Re-inventing your brand

I have been a Go daddy customer since the day I bought this domain. Not that I am particularly proud of. But at that point in time when I was searching for .in Domain Names, it seemed the easiest to setup, use, configure and pay. And then, not to relive the misery of paying up every year, I paid upfront for 4 years. So I am pretty much stuck with it. I know geeks amongst you would tell me that there is a way to transfer your domain, but well it was too much hassle for me (the “why fix it when its not broken” mentality).

So I silently lived through the ex-CEO Elephant killing saga, I have managed to ignore all the suggestive Go daddy advertisements that became so famous, and then finally I turned a blind-eye to their SOPA debacle followed by the mass exodus of people off Go daddy along with Wikipedia. Last week, they had a major outage in which all of their DNS went down for a couple of hours (which also means my blog URL was not accessible). Looking at the daily traffic that I get on this site, I am sure no-one really had any problem for my site.

Anyway, so today I was seriously considering that I should switch and then I had enough time to sit and figure out this domain transferring thing.

I visited the Go daddy website, and I was amazed to see that they are trying hard to reinvent themselves. The advertisements below sort of suggest that they wish to go away from their flamboyant image, and show their “serious” side. So rather than coming up with a serious campaign straight away, they have put up a bunch of “inside-outside” commercials that look pretty cool. I felt its a good way to show “change” without really ignoring what you earlier stood for.

Since I don’t intend to put the old Go daddy commercials on my blog, and I am sure you are curious what they were. Please go to YouTube and see them for your own pleasure.

I am always impressed by marketing and by companies that try to reinvent themselves (yeah and I am not that brand conscious). So I guess, I will be back to my lazy self, and give them at least few more months to bring about a change.

F1 Mindmap

I have been using Mind maps to handle anything and everything from To-do lists, Projects, Meeting Agendas, Action Items and Brainstorming. I got introduced to Mind mapping during my MBA when one of my professors used it to arrange his lectures and distribute the topics in a visual cognitive way for us to track and understand new concepts as he introduced in the lecture. I feel Mind maps are super cool if you are able to recall things visually like me. Now, over the years, I tried out many mind mapping tools (like XMind, Freemind etc) and have now settled for an online utility called Mindmeister. Its web-based and you can share your maps, set alerts, take them offline, see them on your phone and do a whole lot of cool things that kinda satisfy all my requirements.

Now, with the F1 race coming to Singapore next week, followed by India in October end, I am sure we all are gonna be focused on F1 over the next few months. However, there have been a lot of driver changes, new teams and new venues in F1 in the last 2 years, and I am sure many of you have some problems in remembering all of them.

To introduce you (my dear readers) to Mind mapping, and help you track F1, I have put together a Mind map that lists drivers, their teams, their countries, helmets and their current standing. I will keep updating it as the season progresses. If you guys think you have stuff to contribute to the map, please feel free to edit or change it.

 

 

Welcome to the wonder world of Mind mapping.

Extending the battery life of HTC One XL

Disclaimer – This is a beginner’s guide. I am no Android Geek. The statements are based on the links I read on the internet. Please do not blame me for factual accuracy. I am just helping out people who, like me are struggling with this problem.

I bought amongst the latest Android Phones in the market that is 4G/ LTE compatible. HTC One XL. You can read the review here. I pretty much agree with what is written in the review, and I was mighty impressed with the phone, other than one thing – its battery life. Some mysterious force made its 1800 mAh battery drain in less than 10 hours. Now, I was expecting the battery life to be low, but less than 10 hours was unacceptable to me. Like all noobs out there, I did my research on the internet and here is what I concluded:

1. LTE is not completely implemented everywhere in my area. Most providers are just starting so the signals for LTE are not strong. When the phone is chosen to run on LTE, the phone desperately latches on to a not-so-strong LTE signal and consumes more battery. The easiest way to recognize this is – most places your signal strength wont be great when your phone displays “4G”. 
2. LTE is currently unable to handle calls and SMS and uses a battery intensive way to handle them (active dual-mode operation for CDMA and passive dual-mode operation or CSFB for GSM networks). This seems to be a temporary arrangement till they figure out a better way to do it (VoLTE?). But all this active switching between networks causes the battery to drain up to two times faster than it generally would.
3. If you are not using LTE and do not need blazing fast speeds all the time (even while your phone is on stand-by and you are not surfing) its better to switch down to GSM/WCDMA than be at LTE/ 4G speeds. This makes the phone stop doing the dual-mode operation thing that keeps doing otherwise. Result – your battery lasts long, real long. I have been able to get my HTC One XL run for 2 days without a recharge by doing this.
4. And here is a quick way of turning off your LTE. Go to your phone’s Settings > Mobile network > Network mode > Choose GSM/ WCDMA auto. That’s all that you need to do.

