humor me

... and answer this quick poll by adding a comment.

Roughly what percentage of the conversations you have on the web are with people you know, vs. with random digerati?

Obviously, most of your conversations about personal issues are going to be with people you know. But I'm talking about conversations about generally non-personal things; movies, current affairs, technology, politics, etc.

There are conversations going on in the blogosphere (through posts, comments, and trackbacks) and in communities like slashdot. Call these 'public' conversations. There is definitely a group of people who are actively engaged in those.

I know that many of my non-personal, electronic conversations are with people I know in the real-world. Call these 'private' conversations. Until before the blogosphere hit its tipping point, most conversations were like this - 'private' in nature and enabled by email, IM, or the likes.

(This conversation that I'm engaging you in is technically 'public' though I'm guessing that my readership right now is mostly people I know)

So you tell me: how important are 'public' conversations to you? Do you find yourself still reverting back to private conversations most of the time? Why? For non-personal stuff, why not open up your conversations to anyone who cares to participate?

remixing

Are you sick of that word yet? (remixing). sorry. I had to join the bandwagon and comment.

I read this article by joel a while ago that talked about the unix vs windows mentality of building software.

In unix, you build small tools that can be combined together very flexibly (but are typically hard for end-users to use). In windows you build apps that solve a particular use case (but cannot typically be resused/remixed). Unix tools were built by programmers, for programmers, while windows applications were written for end-users.

Companies traditionally have focussed on trying to build end-user applications. They want to completely address every user's problems and dumb you down to a particular workflow. And while that's a nice thought, it totally ignores their most important users; the ones that find great new ways of taking the best parts of what's out there and putting it together. Not all your users will be able to do that; but as soon as one of them does, someone (maybe not you; maybe them, maybe someone else) will find a way to make it easy enough for everyone to use.

Business folk often talk about core competency but when it comes to building software products, they forget about leveraging the core competencies of others in addition to their own, and instead try to be everything to everyone.

As technology creeps into people's daily toolkit, vernacular, and lifestyle; more of us are comfortable thinking like programmers; we're comfortable combining tools together to create 'applications' that are customized to our lifestyle. And that's part of what is enabling the new band of internet innovaters to start building small, great tools.

You've probably heard all of this before. Re-reading the above paragraphs, it feels like I'm replaying a monologue that has been played many times before. But the problem is that there's only a small group of people shouting the same things amongst themselves. Companies are still sitting around scheming up new ways of trying to be everything to their users instead of finding a core competency, kicking ass in that area, and leveraging the brilliant work of others.

fun at work

From an old article about having fun at Pixar:

At Pixar, the mirth can't be half-assed. "The people who work here know when someone is trying to manipulate them," says Stanton. "For example, someone organized a tug-of-war game at one of our company lunches, but I didn't play. I don't like people telling me when it's time to have fun."

That's so true; I've experienced the feeling of 'being told to have fun' several times. So how do you organize stuff for people at work without making them feel like that?

hardcoreness?

So a funny thing happened to me the other day.

I met two people through a friend. After a few minutes of chit-chat, one of them said "wow. how come your water bottle is so shiny?" The other chimed in: "I was just thinking the same thing."

I looked down to see that they were pointing at my Nalgene.

"Funny you ask; I just had a friend bring me a new one from the US becuase I lost my old one when I went kayaking a few weeks ago", I replied somewhat sheepishly.

I felt that I had to defend the fact that I had an unscratched Nalgene. That I had to say "no I'm not just another yuppie that bought a nalgene to drink water in the office, i take this thing to rugged places!"

I was thinking about it the other day... anyone in their right mind would've seen a shiny water bottle and assumed it was new. No conversation required there. But the question really was a question about my lifestyle.

Maybe these guys go and beat up their new Nalgene water bottles so they can look cool and rugged? I don't know. But it definitely reminded me of being a kid when I would buy new shoes and go run in the dirt a bit so they wouldn't look so damn white. Though must admit that the thought did cross my mind when I recently bought a pair of tennis shoes. But then I decided that it was a stupid idea.

rails

So I just finished creating a website with rails. As far as websites go, it really doesn't do that much at all. It's a cross between being slightly overkill for its purpose, yet being too simplistic for harnessing the power of rails.

That said, it was interesting to try to create and deploy a website. I tried to do some 'best practices' things like using subversion for my source control (textdrive provides svn as part of the package), creating a local website on my mac and testing there before doing any deployments, etc. Even though I often changed stuff on the live site, I made all the changes locally and checked them into svn right away. :)

I absolutely hate coming home from work and coding. But

1. I committed to creating a site by the end of the month
   
2. Ruby/Rails was fun to work with

I'm glad I did it because I feel a little more confident about being able to get something up and running from scratch. It's kind of lame that I wasn't comfortable with that, given that I work for a dot-com. But I'm so used to using all the tools and frameworks that we've developed internally, that I hadn't really played with what's out there.

Anyway, aside from bugfixes, I'm done with after-work-coding for a while at least.

Feedburner

I signed up with feedburner just now.

If you're still viewing my blog as a web page, go get a news-reader, or use a web based one, and subscribe to this feed.

Those of you using bloglines can just click here to subscribe to the new feed.

From FC

I love reading Fast Company. Here's some good excerpts:

An article on leadership entitled Borrrrring!:

Under legendary acting teacher Jacques Lecoq, founder of École Jacques Lecoq, Gaulier learned a secret: You can achieve any great vision that you have of yourself -- if your work gives you pleasure

< snip >

"So does one need to go to drama school to learn how to do all this?" I ask Gaulier. No, he says: "Life is a school. Experience teaches you many things. But often, we learn the wrong things from our experiences.

"A lot of events make us contract," he continues. "We learn how to play smaller and smaller roles. A woman may come to think that she is stupid because she has made a few bad decisions. Her voice grows quieter, and she becomes less trusting. Her effectiveness diminishes without her knowing why. Others see that she is performing the role of the frightened creature, but she doesn't see that.

From Climbing Back Up The Mountain:

To attract such knowledgeable employees and keep them happy, EMS offers flexible work plans with sabbatical-like stretches of vacation time. Several years ago, Bradbury took a year off from EMS to go climbing in the Himalayas. Recently, his assistant manager spent a month rock climbing in Thailand. Such liberties aren't just for management-track employees: After a year, any full-timer can cut out for 90 days' unpaid leave. It's just another part of Manzer's plan to get EMS back on the side of the angels.

Think EMS needs someone to write distributed systems code for them?

From Are All Consultants Corrupt?:

I don't want my tombstone to read, "He did tolerable stuff for tolerable people because they paid him." I'm not that much of a whore. Do I do it occasionally? Sure. I'm no more noble than anyone else. But that's not the issue. The issue is, Is that your life? Why would you want to spend your life doing stuff that you can just tolerate, working for people you don't like? Especially when you realize that you can make more money doing work that engages your passions. The only sensible business rule is, Life is too short to work for idiots.

From The Call of the Anti-Extreme Job:

At JLT, which supplies rugged laptop computers for extreme conditions, Einck leaves by 5:10 p.m. almost every evening -- and he expects his 15 employees to follow.
<snip>
Einck admits his company could sell more computers if his people worked longer. But at what cost? Last year, JLT's revenue rose more than 50%, to almost $10 million. Any more than that, he says, would have exhausted workers and taxed morale. As it is, "being able to have dinner with my kids and put them to bed is huge," says general manager Lisa Ridley, a mother of two. "Does it makes you more loyal? Absolutely."

From Soul Proprietor:

"Have you ever seen the movie with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino called Heat?" he continues. "De Niro is the bad guy, and Pacino is the good guy. And at one point, De Niro says to Pacino something like, 'One of the things that lets me do what I do is, there's nothing in my life that I won't walk out on in a matter of seconds. Nothing. So if you're going to chase me, and if there's something in your life that you're not willing to walk out on in a few seconds, you're going to lose.' That's what it's like to be an entrepreneur."

update: I didn't finish reading all the stuff I wanted to. Here's some more.

From Natural Leader:

But we have a love-hate relationship with success and failure -- that is, we love success and we hate failure. That's more of an adult phenomenon, by the way. When little kids are first starting to walk and to pick up and drop things, they're fine. There's no judgment associated with those things. Everything's an experiment to them. But by the time people get to be adults, they have almost no tolerance for failure. And that is a very, very dangerous context to have if you want to be a lifelong learner, because the only way to learn is through failure. That's another one of those "aha" moments: when you realize that people work in organizations that religiously try to reduce the risk of failure, when the only way to grow is through experimentation, practice, and risk.

human history

Check out National Geographic's Genographic Atlas

a bit of inspiration

The Man Who Planted Trees is an amazing feel-good essay with a pretty self explanatory title.

