End of 2008

And another short one after ages.  Just a summary of what I had been upto.

August – Had my exam for Marketing Management and Stats.  For some reason i find that more I learn in a subject the worse I do in the exams.  I really need to learn to write academically!  (Yes I know it sounds like a looser and that most likely must be it!)

September – 3 weeks in India.  Wow Wow Wow!  Entrepreneurship is just springing up.. (ok the financial climate is not so great but that is really an issue of the system rather than the product/environment)… After “the” valley India is the place to be.  Actually not entirely true.  Even though many wouldnt agree with me, Id say china is still leading in that aspect as people are a lot more risk taking than in India but hey Ive never been to china so it is a very very brave and untested statement.

October – 2 weeks in HongKong for one of my subjects (Private Equity and Venture Capital)..  amazing course.. only sad thing was that I had to go all the way to HK to do a course in entrepreneurship, which was not offered by AGSM in sydney… what does that really say about the apetite for entrepreneurship in australia?  But loved HK – the city and the people… I cant say the same about the food.  See I am a vegetarian and this is something not easily catered.  Also I was a bit dissapointed with the prices.  Not exactly as cheap as I hoped them to be.  Oh well..

November – Had my exam for the PE and VC subject..  confirms my theory about learning being inversely proportional to my mark… well havent got my mark yet but not holding my breath for a great mark… damn

December – Had 2 concerts yesterday for SMC.  Tiring but lots of fun.  One more in Brisbane on the 13th and one possibly in melbourne during christmas.  Have to see.  Both very challenging and testing.  One at a time.

Ciao till later.  Will be updating on a lot of programming stuff Ive been hacking away on.

HongKong

Well I am in HK now..  Doing an elective on Private Equity and Venture Capital.  My first time here and the place is breath taking….  Ok the weakened Ausie dollar has just robbed a bit of my ability to buy but still a great place….

The course is very insightful… if you follow VC news on techcrunch and a whole bunch of blogs from the big guns in the Valley (no i am just a follower not a propogator), this course is very very complementary.  Ofcourse it is quite sad that we (students) in the Australian campus of AGSM have to resort to travelling overseas to undertake a course in anything entrepreneurial.  Seems the Australian focus is on management training more than anything else.  Could that explain the pitiable state of entrepreneurship in Australia?

Parur Style Techniques

Well I love Parur style violin.  Full-stop.  I would kill to master it.  It is extremely demanding and needs a kind of discipline that would make the marines look like amateurs at Paintball!

I have had the extreme good fortune of being pointed to a few clips on Youtube by Akella Mallikarjuna Sharma.  Here they are:

http://youtube.com/results?search_query=msakella

Hope you benefit from these.  Good luck.

NextGen Travel – Saucer Style

I wonder when these flying saucer’s would be available for the public? Would love to see the M2 and the M7 Highways with their 3D/Altitude versions so we can manage suburbian air traffic as well!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=447317

Wireless Power

How cool is this? Basically a dime-sized attachment that fits to any device (like mobile phones or pace makers and so on), and quietly converts all that static in the air into a constant DC voltage. Effectively makes batteries last for ever!

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/04/01/8403349/

At the moment this can only be used with low power devices.  So with laptops getting less power intensive, it would become easier to power them as well.  For higher-powered devices, I wonder if these can cascaded together to provide a higher power?

Light and Tangler

I had first met Marty at a lift.  After forcing myself on him (conversationally ofcourse), I had managed to get myself invited to weekly soccer matches (Luckily you can suck at soccer while still loving it!).  At one of these matches he had told me that he was working-on/starting Tangler.  At first I had assumed this was a flavour of chips for us geeks.  So I had decided to go to tangler.com and was presented with an option to signup for beta-testing their new product.  All I had known at this point was it was kind of a forum – “jees done before” I thought.

Soon after I had received my account from Mick.  So I logged in for the first time.  Big mistake.  Let me say I am still paying for it.  While forums themselves are not a new idea, Tangler’s approach to facilitating forums is in fact quite simple and yet very very addictive.  They have used a pure web 2.0 approach to their app.  No software installation is necessary, works on major browsers (so far I have only tried it on Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 on linux), and provides complete control to you.  Also Within moments, I was part of about 15 groups (mostly invited to by Mick) and managed to create a couple myself.  Ofcourse this is what  contributed to one of the biggest mistakes of my life.  With the ease of (instant) communication, lacking in many other forums, you are never out of communicado with your contacts.  Eagerness of new technology will have to give way to rudeness and introverted behaviour if you would like to get any work done!

Tangler also has a standalone desktop client for windows and linux.  However I have not got this to work in linux yet (complains about missing libfXfixes.so.3).  I would have preferred a plugin to existing IMs like everybuddy and/or Trillian rather than YASIM (Yet Another Standalone IM).

