The closest I ever came to quarter million dollars

2 days ago, when I went shopping with Prince, I wanted to buy a bag.. Prince said.. "why don't you check it online? perhaps you will get it cheaper?". "If only, I could check it right now..", I said to him.. "May be we can develop an application, to take a picture of the bar codes of products and do some basic image processing to get the UPC code and do a google product search.. won't that be cool?" He said "yeah.. but I bet, the shops will prohibit you from doing that.. bla bla" .. and we got lost in a digression..

Today, I got an email from Graduate Women in Computing (UT AUSTIN) , inviting all students to compete for a workshop.. When I browsed through the website, I saw the Google Android Challenge. I called up Prince immediately, and asked him, "why don't we participate with our idea of the bar-code scanner + google product search?" . He said "sure, sounds like fun!". Then, I went to see the details of the challenge..

It turns out, that my idea has already been thought.. and IT HAS FREAKING WON a $ 275,000 AWARD!! ..

Well....

Moral of the story: GO SHOPPING MORE OFTEN!

Quote from a Quote from a friend

"...Ivan Illych as he awaits the great leveler, contemplating a past which was throughly dominated by others, a life in which he had given up control of himself in order to fit into a system.

"What if my whole life has been wrong?"

It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.

"But if that is so," he said to himself, "and i am leaving this life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me and it is impossible to rectify it — what then?". . ."