Reduce work Life Stress

Today's topic is subjective and varies from person to person. Recently, I been experiencing an issue to balance work life and personal life. With fast moving world and stressful work life, it is extremely hard to maintain a good personal life. The mood-off at work ruins your after work hours. Your boss gives you hard time, you go home and get mad at your spouse/girlfriend, kids, parents, friends, yourself. I been through that stage as well and recently found few solutions that really helped me in getting better. I am still not able to balance my work life as well as personal life but in my opinion i am getting much better at it. Few of my suggestions would help you to manage your anger.

1. Keep work stress at work place
Everyday when you leave work place, leave all the stress, grudge, envy, incomplete work in the office. It takes some time to get used to it and many would disagree and claim that it is not applicable to all types of job. But my from my experience and what I have seen, many people including me have started doing it and it works. If you have work phone, switch it off that way you will not have access to phone/emails. If you have work laptop, keep it at work. If you have to finish work, take extra time at office, finish it and then leave. While leaving make sure you are sane and feeling relaxed and not mad at anyone. Whenever you reach home, spend some time with your family, friends and do not even make an effort to think about work. This will help you in building good personal life.

2. Meditate everyday
In many cultures, meditation have a very high importance. It helps you to clear your mind, and explore yourself. If you get up early, try to meditate for atleast 15 mins. Sit quietly with eyes closed, clear your thoughts and explore yourself. Think about how you can be better in managing work. What can you do to make everyone's life easy. What can you do to make people around you happy. If you think you have made some mistakes how can you fix them. Meditation will help you in managing your anger. It will help you in calming yourself. Angry mind always makes hasty decisions. I personally do meditation everyday.

3. Get your heart pumping
Everyday for sometime get yourself exercise such that it will raise your heart beat rate. Increase in heart beat will help you clear up your mind. This way you can take out all of your frustration, anger and stress leaving you with clear and calm head. If you don't have time to exercise, make sure sure you walk from your commuter station to home. If you commute by car, make sure you park your car atleast a mile away from work place. This way you will be able to walk before and after. If you can go for jogging after work that is excellent. Try to be involved in sports like dancing, aerobics, swimming, tennis, squash, soccer etc. Early morning people can try Yoga, aerobics, cardio exercises etc.

4. Have and work on plan B
If your work place is really making you stressed resulting in increased frustration, friction with your personal life, have a plan B ready. Plan B can be like change of job or change of career. Start applying to different jobs, network with people which will help you in getting references, start practicing mock interviews. In case of change of career start attending classes, look for the options, training programs, certifications. Make sure you keep this to yourself and never share it with anyone at workplace.

5. Take a Break
One of the common mistakes that people often do is not taking day-off. Most of the companies often provide with vacation days, medical leaves, personal days where you are entitled to take days off. Taking a day or more off helps you to enjoy and/or give some time to take care of your business. Utilize this time to reduce stress. If you cannot take days off, take a sick day. Once in a while it works. People who are not entitled to take the days off can still take unpaid days off. Even though you dont get paid, it is still worth it. After relaxation, your body and mind is fresh and ready to give more productivity. This will in turn improve your image in manager's eye.
That being said, there are many things that can be done in order to balance work life and personal life. Try to calm your self. Keep in mind that "Bad days will always pass and good days will follow". Do not take any decisions in anger or frustration these decisions will always turn against you.

Week One Picks that will boost your portfolio

I love investing and it has become one of my past time hobby. I track companies based on their products and business models. Unlike majority investors, I invest based on their products in the market, past performances, future scope and ofcourse gut-feeling. I am still a newbie in the investment world, but reading articles about companies and opinions from the experts help me a lot in choosing stock position. So far in my two and half years of investment experience, I had pulled in decent returns.

After the big recession of 2008 - 2010, stock market suffered a humongous downturn which is still a terrible nightmare for people who already had their money invested. But it is a good news for start-up investors as they can buy the stocks for reasonable and considerably cheap price. The companies that have suffered huge losses will rise again even more stronger results and profitable years ahead. Even the European are being sorted and disaster is averted for now.

For those who are interested in buying stocks but do not have much idea should consider following companies stocks, in my opinion, will help you in pulling decent returns for long term.

