- June, 2007
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# Title:
I am at the Delhi airport and the secne here is chaotic. I am travelling by Spicejet airways and it looks like the whole world is planning to fly in the same aeroplane. The queue managmnet for Spicejet is t3h suck - I don't think I will travel with Spicejet again unless I am in a major financial crunch. A good thing about the airport though is that there are enough electrical points - if you are willing to sit on the floor. The seats next to electric plug points are occupied by fat, sleeping middle aged women
.Before leaving for this Delhi trip I had setup a very nifty mail setup on my laptop which allows me to read my mail even offline. It involves dovecot and offlineimap.
Delhi weather is really crappy right now - too damn hot. The people here are as ill-behaved as ever. I hardly see anyone standing in the queue or waiting politely for their turn to come.
That is all the update that I have from the Delhi airport.
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my home ?
I have lived in Bangalore for the past two years. Before Bangalore, I was in Delhi for ten years. I was born in Bihar, and I lived there for around sixteen years. When someone asks me, "Which place do you belong to?", I usually answer "Bihar". But it is hard for me to consider Bihar a home now. I have not been there for around ten years now. I think I will call Bangalore my home hence forth. I think it is one city which has rewarded me the most. It is one city that has not discriminated against me for being a Bihari (all North Indians are treated equally badly here
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cleaning the logic in your web forms
Added another article to my website. The article shows a nifty (I hope) way to make the logic part of your web forms cleaner.
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bihar
I was born in Bhagalpur, a small town in Bihar. If you have ever been to Delhi, you might have noticed that calling someone (or something) Bihari (i.e. someone from Bihar) is a popular form of dismissing him or her as mostly illiterate or gaudy or irrelevant. Atanu Dey has a blog entry that sums up pretty much why Bihar has been left out and why I have not been to my home for around 10 years now.
Sitting on in the de-briefing meetings, a picture of gradual and steady decline began forming in my mind. The signs were apparent. The power failed intermittently. Bihar produces no electrical power of its own. Somnath informed me that Bihar gets about 1000 MW of power from outside the state, 700 MW of which is unaccounted for. Patna consumes 300 MW, a good bit of which appears to have been used by the Rabri Devi household. It is reported that when she vacated her official Chief Minister's residence, they had to remove 53 air conditioners.
Heh. I remember the days when we used to go without power for at least a week (stealing power cables and selling the copper used to be good source of income for some people). Enough reminiscing - those days are behind me now.
Update: Changed the blog title
- May, 2007
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some good learnings from startup school 2007
Was reading the notes from the startup school 2007 and some slides/quotes caught my eye
- Limited Life Experiences + Over-Generalizations = ADVICE
- When someone tells you, "That's impossible:" it should be translated as "According to my very limed experience and narrow understanding of reality, that's very unlikely."
- Try adding words "that actually works" when briefly describing your product. (i.e. "search, that actually works", "email, that actually works")
- When you build something, you're trying to create value
- Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are completely useless — (picture of someone smashing their head through concrete blocks kung-fu style). Hard DOES NOT EQUATE TO BEING valuable
- There is a big confusion between people with Talent and "people like us" Research shows diverse teams are more innovative. It is easier to hire people who look and think like you than it is to have a truly diverse working environment, which can be more innovative.
- Take culture seriously — every action & inaction sends a message
- Walk the walk yourself — mind the gap between stated values and actual practice
- Hold people accountable — are you tolerating abusive behavior by star performers
The major takeaway seems to be
- be focused on what you are doing
- it is not necessary to heed to advice
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saving your reputation
Seen on an article on Forbes.com
So Scheff turned to Reputation Defender. Founded last October, the company says it monitors what's written about clients online for a monthly $10 fee and will have specific content "destroyed" for an extra $30. The removal of content usually involves polite take-down requests that occasionally escalate into cease-and-desist letters and legal threats when necessary, says the company's chief executive, Michael Fertik.
But Reputation Defender recently began offering users a subtler approach: hiding unwanted Web comments with a barrage of positive, Google-friendly content, either created by the company or dredged up from elsewhere on the Web and optimized to appear at the top of search-engine results.
This is really bad-shit. The possibility of gaming the system is real and there are companies building business around it. This is perhaps where Y! answers provide an edge, though even they can be gamed (post your own questions and then use another user id to post the answers. An even crafty way would be to pay the top answerers to "plug-in" your company). Is the problem of finding out the reputation of an entity a machine-solvable problem ? My bet is "Yes".
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gnus == skynet ?
If you are an emacs user and you are not using gnus for your email needs, you are missing out. One of the killer features in gnus is scoring. Gnus allows you to score mail on obsecne number of parameters. Sacha has done a great job of documenting her .gnus hacks in a nice article. I especially like her hack to bubble up threads with higher score up in the summary buffer. The only thing I am worried about is that soon my .emacs would be able to infer I think therefore I am.
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