Beginner’s guide to a BarCamp

I thoroughly enjoyed leeching at the third BarCamp of my life for the last 2 days, and it kinda made me feel guilty. Everyone who attends a BarCamp more than once is expected to contribute (be a speaker/ presenter or volunteer), but I have practically done nothing. So I thought I write a small 101 post about what a BarCamp is all about.

Each time that I tell some of you that I am going for a BarCamp, I get only 2 types of funny questions:

1. Is it like a drinking (alcohol) camp?
2. Is it a camp where lawyers meet? (Apparently the word Bar can only remind us of 2 things – a shady place where we all drink, or uptight lawyers!)

So what exactly is a BarCamp? The official definition says “A BarCamp is an informal gathering of people interested in startups, technology, education, media, travel and popular culture. We talk about the projects we are working on and try to learn from each other”. Its what the geeks call an “unconference”.

For me BarCamp is a place where there is no agenda, nothing planned other than the venue. Then on the day of the BarCamp excellent orators, thinkers, geeks, motivators arrive from all over the world and magically let lesser mortals like me explore other things in life than the ordinary. Every thing about the camp is amazing and captivating. Frankly speaking, its not really a technology-only conference. And best of all its free!

So how does a BarCamp start? Typically the organizers (group of motivated individuals like him) put up a blog post or tweet about the event. Then everyone signs up (the last 3 BarCamps I attended have had close to 500 sign-ups each). On the day of the BarCamp, everyone reaches the place. People who want to talk or share put up their topics on a board or post it notes. Everyone else votes for their favourite topics. The topics with most votes are then allocated rooms and people interested in listening/discussing about those topics go to the designated rooms. The entire day is organized this way. Its an excellent example of how people with diverse backgrounds can come together and have a very lively discussion about topics of their interest.

And what if you voted for an idea that you thought was good, but when you actually went to the discussion you found it boring? Well, there kicks in the “two-feet” rule. If you don’t like something, you are allowed to walk out on your two feet in the middle of the discussion with no social-stigma attached to it. How cool is that?

Here is a photo summary of the event:

The BarCamp was held in the National Art Gallery in Singapore this time.

The list of topics that were selected along with the timeslots allotted to them. We had 4 rooms titled A, B, C, D this time. Each talk was scheduled for half an hour.

 

Our voting stickers. If you like a topic on the Post-It then put your sticker. These stickers were then counted to select the topics.

For people who think that BarCamp is all tech, here are excellent examples of the interesting topics that people present on. The guy who founded the “Standing Sushi Bar” in Singapore told us about his experiences in operating a profitable restaurant part-time while doing his full-time job in Microsoft!

And then this guy talked about how to be a good lover :) !! He actually had researched on the types of emotions that go into love and gave an interesting scientific perspective on love!

There were other interesting talks on education, food, fun, OLPC, travelling etc etc.

And while the entire thing is going on, super lively conversations are going on on Twitter as people blog, post pictures and tweet about the event. You can still read what all was tweeted during my last BarCamp over here.

This is a short introduction to BarCamp. I hope you guys attend the next one coming near where you live! And if there isn't any, then its high-time you volunteer to start one. I can’t imagine any other place where you can get so much information on so many varied topics from so many interesting people!

How to make your mom use Ubuntu?

I keep talking about open source and free software all the while. And I always felt guilty that my own computer at home had Windows XP installed on it. The problem with switching to another OS was – there are other people at home (read my mom!) that use my computer and they are not really comfortable doing the switch. But these days Ubuntu is so easy to use that I finally gathered the guts and did it. So here is a step-by-step method to do it:

1. Sneakily download Ubuntu. If you have a slow internet connection, download it overnight. Then create a USB Installer.
2. Tip-toe into the room where your computer is kept. Ninja costumes recommended for added stealth. Make sure that you hide the USB stick from plain sight.
3. Boot through the USB disk. Preview. Install. If someone comes into the room, switch off screen and go “La-la-lala-la” as if you are enjoying your day.
4. After installation is done, go back to your normal clothes, do your normal stuff and pretend that everything is normal.
5. When your mom finally boots the computer and calls you because the computer looks “different” – feign ignorance. (I still haven’t figured why I am blamed for every little thing that goes wrong or stops working in my house!).
6. Casually look at the computer screen and say “Oh! Hmm, I upgraded the computer today". “The new version of Windows is titled Ubuntu”. Show her how things have been moved around and some things have been “changed”.
7. Show her the “latest” game – Mahjong. Guide her through the first game to make sure that she gets addicted to it.
8. Done. Welcome to Linux nirvana.

Jokes apart  the moment my mom boot into Ubuntu, the first question she asked was “Is this the OS sponsored by that South African guy you keep talking about?”

Now she happily plays Mahjong along with her usual favorites – Free Cell, Hearts and Solitaire. She also browses the internet, checks email and listens to music without any issues whatsoever. Thank you Ubuntu.

