Women’s KPI

Women in general and moms in particular are born with a KPI wired into them. The KPI simply put is – “Feed Men”. So sons, nephews, husbands, uncles and every other relation get fed till they burst at their seams. When we were poor and food was scarce, I am sure this was a nice survival strategy. So men were fed a lot when there was abundance of food so that they could go hunt and bring more food for the family. Or if the men were farmers they would go toil hard in the sun so that they had a good crop – to feed their families.

Nowadays with the abundance of food (at least in the supermarkets), this KPI no longer makes sense. However someone has to still rewire the women. Men no longer toil. I mean the last time a man like me toiled was when I changed my car tire! And that was like more than a year ago! The average guy who “toils” in front of his computer for like 10-12 hours a day should not only be starved, but women should make them run around at home so that they at least burn a few calories.

Feeding men with abundance of good food not only makes them fat, but also makes them unhealthy. I know this post sounds a bit like stereotyping women. Well, in my experience – I have never fed someone “a lot” however good food I made or bought. For men, its like – this is food – this is the plate – you want, you eat, else I put in my refrigerator and eat that same stuff for the next one week. No love KPI here.

Waste Size

I never bought a pair of Levi’s jeans. Not because they are expensive (yeah, by my standards they are!) but simply because the label above the back pocket prominently displays not only the length of my legs, but also the size of my waist.

No man my size in the right frame of his mind will ever want to show off his waist size! I mean 135 years ago may be, men thought discussing about their waist size was cool. I can imagine old saloons, in which a macho man would walk in and announce his waist size and the bartender would give him a seat and all. But these days, the only thing I might proudly announce is the memory size of my smartphone. And announcing that too wont get me anywhere.

Brad Pitt Levi’s Commercial - 1991

It’s one thing to be Brad Pitt and flaunting your well toned abs in a Levi’s 501. But its totally uncool to be Girish and showing off your waist size while you desperately try to suck your breathe in so that your stomach doesn’t rollover the top of the jeans and fold them awkwardly.

Anyway, I think I waited enough for Levi’s to change their labelling. They are sticking to their tradition. I got one today, and I am gonna strategically cover my butt with a t-shirt so that you can’t see my size. I might pretend to be cool and all, but now you know why I don't tuck in.

Bargained

If there is one life skill that I seriously lack is – bargaining. Well, not that I am very good at other skills, but I have always got the raw end of a price negotiation whether I am a buyer or a seller.

This one time, when I tried to get rid of my furniture while moving countries, I not only gave away my almost new and absolutely well maintained table for peanuts, but also the new owner made me ship (drive) it to his place. And then each time I try bargaining the only discount that I have ever gotten is – pennies. Its generally so  bad, that I might have as well not bargained to save face.

Anyway, over the years I have become increasingly weary of bargaining so much so that, I just plain avoid places where I might have to get into a verbal tussle and haggle on price. However yesterday I was caught in an unfortunate situation where the only option I had was to bargain and buy a product.

In my quest to live a healthier life, there is this vest that I have been eyeing for a while. Yesterday I happened to see it being sold at a Tradeshow. The difficult bit was – it was being sold by a Chinese lady.

Russell Peters–Indians vs Chinese

However hard I try, I can’t hide my looks and my accent. So boldly I approached her and asked for the price. Having had a very nice conversation with a Chinese lady before, I was sure I could pull this bargain off.

Now, I have heard from other seasoned shoppers that the trick to bargaining is to stick to your base and not be perturbed by any antics that the seller pulls off on you. To compensate for our ridiculous accents and our inability to understand each other, she pulled out a calculator and started typing numbers to indicate the offer price. Then I took over and I gave my number. This went on for a while and I could see that she was visually very upset. Finally after what seemed eternity, I successfully managed to get the price down by 10%. Imagine 10 whole percentage points! I was very happy and walked away grinning with my prized vest.

Today I wore it to the office. One of my colleagues asked me the price I got it for. Then he showed me a website which lists its original price. I am never ever gonna ever bargain again.

Drink Sweat

I have been fascinated by this isotonic drink Made in Japan. It is called Pocari Sweat. It was introduced in the 1980s. Enough internet-ink has already been spilled over having the rather odd “Sweat” in its name. I mean, people would generally not associate “Sweat” with a drink, but well, as I said before, enough people have already ridiculed the use of sweat. The counter argument is – in Japanese culture – sweat has a rather neutral connotation as it is associated with hard work. Well so be it.

What I have been really interested in has been the first part of the name – Pocari. I always assumed that it had some meaning in Japanese and let it be. However last week curiosity killed the cat and I looked it up online. Apparently the company officials thought “Pocari” would sound cool with the sweat and so they named the drink Pocari Sweat. So its a coined word.

Now mind you. The company behind the drink – Otsuka is no mom and pop shop. Its 2012 revenue was freaking USD 14.05 Billion. That means the company is huge. So huge that they got Cindy Crawford to model for their commercial yeah with a black panther. I can’t figure out what she is trying to do there, but well that's the advertisement. Enjoy.

