Swaroop C H is 26 years of age. He graduated in B.E. (Computer Science) from PESIT, Bangalore, India. He has previously worked at Yahoo! and Adobe.
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“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.â€?— Martin Luther King, Jr.
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blockquote> “A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults.�
Are there any more hard questions one has to ask oneself?
After an encounter with a firangee person, Vikram and myself started talking about difference in cultures.
For example, how doors are opened or closed. In USA, doors are pulled to get in but pushed to get out. Why? If there’s an emergency, it’s easier to push yourself through and get out of the building quickly. If you’re trying to get into the building, that means the building is safe, so it’s okay to take time to pull the door.
It’s the opposite direction in India. Why? Because we hope that bhagya da lakshmi enters our homes.
Such a minor issue, and yet such a difference between cultures.
When I look at people around me, I often ponder how they manage to live life just like any other day. They tackle work and fun and go home and watch TV and sleep. Then, get up the next day and the cycle continues. I think of them as analogous to “machines”.
On the other hand, I’m more like a wind-up toy. I need to motivate myself regularly to keep me going. I don’t know if there’s a deficiency in me or it’s just that I’m built that way. I usually resort to many tricks and advice and the worst/best part is that these tricks usually work for me.
Why is it that I find it so hard to get motivated?
I can think of several reasons :
Looks like I already have 5 points. I guess that part of my “growing up” would be to tackle these issues.
A month ago. Saturday evening. Calls at 7.30 pm. 5 friends arrive at 9 pm. We take out the Karnataka map and decide where to go.
I suggested that we plan such that we can go to Shivagange for the sunrise and that we should take the shortest route out of Bangalore so that we can avoid the traffic as much as possible, and left the rest to the others. Since we were close to Mysore road, we reached a consensus within 2 minutes to take Mysore road → Srirangapatanam → Pandavapura → Nagamangala → Yediyur → Kunigal → Nelamangala → Shivagange → Back home. Roads : Mysore Road, Road connecting Mysore road to NH-48 , NH-48, NH-4.
On the way on Mysore Road, I suggested we skip “kaaDu mane” restaurant because we’ve been there often, and one of us was insisting on a dhaba. We kept saying we’ll stop for the next one, and kept skipping dhabas. Discussion topics varied from pulling legs to politics to amazing lecturers like for example, an Electronics lecturer said that high-strength signals are sent towards a satellite and low-strength signals come towards earth. Why? Because of gravity! True story. We finally went to Kamat Lokaruchi and had amazing joLada roti oota.
I was singing “Hit the road, Jack” and we were back on the highway.
I just finished reading ‘The Search’ by John Battelle. What an amazing story to read. Learning about Bill Gross and his IdeaLab alone was worth reading the book, and he still keeps ideating, like Snap.com. Heck, even Picasa came from IdeaLab.
There are many tidbits from the book that were interesting, such as about Louis Monier:
It was Louis Monier who took AltaVista from concept to executable code … “I’ve always been interested in big, nasty problems,” Monier told me. Search provided one of the nastiest. Not only do the numbers scale to the near infinite, there was a very real need for good search in 1994. “Search engines at the time were just terrible,” Monier recalls. “Yahoo was a great catalog, but it had no search. So I set about to work on the crawl.”
About Stanford:
Stanford’s 6,200-acre patch of rolling California woodlands is the most productive incubator of technology companies the world has ever seen. Nestled between the silicon factories of Intel and Apple on one end and Sand Hill Road’s venture capitalists on the other, Stanford is a place where students have already dreamed of starting their own companies or going to work for a pre-IPO start-up. And Stanford’s computer science department, where Yang and Filo hung their hats, is perhaps the most prodigious start-up incubator of them all.
About Yahoo:
Another reason Yahoo succeeded was its sense of fun - a characteristic that would come to define not only Yahoo, but nearly every Internet company seeking the fickle approval of the Web public. Yahoo pioneered some of the Web’s earliest social mores - including, for example, links to competitors’ sites in case a searcher could not find what he or she was looking for, and listing “what’s hot” prominently on its home page, thereby driving extraordinary amounts of traffic to otherwise obscure sites.
Thanks to practices like these, the company captured the public’s imagination early and often, garnering a slew of adoring press notices familiar to anyone watching Google’s rise to prominence over the past few years.
