Drink Sweat

I have been fascinated by this isotonic drink Made in Japan. It is called Pocari Sweat. It was introduced in the 1980s. Enough internet-ink has already been spilled over having the rather odd “Sweat” in its name. I mean, people would generally not associate “Sweat” with a drink, but well, as I said before, enough people have already ridiculed the use of sweat. The counter argument is – in Japanese culture – sweat has a rather neutral connotation as it is associated with hard work. Well so be it.

What I have been really interested in has been the first part of the name – Pocari. I always assumed that it had some meaning in Japanese and let it be. However last week curiosity killed the cat and I looked it up online. Apparently the company officials thought “Pocari” would sound cool with the sweat and so they named the drink Pocari Sweat. So its a coined word.

Now mind you. The company behind the drink – Otsuka is no mom and pop shop. Its 2012 revenue was freaking USD 14.05 Billion. That means the company is huge. So huge that they got Cindy Crawford to model for their commercial yeah with a black panther. I can’t figure out what she is trying to do there, but well that's the advertisement. Enjoy.

Cindy Crawford–Pocari Sweat

Anyway coming back to Pocari. Now Pocari suspiciously rhymes with Ocari (yeah just drop the P and say the word out loud – you got it). Ocari in the Marathi language stands for – vomit. Yeah you read it right – puke. And if you think Marathi is a relatively obscure language, well its the 19th most popular language in the world and close to 100 million people speak it. So statistically you ought to know at least one person in your life who knows someone who speaks Marathi (like me!).

I checked out Otsuka’s expansion plans and they seem close to entering into India anytime soon. I wonder how approximately 10% of our population is gonna react to this name.

Anyway, this obsession has actually made me a Pocari Sweat addict. These days the only isotonic drink that I have is, well, you guessed it right. And while writing this blog, I just popped one can down my throat. Burp. Silly consumer I am.

Workrave

Having spent countless hours in front of the computer for well over a decade and damaging my eyesight in the process, I decided to get a bit more serious about my health. Yeah, and then age is fast catching up on me, and things that looked trivial a few years ago like waking up one morning and playing badminton like crazy for 2 hours – still to be very fine the next day – have now become impossible.

People who sit for long hours in front of the computer are susceptible to RSI (Repetitive Stress/Strain Injury). The key to prevent RSI is to have a nice posture while you sit in front of the computer and to take regular breaks. Now, sitting with a proper posture may or may not be in every office worker’s hand (at least in this part of the world where investing in ergonomic equipment is the last thing on an organization’s mind). However, if there is one thing that we all can religiously do – is take regular breaks.

What is RSI and what can you do to prevent it?

Though I know that taking breaks is good for my health, when it really comes to taking breaks, I tend to either be lazy or I just forget. So, in the last few months, I have disciplined myself by using an open source software – Workrave.

What Workrave essentially does is – at pre-configured intervals – it reminds me to take breaks. And if you configure it well, it can actually blank out your screen from doing something else. At present, I have configured Workrave to make me break for 15 seconds every 15 minutes and then make me take a 3 minute break at the end of the hour. I know these are lower than recommended break times, but better small breaks than no breaks.

After having used it for more than a month, I have realized that now I am regularly taking breaks and stretching, something which I never did that well before.

If you happen to download and use Workrave, two things that I would remind you to configure in Workrave are:

1. Configure Workrave to “Block input and screen” during breaks so that you don't cheat and continue reading during your breaks!
   
2. If your work involves more of reading (or watching YouTube videos) remember to turn on the “Reading mode” (by right-clicking on the cute sheep icon in the notification area of your task bar). That way even if you are not typing or using the keyboard, Workrave will remind you to take breaks.
   

Happy healthy working!

Scoop

I have been having this one brand of breakfast Cereals on and off for more than 6 years now. Considering that I eat like 1 box a week and assuming I at least consume 30 boxes a year (costing approximately $7 a box) I have spent more than $1260 on this brand. So much for brand loyalty.

