Facebook challenges!

I admit that no quote sprang to mind when I thought of challenges. How would it? The only reading I have got done in the last two years is the latest Harry Potter book. So, I googled for it and found an intriguing one in the form of a meme. “Don’t limit your challenges. Challenge your limits.”

Nice, I do think a "7-day landscape photograph challenge" is challenging enough for me. It may be somewhat of a limited challenge to so many of our semi-pro or full-pro photographers of today, but it does challenge some people’s limits.

I do know a bit about different kinds of sarees because of going shopping with the ladies at home, but I am no expert because I don’t wear sarees. Still I suppose a "100-saree photo challenge" isn’t bad as a challenge. I mean, it does challenge the coolness quotient of the “I don’t wear sarees yaa!” tribe and makes ladies proudly carry forward the tradition as well as be hip doing it.

Tell me though, but what stretch of imagination, on which scale, under what circumstances, is a “Post a B&W photo with your spouse on Facebook” a challenge?!

It severely limits your challenges and does not challenge any limits.

If you are in speaking terms with your spouse despite the different social media sites you are both active on, if your spouse is a selfie-bug just like you, if you have even some old camera app which has a B&W setting or even if you have an old picture with your spouse from the days before smartphones, any post-processing app has a ready B&W filter and you can easily post a B&W photo with your spouse. What is challenging about it?!

If you give this challenge to single people – for example “Find a spouse in 7 days and post a B&W photo with them challenge”, that would be a real challenge now!

A really good one to challenge your limits would be – "Find a film camera, find a B&W film roll, take a picture with your spouse using such a camera, find the required processing material and develop it yourself in a dark-room. Then scan the picture and post it on Facebook!"

Do it! I challenge you!

Work Anniversary!

It’s amazing how the impact of a term is lost in translation. Somehow the term ‘pouring garbage’ when said in English doesn’t evoke the same kind of ideas, emotions or images as it does when ‘kuppai kottaradhu’ is said in Tamil.

Yet, as on today, I have successfully done that for 20 years in the software industry. Or whatever is the equivalent of crumpling up papers with rough designed ideas and throwing them away in the waste-paper basket.

I had never shutdown or switched off a computer before I landed in the Siemens office on 1st July 1996 – in IISc we had always just logged off and left – along with 4 other classmates and 15 other campus recruits from other colleges. We had each a large 133 MHz desktop machine sitting under our desks and a monstrous CRT monitor on it.

The Internet was a toddler at best, if not in its infancy. Web-crawler and Lycos were our search engines and Altavista joined in later. For configuration management we were actually beta testers for Clearcase!

Windows 3.11 and MSDev were such infuriating things for someone who had only worked on UNIX and Xenix machines on RS6000 workstations and being an expert user of the ‘VI editor’. Especially maddening when it used to say ‘Unknown Error’. Hmm, Windows probably hasn’t changed much!

After that? Lots of adventure. Programming using MFC – though I used to have a less flattering expansion for it, foray into Object Oriented Databases, DICOM, HL7, IHE, tech leadership roles, requirement engineering roles, learning project management, getting audited hundreds of times, moving to quality management and …

… here we are. 20 down, 20 more to go. At least nowadays dry kuppai can be recycled!

Coffee

I had to make an entry into the ‘Grievance Redressal System’ today.

I stumbled into the pantry with half-closed eyes desperately craving for that rejuvenating first-sip which will activate my eyelids to fully operational, kick-start my brain and make my senses observe the world clearly again.

I put my cup under the general area of the dispenser, pressed the ‘Espresso’ button through muscle memory… and… there was a power outage. S-word!

That activated a ‘fight or flight’ area of my brain which has evolved over the millennia to face such situations. I mean, what did the hunter-gatherer do when he realized in the morning that he had run out of the coffee-fruits he had gathered? He obviously couldn’t go hunting without having a few? The huntress has been needing way too many ever since the little baby huntress was born!

