Bait and Switch?

I was intrigued when I read on kottke about a TED talk by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. The talk looked promising when Dr Taylor used a real human brain as prop to explain left and right hemisphere functions. But soon the talk devolved into phrases like "my spirit felt like a genie liberated from the bottle", "great white whale swimming in the silent ocean...", "nirvana, if I can attain it, everybody can".

Yeah, not what I had in mind when I heard one of the leading neuroanatomists from Harvard was going to explain brain function to me. She got a standing ovation from the crowd and is widely considered as one of the best talks at TED. I applaud her courage and strength in coming back from a stroke but I am not sure her talk was meaningful or useful. I expected to hear more science and facts instead I got perceptions and almost a new age religion pitch.

Non linear improvements can look very different at first glance :-)

Cool project being tested in India. Key phrase for me is,

Question Boxes leap over illiteracy, computer illiteracy, lack of networks, and language barriers.

check it out.

Do we need to market the value of education?

Below is a link that takes you to a blog post with 7 different videos shot using cell phones. All of these are videos shot by high school students mostly without their teachers knowledge. It left me numb. The utter callousness, disrespect and lack of value for education these kids display is very frightening.

I don't know what the panacea is, I do know it is not simple and I do believe it begins at home :).

-> Link
Hat Tip: Seth Godin

Cool visualization software

hat tip -> ReadWriteWeb

Is your job related to retail?

Then you need to add this blog to your rss reader : link
This is a blog authored by multiple buyers who all work for Walmart.

Thanks to Corbett

I biked 50 miles yesterday :) Woo Hoo! my longest ride to date. Corbett helped me finish! Thanks man.

Publications I am currently reading...

1. Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
   
2. Deep Economy by Bill McKibben
3. The Bible (NASB) by :-)
   
4. Six Days of War by Michael B.Oren
5. The New Yorker
   
6. The National Geographic.

Just Finished

1. With the Old Breed by E.B.Sledge
2. The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
3. The Jewish War by Josephus

Quotable - Warren Buffet

Complete interview here

Austin:

Have there been instances in your career where you have been tempted to deviate from your strategy and if so, how did you handle that?

Buffett:

I’m not that type. I’m not disciplined. I just naturally want to do things that make sense. In my personal life too, I don’t care what other rich people are doing. I don’t want a 405 foot boat just because someone else has a 400 foot boat. Some of my friends have big boats where 55 people are serving 14. Of those 55, some will be stealing from you, some will be sleeping with each other, and I just don’t want to deal with that. My friends have the boats, so I’m the ultimate freeloader. I don’t need multiple houses. If I wanted to do something wild & crazy I could do it, but Anna Nicole Smith is gone. Reminds me of the story of the 60 year old man that got a 25 year old to marry him. When his friends asked how he did it, he replied, “I told her I was 90.”

Emory:

At the Wesco annual meeting last year, Charlie said, "The best way to get success is to deserve success". Do you recall anything from your experience which best demonstrates how you were able to position yourself to deserve success, and do you have any advice for students on how they can position themselves to deserve success as well?

Buffett:

Behaving decent is a large part of it. Out of school I offered to work for Graham for free and he said I was overpriced. I tried to be useful and visible to him. I gave him stock tips and kept up with him. Almost always good things come from good behavior. Don’t keep score in life. Tom Murphy does not keep score. He keeps doing 20 things for me and I can only hope to return the favor. Keeping score is terrible in marriage and terrible in business. I put myself in the seller’s shoes. With most humans there is a great desire to reciprocate. If you do something for them, they will do 2X for you. How rare is it to work during lunch hours and be the first one there in the morning. You’ll get noticed if you do something extra. It’s good to have a willingness to pitch in when you aren’t going to get credit for it. Charlie and I partnered up in 1959. We always both think we’re right. We disagree but we’ve never fought. And we’ve never held past mistakes over each other’s heads. I recommend reading “Poor Charlie’s Almanack”. It’s amazing, has sold 50,000 copies and it’s still sold independently.

Emory:

What do you think of aggregate infrastructure investment to stimulate the economy?

Buffett:

I think the best way to stimulate the economy is to give money to the poor. They will spend it. Don’t give it to guys like me. Infrastructure investment makes sense, but we haven’t done it in a while and it won’t do anything for the next 6-12 months. Infrastructure is not big relative to GDP. We are a consumer-driven society, spending 106% of production.

Pushing the limites of packaging - Bizzare

Hat tips: article source, picture source

Product Management and Product Design

This is something I have been mulling over for a little while now.
My company's product management is organized in a classic pragmatic marketing model. This is great! I am serious, i continue to hear horror stories from friends about companies where product management is either in sales, engineering or marketing and thus is subverted for that functional need instead of operating strategically. So I do deeply appreciate my situation.

The only flaw imo in the pragmatic model is that it does not seem to highlight the amount of messiness and collaboration required to design and deliver a good product.

You have vertically focused product managers, technical product managers, product marketing managers, product architects and usability engineers(designers?). These are typical roles that you see in most software companies. The challenge is that none of these roles are responsible for product design. Architects lay out the architecture (duh!), marketing managers lay out the buying process and competitive info, technical product managers drive requirements to engineering and vertical product managers identify market problems and prioritize them. Out of all this information arises a "product" once, twice or 8 times a year... The problem is, a collection of these requirements does not a product design make!

That is like saying an elephant was designed from the need to
a. create a mammal
b. that is a herbivore
c. weighs xx tons
d. has a life span of zz years
e. will occupy a volume of ccc cubic inches and
f. have unique features that permit it to use suction to draw water and dig through roots.

blah blah blah you get it. These requirements above do not capture the zeitgeist of an elephant. So for now I am hoping to design a product intentionally instead of as a side effect. I will let you know how it turns out.

Product Management and market problems

Lunch conversation excerpt:
me: woah.... that is un-freaking believable.
A: You think as a product manager you have an idea of what a product/market problem looks like and then you hear about something like this.
C: Yup it is absolutely true. The chair manufacturers are dealing with this specific problem in casinos.

(C used to be a product manager for a company whose target market is casinos)

So what is the problem -> It turns out that "customers" tend to get so into the games they are playing that they often refuse to get up to use the restrooms. Thus casinos are constantly finding themselves with soiled chairs at the end of the day.

Hrmm I wonder if these customers are wondering if they have a teeny-weeny addiction problem.

The problems of the future - Youtube's board discusses Pakistani politics.

Youtube recently had a global site outage. According to Youtube this is because of an ISP based in Pakistan. Politics aside, what happened here is that the government wanted the ISP to block access to Youtube and it sounds like the ISP took a sledgehammer to tap in a nail.

Here is another way to look at it, if the Pakistani government wanted to block access to Victoria's Secret catalogs to its mass population, it is easy to do. Locate all points of entry and destroy the printed material. Unfortunately restricting access to Youtube is a bit trickier, routing protocols are smarter than the 20 words used to describe them in Wired.
My point being, I think we are going to see a lot more of this in the future. The good news is that clumsy attempts on information restriction will now be globally noticed, the bad news is that in many cases (like this one) the effects will also be globally felt.

