Gill Adarsh Days...

Today I felt like I was taken back in Time as I visited my old apartment and school. I happened to be in the neighbourhood of the apartments where I lived from 1989 through 1995, from my 3rd through 8th grade. And since my apartment was at a stone's throw from the school I studied in, I also visited my school (Gill Adarsh M.H.S.S., Roypettah, Chennai)

Its amazing how fast time passes. Looking at the balcony of my old apartment from the street, it felt like only yesterday I was running around in the balcony as a little kid, trying to fly the kites I made or throwing stones at my neighbors whom I used to hate. The school was even more memorable. I was delighted to see that the tree under which I used to play cricket after school till my mother picked me up was still there. I even managed to sneak into the school (much to the annoyance of the security person who strictly warned me against going in) and see my 6th, 7th and 8th standard classrooms. Since the school was closed, I was able to go into the classrooms and think about those days when I studied there. I was reminded of the time I was asked to kneel down because my classteacher caught me singing and dancing in the class. And also the time the whole class burst out laughing at me because I entered the class after using the restroom with my fly wide open.

Those days will never come back again, yet those memories will last a lifetime. Partly because I secretly wish (well...not a secret anymore!!) I could be a kid again. Those days were delightfully simple. There was no pressure to perform, no board exams..nothing. Life was all about going to school, coming back and playing and yeah..may be doing some homework. I was soo blisfully ingnorantly happy. Not that I am not Happy now, but back then I was Happy in a way that I didn't know what sorrow was...and there is something tremendrously light about that feeling. I know I can never be like that again. My only other regret is since I wasn't planning on the trip, I didn't have a camera handy to snap a few pictures. :-(

btw, Gill Adarsh is the best school ever...I loved every bit of it!!

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.

India Trip

Quite a few of my friends often ask me, why I go back to India every year? Many of them visit may be once every 2 or 3 years. Truth be told, going back to India every year has been a major financial drain on me. After all, with as expensive as flight tickets are these days, especially during the peak season and the gifts you buy, you start seeing a significant hole in your savings. What more? considering you want to maximize the time you spend back home, you use your entire vacation on the trip. Atleast for me, my routine goes something like this...January 2 to December 15, work! work! work!...don't take a single day of vacation. December 15 - January 1, go back to India and blow up your entire year's savings and vacation in one trip. (If wasn't for this trip to India, in my home in the place of my old sony boob tube would be a new 50 inch plasma and a few hundred dollars more in my savings)

So again why go every year? I think the answer to that lies in they way you think and the way you have been brought up. To me, no matter how many countries I visit, my number one choice for a vacation destination will be Chennai, India. I grew up in that town and for the most part know the "In's and Out's" of it. Especially in late december (Marghazi Masam) Chennai offers a multitude of things which charms me to no end. The early morning Bhakti music concert played in each street with cheap LOUD speakers, the beautiful sunshine with 80 degrees temperature which is such a great escape from the rain and 45 degrees it is in Detroit right now, the classical music season with various artists performing and the canteens outside the music sabhas serving fresh dosas and coffee and so on. Most importantly the joy of meeting and spending time with my family and old friends, to play home cricket with my 3 year old nephew, to take my mom out to ice creams, to go to my old saloon and get a head massage (Rs 50 for a long 1/2 hour massage - cheap isn't it?), to walk, sit, relax in Marina/Besant nagar beach, to enjoy the Rs 10 Masala Kadalai at the beach. I love to go to Satyam and see young college kids bunk class to watch a matinee, reminds me of time I used to do it and the 4 golden years I spent in college.

Having spent pretty much all of my life in India in Chennai, I think a part of who I am is because of the things I learnt, in and from the city. So nothing relaxes, invigorates and recharges me like my trips back home. And I can't think of a better way to start a new year than to have a cup of filter coffee (Hungover from New year's party??..may be!) and some hot mom cooked breakfast, watching "puthanda sigapu Nizahichi" in Sun/Moon/Mars TV. And all this more than justifies the trip (to me atleast)....

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?
----

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!
----

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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Creativity - where we get our ass kicked!

