so

Have you ever noticed that some people tend to start almost all their sentences with "so"?

"So, what time will you be back?"
"So, we don't really like that."
"So, let me finish my story."

And using it not as a conjunction or an adverb, but either as a foot in the door in a conversation or to get that moment's thought before actually saying something. I've noticed this habit (which even borders on the compulsive in cases!) common among the techies here which makes me inclined to believe it might be an Americanism. Who is to say.

It is quite amusing. I hadn't noticed it creeping up until one day I suddenly realised that everyone around me is starting off with "so"!

crayon physics deluxe

Crayon Physics Deluxe. Watch this video:


(if you're reading this in a feedreader, you may have to click-through to see the video)

I can easily see a child playing with this for so much time, and learning so much. Just because he/she can do things and try them out and see the results for themselves, as opposed to being told how things work. It is the perfect tool to spark off that curiousness...

demo cracy

I'm getting a Voter's ID card made for myself here in Bangalore. With the local elections round the corner, there is somewhat of a drive to get people in Bangalore to register as voters. I'm not sure who is behind that drive, though. I can't imagine any of the political parties interested in that!

I haven't voted yet. Strangely, I've always taken this democracy thing for granted. Somehow it works without me. And not many (none, actually!) of my friends or other acquaintances talk about it. Politics, yes - usually with, at worst, a cynical or, at best, an indifferent attitude. But not about the process or of participating in it. Funny how I end up reading more about the American Presidential elections than the Indian Central Government ones. But in all fairness, it is because the American elections are a larger media event.

Anyhow, this time I'm determined to vote in the state elections. I would love to get my hands on some statistics about the vote bank here - how much is rural, how much is urban, etc. With the population of Bangalore shooting up as it has in the past few years, it must have caused the vote bank to shift and become more urban. Has it really? Do the political parties know that and are they shifting focus for it?

Bangalore probably has the largest number of flux of its denizens - I would estimate a significant percentage of Bangaloreans live here for 3-4 years, not more. That could potentially create a section of people who are being governed without even getting a chance to take part it in it, what with the bureaucracy, delays and disinterest in getting electoral rolls modified.

It would be fantastic if all this data were available somewhere.

reliance retail

Anyone in the big cities in India cannot have missed the Reliance stores mushrooming with increasing frequency all over the place - iStore, Wellness, Fresh, Footprint, Jewels, Timeout etc. - the list is long.

I have been to Footprint and Timeout and both places give the same feel - an individual store with a wide variety of brands and product lines but the range in any one particular brand or product line falls abysmally short of being complete. Although Footprint had nearly 10 brands of men's shoes, I realised that by going to the Nike and Reebok shops at any mall I could get to see a better variety of, say, sports shoes. The same was the case with Timeout when it came to books and even some of their electronics range. Also, I'm not sure why they have electrical appliances at a bookstore.

Of all their chains, only Reliance Fresh is really overcrowded and has queues stretching past your imagination. But I would attribute that to lower prices and the mindset of people here to spend more time/effort/money to save a few rupees on groceries than it is worth. And even then these stores are so small that it takes a lot of determination to shop there. In fact, Tata's newly launched Star Bazaar beats Reliance Fresh hollow in terms of size and convenience.

I haven't understood their strategy. Given that this is Reliance entering retail, given their resources and given the excitement about retail in India, one would have expected Reliance to have a game-changing strategy. But they don't even offer the conveniences of everything under one roof, and aren't part of the usual malls - shoppers have to make the effort of going to a Reliance store to buy something, and to multiple stores to buy different things. And to top that, I don't see a compelling reason for a shopper to go to any of their stores. Perhaps I am missing something.

accidental inventions

10 accidental inventions. An interesting read.

coincidences

http://listverse.com/bizarre/top-15-amazing-coincidences/
I wonder how many of these are true and how many are just urban legends. But they do make for very interesting reading.

Do you think coincidences have a deeper significance or are just one of the many possible manifestations of an eventuality following a probabilistic distribution?

eye on what?

