Stuff amidst fluff

Caught up once in a bout of arbit enthu, I added a bunch of "business"-related feeds to my Google Reader subscriptions. Roughly a month after that, I into a routine of diligently reading the webcomics, the occasional update by an XLer or two, items shared by my Google Reader buddies and promptly "Mark As Read"-ing everything else.

Earlier today though, a post titled "Are You Programmed to Fail" from a blog called "Sales Machine" (I know, I know...) caught my eye. This is one of those hardcore "everything you do is a sales pitch" blogs, so one has to click through to the actual website to read the post, which usually annoys me enough that I avoid doing so, barring one or two intriguing Freakonomics posts. But then again, I really did want to If I Was Programmed to Fail.

Wonder of wonders, amidst the most patently ridiculous premise, was actually something interesting!

Everybody has a set of arbitrary rules defining the meaning of events in their life. Most people don’t set these rules consciously; instead, they just “grow” into them based on their temperament and upbringing. Because of this, many people have rules that tend to make them miserable.

I’ve known people who, in order to consider themselves really happy, must be on a wonderful vacation, win the lottery, fall in love, eats some rare delicacy, or some other unusual or even once-in-a-lifetime event.

In almost every case, these same people can find virtually any excuse to be miserable. If they miss a stop light, they get upset. If they can’t get a jelly donut in the morning, they’re upset. If they can’t watch their favorite TV show, it ruins their day, etc., etc., etc. They have an endless list of tiny things that steal away their happiness.

People who have those rules about life, are programmed to be miserable, because they’ll encounter dozens of things each day that irritate them, and very few events that will make them happy. And being unhappy or irritated most of the day is the ULTIMATE expression of failure in life.

[...]

The solution, of course, is to get off your emotional duff and start doing the hard work of changing your rules. Because here’s the exciting thing: if you switch the two sets around, you’re re-programming yourself to be happy, and therefore to win.

Want to be successful? Here’s how:

• Decide to have rules that make it easy to be happy. Let little things that happen every day be cause for celebration. Find every excuse possible to take a little pleasure out of life.
• Decide to have rules that make it difficult to be miserable. Save your misery for truly awful things, like the death of a close relative, financial disaster, or a major, debilitating illness.

Well played, sir. But. B-U-T but! Seeing as I have no other way of paying for the "content I consume", I urge you, dear readers, to trundle on over to the Sales Machine blog to see what the real point of that post is.

Linky to consume and pay for.

There goes the day

One Hundred Interesting Wikipedia Articles:

• First 50
• Next 50

As the disclaimer over that blog says: I will not be held responsible for the many MANY hours of lost productivity resulting from the exploratory clicking around that will inevitably ensue as a result of following above links.

Ancient history (sort of) repeats itself

THEN: Xenophon with Cyrus

While a young man, Xenophon participated in the expedition led by Cyrus the Younger against his older brother, the emperor Artaxerxes II of Persia, in 401 BC.

NOW: Xenophon against Cyrus

Senator Nick Xenophon launched a scathing attack on Scientology, citing letters from former followers alleging extensive criminal activity. Scientology spokesman Cyrus Brooks said the senator's attack had been an abuse of parliamentary proceedings.

One expects the battles to be no less bloody, though.

Combining theory with practice indeed!

So tell me, is this how one manages the studies of one's faculties?

Apple users are gullible

MediaPost is carrying an article about a study done by a mobile ad network called Quattro Wireless, which looks at click-through rates on online advertisements via mobile devices.

The results:


The article itself also mentions that the total number of ad impressions were the highest for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

So basically, iBlahWhatever users are more likely to click on ads, or in other words, fall for marketer-bait. QED - these folks are gullible and like to splurge on shiny thingummies. As, it would appear, are gamers, but that was never in question :-)

Kick-ass food!

(My review of Cafe Thulp in Koramangala, which I put up on Burrp! Bangalore, slightly edited)

While I'm not quite the burger connoisseur, I certainly know my meats and breads, and Cafe Thulp is pretty awesome in this respect.

I called up and asked for directions to the place, which turned out to be a good idea, as the placement on the map here wasn't entirely accurate, and had my expectations raised by the courteous and cheerful way in which the chap directed me.

On reaching, both me and the significant other were impressed with the decor of the place - bright, and stacked with board games and books near the entrance!

The place-mats on the table had some funnies on them, and the menu was a delight to read (funky names for the items, and a couple of margin scribbles), which made us delay our order by quite a bit! We finally settled on a hummus with pita bread, a chicken sub (The Funky Chicken) and a vegetarian spaghetti (don't remember the name.. Alphonse something?), a lime-mint cooler (Sour Puss) and the apple/cinnamon smoothie. We also packed a grill-cheese sandwich (PETA ka Beta) and a burger (Moo with Cheese) for a friend.

