Forced self-control

The zoo in Singapore has a segment on a Sea lion's self-control. The trainer keeps a fresh juicy fish right in front of the sea lion's nose. Then she tells the audience that the Sea lion won’t eat it till she signals him to. The poor lion looks at the fish then at her and then back again at the fish. This goes on for several seconds, then she signals, he pounces on the fish and we, the audience clap! More information about this behaviour in this paper.

Sea-lion Self-control

Now for the last few days I have been consulting this Hotel. For our consulting assignment, we have been given a room to work from. And then, they serve the choicest food from the hotel (for their esteemed guests) right outside my room. Everyday morning breakfast, afternoon high-tea and evening snacks are nicely decorated and placed outside.

Then they make sure that some of that aroma comes inside so that I feel hungry. And they have put a clause in our contract which indicates “You shalt not eat whatever we serve outside”. So effectively, I see, I get enticed, but I can’t eat. And everyday when I walk past that food, I think of the sea lion. Someday, I will get my big fish too.

Neck pain saga

I take public transport everyday on my way to work. And I have been working long enough to see how people’s tastes and routines have gradually changed over time.

So I began working long long ago when MP3 players were the rage of the town. Everyone carried their own collection of personal music everywhere and entertained themselves with earphones in their ears and completely oblivious of their surroundings. Then after a few years came the handheld game consoles. People started travelling with the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP and everywhere you could see them play games. After a few years, we then got the smartphones. Initially people would Facebook and chat with their friends on the phones. But then came the games. We tried killing a lot of pigs for a while, then some of us gave up and others continued.

These days, when I travel I see everyone glued to their phone screens, maniacally playing Candy Crush Saga. In the train everyday morning, if I peek into anyone’s screen (mind you that’s just out of interest to see their progress, than anything else!) I can see them feverishly crushing candies as they tumble from above their screen.  I checked and indeed, Candy Crush Saga is the most popular game ever (May 2013). I am sure it will be superseded by some game in the future. I am also sure that if there is one disease that this generation is gonna suffer from is – chronic neck pain. We already have managed to damage our eyesight by too much eye strain and now we are complementing it by crushing candies.

Imagine if SETI could come up with a crowd sourced game that could somehow help us search for alien life forms. If it was as addictive for people, I am sure we would have met some aliens by now.

Recommendation Engines

I have always been interested in how recommendation engines decide what I might like and eventually borrow or buy on a website or guess who are my friends and acquaintances and add them to my social network. My local Library recently updated its website and as a part of its new features, it also tries to recommend titles.

Recommendations are not easy. I know that Netflix and Amazon have teams of dedicated scientists working on their algorithms to tweak it all the time. Or for that matter Facebook and LinkedIn use extremely creepy measures to figure out who should be in your network. My local library however (I guess) has chosen the easier route. What it does is – it just shows what other books were borrowed by people who borrowed the book you are looking at.

Though this kind of system can work for movies, it fails miserably for books. So when I was trying to borrow the “The data warehouse toolkit” again, it ended up showing me the following:

Now none of the books are even remotely connected to computing (forget data warehousing). It is just a sad reminder of the fact that everything you do anywhere these days gets tracked. 6 out of the 9 books recommended are actually what I had borrowed while I was reading the data warehouse book last time around. This just proves 2 things to me – the book that I am reading is not that popular anymore (cause no one else is reading it) and the other person ( the 3 other books) who is reading it has a kid.

As for me, I have a mom that shares my library card and she only reads fiction. So there you go. Books, unlike movies are read individually by each person in a family. So when Netflix recommends it assumes that the entire family sits together and watches the movie (along with a host of other statistical and creepy factors that it uses to determine your taste). However, library cards are shared across a family, and books that I read have no correlation with the ones that anyone else in my family reads.

I hope this data is not used any where else to determine my tastes. I do not read fiction at all. FYI only.

6 fruits that I discovered this year

Having been on this planet for more than 3 decades, I was of the opinion that I had already eaten or at least known about all the fruits that are available for human consumption. I mean come on, with the rapid deforestation and exploitation of the entire world, how much more have we left to discover?