Ok, let’s go to the upstairs pantry; F-word, that would be out too! The cafeteria? That B-word vendor hasn’t been coming all this week!

Calm down! Breathe deeply. Say ‘Ooooohhhmmmm’; let go of all resistance. Breathe in from one nostril, breathe out of another… but even this is only possible AFTER coffee! Should I go out to Adyar Ananda Bhavan 3km down the road? Oh D-word, I take the office cab these days. F-word carbon-credits, I should start driving again!

Power hadn’t come back. I slowly started trudging back to my desk, turned my chair around and was half way through sitting on it when the power came back. I had to trudge back to the pantry and wait for the machine to stop saying ‘Please wait… initializing’ for five minutes before I could get my coffee.

Suggestion to admin department is that the coffee machine should be connected to the UPS. After all it is life-giving fluid somewhere between ‘Wi-fi’ and ‘Water’ on Maslow’s Pyramid of needs.

Facebook Privacy!

No, it is not fake news, it is not just a rumour which went viral.

Your Facebook posts are NOT private. They never have been. It is important to recognize that we Facebook users are not Facebook's customers! In fact we are the commodity.

Our posts and our information is what they sell to make money. Why else does Whatsapp never come good its threat to charge us 'starting next year'?

Yet, we use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Flickr, Tumblr, Imgur, FourSquare... Weibo and everything in between. There is even something called ‘43Things’. Go figure!

There are software service companies who sell Data Analysis tools which can hook into your Social Networking stream, parse through all that 'unstructured' data using tools like Hadoop, make sense out of it and provide a dashboard full of charts as big as a Rajini cut out at Satyam theatre on Kabali opening day.

And there are hundreds of such companies using these dashboards to figure out what ads can be placed when you are reading news online and what spam can be sent to your Gmail ‘Promotions’ folder. Which is why it is unforgivable that Flipkart still tries to sell me an expensive phone after I have already bought an expensive phone from their very website; though that strategy works well on consumables, like Firstcry.in putting up diaper ads on whichever site I go to!

Yet, this is fake news. Not only is it fake news, it is fake news from nearly 4 years ago! Please stop copy-pasting it on your walls! FB is not going to make all your posts ‘Public’. Even people who have never bothered to change their post privacy settings from ‘Public’ are copy-pasting this stupidity on their walls!

Stop eet! Eva ava…
(BTW, why copy-paste and not share? I would never figure that logic out!)

The very real siblings!

Richard and Dickie; Ana and Mina! That was the first thought when I heard of Carlos Brathwaite.

I was thinking of an extract from E. R. Braithwaite's 'To Sir, with love', which was in my English book in school. It was 30 years ago, but I remember the story.

There is this poor little kid called Ha'Penny in the author's class. When everyone introduces his or her family, Ha'Penny tells him that he has four siblings, Richard and Dickie; Ana and Mina. He remains silent when the author mentions that Richard and Dickie are the same name. The next time, he softens the 'D' to a 'T' and says Richard and Tickie. Then the author realises that the kid is an orphan, he made up a family so as to be not left out.

Of course, this is prime material for a pathetic tear-jerker on WhatsApp, which will appear in each of my groups within an hour, transform itself into a story of a refugee child in a Western country within a week and appear on Facebook with a equally sad photograph. Then an uncle will re-send it on WhatsApp aftet 2 months and will get congratulated as though he wrote it himself!

It might still happen. Don't say I didn't warn you!

Anyway, when Carlos Brathwaite walked in to the crease at Kolkata, the words in my mind were... “Richard and Dickie; Ana and Mina”. As he took strike with 19 to get off 6 balls, while there was the tension on one side, the disappointment that Marlon wasn't facing, the anxiety of whether he could get that single... those names were constantly chanting in the background.

Then he unleashed them.

Richard was heaved over square leg. It was a bit smallish, that boundary, but he still had to get it over. Even Stokes wasn't too worried though. 13 off 5 isn't easy either.

