The Korean Tourism Commercial

 If you are an advertiser showing videos on YouTube in the 6-10 seconds before the actual video starts, your life is tough. First of all, you are interrupting someone's binge watching and that someone is more interested in looking at the countdown to "skip" your advertisement, than looking at it. If you are able to attract attention when the odds are against you, then I really think you are awesome at your game. I came across this random video about Korean tourism while binge watching YouTube and for some reason, I find it so addictive that I never skipped the commercial.

The ultimate compliment though is that, I actively searched for the commercial and also the song, the artist, the lyrics etc. etc. Now before I proceed, I want you to experience the commercial:

Now that the commercial is out of the way, I did some research on the song it is called "Tiger is coming". It is sung by this Korean band called "Leenalchi". The lyrics translated by a YouTube comment go like this:

A tiger is coming down, a tiger is coming
A beast is coming down
through the deep valley in the pine woods

His body is freckled,
His tail is stuffed
which is longer than a grown man's fathom.

Making the high hills shiver,
his front leg is like a quiver,
his hind paw is like a jar,
Both ears are ripped ajar.

Brandishing his sickle claws,
'Charrrr!'

He splashes grass roots and pebbles.
Opening his crimson jaws,
'Worirung!' he rumbles.

Like the sky falls and
the ground settles down,
The turtle hides his head and
on the ground bows down. 

Of-course I am no Korean, and I have not "verified" this from any Korean. It's just a random YouTube comment by this person.

If you wish to see their live performance of the same song, you should check this video out:

The dance is performed by this group called "Ambiguous Dance Company". You can see a lot of their videos on YouTube. Finally to top it off, I find another commercial by the same group quite nice and catchy as well:

Anyway, hats-off to the complete campaign! Everything is amazingly choreographed (literally and figuratively).

How to get rid of your dandruff in a week?

 If this sounds like a click bait article, I am sorry. I thought I share something I found out a couple of years ago and it seems to have worked for me till today.

Now before you proceed, here are some disclaimers:

• I am not a doctor or a dermatologist or even remotely associated with the medical profession
• People on the internet can write anything they want, and you should not trust them
• This is my personal experience, and everyone's experience can be totally different
• I am not being paid to write this blog post (or any other) so this just my honest opinion

Okay, with that list out of the way - let me tell you my story. As a school going kid, and subsequently through out my life, besides my weight and my looks the other thing I was always embarrassed about was my dandruff problem. I have had dandruff in my hair for as far back as I recall. I tried a lot of remedies - medical, Ayurvedic or advertised. Nothing really ever worked for me. Anti-dandruff shampoo was always a part of my grooming arsenal, and it just managed to sometimes reduce it, but I never really got rid of it. I tried crazy remedies like egg, beer, yogurt, shampoos with ZPTO on my head and other than the awkward smell, it didn't impact much.

 

A few years ago, someone advised me to use the Selsun 2.5% suspension shampoo to wash my hair everyday for a week and then subsequently alternate days for a month. The shampoo contains Selenium Sulfide. And it is apparently not available over the counter in USA. However, I can get it in a pharmacy in Singapore without a prescription.

My dandruff has completely disappeared ever since. I switched to using their Selsun Blue version once a week subsequently, and it dandruff has not recurred again. I am not "absolutely" sure if its really the shampoo or my diet, or my horoscope, or climate change, or just the fact that I am dangerously close to my 4th decade on this planet, and apparently dandruff is not an old person problem.

So all the best!

From Bed to Desk (and back)

 It has been more than 4.5 months since I started working from home. Initially what was a novelty has now become mundane. This means the excitement of the false sense of "more time" (because of no travel and no commuting) is now gone. What was perceived to be more time initially for the first few weeks has been now quickly taken over by "more work" and procrastination. Now to be fair, in the initial few weeks of the pandemic, I did get a daily routine going on exercise, mental enrichment and education. However, now that's all gone.

My days now start with work right off the bed and working all the way to the wee hours of the night when I get exhausted and drop back into the bed. Many a times lunch and dinner is hurriedly gobbled while taking a work call.

I hope and pray that this is not the case for you, and I wish that things change for the better for me fast! Late to bed and early to rise makes Girish unhealthy, irritable and annoyed.

Philanthropy and the wisdom of Bill Gates

Growing up (especially during my Engineering days and the early part of my career), I was a big believer in the Open Source Software philosophy. In the late 90s and early 2000s the biggest perceived enemy of Open Source was Microsoft and by association Bill Gates. I was not very fond of him as a starry eyed under-graduate student.

