Happy New Year 2019

”We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” – Edith Lovejoy Pierce

”It is never too late to be what you might have been.” —George Eliot

”Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.” – Helen Keller

Christmassy words

There are some wonderful old wintery words that have worked their way out of our vocabulary – and we think it’s about time we brought them back into circulation. Here are a few of our favourite old-fashioned festive vocables,

1. Waissail

A spiced mulled cider, Waissail was traditionally drunk on Twelfth Night. Revellers would serenade or “waissail” the trees in the orchard, in a custom intended to ensure a fruitful harvest.

In a sentence: “Pour me a glass of waissail, I’m off to waissail at neighbours.”The same word can also be used to mean drinking large amounts of alcohol and enjoying oneself with others in a noisy, lively way, or to go from house to house at Christmas singing carols. Cider is of course helpful for all the above.

Recipe https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/holiday-wassail/  

2. Kissing bough

A precursor to mistletoe, the kissing bough was a popular Christmas decoration in Tudor homes. A round ball of twigs and foliage, decorated with seasonal fruit such as apples, it was often hung on walls or over doorways as a gesture of goodwill, and to welcome guests into the home. The boughs gave birth to the ritual of kissing under the mistletoe, first documented in the 16th century.

In a sentence: “Pop under the kissing bough, Janet, and let’s have a snog.”

3. Bubbly-jock

Bubbly-jock, or bublie-cock, is an old Scots word for a male Turkey. Treasure Island author and famous Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, once wrote in a letter: “ At table I was exceedingly funny, and entertained the company with tales of geese and bubbly-jocks”.

In a sentence: “That bubbly-jock is never going to fit in the oven, we’ll have to barbeque it.”

4. Crawmassing

Not happy with your prezzies this year? Why not do a spot of crawmassing, which means to go around begging gifts at Christmas. It also means to gather up, or go through the remnants of a festive feast. No point wasting those last few sprouts.

In a sentence: “Oh dear, your Auntie Barbara is crawmassing again.”

5. Snow-broth

A 16th century word for melted snow, icy water or slush. It features in Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure: the character Lucio describes Lord Angelo as “a man whose blood is very snow-broth”, implying that he has no sexual appetite.

In a sentence: “No chance of going sledging I’m afraid – it’s just snow-broth out there.”

6. Bummock

Having a party? Then it’s time to brew a bummock. It’s an old Scots word for a large quantity of drink, purposely prepared for a festival or special occasion – in particular Christmas. In the 18th century a bummack, or bummock, was also the name given to a Christmas party given by landlords to their tenants.

In a sentence: “Can you make it to my bummack? I’m brewing a bummock!”

7. Waits

From as early as the Middle Ages, almost every town and city in the UK had a band of musicians and singers called waits. Their duties included waking the townspeople on dark winter days by playing in the streets, and welcoming Royal visitors by performing at the town gates.

Waits were abolished in 1835, but the term became associated with any group of singers or musicians who sang and played carols around their town or village at night, over the Christmas period, whilst collecting money. In other words, carol singers.

In a sentence: “Bob, come to the door – the Christmas waits are here!”

8. Blenky

Forget a smattering of snow – what about a blenky? The long-forgotten word means “to snow sparingly” and is probably derived from blenks, an 18th century word for ashes or cinders. The light snow resembles the blenks or ashes that can fly out of a chimney and settle on the ground.

In a sentence: “It’s forecast to blenky tonight. Don’t forget your scarf.”

9. Rumball

Rumball or Rumball Night is an old 18th century name for Christmas Eve. A rumball is also a feast served up on December 24th, rather than Christmas Day itself.

In a sentence: “Remember to put mince pies out for Father Christmas on Rumball.”

Priorities

In today's era both men and women start working full time at 16 and change lots of job by the time we reach our retirement age of 65. 

This is also the decade of failure. And that's okay - it's probably the first time in your life you've had to contend with most of the things you're taking on. 

Things like supporting yourself, managing your time/stress/relationships, figuring out what role you want work/study/spirituality/etc. to play in your life. 

 As you get a bit older, and you start to meet people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who kept up that lifestyle, and believe me, you don't want to be one of them. Have your fun, but remember: they call it excess for a reason. 

Eat well (whatever that means to you), get exercise, get enough sleep, and try to have a steady life if you possibly can.

You will fail in life, over and over and over. It won't feel fair. Maybe for decades. You've got to keep moving forward. Keep going. Keep going!