EyeOnIM.com, they call it.
The website caught my attention as the founder is Sabeer Bhatia's partner in his latest SabSeBolo.com. It claims to help parents protect their children online. Here's how:

"EyeOnIM... will automatically start monitoring and archiving the IM conversation as well as capture the files that are transferred... since EyeOnIM also archives all the chat sessions, you can always view the chat conversation at a later time.... Of course, EyeOnIM is not a spying tool..."
http://eyeonim.com/eyeonim/html/How Does EyeOnIM Work.htm.

I find it the whole concept extremely disgusting: telling parents that it is alright to spy on their kids. There are healthier ways to keep your children safe while maintaining decency and complete trust. After all, a child will not learn to trust if he/she is not trusted; and trust and respect go farther than anything else in carrying through your message.

I'm quite sure the people who would use EyeOnIM are the sorts who would also not hesitate in rummaging through their children's cupboards, or school bags, or tap their phones or even shadow them. And if they are doing any of this, their relationship with their child is so screwed that they are probably responsible for any wayward behaviour.

I'm half inclined to set up a website or at least a forum that lets children figure out if their parents are electronically spying on them. I wonder how the parents would like that!

through the early morning fog i see...

...visions of the things to be.

This is how it looked from my apartment today morning at 7:30 am:

____________________________________________

And in stark contrast is a sunset taken from about the same place only the day before:

broad band

Yeah right! Since when did bandwidth of two hundred and fifty six kilobits per second become broad? Despite all the excitement about IT in India, broadband costs, QoS and penetration are appalling.

I recently switched my ISP. BSNL had had a few consecutive days of interruptions and their false promises just got to me. And I had been eyeing the upgrade to a 512 kbps line for some time. Airtel had been advertising their Rs. 1999 a month, 512 kbps connection which, at double the cost of the 256 kbps one, is a little high. Don't these guys realise that doubling the bandwidth does NOT mean double the cost? Anyhow, I chanced upon a similar broadband plan on their website, with only higher telephone call rates for Rs. 1499 a month and called their salesman to sign me up for that. To my astonishment, he at first refused to believe there was such a plan and kept trying to sell me the other more expensive one. The long and short of it is that I got what I wanted for an affordable rate.

During the signing up process I got talking with the salesman about how bandwidth was so expensive. My brother in Hyderabad says the standard rates there are about a nine hundred bucks for a 384 kbps line - which is 50% cheaper than here. So this salesman dude tells me that in Bangalore no one cares about the broadband expense. Most of his customers work at IT MNCs and get reimbursed for their broadband expenses by their companies. Hence they don't even bat an eyelid at shelling out a 1000 bucks for a measly 256kbps (which also is a best effort claim) or whatever the "standard" rates are.

Shocking. There is no economic incentive for either the service providers or the consumers to increase quality of service and/or reduce charges.

I can't think of any solution to this. It is a larger problem than just broadband reimbursements. These all-expenses-paid perks and habits really trounce the notional value of money or goods or services, as the case may be.

remembering the milk and platform goodness

Ever since being inspired by Gustave Faubert's "Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work." and Mr. WishfulThinking.Co.Uk, I've been trying to actually be regular and orderly in my life (although I still haven't finished that e-book I mentioned in my earlier post).

One of the firsts things I did was something about task tracking. Lifehacker, that faithful toolsmith, pointed me to RememberTheMilk. It is really really good. After giving up on all to-do lists more complicated than a notepad file, I am actually using RTM and loving it. Their GMail integration is lovely. I have GMail open almost all the time, so task management doesn't mean open up a new website or a file. It's just there. And since it's online, no syncing problems - I don't have to worry about which computer I'm using or where I am. And their integration makes the task list widget look and feel exactly like GMail:

See that little vertical bar of goodness on the right? That's it. Minimal clicks to work it and a simple interface make it very, very usable. It also has task collaboration and more sophisticated organizational features, but I haven't needed to use those. The simplicity is beautiful. Check out the screencast.

