Following the clock

Typical day:

5-6 AM wakeup -> Afternoon rush

Evening

At close of work, either go to gym, or get to reading/helping with homework/cooking.

Post dinner, get school work done, get reading.

Put child to sleep, and if I survive, get back to reading

Else, continue with step #1, the next day.

I observe that books and some form of exercise are the regular habits, which can be classified as good.

The regular digital habits, on the other hand required some monitoring and introspection:

a) Twitter(X)

Scroll through a list of regular people whom I follow, with very very limited political exposure (unavoidable, unless I want to be proverbially living under the rock).

With interesting events happening, I might over 40 mins a day scrolling and retweeting. Otherwise it might be within the 30 mins window.

Main topics I find myself reading/responding are: Fitness, travel, wildlife, world events, very specific trolling incidents outside my lil echo chamber. I had over the last two years trimmed the list of people I follow significantly, weeding out inactive or toxic accounts for people who consistently post relevant, informative or creative content. Biggest examples would be Sandeep Mall, Science Girl etc.

b) Youtube

I don't use the standard Youtube app due to the ads, and rely on the Youtube Vanced app [boohoo, this is now gone, and I'm subjected to the horrors of watching ads] for my video binging which I try to also avoid when my son is around. After all, we are lecturing him to restrict his screen time, all the time. 

On a average, I find I use Youtube for 30-40 mins a day. Rarely it can go beyond an hour if I sit late night to finish watching some long pending ones, or get into a YT Shorts binge-until-burnout.

Again, the contents mainly seem to either personal finance (quality/novelty over quantity here), medieval history (mostly related to something  I am reading/playing/listening), documentaries of something being manufactured or cooked, and sometimes fitness/workout videos and comedies or movie based stuff. 

c) Finance apps

I have off late got myself out of the personal finance/investment whirlpool by removing the Stock broker and Mutual fund apps from phone main screen. This significantly helps with not worrying about markets, investment levels and missed opportunities. So these app take hardly 2 min on a average every day, considering that these aren't opened at all most of the time, and when opened for checkpoints, I do spend some time analyzing trends.

Apps: Kite, MyCams, KFintech

d) Chrome:

This is too generic, and its usage widely depends on what I am googling. Regular websites would only be Farnam Street Blog, HackerNews etc, which are bookmarked. Most others are irregular investment related ones or yes, one minor whirlpool known as LinkedIn.

e) Steam:

This is a relatively new habit of mine, by virtue of getting Age of Empires 2 Defnitive Edition on my laptop through Steam ( paid for, really!). Not only have I spent 120+hrs already on the game (with 2+hrs in each session, leaving me mildly numb in the right arm afterwards ), but I have been induced to find and install a few more time draining Free-To-Play games. Off late, I uninstalled all of those additional ones as these were just straining my arms and eyes and plainly boring/violent games which my young son gets inspired with. AoE2 is relatively benign/boring/exciting depending on level of play and time sunk into it. Playing with a context, and strategy makes it rewarding especially campaigns which provide some historical stories also. Plain fighting it out makes it a burnout game though.

Ahem, after which, I found the "Uncharted Waters:Origins". It was a craze, engulfing many hours of my life until when I reached Level 40, and the satisfaction is saturated.  I find myself more gravitated to the non-digital activities to cope with higher hours on the work side.

f) Podcasts:

This is almost exclusively reserved for use while driving ( that too when I'm alone ), but there are also podcasts which I need a OneNote to take notes with too. These I re-listen after the car episode to distill the information, in the good imitation of Farnam Street advice on good reading practices.

Some of the podcasts I'm listening are:

a) The Knowledge Project of Farnam Street fame. Not bad, but not daily digestible content either.

b) Huberman lab. Wonderful topics, but need dedicated attention, filtering and note taking, plus followup.

c) Empire. This is my favourite go-to podcast because of the history, adventure, facts, relatable events with unknown backgrounds, funny banter of my favourite author and the ability to travel all over the world in my mind. But I have been slow on catching up the pace at which they release pods.

d) The seen and the unseen. Again, a masterful show. I pick topics I want to listen, because these are 2-3 hrs deep dives, but completely worth it.

News is shit!

New is shit nowadays. Ain't it?

I can't understand the need for sensible human beings to sell and pimp their judgement to suit the fancies of the news channels and other sources.

