“So if you want to start a startup and don’t know yet what you’re going to do, I’d encourage you to focus initially on organic ideas. What’s missing or broken in your daily life? Sometimes if you just ask that question you’ll get immediate answers. It must have seemed obviously broken to Bill Gates that you could only program the Altair in machine language.”

 -Paul Graham in  Organic Startups

Last Night, Faris came up to me with an idea. “Why not make a timetable for our dinner eatouts for the coming week?”. We always end up wondering where to go and after some confusion settle upon a place. I realized that this was a brilliant idea. So we set about making a Excel file and placed it in our Dropbox. I mean thats a good start to scratch our itch.

There’s a lot of truth in what Paul Graham says. You would find the highest motivation only to repair something broken in your day to day life. That’s what i have kept in mind these past few months whenever i thought of building something. Why would i be passionate about building something for someone else? You wouldn’t be.

Everyone has an itch that needs scratching. You only need to find it. Think for a while. Think simple. I am not telling you that you could come up with something that could bring world peace but maybe..just maybe you can find an itch and a solution for that itch.

Filed under: Food for Thought, Startups, Technology Tagged: Ideas, Inspiration, life, Paul Graham, Quotes, Startups, Technology ]]> http://aninosaintlife.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/scratching-your-own-itches/feed/ 0 iNOsaint http://aninosaintlife.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/objectified/ http://aninosaintlife.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/objectified/#comments Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:07:19 +0000 iNOsaint http://aninosaintlife.wordpress.com/?p=860 ]]>

I just finished watching ‘Objectified‘, a film by Gary Hustwit. Its a documentary which takes us through the various facets of design; the conception, the sustainability and the innovation. Objectified is the second part of a three-film “design trilogy” by Gary Hustwit, who is currently working on the final film: ‘Urbanized’.

Watching it made me realize some things about design. About how design is everywhere and how good design is invisible. Whenever an individual designs he/she brings to it their own being. I know i am not happy when i am doing something eventhough it looks okay. I always tend to get my geeky nature involved into things i create like those quizzes.

“At the end of the day, when you are looking around the objects in your house and you are deciding ‘what here really has value to me. They are going to be the things that have some meaning in your life.
The Hurricane is coming, you have 20 minutes to get your stuff and go. You are not going to be saying. “Well that got an amazing writeup on the design blog”. You will pick the most meaningful objects to you because those are the true objects that truly reflect the true story of who you are and what your personal narrative is, the story that you are telling to yourself and no one else. Coz thats the only audience that matters.”

Thanks to Citruz for the recommend.

At around the same time, the Stanford online classes started off. Prof. Thurn who started the  ’Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class’ gave up his tenure at Stanford and started a new online university called Udacity. I was not very interested in the first session but now i have enrolled for a class[2]. Lets see how that goes. MIT also decided to jump onto the bandwagon.

Then the trickle turned into a torrent which flooded the internet. Some of the websites i came across include

Ruby: Rubymonk, TeamTreehouse, tryBloc, tryRuby, RubyLearning
Clojure: tryClojure
Web Design/Development: TeamTreehouse, Codepupil.
Design: Method of Action

I also came across these two Reddit pages filled with resources. And last but not the least, I love the work Salman Khan is doing with his Khan Academy.

If you know of any interesting learning resources, do let me know in the comments below and i shall update this post.

Footnotes:

1.  Codecademy recently started out CodeYear to get more people to start learning. NYC Mayor Bloomberg is one among the many who has vouched to code this year.
2. I have signed on for the ‘Human Computer Interaction‘ class which will start on 30th January 2012. Check out the entire Winter semester course list here.

Way back in College, Way back when we started watching Highway on My Plate.. i had this dream of having a job of travelling and reviewing food. Man vs Food introduced us to food challenges. What a life i thought, even though it had its own pitfalls health wise. But nevertheless everyone has a dream job and this is one of mine.

I’ve been in Chennai for the past one year and i’ve been loving the food here. When me and my friends initially got placed in TCS and booked our tickets to Chennai, our friends and relatives were apprehensive about the food in Chennai. They talked about stereotyped food everywhere and this scared us a bit. But surprise, surprise..our gastronomical journey so far has been awesome. True there have been ups and downs but generally i’ve had some really good food. It helped that i have a group of friends who love to eat as well. In the past one year, i’ve eaten at more than 60 restaurants in Chennai and my Burrp! profile is proof of that We also had this little side project titles ‘ Experiments and Food ’ going for sometime until it became too tough to gather pictures and upload them to one place.

Now the fun part came when Burrp! emailed me and asked me if i was interested in reviewing Azulia, where a Greek food festival was taking place. THIS was BIG! I was so surprised!! The email said that i could take a friend so i called up @Nievu as she’s accompanied me to most of the restaurants and also because she could offer a vegetarian perspective to the food.