On a related note, there have been vigils to prevent the felling of trees in Bangalore. Go here to find out more.

I heard about the vigils this past Saturday at a festival called Bhoomi Jathre which is an all night music festival hosted by Fireflies, an eco-ashram outside Bangalore. I can't seem to find organized info about when they're held though.

The music festival, by the way, was a lot of fun. I wasn't sure what to expect; the description made me think of Anjuna Beach in Goa, but then I figured there probablyn't wouldn't be too much chemical consumption while listening to indian classical music at an eco-ashram. It was a nice mix of both. Some great organic food stalls, indian classical music, jazz, traditional/fusion dance, art exhibitions. I wanted to scan tickets to keep as a momento, but I left them in my short pockets and they got obliterated in the washing machine.

Breathalizer

So yesterday evening I decided to take Sindya out for a nice dinner; we went to this restaurant called 'Jolly Nawab' at the Windsor Manner hotel. Dinner was great; I had lamb chops marinated in pomengranate juice - extrmeley tender and tasty.

On the way back to Jaynagar (actually, on RV road right around 25th - 30th cross) at about 11:40pm, there were a couple of cops standing around asking people to slow down. One cop asked me if I'd had anything to drink. Since I'd had only a single beer with dinner, I felt I had nothing to hide and answered truthfully. He asked me to pull over and take a breathalizer.

At this point, I was actually feeling really good about the whole thing; there are too many people driving drunk on Bangalore streets and I'm glad that they stop people and check for alcohol.

So anyways, I blow into the instrument once, and the percentage show up as zero; so they ask me to blow again. It still doesn't show up so they ask me how much I had. I tell them that I've only had one beer two or three hours ago when we started dinner (long dinner). Then they ask to me blow once more. At this point, I'm getting a little irritated but oblige anyway.

Finally (since nothing showed up again), the cop is like:
"Okay. three hundred rupee fine!" I was shocked.
"But there's no percentage!"
"If there is a percentage, the fine is a thousand rupees!"
"No. I'm not paying. I've only had one beer, and I'm below the allowed percentage!"

At which point I just turned around and walked back towards the car and drove off. I really wish I knew Kannada so I could yell at the guy. I forgot to get his name so on the way back I actually slowed down, asked him his name ("Kale Gowda", supposedly), thanked him, and drove off.

Oh well, India will be India. I wouldn't really call it extortion, because when I told him I wasn't going to pay, he just kind of let it go. But what is it that incents people like him to ask for bribes? Part one is that they're probably not paid a lot. But neither are cops most places in the world.

A few months ago I heard someone from egovernments.org speak about how they'd been able to significantly increase the income tax collection by making processes transparent, and incenting tax officials to not take bribes and collect fair tax from everyone. Having worked firsthand with income tax officials (known to be the most corrupt of the government departments) from all over the state, he still believed that all of these guys were basically good people who were in a system that incented them towards corrupt practices. That was heartening because I thought I was being completely naiive in the "everyone is basically good" view. Yet here was someone who had worked with hundreds of people first hand and seen them change as a result of a better system.

So part of it is the financial incentives. But I think more than that is the respect. If everyone thinks you're corrupt, you're not going to tarnish your image by taking one more bribe since it's expected of you. I think Bangalore desperately needs someone who can take the police force and turn it around. A great leader, a great PR person, and a great CEO. Any takers?

tsunami

Sindya just wrote an article about the tsunami which really moved me.

My own concierge.

Guido writes about a concierge service. It reminded me that I had wanted to post about this for a while.

Our office folks are pretty cool about constantly doing little stuff to keep people happy at work. Since fruits are extremely cheap in India, they've started stocking the fridge with grapes and watermellons. Every evening at around 3pm they cut the watermellons and everyone in the office slowly congregates around the fridge area to slurp on red, juicy watermellons. that's usually also when you grab a paper cup and scoop out a cup full of grapes to take back to your desk. In the late morning (around 11am-ish), someone comes around with cups of chaas (buttermilk). Oh, and we have a caterer serve a full buffet lunch on the terrace every afternoon.

Everyone who visits from the US is surprised by all this because we're a pretty frugal company in general. But then you consider that our lunch costs the company about $0.70 per day per person (where each person, including me, is costing the company a fraction of what they would in the US) and then it doesn't sound so bad afterall.

Coming back to the original subject of this post; the office signed up with a similar concierge service to the one Guido mentioned, called Les Concierges. They actually send one person to come sit at our office every day for 2 hours. If anyone has any odd jobs they need done they go talk to the person, give them a small advance, and get a receipt. A few days later they'll come back with what you need. My watch died the other day, and the rechargeable battery for my camera has stopped recharging. So I gave them both and asked them to look into things. A few days later they came back to say that they went to the Timex showroom and tried replacing the battery but that the watch still didn't work. Additionally, they went to a couple of Panasonic showrooms to look for rechargeable batteries but couldn't find them.

I would never had had time to leave work, battle the Bangalore traffic, and get this stuff done. They take care of getting all sorts of official government documents (involves standing in long lines), booking tickets for trains/planes/etc., and a bunch of other cool things. They have some funny ones but I don't have the booklet with me.

innovation

I hadn't seen this kick-ass feature on flickr that lets you add a note to your photograph which shows up when you mouse-over it. Here's an example of it in action. How cool is that?
I love all the rich UI's that people are building.

By the way, with all the talk about ajax, one really cool feature would be an auto-save for any large text boxes (like when I'm blogging or emailing). That way if I lose connectivity, accedentally close my browser window, or anything else, I don't have to worry about losing my data. Does anyone already do this?

more gmail

I got this email from a buddy:

on the gmail login page they now have a continuously increasing, running counter of the max storage space allocated to each account. I've seen running counts like this for "interest paid" on savings account by a given bank which is straight forward since the number simply grows as a function of the interest rate.

What could google be doing that allows the storage space to continue growing a small, but constant rate? When they recently increased from 1gb to 2gb i saw some vaguely worded press release that basically said "we have better technology/methods" for storing information rather than "we bought a bunch more servers"

That's a great question. I hadn't even thought about that. I kind of just assumed that it was a marketting gimmick implying that they are adding capacity. I thought maybe they're doing it at a predictable enough rate that they can just put a counter there for advertising. kind of how McDonald's has the 'number of burgers served' counter.

'Compression' would be an obvious but incomplete answer. Compression of historical data is actually tricky. You face this speed/space tradeoff when you compress, but just saying that you'll compress 'old' data doesn't work because data often goes through cycles of being relevant (think of your bank statements where, at tax time, you may need to go back one year in time). Maybe they've figured out better ways of predicting what data you're interested in, so that they can afford to compress some data a lot, some data a little, some data not at all.
Mail is also a huge revenue generator for them and for people placing ads. Maybe they're good enough at managing their system that the incremental cost of adding storage is less than the predicted incremental ad revenue they're getting (but that answer still boils down to 'more servers').

What else? If you owned all of the email servers in the entire world, maybe you could afford to store a single copy of every email message and just show it to all the people who are meant to receive that email. I doubt Google has reached that critical mass yet. But maybe they do this
with large attachments (since I figure you're only going to send a 300mb file to someone with a gmail account). That means they're actually storing less data. Actually, come to think of it, I think this is quite likely since the google file system would probably make it very very easy to do that.

What could google be doing that allows the storage space to continue growing a small, but constant rate?

None of the answers I have address the question of whether that counter means something more than a general prediction of their overall capacity growth (e.g. 200 GB worth of disk per day) combined with the average account usage (e.g. if they have 1tb of capacity and 100 users, they could actually advertise an account limit of more than 10GB if the average usage is much less - just as long as they're constantly forecasting their demand. Also known as overprovisioning.).

What do you think? What is the significance (if any) of the counter?

Thanks, Sood, for a great question to start my day.

making people's lives better

FC has an article about Progressive Insurance; their feed had a quote that caught my eye:

"If you want to improve something, start measuring it"

Because I work on figuring out how to measure and improve large distributed systems. But the line that I really like from the article is

"We're not in the business of auto insurance. We're in the business of reducing the human trauma and economic costs of automobile accidents -- in effective and profitable ways."

They're not selling just another product or service; they're selling a way to make people's lives better. And they're thinking about their business that way. Customer focus doesn't just mean making your product easier to use. It means thinking about how your product makes your customer's lives better. I think that's the only reason they were able to think of the kinds of changes described in the article.
Creating Passionate Users is a great place to read more about this.

rails

I've been hearing a lot lately about the power of the Ruby on Rails framework. I decided that I'm going to create a website and learn ruby and rails in the process.

I've decided to host with textdrive because they support rails. I found textdrive by browsing around some tags on de.icio.us and trying to find the most popular links. Not terribly scientific; I'll let you know my experience with textdrive soon.

