The art of swimming

Me writing about swimming is like a Hippopotamus teaching you to fly. But then, my kindergarten teachers taught me that nothing is impossible in this world, and I am exploring the limits of it. For those of you who know me well (yeah that means all of you :) !!) the only sensible physical exercise that I can do (other than left-click and right-click of course!) is swimming. This is all thanks to my tryst with a manhole 5 years back and my subsequent knee injury (remind me to write about that fateful night someday when I am sad and down in the dumps (pun intended) :) !!).

So for the greater part of this year, I have been desperately trying to swim. This routine involves me getting in from one end of a perfectly calm swimming pool, and then subsequently creating a turbulence in the water fit enough to cause a tornado. People swimming around me seem to suddenly drift away and I bet, I look like a drain hole as pictured by a Google satellite from above :)

But then, persistence, thy name is Girish, and my quest to reach the other end of the pool continues. At times I have seen the sun rise and set above me and people suddenly looking older as I desperately try to still reach the other end of the pool. Theory of relativity at play, I bet :) !!

Finally, I decided to improve my swimming skills by asking the Internet. Yeah, and I figured one major issue in my swimming. You are supposed to roll your body with every stroke that you take while doing a front crawl stroke. What that means is that all times you are on your side and not flat inside the water. So while your left hand is stretched out your body is turned to the right. This was a MAJOR tip for me. I have been trying doing this for the greater part of this week, and I somehow seem to make it to the other end of the pool before the dawn of the next millennium.

Singapore and Project Better Place

I have been closely following Project Better Place lately (I mean for almost a year now :) !!). So what is Better Place? According to them - "Better Place is working to build an electric car network, using technology available today. Our goals? Sustainable transportation global energy independence and freedom from oil".

Project Better Place

Sounds ambitious doesn't it? Well it sure is. But sometimes it takes more than guts to get things right, and somehow I feel this is the right time to venture into such risky projects. Only time will tell how their vision works out, but I sure wish that it turns out to be a big success! Also with some very solid partnerships (e.g. Renault-Nissan are building cars for Better Place) and some very novel ideas (the rechargeable batteries can be automatically swapped at their battery exchange stations to be spread out all around the country like gas stations today!) coupled with a novel business plan (pay for the service not for the car! If my understanding of the business model is correct, they are going to give the cars for (near) free and will charge for the service (number of miles driven?)) and the cost of charging the car at the charge spots) this project is surely a poster boy of innovative thinking.

After having lived in Singapore for about 4 months now and having spent a lot of time on the Singapore statistics and the Land Transport Authority of Singapore web sites, I feel .. Singapore is a viable place to have the electric car network that Project Better place is talking about.

First things first. Singapore is a small country (4.8 Million population - 2008) and total road lengths as given below:

• Total length of expressways: 150 km
• Total length of major arterial roads: 604 km
• Total length of collector roads: 468 km
• Total length of local access roads: 2040 km
• Total road length: 3262 km

The number of cars in this country are less than 515,000. That works out to less than 9 cars per 100 people. Singapore always has had the policy to restrict the number of cars on the island by means of the COE system. Couple this with the fact that the average journey distance for a car in Singapore is only 9.6 km and electric cars can go a distance of more than 120 km on a single charge this country is the hotbed to try out innovation in electric car technology.

Finally, Better Place is trying to have the recharging stations powered by renewable energy. Singapore being a tropical country, has an average of 6 hours of bright sunshine everyday. A viable option for setting up solar panels to supply electricity for the charging stations! I wonder, as I am writing this article, if there are talks already going on between the Singapore government and Project Better Place :) !!

And why am I making you, my reader, go through all this? Well, I felt I needed to talk to someone about this, and like always I figured I can blabber only to all of you ;) !! Thank you for your patience :)

Outsourcing done right!

I have been using Sify Mail well over 8 years now, and lately their web interface was really getting completely outdated. Added to the constant spam I was getting, it was really a frustrating experience to open up my inbox anymore!

This week I noticed a sudden change in my inbox. Though I am no expert at webmail, I have a feeling that they migrated their email to "Google Apps for business". Suddenly my inbox is a lot cleaner, my spam gets filtered properly, speeds have improved, mailbox size has increased and over all my Sify Mail experience is cleaner and richer again.

I bet they must have done a lot of research before they got to this decision. What really impresses me is that despite being an IT company, they did not continue developing and supporting a service like webmail in-house, but they outsourced it to a third party that could do the same a lot better (and I bet it must be much more economical for Sify too!).

