Creative Zen

My morning routine involves listening to the radio as I go about doing my daily chores. I know many people recommend not listening to the radio first thing in the morning (why worry about the world right at the start of a perfect day?) But I like local radios – they give me a gist of news, a little bit of music and a whole lot of chatter about local happenings at the comfort of my home without really stopping me from going about doing my stuff.

Today morning, as I casually turned on my radio, it just dawned on me – My cute little radio/ MP3 player has spent 10 years with me. A decade of existence! Crazy. It comes in the “disposable electronics” category. The kind which you are supposed to throw and buy a new one every 2 years. That very moment, I decided I am gonna write a post about it.

So my MP3/Radio is – Creative Zen Nano Plus. 512MB of MP3 goodness. I bought it in 2004. Small, compact and runs on a AAA battery. I found a YouTube video for you to adore.

Creative Zen Nano Plus

I know most of you swear by your iPod. But somehow I never ever had an Apple device. I started off with a Sansa clip, quickly followed by this Creative one.

Which brings me to the point that – Creative has been making really amazing and affordable products for a long while. It however never gets that much love and attention from the tech press.

I remember, in my first computer, I had specifically requested my hardware vendor to get me a Creative Sound Blaster 16 card. And then I had a Creative Infra Multimedia system with a CD-ROM Drive and a remote from them in the computer.

Somewhere along the way, Creative lost out to the other companies in the arena. Though they still make really good speakers and headphones, I don’t see them getting the attention like Beats by Dr Dre or Sennheiser and the likes.

Anyway, besides my MP3, I still got a few speakers lying around the house that are Creative. And I hope my Creative Zen Nano Plus continues to entertain me for years to come.

Speaking assignment

Sorry for disappearing for a while. I had the opportunity to speak in a conference. The topic – Visualizing Big Data. I spent unreasonable amount of time researching for it. I had a 30 minute slot. Which meant, I didn’t have to speak more than 20 minutes. 3 weeks of after-work research for it was totally not needed.

Most of my knowledge of Visualization I can attribute to 3 individuals – Edward Tufte, Stephen Few and Nathan Yau. If you read their books and follow their blogs, you are pretty much covered as far as “talking” about Visualization is concerned.

Big data is a bigger mess. There is no formal definition for it (or I didn’t find one!). And every company and marketer twists it to their own liking.

This was the first time I was very careful about using attributions in my PowerPoint presentations. All images I used were Creative Commons (and I attributed them using the right convention). I spent a lot of time searching for the “right” images (using Flickr and Google) so that I inadvertently don’t violate any licenses. If you have been confused about proper attribution, I highly recommend reading this link.

So what did I learn? If you are the 4th speaker, people don’t really pay much attention. They are hungry and waiting for food. Most of them are also stuck to their phone or are just staring at you blankly without really listening. Also, as a speaker, it doesn’t matter how much you really understand. It is more important on how much you can simplify and convey your ideas. I still got a long way to go to be a good orator. But I had fun. And now, I am back to my lazy old self.

Learning online

If you aren’t living under a rock, then you are probably aware of the revolution that is sweeping education. It is called Massive Open Online Course (MooC). Almost every big university I know of, now has its own online course. Besides, you got the good old ones like Coursera. Finally, even SAP has got into the game with its Open SAP content. Education has been revolutionized for ever. There will be a time when people will no longer have to go to Universities to get a degree. We will all study online and study continuous till we leave for our heavenly abode.

I have been trying to study MooCs over the last 2 years. After over 3 failed attempts (in which I left the course half way – got bored or over whelmed) I finally managed to complete 5 courses now. That makes me a self-proclaimed expert. So here is what I have learnt after several botched attempts:

You have to dedicate time for studying in your week – Yup if you don’t plan and allocate time to it just like every other activity, you won’t have time to study. Make sure you plan your calendar for the week with ample time slots for studying.

You need more time to study than you think you do – Most courses say 4-5 hours of study time required per week. Trust me, they are just trying to make you feel good. On an average every week’s worth of lectures and test take me anywhere between 10-20 hours of work depending on how well I can concentrate.

Load your portable device with the lectures – Yeah, your smartphone ain’t for candy crush and Facebook only. Make time to read and listen to your MooC lectures during your daily commutes. Commutes are the best times to listen to the lectures. It is much better time spent than staring at your co-passengers.

Read the course discussion forums – Most course assignments are difficult. The forums are a treasure house of useful information. These forums are almost always well curated and well managed by the professor and the TA so spend ample amount of time to go through them and read the notes.

Practice to assimilate what you learnt – While you can clear the course and get a certificate by following what I mentioned above, online learning doesn’t ever give you the desired amount of practice that you need to master anything. So, you have to spend a lot of time beyond your course to really sit, practice and imbibe whatever you learnt.

