Interesting week

Last week was very interesting for me, I went to Wimbledon last weekend, which by the way is a must-visit-atleast-once-in-your-lifetime place. Especially check out the Wimbledon museum, it’s cool.

My main reason for elation is, Amanda Congdon is back in a vlog show on ABC. You might remember her from the RocketBoom days. According to me, she is one of the sexiest geeks on the web.

I also, stumbled upon the time-waster, but interesting , Stumble upon video feed site.

And, I don’t know how did I not discover Scriggity till last week. It was out there for a long time and the pretty Shauna definitely knows how to throw sarcasm on your face.

As an aside, I’ve left twittering. I don’t fancy it anymore. It just don’t find it cool anymore.

I came across this guy(via an office colleague of mine) who is so passionate about  learning languages that he ended up inventing his own language : Jameld. His name is James Campbell and he lives in England. Supposedly only 3 people in the world can speak this language. That’s what I’ve heard from my colleague, but I am kinda sure many more language enthusiasts must’ve tried to learn Jameld. Check out his website, it may not win prizes in Web Design section, although content wise, it is very high quality stuff, the guy’s got really “warped” sense of humour. Plus his website also has a english to Jameld dictionary.

Yeah, that’s it for now. Enjoy your life, don’t watch telly , spend all your time watching videos on You Tube. Btw, LonelyGirl series has become the most watched video blog in 2006 on You Tube.

Before I sign off, here’s another overheard conversation:

He: You know what, History was invented by a man….I can explain ya….See, if you split the word , you get “His” + “Story”.. Get it…( Guy smirks )

She: Yeaah….I believe you….That’s why it’s so inaccurate …no wonder ( Girl smirks back )

Alright fellas, I am off to Europe tour this xmas weekend. So, I won’t be posting anything for another week.

Adios !!!

Unique..

Overheard while waiting for a train on Salisbury platform:

“The more I debate with atheists on existence/non-existence of God, the more my faith grows stronger. In my desperate attempt to disapprove their claims, I start giving examples of His existence, I never thought I knew.”

I’ve started Twittering

I came across Twitter on this post on Kathy’s blog few days back and I’m already addicted. It might seem silly at first but it is an awesome utility to keep you in the zone. Well, let me first clarify, what”being in the zone” means. One of my previous post talks about how interruptions at work reduce your productivity( both personal and professional), how multi-tasking is costly to your brains processor in terms of context-switches . It’s very important that knowledge-workers understand and exploit this concept.

“Being in the zone” simply means that you are completely focused on the task at hand without any distractions. It dramatically improves your productivity and you can get more things done in less time. This will not only enable you to finish your work in the stipulated time period but also raise the quality of your work. When your brain is focussed on one thing at a time, it utilizes all its faculty to get the task done effectively. For e.g. if you’re reading an important design spec document to understand the requirements. You are totally into the document trying to comprehend every intricate detail…and…. suddenly your IM pings, or your email client buzzes to indicate new mail and if you attend to any of these activities , your brain does a context switch. And it takes a lot of effort and time to get the original context( of design spec) back. This leads to loss in productivity. If you think that such context switces are manageable, then you are fooling yourself. This kind of multi-tasking will effectively reduce your ability to focus on any particular activity thereby decreasing the quality of the output. Some of the external disturbancs like telephones, colleagues dropping in to have a chat cannot be avoided, but even if you manage to avoid the internal distractions( mentioned above), you can ameliorate your productivity by 60%-70 %.

Next question: what is Twitter ? In Kathy’s words “For those of you who don’t know about Twitter, it has one purpose in life–to be (in its own words)–A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? And people answer it. And answer it. And answer it. Over and over and over again, every moment of every hour, people type in a word, fragment, or sentence about what they’re doing right then. (Let’s overlook the fact that there can be only one true answer to the question: “I’m typing to tell twitter what I’m doing right now… which is typing to tell twitter what I’m doing right now.” Or something else that makes my head hurt.)”

Now, where does Twitter fit in ? Well, I’d say Twitter is kinda, on-the-fly To-Do list which we create as we move from one task to another.The only difference is , this To-Do list can be seen by the world or only by your friends. Consider this scenario: you write in Twitter: ” Working on level 1 module of ‘Riddler’ game design spec”. You subconsciously commit yourself to complete that task without checking your mails/IM’s/RSS feeds. This is because, by actually writing down your task, you become aware that your friends( or the whole world) know what you are doing, which pressurizes to you finish it off ASAP. You can have tons of argument against this, but kindly don’t argue if you’ve never used To-Do list in your life. Twittering is not a panacea and will not make you effective at work overnight. It will definitely impose self-discipline on your actions. It doesn’t matter what you’ve written on Twitter, it could be anything,

” Doing my laundry “

” Helping Roomies with Dinner “

” Solving the Zimmerman Quantum-Acoustic Problem” and so on and so forth.

It also doesn’t matter if anybody actually reads your post on Twitter. All that matters is you write it and you do it…period.

In fact, this post was a result of twittering on Twitter . I had written: “I am posting a blog on wordpress now.” Hmm..it works .

No More Aim-less !!!