First off, there are a bunch of good tutorials on how to get started with rails; even some that specifically address setup on a mac.

My main reason for blogging the experience was that I had problems with the setup. So here's some tips:

• After you've installed ruby, it may not be enough to set your path so that your new version (1.8.x) of ruby is found by default. Instead,

  mv /usr/bin/ruby

  out of the way, and

  ln -s /usr/local/bin/ruby /usr/bin/ruby

  
  
• When installing gem,

  sudo ruby setup.rb all

  - make sure you add the all parameter. Some of the docs don't include it and then you get complaints from the setup util.
  

I also couldn't remember how to get apache up and running. O'Reilly has a good series on web serving from a mac.

So far so good. I got through most of the rails tutorial and have a lame site running on my mac. I figured I take a detour though and read up a little bit on ruby.

random

Here's an amazing quote from an FC blog post. Peter Diamandis, the chairman of the X prize foundation answers "why prizes?" :

A prize is typically not intended for incumbent players.
They know it can't be done.

Also; I hadn't heard of this soft drink called "Jones soda" but it seems to be big in Canada. After reading this interview with the founder, I really want to know more.

A cool article about for-profit and not-for-profit organizations collaborating on a project; in this case to produce a better mosquito bed-net.

Instead of doing my daily blog reading, what I really should be doing is figuring out how I'm going to file my US tax returns from India. I'm hoping that I'll just be able to do it all online. I hate taxes. If I ever become an international man of mystery I'm going to make sure that my deal includes someone being personally responsible for filing all of my taxes.

update I hadn't heard of doors of perception but the little bit that I read about it in the past 5 minutes sounds intriguing. They just had a conference in Delhi last week. I have to know more.

distributed systems

The work I do is focused on distributed systems. More specifically, on keeping very large, extremely complex distributed systems healthy. This includes collecting metrics, knowing what values of each metric implies a (potential) problem, and figuring out how to respond. In part, one tries to eliminate as many outages as possible. Once you've done your bit there, you try to reduce the time to recovery as much as possible both by building systems that can heal, and by giving humans as much useful information as possible so that when they get woken up at 2am, they waste as little time as possible. And you have to do all of this while not actually screwing up the system that you're trying to manage.

I'm pretty passionate about this area; even though I often complain about being burnt out at work.

I used to maintain a blog on the company intranet pointing to the papers I was reading, as well as some thoughts about how those ideas may affect our work. We solve some pretty huge problems and run an extremely complex distributed system; the blog was internal because I found it difficult to write something meaningful without mentioning internal projects/tools/concepts/ideas.

I recently read one person's attempt at drafting some guidelines on corporate blogging and now I'm tempted to spin off a blog devoted only to distributed systems; obviously with content fit for public consumption.

I'm still mulling over the idea; I'm not sure how meaningful my content can be while not revealing company jewels. Especially since I'm not some famous industry guru or academic.

Kayaking and prawn-stuffed-papad

At 7:25pm last Friday I was still typing away like crazy; trying to commit some last minute code changes.
7:30pm: eat curd rice
8:20pm: on the bus to Dandeli. I was literally jumping with excitement.

We got to Dandeli on Saturday morning. The Karnataka state government run Jungle Lodges and Resorts is an amazing chain - doesn't seem at all like a public sector undertaking. At around 11 am we were off to the river for kayaking lessons. The first drill was to get in the kayak, flip yourself over, and pull out of the kayak. The next drill was to do the same thing with a 'skirt' on. A skirt looks like a skirt, but the bottom of it water-seals the opening to the kayak so that water doesn't go in when you flip upside down. It also means that you have to pull the skirt off when you're upside down and underwater before you can get out of the kayak. A little scary at first.

Krishna, Vikas, Anand, and I did about 2 hours of paddling, capsizing, and attempting rolling, and then took off for lunch. After an amazing Rs. 17 lunch at a local joint, we decided to split up; Anand and Krishna headed back to do a safari and drink some beer; Vikas and I went back for another kayaking session.

Our guide, Kumar, took us paddling down the river to check out the rapids from afar and I was *sooo* pissed that I didn't know how to roll (capsize and then bring myself upright again) my kayak because doing the rapid looked really tempting. He said that I was paddling well enough that if I wanted to try it ("you just have to be able to paddle straight and hard, and have a strong heart. You're paddling okay, but...") - of COURSE I had to try it! I paddled like crazy and made it through the rapid without capsizing. Then, like an idiot, I turned to give him a hi-five with my paddle. At which point I capsized. Since we were out of the rapids, it wasn't a big deal.

Going through the rapid pretty much made the entire trip complete. We tried for another 20-30 minutes to learn the rolls and I never got the hang of it. But I had been longing kayak through white water for a long time so I came away satisfied. I'll be back to the Kali river soon for a few days of lessons.

Sunday morning was spent rafting. Although the rapids were quite tame in a raft, we had a bunch of fun. Our guide kept throwing us out of the raft, and we eventually started picking on people in other rafts as well. I went on a safari in the evening and didn't see a single thing. Oh. we did see a rooster and the eyes of some deer gleaming in our safari-guide's searchlight. I do highly recommend a Jungle Lodges vacation though - they really take care of you.

Monday morning we took a 6am, 4 hour taxi-ride from the hotel to Goa. After unloading at CSM on Baga, we went straight to the beach and ordered some beer and prawn-stuffed-papad. I was a little worried that the papad wouldn't taste as good as I remembered it but I was wrong. It was phenomenal. Twenty drinks, five prawn-stuffed-papads, three prawn-curry-rices, one goan spiced sausage, one pork vindaloo, six hippie-beads, three henna tatoos, three massages, three beach-chairs, and seven hours later, we were down approximately Rs. 1700. I love Goa.

We didn't party that night; though I woke up and 2am and walked into town to check out the action and found it all at 2-3 bars in Baga. Somehow, chilling, eating, drinking, sleeping are more than enough fun for me. On Tuesday morning, Krishna and I rented a scooter and drove around some of the quieter beaches north of Goa. They were very scenic but none had quite the variety of food that Baga did. We came back and hit the beach again and proceeded to gorge ourselves again.

At 7:30pm we finally said goodbye to Baga and caught a bus back home. They have this concept of an 'A/C sleeper Volvo luxury bus' which sounds amazing. The sleeper part is wierd. Instead of having rows of four seats with an aisle in the middle, you have double-decker beds such that you get about 8 people sleeping in the space where you could have seated 12 (each bed is about 3 rows long; you still have 2 beds, then an aisle, and then another two beds, and you have two levels of those). It's pretty damn wierd if you have to sleep next to someone because there's just about 48 inches of width to each bed. I had to get cushy with Krishna, and Anand got luck and got an entire double bed to himself. Anyways, I was back at work at 10am with a tan, a tattoo, and a bushy beard (I'm not in a hurry to get rid of any of them).

I'm definitely going back to Dandeli for a weekend of pure kayaking.

Update:Here're some pictures I uploaded - from Krishna's camera.

niches, microbrands.

Through a long series of clicks (isn't that how it always is?) I got to this dude Thomas Mahon's blog. He's a tailor on Saville Row. Why would you want to get a suit stiched from him? He answers here. How much will it cost you? Try here. Where can you find him? Well, you could fly to London, like many of his customers, or you could wait for him to come to a city near you.

Damn. I have no idea what services I could render to convince people to fly half way around the world to meet me, but I hope I figure out soon.

Legalize

15-yr-olds who have used cannabis within the past year:

Rank	Male, %		Female, %
	Country	%	Country	%
1	Canada	43.3	Canada	37.5
2	Switzerland	40.3	Switzerland	35.3
3	United States	36.5	United Kingdom	31.7
4	United Kingdom	36.3	Greenland	31.1
5	Greenland	36.1	Spain	30.0
6	Spain	31.6	United States	26.2
7	France	31.2	France	23.8
8	Czech Republic	30.9	Czech Republic	23.2
9	Slovenia	27.3	Slovenia	21.4
10	Ireland	25.5	Belgium	20.2

From The Economist, Pocket World in Figures, 2005 Edition

The top few countries show about a 5-6% difference between males and females, except the US and France which have about a 10% difference.

connected.

Oh I forgot to mention...
I finally got connectivity at home!
The dudes from Airtel came yesterday evening and did some wiring in my house. They then came this morning and hooked up the dsl modem, etc. I was really impressed by how professional they were. They had everything up and running within 25 minutes. And they showed up at the time they promised me. Very rare. I was all smiles. The wireless is up and running as well.
BTW. I still can't concentrate on work.

Winding up/down.

Damn.
I'm having problems concentrating right now. I'm feeling pretty burnt out from work and really in need of some chill.

