Last weekend we made a trip to Gorai Beach – in the northern part of Mumbai. Even though it was a Sunday it was empty!

We took an auto from Kandivali East from our home. The auto guy asked us how do you want to go – trick question. The wife smartly answered – whichever has less traffic. The meter reading came to 7.3 ( return it was 5.5 ) – and he took us for a ride through winding roads.

We reached the Gorai Creek and got into a Ferry. Many had come with their 2 wheelers and I was wondering why they will need it. On the other side it became apparent. The beach was quite far. Autos were plying for Rs.50. Horse cart was Rs.80. And its fun to take your own 2 wheeler if you can. Worth it.

And the beach was dreamy! – not like the Chennai ones with sand getting into ones toes. The sand was black and wet. And it was a huge beach. We had to walk half a km to reach the water – which was very shallow.

The car waalae had brought their cars and were driving it really fast splashing! I was looking at them expecting someone to drift.. but no one did – boring Indians.

We had a betting game on which snail will go out of the box first!

The last Ferry is at 9:30PM. For the beach to ferry ride the Auto guy charged Rs.60. I made a mistake should not have asked – should have just got in and directed him to Ferry place and quietly given Rs.50. The auto guy was saying the rate will keep increasing as time goes on. He did have a point – he had to return empty from the Ferry spot.

We got back to the creek had dinner at Deccan House/Place ( food was good but nothing memorable ) and got back home on a honest auto.

Next trip we are planning to visit the Pagoda – which is a detour from the Gorai beach ( auto was quoting Rs.80 ) – had we started earlier we could have covered both places.

I always thought the 4 Hour Work Week book was a scam. This is a shining example for the adage – Do not judge a book by its covers.

This book is a Whack on the side of the head  ( another good book! ) – made me rethink what I am doing with my life.

Here are the important take aways :

1. Work less for Better Productivity.

I did not end up working 4 Hours per week ( yet 🙂 ). But I definitely work lot lesser now. However I am more productive than before.

What am I doing different?

a. No more FB, Twitter, Google Plus ( adding for posterity’s sake…I had to think hard to remember what was the other one )

b. No more checking and responding emails round the clock. I batch them. Best part is some of the issues will get resolved by itself by the time I check. Now I check emails around 10am ( when I come to work ), 2pm ( after lunch ) and 5pm ( before the team goes home )

c. Give aggressive deadlines. I have started biting more than I can chew – and guess what I chew more nowadays! – This is the insight I got from Goal 2. Having cushion is bad.

2. No more news. 

I had stopped reading newspapers long back. But I will keep myself up to date on Twitter and news sites. Of late I was feeling that what I am reading is totally biased and “news” as I always thought was someone’s view and that too with an agenda. ( reminds me of a  Hindu Ad I saw in 2000 on Mount Road – we offer news without views ).

So I gave up news entirely. I have no idea what games are being played, what scams are being unearthed – what plan is being hatched for the tax money that I am paying. Instead I hear it from friends or glance at the headlines on the newspapers lying on the floor as I walk down the stairs in my apartment. ( ps : almost 90% read Times of India and 90% of the time there is no news – only a big Ad on the front page ).

3. Non Work Time.

a. I go home by 7:00pm. Earlier there was no end time. Since I am working on a startup I should put 80 hour caffeine filled weeks right? Wrong. We need not burn ourselves to reach our goals – we have to just work smart.

b. I take Sundays off and don’t take up any work.

c. I removed the email icon from the home screen of my phone. I can still reach by going to applications but this has reduced the threads running on my head.

d. Most importantly – if I am in a train or just woke up or going to sleep or going for a run and I cannot work on it or respond – I simply don’t open emails. This simple discipline has made a big difference to me.

So – this is me. If you don’t find me on twitter or facebook and want to talk to me – call me or email me or use ApartmentAdda contact us page like one of my acquaintances! And btw – I will be calling you too – I am going to do social networking once again!