Digital Dinosaurs

After years of vehemently denying that age is catching up, I have finally realized I have become old. I am no longer a digital native. I am a dinosaur. The kinds who live and die by the mechanical keyboards.

Mobile can never be my “first” device of choice. I do carry a smartphone and I do surf and fiddle with it all the time. But each time I have to do some “serious stuff” or write or email, I run to a secure corner, open my good old laptop with the giant keyboard and start typing. I have realized that from e-commerce, to surfing to just about doing anything else other than calling people up, I am just more comfortable with the desktop/ laptop.

While I was just about warming up to the idea of responsive websites (yeah the kinds that figure out whether you are logging in from mobile and change their layout accordingly!) I see all these mobilized millennials around me who pretend like there is nothing beyond mobiles. The kinds whose only device is a portable handheld. Who do everything from coding, shopping, flirting to eating and sleeping on their phones. I can never be like them.

I feel like the cynical grandpa who keeps telling kids about the “good old days”. The new generation of kids that are now growing up are not aware of things like – internet was not always available (you had to dial-up to it!) and that not every screen could be touched and interacted with.

Tch tch, reminds me of this famous quote by Douglas Adams. I have picked it up verbatim from his article published way back in 1999:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Confused pricing

I am sure everyone of you has come across those “souvenir photos”. The kinds that are taken before you go into a world famous attraction or the ones that are taken on top of a roller coaster just when you make your most horrible scared faces. These photos are definitely memorabilia taken at strategic places many a times by semi-professionals. Most photos are nice enough to be “considered” to be bought.

However, they are priced at ridiculously high-prices. The logic is – if you like them enough, money shouldn’t be a problem. And then, you are also covering the cost of all the other people who made a conscious decision not to buy the photo. So in a way, every photo that is purchased ends up covering the cost of 10-15 other photos that are not bought and a partial amount of profit. This might be a good business model when it was invented.

These days however, with everyone having cameras and with the proliferation of digital imaging technology, the cost of actually taking a photograph is minimal. Consequently the “value” associated by consumers with a single photograph is ridiculously low. However human beings are still souvenir hunters.

I believe that if the prices of those photos are cut down by 80 odd percentage, many more people will buy them. The cost of production of each photo anyway is ridiculously low. The current high pricing is to cover the cost of the wasted photographs. With a drastic price cut, the increase in volume should more than cover the drop in per unit revenue.

So says the wise Girish. May be a case of sour grapes. But well, definitely worth a try!

Born to sleep

A small little secret – Sometime end of last year, I read this very inspiring book – “Born to run”. The basic premise of the book is – human beings are naturally (genetically and physiologically) designed to run long distances. Our bodies can endure long distance running without any physical injuries and we can outlast most animals in endurance.

Christopher McDougall–Are we born to run?

The book inspired me quite a lot and I resolved to take up running. Besides endurance and long distance running (ultra-marathons) the book introduced me to the following concepts:

1. The Tarahumara tribe still runs extremely long distances
2. They eat chia seeds
3. They run barefoot

Like the wanna-be sportsman that I am. After reading the book (besides “resolving” to run), I went to the local grocery store and picked up a bag of extremely expensive organic chia seeds. Then I spent countless hours on the internet researching about barefoot running, zero drop shoes, Vibram FiveFingers etc. etc. The FiveFingers looked a bit too sophisticated for a guy who hardly runs a KM, so I settled for the New balance Minimus. That’s the closest I could get to barefoot without looking like a pro.

Barefoot running–Correct running technique

Anyway, come new year, I put on some ceremonial paint on my face (pretending to be a Asian – Tarahumara), got me a new set of running clothes and set my alarm to 6:00 AM in the morning to start my epic running. The only slight problem I faced was that – some lazy bum human beings (me) are also born to sleep. I snoozed myself away to glory.

It’s been 6 months since that glorious day. I have managed to not get up, not sign-up and not train myself for any of the marathons that happened in this part of the world this year. And at my current fitness level, I am sure I ain’t gonna do anything till the end of 2014 (or for eternity). Did I tell you, the shoes are still in their box and the only thing barefoot I do is walk around the house?

As for the chia seeds, I have been religiously having them everyday hoping that I might get inspired and run. Too bad I didn’t realize that though I am born to run, I am also born to sleep and born to procrastinate.

Are you human?

I guess everyone of us by now have been horrified by captchas. If you don’t know what a captcha is, or if you ever wondered why you were asked to type numbers or letters from a super difficult image, well that was because the website wanted to verify that you are a human and not a bot (a program meant to go create millions of accounts automatically – thereby crippling the website).

I have noticed that captchas are becoming increasingly complex. It is sort of obvious because computers have become excellent at character recognition. What that means is – now only highly complex images with highly distorted characters can’t be recognized by computers and their algorithms.