SO here's the plan for this weekend (at the risk of jinxing myself by prematurely publishing it):

• Friday night: leave by bus from Bangalore
  
• Saturday morning: arrive on the banks of the Kali river
  
• Saturday + Sunday: Take kayaking lessons; possibly do some white-water kayaking.
  
• Monday morning: Hop on a bus. Arrive in Goa.
  
• Monday afternoon/Tuesday: What? It's already Tuesday evening!? I want more prawn stuffed papad!
  
• Wednesday morning: shower at the office and get back into the grind.
  

I'm sooo excited.

Pining for the outdoors.

This past week there's been a tournament going on at KSLTA so we haven't been playing tennis. I went and watched a little bit yesterday morning - it was awe inspiring and made me itch to go play (in private so as not to embarass myself).

Not playing tennis all week, combined with the fact that I haven't been camping or hiking since I got here, plus the fact that we're scambling to meet a code complete deadline; that means I'm just dying to go outside and play.

I found out that there are quite a few adventure travel companies in Bangalore so hopefully I'll get outside this weekend.

It's 2:30am and I'm typically not a night person.

Holi

Holi is tomorrow.
We celebrated at work today. Someone brought in colors today and my face, hair, and shirt are now a mixture of yellow, pink, blue, green, red, and some other colors. My shirt is also pretty much soaked with water. I had forgotten to wear old clothes today (actually I figured since Holi is tomorrow I didn't need to do that today).

I'll post pictures as soon as I get them. The office looks funny though because everyone is walking around doing work with peacock colored faces.

Update: Here's a post that has pictures.

Are you happy?

are you happy doing what you do?

On a different note, I'm curious to know what rss feeds you're tracking. Here's what I read. Tell me if there're other interesting ones you think I'd like.

Life expectency

So I was looking through the Life Expectancy rankings and felt suddenly ashamed at not having even heard of the number one country on the list. I'm even more ashamed to be publicly (well, as public as a blog is since I don't think I have much of a readership anymore) admitting it.

Rank	Country	Years
1	Andorra	83.5
2	Japan	81.6
3	Sweden	80.1
4	Hong Kong	79.9
5	Iceland	79.8
6	Cayman Islands	79.7
7	Canada	79.3
8	Spain	79.3
9	Australia	79.2
10	Israel	79.2

So I went and read about Andorra in the CIA's World Factbook and I think Andorra and the Caymans may not be the most legitimate entrants on this list because they probably have a large population of rich, old transplants that have moved there for tax reasons.

On a different note, I had lunch with Matt (Jigna's husband) and his coworker from Avenade Riccardo today; they were here from Seattle, on a weeklong whirlwind tour of India. They'd spent the week eating at super fancy restaurants in 5 star hotel. I'm glad I was the one to take them to a tiny little south-indian place where they ate a Thaali each (and I drank a lassi) for all of Rs. 77.

I was hoping to treat them to the lunch in exchange for a lunch treat in Seattle, but they wouldn't let me. Damn.

Random Tidbit: Check out Experience with Evaluating Human-Assisted Recovery Processes from the ROC group at Berkeley.

Pay what you like

A while ago I read something about an internet content-charging paradigm that is summarized by the phrase "pay what you think it's worth". I go read a blog entry that I think is superb, so I donate the author $1.50 for her wisdom. Then I read some piece-of-crap article and close my browser tab without a second thought.

Seems like a pretty reasonable concept. I think I read somewhere on The Long Tail (though I'm lazy to find the exact post) that a similar model could be used for all sorts of 'independent content' (think indie bands, indie movies, etc).

Here's an article about someone who tried that for a restaurant. Clearly it caused lots of anxiety for both the restauranter as well as the diners. I wonder if it was only because of the human-interaction factor, or if there were other factors involved? i.e. is there a lesson here about online settings in which this strategy wouldn't work?

Incidentally, I think it's funny that some good old desi guys headed over there and ate for free. $5 says they were Guju ;)

Environmental Sustainability

Are you (I'm assuming that someone is reading this thing) bored of country statistics yet?

Here's another one, assuming that you're not. A ranking of countries by environmental sustainability index:

Country	index
Finland	73.9
Norway	73.0
Sweden	72.6
Canada	70.6
Switzerland	66.5
Uruguay	66.0
Austria	64.2
Iceland	63.9
Costa Rica	63.2
Latvia	63.0

In other news, a9 launched OpenSearch today. It got some great reviews, and some not so great reviews. I guess I agree with Greg's comments; it would have been a nice launch gesture for a9 to expose its own search in OpenSearch format. One thought I had was that I may soon need a meta-search to find the OpenSearch search add-ons that I really want.

I need to find blogs where I can read realtime reviews of O'Reilly's etech.

Quality Of Life

This is a rank of countries by the Human Development Index, compiled by the UNDP.

Rank	Country
1	Norway
2	Iceland
3	Sweden
4	Australia
5	Netherlands
6	Belgium Canada United States
.	...
25	Honk Kong
26	Barbados
27	Singapore

Does anyone else see a correlation between how frikkin cold a country is and its HDI ranking? Why is it that you have to skip all the way down to like 25 before the weather gets consistently warm. Or is Hong Kong 25 because the weather is consistently warm?
If you click around on the UNDP site you should be able to find some descriptions of the index. It looks like it weighs factors like Life Expectancy, Literacy, Gross enrollment in primary/secondary/tertiary schools, and GDP per captita.

What is it about hot places that puts them low on the list? Even Australia gets kinda cold. Why aren't any tropical islands chilling (metaphorically speaking) in the top 10?

Largest Countries

This weekend I picked up The Economist's Pocket World in Figures 2005. It's a great 2 minute diversion during the work day.
So here are the largest countries (includes freshwater):

Rank	Country	Area, sq km
1	Russia	17075
2	Canada	9971
3	China	9561
4	United States	9373

DVDs

A coworker took me to an area of Bangalore known as Majestic. Most cities in India seem to have an area like this; it's near the main bus and/or railway station, it's super crowded, has lodges (motels) on every corner, lots of cheap eating places, and many shops specializing in gray/black market goods.

We went to these tiny stores which sell DVDs for Rs. 110 ($2) each. Most of them have somewhere between 2 and 5 movies per DVD. I picked up Finding Neverland (loved it), Road to Perdition (haven't seen it yet), and a few others.

Oh. While we were there, another customer came and asked for some 'special english movies'. He was handed a paper packet which he looked into. Then he asked the shopkeeper for his top pick among the three movies that he was apparently handed. After some discussion revolving around verifying the picture quality, he left with a DVD. Good to see that the oldest trade in the world is high tech, pirated, and flourishing.

I definitely have to go back to that area and check out all the other stuff there - imported electronics, fake perfumes, fake watches, fake shoes, etc.

sing your heart out.

Yesterday we had a little company-party-thing and They wanted to turn it into a mini talent show so a couple of us brought guitars in and practiced for 10 minutes in the evening before singing on the roof of our office. A bunch of people sang. Birla did an awesome job getting the entire crowd to participate in his singing. Pretty amazing.

So anyways, fast forward three hours. 10pm and I was headed back home from my fiancee's place. It started raining really hard. Having lived in the colder parts of the US for a long time, I really miss warm rain and thunderstorms. I was just dying to get out of the car and run around in the rain. Rather than risk stopping in Bangalore traffic, I changed my route so that I'd go through Cubbon Park.

I found a convinient place to pull over and, wouldn't you know it, the rain had by then slowed to a drizzle. No matter; standing in the rain still felt awesome. Since I had my guitar in the car, I decided to put up the hatchback door and sit in the trunk (to prevent the guitar getting too wet) and strum and sing.

It was raining, somewhat dark (save the few streetlamps), and the only people around were the not-so-frequent caravans of cars taking a shortcut through the park. It was awesome. I just sang at the top of my voice for 30 minutes. I even had one dude stop his van and come listen to me for a few minutes and tell me how much he wanted to learn to play the guitar.

I just read about how potting plants has been the secret to someone's success. I don't have a particular, single hobby that gives me the plant-potting effect - I generally rejeuvinate either by learning to do new stuff or pursuing one of the many proverbial Trades that I am a Jack of - but I completely empathize with the sentiments.

I have never tried taking time off to pursue something different - maybe I'll try plant-potting soon...

alien rights

I must admit I've been totally out of touch with any sort of news for a while now. Even though I now get the paper every morning - I rarely have time to actually read it.

But I just stumbled across this article that talks about how the US has withdrawn from the international protocol "that guarantees jailed foreigners the right to talk to consular officers". Wow.

Conference, day 2

Day 2 started with... well.... I'm not sure exactly how it started because we had a 'breakfast meeting' (which involved devouring the leela breakfast buffet among other, less important, things).

I got there in time for a talk on Enterprise Middleware by Prof Joshi but it was mostly text-book stuff so my attention span didn't last through the entire presentation.