Anyway come 2013, I decided to be a bit more adventurous with my eating habits and have been trying all the funny looking and unknown fruits that I can find in my local market. I am pleasantly surprised that I actually managed to discover (read eat) 6 new fruits in the last 4 months. I am sure most of you have heard or at least tried a few of them. But here is my list (I dropped out the infamous Durian because I have had it many times before):

1. Pomelo
2. Mangosteen
3. Starfruit
4. Kaki
5. Longan
6. Dragonfruit

Well nothing much to write here, other than the fact that I liked each one of them. You should probably follow the links I have provided and be jealous.

Happy

I am elated. I was struggling reverse engineering someone else's buggy code for the last 72 hours. Finally figured out what the issue was. I have been away from any form of programming for at least 5 years and it was an almost insurmountable obstacle to not only look at someone else’s code, but also in a language and an IDE that I am not at all familiar with.

Yeah, I don’t code for a living these days. I am somewhere in between. Anyway, the reason I wrote this blog post is to relive the ephemeral happiness and acknowledge the 72 hour anxiety when I was pretty much clueless of what I should be doing. I am sure I had some divine intervention, but may be that would make a blog post for another time.

I realized that I shouldn’t be seeking out happiness from other sources of entertainment while such moments of extreme happiness are such a banal everyday occurrence. I just don’t acknowledge them that often (or ever!). So if I walk around with this foolish grin, don’t look down on me.

Confessions of a jilted lover

I was in a pretty serious and committed relationship with Google Reader (GR) for the last 4 years. The news of its sudden demise affected me more than I expected it to be. Suffering from a broken heart after GR decided to dump me this way, I did the obvious thing that every jilted lover worth his grain of salt does – I got into a rebound relationship.

Now for the last 5 days, I am having a rather torrid relationship with Bloglines. Since the beginning of time (I mean since the time I discovered RSS) I consumed the internet off Bloglines. Then somewhere around 2008, Bloglines was plain neglected by its owner then, and like others, I jumped ship to GR. And now after 4 years, I complete a circle and transition back to Bloglines again. However, now its not the same old product anymore. Its hosted on Netvibes.

But, jokes apart, the death of GR has had other long lasting scars that are pretty hard to heal. Here is what I would summarize about the way I feel since this betrayal:

1. You can sign petitions, complain and whine. But if a company decides to get rid of a product, there is nothing much you can do about it. Long ago when Microsoft killed Money, I went through the same set of emotions, till GnuCash came to my rescue and I learnt Accounting.
2. On one hand the big companies want us to move completely into the cloud. So much so that we are almost back into the era of dumb terminals and hosting everything off the cloud (Chrome OS?). At the same time, these companies can recklessly close down services that don’t make money for them. How practical is it to move all my digital life into the cloud? Do I “live” at the mercy of these companies?
3. I was slowly consolidating all my online presence onto the Google Platform. Like I mentioned before, my everyday and my everything was being run off Google servers. Now with the sudden demise of GR, I am worried (worried is an understatement). I don’t think Google makes much money off me and sooner or later they will close other properties (read – Calendar, Contacts, Android, Drive, Blogger, Picasa, Feedburner). Whenever that happens, if I don’t have an alternate option, I will plain go through a digital assassination of me. The best option for people like me is to move my eggs from one basket (Google) and distribute it across the internet so that I don't rely on a single service provider (Who needs tight integration anyways?).
4. Platform independent open source software continues to remain a safe bet to trust your data with. Why Open Source? Because even if the current set of product developers decide not to continue its development, the community can take over and make the product survive. And Platform independent because – you don't wish to be dependent on an operating system either.

So, now its 2013 and think hard before you cloudify your existence mere mortals.

Cookie conundrum

One of the value-added activities that I do in my organization is – I occasionally buy cookies (biscuits) to be kept and shared in the common pantry area of my small office. We have a set of 4 cookie options that are already “approved” by our Admin and so we (the cookie buying volunteers) generally end up buying 3 varieties of them each time that we need to top up the 1 common cookie jar. Why one jar you ask? Well cause we are a small organization and the pantry is seriously short of real estate (for a lack of better words) to keep multiple jars. So 1 big jar it is – and each time that we buy, we put all the cookies into that jar. This also explains why we buy 3 of the 4 approved varieties.

On an average a top-up of the jar lasts the entire office’s cookie appetite for 2-3 weeks. Having volunteered to buy the last few times, I have made an interesting observation which I thought is imperative to share with my favourite audience (thyself).

