The best a (young) man can get - really!

This post is about blades. No... Not the kind who bore you with their non-stop non-sense. It is about the actual blade that you use to - well, shave. Or if you are a psychopath, to deface your ex or even to kill.

Reaching the shave-able age in liberalised India, where capitalism was thriving, had exposed me to the in-your-face ads of all the commercial, international brands that brandish their images in every aspect of one's life, as expected. Whether this is right or wrong (according to the left, right & center) is a debate in itself which I'm not going to go into.

This exposure made me and my friends to, naturally, get attracted to buying and using them. The blade companies were no exception to this trend.

We being brought up in the typical middle-class setup of emerging India, always aspire for more in terms of recognition in terms of money, fame and social circles. And we being the starry-eyed teenagers of the day, were foolish enough to believe anything the advertisers said. Like "Use our blades to shave and look like David Beckham!", for example. What crap! Yeah. Now I know.

One of the side-effects of this was for us to go buy the Gillette Mach 3 Turbo triple blade for shaving. Yeah. We were that stupid. The only respite is that all teenagers are in the mid-twenties. Now we know.

With the blade alone costing as much as 1/4th of the groceries at the time, I shaved as less as possible. Gillette, true to their claims, proved that their blades lasted 5 times as many shaves as normal ones. This meant that once bought, the blade lasted for almost a year and a half! Now, tell me what else can beat that!

[Edit 14/02/2013: Gillette Mach 5 with 5 blades was introduced last year]

So, convincing my parents to buy that razor and blade, with the ad's claim, didn't let me down. :)

Recently, after almost a couple of months of not shaving and looking like a Neanderthal, I made everyone around question my well-being. Little did they know that I had just run out of my previous blade's life and was short of cash to buy a new set. Finally, after I ascertained that I didn't have any more essential expenses, bought a new set of Gillette Mach 3 Turbo blades and boy, was it quite an impressive shave! It was like hot knife through butter when I put it's edge to the two-month old Saharan grassland that had been growing on my face. No irritation, no rough shaves, no multiple strokes. It was simply superb!

One of the few decisions as a teenager that I don't regret!

Do you have a few, too? Let me know.

Ubuntu Developer Day

With the usual attitude of the IST – the Indian stretchable time, I reached the “Ubuntu Developer Day” or UDD for short, 10 minutes late, expecting the conference not to have begun. Contrary to my belief and to my surprise, the conference had already begun. It felt like there was a gun fire or something that indicated the start like in a track even in sports.

As soon as I entered the Leela Kempinski hotel on my humble “two-wheeler” Unicorn, I was promptly stopped and redirected back out of the gate as the Leela gives parking only for cars and its employees’’ two-wheelers. The small side-lane played host to all us literally poor souls’ two-wheelers, where parking space is provided by our beloved BBMP.

Once parked, I had to walk all the way back to the main gate again. After passing all my paraphernalia to the lady at the door, come to know that I had to use the other door which was behind the building and had to go through removing all my stuff off of me again for it to be X-Ray scanned. After entering the building and inquiring as to where UDD was taking place, I was redirected, again, to the previous building that I had tried to enter the first time. “WTF!” I thought.

Finally, I managed to reach the actual venue with the help from a chef of the Leela, and found a registration desk swarmed by people. It looked like I was not the only one following the IST. That was some respite. :-P

On getting my name and my employer’s name, the lady at the registration desk quickly found my ID that was already kept ready. She handed me the ID, the bright orange coloured, Ubuntu branded neck tag (which I liked very much) for it and also a copy of the agenda for the day.

I had missed the Intro by now and was walking in to the second session by Jon Melamut – The Keynote address on Ubuntu and its future, followed by various other speakers which went on for the whole day.

Talks went on about how Ubuntu promotes open source, how canonical actively pushes manufacturers to make their drivers open source, how open source helps third-world countries and a gentleman who runs Indiatechonline.com pointed out that Kerala is the first state government in India that has open source usage as a state policy.

Some very good sessions followed on multi-touch and gesture recognition that is going to come in in the next versions viz. 11.04 and 11.10 and they had some neat demos of some multi-touch interfaces in the demo room.

They had also this new piece of hardware created by marvel which packs a whole load of processing power into a brick sized device called a plug computer that runs on Ubuntu which attracted the most crowd in the demo room.

The food at the Leela wasn’t to the expectations. There was a lot of variety but tasted worse than that of street vendors. Though there were a few items of our traditional cuisine that saved the day.

Tea time and there were cutesy small Samosas and chocolate chip cookies which made a couple of boring sessions bearable.

