Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

latelyontime and I are speaking (separately) at a career fair in Bombay this weekend. I agreed since I was going to be in the city anyway, and—looking at the schedule now—none of the earlier candidates for speaking on blogging seem to have accepted. Due to email overload, I wasn’t very responsive when the agenda was set, and I now find my talk has been described as how to make a career out of web journalism.

Which is a problem. I have no idea how to make a career blogging. I don’t know of anyone in this country who’s managed it.

And so, dear reader, I’m going to need your help to take advantage of the fact that the word “career” is not a synonym for “income”, and instead present a case for how writing on the web can significantly aid your non-blogging career. Do you have stories to share, either personal or of someone else? Indian examples only, please. Negative examples also welcome.

My favourites are the cases of Zainab Bawa and Rashmi Bansal:

Zainab writes about street life in South Bombay. Her writing evokes empathy without the associated shades of pity or pain. It is stark, honest, and yet, very moving. I do not know how Zainab supports herself, but I do know that her blog is getting her the kind of visibility she wouldn’t have had otherwise, including getting her a two month fellowship from the Waag Society in Amsterdam.

Rashmi is editor and publisher of Just Another Magazine (JAM). I’ve tried several youth magazines before and found them all to be frivolous and ultimately hollow. Rashmi’s blog, OTOH, is vibrant, sensibly written, and actually covers issues I care about. I don’t know if her blog has had any positive impact on her magazine, but I’d love to find out.

My career has also received a significant boost from my writing here on LiveJournal, especially over the last three years, but I’d rather not go on stage and talk about myself, unless it is to back-up someone else’s story.

Your stories, please?

PS: Anyone tempted to link me to Tim Bray’s Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career is advised to look at Rui Carmo’s excellent response. I really don’t care about the airy possibilities. My intent is to illustrate with real examples.

Me: :)
Her: :)
Me: wotchu doing?
Her: thinkin of u
Her: :)
Me: :)
Me: bad news.
Me: stay calm, ok?
Me: i got beaten up by some rowdies last night.
Her: what?!
Her: where?
Me: near the banaswadi railway station.
Her: and what the hell did u do to get beaten up?
Me: on the way to rashmiprasad’s [farewell] party.
Me: it was at killapop’s [(allan’s)] friend felix’s place.
Me: i didn’t know the way
Me: so allan said he’d come to that corner to pick me up
Me: so we met there, and al went to a wine shop to get some beer
Me: and i was waiting on the bike.
Me: then one fellow standing there asked me to park on the opposite side of the road.
Me: i wasn’t feeling like arguing, so i did that and came back
Her: then?
Me: then he asked me to come near him, and i was annoyed, so said “what’s your problem, dude?”
Me: and then he started beating me up
Me: and then his friends came and started beating me up.
Her: sheesh
Her: where the fuck was allan????
Me: standing right there, trying to get to me
Me: i wasn’t fighting back. i just stood there and kept demanding to know what that fellow’s problem was.
Me: allan finally managed to rescue me.
Her: screw!!!!
Her: are u alright?
Me: yes
Her: bruises n all?
Me: nothing broken
Me: no visible damage
Me: just a sore jaw
Me: they were drunk, didn’t know how to hit.
Me: kept hitting me on the head and neck
Her: :(
Her: i feel so sick now
Her: sick in the stomach
Me: relax, it’s all right.
Her: *hugg*
Me: i’m perfectly fine.
Me: pradeep was also there. he was totally petrified.
Her: i’m sorry i wasn’t around for u to hug
Me: allan had a friend along who also got hit. he didn’t know what was happening.
Me: he’s got a bruise on his head.
Me: bad swelling
Me: i was actually quite amused after that.
Me: you know how you can spend your whole life dreading that something will happen to you?
Me: and after a point that dread becomes more dominant than the event itself?
Me: i always feared being mugged. yesterday set me free.
Her: damn u
Her: i dont see one positive thing out of the mugging
Me: you won’t until it happens to you.
Me: al’s still pissed, wants to go back and photograph all those chaps
Me: they seemed like regulars there.
Me: they didn’t look like rowdies.
Me: they were young, clean shaved, spoke english, looked like they worked out regularly.
Me: can i post this to lj?
Me: i’m not feeling like writing proper english paragraphs.
Her: post
Her: so the others will be careful
Me: what i’d like is to see those fellows rounded up
Me: but that’s unlikely to happen

For the past week I’ve been playing with a Garmin eTrex Legend GPS unit that shekhark got me. It’s a lot of fun!

I had used a GPS unit before, in 1998, when working on the Bangalore Street Atlas Project (I built a CD-ROM viewer interface to what was otherwise a paper-only map). That thing weighed a few kilos and did nothing more than provide current coordinates over a 2400 bps serial line. Thanks to the signal scrambling policy in effect at that time, it was also wildly inaccurate. In a test with a borrowed laptop and the antenna on the roof of the car, it would jump several metres every few seconds, making it unusable for navigation.

Things have changed radically since. The eTrex is a handheld unit about the size of a mobile phone. It—like most consumer GPS devices these days—not only displays coordinates, but tracks and plots motion against a base map, allows waypoints to be recorded, can save a track and provide directions to navigate it again, and other features I haven’t explored yet.

