Poker Pursuit

Poker. During the final few months of my college this game was wildly popular and everywhere in the hostel you could see people sitting with a bunch of playing cards in their hands. Caught up with the campus recruitment season, I missed out the poker wave.

There were a couple of rooms in the hostel where you get to watch a poker game 24×7. A few guys even lived primarily off poker. I often used spend sometime in those rooms trying to get a grasp of what the fuss was all about. Occasionally I joined them, whenever it wasn’t real money that was at stake. Though I didn’t learn much there, I learnt more about it online.

Then there was this second poker wave on Facebook. It was because of yet another popular game of Zynga apart from FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Back then I used to get like 20 requests to join Texas HoldEm Poker everyday. This time I did accept those requests and spent quite sometime playing online. But still it was never equal to the fun that comes from playing it at a poker table with your friends.

Though I am considerably good at the game now, I can never be too sure unless I play more often. There truly is no replacement for real life experience. Wish I was back at college when we had ‘more time’ on our hands. Probably if I get a good gang here in Chennai to play on the weekend’s I’ll do it. Or probably I got to get back to college again.

Chaos and GenFlux

I happened to stumble across a series of interesting articles on FastCompany about ‘Generation Flux’. The basic idea behind these articles is that there is a rapid acceleration in the pace at which the economy is changing and clarity about the future is rapidly diminishing. We are at a stage where we cannot ignore the major transformations that are taking place all around us. It also argues that uncertainty have taken over today’s decision making process and today’s decision makers have no credible long term solution.

They have outlined a idea called the Generation Flux which it believes are people who are able to thrive in such a scenario. These are the people who embrace instability and are not afraid to learn new things and adapt themselves. Being future focused is one of the traits of this so called Generation Flux and trying to replicate the past is a sign of vulnerability.

There are a lot of things one can learn from the so called Generation Flux. One of the major things that we can and should try to instill in ourselves is to keep learning new skills. According to GenFluxer danah boyd*, being able to live on one set of skills over a career is not realistic. Raina Kumra, another of the Gen Flux says that she is a ‘skill hoarder’. She says, “You keep throwing things into your backpack, and eventually you’ll have everything in your tool kit.”

Other important skill is to be able to manage information. “To manage large amounts of information is super important,” says Baratunde Thurston. “And the ability to tell a story is more important than ever. Coalition building is an important skill, the ability to connect. Flexibility of skills leads to flexibility of options. To see what you can’t see coming, you’ve got to embrace larger principles.”

According to boyd*, Kumra and other gen fluxers, there is no fixed path, no one to point your way. There is no role model. Anything settled is vulnerable. The article comes back to the theory of natural selection outlined by Darwin -  ”It is not the strongest of the species that survives; nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

*She doesn’t use capital letters in her name

500 Words Before 9

I came across Kiruba Shankar’s blogpost a couple of days ago where mentioned about an writing experiment of his. Kiruba is a well known speaker and author who is actively involved in various unconferences and similar events.

Internet is driven by content creation and it is one of the prime reasons for the staggering growth of internet startups. Photographs, Videos, Podcasts, Designs, Blogs everything is content. Most of the websites rely on the content created by its users and try to enhance how others interact with it. Twitter’s Tweets – content. Facebook status update – content. Flickr photo upload – content. Blog post – content. Email – content.

I for my part have been contributing a little content once in a while. Either through one of the rare blog posts here or through tweets or through comments etc on various blogs that I read regularly.  I also regularly take photos when I travel. Though the photos are not equal to that of a pro, it serves its purpose of preserving memories and capturing the fun of the moment.

So when I came across the blog post about Kiruba’s experiment of writing 500 words before 9AM, I was influenced. I too decided to try out the experiment. I hope to write everyday. But not necessarily before 9. I’m not exactly a morning person (with the exception during trekking when I get up before sunrise to enjoy the feeling). With greater quantity it would be easy to improve on quality. So I will write. It can be a blog post here or an entry in my personal online diary, Oh Life or probably a set of tweets or some or all of them.