Btw, I heard on NPR this morning that Taliban has given cell phone companies three days to turn of their cell towers at night (to prevent US troops from tracking them through their cell phone usage) . After three days they plan on blowing up cell phone towers that operate through the night.

Welcome to the era where the CEO and technology companies have to discuss terrorist demands in their board meetings. This was inevitable as technology kept moving towards becoming an indispensable commodity like energy. Well it is here now... enjoy

Health Care - Perceptions - Contd...

More health care news from California. Health Net, Inc was ordered by a judge to pay 9 million dollars to the defendant. It turns out that she had lied to them about prior conditions and her weight but their timing was beyond pathetic. They apparently rescinded the woman's policy when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Seriously! are you people Nuts!

Either health care companies do not have PR folks or their PR people lack common sense.

Paging Trading Spaces

Move over Amy Devers, my wife has you in her scope :-). Ladies and gentlemen this is my wife's latest pursuit of her passion and it is freaking good! if I may say so myself. We got some serious talent in the house people and it is not me.

Great job babe!

p.s "paging" trading spaces... get it?

To our Mc Friends

This is a honest to goodness patent approved by the uspto. It is titled " Method of exercising a cat". I think you guys should patent the method of exercising a dog using fairies before some one else does.

Link spam

A vc pitch for a company that makes undershirts targeted at VC's.

Love free market trends!!

The Next President: Update

from Greg Mankiw's Blog by Greg Mankiw

From the market at Intrade, here are the probabilities as of this morning:
P(Obama) = 0.54
P(McCain) = 0.35
P(Clinton) = 0.11

Go here for more on Intrade.

Improvements to the world must be highly contextualized

I saw a wonderful video (TED talks) presented by Dr Hans Rosling. Dr Rosling is well known for his unique approach to data visualization. I highly recommend this video.
While it certainly is educational in its core area of poverty, what was truly inspiring to me was how it made me question my assumptions.

At one point in the video Dr Rosling says the challenge he was facing with his students was not "ignorance" but rather "prejudice". This truth applies irrespective of what you do in your life.

Watch this video, it is worth your time :-)

My family just got a little closer

Welcome back Aswin :-) You went from point A to point B faster than I could comprehend. Glad you are back here.

Thought

I see the upcoming Android roadmap as a reality test between two product development/design philosophies.



a. It is important to NOT design by committee and have firm and clear control over the product's form, function and usability. Listen to the market but deliver via a vision. More crudely stated = "Always Listen to the customer but the customer is not always right"







b. Open source philosophies can translate to product design as well as development. I see Android as an example of both form and function going through consensus as opposed to a single point of control/vision. More crudely stated = "Let the market define, design and develop what they want".


I am eager to see where this goes.

Taking Risks

I was having lunch with Rick; one of our development managers (real name used so as to give credit where credit is due). He mentioned that one of his values is to encourage his team to embrace risks.

It was then I realized that I actually was in an organization which was not hypocritical. I had gotten used to working for people/companies which liked the buzz word of "smart risks" but did not quite understand what taking a risk means. In my past experience I was encouraged to take risks as long as we did not lose money, lose a sale or have a bad launch. ummmm hello :-) ...

Anyway, thanks Rick and woot! me that I work in an otufit which so far is rocking hard. I am looking forward to creating products which change lives and delight our market. Anything less is not good enough.

Ouch! perception is reality?

The title of this article indicates strong emotions -> "Doctors Outraged at Blue Cross Request". Even accounting for the fact that ABC.com might have a bias this is a disaster from the perspective of BCBS of California. What were they thinking?
My standing assumption is that managed health care started as an attempt to provide better health care to the majority of the population while bringing the transparency of an open market system to the process. It looks like the somewhere along way the way the second became more important than the first.
If this is not the case, then BCBS of Cali. better start doing some damage control or explain their intentions since this does not look good. I am not saying that their patients (or customers?) should get away with lying but the seemed to have dropped the ball in their search for a solution to the problem.

I am willing to give BCBS the benefit of the doubt, I am hoping that their initiative is to encourage their patients not to lie with them so they can do a better job of providing good care while keeping costs down. In either case they better clarify their motive before people start clarifying it for them.

Simple solutions that change the world

Came across this courtesy of Guy Kawasaki's blog. Beautiful :-) I am thinking of donating money to playpumps.

My alignment with the presidential hopefuls

My wife sent me this link to a poll that estimates how much my views align with a given presidential candidates. Thanks kim :-)

84% John McCain
81% Mitt Romney
74% Mike Huckabee
72% Rudy Giuliani
69% Fred Thompson
68% Tom Tancredo
58% Hillary Clinton
56% Ron Paul
56% Barack Obama
54% Bill Richardson
53% Chris Dodd
52% John Edwards
49% Joe Biden
30% Mike Gravel
29% Dennis Kucinich

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Quotable - CK Prahalad

Entrepreneurs should use Price - Profit = Design as their guiding principle rather than the shortage economy paradigm of Cost + Profit = Price. "Challenge and change the price performance equations. If we can satisfy 500 million (poor) customers in India by producing world-class quality, then that can become the biggest export opportunity in the world," Prahalad said.

N. Gopalaswami, India's chief election commissioner, spoke about entrepreneurship in government. "The biggest enterprise in India is maintaining democracy. Our elections, involving 700 million voters, are the single largest event management exercise in the world,"

From the article ->C.K. Prahalad: 'The Poor Deserve World-Class Products and Services'

Know your buyer's dream not just the need

It is important for a company to not just think of its customers as people who get what they paid for but instead as people who get "the story" they paid for. This story (via kim) is a great example of that.

From consumerist.com:

Ritzy Fifth Avenue jeweler Tiffany & Co. failed to ship Chris' grandfather a bracelet for his wife in time for Christmas. We expect a certain level of service from high-end stores, but Tiffany's extravagant amends caught us by surprise.

My grandfather ordered an engraved Tiffany silver bracelet as a surprise Christmas gift for my grandmother. He had custom engraving put on the bracelet, and had arranged for the bracelet to be delivered to my house about 2 weeks before Christmas. Two weeks after the order (when we should've received the bracelet), there was no bracelet. We gave it another week, and the my grandfather emailed Tiffany customer support. He received an automated response stating that because of the overwhelming Christmas rush, he needed to contact customer support via their 800 number. Of course, the 800 number was impossible to get through to also.

My grandfather, being the laid back man that he is, wasn't really angry, but he wanted to know what was going on with the bracelet. Tiffany customer service ended up calling him on the Friday before Christmas. As luck would have it, he was out fishing, and my grandmother talked to them, thus ruining the surprise. When he returned home, he was able to actually get through to the rep who called him earlier. She informed him that because of a Christmas rush they were not expecting, the bracelet would not be arriving before Christmas. To make up for the fact that they had ruined the surprise and would not be getting the bracelet to my grandfather before Christmas, they would be giving him the order FREE. He asked to clarify, asking if they just meant the shipping or the engraving free, but no, the ENTIRE COST of the order was FREE. Of course, he was blown away (after all, this is a $255 bracelet, plus the cost of engraving and shipping).