CRM

3 years back, we had a decision to be made in the team. Should we use a CRM software like Salesforce, HighRise or get an open source one like Sugar CRM, or build one in-house.

For a Bootstrapped startup “money” is this big fat guy sitting across the table, without a care,  smoking cigar and blowing rings in the air – while we fight it out. He finally clears his throat and says – to hell with your arguments this is what you should do – and he leaves the room.

It was decided for us – and we decided to build a simple CRM in-house. The interface is not fancy, no configuration  was necessary – because this is a square peg fitting exactly into a square hole and had no unnecessary reports, and no data upload was needed.

We started with simple categories – Boo, Cold, Warm, Hot, Super Hot, Win.

It did not make sense – so we changed them to Boo, Uncategorized, Nurture, Qualified, Demo, Propose, Negotiate, Negotiate Critical,Collect Cheque and Win.

Whenever the team says – man this sucks or can we have this – it got built. Now we have a stable CRM with even more cool features which a third party can never give – like activating Trial for a customer or giving a demo link just with a click.

And how much did this cost in real money? Almost nothing but did take away precious Developer Hours which could have been spent on the actual product. The pay-off happens in the long term.

Helpdesk

Couple of months back we looked at another pain point the team was facing – Support. We have a good volume of Support queries coming now – and is usually spread across phone calls, emails to various members – and we hired a few more folks and the chaos just kept multiplying.

Again we started looking around and there were lot of good options – *desks – on a monthly billing basis. And this time we locked the money man out of the meeting – as he wins all arguments hands down – while we brainstormed what was the best way.

Finally we decided to build it in-house again – and the reason that won the argument was automation. Our users can email us or raise Support Tickets online, reply to them by email – and it all gets into this Support system – the usual Support Ticketing workflow. All tickets can be monitored centrally now – and if someone in the team is off or is stuck with work – one of us can step in and take it over.

The best part is – we can now build lot of automations – we can easily copy the moderator of that user’s ADDA, we can trigger a password right from the Support ticket itself etc..  and many more automations that can be built by observing the nature of the tickets over a period of time.

Again – does not cost us in real money – but in precious Developer hours. And btw – we can have unlimited users, unlimited tickets.


Why you should Outsource?

This is not our “core”. There are companies who are doing this for a living and they have figured out what is best. We might be “wasting” precious developer hours and analysis re-inventing the wheel. We might be “missing” out on the industry “best practices”.

All valid arguments.

Actually we have Outsourced many flows which are not our core – perhaps will write about them in another post.

Do it yourself or Outsource?

Here is some criteria to use :

a. How much money is in your kitty?

b. What is the long term strategy – 1 year, 5 years, 10 years or more?

c. How “core” is this for your startup?

d. Can your development team “sustain” if you do it in-house?

e. Are your processes established or are you iterating? 

What has been your experience – Do it Yourself or Outsource it?

Last weekend I went to a mall and was playing with an iMac – what a beauty it is. Apps were loading with one click and they looked beautiful on a gorgeous display. 

I got home and checked my 13″ Mac book pro which is nearing its complimentary 1 year warranty  ( debating whether to bite the expensive Apple Care or going Commando ). It was slow. Really slow. I longed for the spiffy machine I once used to have.

This put me on a hunt and meanwhile set up development environment in Windows and worked on it for a day to see how things are.

Here is the bitter truth – Apple Fans – OS X Lion sucks at Memory Management. The net is ablaze with cribs and complaints on how poorly Lion manages memory – inspite of Macs being blessed with super powerful processors and enormous amount of RAM.

Still I would vote OS X Lion to be the best in class for Productivity and by the amount of things one can get done all under one roof.

I could not work in Windows – even though it was blazingly fast and responsive – could not get used to the shortcut keys ( in spite of swapping the Control and Windows key ), kept rotating the monitor on some combinations, no quick look, Alt-tabbing was painful, no full screen… and most of all – there is no CLI. ( No – cygwin is not a CLI )

I got back to Lion and tamed it ( or rather Lion tamed me ). 