GMail 2.0 (and their new API) is a real platform. RTM is just one of the first applications on it and more are bound to come. Yahoo! making their email into a platform seems almost retarded in comparison to GMail 2.0.

I wonder if RememberTheMilk has enough users to be a Google acquisition target. The product is excellent. Perhaps Google has its own to-do list in the offing; there have been enough and more user requests for it for sure.

ticking away

Thus far, I've avoided all time management gyaan as if it were the plague. The very phrase embodies the pith of everything that is mundane, lifeless, unimaginative, stale...
Thus far, I've managed very well without any extra effort at it.

But of late I'm finding more to do at hand than I am able to juggle and that made me willing to open an e-book I chanced upon. The first sentence of the first chapter had me hooked:

“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Gustave Flaubert

I haven't read it entirely yet, but I have liked whatever I've read.
Here it is: http://wishful.fileburst.com/creativetime.pdf.
(via wishfulthinking.co.uk/blog/)

we didn't start the fire

He says it all:


(Feedreaders, I'm afraid you might have to click through to see the video. But it's worth the effort)

It is also uncannily reflective of my mood at the moment.

Update: Sorry, the video is off. Someone played spoilsport.. Back again.

video podcasts

I came across a wonderful video podcast that animates the New Yorker cartoons into small 15-second clips. They're really neat and some of them are hilarious!
Check them out: http://www.ringtales.com/

Some of these are on YouTube as well. Here are two that are very funny:






(If you're reading this in a feed-reader, you might have to click through to see the videos)

Video Postcasts are great. I love them! They're so much better than dreary audio podcasts that need 10 times more concentration. If you know of more cool video podcasts that you can recommend, please leave a comment!

code reuse

Remember my Aswan posts (1, 2, 3, 4)?
Well, I just came across an article talking about how Indian software services companies are discovering the same inherent inefficiencies I mention and how they are starting to move to the first level of reuse.

It's ironic how after regurgitating the hajaar benefits of reusability in every exam through the four years of computer engineering, everyone promptly forgets about it after getting into Infosys (or Wipro or TCS... ).

The change in mindset that the Mint article highlights is, I think, the result of the widespread adoption of the Open Source philosophy. Source code of software has become less of a commodity in the minds of people.

Aswan is about the next level of reuse - harnessing collective intelligence to help build software. And service industries are the best proving ground for such a concept.

Aswan: http://umangjaipuria.blogspot.com/2007/05/aswan-part-1.html
Article: http://www.livemint.com/2007/12/03233411/Software-firms-reap-benefits-o.html

yellow

It is such a relief to finally start getting out of convalescence. Apparently all the "yellowness" will take another month or two to disappear but this is the end and I can officially stop being a vegetable now.

I was looking at losing a lot of weight to be the main upside of this long drawn bout of jaundice but it seems like I am doomed to do this the hard way. As consolation, I now know new limits of my patience. Heh.

The real good thing that has happened in these past five past weeks is the breaking of a long rut that I had gotten into. These things are a vicious cycle, almost impossible to notice while you're in it and it only goes downhill. Even brief vacations had not been able to get me out of this. But more on this later. Change is in the offing...

kindle

Having read so many reviews about the Kindle - seemingly by people who had only seen the demo videos published by Amazon - and read about it being likened to the iPod, I went and fished out an image of the first iPod and put it next to the first Kindle:

(Psst.... it had a mechanical scroll wheel!)
And we all know what the latest iPods look like.

I, being an ardent book-lover myself, am a little skeptical of undermining the rich feel of paper and the smell of new books and of turning pages. But the Kindle promises to be a lot more than a conventional book.
And a little bit of convenience is known to go a long way in transforming old habits.

one month

It's been a entire month since I last blogged.

I managed to catch jaundice a little more than three weeks ago and I've been under the weather since. The bout has been pretty severe with my blood tests through the roof, but I'm coming back to life now.

The major gripe has been missing Diwali. I had to cancel a trip to Calcutta but my parents came down instead and we had a low-key affair. Ofcourse, I couldn't eat any of the scrumptious food. I was way too bummed out all of that week to send the usual Diwali greetings, so here's a photograph I took from the last real Diwali I had:


Happy (belated) Diwali folks.