This might sound quite insulting and offensive to many heroic members who take part in passing judgement or forwarding news-based content over the social media and also among their circles.

But I propose this offensive path purely for the purpose of catching the attention of such people, so that I can ask them to first learn to scrutinize news content and the way sources portray news.

What is so wrong or bad in the way news is served?

Lets try to find and write em down. Shall we?

a) News is supposed to be reporting of events based on recorded facts. It shouldn't be making news in the first place. Most news channels, in order to bring exclusive content, select scoop news that has good chances of increasing TRP temporarily. In order to form a good story, many reporters make a good story and fit the facts to suit it. All this sounds fine as long as they do not sell it as news. It should be marketed as 'inspired by real incidents' and be played as a short movie. That provides the entertainment value intended by the news channel, and they get their required TRP too. And no one has a problem with fake news.

b) News sources making judgements not found in the recorded facts. This is the increasing trend which most members of the audience fail to grasp. Though a judgemental article makes for an excellent click-bait and brings good readership/response in social media, it is making a mockery of journalism and its core purpose. Everyone knows that being judgemental is an exciting position for the one who is judging, but the one who is being judged directly or indirectly is being dealt with unfairly. Judgemental individuals can be a pain in the ass based on their reach. So when a news network itself is intentionally judgemental, supported by scores of fans, expert panels, shrewd show hosts and eloquent speakers, the common man's cry for sensible, unbiased facts goes unheard.

c) News sources are off late being very selective in news reporting, indicating their political or business affiliations. Due to the two points above, warring sides can throw news channels and reports against each other with differing sequence of events for the same set of facts. These practices splits the audiences against channels that give undue importance to topics they dislike and pick out wrongs in things they are interested in. Now we have a large ecosystem of divided audience who are blind to any facts presented by the media source that is against their interests. This destroys the credibility that any party wishes to bring forth using the massive reach of these channels. They have all basically spoilt their reputation by splitting ways with unbiased journalism.

d) Influencers who control the news media using political means or financial means are the modern bane of media houses. Coming under attack for the 3 points above, if any individual decides to move away from mainstream techniques above, they are guaranteed to have a bad time. Once a third front opens with unbiased news, it takes only a sentient population to realize the imaginary worlds created by the mainstream media. As long as intelligent news consumers exist in the ecosystem, it is the need of the tycoons to ensure that such independent sources do not rise up to prominence. The techniques used to stall their growth ranges from persuasion,coercion,public humiliation,trapping into losing credibility, starting smear campaigns etc to using political and financial muscle to subdue such sources. This is by far the largest reason for the mainstream media to continue in the same fashion, though the number of media houses keep rising every fiscal.

e) Each media house, as explained above represents a set of ideals, supports selective bigwigs and shuns certain others. In such conditions, the fan following is split for such houses based on their individual preferences. Quite similar to how political party members support their party leaders through thick and thin irrespective of what they personally think about their actions, these fans forget their own personal stances and start worshiping their media houses. They also take up the role of attacking rival houses, defending their house and its ideals against rivals and/or random independent critics. The techniques used for attacking can range from simple arguments using facts,ranting incoherently,taunting etc to participating in smear campaigns using memes and spreading libel. It is quite sad at this point that the very same audience which is being cheated by the media houses and their bigwigs puts out so much of its time and energy on these petty fights instead of fighting to bring real facts out.


News is an entertainment now for many, and it is a source of money for many others. In between that, the lives of people who rely on the reported news being corrected is not really in focus, unless by sheer luck it also happens to bring in good TRP ratings. You would have to convince the media house's manager about this and also need to bring all houses into an agreement if you really want to reap the benefits. Otherwise you'd end up being either torn down or be worshiped albeit temporarily, until they find another juicy piece of news to follow.

Search for a new base

The way life takes one is sometimes a riddle for even the best minds and thinkers amongst us. Hence one fine morning I found myself distributing my wedding invitations and taking queries about preparations. Everything about getting married looks rosy(well, at least it did :P ) except the task of moving away from the bachelor house and settling in a house of one's own.

I must admit that it was quite challenging and I felt overwhelmed at times when faced with the various complexities of searching for the 'right' house to start our new life. Being a foolhardy and easy going traveller, finding a solid house was almost the opposite of what I knew about life, and that troubled me somewhere inside.