Here is a list of things I did to get back in shape – use it at your own peril.

1. Run as many apps as possible in 32 bit mode.

Do a Get Info ( Command-I ) on the program in Applications and choose 32 bit mode. Its a shame isn’t it – but it reduces memory footprint
Safari
PhpStorm
Sparrow
Chrome
Firefox

iChat didnt launch in 32 bit mode. I switched to Sparrow – so not sure of the benefits / effects of Mail.

2. Remove all fancy icons from the menubar.

Here is a screenshot of my menubar – only Spotlight icon is there – couldn’t remove it.

No Volume control, no Network Icon, no date and time ( useless since calendar never opens anyway ), no blue tooth icon, no display icon ( why did I ever have it there? )

The reason is to tame a process called SystemUIServer. This grows and grows and hogs almost a Gig of RAM. Now you can always kill it and recover some memory – but removing all the icons from menubar keeps this one at bay.

There are other benefits –  it is like being in a Zen like state – no distractions and if I want to know the time I do a date command on terminal.. feel like a true geek.

3.  Inactive Memory

This keeps creeping up and suddenly it would have taken more than a Gig – and what does it do – Heaven Knows ( Steve you there? ). Anyway there is a nice command “purge” – run it – system freezes for a moment and then you get back some free RAM.

Here is the before and after of running Purge – ( like those Gym Ads). Btw – this is the Activity Monitor icon tracking the Memory usage – what a nice idea Sirjee to use icons as indicators.

Did you see the Green ( Free Memory ) just eat into the Blue ( Inactive useless Memory ) – almost 600MB got recovered.

Now I work with activity monitor pie chart always on. When the green disappears I either run Purge or close down some unused Applications.


4. Close down everything

From the beginning of time – OS X does not quit when you close an application – it only closes the window. And these processes sit quietly eating 100+ MBs.. and these add up. Now I am retraining myself to do more of Command Q instead of Command W.

5. Turn off unwanted features – everywhere

The bloatware called iTunes has a social networking module, a sharing module, a DJ module, a Genius Module…. and so many which I never use – turned off all of them. Also shutdown dashboard, spotlight ( I am used to spotlight so not sure how i will fare ). Also turned off fancy animations etc. – even though we have been brainwashed into believing that GPU is the one that does all the GUI work – I refuse to believe this BS anymore – Lion is seriously broken.

There are 2 processes which will start hogging memory like crazy – LoginWindow and UserEventAgent and you will need to keep an eye on these 2 culprits and closing unwanted applications and turning off unwanted modules is the key I guess.


6. The Strange story of coreaudiod

Go ahead take a look at the CPU usage of coreaudiod – it will be singing why this Kolaveri D right now. It was using some crazy number like 50% and at times shot up to 120% ( I dont understand % more than 100 ).

Restarting it will jump right back to the crazy processor usage numbers. Folks at Apple Support forums advised to plug a headphone into the socket, some said remove Ambient noise reduction. I stopped the notifications sound also. Still no luck.

Then I started iTunes and the process dropped! Weird ! Now iTunes was consuming some crazy RAM – so I shut down and coreaudiod made a brief appearance and went away to its nice 0.0% usage.


7. Some good habits

I will be shutting down the laptop every night before going to sleep.
I will run the nice jobs Onyx has.
Will also not run anymore fancy apps ( Better touch tool you are an exception ).
I would also burn the installer to a DVD – i do not have the bandwidth to download 4GB – so I am unable to do a fresh clean install.

So thats it – looking forward to Mountain Lion and hopefully someone in Apple Team is working his Apple off in fixing the Memory issues.

And as we were speaking – my free memory has dropped to just 13 MB ( almost 4GB is being eaten up ). iTunes is now fighting for the crown.. ugh.Time to kill this sucker and run purge… all for the love of OS X.. sigh.

My crazy nation – India – is the one I am talking about. It is getting really boring day by day.