Passwords in the Cloud

So I have been generally paranoid about keeping my passwords in the cloud. However, over the last few days I have figured a way to keep them in the cloud in a relatively safer way. Mind you, its relatively safe. Relative to what you ask? Well, relative to keeping them in clear text on an excel spread sheet on your computer, or better still, relatively safer to having the same password (or a slightly varied password) for all your accounts. If you haven’t been scared about how insecure your passwords really are, or have been lazy enough to commit the two cardinal sins of managing passwords – reusing them, storing them/ writing them; its high time you do something serious about it. How about, you take a 10 minute break from whatever you are doing now, and follow what I say in this blog post. For once? Please?

Why do I need passwords in the cloud?

For a very long time, the primary computer from where I accessed the internet was my home PC. So I have been using Keepass for more than 6 years now and it has been really good. My passwords were securely encrypted in Keepass on my computer and that's about it.

Then came a time that I had to have passwords to access multiple sites and servers in office. So it became imperative that I have Keepass in office to store my passwords. Now having two copies of anything leads to inconsistencies. So I devised a way to sync my passwords every week. The solution was deceptively simple but cumbersome. I setup SyncToy on my home PC and I carried Keepass on a SD card in my office Laptop. So each time that I had to sync, I removed the SD card from my office Laptop and plugged it into my Home PC and synced them together. Synctoy is a very nifty and free Windows utility to delta sync two hard drives. If you are not using it to backup your PC, may be you should.

Now I have reached a stage that I need my passwords on my Smartphone, my Office PC and my Home PC. Now I can no longer do the SD Card thingie. So the easiest solution was to go cloud.

Having a Cloud based pure play password manager would be too big a risk. For all hackers out there, it would be a treasure trove of information waiting to be hacked into. Maybe that's why a pure cloud based password manager never came into being (till now).

How do I cloud-enable my password manager?

These days there are a lot of cloud-based storage options available. There is the SkyDrive by Windows, Apple iCloud, Google Drive and of course Dropbox. All these solutions let you store files in the cloud. They have been relatively secure. Yeah I know Dropbox got breached last month, but well it was not really a breach on their servers. And the beauty of this solution is that – the vulnerability is not on the cloud, but its on your Keepass encryption (or its distributed across your device, the cloud, your passkey and your master password). Getting access to just one of the things mentioned will not compromise your password security.

Here is the solution step-by-step:

1. Download Keepass on all your computers (I use the portable version, but that's just me)
2. Signup for and download one of the cloud-storage options like Dropbox on all your computers
3. Create a private folder on the cloud-storage provider
4. Create a new password database (or copy your existing database) onto the private folder in the cloud
5. Point Keepass to access that database on the cloud on all your computers(as long as your cloud-storage app is visible in Windows Explorer, Keepass can access it)
6. Create a Key File in Keepass and physically copy it to all your computers (this is a one time activity). Mind you, do not keep your Key File on the cloud.
7. Choose a strong password for Keepass (And here are tips for it)

And you are ready to rock!

How secure is the solution?

So the security of the solution really depends on how safe is Keepass and how complex is your master password. Keepass is relatively very safe. As of now, it has military grade encryption capabilities and its open source (so everyone can see vulnerabilities in its code). If you are worried, you should read this and this.

Breaches can occur at 2 places – in the cloud and on your computer.

A cloud breach occurs when someone gets access to your cloud-drive. Even if they get access to your password database on the cloud, it will be computationally impossible for them (as of 2012) to hack into it without your master password (which is in your brain) and the Key File (which is physically located on your computer).

A bigger breach is when someone accesses Keepass on your computer. In that case, they can theoretically access your cloud-drive and your Key File. But still the master password remains in your brain. It is computationally very difficult (provided you are not a spy or a government agent) for them to break your Keepass database as long as you had chosen a strong master password. Of course if they tie you to a pole and make you confess your password by unmentionable means then you are compromised. But I am sure if you reach that stage, you will have other things to worry about (like your life) than your passwords.