 

Today’s blog is dedicated to a very special friend of mine. If you’re a regular visitor of this blog, you would have already seen her blog listed in my “Blogroll”, or probably, you must’ve even visited her blog. If you still haven’t guessed, iiiiiiiitttttttttt’s <<<drum rolls in the background please>>> Arch ( a.k.a Archu a.k.a India’s would be best director).

Flashback time: I met Arch during my engineering days in SAKEC; I can’t claim that I knew her then. We weren’t best friends, but we shared a common passion for english movies( though she was 1000 times more passionate than I was). During those blissful engineering days, my idea of Archana, was a nerd who thinks about studies and movies 24 by 7(Just for the record, she was good at sports too, she was also very much involved in cultural and tech fests in our college). I never really knew her on a personal level then. But, her obsession for movies was infectious, her whole face would brighten up whenever the discussion veered towards movies. Sometimes, it was a pain in the neck to watch a movie with Arch, she wouldn’t allow anybody to speak while she is watching the movie. She demanded pin-drop silence during the entire course of the movie. She would glare at us, even if we sneezed or breathed loudly. The rest of us actually had to learn sign language to discuss the movie( okay okay, I’m really exaggerating now…we didn’t do anything like that).Well, coming back to the point, which is : she has always dreamt of making movies. No, let me put it in a better way. She always always wanted to create world class Indian cinema which would win an Oscar. That’s all I knew about Arch during my graduation days.

Eventually, we graduated; and both of us( along with couple of other friends) got a job in one of the leading IT companies. I was transferred to Bangalore and through a strange series of events, even Arch landed up in B’lore. This is where we became close friends, rather best friends. And this is where I began understanding Arch on a personal level. I realized that she was much more than a geek, she is spontaneous, creative, caring and an amazing friend.

But, she was not happy with her job. She wasn’t enjoying it at all. Her interests lied elsewhere. She still aspired to be a movie-director. And she did try her best to get out of the IT rut. I still remember her attempt at MICA, and her disappointment when she didn’t make it. She didn’t lose hope though. She persevered. She started educating herself on Films, took movie-courses on the internet, bought a cam-corder, started shooting short films, sent her films to local film-festivals. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to see any of her short films(Lucky Me…..note to self: delete this bracketed line later otherwise Arch will kill me ). She even got a call from NYFI( or NYFA, I’m not sure but it’s located in Big Apple) but she couldn’t convert the call due to certain constraints.

Her efforts finally bore results today, she cracked an interview for a course in cinematography from MindFilm Screen Institute( an institute launched by ace cinematographer Rajiv Menon) in Chennai. She finally made a breakthrough and I am soooooo proud of her. She is on her way to fulfill her dream and I am sure she’ll be a kick-ass director.

Hey Arch, if you’re reading this, keep in mind that I am not a great writer. I can’t use words like “cacophony” and “anachronistic” in the same line. But, this post is for you, no matter how crude my writing skills are. Congratulations and Happy Birthday again!!!!

- Anup

P.S. The above pic is from Arch’s collection of Dandyman series.

The book that ‘Reads’ you

I’am a voracious reader. I love reading. Books are my favourite pastime. Okay, enough emphasis…Well, I am no philosopher, and I don’t have any rigid or philosophical views about life. I live each day as it comes. I believe in living in the present moment. That’s why I don’t dig philosophical books. And I absolutely hate self-help books :How to get rich ? How to think positive ?

The most hilarious one is: How to read a book ? ( yeah, even I couldn’t believe, someone would write such a book…crazy ). The point is , my taste in books is not philosophical. But then, I came across Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by Robert Persig. I still have no idea why I started reading this book. I thought the book would be about Zen( which I secretly admire ) and about Motorcycle maintenance( sports-bike were part of my wish-list then ). For the first 20 pages, I really struggled with the book, it was soooo boring, with the story following no particular direction. But then, I got hooked. Why ? The author started rambling about human rationale. He was trying to explain the one thing I thought was impossible for anybody to explain. And I became interested. I read diligently each and every idea putforth by Robert. But then, the book reached a point wherein it began a journey into the nature of understanding. And things started making no sense to me and I had to stop reading the book. This happened when I was in 2nd year of engineering.

After 4yrs I came across this book in Salisbury city council library, near my place of work. I said to myself why not give it another shot, and I borrowed the book with the firm intention of reading it through and through. This time the book made more sense. Probably, the four years somehow expanded by ken of understanding and my bubble of experience swallowed the wild but vaguely scientific theories in the book. And I could easily relate to what Robert was trying to say.

He talked about things like Quality, Systematic Analysis, being in flow etc. In latter part of the book, he talks mostly about Quality and his impossible attempt to define Quality in order to understand it. He says “How can we understand something, if we can’t define it ?”. He goes on to establish a counter-intuitive theory that Quality is the father of object and subject. Again I felt struggling with the ideas. The book won again; I said to myself that I am not ready for the book.

Books are an entity which you are supposed to read, to enjoy the word game created by the author. But there are some books which read you, trust me, this is what I felt when I read ZATAOMM. I could feel the author trying to get into my psyche, prove a point by making me vicariously experience it.

That explains the title of this blog. I have shelved the book again without completing it. But I will complete it, hopefully .