Don't ever let somebody tell you… You can't do something!!

I love these words from the movie ‘Pursuit of Happiness’, by Will Smith to his son.

There are times when we want something, dream something and people discourage us or may tell us, “You can’t make it”. That should never drive our thoughts and our efforts toward our dreams. We should not let other decide what we can do or can not. It is we who should go for it, try our best, no matter what! Listen to our heart, take steps and all actions necessary towards making our dream come true, we should not be scared or confused by others.

And as it says in the movie we should always remember:

Don’t ever let somebody tell you… You can’t do something, not even me. You got a dream, you gotta protect it. You want something, go get it!!

Here is the clip from ‘Pursuit of Happiness’:

http://www.youtube.com/v/MEGSiX0JA-s&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b&border=1

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The Impossible Dream!

Very Inspiring Clip. I love the clip:

Did I Give My Best Shots?

Is it hard to achieve something? Or its easier compare to the effort you have to give to keep it after achieving! There are things I regret very much which I easily achieved but was not able to keep it. I am not very proud of everything I did with my life. But when I look back to my past, and sometimes regret for not doing the things I should have done I realize that, this is how you grow. You can’t expect to be perfect. Life gives you chances, you make mistakes, loose the chance, and learn from it, and you get the chance again and you keep loosing unless you get the real lesson to implement the right decision during the practical moment!

The older I am getting the more I am realizing these subtle detail notions of life. I used to think, I am quite intelligent and I know a lot, but trust me, unless you really go through the practical challenges you face, you can barely know how it works! Its like you know the theory that you should be calm before you go to a speech or a presentation, and there are many ways to make yourself strong enough to face it, but when it is the time, you are infront of bunch of people, standing to give the best shot, all theories are gone, and you face the hard truth….the practical part isn’t that straight forward 🙂

With time, you will notice that half of the thing you cried over last few years, never meant anything to anyone, not even to you.  There are things I never noticed but now I do, and I realize how important they were, how valuable they were to me, and to my family and friends.

Sometimes I feel, if I could just start over, and then smile, I might make it even worse if I were to start again. Its better this way, I grow through practical lesson, through understanding myself and my surroundings more. And I hope and wish to grow more. I want to reach a point where I can look back and smile and say to myself that: I tried my best, I gave my best shots and can die in peace 🙂

Some Advice for the Road!

Great Piece of Advice from Study Hacks

Some Advice for the Road (link to this article)

I’m leaving this afternoon to attend a college graduation: my second in three weeks. As you might imagine, graduating is on my mind, and, I would guess, on many of your minds as well. To celebrate the season I thought I would turn my attention to some advice for finding your way after college.

I want to share with you the unique law I use to guide my life. It’s a twist on the standard graduation inducements, but it seems, from my limited experience, to work the best of the various strategies I’ve watched my peers try on for size in their first years out of college.

The advice goes like this:

Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.

That’s it. Notice, I’m not talking about “avoiding taking yourself to seriously” or “always finding ways to give back.” I didn’t mention “the importance of a sense or humor” or why you need to “follow your passion, not money.” These are all reasonable words of wisdom, but they don’t necessarily direct you to a life that you’re happy to live.

My advice does.

Defining Lifestyle

What do I mean by lifestyle? Roughly speaking: a detailed feel for what your day to day existence would be like. Some questions to consider when imagining an ideal lifestyle:

• How much control do I have over my schedule?
• What’s the intensity level of my job?
• What’s the importance of what I do?
• What’s the prestige level?
• What type of work?
• Where do I live?
• What’s my social life like?
• What’s my work life balance?
• What’s my family like?
• How do other people think of me?
• What am I known for?

Using these types of questions to guide you, construct an image in your mind about the ideal future you. Notice, specific jobs don’t need to enter the equation. They can if they help you visualize, but they aren’t necessary. Add little details. Really get a sense for what this lifestyle would feel like. If the image makes you happy and gets you excited about the possibilities for your future, then you’ve hit on a good match.

