16 boxes

I love this particular blog post by Seth Godin that he wrote more than a year ago. Its titled 16 boxes and he talks about how our career or business is not a single entity but is made up of so many different parts (that he refers to as boxes). I have always read this post when I am low so I thought I share it with you all as well.

I feel that just like our career or business, even our life is made up of several different interconnected parts. We have our health, wealth, family, job, children, friends, career aspirations, social circles, ambitions etc. These could all be titled as different boxes that make up our life. Now at any moment, not all boxes may be doing good at the same time. Things might be going wrong in some aspects. But life is not a boat which needs no leaks to float. Even if one of our boxes aren’t doing well, our entire life is not gonna sink. We can still sail around.

But when things actually go wrong, we always focus only on the boxes where things are going bad. We don’t even bother about all the other good boxes that we have in our life. I read somewhere that our primal instincts make us focus on things that are wrong, because when we as a species were still in the jungle hunting for food, not having something right was a matter of survival. However, today that’s not the case. We as a species however have not yet evolved to ignore things which are not in our control. We still continue to worry about the things that are going wrong and many a times end up affecting the other boxes which are perfectly normal till then. So next time when things go wrong with you, try thinking about all the other boxes in your life that are perfectly normal and don’t just focus on what is wrong with your life!

33rd Tooth

I have been blessed with a set of teeth that can make any dentist happy. I have undergone all sorts of dental treatments ranging from mundane cavity filling to tooth extractions, root canals, and other sorts of drilling, exploration and excavation activities. I have also been blessed with a medical condition that does not close my teeth completely (Next time you see me gazing at a girl with my mouth wide open, we just blame my teeth ;) !!).  Because of all this, I have spent so much time in my dentist’s chair that sometimes I feel the dentist is actually excavating for dinosaurs remains in my mouth (just in case!).

With so much time in the dentist’s chair, you can only imagine how I spend my time when he is playing with his tools inside my mouth. I imagine my dentist and I being crime fighters driving a high speed car (if you try hard enough, the drilling sound in your mouth at times does seem like the engine of a high revving sports car!). The occasional pain that I then get in my jaw is assumed to be a punch from a bad guy…

If your imagination is not in a position to run that wild, you can always count the number of times he blinks while he is excavating in your mouth. If you are really really bored, then you can count the number of hair in his nostrils. I bet I have observed him more closely than err .. umm .. even his wife! (Come on, she won’t be staring at him at such close quarters for 2-3 hours in a row!!)

The dentist and I share a very complicated relationship. Every time that I go to his clinic he gives me a warm welcome and I can see a twinkle in his eye with $ signs floating in them. Its funny though, that each time I am in excruciating dental pain, he is the first person that I think of (yeah, not God!). And though he has caused me more pain in my life than all my heart breaks, primary school punishments and sports injuries put together, each time that I am in dental pain I go to sit in his chair and go through more pain!

If all this pain was not enough, 2 years ago God decided to gift me with a 33rd tooth. For the technically minded its called – Supernumerary tooth. I actually had this extra tooth protruding out below my front teeth that prevented me from doing some Mandarin pronunciations (yeah for those of you who haven’t heard Chinese – its the most complicated language that I have ever heard and you need to be able to reach all corners of your mouth with your tongue to make all the sounds that they do! And for my Chinese speaking readers – yeah I know I am exaggerating!). This time around when I went to see the doctor, he was happy to see the tooth and promptly had it extracted. So now I am in pain for the last 2 hours and my tongue is heavy because of the anesthesia. I have been speaking like a 2 year old kid with a caffeine overdose so I thought I keep my mouth shut and blabber all that I had to say to you all in this blog post :) !!

Happy SAD

Hello all you love birds! Thought I remind you that along with your Valentine’s day today is also Singles Awareness Day (SAD). Reason for hapless singles to celebrate our solitude.

Now now, before you go all sad and start eating chocolates because you are single, hold on. Here is some advice from your favorite Uncle Girish:

For the single girls:

If you are a girl and you are single don’t worry. There are only 3 reasons why that must have happened:

1. You are just between two relationships. Wait till some guy comes and does the ceremonial dance. You can sit around and chat with your girlfriends till then.
2. A guy is desperately trying and you are clueless.
3. Your expectations are so high about your knight in shining armor that there is no one out there to fulfill all your criteria. God has stopped making guys like that (evolution)! You gotta lower your expectations right now!

