EEEYUCK!!!

You couldn’t ask for more. With everybody upping their storage space in wake of Google’s GMail, I now have a net e-mail storage space of 3124 MB. That comes from my email accounts at SpyMac, GMail, Hotmail, Mail.com, IndiaTimes, Rediff, and my two at Yahoo!

YIKES!!! I’ve just noticed that I have 8 E-mail IDs, of which I use only 3 regularly. So let’s see, that comes to 1008 MB of space which I use. Of course, if Yahoo! ever decides to up my storage limit, then I’ll be happy.

I got an SMS this morning that went like this:

Can I stay at ur
home for a few
days until things
calm down?

Sender:
SADDAM HUSSAIN
+448329673244

Just kidding. Its
me

Sender:
Osama
+98413794831

Just when you think you’ve seen all the great clocks of the world, some programmer comes along…

Click Here

I left my place today at 3.30 in hopes of catching a route 4 bus to Peters Road and get to Amethyst on time. As always, the bus service in Chennai is the most unpredictable and unreliable one. I finally wound up catching a 23C and getting down at the Sathyam bus stop, only to find out that I was 4 signals away, in the backward direction!!! I managed to catch an auto and I wound up at the MBM v4 held at the Amethyst just on time and was having a bit of a lost look, trying to find somebody I knew.

This time atleast, I wasn’t lost and recognized quite a few fellow Bloggers, among them were Anand, Chandru, Guru, Pleo, Suds & Sat. While we waited for the other bloggers to show up, we had a look at the menu. My heart leaped to my throat as I saw the prices - Rs. 25 for a cup of coffee (which as Kribs said was probably the size of a thimble!!!). And that was the cheapest item on the menu. Anand & I decided to restrict ourselves to the first page (everything else was in triple digits).

The rest of the meet was spent in generally yakking and cracking jokes. One of the surprises was seeing SK in person. From his comments on my blog and others, my impression was that he was a pretty young guy working in some IT firm. Imagine my shock when I see a relatively old guy who says he’s employed (not working) by the Railways. I wish I could get his job though!!! ;-).

The other interesting item was Prashanth’s n-Gage. I couldn’t figure out which side you spoke into. But it looks damn sexy. Oh and also a rather embarrassing moment regarding Krib’s small and sexy phone. The rest of the crowd were more embarrassed than Kribs.

Finally, after depositing our URLs with Alex, we slowly and reluctantly broke up. Pleo gave me a ride upto Saidapet where I had another bitter experience with the pathetic bus service. The 47G which was coming behind us didn’t even stop at the bus stand. After waiting for almost half an hour for a bus back home, I finally would up catching an auto and reached home with a considerably lighter wallet but a considerably heavier - and happier - memory.