Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Years ago, at my first job, I attended an annual day talk by the founder and chairman of the group of companies. The man had started from scratch and built a 200 crore conglomerate with a range of business interests. This was supposed to be a pep talk about what visions he had for us, the newest company in the group, but he couldn’t help starting with a little about himself. His greatest pride in life? That he had never had a job working for someone else.

Well, so much for holding on to mine. Related reading (via @thej).

I’ve posted some pictures from last month’s discussion on using social media for mobilisation, with Dina Mehta and Peter Griffin at CIS. Here’s the report and earlier Twitter feed.

Nothing significant; just some faces. Helping with attaching names to faces appreciated.

Guillaume Marceau, who made a guest post here on how to make comparison charts, has an excellent demonstration of this technique over on his blog, charting performance against code verbosity in programming languages:

The speed, size and dependability of programming languages

If you drew the benchmark results on an XY chart you could name the four corners. The fast but verbose languages would cluster at the top left. Let’s call them system languages. The elegantly concise but sluggish languages would cluster at the bottom right. Let’s call them script languages. On the top right you would find the obsolete languages. That is, languages which have since been outclassed by newer languages, unless they offer some quirky attraction that is not captured by the data here. And finally, in the bottom left corner you would find probably nothing, since this is the space of the ideal language, the one which is at the same time fast and short and a joy to use.

The SIL home page has a hand-drawn map of scripts around the world. It’s interesting how South and Southeast Asia have the highest density of variations.

SIL hosts the Open Font License, a key component of getting to an era of high quality typography on the web using embedded fonts, without resorting to kludges like sIFR. More on that in a bit.

Last week I met Abhimanyu Chirimar and in the course of a long winding conversation, said that if there was anything I had learnt, it is that it is not possible to multi-task. One can do only one thing at a time well. He didn’t buy it but let it pass. Tonight, this quote:

The Technician is the doer.

“If you want it done right, do it yourself” is The Technician’s credo.

The Technician loves to tinker. Things are to be taken apart and put back together again. Things aren’t supposed to be dreamed about, they’re supposed to be done.

If The Entrepreneur lives in the future and The Manager lives in the past, The Technician lives in the present. He loves the feel of things and the fact that things can get done.

As long as The Technician is working, he is happy, but only on one thing at a time. He knows that two things can’t get done simultaneously; only a fool would try. So he works steadily and is happiest when he is in control of the work flow.

As a result, The Technician mistrusts those he works for, because they are always trying to get more work done than is either possible or necessary.

— Michael E. Gerber in The E-Myth Revisited, describing the small business owner’s three main personalities of Entrepreneur, Manager and Technician, and how they conflict with each other.

Abhi’s an entrepreneur and I’m a technician. Gerber’s book is for technicians who decide they want to be entrepreneurs, only to find it conflicts with their technician personality.

I’m on a TED Talks marathon tonight:

Now there’s another play history that I think is a work in progress. Those of you who remember Al Gore during the first term and then during his successful but unelected run for the presidency, may remember him as being kind of wooden and not entirely his own person, at least in public. And looking at his history, which is common in the press, it seems to me, at least, looking at it from a shrink’s point of view, that a lot of his life was programmed.

Summers were hard hard work in the sea(?) heat of the Tennessee summers; he had the expectations of his senatorial father and Washington, DC, and although he had certainly, I think, capacity for play because I do know something about that, he wasn’t as empowered, I think, as he now is, by paying attention to what is his own passion and his own inner drive which I think has its basis in all of us in our play history.

So I would encourage you on an individual level to do, is to explore backwards as far as you can go to the most clear, joyful, playful image that you have whether through a toy or on a birthday or on a vacation, and begin to build from the emotion of that into how that connects with your life now, and you’ll find you may change jobs, which has happened to a number of people when I had them do this, in order to be more empowered through their play, or you’ll be able to invent(?) your life by prioritising it and paying attention to it.

— Stuart Brown on the importance of play (at about 17:00 min), describing Al Gore’s personality transformation as he moved on from politics (emphasis mine).

From the European Parliament’s YouTube channel. Funny. Contrast with Jaagore’s campaign in India which sought to project shame on the apathetic voter:

There’s an old African proverb that says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We need to go far, quickly.”

— Al Gore, speaking on climate change at TED (emphasis mine).

Quickly or far, alone or together? That’s a decision conundrum that applies to so much in life.