Example Lifestyles

There exists an infinite variety of possible lifestyles. Here are just a few examples:

• The Power Broker: You live in a big city in a nice apartment. You climbed the ladder fast in a difficult business. You wield power. You’re good at what you do. You’re well respected. Your job is intense but you are super-organized so it doesn’t drive you crazy. You’re surrounded by good, loyal friends, and when you have fun, you have fun hard.
• The Serial Entrepreneur: You live in a nice San Francisco townhouse. You’ve started several businesses. Some more successful than others. You tend to alternate between an intense year or two growing a business followed by some extended time off for intense relaxation. You’ve got a network of good friends across the country and a bar down the street that you visit every Friday night to catch-up with your closest buddies. You use your off time to develop extreme hobbies and indulge in grand, hopelessly ambitious and wildly fun projects.
• The Virtual Voyager: You live in your dream house in a cozy community-oriented town, surrounded by natural beauty. You work virtually for several technology companies; setting your own hours. Three or four light days a week is enough to take care of your expenses. You and your family spend a lot of time outdoors, barbecuing with the neighbors, and, in general, enjoying small town life. You travel a lot for the sheer adventure of it.

Working Backwards

Once you’ve developed a detailed, visceral sense for your ideal lifestyle, use this image to guide your early career decisions. It’s a rough guide, to be sure, but it can still prove surprisingly useful.

Imagine, for example, that you’re faced with two options as graduation approaches. One is an elite project manager position at Microsoft and the other is acceptance to some good computer science graduate schools. Both are interesting and challenging. What do you choose? The power broker would go for the Microsoft position. The serial entrepreneur, on the other hand, would go for grad school — a perfect place to develop her first marketable technology.

The Power of Lifestyle-Centric Career Planning

Starting with a dream lifestyle — as oppose to a dream job — opens up more creativity. When thinking only about jobs, you’ll find yourself considering the same artificially-narrow menu of options troubled over by most talented college grads (banking, consulting, law, non-profit…) A lifestyle, on the other hand, provides much more flexibility — letting you discover potential paths previously hidden from your planning process.

The main advantage, however, is that, in the end, the whole point of worrying about your career is because you want to feel good about your life. By cutting to the bottom-line — what would make me feel best? — and then working backward from this answer, you are maximizing your odds that you’ll actually get somewhere worth going.

As with any graduation season advice, take this with a grain of salt. This is what I have seen work, but it doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that will. It can’t hurt, however, to take a moment to ask yourself: what lifestyle would suit me best?

You might be surprised where the answer leads you.

2009 – Achievements vs. Failures!!

Achievements:

2009 - Achieve vs. fail!

1. Got a job in that recession period!!!! (Jan 2009)
2. Bought my first car – Infiniti I30.
3. Learned a completely new(!) technology – Symfony (An MVC Framework).
4. Grew my nails like a stylish gal 😛 (stopped biting nails)
5. Had a wonderful Europe Tour – Iceland, England, Switzerland & Italy.
6. Took the strong decision of leaving the job and joining hubby in west coast!!!

7. Started going to gym.
8. Started cooking regularly 🙂

9. Visited family in Bangladesh!!

Failures:

1. Could not finish my PHP Zend Certificate exam ..still pending.
2. Could not lose weight to the extent I wanted
3. Not been involved much into any activity such as social or voluntary!
4. Could not maintain the habit of eating healthy food 😦
5. Could not finish a project I always wanted to work on!

I have few more failures in mind which I don;t blame myself for not doing given the timing and other circumstances, but I hope I am able to do finish those targets on 2010!! Best of luck for to myself!!!

A Very Rich Communication Platform – Apture!

Just came to know about this nice tool ‘Apture ‘. Its really cool tool that we can use in our  blogs to have an interactive page rather than  a flat one. I am very impressed by the idea of this tool and have installed it to start using it in my blog. About Apture – From its website :

Apture provides the first rich communication platform that allows people to intuitively experience the web.

With just one line of code, publishers and bloggers can quickly and easily turn flat pages of text into a compelling multimedia experience. Apture gives content creators the power to find and incorporate relevant multimedia items directly into their pages.

Readers can then access these items without ever leaving the page, providing them with a deeper and more meaningful web experience.

Here is a clip from our tour to London Tower Bridge. I added the  video link from youtube and also added the google map,wiki page, image links & some Amazon info related to ‘London Bridge Tower’ using the ‘Apture’ tool. It helps the visitor who are looking at the video can simultaneously read the wiki post or the map without leaving my blog!! This is a very impressive!! With the pace of use of media and links into blogs this is a very helpful tool we can use which will facilitate our blog post by making it lot more interactive and interesting for our visitors.

