Post about "entertainment"

A Lifestyle Design Decision

May 16, 2023· Category :Uncategorized· Comments Off

The decision to change your lifestyle and/or career does not come easy. Lifestyle change can be difficult because it is often preceded by a drastic event which forces you to decide to make a significant change in our life. Maybe you have been making great money but a stress induced heart attack at the age of 38 makes you reevaluate what is important in your life and start thinking about how you would go about creating an ideal lifestyle for yourself. Maybe a company’s downsizing in this tough economy has left you jobless and in the job market with hundreds of thousands of other qualified professionals. Maybe your job just isn’t offering you the satisfaction that you had hoped for and you feel like your life and your job has become a series of repetitive, automated, mechanical movements that you perform without even thinking about it, kind of like when you drive somewhere and forget exactly how you got there.

On the other hand, the same hardship or self analysis which leads you to acknowledge that you are not satisfied with the life you are living and that there has to be a better way to live your life can be the fuel that you need to start taking proactive steps to designing your ideal lifestyle. How much fuel these things generate will determine how easy your journey will be. People who decide to take proactive measures to design their lifestyle are people who say enough with the day to day monotony and procrastination. First, you have to identify what is important in your life before you can start to design your ideal lifestyle. And that question can be most easily answered by asking yourself the following question: If you had all the money you needed and never had to work another day in your life, what would you do? Life passes people by and the young adults we are today become old adults full of regret of all things in life that they have not done.

The decision to design your lifestyle should be a conscious exercise of self reflection, goal setting, and implementation of defined strategies to achieve your lifestyle transformation, things that most people never really take the time to do as the daily grind and routine and lack of time are the primary reasons why this is not done. People get set in their ways and in a comfort zone (albeit uncomfortable) and do not want to make the effort to change, or are too scared to change. Anthony Robbins suggests that there are two primary motivations which drive people to make the decisions they make; they are to avoid pain and to gain pleasure. Most people end up continuing living the life they are living because they associate more pain (effort) with the process change would require then with the pleasure they would gain having completed the lifestyle change.

My brother, upon celebrating his 40th birthday, said something if not accurate, at least thought provoking. He said that mid life was actually somewhere in your 20′s. The first 21 years of your life go buy very slowly. Summer vacations as a kid seem like a year. Getting to your 16th birthday so you can get your driver’s license seems like an eternity. Finally being allowed to drink legally is a huge achievement that required much patience on your part. And then, suddenly, you are 30 and 40 starts heading your was at the pace of an Olympic Nigerian marathon runner. Soon, you start saying “has it already been 15 years since my high school graduation?”, or my favorite “she’s a freshmen and was born in WHAT year?” Sometimes, movies can be one of the best sources of inspiration when it comes to changing your career and designing your ideal lifestyle. One of these movies is Fight Club. If it’s been a while since you last saw that movie or if you have never seen it, here are a few quotes that I think are very appropriate on this subject of lifestyle design:

“You wake up at Seattle, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?”

“Only after disaster can we be resurrected.” “Guys, what would you wish you’d done before you died?”… “You have to know the answer to this question! If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?” “The things that you own, own you.” Currently, I have been debating whether to take a certification program from Villanova University on Six Sigma or Project Management. I am going with project management because of the various business and projects that I am involved in, but from what I understood of what Six Sigma is, it’s about trimming the fat and waste from a company’s operations to make it more profitable and healthier. So, what fat and waste can you trim from your life? As cheesy as it sounds, today is the first day of the rest of your life (isn’t that from AA?). There is no time like the present to start taking proactive steps to career optimization and lifestyle design. STOP putting things off and take action today.