For the single guys:

1. If you are young and naive then go read this. You can still develop a core competency and have a sustainable competitive advantage over the other guys. If you don’t understand what I just said, go get an MBA.  (Then you will be old and single and you still won’t understand what it means ;) )
2. If you are a guy my age and still single, don’t lose hope, it just means one thing – You suck! There is nothing you can do about it. You are destined to be single. So don’t sit and day dream. Move your butt and be useful to mankind by doing something good :)!

Roller Skating Uncle

Like India, elderly people in SIngapore are referred to as “Uncle” and “Aunty”. However, unlike India there is no term out here for the not-so-elderly but older than you people which we frequently use as “Bhaiya” (Brother) and “Bhabhi” (Sister-in-law) or “Didi” (Sister). So like you guessed right, everyone elder to you becomes an uncle. At my venerable age, I am an uncle for half the population of Singapore already.

So the venerable me decided to learn roller skating (Inline). I have had a lot of time to kill in the evenings and rather than spending it with my computer or roaming around aimlessly I thought I enrich myself with a new skill. And to prevent it from being just another new year resolution, I started my classes in the last week of December, to “technically” not make it a new year fad.

First day of class I reached the venue 10 minutes early, clad in my shorts and a t-shirt. I saw a lot of kids around me, but since it was being conducted in a park, I wondered the kids must be out to play while their adult parents learnt skating with me. To my horror however, when the instructor assembled the class I figured that most of my classmates were up to my knee, and the tall ones I could use as my walking stick. Most of them had ages in the single digits while some of the older ones had a very respectable pre-teen double digit age. I swallowed whatever little ego I had left and lined up for the class.

The first lesson was very simple, “Wear your skates and standup without falling down”. The instructor showed it to us, and the kids around me did it in a jiffy. I, however could barely lift my bum of the ground without wobbling away to glory. Like you guessed by now, I became the apple of everyone’s eye. From the instructor to my classmates, everyone paid attention to how I did it, and my every move was monitored by a dozen pair of eyes. And so was my rather clumsy fall. I bet no other kid in the history of the class had so much fun laughing at someone on the first day of the class! In no time, I had a fan following which cheered me saying “Uncle you can do it!”, “ Uncle don’t lose hope!” and  of course some smart half-pants tried to help me by giving strategic advice on “What I was doing wrong!'”. I guess criticism comes by birth, you don’t have to teach kids how to criticize!

Well, when you can’t do something that you desperately are trying to do, your natural reaction is to become grumpy. So grumpy I was, and angry I was with all those single-digit-year olds. But luckily, I didn’t give up. After many attempts and many falls I finally could catch up with them. That reminds me there are two ways to fall while skating – the graceful way – in which you decide to fall cause you figure you are out of control and land on your palms and knees safely, and – the clumsy way – in which you wobble and fall on your bum.

Now I have been learning to skate for over a month. I can now wobble around like a mannequin on skates and I am the grumpy-old-uncle-with-a-sour-bum who falls at the drop of a hat. If my classmates were any older they could have had a flourishing business by betting on how many minutes before I fall next!

Geek Humor

In my quest to be recognized as one amongst them and get baptized as a Geek, I have been trying a lot of things to attain tech-nirvana. Besides reading tech blogs all day long, I have also been reading geeky comics for a while now. So for all you people who are also on my path (to salvation!), here is a list of geekiest comics in the increasing order of their geekiness from your fellow wanna-be.

1. Dilbert – This is like the first comic a noob is supposed to read, understand and appreciate. If you don’t know Dilbert, or you don’t find it funny then you can’t even start your journey. Of course, Dilbert is not techie, its just office humor, but yeah you start here. Period.
2. Joy-of-tech – Lets face it. Being a techie without knowing or appreciating Apple is like being an Indian and not knowing who is Gandhi. So this is where I fail miserably. I still don’t own a single Apple product, and I don’t think I am that fascinated by the iPad either. Joy-of-tech is like a comic strip for Apple fan-boys (err.. sorry, I meant Apple fan-girls) and you have to read it to be there!

    

   This is where it starts getting tougher. My success rate with understanding the comics listed now onwards is still not 100%. All three comics use “alt attribute” on the image to convey more information about the joke. I do however love most of them, and the ones that I don’t get I ask Google :) !