About how a mathematical curiosity led to PageRank:
Page didn’t land on the idea of Web-based search at the outset; far from it. Despite the fact that Stanford alumni were getting rich starting Internet companies, Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes - a classic graph structure. “Computer scientists love graphs,” Page tells me, referring to the mathematical definition of the term. The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace. One could reasonably argue that many useful insights lurked in its vertices, awaiting discovery by inquiring graduate students. Winograd agreed, and Page set about pondering the link structure of the Web.
About Google’s geeky sense of humor and control:
On April 29, 2004, Google filed what certainly had to be the most unusual S1 - the formal public offering document - in recent memory. At filing, Google declared it would sell $2,718,281,828 worth of its shares - a seemingly random number, which was, in fact, the mathematical equivalent of e, a concept not unlike pi that has unique characteristics and is well known to serious math geeks. By manipulating the actual offering to provide this knowing wink to nerd humor, Google was in effect declaring: the geeks are in control.
Perhaps, the most interesting part of the book for me was the last chapter - ‘Perfect Search’. Battelle profiles what could be the future of Search.
When it comes to search, as with the Internet itself, the most interesting stuff is yet to come. As every engineer in the search field loves to tell you, search is at best 5 percent solved - we’re not even into the double digits of its potential. And search itself is changing at such a rapid pace - in the past year important innovations have rolled out once a week, if not faster - that attempts to predict the near future are almost certainly doomed.
I’ve been working on the Yahoo! Buzz Index for the past 2 years, and many a time I’ve been asked (by friends and colleagues) why I haven’t changed teams yet. But I often ponder to myself - change to what? Being a rabidly information-hungry internet user (well, I’ve calmed down off late), I always found search engines remarkable and Buzz does a lot of analysis on search, it’s quite fascinating, and the sheer volume of data is equally interesting. I’ve had my share of ups and downs (and some very steep downs), but it has been interesting.
We do a lot more than what Google Trends does, however Buzz has a more practical business model in which the interesting insights are kept for the paid customers and the interesting stories are written for the public.
I hereby announce the coinage of “The Dappers Rule”*.
* assuming we live up to the principle ourselves ;-).
Do anything with full josh and full hosh — Swaroop
With the loss of a loved one, you realize how much time you want to spend with your family and how much time you actually do spend.
And though my flesh is gone, whoa I’ll still be with you at all times And although my body’s gone, oh I’ll be there to comfort you at all times
But If I’m gone when you wake up Please don’t cry And if I’m gone when you wake up Don’t ask why Don’t look back at this time As a time of heartbreak and distress Remember me, remember me ‘Cause I’ll be with you I’ll be with you in your dreams
I got into a random think mode, and I realized that in the past two years, I have had more failures than successes. Some painful failures. Some memorable successes. Yet, the point that the failures were more in number bothers me.
This article by Pavlina has advice that helps :
Understand that failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is an essential part of success. Once you succeed, no one will remember your failures anyway. Microsoft wasn’t Bill Gates’ and Paul Allen’s first business venture. Who remembers that their original Traf-o-Data business was a flop?
…
Letting go of the fear of failure will serve you well. If you’re excited about achieving a particular goal, but you’re afraid you might not be able to pull it off, jump on it and do it anyway. Even if you fail in your attempt, you’ll learn something valuable and can make a better attempt next time. If you look at people who are successful in business today, you will commonly see that many of them had a string of dismal failures before finally hitting on something that worked, myself included. And I think most of these people will agree that those early failure experiences were an essential contributing factor in their future successes. My advice to anyone starting a new business is to begin pumping out products or devising services and don’t worry much about whether they’ll be hits. They probably won’t be. But you’ll learn a lot more by doing than you ever will by thinking.
Listening to : Tubthumping by Chumbawamba
Usually I don’t pay attention to memes because everybody’s doing it at the same time and it gets boring quickly, but for once, I decided to play along. Pradeep has tagged me to make lists of four things. So here goes:
Four movies I can watch over and over:
Four songs I can listen to over and over (there are too many songs I like, I’m just listing 4 songs I want to listen to, right now):
Four TV shows I love to watch (I don’t really watch TV anymore):
Four places I would rather be right now:
Four websites I visit daily:
