I Learnt Today…

2008-11-30

I have been postponing things since I don’t know when…

I consider this as a major mistake that we all make and the most unfortunate thing is that we don’t feel we are going down because postponing takes us down slowly. In other words, you will not even notice that you have not checked your eyes until it’s been a year since when it was initially planned.

Yes it is that bad and even worse…

The main reason for many people to end up with postponing is the busy life most of us are living today.

Most of us are very good at work and never postpone a single office work. Then the important things in personal life get piled almost kissing the sun.

Most of us only have the weekend for all our personal life work. And the worst of all is it’s the weekend that we can sit and get a rest.

So what ever the important thing that should be done in this weekend gets LESS URGENT and easily gets postponed to the next. Of course, hoping there won’t be any new movies next week!

Let me discuss some experience of mine:

• Lat December (2007) I brought my coffee cup to home thinking I should clean it thoroughly before start using the next year. My mother washed it and returned it to me so that I could take it back to office the day after. But every morning when I get ready to go, I did not get the cup which was lying on my table because I had to rearrange my backpack to accommodate a round shape thing. Believe me it’s been a year for now and the cup still lies on my table … !
• I checked my eyes last March and I forgot to bring my old specs or any details of my previous checking of eyes and unfortunately I had to go to a new doctor from whom I had last checked when I was a kid. So he checked my eyes without any clue of previous checks. But he certainly did not do a good job and my eyes rejected the new specs. Even though he told that it was natural and would be all right in some time, my eyes kept rejecting new specs. Then I decided to recheck the specs with my usual doctor. If I go to him I have to take a leave on a weekday or have to go Saturday night. Trust me I am still wearing the same specs and my eyes are still rejecting it and I am working 9-12 hours everyday in front of computer with this pair of specs making my eyes double tired.

I can write hundreds of such experience here but rather I would like to discuss how I feel about this situation.

You may think I am a so ignorant stupid. Actually I am not (at least I don’t think so) I loved my coffee cup but I lived without it for a year… How? If anyone told me not to use my coffee cup for a year, I would fight with him. But I, by myself didn’t use it for a year…!

If someone asked me to use wrong specs for more than 8 months 10 hours a day, I would kill him because I love my eyes. But I just did that by myself…!

How did I do this?

Yes, I found how I did it, I never painted the big picture nor had even an idea of what I was drawing, I always drew a tiny pixel at a time.

I never wanted to lose my cup for a year; I only wanted to take the cup on the next day. Everyday I thought that I would only lose it for a day and I could live with it.

I never wanted to hurt my eyes without which I don’t even want to try living. But I could live with it for a single week. Every time I was postponing my checking only for a week.

So as we can clearly see we always have calm and quiet reason to justify the single unit level postpones which alone does not make any visible impact on us. But together, as the time go, it’s those tiny pixels that makes the big picture which is once drawn can never be re-painted.

So how could we get rid of this?

Well, I would like to get the lesson from my first great teacher, yes my mother.

She does a job and also does all house work without a servant.

Every night she prepares the need to make tomorrows cooking which she start doing in the early morning around 4.00 am.

If I was her, I would postpone the preparation for tomorrow morning. But she never does that because she knows that she would never get enough time to finish cooking with quality and dress-up for the office before 7.00 am.

Even if she is sick, she never postpones a single task…

Yes she has the will that I don’t have. She has the power in her heart which I need to develop within my heart.

I think one should make his/her heart strong to stand against those tiny evils which suggests to postpone tiny things to make it comfortable for a small span of time but make the life worse long term.

Cassian Menol Razeek

2008-11-29

When we talk about animal camouflage, the first creature that hits our minds is lizard. If we leave the earth surface  and swim deeper we can find octopus a master of disguise.

Octopus can alter its color and skin texture to blend into its surroundings to fool away predators such as sharks which are keen to taste octopuses’ soft boneless bodies.

Octopuses are gifted with sacs of yellow, red, brown and black pigment called chromatophores which covers their bodies. They can control these pigments by contracting their muscles. In other words, Tightening certain muscles can also transform the texture of their skin to look like the smooth ocean floor or a craggy reef.

Mimic Octopus – The master of disguise

As we discussed, ordinary octopuses can change their colors to match their skin texture to match their surroundings but the Mimic Octopus is capable of systematically copying multiple species’ appearances which is a skill that mystifies sea scientists around the globe.

Mimic Octopus takes the form of venomous creatures in the sea such as lionfish, flatfish and sea snake.

How can an eight armed octopus look like a snake? This master hides six arms and shows only two to make its trick look very real.

This is a picture taken when mimicking a sea snake :

Mimicing a sea star:

It’s amazing, Isn’t it?

Was this post helpful to you? How can I improve? - Your comment is highly appreciated!

Cassian Menol Razeek

2008-11-24

Among various helpful functions provided by Oracle, Trunc function took my attention today because I had to fix a defect where some one has misunderstood and misused this function.

As the name itself suggests, the trunc function is capable of truncating a value. This function can be used either on a date type value or a numeric value.

Using trunc for numeric values

When it comes to numbers, trunc function can return a number truncated to a certain number of decimal places.

syntax:

trunc( number, [ decimal_places ] )

Example usage:

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Note: The trunc function does not round the values like in round function. It simply truncates the number as instructed.

Using trunc for date values

The trunc function is capable to truncate a date value to a specific unit of measure.

Syntax:

trunc ( date, [ format ] )

Possible values for format parameter:

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Example Usage:

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Was this post helpful to you? How can I improve? – Your comment is highly appreciated!

Cassian Menol Razeek