Daily Blogs!

I’ve just downloaded Google Chrome, Google’s latest free-and-beta offering - a fast, lean and mean browser. And here are some of my first impressions:

• It’s positively a small download.
• Borrows a lot of concepts from other browsers, most noticably, Opera:
  • The URL bar auto suggests existing sites, sites you’ve already visited by explicitly typing in the URL, and options to search using Google or any other search engine you prefer
  • A recently closed tabs box to reopen tabs closed recently
  • Ability to retain sessions across Chrome / Computer restarts, and auto open with last session (tabs etc. are retained)
• An incognito mode that allows you to surf the web without leaving any traces whatsoever (provided the window is closed)
• No browser title bar, more screen real-estate
• It’s really fast, and they kid you not. And believe me when I say this - I’m an Opera fanatic and Opera is / was the fastest yet. This is in concern with the page rendering speed.
• The internal task manager and separate process for each tab, with the ability to kill each tab separately does wonders to stability and reliability. Awesome work Google. And I thought that I’d need to sign in to my services explicitly - like GMail and Orkut, but apparently signing in at one place seems to work for both - maybe they share cookies
• Javascript optimizations - I need to see this in action, as of now I’m seeing minor improvements in GMail, but can’t say for sure
• It’s a lot more fluid than any other browser I’ve seen so far
• Importing works, but only just. Opera isn’t supported, and a friend reported a crash when importing from Mozilla
• Stats for Nerds is interesting for those who want to explore
• I’m missing a complete status bar already - I need my data of how much is downloaded, how much is left
• Pre-fetching may be a PITA for some users, works decent on broadband
• Moving tabs around and into their independent windows is uber-kewl. Getting them back is even kewler!
• Downloads: Mixed first impressions. I like the concept of simplified downloads, but I need download history. And dragging and dropping the download to a folder of my choice (such as the Desktop) means it is going to copy the whole file from the default folder where it downloaded it to my selected folder. I’d want this to happen when I start the download and not when it’s done. There’s an option to do this, but it’s not turned-on by default. Personal quirk.
• For once, opening windows in new window (such as in Google Searches) works as expected, by opening a new tab and not a new window. New windows are old school - pre-IE7. Now that even IE supports tabs, high time “Open in New Window” opens in a new tab.
• I’m sort-of skeptical about long-term usage of the browser - memory leaks and other things - Opera has reasonably mastered that, and works great for days altogether. Am yet to test this with the Chrome, will post a comment later.
• Chrome is confused with my tablet strokes. Flicking to go back makes it go to the first page, instead of the immediately previous page for some reason.
• Mouse gestures are missing, but they wanted it to be minimalistic
• Security features are interesting - auto updated real-time lists, highlighting the domain name are good additions for the dumb user. I’m a bit concerned about how they do it though - they use their page ranks and frequently visited pages database to target this info, so some privacy concerns are looking back at me.
• I’m yet to explore the Cache management, Cookie management and support for other plug-ins. Out-of-the-box Flash and Java seem to be working fine.
• This passes Acid2.

Overall an excellent product - something we’ve come to expect from Google these days. More details to follow later.

The funny thing with management studies is that almost everything can be viewed or can be construed to be a genuiene persepective of the real world or a pure lie - and it doesn’t end there, since that is exactly how the corporate (and otherwise) world seems to work.

First, let me talk about Statistics or Quantitative Methods or whatever fancy name you want to call the fundamental branch of Operations Research. There are times when you cannot agree more with Taleb and his Fooled by Randomness or Black Swan. A 95% confidence interval is going to be just that - it will be wrong the other 5% of the times. Statisticians will argue that yes, that’s precisely the point, and we care of that 95% of the time, let the 5% go to Pluto for a mining expedition. Unfortunately, analysts and future managers (or I-Bankers) often tend to ignore this fine print, so that they can sleep peacefully for the few hours that they manage to squeeze in between the markets and the commute and the demanding work environment. In fact, the whole concept of normal distribution and the many approximations to it (when the sample sizes increase beyond, hold you breath, 30 items, because research has shown that 30 samples are statistically sufficient for such an approximation) appears to be extremely fraudy at so many levels.