I got a chance to chat with Prof. Umesh Bellur before his talk on autonomous systems. It was, again, a very cursory introduction to the topic but held my attention because I've been very involved and passionate about the space for the past year or so.

I missed the next few talks (on security) because I was:

1. taking a nap on the grass under a tree (I haven't done that in ages! IIT has a beautiful campus
   
2. getting a demo of a distributed system simulation tool that Varsha Apte is building with some students
   

The final talk of the day was by Werner. You can read more about that here (although the link is for a Bangalore event, the abstract of the talk is the same).

And that was it. After being bombarded by questions about jobs and what we're working on, we took off for the airport with a slight detour at a roadside bhel-puri-wallah. I frikkin passed out on the plane.

Conference, day 1

Last weekend I attended Convergence 2005
at IITB, Powai. The topic for the talk was "Computing Infrastructure
in Enterprise Networks". (Click here
for details.)

I took a 7am Jet Airways flight from Bangalore to Mumbai. Jet
Airways has some pretty awesome breakfast. I was looking forward to
eating a huge (complimentary) breakfast buffet at the Leela after
getting there but:
a) We had to dump our bags and take off right away for IIT
b) I was already kind of full from the breakfast on the plane :)

I missed the keynote, but got to hear Prof. Iyer give an overview
of enterprise networks. It was pretty interesting: he started by
looking at a single node and seeing what problems there were at the
application and administration levels. Then he talked about managing a
small cluster of nodes (e.g. a lab at IIT), followed by a cluster of
clusters (a department); etc., all the way up to looking at the public
internet.

Mr Ganguly from Intel spoke next. I don't think the talk was
extremely relevant to the topic of the conference. He basically ran us
through Intel's product line. Maybe I missed the point slightly.

During lunch I got to chat with a few students and find out what
they're working on. The particular student I spoke with was looking at
the problem of data forecasting and how, after removing the
seasonality and trend components of a time series, he believed there
are still more patterns to be derived out of the white-noise component
that's left behind.

After lunch, Prof Om Damani gave an overview to load balancing
solutions. I didn't get a chance to talk with him in detail but he's
worked at Akamai (and TJ Watson) so I'm sure he has some pretty cool
real-world experiences to share.

Mr. Manoj Chugh (President, EMC2 india) gave the next talk regarding
EMC2's storage strategy. It was a well delivered, highly entertaining
talk with a lot of vision but little content. I wish I had his public
speaking skills and presence.

Post-tea-and-samosa-break, Prof Varsha Apte was to
give a talk on Queuing Theory and capacity planning. Following a great
speaker and a tea break; being the last session of the day; and trying
to teach an auditorium full of people the intricacies of Queueing Threory is no easy
task. She did a great job motivating the need to study queueing theory
as well as giving people an intuitive understanding of the
subject. She ended with a discussion of a real-world example from AT&T
labs where she had used some queuing theory to identify bottlenecks in a
server.

Before leaving for Bombay I had found out that Leela Bombay has a squash court. Vikas and I played an amazing and exhausting hour of squash
(I got my ass beat again though) and then cooled off in a pool for a few minutes.

The rest of the evening was spent drinking, eating, and chilling with
Werner. and Drew. I think we actually started dinner at 11:15 or something ridiculous like that so it was past 1 by the time I got to bed. 6:30am squash plans were cancelled though I made a valiant effort (I set my alarm and even got out of bed to switch it off).

iPod

This particular entry is about 5 months late. Before leaving Seattle, some of my buddies chipped in to buy me a yuppie accessory to my yuppie iMac; an iPod. I wasn't completely sure how much I'd use it, even though I really wanted one.

I must say that the iPod kicks butt. I pretty much don't go anywhere without it. As soon as I sit in the car, I hook it up to my car stereo (nothing fancy, just through a microphone-like input jack that my casette deck has). When I get to work, I'm listening to it. When I get home, I hook it up to my home stereo.

I've been going through and rating my songs. I have an 'unrated' list which is reverse sorted by the last time I heard a song (least recently). Whenever I listen to one of those, it either gets:
- 1 star: delete next time I sync with my mac
- 2 star: hate it but keeping it for various reasons (such as: fiancee likes song)
- 3 star: undecided
- 4/5 star: I want to listen to this when I want instant gratification from good music.

So when I'm particularly frustrated with traffic in Bangalore or work, I switch to the top rated list. The rest of the time I go through the process of rating my music.

It has definitely added to my standard of living; another humungous (and somewhat delayed) thank you to all my buddies for the wonderful gift. Now if anyone wants to send me some new music... :)

(BTW - is there a way to share iTunes song ratings and/or find new music based on those ratings?)

Tennis

I've been terrible about keeping this up-to-date. Why?
1) My parents were in town for a few weeks
2) I got (and am) super busy at work
3) I got a little depressed about b'lore.

#3 is an interesting one. I usually get a little down if I don't exercise in a long time. All it takes is a few days of going running to get my spirits up again. Well, the whole move and everything screwed up my schedule and I didn't realize that I hadn't been doing any exercise. So little things at work and in Bangalore got me depressed.

But we finally signed up for a tennis membership a few weeks ago. Since then we also started taking tennis lessons every morning from 9-10am. So my new schedule looks something like this:

7:00 : out of bed
7:30 : at work
8:45 : leave work
9:00 : tennis coaching
10:00 : gym
10:30 : shower
10:45 : breakfast (idli/sambar, kesri bhath, lassi, coffee all for about Rs. 50)
23:00 : go to bed.

I love it. The weather here is amazing. In the mornings and evenings there's a cool breeze. Around 9-10 when we play tennis, it's pretty hot and I hit the shower just drenched with sweat. I missed that a lot while living in north america.

I'm also glad to be taking tennis lessons 5 days a week though it leaves me pretty exhausted. After a few months we'll probably cut down to taking lessons only a few times a week so we'll have time left over to just play, or go running, or climbing, or something else. The tennis club (KSLTA) is bang in the middle of cubbon park (in the middle of bangalore) so it's convinient to go running or climbing.

More later.

Weekend trip

Last week I went to Hyderabad to recruit MBAs at the Indian School of Business.

Here's a picture of a big lake in Hyderabad that I took from the car. There's a big Buddha statue in the middle.



The ISB campus is amazing. This is their main building, taken from the near the executive suites (on campus hotel), with a close-up of the central part of the same building:



The architecture is... well... strange. I'm not sure if it's pleasing or not. But it's definitely striking. Here's a picture from a stairwell, and then a closeup of the strange structure that's in the background. It looks like a huge wine glass to me.



After coming back from Hyderabad I immediately took an overnight bus to Belgaum to spend the weekend with relatives. My Mama lives in Belgaum. I spent Friday there and then, on Saturday, we drove to Sangli where his daughter lives. Her husband owns a factory that makes PVC pipes; here's a picture of all the cool colors:



On the way back from Sangli I took a train (first time this trip). Unfortunately, I had to buy a first class ticket because there was no availability otherwise. I say unforunately because you don't really get the true indian railways experience by travelling in first class. Anyways, it was my first time travelling first class on a train so there were a bunch of things that surprised me.

There's an indicator in every cabin letting you know which bathrooms are vacant. And the bathrooms are actually pretty clean.

You can ring a bell and a 'Jeeves' will come ask you what you need. This light shows him who called.

There's a laptop/mobile phone charging outlet that actually gives 110V AC power (instead of 240V which is the indian standard)

Let me just say that you have to have travelled 3rd class to really appreciate how out-of-place all of these ameneties seem! :)

Finally, here're some pictures of the wonderful sunset caught from the train:

vacationing

My niece was orginally going to visit me in Bangalore during her Christmas vacations. But when I got sick last month I decided that I'm not yet set up well enough in Bangalore to be a good host to her. So I decided to go to Pune to visit them. Then tickets became hard to find and we had deadlines coming up at the end of the month.

Last week though, it occurred to me that one of the big reasons I came to India is so that I could meet up with family. I decided to chuck work and just leave, so I jumped in my friend's car (he was planning on driving to Pune for a wedding) and did the 850km, 17 hour drive to Pune. I didn't drive (though I offered) so it wasn't as tiring for me. The drive was okay; the roads were a mixture of amazing (for india) divided highways and smaller two-lane undivided roads that were in the process of being converted to highways. As great as the divided highways are, I'm still nostalgic for the small roads that go through a village every 20km. The divided highways are becoming as boring as america's interstates.

I spent Saturday with my parents, talking to banquet managers at various hotels to decide on venues for the wedding. That was fun and I'm actually pretty excited now. I spent Sunday chilling with my sister and nieces. Instead of taking a nice afternoon nap after overeating, we ended up watching a terrible movie. Then we went up one of the tekdi's (hills) near my sister's old apartment for a fast walk. It's such a luxury to be able to do that here. You can be in the middle of the city and just go up on these tekdi's for a walk or jog and escape most of the pollution. That said, there were some idiot kids on dirt bikes riding around on the hill. When we saw them they were on their way home after being yelled at a bunch of regular walkers (including my sister). I think it's awesome that the Pune-ites are so protective of their open spaces.