Tiffany ended up shipping the bracelet on Saturday, overnighting it to my house where I received it on Monday. There was no invoice or such in the box, so we were still wondering IF the bracelet was actually going to be free (with the final call coming from the credit card bill). Sure enough, when the credit card bill came that would've contained the charge, there was absolutely no charges from Tiffany.

So, it's nice to know that there are indeed some companies who want to keep their reputation that treat their customers well.

Sometimes you get the service you intended to pay for. For Tiffany, which stocks $210,000 bracelets, $255 isn't much to keep the customer happy and willing to consider larger purchases.

Good job Tiffany's.

History lessons from the family

My wife recently got a set of boxes containing stuff that belonged to her mom. As she was going through the contents she uncovered a couple of porcelain dolls of British soldiers. At the bottom they had the words "made in occupied Japan" printed on them. So I turned to the highly trusted Wikipedia as usual and found this ->

At the end of the Second World War, Japan was occupied by the Allied Powers, led by the United States with contributions from Australia, India, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. This was the first time since the unification of Japan that the island nation had been occupied by a foreign power. The San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed on September 8, 1951, marked the end of the Allied occupation, and when it went into effect on April 28, 1952, Japan was once again an independent state.

I am fascinated by this. It was less than an average human life span ago (55 years ago) that Japan was considered an "occupied nation". India contributed towards the occupation of Japan. I never knew that there was a window between India's slavery and freedom where it helped with the occupation of another country. There is more thought provoking material here.

What struck me most was the fact that living in a time of accelerated rate-of-change makes us give disproportionate importance to our local history over the past. Reminds me of the quote that talks about "people who don't know history are doomed to repeat it".

I think there is a lot to be gained from slowing down, and looking back to where we came from and drawing deep breaths. Slow down grasshopper slow down.

note: picture above is not of the actual doll we own but similar.

First looks can be deceptive

On first glance this post reads like a damning indictment. On second thoughts it may be a second (most like 999999th) chance for the outlook team. The fact that this user,

1. Continues to use outlook in spite of 67 "known" issues :)
2. Takes the time and energy to document and detail the known issues.

tells me that he gets enough value out of outlook not to walk away in apathy (or might be the company standard, blah blah. I get it I cannot positively conclude that outlook is adding value from this).

My point is simply just that Outlook has done a good job of solving the base problem. It is time for it to catch up with the myriad of usability and interaction issues defined here.

In other words the original user persona defined for Outlook has changed over time and it is the product's responsibility to keep up.

From the you have got to be kidding me department

"I don't want people to get the wrong idea. It's not that we're starting a swinger club in mid-air or something like that," he added. "We're a perfectly normal holiday company."

Clearly they seem to have redefined what "perfectly normal " means. The entire article -> "Fly naked on Germany's first nudist holiday flight".

Slow boil kills the frog

Both of these are headlines from yesterday's news

A computer tape containing personal data of 650,000 customers of about 230 retailers including J.C. Penney Co is missing, credit card issuer GE Money said on Friday.

and

A laptop containing the personal details of 600,000 new and prospective military recruits has been stolen, the Ministry of Defense said Friday, the latest in a series of government blunders over data.

230 retailers... what does that mean? Should I switch over to cash only. WT$%$ ! I assume yesterday was a normal news day. Should I just assume that these kind of gaffe's are the norm in the modern world or should i be worried?

I admit, I do not get my credit report from Equifax/Experian/Transunion every 4 months. I guess I will have to start doing that. The worrying part here is that as the financial industry works its darnest to make every person use their birth right to credit card, it continues to exacerbate the worst case scenario. The credit card user who does not pay his/her monthly bills in full is most likely also the user who has no idea of the risks he is being exposed to.

Anyways rants aside. Any suggestion for practical solutions to this problem, should I be looking into something like "lifelock" or is one of those long term attitude adjustment problems?

--Update--
I came across this recommendation to apply for a credit freeze with the three major credit bureaus. I am looking into this and if it is not a major hassle, I might go ahead and do this. I urge you to do the same :-) and keep me posted on anything you might find as well.

How not to title your article

I saw this title pop up on google news reader recently,

Crash Landing Pilot John Coward Is a Hero

:-) it is hard to imagine that this was not intentional.

America's most wired cities

Forbes published their list of America's top 25 most wired cities. I kind of lost interest when their definition of measurement metric started to go past 75 words. All I wanted to say was that here is another example of my instincts failing me, I was surprised to see Austin did not crack this list.
Forbes most wired cities.

Quotable - Yossi Vardi

“We have become two countries: a high-tech one with few children and very high incomes, and a poor one with lots of kids,”

“Three major viral products emerged from this part of the world: the Bible 2,700 years ago, Jesus 2,000 years ago and ICQ ten years ago,” he jokes. Search for ICQ using Google and there are 675m matches, he points out, compared with 160m for the Bible and 178m for Jesus."

Context - At the age of 27 he was appointed director-general of Israel's development ministry and then held a similar job at the energy ministry. Later he led or helped to found some 60 companies such as Israel Chemicals, the Israel Oil Company and ITL Optronics. Then, in 1996, he invested in his first internet start-up, Mirabilis, the company behind ICQ.

“PowerPoint presentations damage your brain—if you look at too many, you become immoral,”

“Happiness is relative, the more successful the high-tech sector, the more frustrated and unhappy the rest of society could become.”

The whole article runs the length of page and is available at the economist web site. It is worth a read, to me it is a good reminder that success is a healthy dose of luck combined with backing your strength and individuality. IOW, the fact that his profile is so different from your typical "US Entrepreneur" profile gives me lot of hope.

Product Management lessons from watching Season III of Food Networks "Next Big Star"

I just finished watching the marathon new years special by Food Network. They aired the entire season of Food Networks "Next Big Star". I surprisingly got into it. Let me clarify, I am not a fan of reality shows, they seem phony, pretentious, and if anything "un"real to me. They seem as far removed from real life as can be except for the oxymoron categorization. The only reality show I have watched is Project Runway (thanks to my lovely wife) and the season finale of "The Biggest Loser" both Bravo shows. I think I got into "Next Big Star" because it was surprisingly real, and it is to date the most unpretentious and honest reality show that I have watched. I was trying capture the elements that gave it credibility and I think there is a good lesson in product management here.

• Be very clear on your product's core competency - Food Network's product is NOT recipes, NOT travel, NOT anything else. It is television and the way to measure that is audience size and ratings. Their integrity to their product was very compelling to me. This reality show was a clear means to an end -> the end being identify the next personality who will contribute to Food Networks ratings and differentiations vs other TV stations involving food. The contest itself helped with a temporary ratings boost I am sure but the contest was not the end. This is an important distinction to make, with "The Apprentice" for instance the contest is the end and that reeks of make-believe crap. This is why this reality TV is so much better than "Top Chef"(Top Chef of what!?! - this is like getting the "world's greatest dad" mug from your kid and there is no context.)
  

• Make-believe is insulting to end-users. Don't "make" something believable if you can deliver the real thing. I was impressed that the judges for the show were Food TV's Senior VP of Programming and Production and its VP of marketing. These are people whose job it is to grow the product. This made it "real" because in the real world it is exactly these people who would be making these decisions. They did not bring random celebrities to judge the competition or random celebrities to pretend like they understand the product.
  

