¿ ŋάkзđ ļŭŋĉħ

People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime. When you figure out which one it is, you will know what to do for each person.

When someone is in your life for a REASON. It is usually to meet a need you have expressed. They have come to assist you through a difficulty, to provide you with guidance and support, to aid you physically, emotionally, or spiritually. They may seem like a godsend, and they are! They are there for the reason you need them to be. Then, without any wrongdoing on your part, or at an inconvenient time, this person will say or do something to bring the relationship to an end. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they walk away. Sometimes they act up and force you to take a stand. What we must realize is that our need has been met, our desire fulfilled, their work is done. The prayer you sent up has been answered. And now it is time to move on.

Then people come into your life for a SEASON. Because your turn has come to share, grow, or learn. They bring you an experience of peace, or make you laugh. They may teach you something you have never done. They usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy. Believe it! It is real! But, only for a season.

LIFETIME relationships teach you lifetime lessons: things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation. Your job is to accept the lesson, love the person, and put what you have learned to use in all other relationships and areas of your life. It is said that love is blind but friendship is clairvoyant.

[ found it in sum grp mail ]

[ posted on askYahoo by sum guy cald JJ]

An excellent question and one we thought we could answer in a flash. Not so. After much digging, we found an article in The Washington Post that states the first letter grade given in the United States was a "B" at Harvard University in 1883.

Prior to that time and up to about 1900, most institutions of higher learning used the numeric system (0-100) for grading. According to the Georgia State University web site, from about 1900 to the 1960s, colleges and universities became more general in grading. Hence, the letter-grade system became popular.

Georgia State University surveyed 1,395 two-year colleges, four-year colleges, and universities, and found 89.8% use the letter-grading system with a tendency to add plus or minus.

About that "E" grade -- some schools have used the E instead of F, but we speculate too many students tried to convince their parents the "E" stood for "excellent." It's much harder to trick parents into believing an "F" stands for "fantastic."

Some academics oppose this system of grading. One Stanford University professor claims students tend to take only courses in which they can get good grades. It would be much better, he states, if students explored courses in subjects of interest to them and there were no grades. Where was this guy when we were in school?

If
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Is equal to
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Then
H+A+R+D+W+O+R+K = 8 +1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%
K+N+O+W+L+E+D+G+E = 11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%
L+O+V+E = 12+15+22+5 = 54%
L+U+C+K = 12+21+3+11 = 47%

(None of them makes 100%)

...............................

Then what makes 100%
Is it Money? ..... No!!!!!
Leadership? ...... NO!!!!

Every problem has a solution, only if we perhaps change our "ATTITUDE".
It is OUR ATTITUDE towards Life and Work that makes OUR Life 100% Successful ..

A+T+T+I+T+U+D+E = 1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

Don't you think so ..... !

Have you ever wondered why foreigners have trouble with the English Language?
Let's face it,
English is a language where,
There is no egg in the eggplant.
No ham in the hamburger,
And neither pine nor apple in the pineapple!
English muffins were not invented in England.
French fries were not invented in France.

We sometimes take English for granted.
But if we examine its paradoxes we find that,
Quicksand takes you down slowly,
Boxing rings are square,
And a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

If writers write, how come fingers don't fing!
If the plural of tooth is teeth,
Shouldn't the plural of phone booth be phone beeth!
If the teacher taught,
Why didn't the preacher praught.

If a vegetarian eats vegetables,
What the heck does a humanitarian eat!?
Why do people recite at a play
Yet play at a recital?
Park on driveways and
Drive on parkways

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy
Of a language where a house can burn up as
It burns down
And in which you fill in a form
By filling it out
And a bell is only heard once it goes!

English was invented by people, not computers,
And it reflects the creativity of the human race.
(Which of course isn't a race at all)

That is why
When the stars are out they are visible,
But when the lights are out they are invisible
And why it is that when I wind up my watch,
It starts.
But when I wind up this observation,
It ends.