Accuracy is still dodgy, due to various issues. GPS signals don’t travel through buildings and humans. You can’t put the device in a pocket and expect it to track where you go. It doesn’t work tucked away or indoors. It has to be out in the open, with a clear view of the sky. This makes it somewhat difficult to use when riding a bike, unless you have some kind of a mount (I don’t). Even when in the open, the best accuracy I’ve seen is seven metres. That means the actual location could be anywhere within seven metres of where it thinks it is. On a road hemmed in by buildings with no satellites currently overhead (they’re not geostationary), accuracy drops as low as eighty to a hundred metres.

To cut it short, here are my tracks from the past week, projected against a 30-metre resolution Landsat satellite image. For more fun, see the SVG version.

Read on...

BitTorrent: A more appropriate name would be BitTrickle.

Joel Spolsky’s new book. If you can’t buy it, read the individual pieces online:

1. Ken Arnold — Style Is Substance
   
2. Leon Bambrick — Award for the Silliest User Interface: Windows Search
   
3. Michael Bean — The Pitfalls of Outsourcing Programmers
   
4. Rory Blyth — Excel as a Database
   
5. Adam Bosworth — ICSOC04 Talk
   
6. danah boyd — Autistic Social Software
   
7. Raymond Chen — Why Not Just Block the Apps That Rely on Undocumented Behavior?
   
8. Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi — Kicking the Llama
   
9. Cory Doctorow — Save Canada’s Internet from WIPO
   
10. ea_spouse — EA: The Human Story
    
11. Bruce Eckel — Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing
    
12. Paul Ford — Processing Processing
    
13. Paul Graham — Great Hackers
    
14. John Gruber — The Location Field is the New Command Line
    
15. Gregor Hohpe — Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit
    
16. Ron Jeffries — Passion
    
17. Eric Johnson — C++ — The Forgotten Trojan Horse
    
18. Eric Lippert — How Many Microsoft Employees Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?
    
19. Michael “Rands” Lopp — What to do when you’re screwed
    
20. Larry Osterman — Larry’s Rules of Software Engineering #2: Measuring Testers by Test Metrics Doesn’t
    
21. Mary Poppendieck — Team Compensation (PDF, 1.0 MB)
    
22. Rick Schaut — Mac Word 6.0
    
23. Clay Shirky — A Group is its Own Worst Enemy
    
24. Clay Shirky — Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software
    
25. Eric Sink — Closing the Gap (Part 2)
    
26. Eric Sink — Hazards of Hiring
    
27. Aaron Swartz — PowerPoint Remix
    
28. why the lucky stiff — A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes)
    

The art of declaring man hours with a straight face when you know perfectly well they’re 100% fiction.

urmila and I are

Read on...

irq2 and shruthirao are finally doing it.

At the Symbiosis canteen today, three students pulled out a guitar and strummed away to classic pop songs.

The sound of an acoustic guitar played live; the faces of those three men, so plainly uninhibited and oblivious to the world around them… little things that add up to a pleasant day.

Prof U R Ananthamurthy spoke on whether English can represent Asian cultures, at a book launch ceremony in Bangalore Saturday. This was supposed to be a debate, but the good professor decided to cover both sides himself.

Respondent Lawrence Liang, who said he didn’t know what he was doing there, managed a comeback anyway. He pointed out that some words carry a cultural context that is hard to reproduce in other languages. The English word “ought”, for example, connotes a moral obligation. There is no equivalent in Chinese.

By the end of the debate, several audience members were screaming that this debate had been done to death already and there was no point beating its corpse anymore. To that, I wholeheartedly agreed.

thejaszalcatraz says “i was on vacation in sikkim and our
host was in the army......so we usually stayed in their officrs
mess......this was a picture i took in their bathroom”.

This tree has been my muse for six months.

When I first saw it, I knew I wanted a picture. That exquisite geometry of its branches, that staid background, that sheer aura of a warped tree reigning over its patch of ground… and yet it refused to fill my frame.

Oh, I tried. I stood back and zoomed in. I knelt and pointed up. I stepped around for a better angle. And yet there was always that niggling detail that didn’t belong in the frame. That annoying window in the wall. That branch that failed to hold shape when seen from below. That open space that ruined it all when seen from behind the tree. I tried. I shot in the day when the sun lit up the scene. Shot in the night when unwanted detail was hidden. Tried a large aperture to blur the background. Changed lenses to get a different perspective. And yet it refused to frame.

I didn’t dare shoot anyway and brush away the imperfections. That would be dishonest. If only it wasn’t imperfect.

Seasons passed. The chill tightened and I put on my jacket. The sun blazed and I loosened up. The tree, it just stayed there, unchanging, as I passed it everyday ruing the wasted potential. It was so close to being the perfect picture. Why wasn’t it? Where was I going to find another?

Last evening was a zen moment. I paused, clicked once, moved on. This is the result. Nothing had changed, and yet, nothing?

Sometimes you can’t expect acceptance. You have to wait for it to grow. Wait. And know it will grow. I’m still waiting.

Nokia’s service centre near Dairy Circle says they need ten more days to source a replacement flash chip for my phone. They had promised delivery yesterday. *sigh*

At least, hopefully, they won’t hold on to it for two months like Salora (Sony Ericsson) did.