The Awakening

Today I read a wonderful piece of articles, something I have been really looking forward to for long time. It gave me peace which could calm me and gave me enough energy to move forward with hope and prospects ahead. Loved reading it!! Here it is for you:

The Awakening

Author: Unknown

“A time comes in your life when you finally get…when, in the midst of all your fears and insanity, you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere the voice inside your head cries out…ENOUGH1 Enough fighting and crying and blaming and struggling to hold on. Then, like a child quieting down after a tantrum, you blink back your tears and begin to look at the world through new eyes.

This is your awakening.

You realize it’s time to stop hoping and waiting for something to change, or for happiness, safety and security to magically appear over the next horizon.

You realize that in the real world there aren’t always fairy tale endings, and that any guarantee of “happily ever after” must begin with you…and in the process a sense of serenity is born of acceptance.

You awaken to the fact that you are not perfect and that not everyone will always love, appreciate or approve of who or what you are…and that’s OK. They are entitled to their own views and opinions.

You learn the importance of loving and championing yourself…and in the process a sense of new found confidence is born of self-approval.

You stop complaining and blaming other people for the things they did to you – or didn’t do for you – and you learn that the only thing you can really count on is the unexpected.

You learn that people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say and that not everyone will always be there for you and everything isn’t always about you.

So, you learn to stand on your own and to take care of yourself…and in the process a sense of safety and security is born of self-reliance.

You stop judging and pointing fingers and you begin to accept people as they are and to overlook their shortcomings and human frailties…and in the process a sense of peace and contentment is born of forgiveness.

You learn to open up to new worlds and different points of view. You begin reassessing and redefining who you are and what you really stand for.

You learn the difference between wanting and needing and you begin to discard the doctrines and values you’ve outgrown, or should never have bought into to begin with.

You learn that there is power and glory in creating and contributing and you stop maneuvering through life merely as a “consumer” looking for you next fix.

You learn that principles such as honesty and integrity are not the outdated ideals of a bygone era, but the mortar that holds together the foundation upon which you must build a life.

You learn that you don’t know everything, it’s not you job to save the world and that you can’t teach a pig to sing. You learn the only cross to bear is the one you choose to carry and that martyrs get burned at the stake.

Then you learn about love. You learn to look at relationships as they really are and not as you would have them be. You learn that alone does not mean lonely.

You stop trying to control people, situations and outcomes. You learn to distinguish between guilt and responsibility and the importance of setting boundaries and learning to say NO.

You also stop working so hard at putting your feelings aside, smoothing things over and ignoring your needs.

You learn that your body really is your temple. You begin to care for it and treat it with respect. You begin to eat a balanced diet, drinking more water, and take more time to exercise.

You learn that being tired fuels doubt, fear, and uncertainty and so you take more time to rest. And, just food fuels the body, laughter fuels our soul. So you take more time to laugh and to play.

You learn that, for the most part, you get in life what you deserve, and that much of life truly is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You learn that anything worth achieving is worth working for and that wishing for something to happen is different than working toward making it happen.

More importantly, you learn that in order to achieve success you need direction, discipline and perseverance. You learn that no one can do it all alone, and that it’s OK to risk asking for help.

You learn the only thing you must truly fear is fear itself. You learn to step right into and through your fears because you know that whatever happens you can handle it and to give in to fear is to give away the right to live life on your own terms.

You learn to fight for your life and not to squander it living under a cloud of impending doom.

You learn that life isn’t always fair, you don’t always get what you think you deserve and that sometimes bad things happen to unsuspecting, good people…and you lean not to always take it personally.

You learn that nobody’s punishing you and everything isn’t always somebody’s fault. It’s just life happening. You learn to admit when you are wrong and to build bridges instead of walls.

You lean that negative feelings such as anger, envy and resentment must be understood and redirected or they will suffocate the life out of you and poison the universe that surrounds you.

You learn to be thankful and to take comfort in many of the simple things we take for granted, things that millions of people upon the earth can only dream about: a full refrigerator, clean running water, a soft warm bed, a long hot shower.

Then, you begin to take responsibility for yourself by yourself and you make yourself a promise to never betray yourself and to never, ever settle for less than you heart’s desire.

You make it a point to keep smiling, to keep trusting, and to stay open to every wonderful possibility.