We came back and turned on the TV to hear about the tsunamis that had hit the region. It's crazy that there were three hours between the earthquake and the time when the waves hit the Indian coast. It sucks that our meteorologists didn't know to expect them coming. Though supposedly they had some information but didn't react fast enough.

Anyways, I didn't totally chuck work. I'm online from my cousin's place this week and trying to get a bunch of work done remotely (which I should get back to doing right now).

Shiok!

Well last night I went to eat at Shiok, a 'far eastern cuisine' restaurant, after reading about their Chef's tasting menu here.

I was really impressed. The place is very nicely decorated. The walls are a textured deep orange and the lighting is soft but not too dark. They have a regular restaurant area, and then a really cool cocktail lounge area that's a little more chill. It'd be awesome to rent it out.

The menu's were printed on sheets of paper, rolled up, tied with a red ribbon, and placed on our tables. Nice touch. I decided to go with the seafood lover's menu and Sindya went with the vegetarian supreme. There was a complementary glass of wine included with the meal (but Sindya's not drinking these days). I had a glass of red. I should've asked to look at the label. I'm no wine expert, but I haven't been impressed by the wine here yet. It tastes pretty 'flat' (is that a technical wine-tasting term?) like they got grape juice and made it alcoholic; no other flavors really.

Anyways, the food was fantastic. I'm going to list out the actual menu in case they remove the link from their site:

Fried fish soup
A citrus-flavoured soup flavoured with tamarind juice and bits of pan-fried fish fillets

Steamed fish mousse
A Thai mousse of fish paste, red curry paste, coconut cream, and lime leaves - steamed

Prawn satay
Large juicy prawns marinated overnight in a spice paste and then grilled in their shells on a satay stick

Soft rice noodles with fish curry
Rice stick noodles are steamed and served topped with a Thai fish curry sauce garnished with basil leaves

Tiger prawn - lemongrass, chilli, and lime
Marinated large Tiger prawns in steamed in a mixture of chillies, lemongrass, galangal, garlic, and lime.

Pineapple and shrimp fried rice
A standalone dish of juicy shrimp and pineapple pieces stir-fried with curry powder, a touch of chilli, garlic, and red peppers

Thai Coconut custard
The perfect ending to a hearty meal, this custard is made from a coconut cream and palm sugar mixture that is then steamed.

The commentary is not mine, it's from their menu. :)

My comments:

• The fish mousse was nicely done.
  
• The service was great.
  
• I know prawn is an expensive delicacy, but I was a little 'prawned out' by the end of the meal. I loved the fish curry; maybe they could've switched out one of the prawn items for another fish dish.
  
• I never found tiger prawn to be worth the hype.
  
• For a seven course meal, the portions were a little large. They started off with small portions which made me feel like I was going to end up just right, but then they threw in some big dishes. I ended up getting my fried rice packed to-go (even though it was phenomenal) because I wanted to make sure I could enjoy my dessert.
  
• I asked if I could get a hybrid between the chicken and seafood menu, but they weren't amenable to that. I can see how, because of the big price difference between the two and the fact that not everyone likes seafood, they separate the two menus. However, it would've been nice to get a bit of everything during the meal.
  

But now I'm just nitpicking. I highly recommend.

I love that there is so much good food in Bangalore.

Update (12/22): Check out Chef Menon's blog . In addition to cooking up a riot, this guy is hilarious and he stops at red lights and waits in lines. I'll definitely be frequenting Shiok.

More food reviews.

I was told this weekend that Peco's (just off Brigade Rd.) is an absolute must-visit pub in Bangalore. I went there for lunch yesterday. It was pretty terrible. I'm sure that die-hard old-time Bangaloreans are going to be pissed at me; but I'm sorry, the place is terrible. It's dark and dingy, has bad circulation (probably not as big a deal if you smoke), and terrible service. The tacos were actually quite alright, though they weren't really tacos. I had a ginger sausage and it turned out to be cocktail sausages bathed in a spicy ginger sauce (ok, the sauce was actually quite tasty). We ordered some more tacos and nachos when some friends joined us, and 45 minutes later we had no food. Pretty annoying. I hear they're redecorating soon. I think it could be a chill place if they improved the ventilation, light, and service. We'll see.

Next stop was Koshy's (off St. Mark's Rd.). I had acutally eaten already so I didn't sample the food there. But the place was chill and well ventilated. I had a "Ginger Punch" (some sort of fruit juice with ginger) that was pungent but extremely tasty. Clearly I was in a state of ginger-lust.

After chilling at home for a few hours, we finished the night off with dinner at "Herbs and Spice" in Indiranagar (directions: go North on 100 ft. Road past the junction with CMH Rd. Take a left in the alley before Domino's, then take the first right and first left. It's on your left). This place is amazing. It's a tiny Italian restaurant with very cosy but minimal decor. There's a blackboard with 8 items on it that make up the menu for the evening. The ice-tea was super refreshing. The bread rolls were hot and delicious. We split a spinach and cumin soup which was very healthy tasting, and then had a simple pasta with marinara. The marinara tasted very fresh, with large chunks of tomato in it. There was just a little cheese - enough to add taste, not enough to give you a heart attack. I was told that the desserts there are phenomenal, but we were pretty pooped after a day of eating and decided not to indulge. Price was reasonable - under Rs. 500 for three people. I highly recommend.

I took some of my books out of their boxes. I'm slowly getting closer to decorating my apartment. Need to find a place to buy plants.

Lunch

I woke up pretty late this morning (11am) because I was at work till about 2:30 last night. How pathetic is that? 2:30am on a Friday night.

Anyways, the upside is that I took off in the evening to go watch a play with Sindya and one her Indicorps coordinator Sonal (who's visiting this week). Sonal's awesome. The play was called "Where there's a will" and was playing at the Rangashankara theatre. It was pretty funny. Slightly stretched at some points but pretty damn funny.

I spent the morning driving around town trying to find a Hutch store to pay my phone bill. Parking is a nightmare. Finally parked at Bangalore Central which is a pretty big mall in the central area. Was inspired to buy a shirt there because the parking fee of Rs. 50 is fully refundable on any purchase. Pathetic how gullible I am.

The Hutch store is a 10 minute walk away. On the way back I passed a small vegetarian restaurant. Apparently there's a genre of restaurants called "Darshan" that, according to Sindya, have strict requirements in order to carry that name. They are pure veg, have a certain cleanliness standard, etc. A meal there was Rs. 11 for a huge pile of rice, some rassam, sambar, a vegetable, and some dahi. I topped all that off with a Rs. 10 coconut off the street.

Now I'm being pathetic and at work checking email and blogging. I'm out of here.

Spinn

I went out clubbing with some people from work yesterday.

Unfortunately, I got a flat tire on the way. The car jack was a little wierd and it took me longer than I'd like to figure out how to work it. Anyways.

The club (Spinn) was pretty fancy. I actually liked it a lot. When you walk in, there's a pretty large outdoor seating area where you can just chill. Inside, there's a large bar with a lounge type area next to it with plush sofas. In the back there's a dance floor. You can take the stairs up to a smaller dance floor that overlooks the main one. Once you're upstairs, you can also walk outside and chill under the stars (there's a see-through covering so you can still see the stars). It had something for every mood.

The music wasn't that great, though I'm not a big clubbing person so don't take my word for it. The crowd supposedly included a lot of who's who from Bangalore. The downside of that was that it seemed a little haughty. But that's what you get if you go to a swank club I guess.

PS: someone else posted a comment about Rs. 200 for a daily carwash being pretty expensive. To set the record straight, that was Rs. 200 for an entire month of carwashes. I say 'was' because that security guard took Rs. 100 from me "for new shampoo that he bought for my car" and then quit his job 3 days later. grr. Anyways, I now pay someone Rs. 350 a month to wash the car. And every Saturday I give him the keys and he cleans the inside too.

Timing the commute

I timed the commute from work back home, and then from home to work.

It's 7km from Divyasree chambers in Shantinagar to my home in Benson Town. The distance is pretty much symmetric (which is not always the case in Bangalore).

Last night (12:49am) I got back in 9 minutes. This morning (8:21am) it took me 16 minutes. Maybe I'll start plotting graphs similar to the ridiculously detailed telemetry provided by the trixe update.