1. MCP (Molycorp, Inc)
Molycorp is the leading producer of rare-earth metals. Current speculations states that Molycorp is in process to take over Neo Material Technologies. This will make Stock price of Molycorp attractive. Not to mention, cost of rare-earth metals will increase with increase in demand.
2. LTD (Limited Brands, Inc)
Limited brands holds women’s intimate and other apparels, beauty and personal care products and accessories. Some of them have a big names like Victoria Secret, PINK, Bath and body works etc. The current demand for Intimate apparel and beauty products will result is higher sales thus reporting strong quarter results.
3. AAPL (Apple, Inc)
Apple have become the biggest and most valuable company in the world by surpassing 500 Billion market cap. Apple have a cash stash of almost $100 Billion and at 600+ is still a good buy. Not to mention, apple recently decided 2.5% dividends for the investors.
4. BAC (Bank of America)
During financial meltdown, All the financial institutions suffered a gigantic losses. Bank of america is one of them. Since Jan'12 Bank of America have rallied from $5.7 to $9.6 providing gains of 40%. At current $9.6 bank of america is still a good buy for long term.
5. IRE (Bank of Ireland)
Europe have caused a big stir all around the world during 2011. Ireland have suffered a big depression and is currently in a recession. This means, it is a chance for investors to start buying bank of ireland for long term. It will take time for Bank of Ireland to rise again but with long term investors can be surely bet on it. In my opinion, When European crises are resolved, Ireland will be one of the first one to rise and soo will bank of ireland.


Disclaimer: I own MCP, BAC and IRE as long term holding and currently do not intend to sell it within next 30 days. I do not own LTD and AAPL and do not intend to buy the stocks for next 30 days.

ORA-03124: two-task internal error

Recently, at work I am facing lot of interesting issues. One of them is the "ORA-03124: two-task internal error".

If you have scratched your head, given up on search results, looked at millions of un-answered threads I have one more solutions for you. The solution that worked for me.

In 11g Oracle there is a parameter called "_enable_row_shipping” which sometimes defaults to TRUE. Occasionally your table is huge and have large number of columns. While trying to perform select with parameter true, Oracle restricts and throws an error.

To resolve this issue, set the _ENABLE_ROW_SHIPPING to FALSE.

SQL statement:

alter system set "_enable_row_shipping"=false;

Once this statement is executed successfully, restart your webapp. Sometimes you might have to restart DB server(it is unlikely).

Soo try it out and let me know if it worked for you guys.

"The Devil Inside" -- Review

I am a big fan of horror movies. Very few movies interests me, "The Devil Inside" was one of them.



Last weekend, I decided to watch this movie. Being all excited, I got the ticket but the whole theater was empty when I arrived. Movie was released 2 days ago and the theater was empty? Not all are fans of Horror movies. Hardly 50 people came to see this movie.
  The trailer shows it is a documentary type of movie, which gives it a realistic feel. The setup and story of the movie was nice. The movie is based on exorcism which interests me more. It's spooky to find out who is possessed and how. what will they do?

The movie picked up slowly, pretty good. It built very nice suspense. Slowly my heart was racing, eager to find out what will happen next. The effects of the possessed people was too good.

I don't want to give out the whole story here for those who is eager to watch the movie, but i am disappointed to tell you guys that this movie was not as good as I had expected.

The whole suspense, thrill built in the movie was destroyed by its ending in a bang. I had to convince myself that movie was over. I am very sure everyone in the theater had WTF on their faces. As soon as movie was over, i heard a big loud noise of laughter from people. Some one actually shouted, "IT SUCKED".

I would have really liked the movie if the ending was better.

PS: For those who are still willing to watch the movie, Please wait and watch it on Netflix.

Welcome Me

Hello Everyone,

Its been long time since I wrote my last blog. I did try my best to find my old blogs online but didn't find them. But what the heck, its new year and hence new blog.

For those, who don't know me, I am ordinary guy living in New York and working 9-6 job.

My interest includes video games, cooking, investing, reading, chatting, travelling, watching movies, etc.

In short I like to have fun.

I will write about everything from my daily experiences on day to day life, gaming experience, investing opinions, cooking recipes, movie opinions, etc.

My blogs will reflect my opinions and wont compel you in anyways to follow it.

Do leave me comments.