Make a list of all the macro “areas” in your life – This might include: Work, Home, School, Social, Church, Self, Community, Sleep (don’t forget that one!) etc

Take each item on the list and break it down into “projects”. I’ll use Home as an example:
Home:  Spouse, Kids, Yard, Groceries, Dinner, Lunches, Laundry, etc

If possible, break it down even further.
    Kids: Homework, School project, T-ball, Ballet
    Yard: Mow lawn, Weed beds, Prune shrubs, plant garden

Look at each project independently and answer this question – How much time a week do I need/want to spend on this?

It is going to take some time to drill down each macro category. I suggest my clients use index cards. That way we can spread them out like a flow chart. The thing that is most surprising to everyone I do this project with is how much the total time ends up being. I can guarantee you will have more hours than there are in a week.

Now you have a basic understanding of what is going on in your life and how much time it takes, Where are your priorities? How many of them are there? How many hours of your week are dedicated to them? What about the other stuff? Is it okay to let it fall by the wayside?

So you tell me – How many priorities are too many?
Finally, if you could only do one thing – Which card would you pick up? As always, I wish you the MOST from your potential,

I think few priority's will be make your life and others easy, 

To your boss: 
Your number one priority is to make your boss look good. I am not joking.

To your company: 
Your Number One priority is to increase revenue. 
Number Two is to improve profitability. 
These two priorities should guide all your thinking and actions.

To yourself: 
Your number one priority is to always, without exception, maintain a positive attitude, positive self confidence and the appearance of success.

The third item is for your career and your life and no single thing you can do, no amount of education, no amount of expertise or knowledge is more important.

 An employee with average skills and a good attitude is worth more than 5 dour experts.

 As the pilots say, 'your attitude determines your altitude' and you must maintain a positive attitude at ALL COSTS and you WILL be successful, as day follows the night. You cannot fail.

That ugly person you may think you are inside is actually going to be the most compelling, most interesting, and most powerful manifestation of yourself.

Oh, and don't forget to have fun along the way! Enjoy every moment you possibly can.

Creating Success Out Of Chaos 

https://youtu.be/k7HKJn7NDZs 

Thanks 

Ann

Google Cloud Concepts Part I

The Google Cloud Platform provides a comprehensive big data solution in a single platform.

The Google Cloud Platform is a full service platform, and it's set up so that you can utilize not only cloud native services, but also open-source tools. It also supports both batch and stream data processing modes.

Google Cloud Platform resources consist of physical resources, like computers and hard disk drives, as well as virtual resources, for example virtual machines. It's global in scope, with resources located around the world in Google data centers. And global distribution has a number of positive implications, including redundancy in the event of failure. The vast reach of the global data centers offered by Google Cloud Platform mean that you can pretty much deploy whatever number of resources you need to without worry. It also means reduced latency, since you can locate your services at a data center close to your end users.

Resources reside in regions or zones. A region is a particular geographical location where resources run. Each region contains one or more zones. For example, the us-central1 region specifies a region in central US that has zones in us-central1-a, us-central1-b, -c, and -f. Resources that reside in a zone, for example resources like virtual machine instances or persistent disks, are called zonal resources. Other resources, like static external IP addresses, are regional. Regional resources can be consumed by any resources within that region. And that includes any zone within that region, while zonal resources are only used by other resources within the same zone.

 

Google Cloud Platform resources are hosted across multiple locations globally. Placing resources in different zones within a region provides isolation from several common types of infrastructure, software, and hardware failures. Placing resources in different regions provides an even higher level of protection against failure. The bottom line is that you can design robust systems using resources that are spread across different failure domains. Compute Engine resources are either global, regional, or zonal. As an example, images themselves are global resources, while disks are zonal. Global resources are accessible by resources regardless of region or zone. So virtual machine instances from different zones can apply the same global image. The scope of a resource indicates how accessible it is to other resources. Though all resources, regardless of whether global, zonal, or regional, must be uniquely named within a project. What this means is that you can't, for example, name a virtual machine instance demo instance in one zone and then try to name another VM within the same project with that same name.

Google Cloud Platform Services

Google Cloud Platform provides a huge number of services.

Some of the more common services include computing and hosting, storage, networking as well as big data.Let's look at computing and hosting first. First, managed application platform. This is offered as Google App Engine and it's a platform as a service offering. It's a somewhat hands off approach in which you allow Google to manage hosting, scaling, and monitoring services. Well, for example, if traffic to your e-commerce website is a dramatic upturn, Google will automatically scale the system for you.