Cindy Crawford–Pocari Sweat

Anyway coming back to Pocari. Now Pocari suspiciously rhymes with Ocari (yeah just drop the P and say the word out loud – you got it). Ocari in the Marathi language stands for – vomit. Yeah you read it right – puke. And if you think Marathi is a relatively obscure language, well its the 19th most popular language in the world and close to 100 million people speak it. So statistically you ought to know at least one person in your life who knows someone who speaks Marathi (like me!).

I checked out Otsuka’s expansion plans and they seem close to entering into India anytime soon. I wonder how approximately 10% of our population is gonna react to this name.

Anyway, this obsession has actually made me a Pocari Sweat addict. These days the only isotonic drink that I have is, well, you guessed it right. And while writing this blog, I just popped one can down my throat. Burp. Silly consumer I am.

Workrave

Having spent countless hours in front of the computer for well over a decade and damaging my eyesight in the process, I decided to get a bit more serious about my health. Yeah, and then age is fast catching up on me, and things that looked trivial a few years ago like waking up one morning and playing badminton like crazy for 2 hours – still to be very fine the next day – have now become impossible.

People who sit for long hours in front of the computer are susceptible to RSI (Repetitive Stress/Strain Injury). The key to prevent RSI is to have a nice posture while you sit in front of the computer and to take regular breaks. Now, sitting with a proper posture may or may not be in every office worker’s hand (at least in this part of the world where investing in ergonomic equipment is the last thing on an organization’s mind). However, if there is one thing that we all can religiously do – is take regular breaks.

What is RSI and what can you do to prevent it?

Though I know that taking breaks is good for my health, when it really comes to taking breaks, I tend to either be lazy or I just forget. So, in the last few months, I have disciplined myself by using an open source software – Workrave.

What Workrave essentially does is – at pre-configured intervals – it reminds me to take breaks. And if you configure it well, it can actually blank out your screen from doing something else. At present, I have configured Workrave to make me break for 15 seconds every 15 minutes and then make me take a 3 minute break at the end of the hour. I know these are lower than recommended break times, but better small breaks than no breaks.

After having used it for more than a month, I have realized that now I am regularly taking breaks and stretching, something which I never did that well before.

If you happen to download and use Workrave, two things that I would remind you to configure in Workrave are:

1. Configure Workrave to “Block input and screen” during breaks so that you don't cheat and continue reading during your breaks!
   
2. If your work involves more of reading (or watching YouTube videos) remember to turn on the “Reading mode” (by right-clicking on the cute sheep icon in the notification area of your task bar). That way even if you are not typing or using the keyboard, Workrave will remind you to take breaks.
   

Happy healthy working!

Scoop

I have been having this one brand of breakfast Cereals on and off for more than 6 years now. Considering that I eat like 1 box a week and assuming I at least consume 30 boxes a year (costing approximately $7 a box) I have spent more than $1260 on this brand. So much for brand loyalty.

Anyway, last few years I have noticed that they have a white sticker posted on the front-bottom of the boxes and always wondered why they were. My investigative senses made me try to carefully peel the stickers off to have a peak inside (if you don’t want me to see, then I am really interested to see!) but the adhesive they use is so good, that it always managed to tear off the writing beneath it. After a while I gave up, and became a drone doing my morning routine without bothering what the sticker stood for.

However, yesterday after so many years, I finally saw a box on my supermarket’s aisle without the sticker. I was exhilarated. I felt like a adolescent seeing porn for the first time. And what did I read? – “No high fructose corn syrup – unlike Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats Bite Size Cereal” on the box. I was mighty disappointed. I mean for last few years you have been hiding this meagre detail from me by putting that big bright white sticker? I mean, all this excitement for nothing?

Anyways, now that I managed to see it, I did my own little research on why it was covered. Apparently, the only place that Post manufactures this brand of Cereals is in the US. Their packaging is also done in the US and from there these boxes are shipped all over the world. Unlike some other brand of cereals (e.g. Quakers) who actually have a different Asia-specific packaging.

In the US – you are allowed to name your competitor in your advertising and most countries in this part of the world, don’t let you name them. So all this while, these white stripes were to comply with local advertising regulation. And – life will never be the same for me again! Anyway to curtail my disappointment (and yours), see the Coke vs Pepsi commercial which shows both brands!

Boxed men

Put a guy and a gal next to each other and it indicates a toilet. Put a bunch of guys standing next to each other inside a box and that indicates an elevator. Ridiculous symbols. Being the pro-feminist I am, I think these symbols are unfair to women. Does this mean women cannot take elevators? Huh? Or does it mean that only women in pants can go in?

And why did I have to write a blog post about this? Well, today I was in a hurry to attend nature’s call. Subconsciously I followed the symbol of many men standing in a box as a crowded restroom. Only when I reached the destination I figured I was following directions to an elevator all the time. Not only was that embarrassing, but also it tested my limits of self-control.

