Smart things to know

 

Did you know, In a multiplex, you ‘can’ use the same ticket for viewing another show at another screen ?

Come to think of it, I never even gave a second thought to this anytime. But when I heard this It sounded crazy. But apparently there was some truth in it. Some of the present immediately acknowledged having done so.  No wonder many students might as well as use this information for getting into a screen which charges higher ‘ticket’ price by buying a ‘lower priced ticket’ and then switch to another screen after the show starts.

What Say !? Isn’t that smart ?

For quite sometime I was thinking about posting some of the smartest ideas I have learnt from my interaction with few of my friends in recent years.

Another friend of mine mentioned about considering ‘road inclines’ while driving in drizzle or rain time and driving in the highest lane to avoid encountering ‘hydroplaning’. Of course I should have known it, but It never registered until my friend mentioned.

The smartest mention according to me was to allow free entry into screening of ‘Bollywood’ movies and charging for ‘permission’ to leave in the middle of the screening. Come to think of that, the most tepid and stupid movies being made, this free business model might generate more amount of revenue than cinema halls running movie for less than 5 patrons. What Say !?

If you are aware that on Saturday mornings most theatres sell tickets at half the price, then another smart thing is to catch up with movies in theatres only on Saturday mornings.

Let me cut this post short here abruptly because I am beginning to sound a wee bit whacky !!!

Always remember ‘Information is wealth and/or power’, ‘Half Knowledge could be dangerous’ and ‘Look before you leap’.

Ciao again soon !!!

The Missing Decimal Point

 

Another weekend passed by and I had another set of interesting events and incidents.

I attended two sessions of NoVa Code Camp and both the session were extremes for my liking. While One was a slow and patient snail walk, the other was a roller-coaster ride without the safety belts on. Many interesting ideas presented just flew over my head before I could wrap my brain around it.

Was pleasantly surprised to see sparsely crowded temple, when we made it to the temple at an hour early than usual.

Learnt it the difficult way that Not all Costco’s have gas fuelling facilities, and It is best to avoid driving through Washington DC downtown on weekends even though the GPS shows a comparatively faster travel time.

When my Wifey read out the gas price to be 241 dollars, I immediately asked her to round it to the next cent up because of the 9 at the end. “Read that as 242 dollars coz its 241.9 where 9 is in superscript.”.

Strangely when she observed that people new to the country will misread that as “242” dollars instead of “2 dollars 42 cents” it makes me wonder who came up with this atrocious idea of dropping the decimal point.

I recollect now why my friend once filled up the car tank only to realize it later, it was the price of Milk ‘Gallon’ displayed prominently on the gas station board. Even I too had resisted from ordering wine at a local wine shop, when the labels on bottles showed 899.

I wonder how many people really correctly understand displayed price in any shop.

Think about this, Prices ending in .99 definitely have an edge than a rounded out price but the missing decimal point is can play tricks on the consumer. Time for a revamp.

What Say !?

:-)

Information Overload – Tipping Point

 

My understanding of ‘Tipping Point’ is a hind sight recognized threshold number at which an activity starts to deviate from its travel path. Thanks to new york press writer Malcohm Gladwell, ‘Tipping Point’, ‘Blink’ and ‘Outliers’ are words being used frequently in the day to day vocabulary.

Every time I open up a browser, I type the url http://reader.google.com and start acknowledging articles which arrive promptly by the rss subscriptions I have setup, by either sharing, marking as read or comment.

When I was introduced to the rss readers, google reader was the simplest and easiest to configure and I have seen it being upgraded with a few salient features which makes it a worthy utility.

Being a avid reader, before RSS Aggregator tools, I used to search for articles on a few subjects and visit various web sites, but thanks to RSS it became easy as a pie to get all the feeds in one place.

Sometime during the Last couple of weeks, I have had an epiphany that this ‘reading' on reader is an overkill for my appetite and I have lost track of my time and other personal events which keeps my life enriched.

From Now on till the end of this year, I am consciously pulling the plug on my google reader feeds subscription and will not visit again still 1st January 2010.

I have reached the ‘Tipping Point’ of information (junk) (perspective) Overload.

Whew !!!

Any Comments !?

:-)

Book Review : Free , The Future of a Radical Price

 

I always acknowledge that any book or article which introduces an ‘idea’ or a ‘train of thought’ I have not thought about is well worth the price and time spent. I might not always agree or be totally convinced but the influence it might cause will only be known later.