You hang a wind chime outside your window so you can listen to the wind.

Finally, with courage in you heart, you take a stand, you take a deep breath, and you begin to design the life you want to live as best as you can.”

Acknowledgement: Online Resource

New Hosting Place for my Blog!

I have moved this blog to a new hosting server ….I can now be found @ www.lipna.com

Will close this one soon. Hope to see you in the new one 🙂

How am I doing?

I have been quite busy lately. Moved to west coast to hubby’s place, was busy renting new apartment, buying furniture, cooking (or trying to cook :P) different food to surprise hubby, visiting beautiful and serene place. Its been a sweet life.  It was so terrible living alone. Now I wonder how I did that :-/I am loving this conjugal life 😀

This north west part of the country is very scenic…..the natural beauty amazes me here. So many places to explore and so many activities. Summer is leaving so fats and I have so many things planned but couldn’t make it! So far I have visited: Kerry park, Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, Alki Beach, Orcas Island and so many parks and lakes. I become member of gym to learn how to swim and then, after one lesson I felt its not my cup of tea 😦

Before I even realized I already passed 2.5 months here….I feel like I just moved here few days back and I have tons of new recipes to cook (try), tons of people to invite, tons of new places to go… 😛 Looks like I have to stall the plans for now as I am going to visit my home sweet home country (BANGLADESH) and am so excited about it….yeaayyyy… On our way to Bangladesh, we have a small honeymoon plan 😛 I should rather say small relative visit plan to Europe. We will be visiting my uncle and aunt family in London, then one of my best friends in Zurich and finally my sister-in-laws in Italy. I am really excited about all these 🙂

I don’t know when I can update my blog next, but when I do, I hope I have lotta interesting and exciting things to write about!

“Woods are lovely dark and deep….
And I have promises to keep….
And miles to go before I sleep…..”

Me and Hubby going crazy in Mount Baker 🙂

I have Learned – Inspirational Thought!

(Online Collection)

An Inspirational Thought
Author unknown

I’ve learned that you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is be some that can be loved. The rest is up to them.
I’ve learned that no matter how much I care, some people just don’t care back.
I’ve learned that it takes years to build up trust, and only seconds to destroy it.
I’ve learned that it’s not what you have in your life, but who you have in your life that counts.
I’ve learned that you shouldn’t compare yourself to the best others can do.
I’ve learned that you can do some thing 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. That either you control your attitude or it controls you.
I’ve learned that heroes are the people who do what has to be done regardless of the consequences.
I’ve learned that money is a lousy way to keep score.
I’ve learned that my best friend and I can do anything or nothing and have the best time.
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 from them and less to do with how many birthdays you’ve celebrated.
I’ve learned that you should never tell a child their dreams are unlikely or outlandish. Few things are more humiliating, and what a tragedy it would be if they believed it.
I’ve learned that no matter 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 no matter how bad your heart is broken the world doesn’t stop for your grief.
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 even when you think you have no more to give, when a friend cries out to you, you will find the strength to help.

New Changed Lipna!

I am a different person now. No more the same old Lipna. It surprises me when I see my acts these days. I have changed…changed a lot. Some of the changes are really good, I always wanted them to happen. One such example would be being very focused and serious about work. I have been bad about my work responsibilities in the past. I never used to take it much seriously and now I DO! And I love my new work!

Am also very controlled at certain weak things which used to give me hard time before.

But the changes scares me are: I lost my spirit of being lively all the time…smiling..enjoying every bit of life….I don’t want to be like that…I want to explore…be happpy…live …love…& laugh!!

I believe in continuous effort for improvements.

I believe: no matter what I need to work as much I can to improve myself in the things I lack….like my health…my diets which I have been trying forever and can never manage….yet I never want to give up trying…

Right now there are two things I really wish to focus and give my best effort:

1. Improving my health – have vitamins…have healthy food, drink lots of water.

2. Smile – I want to be lively again…..the spirit of Lipna…the identity of Lipna will be lost if I become a spiritless sad lady! I want to smile, enjoy and live my life. I have walked a long way through many obstacles..and I deserve to be happy 🙂

Cheers towards the new Lipna and wishes for her effort towards improvements!!

Quote of the Day:

“The most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well – Pierre de Courbertin”

Attitude!