Climbing in Ramanagar

I went climbing in Ramanagar this Saturday with Romain, who I met at the climbing wall last week, and Dean, who's visiting the India office from Seattle to take care of some legal stuff. We left Bangalore at about 9am and reached Ramanagar about 10:30ish. Dean went on a hike of the area while Romain and I headed towards some 'easy' climbing near a lake. I don't know the names of the climbs we did. I say 'easy' and not easy because the climbs weren't rated too high. I know I'm capable of doing them in the gym but, for some reason, I get pretty freaked out on real rock. It's only the 3rd or 4th time that I've climbed outdoors. I definitely want to go back more often and get comfortable climbing outside.

It was hot as hell during the day and we as exhausted from the heat as the actual climbing. We stopped for a quick lunch on the way back. Dean was surprised that you could get a light meal for four people for Rs. 140 - probably because his food consumption had been restricted to the Taj Westend hotel. We got back around 6pm and Dean offered to let us use the Taj swimming pool. By the time I went home, got my swimming trunks and got back to the hotel, then sun had set and the water was excruciatingly cold. Nevertheless, we had a quick swim and then decided to 'hit the town.' Unfortunately, we were blocked by the same problem again; getting into places all-stag on a Saturday night is pretty unlikely.

There is a festival called 'Bangalore Habba' going on here. One of the events is an art sidewalk on M.G. Road. We spent a while walking there and then went back to Ebony for dinner (Romain met up with us), after which we stopped by Nineteen Twelve for a few drinks. The crowd there was pretty old and docile.

I think I need to set a goal for myself to explore some of the city's much talked about nightlife in the next few weeks.

Making the world smaller

So I got this amazing email from a friend in response to my 'cheesy comment' about the world feeling smaller:


The world seems really really small. When I was little we used to have a specific time on Saturday mornings when my abuelita (grandma) in bolivia would be listening on a certain frequency on the ham radio and we would "call her" with the radio: "C P 6 D G, this is C P 6 D G, can you here me D C 3 P B? Hi abuelita how are you doing?" This was before there was a direct telephone line to Bolivia from the US and it wasn't until the beginning of the 1990s that it was cheap enough to actually use the phone to call Bolivia.

Now I'm reading about my friend's stomach ache on his blog in India and my dad emailing me everyday about what so-and-so said to so-and-so; Stuff that you wouldn't have wasted your short and expensive communication systems of the past.


I guess that makes this a reply to a comment about a post about comments about earlier posts. I've heard that that's not good blogging etiquette. Oh well.

Around bangalore

So apparently there's an email going around which talks about cool stuff to do around bangalore. There's also a book called something like '52 weekend getaways around bangalore'.

I don't have either. However, last weekend I went to Nandi Hill. It's about an hour and a half outside bangalore. It's a pleasant drive and the temperature there is a few degrees cooler than here. The air is wonderfully clean.

To get there: go north on Chowdiah Road, past Mekhri Circle. At Yelankha Police Station, veer right at the fork in the road. After a while you'll see signs for Nandi Hill and you'll take a left at the fork. Eventually you'll come to a T junction with a lot of activity (people with carts set up to sell stuff). Take a left; when you get to the next junction, take a right. A little vague I know, but that's how directions work here.

On the hill itself, there isn't tooo much to do. You can walk around and take in the view. There are 4-5 restaurants there. The one we went to served us cold idli sambar so I wasn't too thrilled. There is some historic significance to the place; apparently Tipu Sultan fought off the British from there. There's even a special place on a cliff from where Tipu Sultan threw British soldiers to their death. Note that this information comes through a somewhat questionable channel. There was an enterprising little kid whose grandfather told him all these stories. He in turn told Abhijit the stories in Kanada. Abhijit then did a poor job translating those to English!

Reply to comments

Thanks for leaving comments. It makes me feel loved. Thought I'd respond to some:

sn's comment about Indian Ingenuity: I went to the origianal MTR (Mavalli Tiffin Room) two nights ago. You may know MTR for its ready-to-cook packet mixes, but this place is the original. They have a thaali (mixed plate of food) for Rs. 75 and you can get as many dosas as you want. They give you like 3-4 rounds of sweets, 3-4 different types of rice... basically it's death by glutony. But I digress. I just wanted to point out that the original MTR restaurant has sinks with foot pedals.

In response to Amod's comment about me being brave by driving a car... I think it'd be much braver of me to drive a two wheeler here. For one, the buses here just barrel through the roads and barely move for cars, let alone two wheelers. Second, two-wheeler riders have a tendency to attempt to swerve through traffic a lot resulting in them having close calls with four-wheelers. Third, the traffic is pretty bad so when you're stuck at a traffic light, you end up standing for minutes at a time (I got stuck on my motorcycle in a traffic jam on my way from Seattle to Portland and I never want to do that again). Lastly, you're constantly exposed to all the fumes on the road and I don't think I could deal with that first thing in the morning and on my way home from work every day.

Jigna asked why I get my car washed every day . Because of the pollution, as well as the indian climate in general, there is a lot of dust in the air. So at the end of the day, the car is covered in a film of dust. Actually, it still doesn't look bad after one day. But after two days it looks pretty terrible. Plus, I justified buying a red car (red, like black, usually looks pretty bad when dirty) based on the fact that I'd be able to afford getting my car washed daily here.

This sounds cheesy but hearing from you guys definitely makes the world seem smaller.

Some price estimates.

I thought I'd clue people in a bit on random expenses I've faced in Bangalore. If there are any Bangalore-ans reading this, then let me know if I'm getting ripped off! :)

• Services
  
  
  
  • I get shirts and pants ironed for Rs. 2.50 per item. I drop it off with the dude who sits down the street, and he leaves it with the security guard at the end of the day. I have a feeling that some people pay Rs.2. This morning I gave it to a different dude (there's 3-4 of them that do the ironing) and he tried to charge me Rs. 3.
    
  • I pay a lady Rs. 500 to come to my place every morning and spend 45 minutes sweeping, mopping, dusting, and washing dishes. I'm paying too much; mainly because of the building/area I live in. For the work she does in a neighboring area, I should expect to pay about Rs. 300
    
  • I pay someone Rs. 200 to wash my car every morning. He hasn't washed my car since Saturday so I need to yell at him (actually I think he's been sick). However, assuming that washes it every day, I think that's pretty reasonable.
    
  
  
• Eating out
  
  
  
  • I paid Rs. 12 for a plate of idli-vada this morning at the cafeteria in our building. I'm told that prices outside are about the same; maybe I'd pay Rs. 8-10 instead (at a simple non-fancy place). A small cup of coffee was Rs. 5
    
  • Last night I had dinner at a pretty nice restaurant called Little Italy which is an all-vegetarian italian + mexican place (we only tried the italian dishes). We had garlic bread, bruschetta (sp?), and two eggplant parmesians (they were each called something different but that's basically what they were). We also split a bottle of local Indian wine (I forget the exact name but it was something Indage - I didn't like it but Pooja did. She also said that she expected me not to like it because it wasn't a 'guys wine'; whatever that means!) between three. I paid Rs. 550 for my part of the meal. The wine bottle was sold to us for about Rs. 800 but I checked the MRP (Maximum Retail Price) was Rs. 298.
    
  
  
• Groceries
  
  
  
  • Half a liter of milk costs Rs. 14.
    
  • A liter of Tropicana Apple Juice costs Rs. 74
    
  • At my corner store, I bought tomatoes at Rs. 10 per kg; a head of cauliflower for Rs. 10 ; a small bundle of cilantro (about the same size as you get in the US for $.75 or so) for Rs. 4 ; and I think I got onions for Rs. 12 per kilo. As you can see, my cooking has been somewhat limited so far.
    
  
  
• Other
  
  
  
  • Petrol is about Rs. 42 per liter. There's about 3.78 liters in a gallon. So that's pretty expensive.
    
  • At our office building, you pay Rs. 20 per day to park a car. If you go to some random shopping area and park for a few hours, you can expect to pay Rs. 5 to park.
    
  • It's recommended that you connect most electronics through a voltage stabilizer here (generally they take input voltages in about the 200 ~ 300 range and give you 240V). I paid Rs. 1200 for a .5KVA (500 Watt) stabilizer. I later found out that I should expect to pay about double that, and I probably got what I paid for. I'll need to buy some more for around the house so I'll have a chance to buy some better quality items at that point.
    
  
  

I can't think of anything more that I've bought recently. If you found this useful, leave me a comment and maybe I'll put up another similar post in the future.

Staying fit in Bangalore

I'm still trying to figure out how to stay fit in Bangalore. There are a fair number of gyms here - which is definitely an option. However, the avenues for playing any sports are limited.

Minus the past week and a half when I've been sick, I have been going to the climbing wall at kanteerava stadium. It's pretty cool and there are a bunch of friendly climbers there around 7-9am and 4-6pm.

We investigated most of the clubs in Bangalore looking for squash, tennis, badminton, swimming... but most of them have huge membership initiation fees and 15-20 year waiting lists.