Since I haven't been traveling a lot the last 3 months, its given me a chance to do some creative stuff, like cooking, decorating my apartment etc. Now first and foremost, I am by no means any good in either of these, but I'd like to be good and am working towards that. I have gotten a lot better than I was 3 months ago, thanks to watching hours of HGTV and food channel.



In general, I would like to think of myself as being creative. Creative not in the sense that I can cook amazing dishes or paint. But creative in the sense that I often times can think of things to do which are in general different from what others would think of doing. However, after carefully thinking on the topic of creativity, I am convinced that what separates very creative people from the rest is attention to detail. I have to admit, I suck at it. Here is why I think so. If you were to watch any creative program (redoing you home or a cooking show, architectural show..anything) often times its the minute details, things I wouldn't even think about which would make the big difference. In my mind its analogous to the difference in the print quality of a 8X10 picture printed out of a 640X480 image and a 8X10 picture printed out of a 5000X4000 image. They both probably tell the same story and show the same thing, yet the latter does it much better than the former.



I hate gender based generalizations, which say men are like this and women are like that etc., for the same reason I hate it when people say "Men can never understand women". I truly believe every person is different and has a different story to tell. Which is why generalizations typically don't work. Men will never understand women. But I believe if they listen well enough, they can understand "a woman". And when they meet another woman, its a totally different story and they have to start from scratch again. I have not, in my whole life met 2 women who are very similar. But before I digress too much, where I was going with this was that, One safe gender based generalization I think I can make is that, women are much better at paying attention to detail than men are. You put randomly selected, 100 men and 100 women in a room, and I could bet my next paycheck that the cumulative creative genius of the women will be more than that of the men. Sure many would argue that there are more men in creative positions like architecture and cooking etc., than women. However that ignores the fact that only a fraction of women compared to men work, hence I would say that is an invalid argument. Also I am talking about average people here, not professionally educated people.



Another thing that proves my point is that women are much better at remembering anniversaries, birthdays etc., and all finer details men typically tend to forget.



Bottomline...



In a nutshell, I am saying



1) Overall quality of creative genius greatly depends on a person's ability to sense finer details in any form of art. This ability enables the person to adjust and improve the finer details thus creating an overall better experience for people enjoying the art.



2) Women (IMO) tend to be much better at scanning and figuring out the finer details than men.



3) Therefore all other things being equal, women tend to be better at creating, capturing and refining art.



No, I am not sexist. No I am not trying to get Brownie points from women for this post. These are merely my observations based on the experience of working with and having friends, among men and women. Truth be told, I only know a handful of women well and they all exhibit the characteristics I mentioned above. If you disagree with me, let me know.

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Girls with Blackberry

Yesterday while I was at the Y, trying my level best to push the 80 pounds off my chest for the 9th time at the chest press, I saw this chick right across me, to my left running on the thread mill. She was running fairly fast, around 7.5. She was slim, had a great body, but was ordinary looking. She had her headphones on, with her Ipod inside her tracks. Ahem...yes Inside her tracks, she must have had some kind of a pocket or something on the inner side of her tracks, on the front side (near the tie string) where she kept her Ipod (Lucky Ipod!!)

Anyway no big deal, I was about to get back to my workout when all of a sudden, out of no where, she took out her Blackberry and started going through her messages. So here she was, all sweaty and stuff, running at 7.5, listening to music and with her right hand, using the scroll button to go through her email. Its like she was in a zone of her own, she didn't care what others were doing or thinking about her. And that, I though was incredibly cool. All other things equal, I would kill to have a girlfriend like that! (As time passes by and I get older...I would kill to have a girlfriend. Period.)

So I added "Girls with Blackberry" to my list of fetishes.

Happy Thanksgiving

I read this great post from Tom Peters today. Tom Peters is one of the management guru's whose presentations, books and blog I follow religiously. His is one of the blogs that never goes unread in my reader among the 80 odd blogs I try to follow everyday.

I truly believe in what Tom teaches. For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to come to United States, because I have always had this image of U.S. being the land of dreams where I could make it big and be immensely successful. A country where it wouldn't matter who I am or where I am from, and the only thing that would matter would be my Passion (always capital P:)) and performance.