The usual way people do these are by talking to some real estate broker and get them to find the right place. I had done that myself a couple of times when looking for new places to live as bachelors. Well, now the game was being played at a different level altogether, and I had the innate sense of responsibility creeping up my guts slowly. Not only did I have very less time to take chances, I had to ensure that I counted various factors in selecting a home that I have never considered important in my life.

That made the whole 'operation', and yes that's what I like to call it, very interesting. I had tactically tried to evade the entire task by waiting for my fiancée to be transferred to same city and same office complex. I unwittingly kept on procrastinating until the day was upon me and my marriage was merely a fortnight away. At this point of time, I pushed myself off my bum and decided that I wouldn't go via the pesky real estate agents and rather put my own time and get the house myself, thereby saving some money too. *Pride*

(image credits peloruslearning.com)

But this meant that I had to spend a lot of time researching on the real estate conditions, checking available options and comparing them aggressively. I had heard about many online real estate websites that help in finding rentals at ease. I swear I must have heard at least 3-4 names repeated by various sources, and often with conflicting comments. Unable to come to conclusion by hearsay, I decided to put my time on it, and started off with a couple of them, scouring the sites, customizing my options and slowly learning what's for sale on the internet.

I found at least a couple of websites to be really good with the interfaces, but when it came to the quality of data, I found housing.com to be the best option. Not  only was every single ad and owner contact number accurate and up-to-date, they even had a mechanism to interface between owners and buyers, helping in making calls and sending reminders. This helped me especially since I would get return calls from owners I had contacted while I was riding my bike searching for the houses. Housing.com kept on providing me info on missed calls I received from owners and let them be tracked properly.

I must have visited at least 25 properties in a span of two days but when I was standing inside my current home, with the best deal one could get, just on the second day, I even suspected that I made a mistake somewhere. While this might sound like an ad, I must admit that I realized afterwards that if it wasn't for Housing.com, I wouldn't have found the home that we call our wonderful adobe right now. The story of its discovery is another topic in itself, but nothing short of serendipity, a word that I fell so deeply in love with :)

Anyway, here we are, one month after our marriage and with a good jump start for our exciting life ahead, feeling thankful for the presence of friends, relatives and some good neighbours that were found thanks to the time I decided to spend on the internet efficiently.

flame wars everywhere

News is all around us, and many of us devour upon it. I am a mild consumer of news.
News itself might be ranging trivial or funny stuff for leisure reading for people with specific interests to really breaking and important ones which everyone reads.

I occasionally get to read many articles from various news channels on interesting topics. I read quite less, as in I click on news articles in FB timeline,twitter timeline or in some news websites, only if I really get attracted to the headlines.

First I read the article, think upon it, and see if I agree with the author and his/her viewpoints depending upon my expertise on the topic. Then the mind seeks to know what other people or friends think about it if I feel it is something others might be interested in. So, I head over to the comments section to see the public perception.

The responses are interesting topic to study for data statistics and understanding the mindset of the readers. Comparing the responses to the same news topic in multiple media gives a good idea of the coverage of the media and the nature of their readers.

But there are also lots of news of high importance, for which the amount of public response seems strangely insufficient. I often feel short of content after reading some articles and wish to know what the general public reading it thinks about it. But almost all articles of interest to me garners no interest from the public that 'freely shares opinions'.

But among the few that do, I have seen such little useful and sensible comments that I subconsciously don't scroll down to the comments section for good articles. Take a news that even remotely relates to politics, war, religion etc and you get to the other extreme. There are lots of points, data and perceptions to read, but what spoils the apple cart is the flame wars.

Flame wars are fun to read upto some point, if the opposing sides have enough valid ammunition. But I have observed that most of the comments in the Indian media are very immature or sounds like plain propaganda message. I can immediately imagine a furious fanatic typing away on his keyboard trying to block the points made by the other side. The shit hits the fan when the topic covers sensational topics for no reason.

For this reason, sometimes I stick to respectable news media like The Hindu or some other foreign media for news that is of interest to me. Also I trust the category specific news feeds more as they don't tend to deviate from topic..

Your own Social Network Doll House :)

Imagine all the social network tools we indulge ourselves with in day-to-day life. We have built ourselves a nice doll house to live a virtual life in.