 And container based computing. This is focused on application code rather than deployment and hosting. Google Kubernetes Engine is referred to as containers as a service, and is very mature, and one of the most powerful container orchestration platform. Virtual machines are offered as a service called Google Compute Engine, and this is considered to be a type of infrastructure as a service.

With this type of service, you are responsible for configuration, administration, and monitoring tasks. In other words, Google will make sure that reliable resources are always available and up to date, but it's on you to manage and provision them.

 Now, let's look at storage services. Cloud SQL, which is a database service based on Structured Query Language or SQL, and it offers either MySQL or PostgreSQL databases. Google Cloud Platform offers two types of NoSQL data storage. One is Cloud Datastore and Cloud Bigtable is the other.

Cloud Spanner is a fully managed, highly available, relational database service for mission critical application. Cloud Storage offers large capacity, consistent and scalable data storage. And Compute Engine offers persistent disks. And this is available as the primary storage for your instances with both standard persistent disks, as well as solid state drives.

Now, let's look at networking services. Compute Engine provides networking services for virtual machine instances to use. You can load balance traffic across multiple instances. And there's Cloud DNS as well, which allows you to create and manage domain name system records. And Google Cloud Interconnect is an advanced connectivity service which allows you to connect your existing network to Google Cloud Platform networking resources.

And finally, big data services. First, BigQuery, this is a data analysis service. The data analysis services include custom schema creation, so you can organize your data as you wish. For example, you may have a schema structure in mind using specific datasets and tables.It offers the convenience of large dataset querying using SQL-like commands, so the learning curve is more manageable. It provides for loading, querying, and other operations via jobs. And supports managing and protecting data with controllable and manageable permission.

Cloud Dataflow is a managed service that includes software development kits or SDKs for batch and streaming data processing modes. And Cloud Dataflow is also applicable for extract, transform, load, or ETL operation. Then there's Cloud Pub/Sub. This is an asynchronous messaging service. It allows an application to send messages as JSON structures. And on the receiving end is a publishing unit referred to as a topic. These topics are global resources and what means is that other applications and projects owned by your organization can subscribe to the topic. Thereby receiving those messages in the body of HTTP requests or responses.

Benefits of Google Cloud Platform

Some of the main benefits of Google Cloud Platform include ,

Let's have a closer look at these. Future-proof infrastructure includes factors like live migration. And that means you can move Google Compute Engines instances to nearby hosts, even while they are active and under high load. Google Cloud Platform offers pricing innovations like per second billing and discounts for sustained use. The platform allows you to configure a wide combination of memory and virtual CPU, helping to avoid over-provisioning when sizing hardware for a particular workload. Fast archive restore provides a high throughput for right now restoration of data. Google's load balancer is the same system that supplies load balancing to Google products like Gmail and Google Maps over a global distributive platform. It's super fast and capable of tolerating extreme bites of traffic. You can take advantage of the Google security model, built and maintained by some of the top, application, information and network security experts. This is the same infrastructure that secures Google applications like Gmail and G Suite.

Google maintains a global network footprint, boasting over 100 points of presence, banning over 30 countries. Now let's look at powerful data and analytics as a benefit. You can build distributed services or fast results on the platform. BigQuery, Cloud Datalab and Cloud Dataproc. These are the same services that Google uses. So queries that traditionally take hours or days, can now be performed in a fraction of the time. Google Cloud Platform offers powerful applications and tools for working with big data, with data processing tools like Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Pub/Sub, BigQuery, and Cloud Datalab. Making it easier to use extreme volumes of data to deliver results.

Again, these are the same products that Google itself uses. And Google Cloud Machine Learning provides access to powerful deep learning system that google uses for services like Google Translate and Google Photos, as well as voice search. With respect to serverless computing, there are no upfront provisioning costs. So resources are allocated dynamically as needed. You simply bring your code and data. It's full management of servers and eliminates the repetitive tasks and potential errors that are inherent in tasks like scaling clusters and applying security badges. With automatic scaling and dynamic provisioning of resources, you pay only for what you use.

Let's consider a couple of use cases for a serverless computing. Take for example, web backend. You employ Google's App Engine with the highly scalable NoSQL Cloud Datastore database for a full scale, powerful backend infrastructure. Or Internet of Things or IoT device messaging, combined the real time geo-redundent Cloud Pub/Sub messaging service, with Cloud Dataflow serverless stream and batch data processing. When considering extract transform and load or ETL, we could combine Cloud Dataflow again for stream and batch data processing, with BigQuery for serverless data warehousing. [Other examples of Serverless Use Cases are shown.