Everytime I hear about a foreign born (Outside U.S.) person make it big through their own startup or become the CEO/COO of a great/large corporation, it puts a smile in my face. It reinforces my belief that in 20-30 years if I am not where I want to be, I have nobody else to blame but myself...but hopefully I won't have to.

Here is another one of Tom's recent posts I enjoyed.

P.S> For those who don't know Tom Peters (God..which world do you live in?) he is a 63 year old management guru and author of the famous book In search of excellence. Check out his blog, where you can also download some of his presentations.

Amores Perros and Embrassing Childhood

On a friend's recommendation, I rented out Amores Perros and am seeing it right now. I have to admit its one of the goriest, sad and melancholic movies I have seen in a long time. Its essentially stories of three different people coming together with an accident. Although it is supposed to be a critically acclaimed movie taken by a debutant director and not even badly taken, it just isn't my kind of movie. I have to admit, it has left a bad taste, got my mood down and made it a lousy start to a weekend.

On a lighter note, today while cooking I was reminded of a silly and embrassing incident that happened while I was in school. It must have happened when I was in third or fourth grade. I hung out with a bunch of great guys, but most of them were really rich, you know the kind that give each student a dairy milk for their birthday, while the rest of the class gave coffee bite (if you grew up in India, you would know what I am talking about). So I liked to show off whenever I could. So one day, I manage to steal a pair of shades my mom's brother had given her and bring it to school to show it off to my friends. The plan was perfect, I would take it school without my mother's knowledge, brag about it the whole day and then put it back in the evening and my mom wouldn't even know about it.

Everything was working as per plan, I went to school early that day so I could start bragging. Since I had dropped the shades earlier, I went on about how these shades were unbreakable and then dropped it on the floor to show it to my friends.

(Amores Perros, just got over....what a freaking relief!)

At that point one of my friends said, how much force can it withstand, to which I said, any amount. (If only I knew when to shutup!) I then got on top of a desk and flung the shades with as much force as I could muster in the floor. Guess what happened? The shades cracked...

Well...the rest of the day was hell. Not only did I look ridiculously stupid in front of my friends, I also had a heck of a lot of explaining to do to my mom, who fortunately or unfortunately is not fooled very easily.

Thinking back now, I had a childhood filled with so many embrassing events, mostly brought upon me by myself that I am not surprised that I no longer get embrassed that easily.

Oh well!! Have a good weekend

btw, Go Blue - Hopefully Michigan kicks Ohio State's ass tommorow. You know how excited I have been about this game...I blogged about it a month back in this post.

A little Trick

I came across this key board shortcut in a tech journal. I was surprised that I didn't know this earlier.

"This shortcut is probably the most useful of all. It
involves using the Shift key when selecting long lists or text
passages.

Let's
say you want to select a section of this newsletter
covering several paragraphs. The way most users would do this
would be to left mouse click at the start, hold the mouse button
down and then move the mouse curser to the end of the text to be
selected.

That's
fine but if the text covers more than one screen it can
get tricky. Here's a much better way.

First,
left click at the start of the text and release the mouse
button. Then scroll down to the end of the text and left click
again while holding down Shift key. All the text in between will
be selected.

Try
it now on this newsletter. Neat eh?

The
same technique works well when selecting items on a list."

I can see myself using this keyboard shortcut quite a bit. Pretty neat right? Here is the complete list of all keyboard shortcuts.

Alright Tschüss! now

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Performancing for Firefox

If you actually read this post, then check out Performancing for Firefox which is a great way you can blog directly from your browser. This combined with Firefox 2.0 built in spell check means, no more stupid spelling mistakes in your posts. Nice way to be able to post directly from your browser, especially useful if you are at work, like I am right now. Another way is to use Google Docs Spreadsheets, if you post to Blogger. I am not sure about other blogs.



If you don't see this post, well then performancing doesn't work very well with blogger beta. Also in any case I dont see how you can add tags to your post from performancing. Of course there is always a tiny bit of possibility that I screwed up and didn't do something right



Adios



CorrectionS



I just figured out, you can add labels to your post. You do that under the categories section in performancing. Also this works, since I just saw the the post had been posted to my blog with the labels.



