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

Go Go Go Goa

Everybody says “You’ve got to go to Goa!”. So we did. Republic Day was a Thursday. Took off on Friday and hopped on to the flight to Goa. Some friends came with me. Some came directly from Bangalore and Hyderabad. In all it a gang of ten, all from my batch in college.

Spent four days at Goa with friends at a rented house near the Baga Beach. Roamed around North Goa in a bunch of two-wheelers. Beaches, Beaches and Beaches. And lots of food. It was an amazing experience.

Should have posted more here. Time has passed on though. Probably I will add more here later on. You might never know. But search engines will and my future self will be able to read it as well.

If you are planning for a trip to Goa and would like to get more details, do contact me about my experience at Goa. I am willing to share more.

Leh Ladakh November 2011

This was in my wishlist for long. Who wouldn’t have wanted to visit the Himalayas and see the snow clad peaks in their full glory? I did. And my dream came true when a group of office guys planned a trip. I immediately asked them to book tickets for me as well.

We set off on a Wednesday night from Chennai. The first flight was from Chennai to Delhi. We reached Delhi at around 10 in the night. And the next flight to Leh was in the morning. So we took a taxi and went to a hotel for night stay. I was setting foot in Delhi after almost ten years. It felt a lot different now, that it was when I lived there. We didn’t get to spend much time in Delhi as we had a high time constraint.

The next day morning the flight took us to Leh, via Jammu. Before the flight even landed, Leh greeted us with thousands of tiny peaks glimmering in the sunshine. It was a surreal experience. I had no idea where the flight was going to land, because all I could see was peaks and there seemed to be no surface flat enough for a runway to be constructed. Then all of a sudden a tiny runway appeared and we landed within a matter of seconds. The Leh airport was tiny compared to the the Delhi and Chennai airport.

Soon after we came out, we got two taxis and went to the hotel that we had booked. It was Oriental Guesthouse. It is run buy a very hospitable Ladakhi family. It was right next to the famous Shanti Stupa. It is a quiet place with a nice courtyard. After some brief refreshments at the hotel, most of us chose to take some rest before embarking on a local trip. So after lunch, we decided to move out. We visited a couple of monasteries viz Thiksey and Shey. There are so many of them in the region. Majestically constructed and beautifully decorated, each of these were more than centuries old. All of them had numerous prayer wheels placed all over and there were many Buddhists monks praying at these places. Perched on top of small mountain peaks, these command panoramic view of the surroundings.

After it was dark enough to not to be able to see the panoramas at its majestic best, we went to the Leh marketplace to try out a few Kashmiri sweets while a few others bought some clothes. Then we returned to our hotel to eat dinner and play Scotland Yard for sometime, before going to sleep.

The next day, one guy in the group was sick. Probably because we didn’t take enough rest to get ourselves acclimatize to the climate. He chose to stay back at the hotel, while the rest of us set off to see Alchi and Zanskar Valley. It snowed just before we started. It was my first brush with real snowfall and it was simply amazing. On the way, the driver stopped the vehicle at a valley where we got the chance to play around with snow. We got a glimpse of the Zanskar flowing from atop a nearby peak on our way to the Alchi monastery. The color of water was a shade of blue that you only see in photoshopped images. The region looked like the Grand Canyon of India. Simply spellbinding.

The other days were reserved for Pangong Tso lake and Khardung La Pass, the highest motor-able road in the world. In both cases, we set off early in the day and halfway the drivers realized that it was dangerous to go beyond a point since the snow levels were high and the chances of accidents and getting stuck were also high. So we enjoyed the snow, panoramic views at these points, which themselves were thousands of feet above sea level. Disappointed we were, but apparently it is common if you visit Leh/Ladakh in Nov/Dec.

The return journey was on Sunday, when we boarded the flight in Leh airport in the morning and reached Chennai by the end of the day. It was a memorable trip. A dream come true. I would have loved to spend more time there and I would definitely go there again if I get such a chance.

Browse Happy

When I logged into my blog from Firefox 3.6, WordPress prompted me to upgrade my browser.

The amusing prompt also had a link to a site called BrowseHappy. This site contains info about the latest versions of major browsers viz. Ie, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera and links to download them. A nice initiative by WordPress.

If everybody had the latest browsers, both the users as well as web developers can breate easy.

Up Again

At last, I forced myself to do what I should have done 6 months ago. Brought my blog back to life.

6 months ago, when I was trying to upgrade the WordPress version on my blog, it crashed. And I had not been able to open my blog and I was getting Internal Server Error ever since. Somehow I couldn’t devote time for my blog. Heights of Laziness.

So last week, I got into FileZilla. Connected to my server. Took a back up all the WP related files and content. Deleted everything from the server. Downloaded a fresh copy of WP. Replaced the wp-config.php with the old one which contains all the db related data. Also replaced the wp-content folder from the backup.

All it took was 5-10 mins. No idea why I had been delaying this for so many months. Should blog regularly now.

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’.

Photos and Watermarking

I have been travelling and trekking a bit. And I have been taking a lot of photos. Many of my friends and colleagues too are into photography and I see a lot of them adding watermarks to their photos. Even I wanted to add them. Not that each of them is a masterpiece but still I wanted to retain my rights to the photos.