Today I completed reading (hearing) the Chris Anderson’s latest book ‘Free’. I did not pay a cent for it but I invested a lot of time, first waiting for the Library request and then later downloading the audio version (read by Chris himself) as podcasts on my iPhone.

Personally I have been a late bloomer to appreciate the value of money. I have unwisely lost large sums of hard earned dollars and the key reason being not really recognizing the potential power of money. My friends know that I often quote ‘The most difficult thing to do in this world is to wait’. Somehow unconsciously we all have been following a commonly recognized rule ‘Time is Money’.

When I picked up this book, Chris Anderson was being criticized for lifting paragraphs directly from Wikipedia without acknowledging the source. Hats off to Chris for covering an idea which lay in front of us and informing us consciously about the various applications of the word ‘free’ and the implications of the same.

You can read this book free at http://books.google.com/books?id=lLZbXN2odVYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Please do pick up this book and read, listen to it on a long distance flight trip. It is worth the time invested.

 

:-)

What is Google Wave !?

 

I was searching for a brief and really helpful explanation of google wave for those who have come in late. The video below explains 3.5 % of google wave and is really good.

[Thanks Ben]

My Incomplete Blog Drafts - Heading

 

Over the last couple of years, I have had numerous instances when a thought occupied me long enough to make me almost blog about it. In the following cases I started with a heading but somehow did not get enough time to complete it . Just blasting it off so that one day hopefully it will be either irrelevant to write about or I get charged enough to complete this draft.

1. Why twitter will never catch up to Blogs ?

2. Curse of the 26th.

3. Moving beyond the Obvious

4. Trick Questions and Question Tricks.

5. Standards for Technology Blogging.

6. Mini Blog Posts Series

7. Why Cricket Interests Me ?

8. Big Sentences and Inarticulate communication.

9. Consistently Predictable

10. When God Slept.

11. Canonical Standards for TDD.

12. Earliest Memories of Meeting You.

13. Why did I stop blogging on Sulekha?

14. Memory Lapses

15. Connecting the Straight Lines.

I also lost many other drafts in my previous installations on various computers. But nevertheless the idea to pursue and recover them still lingers on.

(:-()

Reading ‘The Lost Symbol’

 

Ever since I saw the poster announcing Dan Brown’s next book ‘The Lost Symbol’ at a Barnes and Nobles shop about 6 months ago, I have been awaiting it.

Now that it has been released last week, I got my own copy from the ‘Costco’ shop last week instead of waiting for the ‘request’ queue in the Local Library to serve it fast.

I have been trying to read and flip through the chapter’s and after 5 days of effort, I am into Chapter 6. I am now getting more interested in the book.

Whenever anybody mentions ‘Dan Brown’ the book ‘The Da Vinci Code’ popsup immediately. But avid book readers know and believe ‘Angels and Demons’ the book was a far interesting and more polished work of the Author. Even ‘Deception Point’ gets a lot of nods as being a better book than the ‘Da Vinci Code’. I have not yet read ‘Digital Fortress’.

I wonder what kind of book an author should take up once his last book is a best seller. Should the author stick to the same genre or should there be a change in the style, language, editing ?

Every year a new Jeffrey Archer book attempts to tell another story and it always tends to be compelling page turner and almost un-put-downable for the fans. It meets the minimum quotient of a good write up. But can ‘Dan Brown’ live up to his own standards.

So far, I think ‘The Lost Symbol’ is a lame title not really interesting. For some strange reason I keep referring to it as ‘The LAST symbol’.

Lets see how this goes……

 

:-)

Waste of Time – Another Go

 

Before retiring for the night, during our visit to New York when, I copied roughly 600 photos from my DSLR to the Laptop. Just to quality check, I started the Slideshow  and was viewing each of them. I do this exercise after almost every day after the camera use.

 

My friend brought it to my attention calculating ‘3 seconds per snaps’ makes it 30 minutes of browsing through the days shots.

 

DARN !!! I have wasted roughly 1 hour every GB of photos I have taken with my camera. I have almost a Terabyte of photos captured in the last couple of years.