Performancing Rocks!!

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Putty Beach - Central Coast, NSW, Australia

Putty Beach - Central Coast, NSW, Australia
Originally uploaded by `Bobesh.

Saw this picture in interestingness in Flickr today. two things came to my mind..

1) I need to travel to Australia. I have seen a lot of pictures of beautiful beaches and the coastline there and I am throughly convinced its a neat place to visit

2) Why the hell can't I take pictures like these? I mean even if I were in the exact same beach at the exact same spot at the exact sametime, somehow I feel the picture I would have taken probably wouldnt have been this good and definitely wouldnt have made it to the interestingness page! Something I need to work on...

Later then...

Europe Series 2 - Cologne, Germany

The first weekend I was in Germany, me and my colleague (Karthik) went to Cologne (Koln). A fairly large sized city, located on the banks of the river Rhine about an hour's drive from where we were staying. The first thing people notice, as they enter Cologne is the magnificient, huge Cathedral, called the Dom. We went there on a sunny and bright saturday and the weather was just perfect. Since we wanted to visit the Dom, we had to drive around for about 30 minutes till we found a parking tower we could park at. The Dom is located right at the city enter and has a ton of shopping and food joints around it, hence it is almost always tough to find a good parking spot in the area. Having been in Germany for a week now, me and my Karthik were dying for some spicy Indian food. The first thing we did was to find an Indian restraunt and eat lunch. The food was ok, far from good and nothing memorable.

Then we started walked to the Dom. The cathedral is just so imposing and intimidating when you stand close to it. It almost reminded me of a Dragon's castle. The kind that lets fire out of its mouth..like in Shrek! We went in, and it was peaceful and quiet, contrary to the noise and chaos outside. Me and Karthik then went started climbing the 509 steps to get to the top of the building. Karthik gave up half way, but I managed to climb all the way to the top with breaks. The view from top was certainly not breathtaking, but was beautiful all the same. It is always nice to get on top of buildings in Europe and enjoy the views as the architecture is so different and much more ornate than the concrete jungles you see in the States.

After hanging out around the city center for a few hours we started heading back to Wuppertal. We also had a cup of coffee in one of the famous side walk cafe's Europe is soo famous for. One of the things I love about Europe is its laid back culture. Its just so relaxing to see people and families sitting in the sidewalks, enjoying a cup of coffee and just chatting. Although there are side walk cafe's cafes in the States, you just dont get the same feel you get in Europe.

One the way back, while I was driving my car from the parking lot, I made a sharp turn and caused coniderable dents to my car when I made contact with the wall. I obviously was not yet used to the cramped tight parking spaces and ramps of the European parking towers. I since then noticed, Cologne is especially notorious for that. During one of our trips to Cologne sometime later, we once had to close our side view mirrors so they would not make contact with the mirrors of the car parked adjacent to ours.

All in all, looking back now, that trip to Cologne was a great experience. I guess I was lucky that my company paid the 750 Euros deductible for damages I caused to the car. I made several more trips to Cologne after that. Cologne is one of those cities that becomes more fascinating and interesting, the more times you visit.

If you ever happened to go to Cologne, dont forget to try the food and beer at the Peters Brauhaus. Its phenomenal.

Attached below are some pictures...

Thats a picture of the Dom and the railway bridge over the river Rhine. Right beside the railway tracks there is a small pedestrian area where you can walk.


This is a picture of me on the bridge (the one above), with the Dom in the background.



That's a picture of me having a cup of coffee at a sidewalk cafe.

