Outbound Training

An Outbound Training session was organized for our batch by our PPD Miss and was done at the Naval and Maritime Academy in Trincomalee. Our 2nd Year Batch and our junior Batch had spent two days in there and I unfortunately missed to go to this. If I would have gone there, I would have experienced the following amazing things.

DAY 1

My Batch mates have reached the camp around 10 a.m and after welcoming them, they were offered a delicious Lunch. They were divided into Alpha, Bravo, Delta and Charlie which are group names. Then they were given leadership based group activities at the Beach.



First one was to go through a small rectangle made with ropes. But is they touch the rope then they are considered to have died and any one holding you at that time also dies. In those activities they had to have someone as a leader to guide the team to be effective. 

The next activity was to roll a small ball through set of pipes without dropping it to the ground. They also could not touch the next person's pipe before he/she(the person) got the ball. It seems as it was not as easy as it sounds. 

As the next activity, they had to fill water to a cylinder having holes everywhere and the catch was that they could only use body parts to cover the cylinder. Even filling it with water had to be done using hands and mouth. 

The next activity was to carry out some wooden logs which were given not using hands but using our tummies! Next task was to throw a volleyball over the net so that one person was there on the other side to catch it and four people had to throw the ball to him using a rug. 

The last activity was a tug of war. Everyone seems to have had so much fun during this activity.

After all the activities and freshening up in our hostels, we had a talent show and a campfire at the night. It was truly a beautiful night and we sang, danced and enjoyed a lot!

DAY 2

On the next day morning after having a delicious breakfast, they were taken to the forest for a compass march and taught on how to use a compass to find your way if you get lost in the forest. After quite a long walk in the forest, they finally came to the beach.

Next they went to see the Maritime and Naval Museum where some ruins and leftovers from the war was seen. All my Friends also got the opportunity to witness some of the Technologies that the Navy were using. 

Table Ethics Session

This session was about Table Ethics and was done at the Sri lanka Institute of Tourism and Hotel Management. Unfortunately I couldn't attend this session, but if I had attended, I would have learnt the following things.

As I asked my friends to share their experience, I learnt these things which I share below. The first half of the session was a presentation in which they were taught how to dress for occasions properly, how to behave, hand shake and table manners.

The next half of the session has been the practical things of what was taught in the first half. Learning by kinesthetics was implemented. My badge mates had learned a lot and enjoyed in this session. Very good Food was provided itsims and the day seemed to have gone very well. Below are some images of the fantastic session.

Latest Software Engineering Trends

This session was about the latest Software Engineering Trends in the industry currently and which are most likely to be a Trend for the upcoming years. It was conducted by the hSenid mobile company. I could not attend it unfortunately, but if I had attended it, I would have learnt a lot of some of which are below.

Artificial Intelligence is a key Area dominating right now. Lots of huge companies have started to move towards AI and is impacting the world on a great scale already. If you want to know the use of AI, let's say you know to drive. Two of your friends also know to drive. When you drive more and more, you get more wiser by the experiences you face daily right? So, let's say you gain a good experience on Road while driving. What is the likelihood of your friend who hasn't faced such a situation on road, using your experience to handle it better? (Let's say a person jumps in front of the vehicle suddenly and you hit the person slightly although no serious damages, your friend faces a similar situation now. Can he avoid it by learning from your experience?) The likelihood of you using your friends' experience in this case is very low. But using AI, there are self driving cars now. Let's say there are 100,000 cars in the network which self drive. So, using the experience of one car, the remaining 99,999 cars learn it and when it faces a similar situation, it uses previous experience for the betterment. This gives a huge edge for us in using this Technology. But there is a potential downside as well which only a few percentage of people are consciously aware of. If you have ever seen the movie, "I Robot" where the Robots start a revolution to dominate and defeat the human race, that thing is not something to neglect as of now. Elon Musk, the saviour of the World right now working hard towards sustainable future goals on all of his companies like spacex, solar city and Tesla is also conducting a research institute with the Goal of "Safe Artificial Intelligence" which simply means how we can use this technology in a safe manner without any effects as mentioned previously. All in all, this is a key Area for years to come.

IOT is the Internet of Things which is a network of embedded devices with electronics, sensors, actuators, software, etc. This is helping massively increase functionality of the things that we already have. The possibilities seem endless as of now.

Virtual Reality is another amazing Area which is already making an excellent change in the World. Nowadays even Doctors use this technology to do Treatment sessions where the patients with mental issues get healed by virtually being in an environment which could heal their mental problem.

Augmented Reality too is a connected Technology with VR. (Virtual Reality) This is said to be the next Trillion Dollar Industry for the upcoming years by Jay Samit, serial entrepreneur and Author of Best Selling Book Disrupt Yourself.

Art of Living - PPD

So, generally Life has been a mess for most people. It is simply because they have not taken the effort to take it to the right way or else they simply haven't got a chance to know that the direction of Life can be changed at your own will. So, here's your opportunity. You can either use it or loose it. The opportunity cost of loosing it might be a lot and I don't want you to think of what you lost after another 10 or 20 years. EVERY DAY MATTERS.

