Before you ask, here’s what happened. Switched the phone on now, came online, heard weird wise words which I didn’t want to, got another uncle asking me to apply to a company where his son is placed for 4 million INR per annum in Germany so that he can “recommend” me, got 10 smses from the stalker girl, got called up by her on our land line, got my mom angry, cut myself while shaving with a Gillette Mach3 turbo sensitive (that should get me into the Guinness book of world records or something). Don’t I love my birthday…
Category Archives: Random
Birthday
Its the night of the year I enjoyed the most till I was 10. Excitement of the unseen which awaited me in the bright day to rejoice a step into the future. Presents, friends and most of all attention, what else can a kid need?
But as the years went by and I “grew up”, the day started haunting me and now its fear of the awkward conversations and connections that will creep out of the blue. High school friends who were mean to me back then calling me up, ex-gfs who are on the verge of being full time stalker… Awkward silences after calls from relatives after saying the initial “happy birthday” asking questions without saying a word.
So this year I am taking control of things. 00:00 - 23:59 hours 13th October 2011, I’ll stay disconnected from everyone. No “friends”, no relatives. no internet. 24 hours of me in peace…
Edge World
After the GSoC end term, I took a little break from coding to chill out for a while and reset myself for diving back in. Ankit got me hooked into a flash game on google plus called “Edge World”. I wasn’t very optimistic about it after having tried a few games on facebook, but it turned out to be pretty decent game when compared to the games I had played previously. Its more or less an asynchronous MMORTS (I might go as far as calling it an asynchronous and over stretched in time version of starcraft perhaps). I know the “asynchronous” and “real time” are contradictory but that is the best way to describe it. I made a little alliance in the game and as with everything else involving human beings, learnt a lot from it. MMOs form a very strong base of real human connection. This is probably the most engaging feature in these games. The game itself was not too engaging with time and frankly starts to get dull and rather irritating with the increasing build times for everything. you literally have to wait for days for stuff to build in your base increasing with every level. But the social connection we made in the alliance/guild/clan was really awesome. I met with amazing new people and learnt a great deal about how people think/react in situations they are new to. Over all I felt the collective happy feeling that Jane McGonigal terms as “being part of something epic”. I think I’ll have a better understanding of things if I attempt to make a site for a lot of human interactions perhaps. I would suggest that you should try this game and if you get into “Procyon” sector, join our alliance. Its called “POW” :D
HOLY CHILD – My first real school
I was recently added to my batch’s closed facebook group “SVCS 2005″ by Satya. Usually, I un-join groups as soon as I am added to them because of all the clutter and awkward social interaction but I think I got biased by papa’s excitement about the fb group of his b-tech batch this time.
In a particular thread my friends teased Vicky Barik of being a “HOLY CHILD”. Well this has nothing to do with his religion / beliefs. Its the name of the school he went to before joining St. Vincent’s. I was also a student of HOLY CHILD. It was a small school with very few students in a class. I could then count the ones in my class on fingers.
I remember waking up really early and getting ready for school. I had absolutely no sense of time then (or now ;-)). Although I had learnt most of it, most of the times mumma would end up brushing my teeth or combing my hair, polishing my shoes or dressing me up. Laces were just damn difficult! I was fascinated and intimidated by them.
Then I remember Ansari, our rickshaw waala bhaiya. He was one smelly guy! I wonder if the present me would smell/stink more than him… He was a very happy person. He would talk to us about his life, race other rickshaw waalas on the way and crack all sorts of jokes with us. Those rides were perhaps one of the most fun times of my daily routine. I have not heard from him in years. IIRC he promoted himself to become a trolley waala soon after we left the school.
We used to wear red pull overs to school and I loved pulling out the sweater pills. In almost all winter classes when the teacher would be busy teaching, I would be busy pulling out little strands or pills from the sweater. Perhaps I always had my own little world in my mind in which everything had a completely different priority order from the real world which changed very frequently. As Sir Ken Robinson puts it “I think now they’d say its ADHD…” “but ADHD hadn’t been invented. It wasn’t in an available condition. People weren’t aware they could have that”
I remember a test in which we had to write some of the alphabets. I could not figure out that Q was the letter after P. I think I wrote i as Piyush definitely has an i after the P. Perhaps I wasn’t even aware of the existence of an alphabetical order, let alone the possibility of one alphabet preceding another…
I faced my first bully, Sonali Khatua in HOLY CHILD too. What’s worse is that she was my next door neighbor and was the grand daughter of the house owner (we lived in a rented house). Her mother perhaps deserves a separate post for herself. On one occasion, Sona(as we affectionately called her) had scratched my cheeks in school and I could not do enough damage (yeah I am a wuss from birth). When I reached home, my cheeks were bleeding and her mother was on our doorstep howling on me and my mum accusing me of having beaten her up. I would go as far as calling this as a perfect mini-preview of Indian mother child relation ;-). Mumma was perhaps the reason I never actually learned fighting (read: became a wuss). She’d always stop me and discourage fighting. But on this occasion it was too much for her too. Like a typical hindi movie hero, she was swayed by the blood and fought with her mother for me. That was perhaps one of the first times I remember having felt proud and protected.