Post my MBA, I wanted to work for an Open Source software company and change the world. Given the circumstances, that never happened and I went into (or rather continued) in commercial closed-source software.

Anyway, over the last decade, I have been passively following (online), listening and reading about Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation and my opinion about him has changed leaps and bounds. I have come to respect and admire him for the work he is doing globally on things that most Governments and Corporations are turning a blind eye towards. I feel like, he stepped away from the corporate world at the right time, and decided to change the world.

He has shot to prominence in this pandemic. One of the reasons being - his ominous TED talk in April 2015 where he spoke about such a pandemic coming in our lifetime and the deadly consequences of it.

Flash forward to 2020, with all the negativity and uncertainty around us it's refreshing to hear Bill Gates' views on the potentially positive outcomes we might have "after" this pandemic, on the world order.

If we stop being so toxic with each other on social media and so divisive about all our ideas (us vs. them thinking) we can sit back and look at the last 100 years of human progress and see that humanity has stepped up to any challenge always and worked to solve it together. For e.g. we have not had a catastrophic world war after 1945, we managed to not annihilate the planet through a nuclear war, we almost eradicated a lot of common diseases and infant mortality has been all time low. Now, if we put all our creative brains together and work towards solving problems of today - climate change, COVID-19 etc. we can leave this world a better place for future generations.

DOMS

Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) is the pain in your muscles that sets in 24-72 hours after you have done a strenuous exercise. I have been slightly more active at home these days than before, and I realize that my body reminds me that I got muscle groups in my body that I have never ever used before.

I have now increased my "remote coaching" sessions to 3 times a week (Mon-Wed-Sat) which means (Tue-Thu-Sun) typically are my DOMS days. One more reason to TGIF. After almost 4 decades of disuse, some of my muscle groups are now waking up to the reality that they were never used.

There is no "known" cure for DOMS other than enduring it and letting your body heal by itself. The coaches recommend "Foam Rolling" but that just adds more to the misery. I look forward to the day when I have used most of my muscle groups so that they stop getting sore all the while!

Till then, I shall take this opportunity to thank my coaches for the misery.

Jump Rope Workout

Another interesting and effective cardio workout that I discovered in this pandemic is - Jump Rope Skipping. It has a very low learning curve (I picked up in matter of a few weeks) and it is quite fast to do. You can get an extremely great cardio workout in 5 minutes or less anytime of the day with almost no equipment other than the rope and no large space required.

I learnt my jump rope skills from the video below, and while there are a lot of tricks that you can do, I am still at the basic "bounce" and working on my endurance. I will highly recommend stretching and warming up before you actually start jumping to prevent any injuries.

The more I am stuck at home, the more I realize that staying fit or working out is just a matter of discipline! I can imagine skipping late in the night or early in the morning) in a hotel room on a business trip. All you really need is a rope, and it is very light and compact to carry around. So all those excuses are just my lazy brain speaking all this while!

The Big Bang Theory

So I finally completed seeing all 12 Seasons and 279 Episodes of The Big Bang Theory. I did love the series in the beginning, but towards the end it was more of me adhering to the escalation of commitment fallacy. I was just trying to reach the logical conclusion of the series without really enjoying it that much. And my subconscious mind kept telling me - you can't leave the series half way.

I calculated and it turns out to be approximately 93 hours of my life (assuming 20 minutes per episode). I took around 2.5 years to see it, so it was not exactly a binge watch. This becomes the 2nd series that I have watched completely (From S1:E1 to Season Last: Episode Last) after The IT Crowd. The IT Crowd however was much shorter and a lot weirder.

Anyway, watching the complete series of the Big Bang Theory made me think - a lot of times - I no longer enjoy a movie after reaching in the middle, but I still go all the way to the end just to "finish" it. In the recent past the only movie I stopped midway because I couldn't take it anymore was - "The Internship". And I remember forcing myself to continue to see it a bit more because it had a 6.3 on IMDB. Can't be so bad.

I think we all have this obsessive compulsion to finish the movies that we start, even if we don't particularly like them. I am going to now consciously start attempting to leave movies and series half way if I don't like them and see how it goes! Life is short, choose where you spend your time wisely! Even doing nothing is much better!

Masked

Whether you like it or not, masks are going to be an important accessory for the next several months (hopefully not years!). It's the new normal and in Singapore it has been mandatory to wear a mask if you step out of your house for the last 3 months.