 

During commuting I have developed an ear for listening to podcasts (technical or otherwise), audio books and/or NPR. Thanks to another friend of mine who introduced me to audio book world last year. I have finished listening to 10 books mostly short stories, fiction and/or self help. This I believe has been a good investment of time considering the fact that it is almost next to impossible to avoid commute time.

 

Somehow I foresee a future of great opportunity for gadgets, software and utility products around the time waste zones like traffic jams, travel departures, commute.

 

And yes I don’t believe ‘Multi Utility Mobile Phone’ is the answer. There is something missing.

What Say !?

:-)

Waste of Time

 

“The Best Way to Win An Argument is to Avoid It”. There are a zillion acronyms which are used to aid memory retention for a long time and fast recollection. For e.g. WATCH – Watch your Words, Actions , Thoughts, Characters and Habits.

Last week as I celebrated my birthday, One thought which occurred to me was “Time Being Wasted”. Hindsight is an exact science so even though I hope not to regret things I have done in future, I get some time to analyze the time I have wasted not invested in during my lifetime.

Anthony Robbins had said, Most People don’t behave or do what ‘exactly’ they should be doing, it is always a case of what causes less pain and what gives greater pleasure influencing the behavior and/or actions.

When I was in my teens in the My friend and Me used to Frequent the Town Local Library to devour each and every page of “Illustrated Weekly”, “India Today”, “Filmfare” , “Science 2001” et al including all ‘Marathi’, ‘Hindi’ and English dailies. This activity lasted till we left the town for higher studies. In the last decade, Internet has been the major source of all reading in my case.  So every time I was not in school studies or working, my waste of time was around reading, movies or playing.

Whenever I catch up with friends, we frequently tend to exchange a few thoughts, experiences, opinions on some random but related topics. One of the most recent discussions was about ‘Waste of Time’.

Most of my ‘Time waste’ activities like reading, entertainment, surfing, playing and fooling around has been influenced majorly by my passing interest or ‘bad’ habit. I have been guilty of wasting time because of ‘cricket’ and ‘Movies’ when I was so much addicted to following cricket that all the cricket sites were on my favorites folder and I used to visit them several times a day.

I was surprised the other day I discovered my best friend, equally passionate in following cricket, had found his interest Waned. So we had a good intellectual discussion about how and why this can happen.

One good analogy he mentioned was about ‘Generally people of a generation Idolize and passionately follow Individuals and/or Teams/Bands throughout their career ups and downs’. As soon as the ‘team'/individual’ retires it takes some time for a successor to be followed with the same zeal.

Extrapolating based on the discussion ‘I can certainly foresee a high amount of productivity increase by the fans of “Sachin Tendulkar” when he retires from cricket’.

What Say ?

On another topic, I was lucky to handle an Amazon Kindle which my friend has and was extremely pleased with it. The most surprising aspect for me was I cannot read on KINDLE it when its dark.

:-)

Whatz a D&G ?

 

I have seldom been a time person. Somehow on instinct I recollect dates of special events or occasions. But keeping track of time has never been my forte. As a matter of fact, my friend BM chides me by asking to mention time the moment I recollect a date of a certain event/occasion.

My best friend was once worked for marketing a reputed Jewellery and Watch brand and had told me once that “there are more than 600 odd distinct parts of a wrist watch”. Unbelievable but true, like the number of 200 odd bones in a human body.

Time and again, I have been very lucky to have been gifted a few watches and also recollect getting one on my marriage. But I seldom wear it. Now that my better half has got me a sports D&G Sean Brown DW0365, I am exhilarated. It looks a beautiful piece as can be seen in the image below. It also constantly reminds me of its presence.

And what is D&G ? It stands for Dolce&Gabbana which is a Italian based luxury fashion brand. So far I have not been a fashion person. I still can’t identify a Prada or a Gucci. But who says you need to be aware of each and everything. Sometimes Ignorance can be bliss. If it looks good and you can afford it and you like it, go ahead and buy it.

When I mentioned I got a D&G watch from my wifey, my friend says ‘Get It checked for Bugs Dude, You might be Tracked’. LOL.

Next time we meet don’t be surprised to find my wrist occupied with a D&G and guess what I might be looking forward to hearing a few words of praise of D&G.

Also no more switching on the iPhone or looking around at the Set Top box or a Wall Clock to check time. Just twist the wrist and view the time. Oh yes.. Its time to go…. Ciao !!!

:-)