Madhavamandiram and Garden Gate

When I was a kid I used to study in the Madhavamandiram School in Sholinghur.

It was during my first grade I had Mohan Sir as my class teacher. He used to
Teach maily Tamil and Maths to us.

It used to be a class of 50 people. Basically the teaching methodology is one
for all. I mean one instruction for all. Whether you are able to grasp the
knowledge or not.

Right now my daughter studies in garden gate school in cupertino. Karla Daw is
her class teacher. The one difference that I could see is the difference in
teaching.

She basically adopts the concept of teaching whatever the child can grasp.
Not a one for all teaching method. I found this is good for the children,
so that they can cope up with the knowledge level.

I thought I will take this opportunity to comment on the same.

Type Talk at Work...

This is the book I am currently reading. I saw this book couple of
weeks back in the library and I am hooked on to it.

It talks about the 16 personality types that determine your success
on the job.

Using these types the author explores time management, hiring, firing,
stress management etc.

This book is quite interesting to me. I hope it will be interesting for
others too.

I may post more about this book later here.

Horrible experience at the Chennai International Airport

On Nov 2nd I was about to travel from Chennai To SFO. On this regard I came to the
Chennai airport on Nov 1st around 11pm.

My parents were with me at the time. I was speaking to them for some time and spending
my time there. Since the flight is at 3am I got into the airport around 12 mid night.

I had carried 2 checkin bags with me and a hand luggage. I got into the Cathay pacific counter
and did the checkin of the checkin bags and got my boarding pass with no hassle.

During this time I found that the airport was fully crowded with lot of people around. I realized
that there are many air crafts which are about to take off along with Cathay pacific.

For example there were people waiting for Cathay pacific, air france, british airways, singapore airlines, air india etc.

After my checkin when I went to the immigration queue, it was over crowded and there are not much staff to handle the situation.

Since my flight is at 3am, I thought coming to the airport 3 hours before is sufficient enough to catch the flight that was not so.

After finishing the immigration clearance after about an hour, I had to stand in the huge queue of security clearance.

I see most of the people waiting in that line got frustrated with the way the staff were treating the travelers.

It took more than 2 hours to clear the security and I had reached the air craft around 3.30am.

And the flight took off around 4am instead of the scheduled time of 3am. The problem lies in the way the things are handled in the chennai airport not because of the flights them selves.

I think the airport requires massive restructuring with respect to handling the travelers. Even though there is exponential growth of travelers from this airport the staff are not trained enough to handle the crowd.

My experience with RAID testing

I have been working on the RAID testing for the past couple of months.
I am trying to share the various phases that I had gone through in the past.

The meaning of RAID is Redundant Array of Independent disks. It is basically
meant for providing redundancy when there is a failure of the other drive.

Dell provides various servers with different RAID models. Some examples include
CR100 model. R200 model. Power edge 2950 model etc

If you take the Dell R200 model, it has a RAID type of 2 and it consists of two disks
of same size and capacity.

Whenever a software or data is written in one of these disks the same will be parallely
copied to the other disk. So that providing redundancy at any point in time.

If there is a failure of one disk, the same can be replaced with another new drive.
The data from the master drive will be copied to the new drive and making the
redundancy work.

Dell also provides the power edge models where in the redundancy is spread across more than
two disks, like 4 disks and sometimes 6 disks.

In case of a 4 disk model, assuming each disk is 100GB, the total capacity is 200GB, remaining two drives will be mirrored.

At any point in time the data from the first 100GB harddisk is copied to the other 100GB harddisk. Same way with other two disks also.

In order to identify which disk is mirrored to another disk, you can pull one disk and reinsert the same. The leds in two of the disks will be blinking fast. With this you can identify the rebuild is happening between mirrored drives.

Cigna insurance in USA

I have been having the cigna insurance for couple of months now.
I used the same for myself, my wife and kid many times.

Each time I visit a doctor for myself, wife or kid we have to do
a co pay for them apart from what the insurance is paying.

Since I have in network only, I have to visit doctors and hospitals
which are part of the cigna network.

In some cases the hospital that I visit is part of the network, to
my surprise the doctor in the hospital is out of network.

There are instances where in my hospital charges were covered
by cigna, where as the doctor charges I have to pay.

In some occasions cigna agreed to pay for the doctor also, since the
doctor is part of the hospital which is covered by the cigna network.

so far my experience with cigna is good. I would really recommend
the same to others. This is my personal opinion. You may differ with me.