• You (yes you reading this) are not your product's typical end user: I understand that it is impossible to be a product manager unless you can abstract to some extent but there always will be differences in opinion amongst your user base on all aspects of the product. Accept it, learn from it, and most importantly grow your product through it. This point was struck home for me when I found myself thinking how unbelievably stupid the judges were being in eliminating Amy and retaining Jag and Rory. I was pissed! but thinking on why I was getting so pissed was what led to this point.
  

• Be prepared to be flexible: The judges thought they had picked the best two contestants for the finale (Jag and Rory). Jag was eliminated since he had fabricated history and so it was Rory vs Amy and Amy won. *knock knock* - man these guys are lucky. Americans picked the contestant they had previously eliminated (further confirming my instincts *grin*). Of course hindsight is 50/50 but my point here is that they responded to Jag's revelations admirably and ended up doing a better job than if there had been no bump in the road.
  

Any ways :-) I enjoyed this a lot. Happy 2008 to you and all your loved ones.

Business done differently

I have been wanting to blog about SmugMug, the online photo hosting site that my wife and I use. I was having a hard time articulating what I wanted to say about it. Fortunately for me, the LATimes solved that problem.
They have a great two page article on SmugMug and what makes it cool. Do check it out here.
I am pretty sure we under-utilize our smugmug page :-) We are not active on the message boards either but we are feeling pretty good that our pictures are in really good hands. If you don't have an online photo site or are in the market for one, do take a look at SmugMug, they are really passionate about what they do.

Some good quotes from the LA Times article:

The MacAskills are determined to retain control of their business, turning down all offers to invest in or buy the company. Employees, who include "sorcerers" (engineers) and "support heroes" (customer service staff), agree that SmugMug wouldn't be the same with outside influence.

SmugMug may have one of the most distinctive corporate characters in Silicon Valley. After all, this is the company that in January gave a couple, Naomi Smith and Roger Brimacombe from Fetlar, one of Scotland's Shetland islands, a lifetime SmugMug membership in exchange for a sheep. As part of the lighthearted deal, the ram, which remained on Fetlar, was christened Smuggy, and SmugMug's green smiley face logo was spray painted on his coat, where it remained until he was sheared this fall.


Sean Rogan, 33, was a SmugMug customer who used to keep readers of Chris' motorcycle forum on the edge of their seats with his tales of life on the road. While he was passing through San Francisco on his way to Guatemala, Chris surprised him by offering him a job as the company writer.

"I thought: Could this have really found me?" Rogan said.


They also reward customer loyalty. Two years ago, when SmugMug raised its prices, it grandfathered in all its current customers. Every year, SmugMug organizes "shootouts" for its customers: roving expeditions to national parks with expert instruction on how to get the perfect shot.

And once, as payment for photo services, the MacAskills accepted livestock.

Like I said, business done differently. I was pretty encouraged and inspired by their story. Let me know what you think.

Merriam-Webster word of the year 2007 (and fine print)

is ... drum rolls ... W00t! and yes I did not type Woot (I purposely used zeros instead of the letter o)

W00t (interjection):expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay"

If I understand this correctly, the 2007 word of the year is a synonym for "yay". I cannot help but find this disturbingly amusing. Oh but wait, it gets better, here are some choice snippets from the web site.

Thousands of you took part in the search for Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2007, and the vast majority of you chose a small word that packs a pretty big punch. The word you've selected hasn't found its way into a regular Merriam-Webster dictionary yet—

the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for "we owned the other team"—again stemming from the gaming community.

Merriam-Webster's #1 Word of the Year for 2007 based on votes from visitors to our Web site:

So, if I understand these findings. The 2007 word for the year is not found in the regular English dictionary and it is an acronym for "owning the other team" (talk about explaining theory A using an even more obscure theory B) and oh the result is based on votes from visitors to our website.

I do understand what W00t! means, I have used the word, the website and am quite aware of it. I have nothing against W00t. What I find troubling here is that a word with its primary relevance emanating from an extremely niche population (online gamers/gamers) has been chosen as the word of the year.

I find this similar to this imho classic post by Josh Kopelman who blogged about the techcrunch effect. The gist of the post is that, the 60+K (now maybe 100+K) users of techcrunch drink each others kool-aid in mass amounts and are freaked out by findings that the biggest priority of most Internet users is not switching from Word to Google Docs (gasp!).

I am sure there is a gamer somewhere who is thrilled to bits that W00t is the word of the year and cannot comprehend the fact that 95+% (i am guessing here) of the world's English speaking population has not heard of it.

IMO, the deeper problem here is that as the Internet makes communication quicker, easier and louder we are mistakenly associating the frequency of appearance of a thought/concept on the Internet as indicative of its prevalence or popularity. It is not and I am afraid some of the mistakes may be more costly than just a unknown word of the year.

But for now, hope you had a great 2007 and a big W00t! for 2008 ;-)

The top 10 words of 2007 can be found here

Prince Caspian Trailer

I am easing back into blog posting after a hiatus. I was busy for the past two months, starting a new job here. That left me in Chicago for 2.5 weeks in November, pictures here from when my wife joined me for the weekend. As you can tell, the 'Bean' fascinated us to no end *grin*

Then Kim and I were visiting Israel for two weeks and we had a wonderful time, pictures here (courtesy Kim again).

Anyways there was too much blog-backlog and I eventually stopped because the backlog was too daunting. I think the word "blog" above can be substituted with a lot of life activities and the statement would still ring true. For instance I can replace blog in that sentence with "exercise" or "reading my bible" or "phone calls to my parents" or "emails to friends" -- you get the idea. I am not going into deep introspection, just making an observation that this is a situation I find myself in quite often so learning to deal with it will probably help in more ways than one.

So here you go, I start by not worrying about the backlog and figure if something was worth blogging about or sharing about in the backlog the need will make itself clear.

Now for the title of the blog, the trailer for the next movie in the Narnia series is out. I found it here.

Perfect Business defined

I came across this post on Howard Lindzon's blog

...

Facebook and Google are just giant brains. No packaging, no shipping, no retail…in a word, perfect businesses. Google has proven out a revenue model and Facebook is on it’s way .

Both these businesses are creating their own global economies and it’s awesome to watch the leverage they are displaying...

I have an issue with the statement, "Perfect businesses" - no packaging, no shipping, no retail. This is ironic since these perfect businesses are advertisement vehicles/platforms.
In other words they exist solely to connect majority of their customers with products that require packaging, shipping and retail. So if every business decided to become perfect than *cough* *cough* google and facebook would have nothing to sell.

Myth turns into realilty

One of the first myths I remember when I started my career in software development was the one about the M$ janitor who became a millionaire.
It turns out that Google decide to create it own version only in this case it is for real - Google options make masseuse a multimillionaire (behind the walled garden - use bugmenot dot com).

Make of this what you will, etc.