A Brief History of Home Entertainment

May 2, 2023· Category :Uncategorized· No Comments

The concept of home entertainment and indoor recreational activities changed when home electronics invaded our lives. One can say that access to numerous electronic products at home has revolutionized the idea of what constitutes a complete home entertainment. Nowadays, anyone can have immediate access to every kind of electronic entertainment via different media within the comforts of their homes. They can have their choice of entertainment which may range from the latest DVD players, radios to the wireless internet connection which offers them the convenience of mobility. Advancement in technology has gifted us with loads of home entertainment options ranging from radio, television, CD, DVD players, home theatre system, games consoles and so on.Music has always been one of the most preferred leisure activities. It found its way into our home through the long playing discs and the gramophone. Of course with the coming of radio a decade later made music a more widespread home entertainment. Before the advent of the CD or DVD player, the radio was the most popular home entertainment system available. Though there were some juke boxes available in the local pubs or salons where one could listen to a song of their choice at home there was only the radio. With radio, the choice of listening was however quite limited as people had to listen to the songs that the radio channels would play, even though some of the stations would at times play the selected numbers based on listeners’ requests. But there were no complaints as there wasn’t anything better for decades to come.Initially, when television had not yet become an everyday part of our lives, the visual entertainment strictly meant those theatres which had large screens to view a movie. Things changed dramatically with the invention of the television in the initial phase of the 1950s. The television was a complete wonder in the days when it was discovered. People did not have to restrict themselves anymore to music as their only entertainment at home. They could actually watch a full length movie in the comfort of their own home.Not only movies, this small wonder box started entertaining people with more and more new ideas, programs and techniques. Television has been considered as one of the pioneers in the history of home visual entertainment. Of course it provided more than just entertainment. With news and special documentaries, TV soon became the most important source of amusement. The long playing discs were also a part of home entertainment which was an early discovery. While radios, LPs and television made a permanent place in everyone’s home, the quality of sound in those times essentially required tremendous development.Good sound systems and speakers stared to develop in the mid 1970s. Various technologies were discovered to enhance the quality of sound. And with the music genres like rock, pop and discos coming into being, there was a specific and urgent requirement for good quality sound systems. Thus the electronic giants did not stop producing recorders and put more emphasis on amplifying and equalizing the sound to give it a new dimension.Good quality sound systems were specially designed and created for homes which produced outstanding music. Woofers and subwoofers along with various amplifiers equalizers and multi channel audio were being used to produce crisp stereophonic sounds.However, this concept took a back seat when CD and DVD players came into existence. During the end of the ’70s and early ’80s some of the electronic giants worked in collaboration to develop the world’s first Compact Disc system. Experts proved that this CD player was quite compact and lightweight with its unique durability. For music lovers it was truly a boon. At the same time this CD system opened a new window in the audio equipment industry.Compact discs were more durable than any other long playing discs or tapes. Thus the CDs removed all other music disc and tapes from the market and held prominent position. The 80s and early 90s saw a vast improvement in the technology of compact disc systems. It became very popular with people because of the crystal clear sound it produced and was affordable. These CDs not only stored music, it was versatile enough to store movies, data, pictures or even software.Along with CDs a much improved device which actually revolutionized and changed the entire system of home entertainment is the DVD or digital versatile discs. These discs are powerful and large enough to hold two movies in one. It stores data digitally and is more durable. The scratch proof technology of the DVD players also makes the DVDs last a long time. Both music and movie buffs felt delighted when the DVD player came into the market. Recent survey statistics reveal that the DVD player is the most successful product of home entertainment. It was introduced in the year 1997 and has reached great heights of success ever since.Nowadays, people can have the same effect of a movie theatre in their homes. With the latest DVD players, LCD screens and the sound systems with woofers, sub woofers and multi channel audio systems, anyone can have a fantastic home entertainment system with high quality sound and spectacular visual effects. The plasma and LCD screens are high resolution televisions which started to develop in the latter half of the 1990s and these sleek televisions enabled the viewers to experience digital sound and vision with fantastic picture quality and various advanced features.With the invention of DVDs and a major development in the visual media such as Plasma and Liquid Crystal Display or LCD in the late 90s gave home entertainment its latest technical dimension. With it, the meaning of home entertainment changed significantly with more and more people installing the home theatre systems with newest gadgets and technologies.