I suggest we change the elevator symbols to have all women in a box (or, if we are in Scotland, its all men wearing kilts). That way silly men like me won't follow it and it will show how we respect women and let them take the lifts while we take the stairs.

I always felt that a better symbol for toilets would be showing a man sitting on a toilet (for added effect we could show a trouser crumpled around his ankles). Its unmistakable and no one can ever confuse it for an elevator.

Lazy consumers

I have been on twitter since the time I heard about it (around 4 years ago?). But I never really tweeted. 140 characters to express myself is just too less for a talkative guy like me. Also I am not funny enough to sound witty in less words. However, the tweets I found interesting, I did re-tweet them. After a while, I thought I clean up my tweet history and so for major part of the 4 years, my tweeter timeline shows 0 tweets with occasional re-tweets popping up for sometime then going back to 0.

But does that mean I don’t use twitter? NOT at all. I love twitter, its my main source of information after my Google Reader. Everyday religiously, I login to twitter from my phone and read all the tweets, follow links and get my updates. My phone shows that after Facebook (the perennial time drain!) twitter is the app that consumes most of my bandwidth!

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is – not tweeting doesn’t mean that I don’t “use” twitter nor does it mean that my account is “fake” or “spam”. I am very much an active consumer. Twitter for me is like watching TV or YouTube – I don’t produce my own videos or programs but I actively consume it.

Now there are new websites in the wild that classify users into spam or real accounts depending on the following criteria:

“On a very basic level spam accounts tend to have few or no followers and few or no tweets. But in contrast they tend to follow a lot of other accounts”.

That’s unfair and wrong on many accounts and I wanted to protest, till I figured there are people similar to me. 40% of tweeter users actually just read tweets. We are an active part of the ecosystem and twitter happily acknowledges our existence and is trying hard to monetize us. Relieved I am. Now I can be peacefully shy on twitter and be completely worthless on blogger! Sigh the pressures of a social life!

Re-inventing your brand

I have been a Go daddy customer since the day I bought this domain. Not that I am particularly proud of. But at that point in time when I was searching for .in Domain Names, it seemed the easiest to setup, use, configure and pay. And then, not to relive the misery of paying up every year, I paid upfront for 4 years. So I am pretty much stuck with it. I know geeks amongst you would tell me that there is a way to transfer your domain, but well it was too much hassle for me (the “why fix it when its not broken” mentality).

So I silently lived through the ex-CEO Elephant killing saga, I have managed to ignore all the suggestive Go daddy advertisements that became so famous, and then finally I turned a blind-eye to their SOPA debacle followed by the mass exodus of people off Go daddy along with Wikipedia. Last week, they had a major outage in which all of their DNS went down for a couple of hours (which also means my blog URL was not accessible). Looking at the daily traffic that I get on this site, I am sure no-one really had any problem for my site.

Anyway, so today I was seriously considering that I should switch and then I had enough time to sit and figure out this domain transferring thing.

I visited the Go daddy website, and I was amazed to see that they are trying hard to reinvent themselves. The advertisements below sort of suggest that they wish to go away from their flamboyant image, and show their “serious” side. So rather than coming up with a serious campaign straight away, they have put up a bunch of “inside-outside” commercials that look pretty cool. I felt its a good way to show “change” without really ignoring what you earlier stood for.

Since I don’t intend to put the old Go daddy commercials on my blog, and I am sure you are curious what they were. Please go to YouTube and see them for your own pleasure.

I am always impressed by marketing and by companies that try to reinvent themselves (yeah and I am not that brand conscious). So I guess, I will be back to my lazy self, and give them at least few more months to bring about a change.

F1 Mindmap

I have been using Mind maps to handle anything and everything from To-do lists, Projects, Meeting Agendas, Action Items and Brainstorming. I got introduced to Mind mapping during my MBA when one of my professors used it to arrange his lectures and distribute the topics in a visual cognitive way for us to track and understand new concepts as he introduced in the lecture. I feel Mind maps are super cool if you are able to recall things visually like me. Now, over the years, I tried out many mind mapping tools (like XMind, Freemind etc) and have now settled for an online utility called Mindmeister. Its web-based and you can share your maps, set alerts, take them offline, see them on your phone and do a whole lot of cool things that kinda satisfy all my requirements.

Now, with the F1 race coming to Singapore next week, followed by India in October end, I am sure we all are gonna be focused on F1 over the next few months. However, there have been a lot of driver changes, new teams and new venues in F1 in the last 2 years, and I am sure many of you have some problems in remembering all of them.

To introduce you (my dear readers) to Mind mapping, and help you track F1, I have put together a Mind map that lists drivers, their teams, their countries, helmets and their current standing. I will keep updating it as the season progresses. If you guys think you have stuff to contribute to the map, please feel free to edit or change it.

 

 

Welcome to the wonder world of Mind mapping.