I think the last clear memory I have from HOLY CHILD is of the day we passed out. I had somehow managed to stand second in class. I had no idea what being second in a class or what competition meant. I hadn’t actually realized anything worth noticing had happened on that date till I saw my mumma.
I gave the thing wrapped in a yellow paper to her. It was my prize(a katori, lol). That was the first time I remember realizing that she could bring up an emotion other than the frown on her face for me. I had no idea if it was good or bad. I could barely make sense of facial emotions other than those of anger (which were pretty obvious because of the accompanied beating or yelling).
That little katori had caused a smile on her face. It took me a few more years to understand that it was me who had done the magic…
Looking back I think it was one of the most beautiful times of my childhood with her. That is what you get when you go to a low-competition few-students school ;-)
Google plus test drive
I’ve been invited to Google plus this morning and haven’t gotten off it since then. So I would say it is a nice take on social sharing. Google has hit a better chord than facebook in a lot of features and it has took lessons from the buzz blunder and other social networks. Features seem to have been given a lot of thought and work fairly well considering its being field tested.
Even though its fairly simple to use, you somewhat need a little social networking experience to get started with it. I’ll assume you know how facebook, twitter and orkut(optional) works with this whole post…
I’ll talk about the features which are interesting and somewhat different from facebook with Google plus
Animations and intuitive UI
G+ is really fun to use with fun little animations. You can click, drag, box-select, and do really a lot with drag and drop, specially with circles. j,k keyboard shortcuts work like gmail.
Circles
You can call it an step up from Facebook groups. I am tending to define it more on lines of a cross between Orkut (yes that site is still up :P) Groups and Facebook Groups with a lot of more pep in it. Also where facebook lets you arrange people in groups, Google makes you do it. Which helps a lot on the site later on :)
Hangout
Talk, video chat with upto 10 people at a time. you can also watch youtube videos together. lol I can almost hear Skype saying “Goodbye cruel world!” ;) Ankit and I took it for a test ride and found some glitches which will probably be fixed before a full scale public release. Watching youtube videos together is awesome :D
Sparks
This is a completely new feature which makes plus different in all respects from other social networks. Add your interest and see content from the web related to it. I am hoping in near future, they start considering open graph data (yes, its an fb initiative but a really good way to let people categorize their content) for putting up stream for that.
Stream
Where most people consider it a copy of facebook feed, I see fundamental differences. These differences are that of design. If you do not know this, you can filter your facebook feed according to status updates pics etc etc and also by groups (click the arrow near most recent or whatever you have previously selected and see). Posting to stream also gives you options to send it to various people. “Public” behaviour is more like twitter, so when you share something as a public post, anyone on plus can respond to it. So share it to “Your Circles” or “Extended circles” instead for only limited people.
Do checkout the “Incoming” tab for people who have you in some circle and you have not added them to any circle yet. it may turn into a spam house soon enough but you may find interesting people before spammers come up on the site
Tagging people by @/+
Though we have this feature in facebook too, it behaves more like twitter and somewhat worse than it. you can tag people with + or @. @ gets converted to + so for me you have “+Piyush Mishra”. When you start typing, it starts giving you options of people as autocomplete and that is where it starts to suck in my opinion. You can start typing any random name and tag the person. And the person probably gets a notification for it.
Reply Via Notifications
You do not need to be on G+ to respond to all posts on your or your friends streams. You can do it from the top Google bar anywhere. Now this would be super awesome if they allowed the bar to be placed on other sites as well via an API (probably then I would call it an FB killer)
Edit Comments
I am yet to figure out if this is a good feature or a bad one but yes you can edit your comments and prevent further possible shame in a lot of cases. though it may disrupt the flow and logic of most conversations
Ultimate balance of Privacy
This is where Google probably strikes gold. They have tried to and in my opinion made a really good balance of privacy this time. You can disable comments on posts, disable re-share, select exact people to public while sharing, circles and tagging. all are awesome ;)
Data Liberation
Google is giving out your data. proabably one of the only social networks allowing a proper version of this :D
I am eagerly waiting for the developer API to get released!!
I am yet to test photos and others. do comment with any tips etc so that I can add them to this post ;)
Edit: For a complete user and feature guide check out Google+ Tips and Tricks doc-cum-wiki
Thinking VS Doing
After getting back from Kolkata, I have been acting rather crazy crazier than before. I am almost doing a full time thinking now.
What I mean is I spend almost all my waking hour and perhaps some part of my sleeping hours too thinking and planning the future and making up scenarios and trying fit all crazy in it.
Having a nerd-ish brain (refer The Nerd Handbook for details), I wanted to perhaps think through all the possible outcomes and scenarios that the future might hold and make a well-informed and wise choice. What I failed to realize that finding the right choice for today is more like finding the position and momentum of an electron (refer Uncertainty principle). And as always it took me ages to realize this and now perhaps it’ll take some time to get over it.