Being an ex-IT company employee, I have seen many such in-house applications developed by in-house experts which do not stand up to the ease of use and feature set of easily available third party applications (both commercial and open-source!). However they continue to be used and supported (at the expense of a complete cost-center of talented employees supporting an aging application!). Supporting an application which has no future outside the 4 walls of the company is definitely a boredom inducer for the employees and very few of them stick around to support it! Not only are you making your other employees lose their productivity by using applications that simply suck, but you are also losing good employees in the team that is supporting this dead application! I bet investing in an alternative would be much more productive and economical!

I feel that all businesses should stick to what they can do best, and not waste their time and energies on things that others can do better!

The Open book exam fallacy

My MBA first Trimester is over. Three months 4 subjects and 90 days of sleep deprivation! So what all did I learn in this trimester you ask? Well, I learnt a little bit of Marketing, a little bit of Operations Management and a lot of Financial Accounting and Financial Management. The finance courses involved more math than I did in most of my Engineering courses! For those of you who thought that MBA was for the "management kind" (read - mathematically challenged!) you are in for a rude shock!

This week I had exams for all the subjects that I just mentioned. And believe it or not all the exams happily proclaimed that they were "open book" exams!! Yippee, open book, you can actually "officially" cheat in the exams? Yeah! Get whatever notes, text books, periodicals, comics, magazines you want and write the damn paper!!

I was all happy. I carried like a truck load of books in the exam and there came the paper. First time in my life I figured that the appendix in the book is actually very important. It helps you track down words in the examination paper that you have never heard of before in your life!

That's not all. I opened all the books that I carried, but opening the books doesn't mean that you can make sense out of it right? So next 1 hour was spent trying to "comprehend" what the open book I was seeing actually meant :) !! All said and done, open book exams are like an open challenge in your face. They tell you that bring what you want, you are still dumb enough to not crack the exams :) !! Anyway, I am happy that I got over with my exams. This was like the first major exam I wrote after 5.5 years of merrily typing away everything on the computer. The first time that I picked up the pen to write, I felt like a 2 year old kid practicing his A,B,Cs!! By the fourth paper I scribbled words that didn't make much sense to me when I tried to read them back (Trivia - I had won in the handwriting competition that was conducted in my school ... 21 years back :) )!! Computers have crippled us in more ways than we can imagine!!

Anyway, I have this short 3 day vacation before I get on with my second Trimester...

Time tourist!

Hello fellow earthlings from a different era. Today I did the stupidest mistake of my life. I got into an innocuous looking enclosure that looked like an ordinary elevator and 40 seconds later, I came out 30 years into the future! To be precise, today's date is 7th January 2038.

Now I am old, tired and have lost the will to perform! Well for those of you who are interested in knowing about the future here is what it is:

• The world is on the brink of a recession yet again (yeah like it happened in 2008) its the sub-prime and derivates crisis again! (History always repeats itself! We are on a sinusoidal curve!)
• People still use computers, cars and other non-biodegradable pollutants
• Students still have to study for exams

So what you ask is the evidence that I time traveled? Elementary my dear friend, see the time and date in the elevator's display :) !!

Moral of the story: Before you get into an elevator see that its not taking you into another dimension.

If none of you found this post funny, its okay, with my exams less than a week away, my brain can only think so much :) !!

And now that I spoke about time travel, I would like to conclude my post by this particular statement by Stephen Hawking:

"Time travel might be possible, but if that is the case, why haven't we been overrun by tourists from the future?"

Isn't it like the most convincing statement against time travel? Keep thinking...

Made History

So I went for the practice session of the first ever grand prix held at night in Singapore. My first experience of watching a F1 race live. Breath taking indeed. Figured out that F1 cars are really noisy and very fast. So fast that your ordinary point and click camera can do nothing but click photos of the track sans the car.

Also figured that F1 merchandise is expensive and the city looks awesome under lights. I am saving the ticket to sell for millions of dollars 30 years from now to fund my retired life. This is what I call planning ;) !! Those of you who want to drool on the priceless artifact, it is made available here for your viewing pleasure only.

 

Thought that this picture of the track makes it look serene ... enjoy!

Cleaning the floor in 15 minutes

Well, for those of you who know me, I am a cleanliness freak and at times over do it. But my hostel life has toned me down a bit, and I had been procrastinating wet cleaning my floor for a while now.