 

Now one of the other benefits, customer-friendly pricing. As pointed out earlier, you do not have to commit to a specific deployment size, so no upfront costs are involved. You pay as you go and with per second pricing, that means that you pay for services as you require them. So you don't have to maintain a mountain of hardware and have that hardware sitting there idle. And you stop paying when you stop using a service, with no termination fees. Google Cloud Platform offers, as another benefit, data center innovation. For example, high performance virtual machines for fast and consistent performance.

Google's global network provides fast networking, performance, strong redundancy and high availability. Live migration technology means that maintenance of virtual machines is transparent, never requiring down time for scheduled maintenance. Google maintains very high security compliance and standards, providing some of the most secure infrastructure on earth. And Google builds its data centers with energy efficiency top of mind. In fact, Google is the first major Internet services organisation to obtain ISO 50,000 I certification. And Google has reportedly been carbon-neutral for over a decade. Now, consider security.

Google security model is an end-to-end process. Google uses practices and controls to secure data access and when retired, hard disks that contain customer information undergo a data destruction process. With only a few exceptions, customer data stored at rest is always encrypted on Google Cloud Platform. The encryption is automatic and transparent, so no customer intervention or action is required. Google's secure global network helps to improve security of in transit data. And the combination of cloud interconnect and managed VPN, means that you can create encrypted channels from an on-prem private IP environment, to Google's network. In addition to that, Cloud Security Scanner assists app engine developers to identify common vulnerabilities.

Google Cloud Platform also allows the configuration of user permissions at the project level, for full control of who has access to what resources and at what level. Using tools like Google Cloud logging and Google Cloud monitoring, simplifies the collection and analysis of request logs, as well as the monitoring of infrastructure services availability.

Comparing GCP and Other Models

When you're talking about cloud services suppliers, there are really three main suppliers. That's Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. The major differences from platform to platform include pricing. And one thing that you should keep in mind when considering pricing is this. How to calculate cost? For example, the pricing for Amazon's EC2 and Azure's Virtual Machines scalable computing service can get pretty complicated. While Google's scalable computing service is perhaps a little less flexible, but the pricing, way more straightforward. Another major difference lies in how these vendors name and group the services that they offer.

  

Compute offerings

With respect to scalable computing on demand, Amazon Web Services has its Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. While Google Cloud Platform offers Compute Engine, and Azure has Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Scale Set. For web and mobile apps, we have AWS Elastic Beanstalk and GCP, and I'll refer to Google Cloud Platform hereafter as GCP. GCP's App Engine, and Azure offers Webs Apps and Cloud Services. For software container management, Amazon Web Services has ECS. And ECS is Amazon's EC2 container service, while EKS is Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes. Google Cloud Platform provides the Google Kubernetes Engine. And I'm quite familiar with that having a lot of personal experience with GKE, and I can tell you it is very powerful, very flexible, and fantastic. Azure offers AKS, which is Azure Container Service, and Azure Container Instances. 

  

 

For storage offerings, we have object storage. So Amazon Web Services offers Simple Storage Service, or S3. GCP has Cloud Storage, while Azure has Blob Storage. As far as archiving, or as it's known, cold storage, is concerned, AWS offers Glacier and Data Archive. GCP has Cloud Storage Nearline. And Azure offers Backup and Archive. With respect to content delivery networks, AWS offers CloudFront. GCP offers Cloud CDN, and Azure has its Content Delivery Network.

Now let's look at analytics offerings. For big data, AWS offers EMR and Athena. While GCP offers BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, Dataproc, Datalab, and Pub/Sub. Azure has HDInsight and Data Lake Analytics. For BI, or business intelligence, AWS offers QuickSight. GCP offers Data Studio, while Azure has Power BI. Now, you might be thinking, well, Power BI, isn't that an installable application? Yes, it is an installable application. There are applications that are installable on desktop, or on servers even. But they connect to cloud resources very readily and easily. That's why I'm including those here. With respect to machine learning, AWS has Amazon Machine Learning, or AML. Google has Cloud Machine Learning, and Azure offers Azure Machine Learning.