Anyway, last few years I have noticed that they have a white sticker posted on the front-bottom of the boxes and always wondered why they were. My investigative senses made me try to carefully peel the stickers off to have a peak inside (if you don’t want me to see, then I am really interested to see!) but the adhesive they use is so good, that it always managed to tear off the writing beneath it. After a while I gave up, and became a drone doing my morning routine without bothering what the sticker stood for.

However, yesterday after so many years, I finally saw a box on my supermarket’s aisle without the sticker. I was exhilarated. I felt like a adolescent seeing porn for the first time. And what did I read? – “No high fructose corn syrup – unlike Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats Bite Size Cereal” on the box. I was mighty disappointed. I mean for last few years you have been hiding this meagre detail from me by putting that big bright white sticker? I mean, all this excitement for nothing?

Anyways, now that I managed to see it, I did my own little research on why it was covered. Apparently, the only place that Post manufactures this brand of Cereals is in the US. Their packaging is also done in the US and from there these boxes are shipped all over the world. Unlike some other brand of cereals (e.g. Quakers) who actually have a different Asia-specific packaging.

In the US – you are allowed to name your competitor in your advertising and most countries in this part of the world, don’t let you name them. So all this while, these white stripes were to comply with local advertising regulation. And – life will never be the same for me again! Anyway to curtail my disappointment (and yours), see the Coke vs Pepsi commercial which shows both brands!

Boxed men

Put a guy and a gal next to each other and it indicates a toilet. Put a bunch of guys standing next to each other inside a box and that indicates an elevator. Ridiculous symbols. Being the pro-feminist I am, I think these symbols are unfair to women. Does this mean women cannot take elevators? Huh? Or does it mean that only women in pants can go in?

And why did I have to write a blog post about this? Well, today I was in a hurry to attend nature’s call. Subconsciously I followed the symbol of many men standing in a box as a crowded restroom. Only when I reached the destination I figured I was following directions to an elevator all the time. Not only was that embarrassing, but also it tested my limits of self-control.

I suggest we change the elevator symbols to have all women in a box (or, if we are in Scotland, its all men wearing kilts). That way silly men like me won't follow it and it will show how we respect women and let them take the lifts while we take the stairs.

I always felt that a better symbol for toilets would be showing a man sitting on a toilet (for added effect we could show a trouser crumpled around his ankles). Its unmistakable and no one can ever confuse it for an elevator.

Lazy consumers

I have been on twitter since the time I heard about it (around 4 years ago?). But I never really tweeted. 140 characters to express myself is just too less for a talkative guy like me. Also I am not funny enough to sound witty in less words. However, the tweets I found interesting, I did re-tweet them. After a while, I thought I clean up my tweet history and so for major part of the 4 years, my tweeter timeline shows 0 tweets with occasional re-tweets popping up for sometime then going back to 0.

But does that mean I don’t use twitter? NOT at all. I love twitter, its my main source of information after my Google Reader. Everyday religiously, I login to twitter from my phone and read all the tweets, follow links and get my updates. My phone shows that after Facebook (the perennial time drain!) twitter is the app that consumes most of my bandwidth!

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is – not tweeting doesn’t mean that I don’t “use” twitter nor does it mean that my account is “fake” or “spam”. I am very much an active consumer. Twitter for me is like watching TV or YouTube – I don’t produce my own videos or programs but I actively consume it.

Now there are new websites in the wild that classify users into spam or real accounts depending on the following criteria:

“On a very basic level spam accounts tend to have few or no followers and few or no tweets. But in contrast they tend to follow a lot of other accounts”.

That’s unfair and wrong on many accounts and I wanted to protest, till I figured there are people similar to me. 40% of tweeter users actually just read tweets. We are an active part of the ecosystem and twitter happily acknowledges our existence and is trying hard to monetize us. Relieved I am. Now I can be peacefully shy on twitter and be completely worthless on blogger! Sigh the pressures of a social life!

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!