Over the last couple weeks, a colleague and I have been trying to clean up the cable mismanagement behind our racks. To work on the equipment you’re literally standing on about 1 feet of coiled cable mess. This issue has probably been there over the last several years and nobody has paid much attention to it. Likely because it does not affect the actual functioning of the equipment? And also, this is painstakingly unrewarding work. ...
@Morganhousel wrote a fantastic post yesterday outlining how each person’s trajectory is riddled with ‘flukes’. Humanity constantly evolves from a quagmire of possibilities and there’s very little merit in looking in retrospect. I think the likelihood of a successful forecast can only be enhanced if we work with the factors in the present - not the past, not the future. The past is barely helpful and you’d rather not rely on those from the future. (Odd I say that after all those years I spent churning numbers as an actuarial analyst.) Ultimately what trumps is that humans find it really hard to delineate emotions from decision making. As much as you’d like to disagree, you see it in every realm - Medicine, Finance, Sports, Academics, Health just to name a few. ...
An assortment of about fifteen kids are seated in front of me. All supposedly fifth and sixth graders. The syllabus mandates me to read out to them a story and ask them questions based on it. Something akin to the reading comprehension questions that we solve. I set off in my task in reading out a para and asking the one in the third row a very simple question. His poker faced response immediately states he’s not got a word of what I’ve been talking. Same applies almost every other kid out here. I break up the sentences now to see if that helps them. Still the same response. I finally check to see if they at least know the individual words in the sentence. Turns out that NONE of them are even able to appreciate the presence of a ’the’ in the sentence! Besides, when asked to translate a statement like - ‘This is my uncle Kishan’ to telugu, I get the weirdest responses imaginable! They do not know the difference between ‘Buying’ and ‘Going’! Teaching them to decipher paragraphs is way too optimistic. ...
As a school kid, I was taught 70% of Earth is water. It takes me 23years to learn that 97.5% of that is saltwater. What’s your Salary?
It’s been just one week that I’ve got back to Hyderabad after my six months stay at Pune and I’m still struggling to cope with boredom. My body’s sort of got so fine tuned to an active lifestyle that sitting in front of the computer once I’m back home is something that I’d last prefer to do. But then that is all that I’m left to do, at least till I chalk out a few plans to get myself to rebound again. ...
One another interesting article! The Japanese save a lot. They do not spend much. Also Japan exports far more than it imports. They have an annual trade surplus of over $100 billion, yet Japanese economy is considered weak, even collapsing. Americans save little. Also US import more than it exports. Has an annual trade deficit of over $400 billion. Yet, the American economy is considered strong and trusted to get stronger. But where from do Americans get money to spend? They borrow from Japan, China, and even India. Virtually others save for the US to spend. Global savings are mostly invested in US, in dollars. India itself keeps its foreign currency assets of over $50 billions in US securities. China has sunk over $160 billion in US securities. Japan’s stakes in US securities is in trillions. ...
Purushotam skews his head up and looks at the monitor. I’m reminded of the frequent mails that we get regarding body posture while sitting in front of the workstation. The 45 degree look down angle at the monitor cannot be applied in this case. The plastic chair doesn’t help much either. Remotely bothered he hits the arrow key and navigates the word document. He is almost through with the test on Basic ‘C’. Moments later he hints he’s completed the test. A few corrections are done and a jubilant Purushotam walks out with his mother’s help towards the door. ...
Five days back, our Bai ditched us for a few days and left for her native. Lazy bums at times that we are, Adi and I drove down to a close by restaurant for dinner. We’d heard of this place called ‘Rasoi Ghar’ quite some time back and just thought of giving it a shot. Rasoi ghar was just a few hundred yards from the usual place where we’ve been having dinner for the past few days. So we just walked in and gave the order. ...
We keep having these so called Personality Development sessions quite frequently at my workplace. Not that it’s a compulsion , but I see to it that I attend most of these. The main reason being, it so happens that the person delivering the address, mostly is someone who’s experienced in a particular field or way too elder to me. More than the topic, I majorly be there to get to understand and see how he/she expresses his/her thoughts in that timespan. Well, there have been quite a few instances when I got knocked off just few minutes into the session and there have been a couple of those beautiful sessions wherein I’ve got deeply involved. Here comes the factor of how you relate to the topic in hand and how effectively the person communicates it to you; but before we go further I’d rather let you know that this post is not about effective communication, but just a light cast on how attending these sessions may help you from a different aspect and get you know facts that you’d be totally oblivious of. ...
We keep having these so called Personality Development sessions quite frequently at my workplace. Not that it’s a compulsion , but I see to it that I attend most of these. The main reason being, it so happens that the person delivering the address, mostly is someone who’s experienced in a particular field or way too elder to me. More than the topic, I majorly be there to get to understand and see how he/she expresses his/her thoughts in that timespan. Well, there have been quite a few instances when I got knocked off just few minutes into the session and there have been a couple of those beautiful sessions wherein I’ve got deeply involved. Here comes the factor of how you relate to the topic in hand and how effectively the person communicates it to you; but before we go further I’d rather let you know that this post is not about effective communication, but just a light cast on how attending these sessions may help you from a different aspect and get you know facts that you’d be totally oblivious of. ...