I have already felt three inconveniences with wearing masks and here they are listed in no particular order:

1. If you wear spectacles, masks fog them up - Yeah, I tried a lot of internet remedies so far, and nothing seems to work. This is the most annoying part of wearing a mask - I can't see properly when I breathe!
   
2. You end up smelling your own breath - This is a minor annoyance. But I guess it's good in a way. Reminds you to brush and mouthwash regularly. I have experienced this before on red-eye flights.
3. You can't read people's lips - I find this annoying. Now that I can't see people's lips, I realize that I have been seeing people's lips to interpret what they are talking when I meet them face to face. Last several conversations, I have difficulty understanding (especially if the person is new and his/ her accent is not something that I am used to before).
   

And no list is complete if you don't do both pros and cons. So here are some of the advantages I foresee of wearing masks:

1. Masks reduce the spread of the virus - Well that's the most freaking obvious reason why everyone should be wearing masks in this pandemic. I am amused/ worried and downright angry that we are debating whether we should wear masks now!
   
2. Face recognition software will have to now play catch-up (a-bit) - If you have not been living under a rock, you must have realized by now that facial recognition software is amazingly accurate. Just try Google photos for a few days, and you will realize. If Google is this great, the big-brother cameras watching you all the time on the street, must be 100x more intelligent and recognizing your faces and tracking you. I hope with the masks, the facial recognition software will need to be tweaked a bit, and so I think we might have a few months of anonymity on the street before they catch-up at recognizing us on the street again.
   
3. Finally I have a fashion accessory for my face - My favorite clothing brand is making masks. So are a lot of high-fashion brands. It's a matter of weeks before which we all will start wearing designer masks and make a statement, just like how we currently make statements with our clothes, shoes and watches.
   

Auto Switch-off Internet

If you are having broadband internet at home, there is a high chance that you never ever switch off your router. Which means your Wi-Fi signal is always available. Besides reducing the life of your equipment and wasting electricity, I am not sure whether it is an ideal condition to leave your internet running all the while 24x7. So if you are someone who is worried about it like me, here is a simple solution:

There are these cheap mechanical power timer outlets that are available that can be programmed to switch off for specific hours everyday (they are simple 24 hour timers and you can program them to switch off power to any appliance that is connected to them for designated hours). I have mine set to switch off my TV and Router every night from 11 PM to 7 AM. The advantage? Not only do I save electricity, but it forces me to go off to sleep at a fixed hour every night (TV and Internet are the biggest time wasters anyway), even if I am in the middle of a Netflix drama or surfing aimlessly some random YouTube videos.

I would highly recommend you buy these. Or if you have the budget, you can buy the electronic ones that can be programmed to follow a weekly schedule (Mon-Sun, 24 hours - so you could set it to switch off on weekday afternoons when you are not at home and change the hours for weekends - if you wanna binge watch Friday nights). Eco-friendly and help you to be disciplined!

5 Tips for Remote Teams

The whole internet and also my workspace seems to be freaking out about working remotely and working from home. It has been 2+ months now that most of us are locked up at home and working remotely. Having an Asia-Pacific wide work role, I just realized that I have always worked remotely with geographically dispersed teams and other than the fact that I am spending a lot more time physically at home, nothing really has changed work-wise. My workload has of course increased in the pandemic, but I don't think there is any drop in me and my team's work efficiency.

I believe you must have already read a lot of articles by now about leading remote teams, so here is my list for you:

1. Communicate a lot more and a lot often - Unlike when you are sitting next to each other in the same office, casual conversations do not happen remotely. So make sure you as a manager make it a point to talk to your team much more often and over-communicate.
2. Do video calls - While this sounds creepy, our brain is still wired to interpret other people's emotions by looking at their faces when they are speaking. It is bit of an effort for some people as they have to "get dressed" and be "presentable" but this is the single most important thing to build rapport!
3. Use shared drives, shared folders and all the tools available to collaborate - Email is old school. While email is important, a lot of collaborative tools make it easy for multiple people to collaborate and work simultaneously on software, documents, presentations etc. Use them everywhere!
4. Track progress and items through a central repository - Trello is my tool of choice to track items that my team is working on. Choose yours, and use it de facto for all deliverables!
   
5. Do not expect people to be always online - I think this is a golden rule for building trust. Let your team work in hours that are most comfortable to them. There is no point in making them respond to emails/ instant messages instantly. Everyone is responsible and setting such unreasonable expectations just makes people more stressed and distracted.