Sid Yadav

Best Director

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:36:00 +1300

I hated this year’s Oscars and it’s obvious why. But one thing that really got to me was best director. I thought I knew what this award was for — guess I was wrong.

Before it was given, the buzz was, “Oh, I hope it’s Bigelow! First woman ever! Yipeee!”. I don’t have a problem with women winning this spot — I hope a woman wins it every year. But to me, best director should be given to the director who was “responsible in a major way, as the director, for making a film (leaving apart the script, acting, technicalities) into what it turned out to be on celluloid.”

Let’s take two other fellow nominees: Quentin Tarantino for Inglorious Basterds and James Cameron for Avatar. Without these people, can you imagine their respective films even existing? I doubt anyone in this world would have the vivid imagination and historical knowledge to write and direct something like Inglorious, and add to that the technical-knowhow, curiosity, and drive for something at the scale of Avatar. Inglorious Basterds was Quentin Tarantino. Avatar was James Cameron. These people are true visionaries, pioneers, creative geniuses, directors, and it shows in their products. Regardless of whether you can argue if their movies were critically or commercially appreciated — which they were — you can’t argue their influence on it.

Katherine Bigelow for The Hurt Locker? Because she’s a woman who created a decent movie, and for whom winning it would make her the first ever to do so? Give me a break.

Memiary for Education

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:11:24 +1300

Memiary for Education:

Just launched it. Blog post here. Try it out here.

What do you suggest?

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 13:43:04 +1300

What do you suggest?

"Just remember — in whatever you end up doing — failure is always an option, but fear is..."

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:18:20 +1300

“Just remember — in whatever you end up doing — failure is always an option, but fear is not.”

- James Cameron

via Toothpaste For Dinner

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:45:02 +1300

via Toothpaste For Dinner

STORYCHORD.COM

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:03:00 +1300

STORYCHORD.COM:

Each Monday, Storychord.com will feature one story, one image, and one song— each by a different underexposed, talented up-and-comer. All issues are thoughtfully curated by Sarah Lynn Knowles (SARAHSPY, The Furnace Review).

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

To submit work, please carefully follow all guidelines below. Submissions are held in consideration for up to 6 months. Please note, you will hear back only if your work has been selected for publication.

Writers may submit short fiction (3,500 words maximum) either in the body of an email or as an .rtf attachment to storychord@yahoo.com. Be sure to send a short bio, including any recent or upcoming publication credits and your website link.

Photographers & other visual artists may submit links to 1-3 images (no attachments, please) to storychord@yahoo.com. Be sure to send a short bio, including any recent or upcoming gallery/publication credits and your website link.

Bands/labels may submit songs (1-2 songs per artist) via our Soundcloud dropbox. Be sure to include a short bio specifying the artist’s location, label (if unsigned, say so), album title/release date, and website.

This is a cool idea. I often wonder why media in the 21st century is limited to mainstream “movies”, “music”, and “books” — what The Machine wants us to consume. There are so many talented writers, photographers, musicians, film-makers out there… since when did the scale of a release become the measure of good art?

I’m working on a short story which I may submit, but if not, I look forward to seeing what other people come up with.

What's more important: an entrepreneur with a long-term vision, or short-term navigation/improvization?

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:55:00 +1300

This is the question I’ve been pondering ever since hearing the story of Michael Robertson (founder of MP3.com) on ThisWeekInStartups (skip to the interview part around 44 minutes.)

It seems that Robertson’s entrepreneurial strategy — with all his doom and glory — has been to see a general trend (he noticed the word “MP3” was rising on search engine zeitgeists’), to learn about it and chase it, and then to navigate and improvise his way around where things are heading, what users want, and what is technically or strategically achievable. This is a much different style of entrepreneurship to the one we’re used to hearing about — the one of the long-term visionary strategical genius — and one I’m trying to get familiar with.

The idea is that with this style of entrepreneurship, the real genius isn’t in seeing that MP3s will be the future and coming up with an elaborate plan in making that happen, but in seeing that MP3s are a happening trend, in imagining some possibilities and executing on one, learning from every external factor (the users, the lawsuits), and then recallibrating that plan. Instead of following a virtual path that you created in your head, you’re essentially making one and improvising where need be: using all your past knowledge and experience, and the current ‘status of the world’.

When you hear Robertson talk about it and the way things turned out, you realize that despite taking the ‘non-visionary’ approach, he infact turns out to be the visionary — more so than anyone who tries to. The iTunes store? Robertson had that vision, but he couldn’t get the business side of things from the record industry’s part to line up. Steve Jobs made a beautiful device, created a monopoly around it, and he made it work. The app store? Robertson had that vision, too, when he attempted to create a user-friendly retail version of Linux where apps could essentially be downloaded and purchased from a single ‘store’. Steve Jobs made a beautiful device, created a monopoly around it, and he made it work.

When you examine Robertson’s outcomes, along with learning that he worked on pretty much everything we use today before we knew it existed, you also get to see the pitfalls of his approach: execution. Essentially, you never have time to sit and think — since you’re always, in a way, thinking and executing constantly on new things that have never been tried before. This results in you geting so ahead of navigating everything, that you inevitably become the first guy to take the arrow. The people after learn from it, device a master plan along with some key change that resulted in your gloom, and if they get it right, like Steve Jobs did — twice — they become the hero, leaving you in the dust.

