Lane Discipline

Nice sign, but er, where are the lanes?!!

Travelling Swordfish!

How does a swordfish travel in Chennai? In an auto, of course!

Tendulkar, Thin Slicing & Umpiring

I'm watching the 7th ODI between India & England from the early overs. That typically means India would lose! Such is my luck :(. Few minutes back, Tendulkar was given out to a bad umpiring decision. Umpiring must be really hard, especially in a game like cricket where a single bad decision can cost the game for a team. Umpires have to make a split second decision using their senses of vision and hearing. In this particular case, Dar had definitely heard a sound, but it was the wrong one, one where the bat hit the pad. Using that, he had to thin-slice and determine that it was a knick. And probably, his aural senses overwhelmed the visual, as he missed to see no deflection in the course of the ball.

In case you are wondering what the heck is "thin-slicing", it is a term I learned from a book called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell. It is a really fascinating book I'm currently finishing up on my train commute. In a nutshell, it means an instinctive, non-analytical decision we make, especially when pressed for time. Umpires should also be experts at mind reading too, as the batsman or bowler involved typically knows what exactly happened, and would try to fake it to get the umpire's favor.

It is humanly impossible to get it right all the time, but I do believe having a human umpire is definitely needed. However, technology advances can certainly complement umpiring, as the Collingwood decision showed. That's why I think having a certain number of coach's challenges, similar to that in NFL would help. As I finish writing this, the third umpire has given the benefit of doubt to Powar. See what I'm saying?

Two minutes and a few balls later.. Oh crap, the spinning bat says he is out! It's not looking good for India.

Antichrist @ Greenpark?

Paradox

Saw this interesting note on a blog comment - "But then again... what in life is not a paradox... that the more you love someone, the more you'd be taken for granted."

Reminiscing Kinzan

I was talking to my former colleague at Kinzan, Trent Barnes, today and he mentioned it was the 2nd anniversary of closing of Kinzan, which prompted this blog post! I had the privilege of working with many expert programmers there and learnt a lot. We did a lot of cool stuff on cutting edge web technologies. I miss you Kinzan!

One of the best part of working at Kinzan was to see our product getting recognized. I'm reminded of Robert Scoble's blog post that was such a morale booster. My personal favorite was when Randy Hudson and Pratik Shah (creators of GEF) came over to our booth at an EclipseCon and virtually exclaimed that our tool was the best application of GEF they had ever seen! Another one was when a product manager of RIM (creators of Blackberry) came to our booth and lamented that they had spent more than a year trying to create such a tool and weren't even half way there!

Also comes to memory are the countless games of ping pong we played (India vs. China vs. USA :)), endless cans of Coke, Kinzan Olympics, Beach party and the ever wonderful Carlsbad weather. I should also mention Garland, who is my mentor, friend and former CTO of Kinzan who inspired us all and kept us going!

I'm iNFp

I took the online personality test based on Jung-Myers-Brigg typology. It classifies each person in one of 16 types, either

• Extravert - Introvert
• Sensing - Intuition
• Thinking - Feeling
• Judging - Perceiving
  

I came out to be iNFp (Introvert-Intuitive-Feeling-Perceiving). Scary - seems to be fairly accurate! One thing I'd like to find out is that, will getting to know my personality affect my personality?