Smarter or Dumber?

I recently came across two interesting articles of the Wall Street Journal published in June 2010. Each of them competes against the other and provide some interesting thoughts about the Internet’s effect on society. The first article is Does the Internet Make You Smarter? by Clay Shirky which compares digital media creation to the print industry and brings out the positives in the endless streams of amateur digital content like collaboration to create open source software and enormous resources like Wikipedia. The second article published the next day, is Does the Internet Make You Dumber? by Nicholas Carr. Here he argues that easy access to unprecedented amounts of information makes us shallow thinkers and is always a constant source of distraction.

Both articles are though provoking and definitely worth reading. Each of them have valid points. Clay Shirky says that the digital revolution is in fact increasing the intellectual range of the society. The Net also is playing a very important part in restoring reading and writing as the central activities of our culture. As for the funny videos, spam and other perennial distractions, Shirky says that whenever media becomes more abundant, the quality falls and increase in quality will happen gradually as we bring in more controls. According to him, in the print media, we had erotic novels coming up over 100 years before the first scientific journals.

One point that I having strong feelings about is where Shirky says that:

“Reading is an unnatural act; Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it’s our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools.”

Nicholas Carr also has some very valid points on his side of the arguments. He focuses on the division of attention due to the internet affects our ability to focus the mind and sustain concentration. It also is not limited to the time when we are using our digital devices. It also changes the habits of our mind adapting to the use of technology. He says that to read a book is to practice an unnatural process of thought. Reading a long sequence of pages helps us develop a rare kind of mental discipline. It is this control, this mental discipline, that we are at risk of losing as we spend ever more time scanning and skimming online.

Rather than letting the medium take control, we should be in control. Of course, it is true that we have far more distractions than what our parents or grandparents had. It is our responsibility to recognize that and assert that control over the medium.

You should definitely read both articles if you haven’t already read them.

Spam Filters

Ever since I got my blog up again last month, I had been receiving hundreds of spam comments each day. I haven’t ever seen so much spam on my blog earlier and was wondering what could be the reason for such a sudden spam rush. I had to manually mark all comments as spam and delete them. I was cursing all spam bots because those comments got mixed up in other regular comments of the blog and I ended up deleting valid comments as well.

That is when I realized that while getting the site up from the server error, I had deleted most of the plugins because one of them had been causing the problem I didn’t know which one. And at that time, I had also deleted the Akismet plugin. It was the one, which was protecting me from thousands of spam comments all these days. It had come preinstalled with all versions of WordPress shipped after 2.0. I didn’t actually realize its importance until it was gone. Akismet has premium plans as well as free plans. If you are running a small business blog or something that doesn’t run on WordPress, Akismet is a definitely a service worth paying for.

On the way to root my Wildfire

It’s been little over a year since I got my Wildfire. Its warranty has now expired. And with quite a few new models up its sleeve, HTC has stopped support for the Wildfire. Guess what, they are now redirecting HTC.com/wildfire to their latest phone catalog.

With much newer versions of Android floating around, and mine still stuck in 2.2.1, I decided a couple of days back to ROOT my phone. And being a newbie to this whole rooting thing, I began to do a bit of research.

Here is what i found:
-You can find the HBOOT version by turning off your phone and then powering it on with the ‘volume down’ button pressed.
-Depending on the version of HBOOT, there are a few apps that would help you change your phone from S-ON to S-OFF.

-Once the phone becomes S-OFF it hardly takes few minutes to deploy a custom ROM.

-CyanogenMod seems to be the preferred community based custom ROM.

-**If something fails during the rooting process, your phone is ‘bricked’. i.e. it can no longer be used.**

-Most guides have a disclaimer for bricked phones saying something like “I am not responsible for your stupidity”.

Despite the last two points being significant deterrents, I am all set to root my phone. More updates in the subsequent posts as I proceed through the process.