3. Abstruse Goose – This is quite geeky and at times you need to know what is happening around in the world, along with a bit of mathematics, statistics, cryptography and anything else an average geek is supposed to know and enjoy!

4. Geek & Poke – This comic was a chance discovery, but I really love it a lot. Also it is amongst the most regularly updated geeky comics I read, and is really funny!

    

5. xkcd – This comic had to make this list. It was a no brainer. However, it is the most geekiest comic on my list, cause I am still not upto the level to understand all the jokes that this comic has. But persistence pays off, and one day I shall be there :) !!  I especially love the warning at the bottom of the comic which goes - “this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).”

   

Re-connect

I participated in a Business plan competition recently and one of the “optional” requirements (never figured out what that really means!) were to make a “video” explaining the idea! Explaining tech concepts in a 3 minute video is never easy. My friend suggested that I should get inspired by the Common-craft videos and make one like them.

If you gals ;) have never seen a common-craft video before, I suggest that you see this video explaining Twitter now..

Making a similar video was more difficult than I expected it to be. To start with, I had to come up with a story line which was easy to understand and at the same time gave you an idea of what the business idea (product) is all about. I had named my idea as “Re-connect”. Then to narrate the story line I had to make all those card paper cut-outs as props. And finally I had to take help from someone to move those props into the video as I narrated the story.

The tools that I used were:

1. My hand-held digital camera a Fujifilm Finepix f100fd.
2. A Gorillapod to hold my camera steady in between shots. The Gorillapod is very useful for mounting the camera at awkward angles.
3. Windows movie maker for editing and combining all the small video clips that I had taken
4. Audacity to do some basic sound editing and have background music in the clip

The entire 3:17 minute video took more than 12 hours in the making. I think less than 4 hours of it were spent in actually shooting the video. Rest of it was spent drawing the cut-outs, fiddling with my software and then finally editing the video!

And why am I putting it on my blog you ask? Well, the video proved to be too long for most people and many people walked out on me while watching it. We are an entire population of people with the Attention Deficit Disorder (That’s my way of consoling myself that the video wasn’t really boring :D !! ) So now I am putting the video out here so that my hard work doesn’t go waste :) !!

And if you are wondering why my hands look so good, well err .. umm they are girly hands. The person who helped me doesn’t want me to reveal her name on the blog post but if you dig around enough you can find her name (Elementary my dear Watson ;) !). The voice definitely belongs to me (you can hear the distinct bray at times!). And the “Re-connect” logo was used with permission from this blog.

Hey gals!

So now Mark Shuttleworth lands up in a mess because he refers to programmers in general as "guys".And then he refers to naive Linux users as moms and grand moms rather than dads and grand dads :) !! Haha and the feminists around the world term him as a male chauvinist and he draws a lot of flak for a relatively harmless statement!

During my MBA I realized that all textbook authors make it a point to label all third party references to people as women. So if a sentence goes "And if the manager wanted a report, she could ..blah blah" or “Your customer is important. You cant let her walk away that easily… blah blah”. The point is, every single person in textbooks these days is a woman just so that the author is not labeled a sexist.

Now, I bet most of ya folks have the habit of referring to everyone as "Hey guys!" in general, even when you don't specifically mean them to be "guys" (as in men!). However, I have resolved that from now on, I shall start my emails with "Hey gals" even if there is not a single trace of a gal in the group :) !! This is in addition to my earlier resolution that everything I possess shall be of the feminine gender.

Lip-syncing idiot

I have discovered that I love to sing along with the music that I listen to. Earlier in my life however I have also figured that I have been blessed with a voice that can make a donkey’s braying sound more melodious (for people who haven’t ever heard a donkey bray or heard me sing (I pity you!) .. here is a YouTube video for you!)

So to not subject people around me to the atrocity of listening to me bray, I have learnt to lip-sync to the songs that I love to sing along, at times putting in all the emotions to add effect :) !! So if its a love song, my face goes all animated and if its a metal song I play the air guitar and head bang :) !! The kid in the video gets all animated about AC/DC’s TNT …

The last decade of my life, these antics were limited to the places that I heard music to – in my shower, in my room, and most of the times in my beloved car. But times have changed and the only place where I get to listen to music now is in the friendly MRT. That reminds me, the trains over here don’t swing as much as our local trains in India do. So people can stand close to each other without holding onto the handles (which means no smelling armpits :) !!).