Life is not a statistic. Life is not a sample. It is not something that can be put into numbers. Do not ever believe in such a thing as 9 times out of 10 the crow won’t do its thing on you, because there will be that one day when s/he will, 10 times in a row. Statistically proven or not. And then you are screwed - but only so much, since it is not the sub-prime for crying out loud. And the explanation - that’s the flaw in the process; it is bound to happen. So let us all be happy and gay and let the world pick the tab of our expenses and misdealings; of our artificial inflation of incomes and display of extraordinary intelligence and knack.

The other thing is Financial Accounting. When one manages an industry, I find it rather difficult to digest, inspite of the best sauces and seasonings, that anything is really planned and laundered so that some god-damned (and I’m supposed to be agnostic) financial ratio is satisfied and things look good on the financial statements. And frankly, it doesn’t matter. Because everything can be manipulated to prove whatever you, presumably the maximum stakeholder, assuming that you have the control and the power and more importantly, that ability to manipulate, would like to prove to the market, to the investors, and to whoever cares to go and read your declaration to this world.

So what is it? Are the financial statements the true indicators of the performance of a firm? Or do we need to resort to the now popular concepts of the Balanced Score Card and the like? Which, I don’t really see how otherwise, are not immune to the very same things that plague the financial statements. Or are the industries actually run as per these financial statements?

What about the globe that is Behavioral Sciences - or Organizational Behaviour? We all know that these are some of the things that we ought to do, or not ought to do, and think before we speak, and get a detached view and put ourselves in the shoes of others (which is such a stupid thing to do, because I wouldn’t be able to control myself rolling on the floor, or in this case, sole of the shoe, because either I’d have to be really tiny to fit into somebody’s shoe, or the shoe would have to be really really big - both cases are really funny and are blog-post-material for some other time) and get that perspective because we have studied a subjecet at some point in our academic life. Sure. All that is fine. But do we, nay, are we really capable of doing this?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not writing this diatribe to deride the way this world works. No, madam (or sir, lest you call me sexist). Because in a few months, I’ll be very much a part of this world as well, and then I’ll be expected to do the same, and I’ll adjust and accept - like we have been doing for ages for now. That besides the point. This is not meant to be some sort of a ethical dilemma or some big eye-opener. Hardly.

It’s just arbit stuff - stuff I know not at this point of time to make sense of.

(Don’t I just love writing long sentences with zillions of digressing clauses running into each other so that you, my dear reader, get so absolutely lost, and being the brave one that you are, you won’t bother to even ask directions to the next knowledgable punctuation mark heading your way; in fact, it has gotten so bad these days that I can hardly read anything without my mind running into tangents that try to traverse the most obscure of the topics possible, so that the end result is that I end up spending all the time in the world without doing anything really worthwhile, and of course, ending my sentences with prepositions, like in the paragraph before?)

(Gee, I have become a manager, after all!)

Funny thing. Suddenly I’m all charged up and raring to go; to do something, to shake up everything.

What’s different? Mid-term marks are out, and frankly, they are disgusting by my standards. Is that it? Or is it the realization; the discovery of a purpose? Or are these OB (Organizational Behaviour, for the uninitiated) handouts the cause? Or is it the choice of music that I’m playing on the iPod? Maybe it is the weather, or the recent blog I read. Quite possibly the recent win of my hostel at the World War. Or is it the courier that’s headed my way?

Doesn’t matter.

This world is mine.

For some reason, I seem to have a natural inclination towards things that I cannot have. Not material things, necessarily. Even when I have some of those things, I still end up yearning and pining for those that I don’t have, and probably shouldn’t have or wouldn’t have anyway. The change from shouldn’t to wouldn’t because if I really wanted them, I could probably have them, but I can’t make up my mind.

So all the pining and yearning… What does that do? It makes every feature come out alive. Vividly. Distinctly. iMAX Movie. Possibly larger than life.

Which makes me feel rather miserable. Oh, how I wish things were the way I wanted. Then again, it is probably for my best interests that they aren’t the way I would want them to be, since life as we know it would be screwed in so many innumerable ways that I can’t even begin to enumerate them.

I wonder, do they also think in that same way? Or are they entirely different from us, from me?

Is this just an extension of the grass being greener on the other side? Or something more profound, deeper? The way I am wired inside?

I think it is inherently about the challenge. The fun and the intensity that comes with a new challenge. That is the draw. That is what I desire, maybe. (But do I really want it, amidst all the hoopla that’s already there in life? If at all, I would want to relax and enjoying lazing around, waiting for time to slowly run away.) And what happens thereafter? Once the objective of the challenge is achieved, and it no longer remains a challenge, will it all wilt away? Should it be allowed to wilt away?