Zero sense of humour among the ruling class


They do not get a joke. Sometime back an enterprising guy created a video called Manmohansingham – it was very funny and if I was Manmohan Singh I would have sent him a free iPad.  Instead that poor kid got a threatening letter and a take down notice was issued to all the sites hosting it.

The list goes on and on – the Prince / PM in waiting does not joke at all. He is so young ( mid 40s I believe ) and he is going to be in play for the next 40 or so years – and I am getting choked thinking how I will spend the second half of my life – in utter boredom.

Recently the center that spends our tax money – was busy enacting drama on a funny cartoon from 1950s.. now this puts all the cartoonists in self doubt.

To be honest – I am only being partly true – I am getting good entertainment from the ladies – Selvi Jayalalitha ( 1 year = 100 years equivalent of achievements ), Mamta Di ( jailed a poor professor for a cartoon ), Mayawati ji & Election commissioner ( pink elephants ).

Would request the men folks to open up and have fun.  Else I will start campaigning for the above said ladies in the next election – Seriously.

On a related note – I stumbled upon http://textsfromhillaryclinton.tumblr.com/ – and Mrs.Hillary Clinton joined the fun herself – how cool is that. My vote is for her – if she ever runs for a post in India. Lucky Americans.

Cricket and IPL


The first one was novel. Second one was ok. Then it became disgusting multiplied by the number of Sixes being hit in each episode. Staged controversies, team owners soap opera, the fixed nail biting finishes. The good game is being hurried to death like a diabetic patient eating in a Sri Krishna Sweets Buffet.

Then there is the God of cricket. Hits his 100th 100 on a flat pitch against a minnow and the team loses – not only the match but the tournament as we didnt qualify for the finals because of this important match. And yet he celebrates. And declares he is a commercial artiste to avoid Tax. Yuk.

Sun Control Films

A Honorable Supreme Court Judge orders all sun control films to be removed from all cars except a) the Z class – the rich and famous. b) the ones that came tinted with the glass from manufacturer.

What appalls me is no one seems to be bothered about the consequences. For a tropical country like us we are now going to burn more fossil fuels ( yep – this is a high blood pressure patient eating an all you can eat Pickles buffet ), zero privacy at signals, cell phones/laptops no more safe if left in the car – a new can– crate of worms – are being opened as we are speaking.

It is suffocating, hot, boring.. like watching Doordarshan’s shehnai program they usually play when an ex-PM dies – on a Sunday afternoon.

Yours truly
A Depressed Indian Citizen.

I am not going into SEO and other games. This is about the new-age social media games companies are playing now.


Facebook Games

I used to drop my jaw in awe when I see some businesses having thousands of “likes”. I still remember the early days when there was a bet in our team when ApartmentADDA will reach 50 likes. We are yet to reach the 1000 like mark. We let it grow organically and don’t game on the likes.

However recently one of our “neighbours” in this domain, “just” jumped from 900 or so likes to – hold your breath – 9000+ likes overnight. I could not believe my eyes when I saw it.  They must have  bought these likes from some company which sells “likes” –  these are the ‘work from home and earn money’ shops.  If you look at Timeline then you will find where this abnormal jump happened – in May alone there were 5k likes – and may is not over yet. They had a similar jump in April. This is for a fan page which had tanked at 900 for almost a year.

Why will they do such a thing? What do they gain by doing it? Beats me.

The real “likes” on the other hand talk to you, answer your polls, get upset with you, pat you on the back – Facebook is a great platform to interact with your customers and also put a face to their names.


Twitter Games

Recently I went to change my residential address in ICICI Bank. The clerk/asst manager whoever introduced me to a lady sitting in a cabin – must be the branch manager. She pulls out a paper and details on a new investment plan called GSIP. After 20 minutes of explaining how it works she summarizes 5 benefits and the last one being oh – you also get insurance for this. It did not register in me that time but I got back and did a google search on GSIP.

