Vimal can't hack WHAT?

We are all users.
We are in love with consumption.

We deny it. We think the adjective frugal is a polished euphemism for cheap.
There is a difference.
Unfortunately, you have to be frugal first to understand the difference.

There are things you need and there are things you just want.
Desire is the magic currency that advertisers love to create out of thin air.
It’s one of the dark arts. (only half-joking)

Desire leads to consumption.
Consumption gives you an initial high, but it wears off sooner than you’d expect.
Just look back at any of your last few gadget buys – how long did the awesome last? :
A week?, 2 weeks?…

PROTIP : Seek out real lasting value, whenever you encounter the need to acquire something.
Used things often do the job just as well as brand new things.
NEW Cars are a notoriously terrible investment that come to mind.

PROTIP 2: When in doubt, invest in Experiences over ‘Stuff‘. Travelling to new places is always a good bet.

Being frugal doesn’t mean buying the cheapest item on sale.
Get the item that just does the job, without compromising on bare minimum quality requirements.
The real-world difference between that item and the fanciest brand is a single handful of percentage points.

Caveat: NEVER skimp on safety, especially when your loved ones are at stake.
Caveat 2: Don’t be a CHEAPBASTARD. Nobody likes you guys/girls either. :p

P.S: Being frugal in your 20′s makes you a ‘millionaire-next-door‘ sooner than your friends who partied through it.
Compound interest is sufficiently indistinguishable from magic to me, on most days.

There is no meaning.

We are all hormone addicts.
We just wait for the next secretion into our brains.
Repeat, ad infinitum.

Take the common man on the street.
Odds are, he follows one of the major religions of the world.
What do they all have in common?
They make you feel good.

Now take a Zen monk somewhere in Tibet.
He has essentially mastered the chemical systems of his brain.

End result: What we call ‘Happiness‘

Life is meant to be Lived.
That is the only meaning we will ever know while we are alive.

Each of us will have a unique experience of what we call Life.
I think that is the most beautiful thing ever.

Don’t ruin your experience with 1000+ year-old rules, that make no sense what-so-ever to modern man.
You are bound to get slaughtered like Sheep.

Now that we know that we are all high-seeking junkies, lets cut the crap.
Go forth and discover new thrills, chills, creeps, sadness and joy. Apathy is not an option.

In short, discover your personal flavour of Flow .
[relevant reading: Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience ]

Some of you may already know about Stanford University’s free Online classes for AI(Artificial Intelligence) , ML(Machine Learning) and DB(Intro to Database Systems).

Well, like many others out there, AI was a black hole for me during college.
It never managed to hold my attention despite my fascination with all things geeky/obscure/arcane.
Or maybe I was just really lazy to pay attention back in the day. AI qualifies as hard CS.

Anyway, this latest Stanford gift offers you the chance to learn at the feet of the AI master himself : Peter  Norvig,
That’s reason enough for me to click Signup and dust off my 2nd Edition of AIMA (Amazon, Flipkart)

Join me for some really hard CS-ey fun if you’re curious about theoretical CS and seek more than a wikipedia article’s worth of knowledge.

I found a list of Course prerequisites in a Reddit post .
You can get them at Khan Academy’s Youtube[1] channel[2] or if you’d prefer to have the videos offline as well, PirateBay has the cookies .

If you’re significantly smarter than yours truly, sign up for the ML-class too. (I’m giving this one a pass, this fall)

P.S: Hurry! Enrollment for the Fall 2011 class closes on October 10, 2011.