===

Random arbit stuff. Even I’m not sure what I was aiming at - readers might want to ignore.

Wu Shuo tuo is a strong man in his late twenties working in a garment manufacturing firm in Xinyang, China. His name means, quite literally, to support or to push, and such is his job - he is a fork lift operator in the factory unit 22. Wu has this brilliant idea of stealing garments - one or two at at time, maximum - from the packaging department. His line of thinking, very different from the general Chinese, but still human: one out of millions; what difference does it make? So every Saturday, after this 10-hour shift, he’d take two of the garments: one red tee with a white smile-like logo on it, another with a similar design, only black in colour, and sell them to a local market dealer, who’d then repackage and pass them on to a American Mall in uptown Shanghai market, where the tall and big people originally from half way around the globe would shop - these tees would be too big for the Chinese - they’d sell for $8.95 a piece, and Wu would get a commission of two yaun, sometimes even three if the dealer was in a good mood. Those two were the only tees he’d ever steal, for some reason.

Claire is an English-born American who has a degree in business administration and a yearning for foreign travel; she engages in a foreign assignment with one of the leading sports apparel manufacturer - the exact same one who outsources manufacturing to the factory in whose Unit 22 Wu works. She is posted as the General Manager who’d oversee these manufacturing units in China. Life is fun, amidst hot smoked and steamed dumplings and cheap labour. She has even started taking Chinese classes in order to connect with her workers, and maybe find some “local flavour” in the streets.

The era is technology driven, and lots of funny statistics can pour out if technology is implemented to capture and record everything that happens. The technology in Unit 22 was such. Two things happened: One, a certain SKU reported a consistent loss of inventory over a period of three weeks, which an Indian developer had programmed, based on detailed specifications from a certain ERP solutions provider in Europe, to trigger an alarm in the reporting system and so, the next report that Claire received had this fact stated in a nice bullet point under “Concerns”. Two, the security cameras put in place for the perceived happiness and satisfaction of the foreigners do not distinguish between foreigners and Chinese, recording everything diligently.

Claire is practical and very technologically-savy. Putting two-and-two together, she quickly correlates the result of missing inventory to the cause, Wu stealing those two tees every week. As any ethical and yet, profit-oriented, manager would do, she calls Wu to her office. A English-Chinese translator helps her get across the rather curt decision - “The company has a zero tolerance policy for theft of any kind. In accordance with this policy, Wu is fired from immediate effect. Moreover, to make an example of this kind of inappropriate behaviour, Wu would also be reported to the authorities.”

Things move swiftly from here, and everything is a blur.

Claire returns to America, in a state of extreme depression, on the verge of complete breakdown. Only yesterday was she ”apprised” by a rather eager Chinese middle-level manager that the authorities had executed Wu.

—

This is a work of fiction and should be treated as such. Any consequental implications are unprecedented and I bear zero liability for them. Built upon a premise set in the book “Organizational Behavior”, Robbins and Judge, Twelth Edition, published by the Prentice-Hall of India Pvt. Ltd. in an Eastern Economy Edition. ISBN 978-81-203-3090-0.

Basic premise: An offer - you get to do whatever you want for a period of time - anything, just about anything, that you ever might want to do - but, and here’s the fine print - you absolutely won’t remember what you did.

So, will you take it up?

In essence, you get all the satisfaction that you’ve always dreamed of deriving from that one activity, at least when engaging in that activity, but it won’t be a recurring first-person memory. Since the world will not stop existing because you forget about it, people will observe and recollect, they will remember what you did, and they will often be more than happy to recant to you what they percieve you did - only that you don’t remember anything of it.

There are a couple of issues with this - One, people may not always remember the most relevant things, or worse, add their dimensions, outlooks, prejudices to what they believe happened. This alone has enough potential to wreck your second-hand memory, which you are so desperate to acquire, and yet which will be denied to you. Two, consequences do not disappear, just because you have no recollection of the incidences. In fact, because the whole support system that would normally exist if you were knowledgable doesn’t exist, you basically don’t know how to react. You don’t have the upper hand. That does wonders to your confidence.

So, if you ever find yourself in such a position - and there will be times when you’d be - pray that my lifetime dream of having a personal “life recorder” that will record every evanascent moment of life in a multitude of dimensions and senses, is available for purchase, and that you’ve purchased and enabled it.