Devil (or customer satisfaction) is in the details

I am in Chicago for two weeks. I happen to like this particular coffee shop (Bean) at the lobby of the building i am staying at. This morning the barista thanked me by name when i picked up the coffee. I was curious how she knew my namesince I am not from Chicago and I have been at the shop only once before. Turns out that the guy who took my order read my name from my credit card and passed it to the barista. Not a big deal but a great little habit to have if you are in the service industry :)

Good reminder of fundamentals

Great anecdotal post from a product management blog on my blogroll.

This taught me several valuable lessons

1. Baseball metaphors don’t travel well.

2. Usability and look & feel aren’t the same thing.

3. Local functionality matters. Řešení SAP ERP HCM je navrženo pro globální podnikání, podporuje funkce pro výplatu mezd, regulační požadavky a obsahuje nejlepší zkušenosti z praxe pro více než 47 zemí.

4. Translators,Translators, Translators.

Read the blog post in full for the complete context. Always a good reminder.

Good product design is almost always a good investment

I was reminded of this truth today. My wife is a forgiving woman full of grace :-) who forgives me for not being enthusiastic with the vacuum cleaner. This might be changing!

We recently bought a Kone -> and I seem to find myself wanting to use it more often. We also have a Dyson for more regular vacuuming. I very much doubt that the Kone is better technically than the Dyson but I do think they got a lot of the usability and product design 'right' with the Kone.
So what do you have? You have a customer who seems to enjoy using the product and his wife will hopefully think he is a good man for doing so.

Way to go Austin!

According to this Wired report -

Austin, Texas has the highest percentage of residents who read or write blogs

The Good people of Austin Energy

We lost power this morning, around 4:30am. It was starting to look bad outside, the storm clouds were heading towards Austin. Kim called the power company couple minutes after we lost it. It turns out that the power lines run through a rather large bush (i thought it was a tree till today) and the primary and the secondary power lines ended up making contact in the bush thus shorting out.

The fine folks at Austin Energy showed up 5:30 (in spite of the weather) and had the problem resolved by 7:45. Well done gentlemen and thank you for working through the rain.

It is cool to geek once in a while

Technology review did a very good 2 part article (links below) on the latest generation of math whizes (what do you call a collection of math wizards?). These men and women play a very interesting and vital role in our economy and have a direct hand in the sub-prime mortgage market collapse that occurred recently.
If you want to understand what CDO and Derivatives have to do with modern economics this is a good place to start.

1. http://www.technologyreview.com/article/19530/page1/
2. http://www.technologyreview.com/article/19531/page1/
   

It does not take a MBA to do this...

• It is not easy
  
• Nor is it always possible
  
• But it is worth striving for.
  
• It does not need a good ROI
  
• It always makes good business sense!

This blog post is what got me thinking ->link

These belong to us

My wife doing wonders on the camera with her models.

Requirements and Refactoring

This is a dog story. Well the protagonists are dogs but this story is not about dogs, it is about requirements management.

Requirements management is one of those phrases that puts majority of the people in the software industry (well people in general) to sleep. It needn't and in fact it is VITAL.



Assume you are a young strapping gunslinger in the 1870's who just graduated from gunslinging school. You are excited and ready for some action, you are hoping to ride shotgun on the coach transporting the gold from one town to another. You are hoping to draw fast, fire true and make your name known. Instead you are told to spend time with the boring people who maintain the books, you are told to go talk to the bank president and understanding his concerns and his goals...blah..blah..blah.. at some point you stop listening and you fall asleep. After all, you came out of gunslinging school not good listening school.

Finally, you leave town with the coach carrying the gold. Oh No! it is Ben Wade !! You decide it is time to put your education to work. Wade's gang hits the back of the coach first and retrieves lot of the gold and loses interest in your crew.... but you decide you will kill as many of them as you can and make your president proud. There is a fierce firefight and for a while you take down two of them for every one of you who goes down. Eventually the shooting ends and you and the rest of the survivors drag yourself into town. You are expecting praise for your courage and determination - instead your president chews you out and he is MAD!!! what happened...?

Well it turns out, he did not care as much about the gold as he did about the chief accountant who was traveling with you. He wants to expand his franchise and he was planning on using his chief accountant to train a whole cadre of bankers. Since you decided to stay and fight back, the chief accountant is now dead and that is exactly what the president did not want.

Could you have avoided this? Oh yes this is what the old man was talking about when you were told to listen earlier..... costly lesson eh.

Wait didn't i say this was a dog story. Hrmm... well then, here is a less dramatic example: my wife and I got two puppies recently. Bella and Zooey are five months old and came straight from the breeder to our house. So as we went through the usual new puppy process we realized that we had three tags for each of them with their names and our phone numbers plus an additional number. How did this happen?
- my wife ordered custom tags for them with their names and my number
- the vet we took them to for their rabies shots saw they had no tags on them and made them tags with their shot info and the vets number on it. Of course it had their names also.
- I registered them with AKC and akc sold me on a recovery plan for them for the cheap one time price of 12$. This meant now they have a tag with their names, a unique AKC id and a 1-800 akc number to call.

This is mainly a communication issue but also a requirements issue. And you thought this was a boring subject ;-)

Note:
1. I saw two westerns recently, 3:10 to yuma and "annie get your gun". Ben wade is so the man!
2. I am aware that gunslingers are predominately men but that does not mean that requirements management is a male problem.

Watch what you say....

I came across this article on tampabay.com as part of work related research.

Jesus' maker, David Socha, said he created the biblical toys to give girls an alternative to dolls in G-strings and boys a source of amusement not modeled on "demons" and "spawns of Satan."

"The Bible's full of violence, but I don't think violence is glorified in the Bible," said Socha, CEO of California-based One2Believe. "When I was growing up, I was always GI Joe. I was never the bad guy. Now, I think some kids are playing the bad guy. We're trying to bring wholesomeness back."

I am sure his intentions are really good but I am not sure the best way to position it is through stereotypes. Girls like dolls in G-string whereas boys like "spawns of satan".... heh! man wish the boys and girl in Austin were that simple to understand ;-)

I am actually very much for him offering more choice to kids. I just unfortunately get the stench of piety and close-mindedness from that tag line (talk about not stereotyping people *grin*)

revelations

My wife might be amongst the top 10 greatest entomophobists of all times :-)

Nebraska state lawmaker is suing God

Detail Link

Chambers lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in Douglas County Court, seeks a permanent injunction ordering God to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terroristic threats.

The lawsuit admits God goes by all sorts of alias, names, titles and designations and it also recognizes the fact that the defendant is omnipresent.

In the lawsuit, Chambers said he's tried to contact God numerous times...

[The lawsuit] says God has caused "fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects and the like."

The suit also says God has caused "calamitous catastrophes resulting in the wide-spread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants including innocent babes, infants, children, the aged and infirm without mercy or distinction."

Chambers also says God "has manifested neither compassion nor remorse, proclaiming that defendant will laugh" when calamity comes.

HT to mojoblog

Passions flying high

I came across this article buried within rediff. It is about an ongoing case where the Government of India is trying to construct over what most hindus believe to be a divine landmark. The comments were interesting to me. They were insanely passionate and rambling of course but they were also revealing a lot of the assumed prejudices.