The worst part of this conference was that the organizers of such a big event had forgotten to get free Wi-Fi for the audience. I flipped open my netbook and boom – there were 4 hotspots, but on inquiring for the password found out that I had pay to use it. WTF! I thought - A reason for such a late blog about the event.

Overall a great experience, although the food could’ve been better and it lacked Wi-Fi. Organizers take note.

I don’t understand the point. The organizers spend so much on conducting an event of this scale and leave out a fairly basic feature of Wi-Fi which could’ve massively increased the visibility for the event. No internet access prevented people from live blogging/tweeting etc. which could’ve magnified the reach.

The most satisfying part of attending this event, apart from interacting with some of the twitterati and getting to know what goes on behind the scenes in ubuntu’s development, was the goodie bag. After the lunch, goodie bags were given out to every participant, again, brandished with Ubuntu’s logo. A cool looking cloth bag that contained brochures/fliers of “what, how and why Ubuntu”. An Ubuntu CD, surprisingly not the latest version. It was 10.04. Some cool Ubuntu stickers, which I asked for more and the lady at the registration desk, who initially said she had no extra, then somehow found one more just for me at the end of the day. That was cool. If you are that lady reading this blog – Thanks to you, I’m now flaunting the Ubuntu logo at insane places. A very nice looking diary, some pencils and the feedback form.

Developing for the web? Are you Sure?

There are countless number of web developers in our own backyard. Ones calling themselves experts in the field and yet dishing out the most standards non-compliant websites which may nevertheless look great but fail so grotesquely on a browser that it was not designed for (which usually means anything other than IE).

Are you a student, aspiring to learn web development? Or are you an experienced developer finding it difficult to give cross-browser compatibility to your developments?

Are "Where to go?" "Whom to ask?" and "what to do?" are three big questions looming in your head? Fear not for Opera has created a very nice resource just for you.

Image Source: http://dev.opera..com

I being interested not in hard core web development but nonetheless in web standards, while flipping through various Google results, stumbled upon this resource, created by my favourite browser company - Opera. The Web standards Curriculum.

I found it terribly useful and it made a lot of sense. Most of all, it was very simple to understand even to a n00b like me.

The series of articles have just begun and Opera promises to have more than 50 articles, soon, on the subject. Hoping to see a lot of great articles, here's wishing the Opera team all the best.

Let me know how you like this resource, what, in your opinion is lacking or needs to be added.

Netbook screen too small? and other views...

@rakkimk's request for my suggestions about netbooks led me into having a discussion about netbooks with him on twitter. Thanks, @rakkimk :)

  

Posting the tweet conversation here for the benefit of all. FAQ format.

1. Looking at a great netbook? How much did your Samsung one cost?

Ans. Mine costed Rs. 15,300 bought at SP road in Bangalore.

2. Is the 10" screen not too small? Is it not stressful to the eyes?

Ans. Well, 1. screen is matte finish which prevents reflection and which I like. I hate gloss. 2. Great size for portability 3. Once you start using it, it just fades away and let's you do your thing, unless what you do involves multi-page spreadsheets. or presentations or watching HD movies.As for normal SD vids,it's not bad.The clarity is great & in fullscreen mode-quite /good

3. This one is 15K and iPad is 22K ($499). Did you think about iPad at all?

Ans. Yes I did. iPad and MacBook Air. First of all, my budget wasn't permitting. Secondly, iPad sucks in terms of not having ethernet, flash support, hackability, USB support etc.. MacBook Air was just plain costly.

Besides, my purpose was to use it as a download machine that stays ON 24x7, netbook itself is an overkill. Should've got a NAS box.

After all this, support is my major priority. Samsung support - I can find in any major town in India. Apple - Not so.

Signs of an obsession

What are the signs of an obsession with a Job?

I recently discovered I'm becoming Obsessed with mine. Here's how...

Sign no. 1: Working my ass off and not feeling too tired at the end of the day.

Sign No. 2: Working late nights and not minding it

Sign No. 3: Going home only to eat and sleep, but not even doing that. Coding instead, even when at home. Contemplating staying at office on most days.

Sign No. 4: Reading up more about code and design than any other type of article.

Some might say that this is going crazy, but I beg to differ because, after all, what do we work for? It is to enjoy ourselves with the money we earn, right? If I am enjoying myself facing the challenges the job throws at me and craving for the rush of achievement at the end of solving that challenge makes me feel good, then that's good, isn't it?

Think about it.

Having said that, I'm not saying one should make their hobby as their job. That'd be the dumbest thing to do as I found out. In fact, that's the exact thing you should avoid doing. If one takes their hobby as their job then they'd start doing what they love for money and not for the love of it and soon it turns out that one starts to hate their HOBBY!

So, keep personal & professional lives separate but love whatever you do in both.