But the reality is – such images can also not be easily recognized by humans. Case in point is the image below that I got lately cause my email account got blocked. I couldn’t get the captcha right for several images after several tries and the website concluded that I am a bot and blocked my IP address.

The dawn of the super computers is coming. I can’t even prove myself to be human. It’s just a matter of time before computers also break the Turing test.

Efficiency

These days I get to use the airport quite often, though not as much as some of you. Airports are meant to handle passenger traffic efficiently and there are levels of efficiencies that I have noticed at various airports that I have been to. The one airport that consistently beats my expectations is the Changi Airport.

Managing operations and eliminating bottle necks, especially when there is human traffic involved, looks like a very difficult endeavour. Airports are a classic case of too many humans coming together at the same place at the same time. In such cases, effective operations management is very important for passengers to have a pleasant experience.

The two places where other airports generally have queues for Departure are – out immigration and security. Changi Airport effectively eliminates both of them by – having automated clearance – scan passport and finger and leave the country (I don’t need to see a grouchy officer and consequently avoid the long incessant queues) and then doing the security check at the Gate of boarding. Most airports that I have been to the longest queues are at immigration and security.

On Arrivals the efficiency of the airport is commendable. The fastest I have left the airport is in less than 15 minutes the only bottleneck being the speed at which I could walk. There are virtually no bottlenecks once I disembark the plane. After the automated immigration (again scan passport and finger and get into the country) the only place I slow down is to take a taxi (if I ain’t taking the public transport which is readily available in the airport!).

There was this one time when the taxi queue was longer than usual. The airport one upped its customer service by apologizing and providing free mineral water bottles to everyone in the queue. I think the efficiencies and the small friendly gestures like these have put the airport at the top for so many years. I am sure other airports are studying them and we should see more amazing airports around the globe (or there already exist many – I just haven’t been there yet).

Concert

We have a very close friend in the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and every once a while we get the chance to see a symphony or opera.

Now I am a noob when it comes to understanding music. I can’t read, sing or for that matter even understand some of the instruments. But I enjoy listening to classical music. It elicits emotional responses (sorrow and happiness) off my numb brain, makes my nerves relax and that’s what really matters.

The general audience in such concerts are the tuxedo wearing, evening gown trotting suave people of the higher societies. The kinds that insist that their wines should be at 18°C and public transport is for the general public. So I stand out (in the wrong way). Anyway, I don’t care.

I had the opportunity to go for the opening day sound-test of the Victoria Concert Hall in Singapore. Victoria Concert Hall is the oldest (1905) concert hall in Singapore and was closed for renovation starting 2010. Incidentally, I was lucky enough to go for the last concert before renovation and I made it for the first one after it’s reopening. So, well, I decided to show off and document my achievement here. At my age, these are the only kinds of things you can “achieve” [sarcasm].

So, if you have never been for a concert, I highly recommend you go for one. If the orchestra is not that famous, the tickets aren’t that expensive and the experience is just as awesome. Now see this video and imagine you are hearing them live in a hall and the music is flowing around you in it’s purest form. No speakers, no synthesizers.

Beethoven Symphony No. 9 – Ode to Joy

Lefty

Long time readers of my blog know that I am left-handed. Being left handed has it’s own quirks and inconveniences that we lefties never complain or whine about. If you are oblivious, I would recommend you go check these few links out.

So, next time when we catch up for dinner don’t think I am rude cause I choose my own seat. It’s just because I don’t wanna keep bumping elbows into you while eating. And being lefty also makes it clumsy for me to use phones, scissors, tin can openers, computer numeric keypads, spiral books, desks and all the other things that right handed people never even notice. And if you wish to see a list of all the things that are inconvenient for us to use, you should check this store “exclusively for left-handed people”.

My general experience with Asian hospitality has been quite positive. However, yesterday was a weird case. I went for this Indian buffet run by an old uncle during rush hour. The ladle kept to take the curries from the vessels were arranged such that they were convenient for right handed people to take. Now, I don’t really mind the way they are kept, I am used to the righty-centric view of the world. Just that after taking my portion I accidentally kept it in a way that a left-handed person would keep. (Imagine how you would take curry from a vessel if you were right handed. Now change your hand and imagine how you would take if it’s your left hand)

The old uncle who was standing behind the counter got all ballistic on me. He accused me of slowing down the chain and making it inconvenient for other people! How rude. Though it was completely unintentional, I meekly apologized and walked on.

Only later when I thought about the incident I realized that it was because I was a lefty that I kept the ladle that way, and I inconvenienced the right-handed world. I realized I am a minority and even I am unknowingly ostracized against. Sigh. Life is tough! Lefties of the world – please unite!