[ extracted from a group mail ]

found dis in a group mail, lykd it .. so here it is ...

i've learned
that you can do something in an instant that will give you heartache for life.

i've learned
that it's taking me a long time to become the person I want to be.

i've learned
that you should always leave loved ones with loving words. It may be the last time you see them.

i've learned
that you can keep going long after you can't. I've learned- that we are responsible for what we do, no matter how we feel.

i've learned
that either you control your attitude or it controls you.

i've learned
that regardless of how hot and steamy a relationship is at first, the passion fades and there had better be something else to take its place.

i've learned
that heroes are the people who do what has to be done when it needs to be done, regardless of the consequences.

i've learned
that money is a lousy way of keeping score.

i've learned
that my best friend and I can do anything or nothing and have the best time.

i've learned
that sometimes the people you expect to kick you when you're down will be the ones to help you get back up.

i've learned
that sometimes when I'm angry I have the right to be angry, but that doesn't give me the right to be cruel.

i've learned
that true friendship continues to grow, even over the longest distance. Same goes for true love.

i've learned
that just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have.

i've learned
that maturity has more to do with what types of experiences you've had and what you've learned from them and less to do with how many birthdays you've celebrated.

i've learned
that your family won't always be there for you. It may seem funny, but people you aren't related to can take care of you and love you and teach you to trust people again. Families aren't biological.

i've learned
that no matter how good a friend is, they're going to hurt you every once in a while and you must forgive them for that.

i've learned
that it isn't always enough to be forgiven by others, Sometimes you have to learn to forgive yourself.

i've learned
that our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we are responsible for who we become.

i've learned
that just because two people argue, it doesn't mean they don't love each other. And just because they don't argue, it doesn't mean they do.

i've learned
that we don't have to change friends if we understand that friends change.

i've learned
that you shouldn't be so eager to find out a secret, It could change your life forever.

i've learned
that two people can look at the exact same thing and see something totally different.

i've learned
that your life can be changed in a matter of minutes, by people who don't even know you.

i've learned
that even when you think you have no more to give, when a friend cries out to you, you will find the strength to help.

i've learned
that credentials on the wall do not make you a decent human being.

i've learned
that the people you care about most in life are taken from you too soon.

... ... ...
... ... ...

Live life one day at a time.
For it seems that when we are young,
it is all an uphill climb.
But when we get to the top,
we are gravely disappointed.
Because it is the little things in life that matter:
Time spent with family and friends,
and being there for one another.
And time is one thing we cannot take back.
I think that as a society, we are in such
a hurry to achieve all our goals
that we miss out on the one thing
we should conserve
and treasure:
TIME.
Before we know it, our time is up.
It could be any day, any hour, any minute.
It could be expected or unexpected.
Have you spent your time wisely?

Lesson 1: Choose Your Grandparents Carefully

"There are three ways to make money. You can inherit it. You can marry it. You can steal it."
-- conventional wisdom in Italy

William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III.

In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars.

Lesson 2: Choose Your Parents Carefully

"A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money. The old guy fingered his worsted wool vest and said, "Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel. I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for ten cents. The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5 pm for 20 cents. I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I'd accumulated a fortune of $1.37. Then my wife's father died and left us two million dollars."

William Henry Gates, Jr. and Mary Maxwell were among Seattle's social and financial elite. Bill Gates, Jr. was a prominent corporate lawyer while Mary Maxwell was a board member of First Interstate Bank and Pacific Northwest Bell. She was also on the national board of United Way, along with John Opel, the chief executive officer of IBM who approved the inclusion of MS/DOS with the original IBM PC.

Remind your parents not to send you to public school. Bill Gates went to Lakeside, Seattle's most exclusive prep school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1760). Typical classmates included the McCaw brothers, who sold the cellular phone licenses they obtained from the U.S. Government to AT&T for $11.5 billion in 1994. When the kids there wanted to use a computer, they got their moms to hold a rummage sale and raise $3,000 to buy time on a DEC PDP-10, the same machine used by computer science researchers at Stanford and MIT.

Note: Recall that in the 1980s we venerated Donald Trump and studied his "art of the deal". If Donald Trump had taken the millions he inherited from his father and put it all into mutual funds, you'd never have had to suffer through one of his books. But he'd be just about as rich today.

