Month: February 2014

Here are the five elements of effective thinking:

• Understand deeply (earth)
• Fail to succeed (fire)
• Be your own Socrates (air)
• Look back, look forward (water)
• Transform yourself (quintessential)

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking

I could be happy the rest of my life with a cinnamon girl.

What are the odds of waking up in the middle of night and seeing exactly 3:33 on the alarm clock on your bed stand?

Let's assume that you normally go to bed and fall asleep around eleven in the evening and get up around seven in the morning when the alarm goes off.

That comes out to eight times sixty times sixty which equals 28800 seconds that you are sleeping.

In order to make the calculation simpler, let's also assume that you wake up only once in the night.

Therefore, the chance of waking up at exactly a given time (this case 3:33) is one in 28800 which equals 0.003472%.

Okay that may seem like a pretty good calculation, but wait. For those not paying close attention, I've made a fundamental error in my calculations.

Actually, the exact time of 3:33 is in minutes and not in seconds. So upon correction we've got eight times sixty which equals 480 minutes that you are sleeping.

One in 480 equals 0.20% which is a much greater possibility. Normally when I wake up it's not evenly spread across the whole night but usually between let's say 1:30 and 5:00, which isn't 480 seconds but is 210. One in 210 equals 0.47%.

Life is never what you expect it to be, and sloppy calculations make things much worse if you are too careless.

My future-famous son makes the front cover of the electronic dance music magazine.

"Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 21st century..."

Looks like I will not be playing golf today. Once again the golf course is closed because of the rain. Perhaps I will go there anyway after lunch to hit some balls since it is important that I keep in form. I cannot wait until the climate improves and I can play as much golf as I want, asides from my work of course. Goal this year is to get my game down and halving my current handicap to a three. I wonder if I can manage that. There's a good chance that it can happen if I persevere and keep a positive attitude.

When I first got my new Thinkpad T431s up and running, I was all excited about having such a blazingly fast machine at my fingertips.

However, when I started using VirtualBox, I was disappointed how sluggish it ran when trying to install virtual machines. Initially I thought it had to do with SSD, and to no avail I tried various system setting tweaks to improve performance.

There are also a number of settings in VirtualBox that you can play around with, like different chipsets (PIIX3 was the older default option whereas ICH9 supports the more modern machines) and enabling I/O APIC (required for 64-bit guest operating systems, and if you want to use more than one virtual CPU in a virtual machine), but none of that helped either.

This morning I had a flash of insight. Perhaps virtualization isn't enabled in the BIOS, let's go and have a look. On boot I hit the Enter-key, paged my way to the security section and lo-and-behold the VT-d feature was turned off. I quickly enabled it, saved my changes and booted.

Installed CentOS 6.5 within ten minutes, and now it's running like a charm.