One thing I had found (possibly) buggy was time-zone management.  Even though my profile says I am from Australia, I found some of my posts to have the wrong date.  May be I havent set it up correctly.  Also being in beta, I cant expect color-scheme customizations which I think would be very useful.

But all in all a great approach to forums, and especially justifies the eccentricity of folks at Tangler.  Hope to see lots more of it in the future from this bloody awesome team (For non-ausies: “bloody” can be negative – ie “what a bloody f@#%” or positive like “what a bloody ripper”… and this definitely is the latter).

Are reeding and riting important?

Lately (well last five years anyway) there has been quite a bit of media frenzy regarding whether traditional penmanship and writing skills are now becoming obsolete in this day and age of computers, PDAs and styluses (stylii?). One article (Jason Fry, “Mightier than the Pen“, March 05 2007, Wall Street Journal), suggests that the said new forms of communication are sufficient to replace traditional methods (writing and penmanship). Reasoning is that throughout human history new forms of communications have replaced older forms of communication successfully and this is no exception. Also, as Jason suggests, these new forms break down the creative boundaries for child who has embarked in his/her educational journey thereby increasing his/her imagination in ways not envisaged before. Another common argument presented is that (the physical process of) writing, due to outsourcing of this task to computers, itself does not add to human competency (of which survivability in the woods was traditionally a measure of ).

As a high-school student, I absolutely abhorred the idea of writing in all forms (essays, analysis, creative writing, poetry for women and all that “boring” stuff) so I am not sure Id be the right person to comment on this issue. But I suppose that is what blogs are for.

Ignoring the issues of availability of computers and word processing tools, bad (font) typing, eye-strain, difficulty in entry, should a child with access to a computer and wordprocessing tools, first develop handwriting skills or bypass this process in their favour?

I am not so sure it is a good idea to dispense with the basic writing skill (cursive or not). While efficiency can be definitely gained by using computers (via touch typing, voice recognition, styluses etc), there are other benefits that only handwriting, if not a clear and neat one, can offer. Briefly, these include:

• Motor Skills: Handwriting, that most adults take for granted, requires dedicated effort to master and maintain. Learning to type is a process of taping fingers at discreete locations on a keyboards; Handwriting reuqires careful and controlled motion to produce continuous and fluid patterns.
• Orderliness of the mind: Wordprocessing facilitates the noting of ideas in a sequential manner. This forces organising thoughts in an orderly and flowing fashion.
• Internalising Skills: This really falls into the “Terminator” line of thought about maintaining/improving skills internally rather than (unnecessarily) depending externally on machines for basic skills and ideas.

At the end of the day, where can we draw the line regarding dispensibility of core skills? Do we need reading abilities? Text can be synthesized into voice. Computers can solve some of the most complex mathemtical problems so why do we need algebra? If Matrix (the movie) has anything to say, we could all be feeding ourselves via tubes attached to our bodies. Talking about dispensible skills, how about this automatic beer dispenser:

http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/beer-launching-fridge-all-lazy-men-rejoice

Having said all this, perhaps a bit of organising my thoughts on paper would have helped?

Arranged Marriages

Well, I guess it is time I come out of the closet and admit my selling of the soul to the system of arranged marriages. Yep, Ive succumbed (actually a year ago) to a combination of the cultural carrots and sticks that are so common for us beans who sprout from indian parents.

Sticks (best read in an indian language or in an indian accent) including parents giving you the “oh you are too old to going on enjoying your single life” to “look at your friends (really meaning, their friends’ kids) who are married and giving their parents (ie their ‘friends’) lots of grand kids – why do you want to let us down and be such a bad boy”..

Ofcourse the biggest and the juiciest carrot is really the ending of such sticks delivered on a daily basis. Not to mention getting a decent meal (or six) every day. I was going to add that sex on tap (atleast while it lasts) isnt a bad deal either, but I guess anyone used to the sydney life style wouldnt think thats a great advantage .

Dont get me wrong, I am not one of those blokes who lets his wife do all the work for him (seriously, how can you live with such a shameless view). I am simply facilitating a conducive environment for said class of partners (only one in this case) who are happy to perform said duties (purely to vent their creative outlets) and indulge in other related activites!!

I am sure my wife would agree with this. I guess Il find out soon one way or another! But since I think she agrees with this, there’s no point in her really finding out about this is there?

HelloWorld!

Here I finally am. After years of avoiding blogging (due to neutrality and laziness rather than passion – or anti passion), I have jumped online, to yell to the world, all I can yell about.

So as an engineer here is a big HELLO WORLD to you!