Relationships

Some recent events got me thinking about relationships. Most of the current world is trying to mimic the American school of success.

For most part success here still translates to tremendous financial security, freedom to accommodate impulse behavior (travel, trinkets, entertainment, house, cars, .... you know the list) and the ability to get to a point in life where most of the rules that apply to the common man are not applicable to you. ("common man" is my pc version of the "average man") While there is an active movement trying to redefine "success"(Saturn commercial). The popular version still trends towards enabling a life style of excess and immediate gratification"

One of the unspoken consequences of this has been the demotion of relationships in the priority list of a working adult. Relationships are assumed to be "easy". If they cannot be sustained just on the time left after pursuing life's other goals, then there is something wrong with the other person in the relationship. Please realize that I am close to and continue to meet a lot of individuals who do get it "right" (IMHO) but they are counter-cultural. They did not get there without intentional hard work and sacrifices. They have to do a thorough review and refactoring of their convictions before they can be counter cultural. This is hard work and takes sacrifice, both of which are not attitudes we want to associate with relationships.
People assume one has to be unselfish and put the other persons needs ahead of yours to make relationships work. Guess what-- YOU DO! but the mistake is in thinking that you have to be born unselfish. Errr sorry mate :-). NOBODY is born unselfish. You become unselfish in your character by continually working on your relationships. It is a constant side effect and not a necessary starting ingredient.

Interestingly from a cost-benefit analysis, nothing repays your hard word like a strong, healthy and loving relationship. (Incidentally there are no guarantees but that is where your personal "faith" comes in) I am confident of this assertion because like successful platform plays (M$, _maybe facebook_, the internet). Relationship is a platform strategy for the rest of your life. Your success or failure in your distinct life endeavors say job, raising kids or changing the society is highly tied to the strength of your relationships.

What got me thinking about all this are the events of this week.

• My wife is currently in Poland on a work related trip. This is hard for me. I do not like not having her in my house, city, state, country and time zone :-) (have i made my point clear). But we both realize that travel is a part of our adult responsibilities and it is essential that we support each other. What is cool to me from this trip is that we unconsciously switched to frequent emails and sms 's in addition to phone calls. This has had a really good effect on me (i hope for her too). Being able to stay in touch albeit with rapid messages has helped me continue to keep her in my thoughts without a break. I am still very much excited about her coming back this weekend but I am handling the separation a lot better in addition to feeling loved by her and loving her even though we are seven hours apart.
• My grandma passed away yesterday. She was 85. She had a hard life and we are glad the end was quick and peaceful. She was a surrogate mom to me during the first 15 or so years of my life (my mom busted her butt working for us along with my dad - thanks mom and dad). I miss my grandma but probably too personal for me to blog about. What is interesting to me though is that i started to keep my dad in the loop on my life via my blog over the past 6-8 months. This again has helped me tell him and my mom that they are in my thoughts and let them know how much i love them. The net effect is that when my grandma passed away, I was able to have a healthy and good conversation with my dad (she was his mom). We live 12hrs apart and I moved away from my home/country over a decade ago. So getting to this point is not a coincidence. It took hard work and sacrifice.

These examples are not to tout technologies (blogs, sms, etc) but to point out that relationships are unique, require attention, hard work and continuous refinement on a regular basis to get the most out of them. Anyways love to my wife, my brother, my parents and my friends :-). I am not getting maudlin, just letting you know that you all are worth all this and a lot more of my time and energy.

Good luck with your relationships :-) Let me know if you want to bounce thoughts with me.

Interesting Jobs

He says he was afraid of only three things in life "electricity, heights....." You got to see this video :-) -> link

More presentation goodness

This time from Seth Godin. His article is on how to put in a little more thought into your power point creation but get a lot of reward in return. Give it a read, well written with concrete examples as well.

How much effort do you put into your presentations

In the enterprise software context/world we don't have a presentation guru. Presentations are considered as part of the job responsibility of most of the normal functional roles. It is more common to see presentations be a part of the day to day job for functional managers (program, product, project) and for sales and marketing folks than for developers and other engineers.

Most presentations follow a common company template or stay simple. This is not a bad thing but if the goal is to influence people through the presentation that the medium and the tools being used might be as important if not more as the content being presented.

Data Visualizations: Modern Approaches is an aggregation of different presentation techniques. Specifically addressing the problem of data visualization. Good link to have in your book marks list.
(HT to Guy Kawasaki )

Links:
Data Visualizations: Modern Approaches
presentation zen.

Remind me not to teach my (future) kids driving

I accidentally drove one of our cars into the other this morning. I had a not so small dog in the back of the suv and so could not see out of my rear view mirror. I proceeded to back out and ran straight into our other car. Looks like we have to replace the hood :-/ $$$....

Yeah, good thing my wife is kind, loving and did not marry me for my attention to detail or driving skills.

be prepared

http://locator.thevision2020.com/

Stardust

It was a fulfilling movie going experience for me. I am an "all the way" Neil Gaiman fan, so this was a beautiful gift from my wife to me (Thanks Kim). I enjoyed the show 100%.. I loved the richness of the story with its ability to surprise me with magic. As in, it is pretty obvious that you are watching a world where magic is in the open but it still manages to get you when you see magic occur.

There is something beautiful and special when a story is essentially a coming-of-age story and a love story between a prince (from a magical world) and a fallen star but you never stop to think - how exactly does the "love" i know of translate to something shared between a prince and a fallen star. Instead you just accept it, get caught up in it and find yourself rooting.

:-) Then again maybe I am uniquely qualified to enjoy movies like this completely. I can easily suspend disbelief and be completely lost in a rich land provided the story stays seamless as it keeps stretching reality. This one did that for me.

Highly recommend it but YMMV. Btw, to be 100% honest, my wife mentioned that she felt like it dragged a bit in the middle. The run time is ~2hrs.. it felt like 45 mins to me :-)

Small World

I was in LAX on Thursday on my way to Austin. My standard ritual during my return trips is to consume my elixir of choice at the starbucks in the terminal.
The girl who took my credit card looks up at me and says "Are you from India?" I nod with a smile (it is pretty obvious if you look at me) She then asked "which state are you from?" This caught me off guard since most people are not familiar with the states in India. I said I am from South India. She continued confidently, "TamilNadu?".. I was bemused and did the nod again. "Vanakam" ... I did a double take but I had heard her right, she repeats it "vanakkam".
Vanakkam is the word for 'welcome' in Tamil, my mother tongue. She answered my unasked question with, "Yeah I took Tamil in college". Did you go to school here I asked (referring to USC/UCLA etc). No no... of course not. I am from Poland she said. It turns out that Tamil is offered as a foreign language in Poland.

