New Year Resolutions

• Despite being in a world of increased ease in communication, I feel I am distancing myself more and more from my friends. Especially in the last few months I often find myself not feeling like talking to anybody and being contended just sitting home with a book or a DVD. Clearly I know this has to change. My friends define who I am and I wouldn't have an identity without them. Starting 2007, I am going to make a increased effort to keep in touch with my friends. Close friends more often through email and phone and maybe even more personal visits (when possible), the next level through emails and the rest through Orkut scraps.
• I am going to pursue Happiness. I want to fully realize the joy of giving. I want to share more than I am willing to. I want to help develop, motivate the people I work with and share the knowledge I have with them (in a non bragging way!) This doesn't mean letting everybody else go before me, it means I want to grow, but want to make sure the people I work with grow with me. I might not be qualified to do this, but I am going to do the little bit I can. If there is something I can do to help somebody, I know I should, I will. Of course most of this is just plain good Karma, something I believe in more than in religion.
  
• In the spirit of continuous improvement (of ourselves), I think we have to be more critical of ourselves and forgiving of others. Sadly most of us (I am probably first on that list) are currently more critical of others and forgiving of ourselves. The funny thing is I realized this while driving in India on this trip. People swear and curse others for aggressive, rash driving yet they drive the same way and think its alright. I guess its human tendency..if something happens to us we think its misfortune, if the same thing happens to somebody else we think they deserve it.
• Environment - I don't think the world is coming to an end, but however that shouldn't be a reason for inaction on our part to try and preserve our environment for the coming generations. Last year I switched all the bulbs in my house to energy saving lights and started re-cycling PET and Glass bottles. I know its nothing radical, but still is a small thing I can do. I hope to continue along those lines this year.
• Read more....finish a book every 2 weeks. Knowledge is power and there is no better way to gain knowledge than to read books.
  

Some of this might sound silly, some way too cheesy, but everyone of these are things that I have put a lot of thought into and believe in throughly.

As 2007 starts, I welcome the new year with passion, exuberance, smile and more importantly an open mind and hope that whatever happens, good or bad, I learn valuable lessons from them and improvise.

Have a stupendous and sensational new year!!

Information Vs Noise

Everywhere I see, I keep hearing about Information overload and Information explosion powered mainly by what has now come to be called web 2.0. But truth be told, I really question this claim.

I think this is a case where noise has been confused with information. Most of what I find easily available in the internet is noise. Useless pieces of information or one's opinions and thoughts that typically does not come out of data or research. What is worse is that writers typically tend to be polarized and write strongly for or against a cause. Readers typically tend to either strongly agree or disagree with the writer, in any case causing rampant publicity for the writer. It's what I call the "Rush Limbaugh" effect. His listeners either absolutely love him (because they are conservative?) or just can't stand him, yet listen to him just to get enraged (or laugh) by the ridiculous things he has to say. Good solid information is sadly difficult to come by or you have to pay for it.

My claims aren't totally unsubstantiated either. I read (or subscribe) to about 80 blogs in my google reader, in areas ranging from Lean Manufacturing, productivity improvement, management etc., Yet most of the posts have minimal valuable information. Lean Manufacturing blogs are typically a consultant's sales pitch about how successful he/she have been in implementing lean with their clients. Their star lean companies being their clients. There is another lean blog which is apparently famous, but essentially talks about nothing but how bad outsourcing is. Granted outsourcing is not a very lean practice, yet in some cases it makes economic sense and is worth doing. To say all outsourcing is wrong is naive. Then there are some productivity improvement blogs that are really pretty silly. I am not saying all blogs are useless. Certainly there are some blogs that I read without fail.

As far as news goes, new websites like Digg etc., are great start ups but have a long way to go before they mature. Currently its a little community of geeks. Submit a story to Digg with amazing and firefox in the heading and there is a 75% probability that it will appear in the front page. (But then again, may be they are not meant to be what I want them to be...so could be my bad!!)

I have eventually realized that good old published magazines and journals are the best sources of valuable information that can be trusted. They will safely guarantee you know what you need to know without excess information overload. Three months into starting the economist subscription, I have realized why it is the most read magazine on world news and economics by business and political leaders world over. Business Week and Harvard Business Review give you all the happenings in the business world and long term business trends and Management fundamentals you need to know about. Fast Company gives you interesting snippets of information on creativity, design and emerging trends. Men's Health gives you everything you need to know about what, and what not to eat, health info and fashion. Besides there is something about reading from a printed piece of paper that reading of a LCD screen just cannot suffice.

General Thoughts!

Yesterday, my colleague, a fellow Indian and a six sigma master black belt came closest to defining Hinduism in a way that engineers, esp. six sigma trained ones can understand and appreciate. Here is his philosophy, which I totally agree with.

He said "All people are created with a Cp equivalent to two (Indicates Six Sigma capability). Our Ppk (Indication of actual performace level) is much lower though. So essentially Hinduism says if you can raise your Ppk to Cp levels, then you become god". Beautiful eh?
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As an engineer, one of the things that immensely fascinates me are commercial jets. Especially Boeing 747's with the 2 engines on either wing. Seriously, one of the reasons I never get really tired of long layovers is because I could just sit in a coffee shop with a view of the runway and just watch flights take off and land all day.

All this week I was in Chicago. Our facility there is about 10 minutes drive from O'Hare Airport, which is one of the busiest in the world. During general commute I had to drive a bunch of times south on I294, on the part just adjacent to O'Hare. The freeway runs perpendicular to the 2 main runways in O'Hare, about 0.5 miles away from where the runway starts. As a result when you drive south, you can see huge (and small) planes, dip down really low, with its nose tipped up, wheels down and at a very low straight line speed getting ready to land. Its just such a beautiful sight. Infact today, much to the annoyance of my colleague, I almost ran into the car in front of me, gaping at a American Airlines, Boeing 747 touch ground.

To many, planes are annoying noisy necessities of modern life. To me they are generations of ingenuity, engineering excellence and man's (and woman's) persistence to attempt and do what normally seems impossible!
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I can't remember how long it has been since I saw a Hindi or a Tamil movie and came out of the cinema thinking Wow!!, that was a super cool movie. Its kinda sad that the supposedly second biggest movie industry in the world seems to be running out of ideas and creativity to keep its audience captivated. Especially ones like me with very low standards...seriously, I pretty much watch almost every movie unless my friends hit me with a hammer and ask me not to watch that movie.

So despite the warning of my friends (wish I was better at learning from other's mistakes or atleast my own mistakes), I spent $10 today and watched Dhoom II in a theatre. What can I say about the movie?...besides sometime after the interval, I got tired of watching Bipasha Basu and Aishwarya Rai's scantily dressed, tanned breas cleavage bodies. Okay I didn't get tired of watching them, but would have preferred if there was a storyline or something interesting in the movie. On the whole it was a pitiful waste of 10 bucks and 3 hours of my valuable Sunday evening time.

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