Lesson 3: Acquire Research Results by Hiring and Buying

Conventional (loser) economic wisdom holds that monopolies should spend heavily on research because they are in a position to capture the fruits of the research. But if you want to become as rich as Bill Gates, you have to remember that it is cheaper to wait for a small company to come up with something good and then buy them. In the old days, antitrust laws kept monopolies from buying potential competitors. But not anymore. When Microsoft products were threatened by network computers and Web-based applications, they simply bought WebTV and Hotmail.

Another good strategy is to hire the right people. Some of the guys who wrote Microsoft Windows had previous worked on window systems at Xerox PARC. So Xerox paid for the research; Microsoft paid only for development.

In the long run a tech company without research probably can't sustain its market leadership. So you'll eventually need to build something like research.microsoft.com (check out netscan.research.microsoft.com to see some interesting online community research).

Lesson 4: Let Other People Do the Programming

If you're a great engineer, it can be frustrating to rely on other people to translate your ideas into reality. However, keep in mind that the entire Indian subcontinent is learning Java. And that if Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Sun products simply worked and worked simply, half of the world's current IT workers would be out of a job. You're not going to get rich being "just a coder." Especially working in painful low-level imperative languages such as C or Java. It might be worth writing your own SQL queries and HTML pages since these tend to be compact and easier than precisely specifying the work for another person to do. But basically you need to get good at thinking about whether a piece of software is doing something useful for the adopting organization and end-user. Bill Gates does code reviews, not coding.

Lesson 5: Train your new CEO

If you're an intelligent curious person it can be painful to run a company of more than 50 people. You spend more time than you'd like repeating yourself, sitting in boring meetings, skimming over long legal documents in which you know there are errors but aren't sure how serious, etc. The temptation is to hand over the reins to the first "professional manager" who comes along. And that's what the standard venture capitalist formula dictates. But Bill Gates didn't do that. He hired Steve Ballmer in 1980 and gave him the CEO job 20 years later. Making money in the software products business requires domain expertise and a commitment to solving problems within that domain. Great tech companies are seldom built by non-technical management or professional managers who aren't committed to anything more than their paycheck. Adobe is another good example. The two founders were PhD computer science researchers from Xerox PARC who were passionate about solving problems in the publishing and graphics world. They are still guiding operations at Adobe.

Note that this is a principle that Old Economy companies have long understood. Jack Welch joined GE in 1961 and became CEO 20 years later. Sometimes an Old Economy company may pull in a few outsiders to senior positions but, because they have such stable bureaucracies underneath, they can more easily afford this than startups.

Lesson 6: Focus on Profit

"At Hewlett-Packard, people, materials, facilities, money, and time are the resources available to us for conducting our business. By applying our skills, we turn these resources into useful products and services. If we do a good job, customers pay us more for our products than the sum of our costs in producing and distributing them. This difference, our profit, represents the value we add to the resources we utilize."
-- David Packard in The HP Way

Remembering to make a profit was tough in the dotcom 1990s but it turns out that Hewlett and Packard's ideas were right. Most of the management teams at dotcom businesses, by being disorganized, unintelligent, and ignorant, were subtracting value from the resources that they controlled.

How does one make money in the software products business? Simple. The necessary step is to build something that becomes part of information systems that generate value for organizations and end-users. Once you've created value you can extract a portion in lots of ways. You can be closed-source and charge a license fee. You can be open-source and charge for training, service, support, and extensions. But if you aren't getting your software product into important information systems, you don't have a prayer, no matter how slick your marketing materials.

If you're creative and diligent the software products business is extremely lucrative. If you're losing money, ask yourself what you're doing wrong. The answer is probably "plenty".

Lesson 7: Let the Venture Capitalists Schmooze Wall Street ...

... but don't let them run your company. A profitable Microsoft Corporation brought in venture capitalists (VCs) at the last minute. They didn't need or spend the money but used the VCs to boost their valuation at the initial public offering, thus getting more money for the shares that they sold. Venture capitalists are dangerous because even the most successful might not know anything about business. Remember that there are tens of thousands of venture capitalists in this world. Assuming that they make random choices of companies in which to invest there will be a Gaussian curve of performance. Some firms will do consistently better than average even if everyone is guessing. Imagine that thousands of monkeys are flipping coins; some of the monkeys will get 10 heads in a row. These are the monkeys that will be celebrated for their insight. These are the monkeys whose track records will lead to uncritical cheerleading by underwriters and public investors. In bull markets such as we had in the 1990s nearly all the monkeys will be fairly consistent winners. But remember your next-door neighbor who made money in the stock market in 1985. He convinced himself that he had special insight and ability when actually he was only holding high-beta stocks in a rising market. So his foray into the commodities futures market wiped him out in the crash of '87.