(Europe Series...to be continued)

Europe Series 1 - German Engineering

Roughly 1 year ago (10/23/2005) to be exact, I set my foot for the first time on German Soil. The next 10 months were almost magical where I travelled extensively to Europe and also within Europe. Those 10 months will always be considered as one of the most enjoyable moments in my life. All the Germans I worked with were fabulous people. During this time I developed a great sense of respect and admiration for German Engineering. Sure many would claim it is over engineering and I agree. I saw a lot of machines in Germany which werent really needed and didnt serve the people it was designed for in the most effective manner. But what impressed me the most was not just the quality of the work, but passion most men (Not being sexist here, I worked mostly with men...so I dont really know about the women) had for Engineering. Starting from the maintenance guy at the plant, I worked out of. Once we were talking about this idea for a project which had a little bit of engineering involved and I saw this guy who generally has great inertia get all excited about this. Couple of hours later he came to my office with a bunch of AutoCAD plots with potential engineering solutions. All this was on a Saturday and anybody who has been to Europen atleast once knows how hard it is to get Europeans to work in the weekends.

I am an engineer and I am passionate about my work, so nothing wins my admiration more than seeing people being really passionate and proud about their engineering. Thus I changed my mind from a Lexus 330RX, owning which, I had dreamt of for 5 years preceding my trips to Germany, and got a Germany manufactured BMW 330i.

There are many such small stories that happened during my trips to Europe that are deeply embedded in my thoughts and memories of the place. I am going to attempt to write and share some of those in the upcoming months.


I am attaching the very first picture I took in Europe and Germany. It isnt a great picture. My colleague took it and its a picture of the Autobahn A1, while we were driving from Wuppertal to Koln. The car in the picture is the rental car from National I had for almost 2 months, a diesel Opel Vectra.

(Picture taken on 10/29/2005, 11.14 am Local Time)

Michigan Rocks!!

Its an exciting time to be in Detroit...its been a phenomenal time for sports in Michigan. I moved into Michigan and look at what happened? My favorite college football team Michigan Wolverines has been kicking ass having won all games so far this season. It started the season ranked number 16 and has risen upto No. 2 only behind Ohio State. What's more important is having beat Iowa today, it pretty much got a easy run till it meets Ohio State in November. What a game that will be? For folks who dont follow college football, $50 Ohio State Vs Michigan game tickets are selling for over 1000 bucks a piece on eBay right now. They probably will be well over 1500-2000 bucks a piece by Nov. 18 (gameday).

But it all doesnt end there...the Detroit Tigers are in the world series after 22 years. The first game is going to start in about 40 minutes and I am watching the pre game show right now. The game is being played at the Co-America park here in Detroit and the whole city is excited about it!

With the NBA season starting pretty soon hopefully the Pistons will kick ass as well.

Go Blue, Go Wolverines, Go Tigers and Go Pistons!

My Feeds

Due to popular demand, I have uploaded the exported xml file of my google reader feeds here. You can download it and import it on to your RSS reader if you want to.

While we are on the topic, this site localhostr lets you upload any file upto a size of 20MB and gives you the link to share it. I can see it being really useful if you want to share a file in your blog or something like that. The best part is no registration required. I wouldnt trust it with security related files or as the only source of back up though.

TGIF - This week's Best Blog Posts

Its been a long week and I am finally glad its Friday. I have been travelling the past two weekends and its been amazing fun, but yet somehow I no longer have the zest and enthusiasm I once had about going out on the weekends. The idea of freaking out in the weekends and then going back into the week and putting in 60 hours of work sounds cool, but just not practical. It takes its toll on your body and towards the end of the week this week, after almost 20 days of continuous work (travelling in the weekends and going places is fun, but still work for your body) I was almost braindead. I have decided the next 2 days is just to myself, I will watch movies, maybe even grab a book and thats it.

Here are some interasting posts I read this week

1. I was inspired and invigorated by this post. This is the video of Steve Jobs addressing a bunch of Stanford Graduates. As a matter of fact I printed Stay Hungry...Stay Foolish in a 11X17 paper and stuck it in my cubicle. You can search in You Tube and find the full video is you want.
2. This post in collective genius about how to deal with the situation if you feel stuck (in life in general). Its not rocket science, but a simple concise post to give you a jolt and wake you up.
3. I attended a webinar conducted by David Allen where he talks about how to Get things done and how Mind Mapping Software (Mindjet in this case) can help with GTD. You can register here and view the webinar. Mindjet is a paid software, but googling Mind Mapping Software will give you an open source program which is free. Its got almost all the functionality, but just doesnt look as cool!
4. This software when downloaded and installed apparently lets you watch any channel for free. I still have tried it out, but appears in Lifehacker. I plan on trying it out over the weekend and seeing if I can get any cricket matches.

