The Love Of A Brother

I was born in a secluded village on a mountain. Day after day, my parents plowed the yellow dry soil with their backs towards the sky.

One day, I wanted to buy a handkerchief, which all girls around me seemed to have. So, one day I stole 50 cents from my father's drawer. Father discovered about the stolen money right away.

'Who stole the money?' he asked my brother and me.

I was stunned, too afraid to talk. Neither of us admitted to the fault, so he said, 'Fine, if nobody wants to admit, you both should be punished!' Suddenly, my younger brother gripped Father's hand and said, ‘Dad, I was the one who did it!' He took the blame, and punishment, for me.

In the middle of the night, all of sudden, I cried out loudly. My brother covered my mouth with his little hand and said, ‘Sis, now don't cry anymore. Everything has happened. ' I will never forget my brother's expression when he protected me. That year, my brother was 8 years old and I was 11 years old. I still hate myself for not having enough courage to admit what I did. Years went by, but the incident still seemed like it just happened yesterday.

When my brother was in his last year of secondary school, he was accepted in an upper secondary school in the central part of town. At the same time, I was accepted into a university in the province.

That night, Father squatted in the yard, smoking packet by packet. I could hear him ask my mother, 'Both of our children, they have good results? Very good results?'

Mother wiped off her tears and sighed, 'What is the use? How can we possibly finance both of them?& #039;

At that time, my brother walked out , he stood in front of Father and said , 'Dad, I don't want to continue my study anymore, I have read enough books.' Father became angry.

'Why do you have a spirit so weak? Even if it means I have to beg for money on the
streets, I will send you two to school until you have both finished your studies!' And then he started to knock on every house in the village to borrow money.

I stuck out my hand as gently as I could to my brother's face, and told him, 'A boy has to continue his study . If not , he will not be able to overcome this poverty we are experiencing.' I, on the other hand, had decided not to further my study at the university.

Nobody knew that on the next day, before dawn, my brother left the house with a few pieces of worn out clothes and a few dry beans. He sneaked to my side of the bed and left a note on my pillow; 'Sis , getting into a university is not easy. I will go find a job and I will send money to you.' I held the note while sitting on my bed, and cried until I lost my voice.

With the money father borrowed from the whole village, and the money my brother earned from carrying cement on his back at a construction site, finally, I managed to get to the third year of my study in the university. That year, my brother was 17 years old; I was 20 years old.

One day, while I was studying in my room, my roommate came in and told me, 'There 's a villager waiting for you outside!' Why would there be a villager looking for me? I walked out , and I saw my brother from afar. His whole body was covered with dirt, dust, cement and sand. I asked him, 'Why did you not tell my roommate that you are my brother?'

He replied with a smile, 'Look at my appearance. What will they think if they would know that I am your brother? Won&#03 9;t they laugh at you?'

I felt so touched, and tears filled my eyes. I swept away dirt and dust from my brother's body. And told him with a lump in my throat, ‘I don 't care what people would say! You are my brother no matter what your appearance.'

From his pocket, he took out a butterfly hair clip. He put it on my hair and said, 'I saw all the girls in town are wearing it. I think you should also have one.' I could not hold back myself anymore. I pulled my brother into my arms and cried. That year, my brother was 20 years old; I was 23 years old.

After I got married, I lived in the city. Many times my husband invited my parents to come and live with us, but they didn't want. They said once they left the village, they wouldn't know what to do. My brother agreed with them. He said, 'Sis , you just take care of your parents-in-law. I will take care of Mom and Dad here.'

My husband became the directors of his factory. We asked my brother to accept the offer of being the manager in the maintenance department. But my brother rejected the offer. He insisted on working as a repairman instead for a start.

One day, my brother was on the top of a ladder repairing a cable, when he got electrocuted, and was sent to the hospital. My husband and I visited him at the hospital. Looking at the plaster cast on his leg, I grumbled, 'Why did you reject the offer of being a manager? Managers won't do something dangerous like that. Now look at you - you are suffering a serious injury. Why didn't you just listen to us ?'

