Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Worst Thing

Being at the mercy of network latency.

Things to do if this happens to you.
1) Run 'ping' and try to look for a pattern in 'time=' value. Based on its value imagine what the sharks might be doing (next point)
2) Run a quiz 'What happened to the transatlantic cable?' Options
a) Sharks nibbled the bytes
b) Captain Nemo
c) The little mermaid
3) Hate sharks, Captain Nemo and The little mermaid
4) Try to remember names of the last five books you read, in order.
5) See who else is around. Try not to feel lonely.
6) Read blog. No understand. Write blog.
7) Try to think of the seventh option. Make it the seventh option. To infinity and beyond.

$Enjoy!

An exercise in logic

Just finished reading Alfred Sloan's My years with General Motors. For those who don't know, Mr.Sloan was chief executive of GM from 1920s to 1950s, fundamental to the spectacular growth of GM in that era, and the book is his business autobiography. And a business biography it is through and through. Never once Mr.Sloan says I was happy or frustrated or sad, but he'll painstakingly explain the logic of his decisions. There is not a single reference to the events of his personal life, but there is a lot about evolution of GM, modeling of competition and market, design of employee benefit programs and so on, in a tone rational but not cold, humane yet detached. An intersting point, GM being the giant it was at that time, the general response to any crisis was 'I created a committee'. Only that (contrary to popular opinion), it seems to have worked. Of course some parts of the book went over my head, the book being (supposedly) aimed at professional managers, but having never really managed anything of value (including myself) , I was still able to enjoy (and hopefully learn from) it. Give it a try!

Enjoy!

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Assorted (but not sorted) list of updates

[Note: You were supposed to be reading this rant 48 hours ago but for the thing in the last para, appended today].

The last book I read was The Strangest Man, a balanced personal + scientific biography of quantum pioneer Paul Dirac. Dirac was single handedly responsible a lot of great ideas in the early days of quantum theory, and singulary eccentric. A good read!

Recently I purchased a sony NWZ E443 8GB Mp3 player. I wanted once since long, but was confused between iPod and Sony. There is not much difference in the music quality, some 'music experts' told me, and I took their word. iPod has this awesome feel about it, but lack of FM and the restriction of always going through iTunes and price difference of around 2K meant I purchased sony. When I bought it, only songs were on my mind. It was only later that I realized the wealth of knowledge spread around the net in the form of podcasts. I have already started building my podcast library. Let me know if you know of any good podcasts. One especially good one that I found was the weekly sciam science talk. Good Stuff!

Watched Rajneeti yesterday. The first half is nicely done, but the second half is copy-pasted from B R Chopra ki mahabharat. Some scenes are so out of place (eg the nihattha scene towards the end) that they cannot be there by accident. Prakash Jha wanted it to be a copy. But why? we all have seen mahabharat on doordarshan. Is it for the younger generation who hasn't heard of DD? What explains the bunch of steamy scenes then? In short, a one time watch.

Prasad Musale aka aaba (my college buddy) was here on Sunday. What started as a 10AM breakfast plan at Goodluck expanded to 10AM breakfast at Wadeshwar (one of us thought GL is not hygenic enough, can you believe that?) + Rajneeti at Mangala + lukkhagiri on roads + evening snacks at GL with a lot of bakar bakar interspersed throughout and ended at 7:30, only because aaba had a bus to catch. A day wonderfully spent!

Weather here has been exceptionally good for a last couple of days. Makes me feel like singing a crappy song from a crappy movie, but with rather nicely fitting words, mausam yeh, awesome bada! :)

The awesomeness mentioned earlier turned into freaking awesomeness on Monday. Really heavy rainfall combined with the changed geography (new buildings etc) meant the water found safe haven in our parking lot. And by a stupid chain of events I found silencer of my bike filled to the brim. Bike is currently recuperating at the mechanic's, but the knee-high water in the parking lot, taking out the bikes with one carried over the shoulder cuz the owner was not present and the maddening traffic was a fun experience in a strange sense. And what a sight!

That's it for now. I hope I will return sooner with the next bunch of updates.
Enjoy!