First hit – it says Prudential Life Insurance. Damn – she was all along selling a life insurance product morphed as an investment plan. We had decided to keep insurance and investment separate – that way you get maximum returns on both. This was not my idea – it was Sangeeta’s philosophy and a good one.

I tweet my frustration and @ICICIBank Cares picks it up. Asks me what your issue is and send me your contact information. I instead explain why I am not amused at the “mismarketing” of a product. I did not provide my contact details. Thought will do so after I see a sensible reply tweet and also wanted to know I am interacting with a bot or not. They go quiet and after a couple of days I see this tweet.

@venkat2 We have noted your contact details, we’ll assist you soon.

If you go and looks at the ‏ @ICICIBank_Care tweets they seem to be interacting with their customers and solving their issues. Someone reading this would have thought – good they took care of @venkat2’s issues.

Actually they have pulled a fast one on me – twice. First the manager who sold me an Insurance Product as an Investment Product and now this handle – probably run by a “social media expert”.

Probably the customer support handle exists because in the new age you are supposed to have this one too – along with the traditional call support lines.

I hope these support handles are used effectively as this is a great way to cause customer delight. 

For a self proclaimed geek – most of the things in life are under control. There are manuals and APIs for almost everything  around me.

4 years back a toy, which we named Prithvi, got delivered that did not have a manual nor an API. Has a mind of its own and it controls me – somehow the toy has read my APIs very well. It can make me buy ice-cream, chocolate, juice or take him to a mall – he has more wins in the constant mind control battle that is going on between us.

Sometime back I stumbled on this interesting book – Nurtureshock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.  It was an eye opener of sorts. This book is a good summary of the research that is happening on Child Psychology – written in a Malcolm Gladwellish style.

Good Job, WoW, You are so Smart!

I do it all the time – thinking it builds his self-confidence. Apparently this works the opposite way. The kid does get the confidence to believe in himself and attempt tougher things. After a while he stops attempting to learn new things – as the fear of failure sets in. He does not want to disappoint himself or people around him – because they think highly of him. As kids grow things get tough and they stop trying.

I have toned down my Good Job exclamations – I reserve it only for a job well done now onwards. Also when he writes I try to show him what is good and what is not.

Should we Argue in front of kids?

Answer is yes. Kids need to know and understand conflicts and how they are resolved.

Arguments will typically start and we will notice Prithvi in the room doing his thing but listening to our heated argument and we will immediately stop.  We will later continue our arguments, and will resolve them later when Prithvi is not there. Later when he sees us smiling he might be confused – like in a poorly edited movie – how did this happen? He misses out on the best part.

Role Plays

There is a new teaching methodology called Tools method. If the kids are learning about Firemen, they re-enact the whole story. Some are firemen, some are 911 operators, some are family in distress and a whole episode is enacted. This apparently is quite effective in kids involving and learning. Nowadays when Prithvi wants to play a game of role play I actively involve. I am not sure if our schools have picked up this methodology.

Ability to Focus


This is the secret to higher scores and good grades. The kids who can sit still and concentrate more – were able to do well in the aptitude tests and also understand the difficult concepts better. The Tools method apparently makes the kids focus more and this in turn helps them learn better.

This is a challenge for us and I am not sure how to tell our man it takes 10,000 hours to become better at something and not give up after a few tries.

Sleep


Kids need lot of un-interrupted sleep. When they sleep – during one of the cycles things that they learnt that day gets transferred from conscious memory to the inner deeper layers. Also routine is highly beneficial for them.

We have been pretty random with Prithvi – and still are. We work till late and when we get back home we play with him for sometime – and this upsets his sleep routine. Thankfully his new school starts early and he has to go to bed early – this will get us disciplined.

Teenage Drivers

They did an interesting study. They gave a set of questions to both adults and teenagers and measured the response time. Questions like – eating a cockroach, eating a broken glass bulb – all had immediate response from adults. Teenagers did say no – but they took more time to respond to these questions.