It is a small world indeed. Coincidentally my wife is going to Poland in a few weeks.. maybe she will be able to practice her meager but growing Tamil vocabulary there ;-)

If I was a book, I would be

You're Siddhartha!

by Hermann Hesse

You simply don't know what to believe, but you're willing to try
anything once. Western values, Eastern values, hedonism and minimalism, you've spent
some time in every camp. But you still don't have any idea what camp you belong in.
This makes you an individualist of the highest order, but also really lonely. It's
time to chill out under a tree. And realize that at least you believe in
ferries.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Been a while since I posted. Work has been holding the leash pretty tight on my collar. I like these mindless quizzes. This one actually is fun. They ask you just 5 questions (IIRC) and then Bang! they have mapped you to a book :-). I am actually the opposite of their conclusion though I can understand the mapping based only on the questions I answered. I have a sneaking suspicion that they have a pretty simple decision tree and once a leaf node is reached, they stop asking more question :-) since they have no where else to go.

HT to Tish for this link.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Hot Topic: Responsible Journalism

Headline : "USA May Be Set To Have Worst West Nile Virus For Years"

Facts pointing to this headline:

• The number of cases reported so far this year are four times higher than the equivalent period in 2006.
• Georgia has three times as many disease-transmitting mosquitoes this year, compared to 2006

So we could have had 4 cases reported in 06 and 16 so far in '07 but it is much better instead to say 4X MORE CASES IN 2007!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!


Is this a trend we are going to have to live with or is there a chance this will change?

Boston in pictures

Kim uploaded a bunch of pictures from our Boston trip written about here and here.

• Lovingly edited set of pics.
• All pics

She is good with a digital camera indeed :-)

Bizarre news

The title says it all,

Coolbaugh dead at 35 :Tulsa Drillers' first base coach killed by line drive

Ugh a young man survived by two sons and his wife. Sad :-/ I am curious about what the odds are of this happening?

Walk through Boston (continued)

Today was definitely a warmer day :-) We slept in and headed to Harvard square for a bit of brunch.

1. We ate at Zoey's which was great except they looked at me strange when I asked for Sourdough toast. Weird...
2. We came up a movie set on Harvard campus. It turns out that the movie is called "The Great Debaters" and it stars Denzel and Forrest Whitaker. No we did not get a glimpse of either of them.
3. We checked out the MIT campus and took a walk by theCharles river
4. We then went to the Boston Science museum and watched a really cool electricity show featuring tesla coils and van-de-graaf generators that generated some impressive lightings.

Hoping to get some good indian food for dinner tonight.
-amar

Walking our way through Boston

Kim and I decided to explore Boston on foot today :-). We have thoroughly enjoyed it so far. I wanted to share few of the Boston observations.

• This city is super walking friendly. Of all the big cities I have been to in the US (NY, SF, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, DC, Seattle, Denver) Boston is the most walking friendly. We are also enjoying an unbelievably gorgeous day which tilts things in Boston's favor.
• We started from our hotel by the Haymarket T station (close to Faneuil hall) and walked over to Faneuil hall/Quincy market place. Wait, that is neither cool nor interesting, so ..
• Boston seems to have more Dunkin Donuts stores than Starbucks.
• There are over a 100 Italian restaurants/coffee shops/gelataria's lined up along two streets by the North End. We had dinner last night at Bricco's. I wanted Osso Bucco but apparently it is a winter dish.
  
• Boston was founded in 1637 ... so pretty darn old but such a good looking city.
• We walked right by the oldest restaurant in the country.
• I am from Austin but we were treated to 4 different street musicians as we meandered through Newbury street. The variety was great, from rock to country to jazz by a three students who study music at BerkeleyBerklee school of music. Boston seems to have a lot of good street music during the summer if what we encountered is not an exception.
• Newbury street runs parallel to Commonwealth and one is bohemian and shows a lot of the city's culture while the other speaks of power and wealth. Interesting juxtaposition. (Kim noticed this as we were walking through)
• Boston has some beautiful parks. We walked through one right by the Boston commons that was gorgeous.
• What else.... oh yeah we saw this kid in the park, he was holding a branch with a baby bird on it. The chick could not fly, tried to and fell on his bike, the mama was not coming down since this kid was holding the chick and did not know how to return it to its mother. It all worked out in the end.
• Newbury was interesting as well. We were having authentic Boston ice-cream when we noticed that 4 of the 5 people around us had the latest harry potter. Two of them were reading it and the other two were proud new owners. We promptly purchased our copy of course!
• There was a plaque at the park by the Boston Commons that had quotes from some of Boston's original settlers, it was a cool glimpse into the values and principles that were influential back in the days.
  
• We had a green peace group "keeping it real" next to us and trying to get people's attention. Then a LOUD noisy Ferrari pulled up, revved for the next 5 mins and slowly parked right next to them. Seemed oddly funny for some reason.
  
• As we walked by Louis Boston store, we noticed a gaggle of men. The objects of attention it turned out were a Bentley, a Ferrari, a CLS 500 and a Ducati parked next to each another. Good times !

Hoping to find some good food at Chinatown tonight! wish us luck.

It is not about me

There is a lot going on around me. Plus this article by Clay Shirky I read (10 mins back) got me thinking. I am hyper connected these days (relative to my preference not relative to the scoble standard). My dad is more connected to me thanks to my blog. But it is good to remember that my blog is a means to an end, it is not the end. Its goal is to help me stay connected with people not meet people so my blog is more relevant.
So anyway here is what is going with people i know/love/care

1. My wife is on her way right now to join me in Boston (sooner the better).
2. Eryn's horse fancy is moving closer to being a proud mama.
3. Tiffany is living it up in London.
4. Corbett is enjoying his new job and in general seems happier when Jen is with him than when she is not ;-) (which is rare these days)
5. Drew is a proud dad and man their kid is handsome.
6. Speaking of handsome kids, Moyer smith is making waves in the US
7. Krista is cramming away to reach her MBA goal....
8. John (i hope) is loving seattle, kicking butt at amazon and enjoying family with Thao and Issac.
9. The vyssotski's are keeping it real with alexie
10. My parents are busy with a typical Indian summer.
11. My brother is working his way to prepare for some major excitement in life.
    
12. (just realised i could be writing this post for another hour easy!)
    

holy focus changer batman .... gawd people are living such rich busy eventful lives :-). Not sure why I wanted to write this post but writing it has made it easy for me to take the focus of myself and my stressful life and enjoy the changes in my friends lives.


what is going on in your friends lives?

My wife took me to a movie

..and it was fun :-) We saw "Once" (imdb link). The plot outline is apparently

"A modern-day musical about a busker and an immigrant and their eventful week, as they write, rehearse and record songs that tell their love story."

Does not quite do it justice though. You have to see it for yourself. Btw, if you enjoyed "Before Sunset". There is a pretty good chance you will like this one.

True Love vs Infatuation

Our friend Dr Thurman has been teaching on the difference between infatuation and "true" love at church. Obviously "true" is based on how Jesus/the Bible defines love between a husband and wife.

Lately I have been on the receiving end of a lot of true love from my wife :-). Life has been hectic and Kim and I have been crossing paths a lot. What is amazing is that through all of this, the marriage continues to beat with a steady rhythm and pulse. Almost like we are both off key with our respective instruments but the base is healthy and steady (except we are both contributing to the base so there is no separate drummer/base guitarist).

I am so grateful that we are not standing on a foundation of infatuation but on truth that says "true" love involves tremendous hard work, grace, forgiveness and humility. I am also grateful for my wife who finds ways to appreciate me and love me in spite of my best efforts ;-)

Thanks Kim

Zerse or Hobra ?

