Guide to a good sleep onboard

Most of my adult airline travel life has been spent on uncomfortable economy or budget class seats trying to catch a few winks before I get sucked into the dreaded customer meetings or work on the other side. Having worked in not-so-well-to-do companies, I have never had the luxury of traveling a day in advance to recuperate or travel anything better than the "cheapest seat on the cheapest possible airline at the last available minute to the destination".

Anyway, all this misery has taught me that it is vital to be able to sleep on an airplane. The worst I can do on the other side of my journey is doze off in an important meeting or presentation. Over the period of last several years, I have slowly and steadily improvised and figured out ways to catch up on those precious winks. While many well-to-do business travelers insist on dressing up while traveling, I am completely against it. Formal clothes aren't comfortable enough to sleep on an economy or lower class seat. If you insist on dressing up for your journey, I am mighty sure you are the upper class snob. Period.

So how do you get the precious sleep? Here is Girish's guide to airline sleeping:

1. Dress as comfortably as possible. As a guy, I have gone down to wearing extremely comfortable lounge pants, a t-shirt and a hoodie (or sweater).
2. No accessories, no wallets, even specs go into the cabin baggage. Wear removable shoes with socks.
3. Take a window seat so that you are not obligated to get up to let go off any passengers for their bio-breaks. You go in there and stay there till you have to get up. No one else can bother you.
4. Wear a balaclava or a knit cap on your head such that it can be pulled down to cover your eyes and ears when sleeping. Not only does it help you to keep warm but it also forces you to sleep (you can't open your eyes if the cap's fabric is on them).
5. Carry a medical face-mask to cover your nose and mouth. Not only does it provide some level of protection from the perennial germs lurking in the aircraft, but also it helps you to sleep (by not drying up your mouth and face).
6. Finally, the only thing you do once you get inside the airplane is - sleep. That's it. Wear your seat belt and sleep. No reading magazines, no watching television, no chit-chatting with neighbors. And no caffeine since 2 hours before your flight. Don't wait for the flight to taxi/ take-off/ announce random weather news or duty-free items. When food shall be served, the stewards will wake you up.

But if you travel higher classes, kindly ignore my advise and enjoy your flight. Good night. 

Overwork from Home

In the decade+ years of work that I have put in my life, I have hardly ever worked from home. I have supported remotely, worked at a customer's place but have generally never been away from my colleagues working alone from a place of residence.

For some reason, I had to do that for a week last month, and it was a stressful experience. Now let me qualify first. We are a very lean organization. Absolutely everyone of us is over worked. So the physical location doesn't really matter as everyone has tonnes of action items and deliverables pending. My management is not into micro-managing us and nor do I micro-manage the people I am responsible for.

Anyway, there is this unknown pressure on me (guilt maybe) that I have to over deliver and be more productive if I am at home. All the 5 days I put in more than 12 hours of work a day (skipping meals) and starting at 07:00 AM in the morning cause I was working across time zones. The entire experience has left me exhausted and I dread working from home again.

Being at a workplace, you take breaks, you chit-chat with colleagues and generally have a lower stress level than being all by yourself. I can only imagine how people pull-off work from homes this regularly.

Lame reasons

So I managed to disappear for more than 5 months from blogging last year. Besides the usual excuses of - lazy, no mood, no time, writer's block, blah blah - one of the major reasons why I stopped blogging was - Windows Live Writer.

As ironic as it may seem, my favorite tool to write blogs was the reason I couldn't write them anymore. Windows Live Writer is not available for Windows 10, and there apparently are no plans from Microsoft to continue the product. There were rumors that Microsoft would open-source it. But I haven't read anything new. This happens to be a repeat of the emotions I went through when Google pulled the plug on the Google Reader.

Anyway since the beginning of this year, I have started writing into the online composing option of Blogger, and this is the result. So not much difference for you, but some learning curve for me.

In the short 10 years that I have been using Software in my daily life 4 products have died on me:

Microsoft Money - I replaced it with GnuCash
Google Reader - I replaced it with Feedly
Windows Live Writer - I replaced it with the Blogger online compose option
TrueCrypt - Haven't found a reliable replacement yet

I am sure there will be a lot many more deaths in years to come. Learning never stops!

Exercise vs. Diet

Just like everyone else out there struggling with their weight, I had this question bothering me for close to a decade. Eventually a few years ago, I sorta figured out that improper eating has a lot more detrimental impact on your weight than proper exercising can undo it.

Simply put, it is easy to lose weight by proper eating and no exercising, but it is very very difficult (or impossible) to lose weight by proper exercising and improper eating. As an Engineer, I consider this as a very simplistic - Input - Output = Excess Weight problem. If your calorie intake is more than your daily calorie requirement, then you simply end up gaining weight (the excess calories get stored in there). And you can't really burn that much calories off by just exercising, unless you are a full-time athlete or a person who does extremely strenuous physical work all day.

I came across this video that explains this simple concept beautifully, and I thought it's worth sharing:

Anyway, for all you diet skeptics out there, who will be prompt to point out that one friend who is very lean and eats a lot, I just have to say this: not all bodies are equally efficient. Some of us are blessed with a super awesome metabolism, that manages to convert each and every calorie consumed, into a calorie that can be used (100 calories in = 100 calories that can be used by the body). These some of us have a natural tendency to grow fat if we don't take care of our diets.