I did manage to watch Johnny Gaddaar (how did they get the dvd this soon?!) and American Gangster. The first is film noir and coming from Bollywood it is a very nice surprise indeed. I give it five stars. Watch out for Dharmendra spouting Indiana Jones dialogues! The second, too, is very good, notwithstanding the fact that I'm a sucker for dark mafia movies! :-) Oh, Hot Fuzz is brilliant too, very deserving of its 8+ IMDB rating.

Mostly I've been in bed and out of any sort of action. The doc tells me to keep it quiet for another few weeks and has already given me a list of things to avoid (eating and doing) for the next couple of months to make me have nightmares. Right now all I need is a machine that will look into my head and write whatever I am thinking. I have had way too much time to think and not enough (time or energy) to get stuff written.

The Economist and YouTube (watch this!) have been faithful companions for whatever time I can use my eyes before they start feeling the strain. I have been watching movies but it is so difficult to get hold of anything that is not standard Bollywood or Hollywood fare. So I've resorted to watch the older (and more easily available) stuff I've missed out - Indiana Jones, the Godfather sequels, etc. And I'm in dire need of newer music. By newer I mean stuff I don't have already. I'm more than willing to give the usual Dylan and Doors and U2 and Rolling Stones a break.

I tried listening to podcasts recently, to give my eyes a break. They're actually quite intolerable. No wonder they haven't become much of a rage. They are painfully slow and I have to concentrate twice as hard to listen as while reading. And while reading I can choose to glance through or skip back forth and definitely read faster than voice overs with their careful diction. Podcasts aren't worth listening unless they're just news headlines or something as brief as that.

I have much much more to write about - it's all crammed in my head. But I'll just take my own sweet time to do it, unless a brain-reading version of the Dictaphone comes about soon.

Cheerio.

untouchable and unthinkable

I recently came across an article in The Economist about the Indian government forcing businesses too to have quotas for backward castes. While railing about the existence of the caste system in India, the article goes on to blame it on the Hindu religion and cites the scriptures thus:

The caste system is possibly the world's ugliest social system. And it is sanctified by India's largest religion: according to the Laws of Manu, an ancient Hindu text, anybody from the lower orders who has the temerity to mention the name of a higher caste should have a red-hot nail thrust into his mouth; if he makes the mistake of telling a brahmin what to do, he gets hot oil poured into his ears and mouth.

Now, I am not a pundit in these matters but I am pretty sure the author of this article has not done his homework properly and seems to be only too eager for melodrama even if it is slander. From what I know of the Hindu religion, it is really a way of life and of science from the early day of civilization. Many layers of de rigeur practice have been added to it over the ages but one must not confuse social artefacts with religious instruction.

I am going to try and find out little more about what the Laws Of Manu actually say and whether they do recommend hot oil being poured into facial orifices and then give a piece of my mind to The Economist. If you have any pointers in this regard, it will be much appreciated.

Since we are on this topic, the Government of India mandates the reservation of seats for the backward classes in premier academic institutions across the country. And now it is trying to force private sector companies to do the same for jobs. Is this not a case in point to do away with quotas in the educational system too, if even after a quality education they need systemic assistance to find work?

photos

With Yahoo Photos moving all my photos to Flickr (in a very commendable way) and making my account pro for a short while, I was inspired to upload long pending photographs. Here are some of the ones I liked:


Sunset from Deception Pass near Seattle



Sunset sky near the Big Sur



Somewhere on Highway 1. This shot was by fluke but I love the composition.



Inside Muir Woods. This was just like what I had imagined Middle Earth to be, even the sounds.



Golden Gate Bridge. I saw someone nearly jump down from it!



Street of Calcutta. Pure old world charm.

free burma

I am a day late. 4th October was the day to express support for the brave people fighting for a lot of things we take for granted:



Read more about their struggle on The Economist.
You can sign up too. It's never too late.