That's it from me. I would like you to comment on this one if – you have doubts or you feel there is a big gap in my logic.

Measure!

Disclaimer: I am no nutritionist. Have had a weight problem all my life. This is not a post about losing weight!

“What gets measured gets done” – Peter Drucker

Time and again I am impressed by how many times Drucker’s philosophical statement actually comes true. Right from KPIs measured by businesses to improve their operational processes right up to tracking your personal spending to control those aimlessly bought items just because you were bored and had nothing to do; Drucker keeps reminding me that for absolutely anything that I wish to achieve in my life, I need to measure it first.

I have been struggling with my weight since, well my birth. So much so that being fat has been a part of my life (yeah and my blog). About 6 months ago I decided that I go from very fat to moderately fat, so that I have less trouble lunging my huge self around. Being a Drucker student, the first thing I did is – bought myself an expensive digital weighing scale. To achieve my goal, there could have been many KPIs that I could have chosen (e.g. – Body fat content, Waist to Hip ratio, Pedometer etc.) but I felt weighing everyday was like the easiest thing to do.

If you look at the graph, I have been fairly consistent. Ironically the first day I started measuring, I ended up gaining quite some weight (the peak at the beginning). On and off I indulged once in a while (which is indicated by all the peaks that you see in between). But if I take the trend, I was fairly consistent with my weight loss plan, till 2 weeks ago.

Last 2 weeks I have been not measuring and my weight loss has been turned into a weight gain. My trend indicates that if I continue at my current pace, I will be back on my path to become very fat. Well, I don’t know if I will be able to counter that, but if there is one thing that I learnt from the last 6 months is indeed – what gets measured really gets done!

So, whatever you wanna do in life, it is mandatory that you set a goal, and measure yourself against the goal everyday!

The contact distribution

So, I have been backing up my contact list since today morning. Something that I used to do every year before has not been done for a long time now (3 years+). Smartphones and Google has progressively made me dumb and lazy. I have been accumulating contacts without purging the list.

Lately, I have been obsessed with analysing all this data that I keep collecting. So I thought I bombard my readers with a simple frequency distribution of my contact list.

So what do I get from this? 1 in 5 of my contacts had a name starting with S! 85% of my contacts have names starting with S, A, P, R, M, N, V, K, D, T, L, J. I am fairly confident that if you are reading this blog post your name starts with one of the 10 that I just mentioned.

Interestingly, since 2009 I made a new  contact starting with an “O” and dropped a contact starting with a “Q”.

Purging this list of 385 people was an administrative nightmare for me. I first started doing it alphabetically, and as you can see, going through the A list itself took me a while. Hence the distribution. Then I gave up and started walking from the tip of the long tail. So the last of the people who got purged were from “S”. I successfully got down my list by 26% to 283 people. Now people with names T and L are not in the top 10. I haven’t done any analysis about men vs women and Indians vs non-Indians, but I am sure that would be more insightful.

Now for people who are as frustrated as I am with all the contacts lying all around the place. Here is a simple tip – use Google Contacts. Then if you have an Android Phone, make sure that you save all your contacts by default to Google. Also make sure that you setup groups of contacts. Then religiously purge your list every year so that it remains manageable and you get rid of spurious contacts that you tend to accumulate. Enjoy.

How to setup your phone to save all your contacts to Google:

Go to Phone > Contacts > Settings > Save new contacts to > Google.

Boxer Invasion

Indian men (in my area) have taken a new affection towards boxers. Probably because they are ultra-comfortable, convenient and best suited for our climate. Or maybe because they are cheaper than buying shorts, and you can actually wear them around the house as opposed to running around in an underwear.

What is weird though is – many men actually wear these boxers in public places. So I can see men walking around casually shopping, eating, chatting and sipping coffee out there in the open in their boxers!

Men wearing boxers in public can fall into 3 categories – either they are ignorant, or are underwear models or are super cool men who don’t care what the world thinks about them.

If you are a secret undercover underwear model strutting your stuff in a boxer in public places and if you happen to read this blog, I am sorry I blew your cover. I didn’t know that you were trying to spread awareness about boxers to Indian men. I apologize.