Bottom line: successful software products companies spend most of their time listening to their customers and users rather than to venture capitalists.

Lesson 8: Self-Esteem is Not Job 1

Gentility, politesse, decorum, and high self-esteem are wonderful. You can achieve all of these things within your organization. And then watch it be destroyed by competitors where frank and, if necessary, harsh criticism is encouraged. Technical people, even (and especially) those fresh out of school are always convinced that whatever they've developed, no matter how hare-brained, is perfect. It takes a technical person with good judgement to notice the flaws and it may require repeated and increasingly harsh delivery for the, uh, pinhead to realize his or her mistake.

Example: I once encountered a group of 6 people who called themselves "engineers." To solve what they thought was a new problem, they were going to build their own little database management system with their own query language that was SQL-like without being SQL. I pointed them to some published research by a gang of PhD computer scientists from IBM Almaden, the same lab that developed the RDBMS and SQL to begin with in the 1970s. The research had been done over a five-year period and yet they hadn't become aware of it during several months of planning. I pointed them to the SQL-99 standard wherein this IBM research approach of augmenting a standard RDBMS to solve the problem they were attacking was becoming an ISO standard. They ignored it and spent another few months trying to build their enormously complex architecture. Exasperated, I got a kid fresh out of school to code up some Java stored procedures to run inside Oracle. After a week he had his system working and ready for open-source release, something that the team of 6 "engineers" hadn't been able to accomplish in 6 months of full-time work. Yet they never accepted that they were going about things in the wrong way though eventually they did give up on the project.

An 1994 New Yorker article about Microsoft relates "If he strongly disagrees with what you're saying, [Gates] is in the habit of blurting out, 'That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard!'". Jennifer New, a former Microsoft contractor, writes "Meetings with Bill or one of his top people are often replete with a barrage of expletives and other disdainful comments." (Salon, September 1997) My friends who work or have worked at Microsoft tell similar tales. But how different is this from other elite organizations?

When I arrived at MIT as a first-year graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, I asked a professor for help with a research problem. He said "The reason that you've having trouble is that you don't know anything and you're not working very hard." A friend of mine was a surgery resident at Johns Hopkins. He complained to one of his teachers that he was having trouble concentrating because he'd been up all night for several nights in a row. The professor replied "Oh... does your pussy hurt?" According to Business Week, Jack Welch "encouraged near-brutal candor in the meetings he held [at GE]".

The bottom line: self-esteem is great but beware of creating a cozy home for unproductive people with bad ideas.

source: How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates

1. No Breakfast:
    People who do not take breakfast are going to have a lower blood sugar level. This leads to an insufficient supply of nutrients to the brain causing brain degeneration.

2. Overeating:
    It causes hardening of the brain arteries, leading to a decrease in mental power.

3. Smoking:
    It causes multiple brain shrinkage and may lead to Alzheimer disease.

4. High Sugar consumption:
    Too much sugar will interrupt the absorption of proteins and nutrients causing malnutrition and may interfere with brain development.

5. Air Pollution:
    The brain is the largest oxygen consumer in our body. Inhaling polluted air decreases the supply of oxygen to the brain, bringing about a decrease in brain efficiency.

6. Sleep Deprivation:
    Sleep allows our brain to rest. Long term deprivation from sleep will accelerate the death of brain cells.

7. Head covered while sleeping :
   Sleeping with the head covered increases the concentration of carbon dioxide and decrease concentration of  oxygen that may lead to brain damaging effects.

8. Working your brain during illness:
    Working hard or studying with sickness may lead to a decrease in effectiveness of the brain as well as damage the brain.

9. Lacking in stimulating thoughts:
    Thinking is the best way to train our brain, lacking in brain stimulation thoughts may cause brain shrinkage.

10. Talking Rarely:
     Intellectual conversations will promote the efficiency of the brain