There are so many and very few people have actual use and purpose for all these tools. Others just follow blindly the crowd.

Alright.

The following analogies came into my mind while chatting about Quora with my friend whom I call Birdiee Didi.

To me, my bedroom is Grooveshark,my mp3 collection, the equally illegal movie collection and the music videos downloaded from Youtube. They help me sleep,relax and enjoy life.

I wake up to read news from nowhere. So my drawing room is Quora, nowadays. Used to be Yahoo answers once upon a time. But Quora beats Yahoo Answers hands down. It has everything akin to a newspaper except real news. Its all analysis and curiosity satisfying answers to the most itching questions of mankind. Quora is my drawing room because I feel like I have invited friends and people I know and discuss all kinds of topics that is of common interest. We end up chatting for hours together without even noticing the time.

Stumbleupon and Goodreads are like my reading room. I use them to explore and find experimental stuff that are of interest to me. I seldom discuss about these matters, but surely put lots of research time. Each wonderful page I stumble upon gets saved and savoured for a long time. Goodreads provides me the platform to plan my next reading and acquisition cycles. It allows me to sit on my chair dreaming about places I can visit, people I can meet, things I can experience and I end up planning adventures. But they all remain in their places once I leave the reading room.




Twitter, to me is like peeping out of the window into the streets. You watch the people pass by, seeing only a glimpse of their real lives and make impressions about pretty much everything about them from it. I also sometimes shout out random stuff that I am doing in my house to the street. Someone might cock their head and grin their teeth, while most of em just pass by without minding. Thats twitter in all senses to you.

Now, the king of it all, facebook. Facebook was a bit difficult to decipher. But I now believe it is like going to the market. You set out to buy something, but end up buying that and more. And sometimes you never buy what you intended to, but quite happily return buying something else. It is like a mad crowd out there. The hawker with the most attractive wares gets all the customers, and the others soon have to close shop. The attractive ones continue making waves in spite of not bringing in quality items for sale. And with all this money and attraction comes the dirty side of it too. Criminals, hypocrites,show-offs,mafia and what not.

I believe that was a very accurate depiction of what the social networking doll house looks like, in which we are all lifeless dolls, taking the form of lively ones in some imaginary world of ours :)

adios amigos..

food for thought

Thanks to Zenpencils for another wonderful piece

Stupid Spam

I just noticed the bullshit spam messages posted in my chatbox(to the right side)of this article. It is interesting because it has a human touch to it, though probably posted by a bot.

Most of them don't have proper grammar or meaning, and are just meant to lure someone to click on the link which will lead to ad sites probably.

Though I find it very amusing, I wonder whether someone will actually seriously click on those links to read more about the person(:P) who posted it.

The reason why rushed to my blog was a quick increase in site visit via direct link from a particular locality(name to be withheld), as seen in Google Analytics. But this new development was not expected, and I am really happy that someone stepped on my turf with malicious intent.

Building honeypots was once my hobby. I don't do it nowadays. But this unexpected catch caught my attention.

OK. ciao

Twitter Addiction

Among many other things, the new found (from mar/apr 2010) Twitter addiction is one thing I have been trying to break.

I found this site called TweetStats which gives a lot of interesting data and patterns of tweets. I was alarmed at the increasing tweet numbers of my initial days. But as those were initial days, I didn't care much, but cared about what to tweet and what not to.

View the current graph for my account, which shows that, my activity had dropped continuously till June 2010, but picked up again in July, for reasons yet to be found.

Hopefully, due to this month's hectic schedule and unavailability of resources, my twitter addiction will break and I would return to being a normal citizen( rather than a netizen ).

Anyway I like the new zoom feature in tweetstats. Hmm...an addiction to tweetstats better not be imminent.. :)

Some interesting sites

Earth Album is an interesting mashup obtained by combining flickr and google maps. It allows you to click on any place in the map, and load photos from flickr based on that place. It doesn't allow selecting very detailed places,but allows keyword and category based photo search on a location as well. It is worth enjoying for sometime.

Breathing Earth, is an awesome flash site that shows in real time a lot of statistics about CO2 emissions and population in various parts of the world. It is an innovative idea and the site has been designed well.

