Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Are slimming clinics effective? Do they do anything for you that a regular gym workout doesn’t? How do they work?

Kishore’s friends were doing the Sakleshpur-Yedakumeri-Subramanya railway trek. Having long wanted to do it too, I tagged along. There were 34 people in the group (of them 15 girls) so we pretty much had the bus to ourselves. We started at Donigal, a few kilometres from Sakleshpur, where the road conveniently passes within a couple hundred metres of the tracks.



This section of track has been abandoned for several years, apparently for conversion from metre to broad gauge. It is now a popular trekking route with both bus drivers and railway workers accustomed to the sight of backpack wielding youth.

The bus dropped us off at 5 AM. We spent an hour or so under the nearest street lamp, distributing rented sleeping mats and food packets. Someone had mistaken the trek for a picnic and gone shopping for flavoured milk in glass bottles, potato chips and other salted (thirst inducing) snacks, entire cartons of apple and orange juice, loaves of bread, with butter, and other such items that were low on energy while high on packaging weight. We got rid of most of them before boarding the bus; the rest we had to carry.

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Plans are afoot for a Bangalore edition of Barcamp. Barcamp is an “Unconference”, an event where we eliminate the panel of speakers and let the attendees do the talking, on the assumption that most attendees are also knowledgeable and, being unencumbered by the formality of stage, more likely to make interesting conversation.

First, some history:

O’Reilly is a US-based tech publisher that, like all tech publishers, needs to become aware of emerging technologies well in advance so they can get a book out on the subject before it gets mainstream. Books have long gestation periods. Among their methods has been what CEO Tim O’Reilly calls “Friends of O’Reilly Camp” (Foo Camp), an annual event since 2003 wherein Tim invites a bunch of really smart people to hang out together in a camp (a real camp, with tents for accommodation) and teach each other stuff or brainstorm new ideas, without any predetermined structure. O’Reilly skims from this for their books and conferences.

The event was meant to be private, but word got out and this of course pissed off a lot of people who weren’t invited, or weren’t invited the following year. Hence Barcamp, a counter event where anybody can participate. (The words foo and bar have a long and unrelated history together; this has nothing to do with bartending.)

Now, before you think this is yet another tech conference that could be of no possible interest to you, hark! Barcamp is a geek conference, a place for anyone with a good understanding of any subject to come and learn from each other. Whether you are a photographer, architect, lawyer, biker or academic, the place is open to you. See my post to the discussion list with additional thoughts.

Barcamp’s hope is that (a) participants will have a good time (non-contributing spectators are not welcome), and (b) that the event will be a place to form collaborations and germinate ideas that will eventually see the light of day. This concern with outcome is critical: without that, this would just be a bunch of friends hanging out and celebrating their togetherness rather than their achievements.

Interested? Add yourself to the wiki and join the discussion list.

I particularly enjoyed two episodes from IT Conversations, with Robert Trivers on deception and Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the pitfalls of predicting the future. Try them.

Remark that they are in the room, and they will inevitably retort that people are conspiring against them. Perhaps not directly, but retort they will.

Hugh MacLeod does the occasionally profound cartoon over at GapingVoid.

I was in rural Maharashtra last week, wondering what use they could have for computers. It’s not an easy question considering the state of infrastructure.

Bus driver and conductor got off to hand-crank this petrol pump. It must have been hard work, considering the crank fell off often and driver and conductor took turns at it.

The trip left me longing for another round of Cambodia.

Anyone feeling extra generous and in the mood to send me a belated birthday present, please be aware that this nice Gaping Void t-shirt is tops on my list.

kthxbye

Should the text not be clear, it says “Thanks to the Audience for giving great success”. Grammatical accuracy aside, the conflation of producer’s and audience’s desires is curious. Audiences want to enjoy a movie. Producers want to earn a healthy return. So why is the producer thanking the audience for his success instead of being thankful that the enjoyed his work? Is there some insight to be gained here on what the producer understands of his audience?

The HDFC Bank ATM on Bannerghatta road has crashed and rebooted. Turns out it’s running Windows 2000 Professional. Ctrl Alt Del anyone?

I didn’t have a clever quip this year, but I did have a great day.

Road rage in Bangalore is insane. Less than a week away and I can already feel the change.

The new price wars. I love it!

How was your week? I spent it far, far out.

The Hindu can’t decide whether their website is thehindu.com or thehindu.in. Meanwhile, Google splits PageRank across the domains and consequently, results from either domain appear lower than they potentially could have. The Hindu loses for their attempt at having a dual identity. Sad.

Smart painter decided to optimise on space?

(Airtel’s landed in Abuseat.org’s spam backlist, so I can no longer post pictures via MMS. All my mail servers reject it. Posting via authenticated SMTP from the phone henceforth.)

What do you do when you lose a belt buckle? Continue sporting the belt for stylistic integrity?

The weather’s so lovely tonight, I could sing.

I took the 2005 Press Freedom Index results from Reporters Sans Frontières and projected it onto a base map obtained from Wikipedia, using a scale from blue (most free; Denmark) to red (most restricted; North Korea). Countries not in the index are shown in gray.

India ranks a lowly 106 of 167.