With a serious expression on his face , he defended his decision , 'Think of your brother-in-law, he just became the director. If I , being uneducated , would become a manager, what kind of rumors would fly around?'

My husband's eyes filled up with tears, and then I said, 'But you lack in education only because of me!'

'Why do you talk about the past ?' he said and then he held my hand. That year , he was 26 years old and I was 29 years old.

My brother was 30 years old when he married a farmer girl from the village. During the wedding reception, the master of ceremonies asked him, ' Who is the one person you respect and love the most?'

Without even taking a time to think, he answered, 'My sister. ' He continued by telling a story I could not even remember. 'When I was in primary school, the school was in a different village. Everyday, my sister and I would walk for 2 hours to school and back home. One day, I lost one of my gloves. My sister gave me one of hers. She wore only one glove and she had to walk far. When we got home, her hands were trembling because of the cold weather. She could not even hold her chopsticks. From that day on, I swore that as long a s I lived, I would take care of my sister and would always be good to her.'

Applause filled up the room. All guests turned their attention to me. I found it hard to speak, 'In my whole life, the one I would like to thank most is my brother,' And in this happy occasion, in front of the crowd, tears were rolling down my face again.

MORAL:
Love and care for the one you love every single day of your life. You may think what you did is just a small deed, but to that someone, it may mean a lot.

The funniest speech ever from an African President

'My majesty Mr. Queen Sir, horrible ministers and members of parliament, invented Guests, ladies under gentlemen, before I undress you, let us open the windows for the climate to come inside!

I hereby thank you completely….. Mr. Queen, sir; and also what he has done for me and my fellow Uganda who come with me.

We have really eaten very much. And we are fed up completely

But before I go back to my country with a plane from the Entebbe airport of London I wish to invitation you Mr. Queen, to become home to Uganda so that we can also revenge on you.

You will eat a full cow:and also feel up your stomach and walk with difficult because of full stomach completely. Even when you want to rest at night; I will make sure that you sleep on top of me in the top up stairs of my mansion completely so that you can enjoy all the gravity of fresh air.

'But now am sorry because I have to tell you that I have made a short call on you only. But next time I shall make a long call on you to last the whole moon completely. Thank you very much to allow me to undress you completely before these extinguished ladies under gentlemen sir.

Lastly but not list, I ask the band to play our international anthem of the republic of Uganda and also the British international anthem..Your majesty sir, I thank you from the bottom of my heart and from the bottoms of all the people of Uganda.

With this few words I thank you Sir.

QUITTERS ARE LOSERS

If you think you are beaten

You are

If you think you dare not

You don’t

If you wish to win but think you can’t

It’s certain you won’t.

If you think you are out-crashed

You are

Must think high to rise and be

Sure of oneself before you can earn a prize

For out in the world

You find success begins with your will

It’s all in the mind.

Life battles are not always won

By the strongest and fastest runners

But by those who think they can!

Why text messages are limited to 160 characters

Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.
As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.
That became Hillebrand's magic number -- and set the standard for one of today's most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.
"This is perfectly sufficient," he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. "Perfectly sufficient."
The communications researcher and a dozen others had been laying out the plans to standardize a technology that would allow cellphones to transmit and display text messages. Because of tight bandwidth constraints of the wireless networks at the time -- which were mostly used for car phones -- each message would have to be as short as possible.
Before his typewriter experiment, Hillebrand had an argument with a friend about whether 160 characters provided enough space to communicate most thoughts. "My friend said this was impossible for the mass market," Hillebrand said. "I was more optimistic."
His optimism was clearly on the mark. Text messaging has become the prevalent form of mobile communication worldwide. Americans are sending more text messages than making calls on their cellphones, according to a Nielsen Mobile report released last year.
U.S. mobile users sent an average of 357 texts per month in the second quarter of 2008 versus an average of 204 calls, the report said.
Texting has been a boon for telecoms. Giants Verizon Wireless and AT&T each charge 20 to 25 cents a message, or $20 for unlimited texts. Verizon has 86 million subscribers, while AT&T's wireless service has 78.2 million.
And Twitter, the fastest growing online social network, which is being adopted practically en masse by politicians, celebrities ...