How to love your family remotely

I got a call last week from my grandmother with a request for some PC related help. She lives clean across town and it was late in the evening. I did not want to let her down so I ended up using copilot and spending the 5$ for the 24hr license. It worked great :-) and I was able to take care of her issue. But I was wondering if I could have done it even cheaper (sure there is vnc but it is not very grandmother friendly. It looks like I can using crossloop.

I am hoping to try it with my mom so she can read my wife's blog. Will let you know how it works out. This one should be a little trickier since my mom lives half way across the world and is on a dedicated DSL i think but not sure.

p.s you cannot hope to ever "completely" love someone remotely but that does not mean you stop trying.

Random notes from recently

Books read/reading

• Complications by Atul Gawande (in progress)
  
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman (re-read)
• Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (re-read)
  
• Eragon by Christopher Paolini
• Eldest by Christopher Paolini
• Total Truth by Nancy Pearcy (in progress)
  
• Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (in progress)
  
• Polar Shift by Clive Cussler and Paul Kemprecos
  

I think there are probably a few more but i am forgetting them. Work related reading would fall into this category but you need to follow my del.icio.us tags for that.

Movies from recent

• Transformers
  
• Pirates of the Caribbean by III
• Invincibles (repeat)
• Hot Fuzz
• Iron Man (partial)

Houses bought/sold/moved into

• One :-)

Job started/quit/getting used to

• One :-)

Living my life, loving my wife - priceless.

Seeing and Listening

Due to the fact that my new office is located in downtown Austin I have started to take the bus to work. The reasons 'for' are plenty and I have not bothered with the reasons against :-). The 'for' reasons include , saving on gas, more reading time, less stressful commute, saving on downtown parking... like I said a lot.

While in the bus I noticed a "Jack Brown" dry cleaner store. The store was closed but there was a window washer at work and I could not take my eyes of him. He was so meticulous in his attention to detail, making sure that he cleaned the blade of his wiper between every wipe. It reminded me that sometimes a job well done is its own reward. I design software for a living and more often than not I get frustrated with mundane tasks but seeing that clean sparkling window was a cool reminder to the power of commitment.

I get of the bus and am waiting to cross the street. The light turns red, a car pulls to a stop and as I am crossing, I see this man run from the other direction straight to the car, the window rolls down, they smile at each other and the running man gives a package to the car driver and takes of. The windows roll up and the car drives away. My mind started to race at the possibilities of what happened there :-)

All in all, i like taking the bus. It is teaching me to observe again. Hopefully listening will follow.

Biking to work -- getting closer to making it happen

I bought a used R900 R900 (thanks Nick) last night. It is a 2002 bike that belonged to an ex-triathlete. My friend Drew helped me get it :-), thanks Drew.

Psyched! wish me luck as I try to get used to it. I am hoping to use it to get to work on a regular basis!

President makes a fashion statement

bush
Originally uploaded by a.ma.r

Black monogrammed socks and black crocs....ugh very presidential

kiva.org

It is a startup organized at enabling people from wealthy countries to lend small amounts of cash (micro-finance) to entrepreneurs in the poorer nations. It is a beautiful concept and I hope it can stay free of corruption, scandal and abuse long enough for people to realize that a business when focussed on the right vision can be a powerful tool for transformation.

Check it out -> www.kiva.org

call centers - cart before the horse?

I just got of the phone with an Amex representative. I am fairly confident that she is an Indian woman and most likely working out of a call center in India. Quite impressive since it means she is doing the evening or the night shift and I appreciate her willingness to work at odd hours.
During our conversation, she read my address back to me and recited a 6 or 7 digit zip code for me. I of course corrected my address. I am not bothered by this as much as piqued by this. Call centers, BPO's and the companies that hire them work hard to mask the fact that these employees are not from the US. So the intensive training program on American culture and accent. This is a no win game that I believe focuses on the wrong thing.

I don't care that her accent is excellent as much as I care that she does not realize that US has a 5 digit zip code. I find it amusing that call center reps are being trained to hide their identity and act instead of being trained on the "serving" end of "customer service". If he/she realises that I am trying to "change my address" and helps me get it done with courtesy and clarity then I don't care how authentic the accent is.

--disclaimer--
I understand that there are more than enough customers who are comforted by a familiar accent. I do buy the need for accent training but I think it should follow good service training not precede it.
--disclaimer--

how NOT to practice customer service

In the unorganized world of moving there are victims who move and the movers who facilitate these situations. These are their stories.
Da Ding...

Quick version: we moved successfully last week :-) Praise God.

Longer version: We had some hiccups. One of which was moving company "Quality Movers" (henceforth referred to as QM) calling me on Saturday to get the address for the move. But I had never confirmed with QM only got a quote from them. I had signed up with "Minor Moving" (henceforth = MM) to do the actual move.
In their defense, I never explicitly called and told QM that I was not using their services after getting the quote but that is not the same as confirming. So I apologized for the confusion and thanked them for their call and told them that I had picked another company. Few minutes later i get a call back from the same woman at QM who gave me the original quote, she starts the conversation with

• "i heard the movers tried to get your address and you declined, what is up?" not in a friendly tone of voice either.
• i explain to her that i never confirmed with them and i am sorry for the confusion but i was not using them.
• she then proceeds to challenge me on the strength of my memory. i once again point out that i am not calling her a liar, just that sometimes two sides end up with different take on past events. I tell her again that I did not intentionally set out to spoil her day and i am sorry for the unfortunate turn of events but i have somebody else lined up.
• at this point her voice gets louder, tinged with sarcasm and she asks me if i am usually this confused :-)

So I could either have been rude in return or see how far she is willing to lose her cool and discredit her company. I opt for the latter.

• I let that pass and tell her that the conversation is no longer productive and I am sorry for her troubles.
• She explains to me the amount of trouble I have caused her and she asks me what moving company i went with?
• I tell her I went MM, to which she takes a few seconds and then comes back with "Hah, I just found out that the movers you choose lost their license with Texas board of xxx (don't remember). Looks like you made a great choice.. i hope you are happy".

wow! ...... what could have be done differently here? Let me see

• Never call your customer when you are heated up and angry (even if they are wrong). Never do this!
• Remember customers are typically not for single transaction. On average, for any company,I am willing to bet that most customer will make multiple transactions over their life time. So take the time to educate the customer or understand their context so you can win their business next time.
  
• If things are not looking good, try to your best to blow their expectations away by reacting differently. For instance, if QM had called me back and said they were sorry to lose my business but still wished me a great move and gave me good moving tips. You bet I am going to bend over backwards to give them business from my friends.

.....little patience before picking the phone to call me would have made such a difference......

C&O Trattoria - Good Eats

I am in LA working with a client. My team and I headed out to C&O Trattoria last night for dinner on recommendation. It is a great Italian place located right next to the beach at Marina Del Ray. They have pretty darn good food, house wine served on the honour system and nightly sing alongs. All in all, what a good Italian dining experience should be :-).

The only way this evening could have been a better was if I had my wife with me :)