More learning

I am back to blogging. And before I start with my usual yapping, I kinda felt I should pen a summary of some “new” things I learnt in the last couple of months.

1. You have absolutely NO control over anything. Whatever you think you are “planning” is just an illusion of control. It’s more like you are “hoping”.
2. You are good to someone because you cannot be bad. There is no such thing as Karma. So if you are being good because you believe in “cause & effect” then stop.
3. In the bigger order of things your existence or the absence of it doesn’t matter.
4. Love is an extremely irrational emotion that makes you do absolutely illogical things.

Probably most of whatever I wrote here wont make sense to you. And frankly speaking I hope it doesn’t.

Life

This ain't a philosophical post. My life has come to a sudden stand still for close to a month now. Nothing I can do can change anything now.


"Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans" - John Lennon

I am taking a break from blogging for a while now as I try to put my life back together. Thank you for your patience.

Handsome

I finally got to travel to China. Before you ask me anymore questions. It was an 8 hour trip. The only thing I saw was a meeting room and 3 Chinese nationals inside it. So my first impression of China? Their meeting rooms look awfully similar to the ones in India, US and Singapore. And if the temperature of the room is right, I can feel sleepy in any meeting in any part of the world.

Anyway, my experience at Chinese immigration kinda bowled me over. So I thought I tell you guys about it. I have known immigration officers to be rather rude and at times with an apparent lack of a sense of humor. I can totally understand their plight. They have to look at random people with their funny looking pictures in their passports all day. The only thing you do is check the credentials and let that person into the country. Most of the travellers are tired, weary and stinky from a long flight. Very unpleasant I bet.

With my last name that sounds suspiciously close to a radical fundamentalist. And my grin that irritates the hell out of most people, I am not amongst the best guys that a potential immigration officer wants to meet. I have even had tough times emigrating out of India! (Yeah, Mumbai airport interviews you while you are leaving the country as well). I remember in one of my interviews the guy asked me what are you going to do in Singapore. When I told him I am going to study, he almost fell of his chair and gave me that compassioned look saying “You are still studying?” (What he meant was – at your age – most Indian guys’ children are in school!). Anyways, keeping your ego aside during such encounters helps.

Coming back to my Chinese immigration. The officer this time was a woman. She could be anywhere between 16-60 thanks to their genes. I was travelling with my boss, and being this dumb alien I was, he warned her that this Indian chap knows no Mandarin (or that's what he told me he said to her in Mandarin). The moment I came to the window, she gave me this broad nice warm smile – cleared my immigration formalities – gave my Passport back – and then – muttered - “You are handsome”.

Now, trust me, I felt very very nice for a while. There was a “How satisfied are you with the immigration facilities" form and I gave her a 5 star rating (I wanted to add another star just to indicate “super satisfied”). Isn’t it an amazing way to welcome people into your country, especially when they have low self-esteem? But, the more I think about it, the more I concur – that was the sentence someone taught her to say to foreigners. I bet she didn’t know what she was saying. Its like – the only Chinese sentence that I can say audibly (and it kinda makes sense to the Chinese as well) is Wo Ai Ni (I love you in Mandarin – And did I tell you that it was taught to me by a German?).

So the whole incident was like me being an immigration officer and looking at a Chinese national entering my country. The only thing Mandarin that I could utter would absolutely hurt everyone entering. Women would find me creepy and men would find me disgusting. And the best part – no one would bother telling me what it means cause you don’t want to mess with the immigration officer.

Happy 4th Birthday!

After 180 blog posts of relentless yapping, I finally complete 4 whole years of my online existence. Yes 24th July was officially the 4th Anniversary of my blog. What started as a not-so-thought about introduction has helped me to “voice” my opinion to you unsuspecting souls for all this while.

Thank you for having patiently read my blog and also for having commented occasionally :) !! On this happy occasion, I decided to play around with the data that I have collected and bore you readers with some mundane statistics. So (drum roll please) here is the best statistics I could collect:

Number of Blog Posts	180
Most commented Blog Post	My Language Problem
Most viewed Blog Post	Wasabi
First Blog Post	Hello World
Most common label for Blog Posts	funny

And now, like a true wanna-be statistician, here is some analysis of my Blog Posts.

Let me be very frank. I try hard to be funny on this blog. Yeah. If you have not realized all this while I have been desperately trying hard to crack silly jokes to make you guys smile. But very early in the existence of this blog I realized that most people do not realize that I am trying to be funny (thanks to my sense of humor – or the lack of it!). So I started labelling my blog posts "funny” for people to “laugh please”.

As you can see I am funniest in March, September and December. So following the logic that I proposed in this blog post, girls interested in meeting me should schedule to meet me only in those 3 months :) !! (My Calendar is open as of now)

And then, I tend to write the most in July. That's because every July I have my blog’s anniversary, and it makes me feel all the more to write I guess. Or probably I am most free in those months :) !!