The problem of being all animated and lip-syncing in the MRT is that people not only stare at me, but at times in crowded MRTs, I get extra space to perform my antics. Haha, I bet most of them consider me to be a special child. Not that I am complaining ….

Geek Pornography

Disclaimer:The blog remains PG-13 in 2010!! So before you roll your eyes and go complaining to your mom, read on!

pornography [pawr-nog-ruh-fee] (noun) – The graphic, detailed, often gratuitous depiction of something.

This blog-post is education for the non and the wanna-be geeks amongst us. Over the period of several years of reading blogs online I have realized that there are two specific types of videos that geeks seem to derive pleasure out of. I finally decided to classify them out here just so that next time when I am “caught” watching YouTube videos, you realize that I am just satisfying my carnal instincts :)

1) Unboxing ritual – Unboxing is like slowly undressing (strip teasing?) a gadget from its packing (box). The more elegantly you do it, the more amazing it looks. This ritual is good for people who don’t get to use the latest gadget till it enters its second or third generation (people like me! I still ogle the iPhone!) To borrow a quote from a website that explains this routine more explicitly “It's stuff that you're lusting over – you can't have it, but you want it.” And for people who can’t get enough of it, there is a whole website dedicated to see unboxing all day and all night!!

Here is a gallery of the new Nook being unboxed. And a video for your viewing pleasure:

And here is a funny unboxing that Samsung put together for its Omnia i900

2) Teardown – Teardown is the art of opening up a gadget right down to the basic components that it is made of, so that (this is very important) you can put it back again and start using it! Well I have done this since I was 2. But the main part of doing a proper teardown is – you should be able to put it back again in mint condition so that you can actually “use” the tore down device again in your life! The first teardown that I did was that of my dad’s Sharp pocket calculator, and I could still see the broken keys in my room drawer a couple of years down the line, cause I had literally “torn” it down! People interested in doing a tear down at the minimum should go and buy a set of precision screwdrivers and a swiss knife right now. Without it you can’t really do anything!

Here is an amazing photo of a Canon S500 completely tore down. You can read step by step instructions here.

 

Finally, before I end this blog-post I would like to announce that Gadget blending is NOT a type of geek pornography. It is more like an abuse, and it really bleeds our hearts. There are millions of us out there who are hungry without a Digital SLR and then you go and mercilessly blend those gadgets? I call for immediate boycott of this ruthless atrocity. It has caused me (and I bet a lot of other people) restless nights and serious mental problems ;)

Here is a video of the Olympus camera devices being blended. Warning, it is highly graphical and I would not recommend seeing if you have heart problems ;) !!

So coming back to my original topic … I haven’t exactly figured out what makes unboxing and teardown so interesting. But well, err.. umm to put it bluntly, unboxing is pretty damn exciting. And I would like to thank all of you (especially my friends who take me along to buy new tech stuff!) for having given me that pleasure so often :) !!

End of a decade!

So we all are one day away from celebrating a decade of existence in the 21st century. I still vividly remember 2000. (When you start remembering what you had done 10 years ago, like you did it yesterday it just means one thing – you are old with a Capital ‘O’). The Y2K bug was the talk of the town. Apocalypse was predicted. The world as we knew it, was gonna end. Huh! Nothing happened.

2000 was the year I got my first computer (Ok, technically it was bought for my sister, but I guess I messed around with it more than she did!). And I still remember the specs – A Pentium II 350 MHz (I wasn’t an AMD fan boy then), 32MB SD RAM, a SiS Graphics card with 2 MB on board memory, Creative Sound Blaster 16 bit ISA Soundcard, Creative Infra 32x CD-ROM Drive, a 4.3 GB Seagate HDD, 15” CRT monitor and Windows 98. Thumb drives did not exist then. We had to use floppy discs to transfer data :) !! I had not seen the internet and I did not own a mobile phone! I can’t believe its been a decade already. 10 years of playing with computers. TV was my only source of entertainment other than playing (real games that involved physical activity :) !! outside!)

Anyway before I give you all further dose of my nostalgia, on this day, I hope you reflect on what you have achieved (or not) in the last 10 years. I hope you all have a great 2010! Thank you for being with me all this while :) !!