If you are a super cool man, who doesn’t care what people think while you go about doing your stuff; beware in Mumbai you can be arrested under Section 110 of the Bombay Police Act 1951 excerpt from the act goes here:

Behaving indecently in public - No person shall willfully and indecently expose his person ill [sic] any street or public place or within sight of, and in such manner as to be seen from any street or public place, whether from within any house or building or not, or use indecent language or behave indecently or riotously, or in a disorderly manner in a street or place of public resort or in any office station or station house

I am assuming that wearing underwear in public in Mumbai can be classified as indecent behaviour?

And finally if you fall in the ignorant category, please read, understand and assimilate this blog-post and go buy some good shorts for yourself to wear in public.

Dhanyawad.

Horror-scope

I believe, there can be only types of people in this world - People who believe in horoscopes and those who don’t.

Now the people who believe – believe that whatever is told to them to be written in their fate will come true. Such people, subconsciously affect their life to bring the horoscope true.

The people who don’t believe in horoscopes, essentially believe that whatever the horoscope says cannot be true. So they subconsciously work against what is told to them to be written in their fate.

Lets say that your horoscope says you are going to die young. If you are a believer your unconscious mind will start affecting your daily routine to make you sick or put you in harm’s way. And if you are a non-believer you would take extra steps to remain healthy and out of harm’s way. So, whatever you do, you will end up changing your normal routine because of that prediction.

Essentially, horoscope is just a tool to manipulate your thinking about your fate. It’s a tool to introduce a paradox. Depending on the group that you belong to (believer or non-believer) you end up changing your true fate to fit your belief in the science of the horoscope.

De-clutter Now!

So our house is being painted for most of this month. Painting is a nightmare. The dust, the smell of primer and color coupled with the noise all day is tiring and stressful indeed. To add to all this trouble, my family has successfully managed to not throw away absolutely anything for at least 40 odd years. And I ain’t kidding or exaggerating.

So, we got tonnes and tonnes of things stacked, stuffed, neatly tucked and sometimes randomly thrown here and there all around the house. Every room has these special cabinets and wardrobes that are never opened but have things for a rainy day. Then of course there are all those trinkets that my parents and my sister collected over the years to sit and look at longingly someday (luckily, I have managed to get rid of all of mine recently). Each thing I plan to throw has a sweet memory attached to it (ignoring the fact that the memory was lying in a dark corner of the house for close to 30 years without anyone even noticing it). Things that were valuable 10 years ago, somehow never depreciate and they still hold the same value (yeah I am talking about the spider-web covered vase sitting on the top of the transom for so long!).

Finally after shouting, crying, pleading and brainwashing, my mom got ready to get rid of 2 or 3 small items in our house. But, she put a condition that I can’t throw them away, I need to donate them to poor people. Now, I know that India is a poor country and 37% of the people live below the poverty line. So, I had to somehow find these poor people and donate them stuff. Donating money is one thing, but imagine donating a vacuum cleaner to a poor person. In the last 2 weeks, I have visited NGOs, poor neighbourhoods (yeah the slum-dog millionaire style ones) and even asked random poor looking strangers to take away stuff for free. But as you guessed, I have been unsuccessful.

The moral of the stressful story? If you have not de-cluttered yet, go start doing it NOW. Stop accumulating stuff at home (just to throw it away later!). I found some excellent tips online to reduce your clutter. I stand by my earlier statement that every 6 months, vacate your house and move. Its the easiest way to frugal living!

Mosquito Magnet

Continuing with my rant on my animal attractiveness, for years I have noticed that mosquitoes love biting me. So much so that, every time I went out with a group of friends, I would be the one who would complain about mosquitoes biting while others were leisurely enjoying the trip. I am like a mosquito magnet, and if someone wants to have a good time outdoors without the hassle of applying mosquito repellent cream, they just invite me along.

Most of my good intentioned friends advised me that mosquitoes target me because I am fat. Their logic was - fat people = big = more blood = feast for mosquitoes. So apparently mosquitoes look for fat people and then they party (Yeah, once I heard a mosquito sing – “I got a feeling, tonight's gonna be a good night” - when she was biting me).

Being the gullible being I am, I meekly submitted to my fate, till I actually bothered to look it up on the internet. Apparently mosquitoes have 3 types of sensors. One of the sensors that people like me stimulate is because we emit more of Carbon Dioxide and Octen. Finally, I have figured that its not my size that attracts them (Unless you argue that Carbon Dioxide emitted by a person depends on his size!). So I blame my Octen.