The lean over-eating people are blessed with bad metabolism. They can eat to their heart's content, but their bodies can't convert all those consumed calories into useful ones. Though we can be envious of them, we have to live with the fact that our bodies are just very efficient. Had we been cars, people would have loved us for our fuel efficiency.

And to end this blog post, I would like you to visit this link, where they have visually shown how 200 Calories of a few food items look like. See. Ruminate.

Fall from grace

I have had a carry-on bag from a certain company (let's call it (S)) since 2004. It's quite worn out now, but it stood the test of time and traveled with me absolutely everywhere I went for more than a decade. I loved it a lot and decided that when I retire it, I would go with a (S) again. So, last year, I got a replacement (S). This new one (though quite expensive for my pay-scale!) didn't last me even the first trip. The wheels are all wobbly and it is very difficult to drag around on airport carpets.

However, I can understand one-off products can have defects and I forgave (S). I needed a new back-pack and I decided to go again with a (S). This laptop back-pack gave away yesterday. The handle tore less than a year of using it. Now, I am very disappointed.

I don't think it is appropriate for me to shame the brand. I am sure they have millions of other satisfied customers (like I was before) and me getting 2 defective products back-to-back is just my bad luck.

However, I just feel that as a company, you work hard to build your reputation. And then you deliver on it (the way they did with the first bag that I bought back in 2004). But later, cost pressures and other strategic initiatives come in the way of delivering your core brand promise. And you start cutting corners. May be by low cost manufacturing or by reducing the steps in your quality assurance process. Whatever is the case, once a customer is disappointed, you lose them forever. I probably won't give them a 3rd chance with my hard earned money.

Phone calling etiquette

We have reached a point in human evolution where the phone has become an integral part of our life (or may I say body?!!) and the primary function of the phone is no longer calling. It's web messaging (Whatsapp, Viber, Skype, WeChat or whatever you fancy!)

We have reached a stage where even calling a friend up, requires you to first check their availability on their favorite web messenger and then scheduling and re-scheduling multiple number of times - the innocuously simple act of voice chatting with your best buddy.

I have been wanting to call this very close set of my friends for a while (6 months!) and we just can't seem to make time. Never in my life has this happened before. In the beginning of the 21st century, you just randomly called your friends and see if they are free (It sounded like - "Ring, ring" "Hey! Wassup? How's life? You free to gossip?" - and then we went on and on and on!). If not, you just call them again. So simple! Now the more connected we are virtually, the less we talk to each other.

Sigh! Technology, you were supposed to be an enabler not a dis-abler!

Being Nice

You are nice because you can't be evil.

Being nice is thus more of an intrinsic thing. So, when the people who you are nice to, do not acknowledge your being nice, then don't blame them. Being nice is a completely selfish intention. However altruistic it may be. You are either nice because you can't be bad, or you are just too bothered about what the society thinks of you. Either way, the recipient of your nicety has no business returning your favor.

So next time if you are unhappy with a person because he or she didn't bother to be nice back to you because you were nice to them - remember this advice.

Fixing the forward head posture

So by now most of us are in the 15th year of carrying a cellphone around and some of us have used smart phones for more than 5 years. This means we have sent 100K+ SMS/ Whatsapp and other forms of messages on the small screen and have spent days (literally) peering down on our screens. All this by now has caused some of us to have forward head postures depending on how bad our posture was to begin with.

I am a victim of this posture problem and have been actively seeking out information to correct it. I will say, I am better off now than I was a few months ago, but well, I still have a long way to go. Now there are hundreds of exercises that you can do for improving your posture. And each one of them has their own benefits. I found this one particular set of exercises very useful to add to your repertoire of stretching exercises to do everyday to fix your forward head posture. This by means, may not be the only exercise, and be very cautious of taking medical advice from me (standard disclaimers apply!).

2016 Simplified

Hello people. Sorry for the extremely long disappearance. I was hiding under a rock. Procrastinating and waiting for things to happen. Which, they never do. And living your life fully requires "not waiting".

So, I am back again to blogging. Here is wishing all of you a very happy 2016. And my resolution this year is a rather short and terse one. It is to:

Simplify

Yup. I have decided to focus my energies on simplifying my life and de-cluttering it (further). If things go as planned, you shall get to read a lot of stuff about simplifying from me this year. If not, we still keep in touch.

Different perspectives

One of the coolest things with my current Television channel subscription is – I get access to news channels from various countries. Besides the local news channel (CNA – Channel News Asia), I have access to the following:

1. Sky News – UK
2. CCTV News – China
3. NHK World TV – Japan
4. France 24 – France
5. Deutsche Welle – Germany
6. Russia Today – Russia
7. FOX News Channel – USA
8. CNN International
9. HLN – USA
10. Bloomberg Television
11. CNBC Asia
12. Times Now – India

The cool part of having such access is – for contentious international topics, I get to see the viewpoint of multiple parties. And that’s where it really changes your perspective about international news. I have learnt to be more sceptical, and I tend to no longer take news at its face value.

For e.g. – The way the disputes in Ukraine or the conflict in the Middle-east are covered by American news channels are far different than the way they are covered by Russia Today. Or the Asian border disputes as covered by CCTV as compared to NHK are vastly different. You get to really listen to everyone’s point of view and makes you more tolerant.

I think for everyone to have a peaceful co-existence it is important that news from different regions (or from neighbouring countries) is broadcast.