Who is Dr.Kolonne?

                               
Student of Ananda College Colombo.
Completed his Undergraduate Degree in University of Colombo
Completed Masters Degree in the University of Sri Jayawardanapura
Completed PHD in the International University of America
Started career in 1979 as an Instructor in Engineering Mathematics at the University of Peradeniya.
Consultant of NSB and National Enterprise Bank.
Worked at Kothalawala Defense University.
Worked at IBM corporation
Appointed as deputy director of the Directorate of Internal Intelligence.
Involved with the Defense Ministry

He gave a lot of motivation and inspiration for us which helped us a lot to gain confidence in life and hopefully in future as well.

It seems we can get a great life by simply improving relationships with people around us. It starts by speaking the right words. You know, you can make a person feel so good and also feel so bad just with words. At times we don't tend to hurt on purpose, but it happens. If we can take control over here, it would make a remarkable change in our Life.

Success is not just defined by money, it is simply happiness and the key to get there is by focusing on some basic stuff. It is very important to stay positive. When you draw attention to positive things you generally tend to attract a  lot of good things into your Life. For example, when you go to a restaurant, just say you were given a terrible food. Your responses can be of two types.

1. "Can you throw away this junk food and get me something else?"
2. "Can I get some good food? This does not seem good."

In the first case, you're just being negative and focusing on the bad side of it. The bad food can also be termed as "not good" as in the second case where you're focusing on getting good food. Obviously you know which response would get you the good food from the Hotel Server quickly.

One practice that you can follow is to be thankful for whatever you have. Just try making a list of things that you're thankful for, start your day from it and also go through it before you sleep. By doing this, we can break our typical habit of "focusing on what we do not have". When we be thankful for what we have, our eyes open up to the opportunities around us which we were not able to see so far. As a result, we tend to get more things or good in Life and it increases on and on and on. So, I'm on my path to lead a positive life and reach the happiness part which I would call as success. Now, it's your turn to decide what you want to do....

"Whether you think you can or not, in either cases you are correct"

Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions and you can also shoot me an email if you want to. Stay tuned to receive future updates as well.

Beauty of the University of Kelaniya - PPD

It was the 07th of January 2016, that I first stepped into the University of Kelaniya to register for my undergraduate course. It's a wonderful feeling, the first time around to see such a huge place with nature and quality infrastructure combined. 

The Badge of University of Kelaniya

When I first came for the University, it was this Giant Board in front welcoming us to the University.

The following picture shows the place where people used to sit when some sport is going on in the ground. Not just to watch matches, but we generally tend to sit there or have a chat in and around there. Graduation pics are also taken here with all the students since a clear photo with a lot of students can be taken in this place.

We have a lot of places like this in the University. You can see one ground in the above picture and we also have another small ground which is used most of the times to play baseball. We have 04 main canteens and one snack bar. As you can see in the pictures, nature is blended with the infrastructure making it an amazing place to stay among the rush of the Colombo City. You can witness what I put in words through the pictures below.

So, I hope you enjoyed watching around my University. Stay tuned for more updates and if you have any doubts you can always shoot me an email or make a comment below, so that I will get back to you as fast as I can. :-)

My Dream Trip - PPD

So, the story of my dream trip begins from my Childhood. I know you're wondering how. I used to watch a lot of Martial Arts Films when I was a kid, specially that of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. So I naturally developed an interest on Karate and Kung fu. I also watched a movie where the Shaolin Temple in China was shown. It was such an amazing place. So, I decided at that moment that I should visit there one day or another.

In order to do that I will have to earn some money and be financially in a good position and also be having the time as well. I'm sure one day it'll happen. It is not just the Martial Arts or what is commonly perceived as Fight that is taught there. "Qigong" which is the practice of Energy takes up a huge role in their teachings. This has also been used to heal a lot of diseases. It's actually a wonderful thing which a person who doesn't know this stuff could call it as Magic. You can check out more about qigong in the following link or else you can simply google as well.

https://www.springforestqigong.com/

I should spend atleast 6 months in the Shaolin Temple and will be awesome. At the same time I like to go around china in the time when am free. One place that I shouldn't miss is the Great Wall of China which is a massive construction of all time.

So, I hope you can see the beauty of the places just from the pics. Subscribe to this blog to stay tuned of my updates and to know about my trip once I go there. 

The Expert Game - PPD

We had a group of 05 members initially and were told to select 03 members to talk about our expertise areas for 05 minutes. Then we were give some time for the 03 people to talk about their own expertise areas within the group and also for the others to ask any questions they might have once the person finishes talking.