First I got Photoshop running and added a text at the corner of the image with around 50% opacity. The text just contained a URL to my site http://alagappan.co.in. But it was really a pain to do so individually for each photograph. Then I started googling for easier ways to do the same stuff.

That is when I came across a Batch Photo Watermarker tool that allows you to add watermarks to a whole batch of photos. They provide access to a trial version of their tool for up to 50 photos. Beyond that you either have to pay and get their application or do one of these to get a free registration key.

Of course, If you are a Photoshop guru you can create your own macros (or actions as they are called in Photoshop) and run them on multiple photos at the same time. I am yet to learn all that stuff. But yeah! Learning that and further photo enhancement techniques on Photoshop would be an added advantage for a budding photographer like me.

Music and Mobile

I listen to loads of songs at home. Thousands of songs are stored in my hard disk consuming huge amounts of storage space. The best way to listen to them is to play those songs in a randomly shuffled playlist. There is no better feeling than listening to song Awesome Song after a long time and drowning in that ocean of music.

But when it comes to Mobile, we have a very limited storage space. Often not more than 4GB or 8GB. Now, if you take truck loads of photos and download hundreds of apps just to try them out, then there’d be acute shortage of space. With so much space constraints, we often end up storing just a dozen albums and listen repeatedly to the same again and again and again. Or if you are fortunate enough to live in a city like Chennai or Mumbai you can alternatively choose to listen to the wonderful radio stations.

I feel that there needs to be a way with which we can sync our music files on the computer with the mobile seamlessly. There is the DropBox app available with which we can sync files. But again that too has very limited space for the unpaid version and am not too sure how effective that is for music files.

There are various internet radio options which exist. Like Pandora. But majority of them don’t support listening through mobile or are restricted to the US due to licensing constraints.

Grooveshark app is available to solve most of our problems but its collection of Indian songs is VERY limited and moreover it is a paid service.

Any service that lets me listen to my choice of songs direct from the internet through my mobile would be awesome. If implemented in an attractive and impressive way, it does have an opportunity to become huge. If there is any such existing service that I am unaware of, then do let me know in the comments.

WordPress Hacked?!

Couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday morning I got up unusually early and logged in to my laptop. And surprisingly I decided to make a visit to my poor neglected blog. And what I saw shocked me. I saw a lot of my posts that I had intentionally saved in drafts had been published. Was my account hacked?!?

The fact is that I had been using my WordPress account as a Notes app. Whenever I come across something interesting, I just make a note of it in my blog and save it in the drafts. Most of the time what happens is that I don’t find the time to craft it into a complete post and they end up as drafts permanently. And to see them published shocked the hell out of me. Apart from the drafts being published, each of my earlier posts appeared over 10 times on the blog. I tried deleting the posts. But they kept reappearing again. Now I didn’t have any idea of what I was gonna do.

That made me wonder if I had carelessly left my account logged in somewhere sometime. I started tearing my hair apart trying to remember where things went wrong. I logged into gmail to check my latest account activity. I changed my WordPress password. I also changed my Twitter, Facebook and Gmail passwords. I checked up with my bro’s website to check if everything was working fine for him. And whoa. Even his site contained each post published multiple number of times. Now I was quite convinced that the problem was with our web hosting since both our blogs had been hosted together. I informed my bro about it and slept off again (after all it was a Sunday).

After a couple of hours, my bro pinged me and said that the problem was a with a category excluder plugin that had crashed. So much for my wandering thoughts that this blog was something great enough to be the target of a hacking attack. Silly Me!

Roadside Soup Shops

Some of you might have heard of the roadside soup kiosks that are common in the Chennai landscape. These shops were started by a bunch of self help youth groups whose intention was to earn a quick buck during their free time in the evenings. The soups are fairly good and the prices are decent. Moreover the soups are topped with crisp fried cornflakes. Some of the varieties of soup available here include mushroom, tomato, vegetable, banana stem among others.

It started off in the year 2005 I guess. Located at strategic locations of the city, these kiosks cater to people looking for something light before heading home. These guys make considerable sales everyday and the idea was soon replicated by many. Recently some people have even started selling non-veg soups like mutton bone soup (aattu kaal) in a couple of locations in Velachery.

Like every other shop, inflation and price rise has forced these shops to hike their prices too. Am not complaining about the prices. But what I found interesting was the way with which gradual changes were done. First they started off with making the soup more watery. Next change came in the form of reduction in the amount of mushroom/banana stem used in the soup. Despite all this the quality of the soup didn’t deteriorate much and remained good enough for the 10 bucks that we paid. What changed next was the size of the cups that they used to serve the soups in. Change in size was significant enough to be noticed and commented about. Gradually they started charging more for the same cup of soup. And the prices increased upto 15 for a cup.

Am not complaining as long as I get a hot cup of soup. After all its much cheaper than the Mancho soups and Tom Yom soups at big restaurants and you can also get them instantly at a kiosk close to home. So the next time you are looking for some soup, look around. Chances are you’ll come across one of these kiosks, so you can indulge and still get back home for a meal.