Posted from WordPress for Android

New Google Reader #Fail

Google Reader has always been a great RSS subscription tool for me to keep up with the latest posts of my favorite blogs. Apart from that, it has(had) been a great source for me to find new content that my friends were sharing. This was an important reason for me using their service because it helped me find interesting posts shared by like minded people who follow blogs regularly. It helped me find new blogs that I myself can subscribe to.

Google, in their attempt to integrate Reader with their infant social network Google+, have killed that. They have totally removed the entire setup of following others and the Reader specific ‘share’ button. If I find something interesting, I can only share it on Google+, which I rarely use. Moreover, there is a big difference between sharing on Reader and Google+. When I am in a mood to read, I wouldn’t want to wade through zillions of crappy status updates.

And it seems Google just doesn’t care. Reader is going to stay like this and it wants people-who-don’t-like-it to move on.

In all, the new redesigned Google Reader is a big #Fail. It is now just a plain feed reader but a good one at that. Despite all this, I don’t think I’ll move on because I don’t think there is a better feed reader in the market yet.

Six Months With HTC Wildfire

A very short update about my experiences with the HTC Wildfire. This is my first smartphone. And I’m loving it. It is no doubt a handsome phone and its easy to fall in love with it. But no doubt, it is also a low end phone from HTC compared to HTC Legend, HTC Desire or HTC Incredible. As a result there are a few features that are missing and a few apps are not compatible with this phone.

The upsides of using this phone is the Android platform which provides you with a number of fascinating applications. There are a few applications with amazing interfaces that include TweetDeck, Google Reader, WordPress, Maps, Dolphin Browser, Angry Birds etc. The integration with Facebook brings in hundreds of contacts and phone numbers directly to your phone. The sensitivity of the capacitive sensor is also quite good.

The downsides have to be the low resolution screen. As a result many apps are not compatible with this phone. Even the 5MP camera doesn’t work as good as a normal 5MP camera would. Running too many apps at a time may cause this phone to lag.

The phone is an excellent low-budget entry-level android phone for anyone who wishes to be a part of the ‘smartphone generation’.

Headers on My Old Blog

I was going through my Picasa Web Albums when I came across an album which included some of the old headers that I had designed for my old blog which was hosted at blogger.

I did these when I was in college. Most of them in the middle of the night in a sleepy mode. Some of them are outright silly.

Surveys!

Recently a friend at IIM B posted on her Facebook wall a link to a survey on Android phones. My eyes lighted up on seeing the word Android and being an Android user I was tempted to click on it.

It was a research survey about smartphones in general and asked us to compare different operating systems to each other and give appropriate ratings. The wildfire is my first smartphone and I haven’t actually used the iphone or any blackberry device. So I gave ratings based on what I had read at sites like appstorm and mashable.

My feelings about the survey was that it had a quite misleading title. Something on the lines of ‘Smartphones Survey’ would have been more apt. Secondly, they hadn’t included a brief summary about what the survey was about. Till the end of the survey I was expecting sometimg more specific to android but it didn’t have any. In the end, I submitted the survey a bit disappointed.

Surveys conducted by my office are even more amusing. Once they tried a new caterer for lunch and wanted to get the opinion of all employees about this caterer. The questions that they had was “Do you like the food provided by the new caterer?” and “Do you wish to continue with them?”. And most of us intentionally answered that the food was bad but we still wanted to continue with them. At times they come up with much more arbit questions and equally arbit answers.

They use an open source tool called “LimeSurvey“. That eventually led me to find more such tools. A few such interesting tools that I found are SurveyMonkey, PollDaddy, SurveyGizmo etc. Some of these are paid plans. And some like Survey Gizmo offer student plans which was used by my friend for that ‘Android’ survey. And more recently I found a couple of sites like GoPollGo and iQpoll.

And now Facebook has come up with their own Question-Answer system which can also be used for creating polls. And of course we can see Facebook use its gigantic user base to its advantage and try to drive traffic with arbit questions. The most recent poll that I saw was created by my bro asking his friends whether he should take bath or not?

While very few of these polls will be useful a large part of them will be random and will continue to be so.