Our expertise areas were :

1. Cooking(Teshani)
2. Riding Vehicles(Me)  
3. Watching Cricket Matches(Janith). 

At this point we had no idea of what was next and were just made aware of the unique expertise areas of the other person in the team. Then we were given 15 minutes to create a Product/Service where all of these expert areas will have to be interconnected. At first we were like how are we gonna do this for a moment. But then quickly we got a few ideas to integrate the 03 areas into a Business. Our idea was to initially perform some Bike Stunts in some areas which in turn will create a lot of audience in that area and we can use this to sell our foods in the bus we have.(Food Bus) Once we develop our Business in this manner, later we planned to somehow get into contract with cricket council Srilanka and also get the contract to supply foods to people and players whenever there's a cricket match. This would increase our profits by a lot which can help us to invest in creating virtual reality theaters to telecast Cricket Matches to People and also sell our Foods to them in our Theaters as well. In our business to supply foods to cricket grounds, we will have to setup a network to deliver foods easily with the help of riders. We also planned to create a delivery network where we can provide delivery service to any Business and empower them. So at the end of the day, we had 03 Business plans in our hand with one master company.  F. C. D (Food, Cricket, Deliverer) Inc is the Master Company and the following 03 are the sub companies.

1. Bite Foods Inc
2. Sports Theater Inc
3. The Deliverer Inc

This was a great outcome and we were able to see our potentials through this activity and how interconnected simple things were. It's like anything is possible from everything. With this boost of confidence we moved onto the next activity.


Pen and Thread Activity

We were divided into 03 teams of 09 members each and were given thread, pen and a paper. Then our team was given the word "Symbol" to be written on paper, but there's a tricky part. We can't touch the pen directly or even touch it when something's covered on it. We can communicate with our team and come up with any possible strategy to complete the task successfully.

Then we tied strings to our pen on the top and bottom side connected. So one person can hold onto the two strings. But as we tried writing using this strategy, although we got the shape of letters correctly onto the paper, there was no ink on paper. Later I thought it was due to the downward force on the paper not being enough. Hence we tied another string to be having two pieces on opposite sides and on right angles to the other two pieces of strings that are already tied on the pen. The purpose of this two strings is that it will be used to give a downward force, so that the ink will be printed on paper. So as we tried this mission we were right about it and successful. All the team members supported in holding the string in the right way, so that we actually get the letters of the word "Symbol" written nicely. All in all it was a great day. :-)

The Missing Pieces - PPD

This is going to be about an amazing activity we did in our PPD lesson called "Barter Puzzle". We were grouped into four teams and given a picture, which we were asked to cut into 76 small pieces. So each group has a collection of scattered pieces of a picture. Later each group was given the scattered pieces of another group's picture.(interchanged)

But there was a tricky part! We didn't have all the pieces of our picture where few pieces were there with other groups and we had few pieces of them with us too.

Anyways, so we started to complete the jigsaw puzzle. At the beginning it was totally a mess!
Then one by one we started to figure out the pieces. First it was a watermelon, then a pineapple, and finally there were some papayas too. 

But let me tell you, it wasn't so easy as it sounds. At the beginning they were just meaningless pieces with some weird shapes...
But then one set of team members figured out there's a watermelon and started working on that. Then another set of people started working on pineapples. Gradually the meaningless pieces took form into a picture communicating plenty of meaning to us.

But the missing parts that we had to get from other groups was the real challenge. After lots of bargaining we managed to get some of our pieces back, and we also managed to get few more pieces that belonged to other teams as well.

At the end of the day, we managed to almost complete our puzzle, but there was just a single piece missing.  

In the activity of finding the missing pieces, I learnt quite a few valuable things. But with all these lessons, the last missing piece was in my mind quite a lot even when the lecture was over. I had two pieces of the team that had our last missing piece. I was ready to hand them over the two pieces in exchange of our last piece, but they refused.

Maybe we could have tried a bit harder, used a different strategy, helped them to find all their missing pieces and to complete their puzzle. So, the next time I involve in any activity, I'll be more focused on getting the task 100 percent done by trying out whatever the strategies I can. All in all, it was a great day with our team, other team mates and our PPD madam.
Hopefully we'll have more amazing activites to come in the future. 

PPD - Personal Progress and Development

PPD is the abbreviation of Personal Progress and Development. The name itself clearly gives a glimpse of its meaning. This is a subject introduced to the university undergraduates in order to improve their personality by focusing a lot on their soft skills.

This is not yet another lecture where we used to sit in the bench and get bored. PPD is interactive since it allows us to do a lot of activities.

At present a lot of Students fail to get through the job interview due to not being able to communicate effectively with the interviewer. That is due to the fear of speaking in public, not being fluent with their language, lack of confidence, nervousness, etc. We can overcome all of these if trained properly. Hence the activities we do in PPD strive as a learning platform where we're allowed to make mistakes and sharpen ourselves before we ourselves get to the work out in the field.

The activities done in our first year are as follows.

1. Helium stick
2. Paper tower
3. Straw and cotton
4. The human chair
5. Blue ribbon story
6. Youth surge forum                                             
7. SMART goals
8. SWOT analysis
9. Poster(Future goals) presentation                       
10. Blind submarine
11. Blind polygon
12. Peer review
13. Lava river
14. Creating a culture
15. Creating a guard for an egg                                                       
16. Decision making(Sinking ship)                                                      
17. Passing the rope ring
18. Toxic waste bucket
19. How to communicate through emails
20. Decision making 2 (Heart based decisions)
21. Stress management