Uber Super, is an awesome photography site. Its pictures are really breathtaking and creative. Never knew so much can be caught on camera in such ways..

Musicovery. This is from my StumbleUpon "Music" category. This site allows you to select a mood you want and they will play music of that category online. There are various options to play in a sequence. The only downside is that the songs are from Amazon,itunes etc that are paid and many of the features of this site are for premium members only(sensibly so as music needs to be paid for). But I really liked the idea.

Thats all for now.Please leave comments. I would love to hear from you readers

Story of a technical accomplishment

Phew....finally that day came and it didn't bring much harm.I am talking about my Minor Project for our sixth semester.



I will not go into technical details of the project here,I may put them up on my tech blog.I am also trying to find a place to upload the already popular project somewhere on the internet.
OK...briefly speaking the project aims at using a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone for controlling media players running on a computer.The software works on all JSR-82 complaint phones(that majority of phones in the market,but didn't work on most of Motorola handsets).Hehe..while typing this...what comes to my mind is the god-knows-what kinda content that we used to make for documentation..twisting and talking about almost the same point.Initially it was tough,then we got used to it.


As I said early,I would like to keep the technical details for the other blog.The documentation's non-tech part would be similar to this blog,if I take out the personal references.For guys who are gonna start minor projects or are worried how documentation is done,I would like to say only this...know your project,learn the codes and as far as possible involve yourself with all parts/modules of the project.This gives you a far insight into the product perspective(another docu terminology of SRS fame).
Well now I think I should briefly explain how things happened so far in our college and how we fared and finally how the results were met.
To begin with,I had great faith in our project,because unlike most of our classmates,this was an idea my friend(Abhay the puli..) had really wanted(because he needed something to control media players while lying down).I had asked him to concentrate on other ideas also for choosing abstract,but most of them were either involved hardware or needed too much research and time.Finally we stuck to this plan,as while searching for ideas on the net,we came upon an umpteen number of similar projects.
Abhay being a java puli and mobile(especially bluetooth) fanatic quickly found out whether the expected bluetooth implementation is possible,while I was unable to understand much of it.I had taken up the media control part,where my imagination alone is enough and also Abhay's guidance.
We were happy when the abstract was accepted.Afterwards,we hit a rock bottom(as did most groups).We collected and downloaded pages,pdfs and references to Bluetooth and its implementation.Abhay was active with it most of the time..though not much coding took place.

It was by the beginning the stupid documentation process that we got serious with our project.SRS creation was something which needed detailed information the project.Me and Abhay started using del.icio.us and collected materials discussed it online or when we met.Quite a solid ideas was laid at that time and all four of us knew what finally it would be like.
Initial coding involved taking codes from existing open source codes and understanding them(only Abhay could do it).Soon Abhay and Sooraj learnt J2ME needed for the GUI and prepared it very early.By the midterm evaluation,we had GUI completed and we had bits and pieces of client Bluetooth.The evaluation went well and all members progressed alongwith the project.
Then started our search for proper server and how to use the JDIC functions for media control.Then came placements,leaving the project as it is.On the day after TCS,when Mindtree placement was going on,Abhay called and said..."Da,project over.Will show tomorrow".I was so stunned.
Anyway after that we had several fixes and add ons from then on,I learned my part of the code and then started training and fixing strategy of approach.The dirty documentation was what I did to learn the project perfectly,even the previously unknown parts.I designed those UML diagrams,algorithms and all kinda dialogues and sporty lines that make our project look like the next urgent need of the generation.

Rest contd in next post...this has become quite big.

Internet Tools---Google wins

This can be seen as the continuation of my first post on Google!!!

This time I am posting coz I am overwhelmed by the range of tools that I am using as a netizen.

First among those are as usual Google tools only.


Gmail is my most trusted and fav mail service.I have a/cs in many major services,but only gmail prevailed,Yahoo! also prevails,but its interface is heavy.I like Yahoo! services now,they are luking gud and will make improvements.

As for groups,I had few groups in Yahoo!,now shifted to Google Groups 2.Its slick and easy interface that allows listing msgs together is rather cool,compared to Yahoo! provided.I am hoping for Yahoo! to follow suit and make rapid improvements in that field too,coz I noticed the implementation of msg stacking and complex listing methods they are trying,nice..Yahoo! keep it up.