Teenagers are still evaluating things using their conscious brain cycles to most of the life situations. However as adults we do it unconsciously. In the school districts where they pushed the age limit of driving up to 21 had a significant drop in accidents.

[ Dear social media expert Kriba – who made his kid sit in his lap and drive the car on NH4 Highway from Chennai to Bangalore – don’t do it again. ]

There are more chapters on Racial awareness, Sibling fights, The Baby einstein videos effectiveness etc. – all backed up by research.

Now for the manual and API – its like writing one on the fly and the toy keeps changing them randomly – something that worked this week will certainly not work next week.

It is tiring – really 🙂

Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $1 Billion – roughly Rs.5000 Crores – we usually hear these numbers only from Scams. This set me thinking about money – and is it what we should all be running after?

Before I get into money I want to share an important lesson I learnt on Running.Whenever I start with an end goal saying today I will run 8Kms, or will run 5 Kms within 30 minutes – I have a very bad run.

I will get exhausted fast, I will get angry with myself as midway when I check I will realize that I am not going to reach my goal and I will start running harder. My mood and run will be on a downward spiral at that point onwards and I will end my run frustrated and depressed. Every single time I had set this kind of a goal – the end result is the same.

However, the days when I am in a great mood and I run freely and simply enjoy the run – I run really really well. I do not get exhausted, I do not tire, my timing is great, and I can keep running longer distances.

A goal is important – but I should not let it become my boss and start dictating me.

Likewise I have to come to realize the same thing in running our Startup.

We do have a sales target,  but our team does not get stressed out if we do not achieve this number. We had a guess-the-number-of-wins-by-Diwali contest last year ! ( ahemm I lost to our Accounts Champion who guessed accurately.  Sangeeta refused to participate calling this Juvenile but she did monitor closely through out!  )

We have started focusing entirely on solving our customer’s problems and not go by the traditional sales goals. Early in the cycle we try to understand the problem and if we realize that our product was not the right fit – we directed them to other sites and solutions.

We connected our customers with Auditors, Lawyers, Rain Water Harvesting Experts, STP Experts, Facility Management Experts, Accountants and introduced them to other Management Committees who had walked their path. When they needed an Estate Manager, even though they did not use our portal, we sent them leads.

Guess what? We have customers increasingly returning to us. We not only met our goal, we exceeded it.

Now when I tie these 2 string of thoughts together – running and running a startup – the similarities are not surprising : When I enjoy my run the goal is achieved automatically.

This brings out another important angle to a Bootstrapped startup. We do not have a ticking bomb tied to our back – the equivalent of a 8km / 5kms in 30 minutes goal. We have the luxury of concentrating on solving our customer’s problems and building the ecosystem – training managers and accountants – and doing what brings maximum fun to the team.

And this run is what I call the Startup Run – and I am enjoying the run thoroughly.

Closing the loop on Instagram – if they had their primary goal as $1Billion – they would not have achieved it for sure – in the process the team would have got stressed and burnt out. They were so obsessed creating a kickass photo sharing + social network app that FB got threatened –  and finally bought them out.

So what are you running after?

I keep looking for flow / zone while working. Any interruption in my workflow will break my “flow state” and will drain my energy quickly.

However when I am in the zone, things will flow smoothly, I can look ahead and  spot potential bugs, I will get new ideas, better optimizations, I can write better blog posts or difficult emails – it is like being in a meditative state – I am the happiest at this point – it is a beautiful and calming feeling – a zen like state and it leaves me refreshed and I can keep working at this state the entire day.

Ever since I moved to OS X Lion I was always looking for ways to make my workflow smooth – so it fits in my flow and does not disturb it. I kept trying various options till I hit on the best combination to keep me moving without any slow downs or distractions.

Here is how I started :

Different Spaces / Virtual Desktop 

I kept creating a few spaces like the Virtual Desktops I used to have in Ubuntu – a primary development area, communication, music and others. But to switch from one application in a space to another space – I had to do 3 clicks – one to invoke Mission Control and then to click on the space and again invoke Mission Control to find that application in that space. Something was not right – an Alt Tab would have been faster and easier.