So the approved varied of cookies can be classified into following 4 types

1. Extremely unhealthy (Finger-licking good)
2. Moderately unhealthy (Tasty)
3. Unhealthy (Occasionally eatable)
4. Healthy (Eaten only when no other option available)

Now the jar being tall with an opening on the top (duh – that’s why its a jar!) the order in which I put the cookies inside decides the order in which they can be consumed. For the accountants and computer nerds amongst you – it’s LIFO. The first few occasions, I put the unhealthy ones in the bottom and the nutritious ones on the top. This method, made our cookies last well over a month. People (I guess) waited for the other people to finish the healthier ones on the top so that they themselves could consume the tastier ones below later. Effectively, I ended up controlling people’s diets.

The second time when I did the same however, some smart-pants creatively reached the bottom of the jar and ate the tastier ones before. This time, the cookie jar lasted us a few days less.

And finally, during my last refill, I put the unhealthiest ones on the top. Viola, our entire cookie jar was over in 2 weeks.

So my dear friend what can we conclude? We all crave for unhealthy food. But once we eat unhealthy, then we try to console ourselves by eating healthy food too. All-in-all, I felt like God. I could control people’s eating habits. And, I have decided, from now on, I shall be the full-time volunteer. The next wicked thing I am gonna do is – (you guessed it right) – just buy the healthy biscuits for the entire jar and then observe how long the jar lasts for us.

R.I.P Google Reader

Sad day in the history of the internet for me today. Google announced that it is shelving its much neglected Google Reader. Reader has been my gateway to the internet, my main source of consuming information on the internet and now it is going down. Internet for me will never be the same again without it.

Almost 2 years ago, when I setup my Facebook page, I sorta knew that RSS would die its natural death. But I never guessed it would come so soon. I still actively follow 170 blogs, news and portals that will suddenly be difficult for me to access. I am sure many blogs online (including mine) will now be desolate. Gone are the good old days of Web 2.0.

Social it is, and social we shall be.

Writing helps?

After having taken a more than 1 month break from blogging, my conscience started questioning me on why do I even bother to blog. Yeah, I know I have gone through this phase before. If you look at it, everything you do in your life can be simply broken down into three things:

1. It earns you money
2. It helps you impress someone
3. It makes you happy

And blogging hasn’t helped me in either. Sorry for the over simplification. I know there are other things like self-actualization and blah blah, but I don’t think I have reached that high in Maslow’s hierarchy yet.

So here are two instances in which writing here so much and for so long helped. Well … kinda .. but it did!

So I have been put onto this crazy ass super stressful project. Without getting into the details, I had to come up with this 30 something page design document overnight for people to work on.  Under normal circumstances, I would have easily taken a week. But years of blabbering about pointless things here gave me the confidence and determination to pull it off and I did!

And in another instance, I kinda managed to write a funny little story about one of my “life experiences” that managed to win me a small little prize. Nothing fancy, but well, yeah had I not been writing here, probably I wouldn’t have pulled that off.

So, all in all, you shalt continue to read me.

The Feb that was!

Whoosh. Just realized that the entire month of February 2013 vanished right before my eyes.  I have had busy months in my life before, but never has a month passed since I started blabbering here that I didn’t get time to rant something. So with a lot of pain and melancholy I wave good bye to February 2013. Never will have anything to say about you, my dear month.

So what exactly was I doing last month? I thought hard and I thought deep. Technically, I didn’t do anything much. Stuck to my routine, travelled a bit and moved houses yet again. I mean, yeah, I again went through the routine of packing-trashing-moving-unpacking and rearranging my tents all over again. When I look at all my friends living the high-life on Facebook, posing in front of the Great Wall for breakfast then the Golden gate bridge for lunch and finally partying their night away in Rio, I wonder whether I should be even mentioning what I do.

Anyway, the highlight of last month was – I got to sit inside a aircraft parked on the tarmac of an airport for 2 hours in the blazing sun. After a while, once all passengers were sautéed they decided to open the aircraft exits (just in case all the steam released from cooking the passengers builds up pressure inside the cabin). With blatant regards for anyone’s safety the exit doors were left open with nothing whatsoever for safety. One of us sautéed veggies could have easily leaped off the door. Anyway, to add garnishing they also redirected my flight and a journey that would have not taken me more than 5 hours, ended up being a 12 hour nightmare. And did I mention that they also ran out of food? So much from an airline that I praise so much all the while.