There are a lot of things that I figured out and learned during this time. Also, I did come up with a daily master plan. I like to call it Multitasking simplified
- You can not judge the future
No matter how hard you try, you can never judge what the outcome of something will be. You can make a best guess based on how things have been in the past and trying to put yourself in that situation and playing out roles in your mind. This may be a good idea while trying to figure things out with code its way more difficult and almost a waste of time when doing this with people and utterly ridiculous when you are doing it with people whom you really don’t know that well…
The best you can do is know your goals. - Know your goals
Not knowing what to do next is like the worst thing that can happen to a person and that happens only in two occaisions. Not really having anything on mind or having too much at a time. While I would have loved discussing the first one, I have no personal experience in that region so I can not empathize with you if you are there. So I’ll pick the one I am facing right now. After an initial round of thinking, I figured out that my current goals are the plugin manager for DokuWiki and making the future of Enjoy Studies. I love the idea behind Stalk Ninja and am somewhere in the team (not very sure what role I am playing). So here are three major things that I have to be concerned about right now. Apart from these, there’s a client turned friend’s project which has been ultra delayed due to various reasons (one of them is me!) and he’s been very patient and supportive about all the college semester exams and now with GSoC taking most of my time. Then there’s sambhuti, WP FB Comments, VSSUT.com, moving everything to linode, fundakid, codeitout, hacktard, open-graph plugin, fb-merge and a lot of ideas that keep adding and piling everyday…
Isn’t it insane to actually have that many goals at once?
Does that seem like your life? If your answer is yes, you need to drop some things and group goals - Drop things and group goals
From the huge list of goals you have right now, like it or not, you’ll have to scratch some out and pick only the ones which are in best interests of your future and of the future of others involved. Divide them into groups of tasks you can cut easily, tasks you can not avoid and the gray area.
In my case, first victims would be Codeitout, hacktard, fundakid and a bunch of other ideas. As I haven’t started with any of them, I probably should wait a little longer. may be also VSSUT.com.
The things I can not delay at all are the DokuWiki Plugin manager (Because of a deadline, commitment to a huge community and failing the summer of code), the client site (Because he’s a great guy and has been so patient with me). I can’t leave Stalk Ninja and Enjoy Studies (Because they are things I love a lot).
In the gray area come WP FB Comments(Sorry Ankit, I had to…), moving all sites to linode and sambhuti (it is pretty much stable now)
Once you have this list, pick the things you cannot avoid and start prioritizing - Start prioritizing
When you have just a bunch of really super important stuff left, you need to assign weights to them. According to these weights, you need to devote time and effort for each goal. The best way to understand your priority would be checking in what sequence you wrote the list in the previous step.
For example in my case DokuWiki Plugin manager is the most important thing. I can not let it pass at any cost (I have let it slack a little in the past 3 days and am feeling terrible already, I need to get to speed again on it)
Next is the client site. This is something I am not very sure about because there are multiple variables here and according to #1 above, I can not determine which day I’ll get my next task for the project. So I keep it in the important-if-I-have-a-task category.
Now I have Stalk Ninja and Enjoy Studies. One is my idea and I am somewhere between an evangelist and a team member on the other. I love them both equally and I see (read: I am bent on making) their fate intertwined in a very deep sense in future. Enjoy Studies has not yet been pushed to a full throttled launch and Stalk Ninja is already there, ready to “pivot” (the famous and often misused startup word, meaning scaling. origin: more or less pivot in popularity chart or sales chart).
When faced with a decision like this, you have to make your best guess and go with it without blaming yourself 2 years from now.
In my case, I pick Enjoy Studies… Partly because of a plan Pocha Bhaiya gave me for Enjoy Studies (surprisingly, Kushal Bhaiya came up with a similar plan. both unaware of each other) and mostly because Stalk Ninja has already two minds giving probably more than their 100 percent into it. IMHO, Gaurav and Pocha bhaiya are the best people you would want to hand over your new startup to if you want it to work. (This is the reason I would advise startups to float their projects on SN). I feel we have come to a point that they’ll ask me for help whenever they need me without hesitating and I would do the same. :) - Practice Implementation
Now that you have a clear weight based analysis of things, you should fix a time based deadline and stop thinking anymore about the need to re-organize this priority list. Unless of course, something really urgent comes up that you need to fit in somewhere…. After this its just plain implementing it over and over again till you find the perfect balance between the goals ;-) - Thinking and Doing
There can never be a scenario where you can do anyone of the two, they need to go together. When you overdo Thinking, remember step #1 and when doing doesnt give any results repeat step 2-5.
I am sure there must be better authors than me who have written articles like this one. But if you have reached this line, I think I did a pretty good job :P
Change in URL and more!!
I have changed my blog URL. As you can guess, I now have a larger playground and can have a lot of fun with this new domain ;) Expect a lot of easter eggs in the next few weeks. I have quite a few ideas in process for this awesome little domain of mine. piyushmishra.com points to this blog and will eventually die out or keep pointing here. If there is anyone out there linking to my blog posts please update the URLs (I am sorry for not having thought of this awesome URL before) Changing domains with WP isnt that difficult after all ;)
Guess what paid for linode and this new URL?
I’ll update my blog more regularly now and’ll try to keep it short. 2 of new blog resolutions :)