While the food was outstanding, the Sour Puss really only felt like watered down Limca with a few pudina leaves and a lemon slice floating around (our standards for lime-mint coolers are sky-high - we hit the Fruit Shop on Greams Road in Chennai pretty often!). Also, the smoothie/milkshake felt slightly meh - probably not enough ice-cream, too much milk? I dunno.. But this wasn't too sore a point - I plan to come back later and try out the other shakes (including the Snickers Blizzard, which sounds yum..)

Summing up: both of us loved it, and the friend who we parceled the food for also loved it. Hence, while I haven't eaten at too many burger joints in Bangalore just yet, for now, this is the best of them all!

A few nit-picks:

• Personally, we felt the tables were a bit broad - i.e. when sitting facing each other, we seemed to be really far apart..
• The waiter in his enthu to be enthu, comes uncomfortably close to the diners (read, me) :-|
• The bill took AGES to arrive - but this might not be the norm, as the staff had vanished to the back of the restaurant temporarily for some major dressing-down the manager seemed to be dishing out :D

Such is life

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner gave me a good couple of hours, when I read Freakonomics. "Exploring the hidden side of everything" was (to me, at least) a novel concept, which was why I also gobbled up The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford.

These days, though, when the advantage of information (and data!) asymmetry is being gradually eroded by the likes of the Big G, 'counter-intuitive' pronouncements require a phenomenal amount of legwork, and nobody can get away with being contrarian just for the sake it, thanks to the meddling bloggers.

Hence, after Levitt and Dubner get called out again and again, and continue to not "take responsibility for their failed attempt to be cleverly contrarian", I was reminded of a Seth Godin conclusion from about a month back:

You don't have to like the coming era of hyper-measurement, but that doesn't mean it's not here.

Such is life.

Happiness

Dan Gilbert, Harvard psychologist:

Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted. And in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind. Why do we have that belief? Well, it's very simple. What kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it?

Wow. Quite possibly, the most enlightening 21 minutes of my life. Watch it. Ideas worth spreading indeed.

Tech fundoo

"Tech fundoo" is term first made known to me by Krishnamurti (G, not J). It appears to me to be the Indian form of a hacker, as defined in its 'original' form.

I have always felt that I was tech fundoo, and sometimes attempted to back it up with a few blog posts. But most tech fundoo I have felt was, curiously, NOT when twiddling with hardware/software innards or some arcane Linux-y fundaes. These two occasions, by some weird coincidence, involved the use of the Character Map in Windows XP.

The first time was when ant poop had eaten into my laptop's keyboard circuitry, rendering some keys useless. As Murphy would have it, one of these alphabets had a double occurrence in my Windows password.

Living in a relatively boondocky area in Chennai then, rendered me completely unable to get a USB keyboard, so some other ingenuity had to be thought of. Which is when I used a cybercafe computer to look up the Alt code for the missing alphabet of my password, and used this to peacefully log in to Windows. Such technological satisfaction. Such tech fundoo-ness. Ah!

The second time was the previous night, whilst waiting to board a Jet Airways flight from Bombay to Bangalore. (Aside: This was via Jet Airways Konnect, but Travelocity losers never informed me of this in any manner throughout the booking process, or in the e-ticket. And I would rather go hungry than pony up Rs.100+ for a sandwich that wouldn't be enough for Kate Moss.) The waiting area at the boarding gates of the domestic terminal at Bombay Airport has 4 Internet kiosks. Two of them are your standard kiosk fare - LCD screen, hobbled laptop keyboard with touchpad. The other two are touch-screen LCDs, one of which was switched off. The other one was running, and logged in to WinXP, but had no keyboard, and no apps running! This explained why people would wander near this terminal, scratch heads for a few minutes, and walk away. So the question now was: how were we to check up on cricket analysis/bulletins?

Easy. Fire up the Character Map, click-select 'cricket' letter by letter, open up IE, focus on search box, Page > Paste (This took a couple of minutes to figure out - IE8 is frickin' counter-intuitive!), Go. Bam, reading Cricinfo!

Happier still this made me, when after we were done, the stream of people to this kiosk increased. As did the subsequent head-scratching and walking away. We did end up slightly miffed that we'd forgotten to erase the browsing history, so an enterprising kid fired up the browser and used the History to get to CricInfo.

Occam's Razor takes a while to slit one's throat though - I realised much too late that happy online-ness could have been attained via the free airport wi-fi on my trusty Nokia N82.

Still. I am tech fundoo.

On mistakes

Today's so-called 'avant-garde' crowd over-rates making mistakes. The precise load of horse-manure that captures this kind of thinking is spewed by Alyson Hannigan as Lily in How I Met Your Mother:

OK, yes it's a mistake. I know it's a mistake, but there are certain things in life where you know it's a mistake but you don't really know it's a mistake because the only way to really know it's a mistake is to make the mistake and look back and say 'yep, that was a mistake.' So really, the bigger mistake would be to not make the mistake, because then you'd go your whole life not knowing if something is a mistake or not. And dammit, I've made no mistakes! I've done all of this; my life, my relationship, my career, mistake-free. Does any of this make sense to you?

What a steaming load of tripe. Some things are just wrong, religious or philosophical eloquence notwithstanding.