Dickie was almost Tickie. He was a heart stopper. He went too vertically for TV viewers to be certain, but still landed up into the long on crowd. Stokes was distraught, but didn't get any support. He had to walk back lonely to his blowing mark. Where was Morgan? I mean, Plunkett is no Nehra-ji, but I saw no encouragement, no sympathetic arm around his shoulders. I didn't expect Ana. I thought, 7 in 4 balls, he would play it safer than that. And Ana last looked almost a mishit. Whether he wanted her to go to long off or not, that's where she went. That dislodged Sammy and the others from their seats. Haley Matthews was jumping with her player of the match award from the Women's final before.

Mina needed to have been just a tap to third man for a half run, half jumped single, but she too turned out to be a bonus six to mid wicket.

For Ben Stokes, they were not imaginary siblings! They happened and they were very real. His strength of character would show depending on how soon he gets over this and comes back, like Stuart Broad did after 2007.

What a game! What a finish!

Yes, Carlos Brathwaite might not have changed lives the way E.R. Braithwaite did, but he made his bit of cricket history today. And who knows what changes in the board-player wars this might lead to? Hopefully a much better future with the WI restored to former glories!

Kudos Carlos!

The very real siblings!

Richard and Dickie; Ana and Mina! That was the first thought when I heard of Carlos Brathwaite.

I was thinking of an extract from E. R. Braithwaite's 'To Sir, with love', which was in my English book in school. It was 30 years ago, but I remember the story.

There is this poor little kid called Ha'Penny in the author's class. When everyone introduces his or her family, Ha'Penny tells him that he has four siblings, Richard and Dickie; Ana and Mina. He remains silent when the author mentions that Richard and Dickie are the same name. The next time, he softens the 'D' to a 'T' and says Richard and Tickie. Then the author realises that the kid is an orphan, he made up a family so as to be not left out.

Of course, this is prime material for a pathetic tear-jerker on WhatsApp, which will appear in each of my groups within an hour, transform itself into a story of a refugee child in a Western country within a week and appear on Facebook with a equally sad photograph. Then an uncle will re-send it on WhatsApp aftet 2 months and will get congratulated as though he wrote it himself!

It might still happen. Don't say I didn't warn you!

Anyway, when Carlos Brathwaite walked in to the crease at Kolkata, the words in my mind were... “Richard and Dickie; Ana and Mina”. As he took strike with 19 to get off 6 balls, while there was the tension on one side, the disappointment that Marlon wasn't facing, the anxiety of whether he could get that single... those names were constantly chanting in the background.

Then he unleashed them.

Richard was heaved over square leg. It was a bit smallish, that boundary, but he still had to get it over. Even Stokes wasn't too worried though. 13 off 5 isn't easy either.

Dickie was almost Tickie. He was a heart stopper. He went too vertically for TV viewers to be certain, but still landed up into the long on crowd. Stokes was distraught, but didn't get any support. He had to walk back lonely to his blowing mark. Where was Morgan? I mean, Plunkett is no Nehra-ji, but I saw no encouragement, no sympathetic arm around his shoulders.

I didn't expect Ana. I thought, 7 in 4 balls, he would play it safer than that. And Ana last looked almost a mishit. Whether he wanted her to go to long off or not, that's where she went. That dislodged Sammy and the others from their seats. Haley Matthews was jumping with her player of the match award from the Women's final before.

Mina needed to have been just a tap to third man for a half run, half jumped single, but she too turned out to be a bonus six to mid wicket.

For Ben Stokes, they were not imaginary siblings! They happened and they were very real. His strength of character would show depending on how soon he gets over this and comes back, like Stuart Broad did after 2007.

What a game! What a finish!

Yes, Carlos Brathwaite might not have changed lives the way E.R. Braithwaite did, but he made his bit of cricket history today. And who knows what changes in the board-player wars this might lead to? Hopefully a much better future with the WI restored to former glories!

Kudos Carlos!