This is the last stupid statistic that I pulled out. Apparently I blog most on Weekends (understandable!). What I found interesting is that I tend to blog a lot on Wednesdays. So I guess I face mid-week crisis and try to cheer myself up by writing to you folks.

That's it from me. Thank you for being a part of my life.

East Asian Gene

In an unprecedented development, scientists in Singapore have isolated a gene amongst East Asians that stops their aging process at age 16. The gene is supposed to stop the visible effects of aging in individuals like change in appearance and the “mature” looking face. The gene seems to mysteriously stop working its magic beyond 60 years of age. Scientists are now working to introduce this gene in other races.

Well, I just made that up. But every non- East Asian will agree with me on this one. People here don’t seem to age. They just all look 16 years old ( I am lying – some do look close to 18, but I guess that's about it). Then for the next 40 odd years they look the same. So if you bump into a 15 something “looking” person on the public transit don’t just assume he/she is just in high school. They very well might have kids that age.

And why did I have to write this up on my blog? Well, I just realized that since last week, I have become the leading authority on Wasabi for the Brazilians. Google Brazil has been redirecting awfully lot of traffic from Brazil to my Blog post for people’s queries on Wasabi. I wonder what the Brazilians think when they read that lame post on Wasabi. And I also wonder why suddenly soo many people are searching for Wasabi in Brazil after the FIFA World cup.

So going forward, I am the leading authority on East Asian genes (if there is one :) !!). We anyways tend to trust what we read on the internet even if it is written by someone who has no clue what a gene is.

Tight Integration?

So I use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare. I diligently follow what my friends write or do on all these Social Networking sites (that sounds soo 2009).  All was good with these sites last year. But this year its all been so awful.

These days you can combine your status updates. So you come up with a witty 140 character line and post it on Twitter and zap – it automatically updates your Facebook status and your LinkedIn status. Then you Check-In to a place in Foursquare and zap – it updates your Twitter and Facebook status again. Whoa. And what happens to people who follow you at all 4 locations? They get the same update 3 more times. And then you crack a not-so-witty joke. You end up irritating your followers 3 times all over again. Imagine having 100 friends doing that and you have a nightmare of status updates to read every hour, every day (How am I supposed to accomplish anything else in my life? ;) !!)

I am hating integration. Each site exists for a purpose. LinkedIn is the professional side of me. I definitely would love to know what Project you working on professionally, but I definitely ain’t interested in seeing you pruning your cat there (but I don’t mind your cute cat pictures on Facebook). And then if you show me your beach pictures with pina-colada in your hand on Twitter and LinkedIn it just pisses me off (that’s called a case of sour grapes). I hope you get my point.

I don’t want excuses like - “if you get irritated then stop following me”. I just am not gonna do that. Thou shalt be stalked. So just be more courteous to your stalkers.

Big Bank

So some poor soul named Girish (I am a poor soul too, but that’s not me) opened a Credit Card account with The Big Bank. To save the environment he signed up for email statements. And he did this 6 months ago.

For the last 6 months though, I am getting his credit card statements on my email address. Well, I can’t really read it because the statements are password protected. But every month I get an email with a PDF document attached stating it contains my expenses for the last month, and every month I get the shock that someone has opened an account in my name with the Big Bank only to realize that it is - poor soul Girish.

The email is followed by this wordy disclaimer and warning:

This email and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged.  If you are not the addressee, do not disclose, copy, circulate or in any other way use or rely on the information contained in this email or any attachments.  If received in error, notify the sender immediately and delete this email and any attachments from your system.  Emails cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error free as the message and any attachments could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, delayed, incomplete or amended.  Big Bank and its subsidiaries do not accept liability for damage caused by this email or any attachments and may monitor email traffic.

And for the last 6 months I have been diligently notifying the sender and deleting the email. But the joke is Big Bank is not bothered about notifying poor soul Girish about his plight. And, I can’t block their email address because someday I might want to open an account with them.

So what is the moral of this blog post? If you have signed up for email statements, please check that you are actually receiving them!

Where am I?

Sorry people. Long time no post. Life as I know is “happening” to me. I have started living the busy life of a working professional. Going to office everyday by 8:00 AM, and coming home only after everyone has left for the day. To keep myself busy at home (and while travelling) have bought a few gizmos which keep me occupied for the rest of the time I have on hand. Have become highly disorganized and that is reflected on my infrequent posts now. It always takes me time to get on top of things so hold on till I post my next post :) !!

Its funny how we consider ourselves settled when we become a part of the bigger system. The one which makes us countless drones commuting mindlessly to our place of work and back everyday. Waiting for that elusive Friday night, to do something fun, which inevitably is catching up with friends for dinner or movies. Life just goes on and on and on.

My only source of entertainment these days is the gourmet food that I consume for lunch everyday. My ultra-efficient digestive system, meanwhile, is efficiently pulling out all the fat and storing it around my body for safekeeping. I miss my good old days of clumsily roller skating and mindlessly watching The Big Bang Theory!