But why not Alt-Tab

However Alt Tab has a few problems – once I do Alt-Tab I have to keep tabbing and stop at the right application – energy is being wasted. If I have multiple windows open I cannot go directly to the one I am looking for. If I have to see if a job is completed, or a page has loaded – have to do too many unnecessary switches and every time keep coordinating my eye and hand to stop at the right Application Icon when tabbing. Tiring.

Here is the simple elegant solution I stumbled upon.


Enter Full Screen

Whenever an application runs in Full Screen it occupies a Space by itself. It solved my switching problem beautifully.

This is how my desktop looks in Mission Control / Expose.

The first space is my primary work area where most of the Applications live. The rest of the spaces to the right are all full screen apps. It is lovely to have a full screen of terminal – with tabs.  Having mail full screen is also wonderful – when I write an email my entire attention is on that mail.

When I have to switch an App, I invoke Mission Control and I can go to any app with two clicks – one to invoke Mission Control and one to select the Application Window. When I am in the Terminal app I start a job ( hehe.. ex Mainframer ) I switch to Mail to type my email and now and then invoke mission control again to see if the job is complete.

Other things that help me in my flow :

Quick Look

I am so used to quick look that now I find it very hard to use Windows. Any attachments in email, or when I want to quickly look up an excel or a PPT – I can look at it instantly without waiting for a big application to load and show its fancy splash screen. Also these Apps do not stay in memory hogging precious RAM ( even though OS X’s philosophy says it doesn’t matter in my experience it does matter – having too many open unused Apps does slow down the machine )

Magic Mouse with Better Touch Tool

I actually bought this Apple Mouse on a whim. Felt guilty initially for having sunk so much money on a mouse. However my guilt is all gone now – it so well fits in with the OS and my flow. Two taps – it invokes Mission Control, swipe down fast – I go to the end of the page, swipe left I switch spaces to the left. I have become so fluent in switching between Applications or navigating within an Application I do not notice any more.

Less Distractions in Full Screen

When I am in full screen Mail – an Instant Message comes – it pops up once and then goes away.  No Application can pull me away from what I am doing. The tool bars, icons all go away leaving just my content.

Yep – as the old adage says : Mac for Productivity.

Thank you Apple Engineers – OS X Lion is lovely. Please do not spoil it in the next release.

Why did this not occur to me earlier?

Last week I went to Staples to pick a pen. I only write on cheques nowadays and I want to keep my dying handwriting alive as much as possible and for that I want to pick a good pen.

There were rows and rows of Pens – all endorsed by Shah Rukh Khan or Katrina Kaif or Amitabh Bachan. If there was a Javed Akhtar or a Vairamathu or an Arundhati Roy ( I don’t subscribe to her views but I respect her as a writer ), a Chetan Bhagat ( I am yet to read any of his novels – till then he is eligible to promote pens ) it made sense.

Mentally I worked out this equation :

(Cost of Ad money to SRK,AB,KK) – ( Manufacturing Cost of a Pen + Reasonable Profit for a pen ) = The after tax-money that is being swindled from my pocket to pay SRK,AB and KK.

That did it. I decided not to pick any pen endorsed by any of these celebrities. It made my choice quite easy.

When I looked around there was this Sachin 100 Tendulkar – promoting Kaspersky anti virus. All the Cricket heroes were promoting chips and colas – peddling things which are either not needed or are truly harmful.

This brought me to this conclusion : If a cricket celebrity or a bollywood celebrity is endorsing a product then

a) The product is junk
b) The product is not an essential thing for our survival.
c) The marketing head is a clueless bozo

I have decided to support the underdog who is not engaging a celebrity to peddle their products and outright reject the ones promoted by celebrities.

Now a new game begins in my life – to prevent my after-tax money from reaching the pockets of a SRK or an AB or a KK.