Today there is a huge thunderstorm in my part of Singapore. Talking of weather in Singapore, I bet even if you sneeze out there in India the turbulence that you create in the air is big enough for us to have a thunderstorm here!! Butterfly effect I bet. I diligently close my room windows each time that I leave my hostel room (cause like I said before, I would never know when one of you decides to sneeze in India!). But, today, my neighbor forgot to close his windows and went for his classes. The hostel rooms are so designed that there is another door that separates every room (internally connected).

Even though I had closed my windows, the water accumulated in his room came over to mine (from the gap between the connecting door and floor) and flooded here as well. And it took me a while to notice because I was day dreaming about the F1 race scheduled in Singapore from today :) and only realized the water when it reached my feet.

Back to my cleaning habits, I did clean up my room in 15 minutes flat (something which I could have easily done more often!).

Moral of the story? "God makes people clean their rooms who do not clean themselves!".

Update: The *other side* of the story can be found here

Do a good deed online...

So we all have grown up to the fact that every little thing that we find online is free!! Free to the extent that we refuse to pay for any content that we find online, however good it is. An article that Seth Godin wrote recently has gotten me all thinking about this.

Most (if not all) of my knowledge these days is derived from the Internet. And as far as I remember, I have hardly paid any of the web sites for all the amazing content that they provide to me. Most of these web sites are maintained by people like you and me who are making ends meet by juggling their jobs, family and the web site. They are driven by a passion, a passion to share, a passion to help the world.

Aren't we then, as consumers of this information, obligated to help these guys in some way? So saying, if they are using online advertising as their revenue model, aren't we expected to consume (view) those innocuous advertisements? What harm can be done to your soul by seeing some advertisements everyday? Not only will this help you continue to get great content online everyday but also it will support the entire online advertising industry, one click at a time! Who knows, this might just help to eliminate that spam that you get everyday? After all, they are just seeking your attention...

As Seth says .. "If you like what you're reading, click an ad to say thanks". And before you start searching for ads on my site, wait! I don't have any. But if you think hard there are at least a billion other web sites that need your help!

And before I end, here is a sweet ad from Coca Cola (no I am not getting paid for putting it up here ;)) that fits right into this context .. "Give a little love and it all comes back to you.." .. And if you don't get the humor in this advertisement, its time you go play "Grand Theft Auto".

Yupp, you guessed it right, I am in the mood to spread some love ;) !!

Chimp with chopsticks

Whoever thinks that I don't have patience should come and see me eat with chopsticks..

Gimme a pair of chopsticks and I will try to lift anything and everything with my chopsticks under the pretext of learning to use them :) !! I make a big mess at the end of a rather long lunch/dinner (how about 1 hour?) spent fiddling with the chopsticks. The seemingly easy task of lifting things off the plate and putting them in my big mouth has now become a complex process involving my clumsy fingers, the awkwardly held chopsticks and finally gravity!!

However, I think I have already mastered the art of eating with chopsticks in a weightless environment. But then, I still have to live on planet earth, yeah with gravity around, things held between the chopsticks tend to fall back into the bowl splashing whichever colored liquid it held on everything in its vicinity. I have a t-shirt which has a horizontal line on its chest which most people can't decipher as my artwork with chopsticks :) !!

But then, the warrior in me refuses to give up. After all, how hard can it be to chase that last morsel of rice left on your plate with a pair of chopsticks?

Biological Magnetic Compass?

For those of you who have followed my blog long enough know that I have this something (called respect) for cows. Yeah, cows for me are those benign creatures who just go around "ruminating" and posing for photographs for silly strangers on highways. They provide milk, cow-dung (mind you, no bull-shit) and directions!

Directions? Yeah, on the highway you just walk up to a friendly-neighborhood cow and ask her for directions. Its as easy as that! Don't believe me? Read this article. Yeah technically they are just magnetic compasses (as of now!). So all cows in this world tend to point north :) !! Which means, if you are lost at night, you no longer need to look up to the north star. Just search for the nearest cow and see where she is looking at. Life is easy!!

Now we just wait till Google acquires some cows and comes up with a Google-maps mashup on them. Once Google has acquired them, you just walk up to any cow and say "I am feeling lucky". The cow will give you exact directions and also the time required to reach there. I know my imagination is running wild, but then .. I am sleep deprived :( !!!