A wonderful post by Charles Swindle on Attitude, I may have posted it before but its worth posting multiple times 😉

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.

Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude… I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.

And so it is with you… we are in charge of our attitudes.

The Beauty Of Symfony!

These days most of my works are in the symfony framework. A completely new thing for me which I am both working on and learning too. It amazes me how symfony’s form features are so wonderfully balanced. The capability of form validation and security implication are really impressive.

Before I talk about these details, I should write few words about what symfony is: (From its website)

“Symfony is a complete framework designed to optimize the development of web applications by way of several key features. For starters, it separates a web application’s business rules, server logic, and presentation views. It contains numerous tools and classes aimed at shortening the development time of a complex web application. Additionally, it automates common tasks so that the developer can focus entirely on the specifics of an application. The end result of these advantages means there is no need to reinvent the wheel every time a new web application is built!”

The old way of bulding web application is cumbersome, unmanagable. With framekwors complex web application can be handled very easyly without much of a headache on programmers side. Using symfony, when we define a form, we implement validation for each field, we can make some of the fields validation mendatory (such as Name, Age etc.) and we can do string or number validaition very easily. Symfony is build on the basic concepts of OOP, ORM, RAD, DRY, KISS, TDD, YAML, and PEAR. Therefore handling any DB activity is very easy and trouble free. The ambiguity of using different naming conventions for getters & setters are also easily handled.

Recently, I worked on an Auto complete search in our application. It was a search box, and as user goes with entering  letters all available options similar gets popped up. It was so much easier to do in symfony. Using Ajax in symofony also makes many complex things handled easily.

Its not that I have sit here to write a lecture on symfony, but most of my work are involved in these are now a days and I can not help expressing how much I am enjoying working with this 🙂

My Status!!

Its been a while I got a chance to update my blog, so many changes and ups and downs in my life have made it difficult for me to keep track and to express those in my blog. Now things seem relatively better and in a stable shape 🙂

With all the happenings around me for last few months I am completely convinced that life is full of unexpected things and unstable situations. The more you try to keep it stable, handle things the more new things come up to make it worse! And it all happens when you strive for better things. If you just accept the life as it is without much of an expectation it remains more stable compare to when you strive for better goals, improvements. However, what i have learnt and which we all mostly know, no matter what, if you believe that you can do it and then go for it, it does give you some hard time, but persistence will make it happen and you will be able to stabilize with your destination with some time.  But, we are not generally happy with our goals, the better we become, we strive for even more, this never ending process goes on and we really never get a chance to have calm and quiet stage in our life!!

My philosophical thoughts are getting complex i guess 😛

Well, I have got myself into a nice job that is very stressful but interesting & exciting, have settled in a small sweet town, no city hype. This a stage of my life where I can completely focus on my past and future and decide on how I want to proceed with the knowledge from my past failures and weaknesses. This is perfect time to shape myself even better, stronger to manage things properly from now onwards.  Away from all friends and family and specially the city events and all, this is a wonderful opportunity to focus on myself and I am really happy and excited for getting the opportunity.

The thing I am most excited doing is learning few new technologies @ work. To name a few, I am working on OOP PHP, Symfony Framework and Ajax. I never had much exposure to these things before, I have mostly worked on Java and Struts framework (Database off course). I am so happy to get into these web technologies which is diversifying my skill. I believe this is the time when web technologies are very important and has more project opportunities than other technologies. So, the more I expertize in these fields the more I have opportunities open for myself. Also, so many things i have always wanted to do of my own greatly require this skills. I have got some very good & helping colleagues and its a wonderful journey for me to learn all these exciting technologies.

I guess this is the first time in my life, I am really into work. I am enjoying what I am doing and I am  doing it passionately.  I have always wanted to know & learn things, work hard and succeed. But for one reason or another I could not do so. Now, the time has come and I am excited having this chance.

With a new life started, I hope to update my blogs from now on with new happenings! With work pressure and all, I don’t know how frequent I can be. But I will try 🙂

(Online Collection)

Happy New Year To ALL!!!!

New years are a chance for a beginning
Even when there hasn’t been an end.
Wheels turn in an interminable bend,
Yet, marked in one spot, seem to wobble spinning.
Each year we hope to do a little better
Although we know that really nothing’s changed.
Reason thinks that everything’s arranged,
So we must dream if we would fate unfetter