Then again, that offer probably wouldn’t make sense anyway, would it? Also, you wouldn’t, in all possibility, engage in an activity that you’d really want to do, knowing it is being “recorded”, so what if only for your personal consumption.

Darn, life is so complicated.

They have done it again!

They being the alternative rock band from England, the ones who gave us The Scientist, Clocks, Yellow and more recently, Talk. Yes, I’m writing about Coldplay and their latest offering, Viva La Vida / Death And All His Friends.

Somehow I had not managed up until now to lay my hands on their latest offering - and now that I have, I feel that I should have done this quite some time before. This is one album that I liked the first time I heard it. It is very Coldplayesque, unlike the previous X&Y. The music is distinctly their style - mellow, meaningful (if you go looking for it) and deep. Yes, it is a bit heavier and louder than say that in Parachutes, but that’s okay.

Viva had tinges of sadness in many of their songs - not the feeling of sadness per se, but that feeling you get when you start realize that you are losing something that you deeply cherish because you somehow didn’t try harder holding on to it - and it is almost too late. Don’t listen to it when you are rather happy, you might positively hate it.

So personal favourites so far - Life in Tecnicolour, Lost, Lovers in Japan, Violet Hill and Strawberry Swing. Of course, if you ask me tomorrow, it’ll be rather difficult to select these, because I’ll start liking the entire album by then.

And they even have a song titled 42. Now how cool is that?

Overall, beautiful stuff, especially for those nights when you’d want to sort of instropsect. Happy listening!

The problem with technology is that it inherently unreliable. And every so often, I keep forgetting that. Except that sometimes, people are unreliable too. Including you. And me.

Ever wondered why we take the emotional decisions that we do? They are just so gray. It is extremely difficult to look back and say clearly - yes, this is one decision that I do not regret, or no, I completely regret making this decision. Is it really that difficult? Should it really be that difficult?

Pressure and hopelessness brings about a variety of traits in people. Which ones did they bring out in you? Were they the ones you expected? What if they were not? Are you man enough to face the person you are, but didn’t ever think you’d be? Can you live with him? And then, do you really have a choice? Or, even if you do, are you really willing to put in what it takes to change everything?

What does one want from life?

Big talks and big plans. Showcases and storefronts. Are these real? Or just displays? Which is it? When does the illusion stop? Does it ever stop? Or is that the reality that one conveniently assumed to be the unreal?

Loose control, they say. And then, things bubble out. Can you confront them? Can you confront the true you? Why do we have to belong? Social animals and what not. Herds are here to stay. It’s the upbringing and the social context that is at fault. Or is that just an excuse?

And why ponder, really? When it can all go away in the next morning’s rising sun, mingled with the dews from the early morning rain. Especially when it can go away. Do you want it to go away?

Value systems and morals. Roots and ideologies. I have none baselined. What am I? What do I truly want? Am I a hypocrite? A strange series of co-incidences? What is important to me? Do I justify it being important to me? Do I make it feel that it is important to me? Or do I just end up letting it feel entirely otherwise?

Why is it that we (I) often ignore the people and things that matter to us the most? Taking them for granted, most of the times. Fully knowing that this is simply incorrect. Not the way it should be. But then that’s the way it becomes. And then hope that things will turn right all by themselves.

I don’t want this. But then what is it that I do want? Am I ready to accept what I want and stick to it? Samples and experimentation. Where’s that from? Do I get a second chance? Does it matter? What if the choices I make are not in the best interest? Of not just me, but others concerned.

Selfishness. Is it trivial? Or is it the basis of survival? PR. Kickbacks. Unconditional acceptance. Sheesh!

At the crossroads, it is important to lay the strongest, sturdiest foundations. But what lame foundations, they are! Only to be challenged by the simplest of events. Shaky. Crumbly.

Façade. Charade. Unreal. When I don’t know what I really am. Or what I really want to be. Or what I feel I really ought to be. And the difference in being what I ought to be and what I want to be. Do I even know what I want to be?

Pride. Apparently people are proud of accomplishments. What accomplishments? You call that an accomplishment. Stoooopid! More right time, right place – coincidences.

They deserve so much better.
Sorry.

And there’s so much more to be said.

Taken from Slashdot:

Neuroses are red, Melancholia’s blue.
I’m schizophrenic, What are you?