Now let's consider briefly locations offerings. So really you should try to choose your data center close to users, because it reduces latency and provides better user experience. I mean, that goes without saying, if you're involved in any capacity in networking, in administration, you already know that. So here's the thing, AWS has the most global coverage, but unfortunately there's no coverage in Africa at this point. Google Cloud Platform has good coverage in the US, but not so good in Europe and Asia, and there's none in South America or Africa at this time. But knowing Google, I'm pretty sure that they are in the process of planning those right now. And as far as Azure goes, really they have the second best global coverage behind AWS, but again, there is no coverage in Africa.

GCP Locations https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/#global-products

AWS Locations https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/

Azure Locations https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/global-infrastructure/regions/

Login https://cloud.google.com/

Developed by: Google Platform: Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Datastore, Google Cloud Storage, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud SQL

Initial release: April 7, 2008; 10 years ago

License: Proprietary Written in: Java, C++, Python, Go, Ruby

In the beginning, we need to apply a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) account and the new client would have $300 credit to spend in the first 12 months.

Once we logged in to the GCP console, we need to create a new project in order to use the GCP services. Simply click the New Project button and type the project name. At the same time, it would assign a unique project ID for your project which we need to use to access the GCP in terminal later.

Defensive Pessimism

Growing up I heard again and again in school especially on Oct 2^nd the below words

"Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words," 

But the school didn’t teach me what to do if I have a failure in life even though I have been there Mon-Friday for 12 years of my life …

The fact is human body especially human brain is developed enough to help us with cope with loss of some one dear or a sudden illness for you or in the family.

Defensive Pessimism is a strategic approach to life that help bolsters your physical, emotional and mental health

People who tend to be anxious can benefit from this approach. Defensive pessimism is the process that allows anxious people to do good planning.

The obesity in the UK is at record levels among men, women and children, and that many conditions, like heart disease and diabetes, are linked to being overweight. "Defensive pessimism can help with eating well and exercising regularly,"

A defensive pessimist may realize that high blood pressure and diabetes runs in his or her family, and in turn exercise and eat a healthy diet to try to avoid those diseases.

Some times taking that umbrella with you is defensive pessimism.

Think about the below things and keep a journal of your answers in your diary and see each day how decision's change

1.     What is your goal?

2.     What would be the most positive outcome?

3.     What action will I take to reach this goal?

4.     What is the biggest obstacle?

5.     When and where is the obstacle most likely to occur?

6.     What can I do to prevent the obstacle?

7.     What specific thing will I do to get back to my goal when this obstacle happens?

Optimism:

(Read from bottom to top)

Pessimism:

(Read top to bottom)

Follow Your Soul

Simple Gestures of love

It is story time few years ago I worked in a family business. We had a lot of regulars, and I really enjoyed the customers — except for this one woman. She was awful, hateful, rude and just a jerk. One day I was talking to one of my co-workers when we saw Mrs. Wonderful pull up in front of the store. The other worker said to me, “We should kick her bitchy ass out.” I don’t know what made me do it but I said “No, let’s kill her with kindness.” I ran over and immediately started handpicking the three pounds of chocolate mint ice cream that she purchased every time she came in. She hit the door, frowning. I had it weighed, bagged and rung up before she got to the register. I handed it to her, she took it, turned and left. Not a word.

 

The same thing happened for weeks. It sort of became a game for us, to see if we could get it ready before she got to the front door from her car. Finally one day I said, “You can’t have it until you prove to me that you have teeth.” She looked very angry and said, “WHAT?” I was taken aback and replied, “You never smile; smile at me.” She glared and gave me a death head smile, no happiness or humor, just teeth. I thought, oh crap. But she took her ice cream and left. She didn’t come back in for a couple of weeks and I thought it was my fault — I had run off a customer by being rude. I felt really bad.

Then one day she came in and said, “I have to thank you girls. Every time I stopped here you were all so nice to me and I was dreadful. You see, I was taking the ice cream to my husband who was dying in the hospital and the only thing he wanted to eat was chocolate mint ice cream. I was so distraught every time I arrived here that I know I was awful. You all made it so much easier for me with your consideration and kindness. I don’t think I could have taken it if it hadn’t been for you girls.” We were floored.

From her I learned, at the age of 27, that you never know what’s going on in someone else’s life. So just be kind. That jerk tail-gating you, just pull over and let him by; he may have a hurt child in the car. That asshole who took your parking spot may have just buried his wife. You just never know — and kindness costs you nothing.

PS. This story has no relation to any people you may know J

How to pack your hand luggage ?

The infographic was put together by Stasher, which describes itself as the ‘the Airbnb of luggage’, and the world’s largest luggage storage network.

Okra Drink

Quotes of the day