That reminds me, it’s been a while since I read The Daily WTF.

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

This incident happened about three weeks ago when the preparations for ion were in full swing, and Vikram and myself worked all day long to create the posters for ion as well as the website itself. At one point, we realized that we were spending most of our time in choosing just the color and placement of text, and we spent some 20+ min just to decide the font of the apostrophe in “plug ‘n play”!

At around 6 o’ clock, we were dead tired (at least I was, Vikram said he had never seen so lazy before) and decided to go get the posters printed but I didn’t want to, so he suggested instead to go for the new place that he went for cycling to recently. We went by bike through a zig-zag maze of roads and after 3-4 km, suddenly ended up in a place which seemed to be deserted! It was a new layout being formed by destroying the hill and the greenery, the signs of urbanization marked by destruction, the green being replaced by the grey (concrete).

We climbed up the rocks, just sat down there in the darkness and we had a long discussion about random things and sometimes deep things. Then, we noticed there was a huge reddish moon in the sky. Simply beautiful. I was taking photographs.

New Year, New Problems, New Resolutions, New Disappointments.

Same person.

Following the “people developer” Pavlina’s advice, I have chosen my primary focus for the year… so far it’s already worked out good. One thing I’ve realized is that things are gonna change only at the cost of other things – you have to make sacrifices elsewhere so that you can concentrate on one thing*.

Let’s see how long this lasts.

* Of course, all generalizations are not true all the time.

“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.�

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

“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.�

— Charles Kingsley

1. Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?
2. Should your life have a purpose? What if you don’t know what exactly you want to do?
3. How do you know when you’re happy and truly achieved something?
4. Ever inspired by Norvig’s speech?
5. Do you have aspirations/dreams? Even if it is world peace.
6. Is money important or dreams?
7. What if you don’t have any dreams or aspirations?
8. How often should you stop, take a step back and take stock of your situation?

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 :

• I have this mental block that “I am not a finisher”. I tend to start things with great enthusiasm but due to past history, I get an uneasy feeling that I won’t be able to complete it, and once you lose confidence and enthusiasm, that’s the end of it. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.”
• It’s easy to “lose sight” of what’s important. The daily bhaag-daud makes you lose sight of the big picture. As Stephen Covey once said, “The main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing.”
• Don’t follow the herd mentality. Do what is important to you. “To lead a symphony you must occasionally turn your back on the crowd.”
• There’s not enough passion. This violates our Dappers Rule.
• Not enough concentration. One thing at a time. And think while you’re at it. The one thing that I remind myself (and it helps me very effectively) is “You have to think more than you think you should but often less than what you are afraid you have to”.

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