So the date was set, 11th November was the night and boy was it fun. Except for the part where we paid 400 for the cab to drop us back, the night was epic! Wish i could take part in more such free food… erm Food Reviews.

FYI: You can read the Review here.

Food for the Soul

The Wine..hic

The Mezze

Yeros

Pastitsio

Chef Ethem Aydemir

*Burrrrrp*

Then the transfers started. The first flat was left within a month as the rent was unaffordable for 2 people to handle. The girls left F12.

Fast forward to October 2011. Karthik and Raison left the company for greener pastures and Rathan got transfered to Bangalore. That left me as the last man standing at F14. With Girish gone, Ive now moved to F16; the last flat of the three we had.

- John Mayer

Sources: Berklee Blogs The Hacker News article and the page.

Junkyard Groove is one such band. I first heard of them through Rajat. They had appeared on Channel V’s Launchpad and they apparently played an epic version of ‘Dont Cha’ by PCD. That piqued my interest and after a little bit of digging around i found out that they gave their music away for free download, actually they would get paid if people downloaded their music. So i got all their tracks downloaded and i was hooked. I got people hooked as well. I keep doing that. I am a self-confessed music explorer ever on the lookout for good alternative music. My latest find was ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ and before that was ‘Newton Faulkner‘. I would like to mention more but i digress.

So when i came to know i was going to work in Chennai, i was hoping to get a piece of the music i had heard so much about. But 7 months passed by and with no luck. I sincerely feel that finding out events in big cities(or small) is not easy. I know there is Burrp but that isnt always so helpful. For eg., i finally came to know about the JYG gig via a friend and more info via a Facebook event. I had to be there for the concert. I was not going to miss this opportunity and i started rounding up people to go along with.

Junkyard Groove had all of a sudden undergone a breakup barely a couple of months back. It happened on their Facebook page where 3 of the quartet decided to call it quits while Ameeth was left in the dark about the whole thing. Sad stuff. When i heard that they had called it a day, i was sad. I thought i should somehow finish a tribute post to them but soon i came to know that the line-up was reformed by Ameeth.

The new JYG line up has Hudstin Fernandez on drums, Naveen Thomas Joseph – Fan Page on lead, Ameeth Thomas on vocals and acoustic guitar and Sajith Satya on bass …..

This was good news, but even better was the fact that they would be playing their first gig at nearby EC41.

So 17th July was the d-day and we made it in time. Bassin Bridge was headlining for them. Sajith played the Bass for them as well. So the show began and that was one awesome night. I missed the fact that i didnt have a camera to capture those wonderful moments. I had to make do with Nievu‘s android phone. So not much could be salvaged from that. Hardly anything is clear but then i could not be choosy either. The venue was wild, underneath the moonlight sky they played with the bay in the background. After the first few songs, me and Reddy made our way downstairs and we spend the rest of the night there. In front of the band, enjoying the music we swayed, barely a meter from the band. I didnt want it to end and i screamed the songs and headbanged through the night so much so that i had to take the Tuesday off ;P but i still say it was totally worth it. That was my #1 concert till date and i had the most fun. Even now as i write this post , i am happy that i was able to attend it.

JYG, Rock On!

Believe me, i came back presently surprised and inspired from the event. Apart from the fact that i won a Antetype License worth $289, it was the realization of how much interesting the job would be. I learnt what designing is all about, how the industry works, what are the various jobs available and also found out about courses worth considering for higher studies.

UX is an essential thing in today’s world. Everything you look around you has a reason behind its design. Take the mineral water bottle for instance., there is a reason its like that. Innovation is the key to market a product. The little things you add to a product like the way Apple does, adds value to it and a happy customer is what companies should look at. The way a product looks is key to it being popular, Ideas are powerful and dictate whether the product will survive or not. People are fickle and they need to be shown that they are given more value for money and that is exactly why UX is important. Attending this conference did help me a lot in understanding UX and consolidating my decision of higher studies in the field.

I am not great with coding and i feel that is because my OOPS base is weak and no matter how much i try to make sense of things it just doesn’t seem to work. But i feel UI is different. I feel at home with the coding and sometimes i just know where something would look good at. My day-to-day office work deals with coding UI using Javascript frameworks mainly EXT-JS , and i am one of those people lucky enough to be doing something interesting like that in a service company like TCS and i am grateful for that. That is why i decided to write my GRE the moment i heard about HCI programs, so I hope my GRE goes well and i end up doing what i like in the end.

Here’s hoping for the best.

Showing Off, he he!

P.S. Wrote this on a Friend’s wall and felt like posting it here.

P.P.S. Also after coming back i noticed that a friend of mine had texted me ‘Have a Good Day’ on my Bangalore Number out of the blue.