... and news outlets, has its very DNA in text messaging. To avoid the need for splitting cellular text messages into multiple parts, the creators of Twitter capped the length of a tweet at 140 characters, keeping the extra 20 for the user's unique address.
Back in 1985, of course, the guys who invented Twitter were probably still playing with Matchbox cars.

Credit: Friedhelm Hillebrand

Hillebrand found new confidence after his rather unscientific investigations. As chairman of the nonvoice services committee within the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), a group that sets standards for the majority of the global mobile market, he pushed forward the group's plans in 1986. All cellular carriers and mobile phones, they decreed, must support the short messaging service (SMS).

Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks.
This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. Voice communication itself had taken place via a separate signal.
"We were looking to a cheap implementation," Hillebrand said on the phone from Bonn. "Most of the time, nothing happens on this control link. So, it was free capacity on the system."
Initially, Hillebrand's team could fit only 128 characters into that space, but that didn't seem like nearly enough. With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.
Still, his committee wondered, would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, they based their initial assumptions on two "convincing arguments," Hillebrand said.

For one, they found that postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters.
Second, they analyzed a set of messages sent through Telex, a then-prevalent telegraphy network for business professionals. Despite not having a technical limitation, Hillebrand said, Telex transmissions were usually about the same length as postcards.
Just look at your average e-mail today, he noted. Many can be summed up in the subject line, and the rest often contains just a line or two of text asking for a favor or updating about a particular project.
But length wasn't SMS's only limitation. "The input was cumbersome," Hillebrand said. With multiple letters being assigned to each number button on the keypad, finding a single correct letter could take three or four taps. Typing out a sentence or two was a painstaking task.

A GSM document outlining the definition of SMS. Credit: Friedhelm Hillebrand.

Later, software such as T9, which predicts words based on the first few letters typed by the user, QWERTY keyboards such as the BlackBerry's and touchscreen keyboards including the iPhone's made the process more palatable.
But even with these inconveniences, text messaging took off. Fast. Hillebrand never imagined how quickly and universally the technology would be adopted. What was originally devised as a portable paging system for craftsmen using their cars as a mobile office is now the preferred form of on-the-go communication for cellphone users of all ages.
"Nobody had foreseen how fast and quickly the young people would use this," Hillebrand said. He's still fascinated by stories of young couples breaking up via text message.
When he tells the story of his 160-character breakthrough, Hillebrand says, people assume he's rich. But he's not.
There are no text message royalties. He doesn't receive a couple of pennies each time someone sends a text, like songwriters do for radio airplay. Though "that would be nice," Hillebrand said.
Now Hillebrand lives in Bonn, managing Hillebrand & Partners, a technology patent consulting firm. He has written a book about the creation of GSM, a $255 hardcover tome.
Following an early retirement that didn't take, Hillebrand is pondering his next project. Multimedia messaging could benefit from regulation, he said. With so many different cellphones taking photos, videos and audio in a variety of formats, you can never be sure whether your friend's phone will be able to display it.
But he's hoping to make a respectable salary for the work this time

10 great sayings by Apple’s Steve Jobs

Dead at 56: Apple founder and former CEO Steve Jobs

Today we moan the death of a great innovator Steve Jobs who has died at 56 of pancreatic cancer. As I collected this list I am using a Macintosh just shows how much Steve touched our lives. Here are 10 quotes that should guide us daily.

1. “Because the people who are crazy enough  to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
2.  ”Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
3. “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
4. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking”
5. “You’ve got to find what you love. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle”
6. We don’t get to do many things in life and everyone should really be excellent.Because this is our life.”
7. You can’t connect the dots looking forward you can only connect looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something-your gut,destiny,life.,karma,whatever.This approach has never let me down,and it has made all the difference in my life.”
8. :No one wants to die. Even the people who wants to go to heaven don’t want to die to go there.And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be,because death is likely the single best invention of life. It is life change event.  It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
9. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying  we have done something wonderful ,that’s what matters to me.”
10. “I am convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful  ones is pure perseverance.”