Friday, September 17, 2010

'Busy'ness

I often wonder what is Seth Godin's typical day like or whether the concept of a typical day even exists for him. And yet amidst his daily entrepreneur+author+thinker superhuman day, he 'ships' blog posts so frequently as if they were tweets. Maybe his brilliant blog posts are really the usual stuff that's 'on his mind' but the point is as Seth very succinctly puts it - It's all about shipping! Quieting the lizard brain to get things moving and it pretty much applies to everything right from an amazing start-up idea to the long-lived intention of penning down your head onto your own blog.

Now that I have your attention, let me probe further into our sense of 'busy'ness. Let's just for sometime agree that doing a full-time job doesn't afford energy for non-work-related interests during weekdays. However, mostly everyone has 2 full days off every week and invariably everyone has a wishful list of want-to-dos. Typical items featuring on that close-to-heart list are start a hobby, read more, practice a sport or volunteer for a cause. Sigh! but who's got the time for it? Umm..the weekends are practically a third of our lifetime and yet the weekends are somehow not enough! Or is it that 'feeling' busy makes for a convenient way to explain inaction? Is "I don't have enough time" just a deluded version of "I have not been able to get myself to do it yet"? Is the real problem with not having enough free slots for the dear wish-list or is it with what actually makes it to those free slots? And I'll leave it at that.


Sunday, September 12, 2010

Masterful Men


Relax, this post is not about how Federer will age. This post is about my respect for two masterful men whose faces just happen to be really similar. Federer - master tennis player and Tarantino - master filmmaker with one marked similarity - the fluid style! Despite my bias for Rafa, when Federer rises with both his feet in the air to hit that inside-out forehand, I behold that sight in awe. One of Tarantino's masterful acts is his swanky take on revenge in Kill Bill. Smooth yet genius renderings - be it Emilio's death, Bill's narration of Pai Mei's tutelage by the fire with a flute or the classic Relief and Regret after killing Bill with which Tarantino closes Kiddo's character. Check out glimpses of pure genius for yourself.  

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Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Privacy lists on IM, anyone?

How we like talking to some people more than others? How we like to be interrupted (read pinged) by some people more often? How on some days, nostalgia makes us want to connect to one part of our life sooo much more than the rest of it? Oh and, how we sometimes want the rest of the world to drown out when we are in the middle of certain conversations! Times when other pings feel rather annoying..And yet, our flat IM (office communicator/gtalk/yahoo messenger) contacts list has everybody who we ever added to it since we began internet chatting! We can either be online to everyone or offline. On one hand, the invisible setting just blocks everyone out. As good as disabling the chat feature, right? And on the other, the block/blacklist feature is for non-friends! Well, not always useful :) Yahoo! messenger's stealth settings allow to either be online/offline(invisible) or permanently offline (=block) to someone but have to be set distinctly per contact. Aaargh! super tedious, ain't it?    

I want privacy lists in my IM! I want to be able to create lists of people based on the context of my interaction with them and be able to set my status separately for each of these lists. Imagine lists for family, school friends, college friends, work pals, close buddies, once-close buddies et al miscellaneous and the flexibility to set here/idle/brb/dnd/out/random custom status for all of them So if you want the privacy lists too, raise your hands and say Aye Aye Captain! or you know you can even just Like this post.