Priceless

9:20pm: Posted an ad to sell a used Microsoft Natural Keyboard
9:30pm: Received a call from an interested party. Pickup time arranged.
9:40pm: Transaction complete.
9:41pm: Realized that the seller and the buyer work in the same industry.
9:42pm: The buyer tells the seller that he has visited seller's hometown.

Keyboard: $20
Mouse: $12
Meeting someone who knows your hometown rather well: Priceless

There are some things that can't be sold on the Internet, for everything else there's Criagslist.

Frist Post

Spelling mistakes in my emails have always been a joke among my friends. So it's heartening to see newspaper editors make spelling mistakes, especially in a mad rush to publish the news frist

Dirty onions

Call me naive at psychology or call me a marketing newbie for being excited about understanding things, but a lot more interesting things look obvious to me now.

From a nice writeup about Pantaloon deliberately making their stores chaotic: "Even the dirty, black-spotted onions serve a function. For the average Indian, dusty and dirty produce means fresh from the farm, he says. Indian shoppers also love to bargain. Mr. Biyani doesn't allow haggling, but having damaged as well as good quality produce in the same box gives customers a chance to choose and think they are getting a better deal."

(Picture courtsey Michael Newman)

How to say no

The atmosphere was already tensed up as the taxi reached the airport. I had taken a shared eight-seat airport shuttle to the airport and one of the passengers had an altercation with the rude driver. Not of any initial interest, and purely to add some more description of the situation, the accents and the ethnicity of these two were quite noticeable and different. But given the great diversity in the bay area, both of them were equally likely of being Americans as not being Americans. And both of them were well aware of this.


On reaching the terminal, the passenger struggled to unload his heavy bags, while the driver simply chose to look away. After unloading the bags, the passenger paid the driver the exact amount that was due. The agitated driver asked, “Don’t you tip in your country?” Apt came the reply, “Don’t you help other people in your country?”


In exactly one statement each, the two men had stereotyped each other’s countries, knowing very well that they might have been taking of the same country.


Though both these sentences were a result of an emotional outburst rather than a sane analysis, a lot of us tend to take one bit of information in a given situation and generalize from it. Generalizations are mostly convenient, as they save time. But that's what marketing and sales folks also know and tend to capitalize on i.e. simulate a situation that will make you react in way that conforms your generalization.


I just finished reading this book that talks a great deal about Influence and the psychology of persuasion. It covers six standard techniques in six self-sufficient chapters: Reciprocity, Consistency, Social Proof, Liking, Authority & Scarcity. Each chapter has tonnes of examples and a section at the end of each chapter: "How to say no". How more practical can a psychology book get?

Internet TV, like real TV

It's been a couple of weeks since I completely moved to Internet TV. And mind you, I watch it like real TV. That is, I watch it from my couch and the TV screen is about 6 feet away from me. For a laid back experience, I use Joost and Amazon Unbox. For a more interactive experience, I use YouTube. In the attached video, I show you how I use my laptop as an internet enabled set top box.

Before getting started the computer must be setup to be used from that far. There are two settings that need to be changed in the computer to make it operable from 6 feet.

1. Set the display to a lower resolution, so that everything looks larger. This can be done from the “Settings” tab of “Display Properties”. I use the screen resolution of 800x600.
2. Set the windows font size to “Extra Large” from the “Appearance” tab of “Display Properties”. This makes the labels on menus and buttons visible from a distance so that we can find and start various programs.

Now we are all set to watch programs like real TV.

Joost has reasonable video quality, comparable to real TV. The sound is good too. Trying to change channels works without problems. Joost has taken care that the fonts are visible from a distance. It isn’t as good as the channel listing on the real TV though. Also, the other labels in the interface, like volume control, are small. So, Joost still has some improvements to make in the interface.

Joost has a good selection of programs. I like the fact that there aren’t many ads (at least not many as of now). The thing that I don’t like about Joost ads is that they are automatically inserted. So they start off in the middle of a conversation and can get irritating.

With YouTube, I don't run into font issues because we use the browser. When I start the browser, I increase the font size to make it really large. This way I can comfortably read things on the site. Most importantly, I can find and use the "Search Box". Using search, I can find videos and start viewing them in full screen.

Secrets my foot

What is worse than a website that shows your password in clear text on browser after you use the “forgot password” link? A website that sends you the password in clear text in an email confirming the change. Webex meets this criteria. Alright, what could be worse that this?

Earthlink, my ISP, sends you the password in regular mail (good old postman type of mail) on account creation. Now, what could be worse than this?

A teleconferencing service that speaks out your PIN when you entered it incorrectly. It is hard to see why that is a problem, but imagine sitting in conference room on a speaker phone trying to join a teleconference with your colleagues. The voice on the phone would tell them my approximate PIN. Our conferencing provider InterCall does just that. Actually, I should be happy because it is not that bad. After all, it would have been worse had the voice spoken out my correct PIN for confirmation.

I am telling you, my secrets are going to dogs these days.

(Picture taken from the collection of Auntie P under the Creative Commons)

Personal Document Management

It's easy to see value of document management from the eyes of an immigrant. You got to prove everything, residential history, medical history, travel history, work history, educational background and what not. Add to that the regular papers that everyone keeps: automobile records, latest bills or statements, credit records, tax returns etc. When I started filing documents in files a few years ago, I had nice titles on all of them. But over last few years, they got disorganized. Whenever I had to add a new file, I couldn't find the same type of file as old ones. Also, certain types of documents needed fatter folders than others. Sometimes, the newly added folders were of different sizes. On a recent assessment of the situation, I had about two drawers full of files. These files were stacked over each other, stuffed into the night stand.


Last week I was asked to prepare another set of documents for certain procedure. I did not want to spend another two hours finding or preparing copies. So, I finally decided to overhaul my document management. Chris and I had recently discussed digitizing personal records. It seemed like the best way to solve the problem. I could scan all the documents and keep them on a disk. They could be organized and labeled so that they can be easily browsed or searched. Every time a copy were needed, I would simply issue a print command. However, there were two issues with this:

1. The safety of such a disk, both from security as well as failure perspective. Security was less of an issue. I wasn't too keen on online backups and thought that a disk was a better idea. But failure management would have been a big problem. I could have kept taking backups, but then saving the backups would have had similar problems as saving the document folders.

2. The choice of format in which the documents would have been saved. It was necessary that the document format must be supported by software readers 10 or 20 years later. For example, say I saved the documents in .doc format from MS Word in 1995. I doubt if that document would open with today's version of Word. Given the past history of Word, .doc would have been a bad choice. ‘pdf' on the other hand seemed like a more stable format.


I thought that it was possible and affordable for me to manage my documents this way.But it couldn't have been done over the weekend. So, I decided to give it some more thought over the coming months. In the meantime, I started looking for paper based solutions that I could implement over the weekend. I looked around for modular filing system and I am glad I could find it: Hanging file folders and portable box to hang them.


The night stand is now empty and documents have been neatly arranged in the hanging folder box. The process generated about 20 lbs / 10 kgs of junk. You can look at the trash lying above the night stand in the picture below. The box to the right of the night stand is the new document box. At the end of the reorganization, which took about two days, I could gather all the documents that I currently needed in about 20 minutes.