I have this one blog and another tech one,so I am interested in keeping track of visitors,the sources and all kinda info.Google Analytics rock...truly.The plethora of tools and data that is provided by that single tool can leave u customizing ur pages and understanding possible trends.Yahoo or another service wont come near it.Sitemeter is kinda ok,but not near google's counterpart.

Google Webmasters tool is also looking great.I have added my sites there and will check how the crawling is happening and wat kind of optimisations can bring in more visitors to my content(wich i am trying to upgrade in terms of originality and frequency).

Now I have to refer to the page "My Account" to find the services I am using,such a long list.

aah..Orkut.What to say about this revolutionary social networking site.Its the news in every part of the world.The name and the brand google says it all for it.Compared to other services provided by Google,this lacks serious professional attitude from the designers,I have felt that for long.But now many steps have been taken to remove those "doughnut" things and speeds have increased.The idea to integrate flash videos and album customization has gone long way in bringing back old fans.The reply from ur scrap feature is really cool.The updates listing is something less expected at intial times of orkut,but now ppl have competitions of writing attractive profiles(though compared to other services,customization is at lowest point).Communities have also become more sensible and cool with polls and all..orkut is surely moving up the popularity and quality graph once again.Customization is quite a deterrent from making orkut superb compared to the likes of Facebook,Myspace etc..wich are really gr8 luking in terms of eye-candy and functionalities.The large Indian mass hanging onto Orkut has made it a place not many can leave forever as most of frndz and contacts prefer to stick to orkut(sigh...these ppl don't adapt to changes fast).

Another thing is the integration of one of my fav tools ,Yahoo! Answers with orkut.Though not integration,the similar service has started new time pass things.
Btw yahoo answers is a really cool thing,u learn and also enjoy the whole process.
Ppl refer to sites and compile data to make replies,that nice to get integrated answers,but then ur question shud catch the attraction of dedicated answerers(u must see their number of ans and best ans...u will wonder wat other jobs these guys/gals have!!)

I also use online photo albums,I had Yahoo! photos,now Flickr...really nice ....like I said Yahoo is upto gud things now.I am not so satisfied with Google Picasa that needs the tool to be present on the system.I am no-no for tat kinda service.

Another really great tool that I use quite often is Google Docs.This is simply revolutionary by all standards.C'mon how many services allow u to use Word,Excel like interfaces on the net,free of charge???Doc makes sharing my projects,seminar notes,and all kinds of things that an engg student needs,such a simple thing.Sharing with collaborators and also viewers..its really a cool thing all in all.

I am also a fan of gtalk while being in Windows and I rely on Pidgin messenger of Ubuntu to integrate my Yahoo and Google accounts.Nothing beats that!!Yahoo has started its messenger online,its ok,but i prefer tat on my system.

I have also signed up with Google Adsense.Though not much earning(abt $5 only),the idea is nice.I can atleast I earned tat much.:D

As far as the blogs are concerned,the wide variety of tool that blogger has provided after integration with google is simply breathtaking.This has allowed amateurs like me to venture into blogging.Videos,polls,adsense integration....really cool..the templates provided also are great luking.

Another new tool of Google:Google Image Labeler
Its a sort of game you play with another player in random.Both play at giving labels to the image they show.Matching causes u and partner to get points.This is meant to refine their search ability and also understand the possible sequence of thoughts that a user has on giving an image query.This is surely gonna be subject to Data Mining to obtain intelligent decisions for their algorithms..way to go Google.Try it at


Basically my net activities are like this:
1)Mail check(gmail and yahoo only)
2)Chatting(Gmail,gtalk or pidgin)
3)Tech probs(Digit forum,yahoo answers,google search which means all sites are open)
4)browsing all kinds of media and topics(google and wiki rock)
5)Online videos of songs,speech,games,trailers..etc.(google video and youtube also many new services)
6)Anime and game music(search galbadia hotel in Google)
7)Torrents activity--Mininova,Torrentz,isohunt,desitorrents(dead) and demonoid(dead??)..clients being utorrent,azureus,now fav is deluge.
8)P2P music downloading---Strictly Limewire
9)Blogging---only blogspot

After saying all this ,I must say one tool tat i use mostly is google search and all google products.Advanced searching in google is really powerful,thought the methods might be slight complex...the stuff is the best u get....