Alright...thats it for this week. Its 3.30am in the morning and I am ready to hit the sack...(Promised myself earlier that I will post before I goto bed) So guys,

Happy Diwali, may the festival of lights brighten up your life a little bit more and have a great weekend.

P.S> I was half asleep when I wrote this so excuse my typos and grammatical errors if any. I will correct them the first thing in the morning.

Information Overload

For the longest time now, I have been feeling guilty about not reading a lot and also having a lot of books I bought sitting in my bookshelf without having been consumed (Large WIP - Extreme Muda!!). So last week one day I actually sat down and mapped out all the books that I currently have and differentiated them into the following

• Books I want to read, but still havent bought (my Amazon.com wishlist)
• Books I have already bought, but still havent completely read
• Books that I have started reading
• Books that I am yet to start reading

Attached below is the map. I used a mind mapping software to do this and I have to admit, ever since I started using the software, it has given a lot of clarity to my thinking and has made it easier to lay out things in an orderly fashion.



After having done the whole thing, I just realized how consumed I am with just my blogs and journals that I hardly get the time to read anything else. Besides I have what I call a "reading threshold". I cannot read casually. Typically I concentrate immensely when I am reading something, so after 2-3 hours of reading a day, I am already worn out and can take it no longer!

However if Marissa Mayer can work 18 hours a day (see here) and Indra Nooyi thinks there is no substitution to hardwork (see here, second para of second page), then may be I am just not there yet! I am sure I will get there though as long as I stay Hungry. Stay Foolish!

Life come at you fast

Sign 1
I got back from work today and picked up my mail as usual and was stunned to find the November’s edition of the Playboy Manufacturing Engineering journal in my mail box. Not that I am not subscribed to it, but its just that I still haven’t even started reading the October edition and here I already have the November issue. It kinda gave me a sense of how fast time really flies by. Every Monday I wake up sighing and swearing about having to work 5 more long days, but before I realize it, its already the weekend. It reminded me of the “life comes at you fast” commercial, hence the name of the post

Sign 2
Earlier today @ work Novell in my work laptop asked me to change my password. (Thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley I have to remember long complicated passwords and in 2 months forget it and make another one and remember that one & so on…but that’s another post). I had just about gotten used to the old one and it struck on me today that its already been 2 months since I made that one. So here we go again!

Sign 3
I become poorer by a significant amount of money today as I had to write a check to my travel agent for my flight tickets to India this December. Not that I am not excited about the trip, but most of the details of my last trip and still fresh in my memory and it kinda seems like a whole year (almost) passed by pretty quickly!

Moral of the Story
Stop whining and enjoy life, because if you don’t, pretty soon you will be whining about having spent your entire life whining!! Its might not be that credible coming from me, but its true!

Cool Workplaces

I came across this article today which talks about 10 seriously cool workplaces and also documents it with pictures. Pixar and the Red Bull slide (Picture attached below) between different levels were my personal favorite. I was pretty amazed by the creativity tht exists among some of the workforce. Unfortunately I am stuck in a typical dull grey cubicle and that does not help my creativity at all (and there are other reasons too)

I think thats one of the advantages of working in a software company, I some how love the jeans and tshirt, come when you want and work when you want, liberal, work hard-party hard typically Californian culture. It one aspect of the Silicon valley which sometimes makes me wish I was in the computers field.

Poetry

I came across this website Poetiv this week. It has a ton of good poems from a lot of famous poets. I am not much into poetry (writing or reading), but I was glad to find my favorite poem.."Stopping by woods on a snowy evening" by Robert Frost. The poem goes like this..

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it's queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there's some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep

Of all the poems which I read in school, i.e. of all the poems which were imposed upon me by the Tamil Nadu State board of education, this sonnet some how just stayed in my mind. I guess it is because I was able to picturise this clearly unlike any other poem. Also because I think the message in the poem is so clear and simple. I have been thinking reading something like this will be great inspiration and motivation way to start a day or a week.