I'm looking at playing/learning tennis at the Karnataka State Lawn Tennis Association (KSLTA) which has a few courts, good gym, clean locker rooms, a reasonable fee, and no waiting list. The only downside is that you have to sign up for a 3 year membership and, never having played much tennis, that's a big commitment (esp. since it only has tennis and no other sports).

Back up.

Wow.

It's humbling for me to see how demoralized I got last week in the face of illness. The fever/cold didn't get to me; my spirits were still high. But as soon as I started feeling nausea, that was the end of my morale. Thanks to the two sweet ladies that left get-well-soon messages on my blog. They made my morning.

I'm back up to speed now, running at about 95% of normal. I don't yet feel completely there but I've got most of my energy and appetite back. I'm in the office on a saturday morning because an interview candidate is presenting a case study that we asked him to do a few weeks back. He was meant to present earlier but, you guessed it, he was down pretty bad with a flu.

The maid that comes in the morning to sweep/clean for me is Tamil. She only speaks Tamil. The lady who lives next door, Uma (who is awesome), set me up with this maid so she bargained and everything in Tamil. Now I'm left to communicate with her by sign language. I was relying on being able to call up Sindya and have her translate but, unfortunately, she's out of town this week on a water-sports trip (she's taking the kids to a place 5-6 hours away called Hannemardu). The lady is really sweet; her daughter-in-law works at Uma's place. She's pretty old and very smiley. I made tea for her yesterday morning. She told me that she won't come to work tomorrow because it's Sunday but Uma had told me that I should give her 1-2 days off every month but that she'd work on Sundays in general. I tried telling her that this morning but, of course, there was some severe communication gap. Oh well. Once Sindya gets back things will get sorted out hopefully. In the mean time I'm beginning to be able to recognize the few words of Tamil that I know. It's wierd but, even though I knew some words before, it was hard to pick them out in sentences. Now I'm getting better at that.

What else? The world definitely looks like a brighter, sunnier, more beautiful place this week than last. Hopefully I'll be able to go climbing again by next week. This weekend I need to focus on sorting through all my boxes that were delivered last weekend, so my place starts looking more like a home and less like a warehouse.

a slight downer...

I hate to admit it. But this past week has just been terrible. I got sick last Wednesday - I felt like vomitting and had a terrible headache. That spiralled into a really bad fever/cold/cough and I was at home sleeping for the entire weekend. I couldn't keep my eyes open for more than a few minutes at a time because they were stinging. Since I haven't got someone to cook for me and my kitchen is not completely set up, eating was a problem. Thankfully Sindya cooked me some rice/daal which sustainied me for the rest of the weekend. I haven't figured out where to eat out - everything is heavy and oily and I haven't found a place to go get simple food.
The past 2-3 days my fever/cough/cold is better but I keep feeling like throwing up. I'm sick of staying at home and I actually don't feel too ill at home. But if I stay out (at work) too long I start feeling queesy. It's the worst feeling. For some reason, it totally messed with my head the past few days and made me just want to go home. Where's home? Who knows. But it's just frustrating that I don't know how to do simple things here. I don't know what kind of shop to go to to buy a toaster or microwave. I don't know where to go get some soup. I don't know who to call when my stove stops working.

I hope things get better soon.

Finally mobile

I finally got my car last night.
It's blazing red. I can listen to my ipod in it. I don't have to inhale 30 minutes worth of road fumes while getting to work. Unfortunately, I'm contributing to those fumes. :( Hey I gave the buses a chance (probably not a completely fair chance).

Anyone want to suggest a great web hosting service where I can move this blog (I want to start using movabletype) and host photos as well?

Incidentally, if you aren't using a news aggregator to read this, you need to. Check out bloglines.

Indian Ingenuity

I've wanted to write this entry for a long time but I keep forgetting.

So as far as I can tell, there are two reasons why you'd want a water-faucet that automatically turns on when you move your hands close to it (like in newer public restrooms):
1) So you don't have to touch the faucets that other people have touched after using the toilet,
2) So people don't waste water by accidentally (or lazily) leaving the water on.

When I first went to the public restrooms near work I got all pissed off because the water wouldn't turn on. I looked helplessly to the janitor, who looked at me like I was an idiot and then looked towards the ground.

The restroom sinks here (not all, but some) have foot pedals. That's such an awesome idea. You walk up to the sink and just press your foot down on the pedal. You don't have to touch anything with your hands. And when you're done, the water turns off.

A low cost alternative to IR sensors (that often break) on sinks.

Happy Diwali, Eid Mubarak

A little late on the wishes but oh well.

I spent diwali in Pune - it was phenomenal. I left from Bangalore on Thursday afternoon and flew to Mumbai. The flight was terrible. Sitting next to me was an obnoxious little 13 year old Gujju kid from Kuchh. How do I know he was from Kuchh? He informed me. I actually thought he was pretty cute at first. But then a bunch of things started getting on my nerves. First, he was ordering the flight attendants around - no thank you's or please's. That was the big one. Next, he kept interrupting me when I was reading. Next, he kept nudging me when I had my eyes closed and was trying to sleep. Grr.

I then took a prepaid taxi to Dadar TT, which is where one catches busses/taxis to go to Pune. Don't take a Prepaid taxi - it's much, much more expensive than a regular taxi. I got into a CoolCab - a shared, airconditioned Mumbai-Pune taxi. I paid Rs. 420 for 1 1/3 seats (we shared a full cab among 3 people). That was very comfortable and I caught up on all the sleep that I missed on the plane. Because of a slight delay in my flight plus a bunch of traffic en route to Dadar, I ended up reaching Pune late and missed Apte Kaka's (family friend) party.

S came in on Friday morning and Baba and I went to pick her up from the airport. The rest of the weekend is actually a bit of a blur. I spent time with my sister's family and S and my brother's family (they got in on Friday night). I think I made it a point to eat to the point of feeling sick at every meal. Needless to say, I passed out after every meal.

On Sunday night we had a big party at a place called the Harvest Club in Pune. It's a great outdoor location. I walked in needing to go to the bathroom but since everyone wanted to meet S, I didn't get to go for about 30 minutes (until I found someone that S already knew and could leave her with them).

S and I left from Pune on Monday morning. We took an A/C bus to Mumbai for Rs 480 (for the both of us). It was very comfortable except for the extremely loud Hindi movie (Hum Tum) that I was forced to watch. We hung out at the Orchid hotel and had something to eat (curd rice). I met up with an old high school friend there - it was good to catch up on old school gossip. After lunch it was time to fly back to Bangalore and end a wonderful Diwali weekend.

I must say that getting out of bed and into work was tougher than usual this morning.

Transportation

In case there are any doubts about the severity of the traffic in Bangalore, let me dispell them. Traffic here sucks.

I got a ride home yesterday with a coworker (Jeyandran) and we spent at least 15 minutes out of a 40 minute ride waiting in traffic with the engine switched off. I did almost the same commute this morning in a three-wheeler and it took less than 10 minutes. It's about 4 km away.

I have been trying hard to figure out how to get around Bangalore. A two wheeler seems so tempting until I think about inhaling all the bus and truck fumes and risking getting run over. In a four wheeler you don't inhale fumes but you're stuck in traffic for twice as long. I thought of cycling but then I be in the same traffic as the two and four wheelers but would be severely underpowered. I tried walking from home in the direction of our new office (haven't moved yet) but I don't think that'll be feasible. There's no direct bus from home to work; I'll have to change buses.

Any suggestions?

Apartment

I found an apartment yesterday. It's through a family friend of ours so I don't have to worry about getting screwed over on the rent or anything. In addition, it's fully furnished so I pretty much just have to walk in with my bags.

It'll be a relief to move into a permenant place. I still haven't got my own transportation. I hate taking autos...I'm always wondering if I'm getting screwed or not. Paranoia.

Incidentally if you're in Bangalore, I highly recommend picking up a copy of the Eicher Map of the city. It's awesome and has really helped me get to know the place.

Now all we need is a craigslist and a citysearch for bangalore.

I went to an amazing place for dinner on Vittal Maliya (sp?) Road today. It's a small multi-cuisine place in what used to be a house. I forget the name of the place. I'll find out and post back here.

An interesting introduction to bangalore pubs

The other night (Friday), Vikas and I decided to go grab a quick drink before calling it a night so we ducked into a place called NASA on Church St. First off, the music was ultra loud and the place was tiny. Second, Vikas chose a table directly underneath a large speaker. Just after we ordered drinks, we realized that there was something missing... women. We looked around to see an entire room of guys. Pretty pathetic scene for a Friday night. After yelling loudly over the blaring music and gulping down drinks we decided to call it a night.

Found out later in the weekend that NASA is rumoured to be a gay pickup joint. Welcome to Bangalore.