In any case, this is a must-listen interview, and it has made Michael Robertson, a guy who I didn’t know a thing about a day or two ago, into an instant favorite entrepreneur of mine. Only because of what he did a few years ago are you getting to listen to music on your iPod, or download cool apps on your iPhone, or store things in the cloud.

The basic takeaway: Michael Robertson rattled through the bushes, swiping his sword around to create a path, running into deadends and discovering new land. Steve Jobs came along with a helicopter, checked out the already-created path from above and mapped out the rest on paper. Then, he buzzed through it in his Jeep Cherokee, and the whole world followed.

Raghava KK: Five lives of an artist

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:24:39 +1300

Raghava KK: Five lives of an artist

New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Company will soon sell...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:20:16 +1300

New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Company will soon sell commercial jetpacks for about $75,000. The 200-horsepower dual-propeller packs can ‘reach heights of up to 2,400 metres and top speeds of 60mph’ and don’t require a pilot’s license.

(via & via)

The Man Who is Changing Education. I expect Sal Khan to be...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 02:28:06 +1300

The Man Who is Changing Education. I expect Sal Khan to be Time’s Person of the Year 2020.

The Lucky Foreigner with a Half-Working Laptop

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:58:27 +1300

The last month of my life has been a horror movie in terms of laptops, but a couple days ago, it finally had its happy ending.

A month ago, I accidentally spilled water on my 13” MacBook. The incident was so accidental that even a supreme being wouldn’t have seen it coming, but what was worse was my way of handling it: instead of immediately freaking out and detaching the battery, I carrier on using it for an hour or so, being visually misled by the keyboard of the MacBook into thinking that “there is no way any water could get in there” and “it’ll dry up in a few minutes.” Some keys started mis-functioning, and before I knew it, the water had reached my logic board and the laptop wouldn’t turn on after I did finally turn it off and detached the battery. Luckily, I was in India at this time — tech support heaven — so the family technician spent literally 20 hours unscrewing every part and drying it, and before I knew it, it turned on again.

But of course, everything in life has a catch. After we tested it for a while, the laptop automatically turned off. And then, some minutes later we figured out that if we didn’t press a key or use the mouse while booting up, it would automatically turn off. Worse, even after it turned on, it needed some feedback on the mouse or keyboard, or it would — again — turn off. The sleep function didn’t work as it should, and the laptop would simply just turn off after closing the lid. After spending a night trying to write a program that would automatically press a key at timed intervals and then learning that it was a hardware problem (i.e. something *literally* needed to be tapped) — not a software problem — I came upon the ingenious solution of putting a pin into the broken right shift key, which essentially stopped it from turning off, and didn’t interfere with my use because the key itself didn’t work.

That worked for a few days, until I learnt the side-effects: some of the other keys stopped working when Shift was pressed. So, I needed to find another replacement key. I spent the next fifteen days literally working with different pins in different keys and shutting it down before I had to transport it somewhere, which was time enough for me to get back to New Zealand and start considering options.

I had a few:

Pay $300 to replace the keyboard/top section of the MacBook, and hope to god that fixes the 10 second shutdown + sleep problem.
If it doesn’t, pay another $1,000 for a new logic board.
What’s worse, I was warned by the tech person to “not replace it myself,” and knowing how inept I am with hardware, I knew I couldn’t, so if I went this route, I’d probably just have to give it to a tech repair shop here in New Zealand, and knowing how costly that is, I estimate that itself would set me back another $500.

Or:

Sell the laptop in its broken condition (I guessed I’d get around $1,000NZD)
And topping those funds, buy the 2.53GHz 15” MacBook Pro I’ve been dreaming about for the last few years.

Needless to say, I went the second route and purchased the new MacBook Pro. Financially, it may have been a little heavy, but at least I got to make the upgrade of my lifetime and what I ended up with was a perfect new laptop rather then something I tried to fix but broke more in the process or something which could — again — screw up any second. Specifically, my upgrade was the following:

13” -> 15”
2GB RAM -> 4GB RAM
250GB Hard Drive -> 500GB Hard Drive
2.4GHz -> 2.53GHz
2.5 hours battery life -> 7 hours battery life

All in all, I’ve been using this thing for the last couple of days, and love it to death. It’s the best computer I have ever used. I think the upgrade I got from it is worth the price-tag in and of itself, added with the perfect opportunity to do it, and that I could top it up using some of the funds from my previous laptop.

And my takeaway from this incident? I can’t say there were any in terms of its cause (“not keeping water around your laptop” is not one, because the bottle I spilled the water from wasn’t “around” it — I picked it up from a metre away and when I went to keep it back, it misaligned and dropped in a heartbeat, making a few drops hit the keyboard.) Although, I guess in the handling of it, I could have realized the seriousness of water spillage and freaked out and disconnected piece of electricity passing through it rather than just passively using it again like I did.

But life had a deeper takeaway in it for me. One involving certainty, valuing what you have, and not taking things — even your meaningless material possessions like laptops — for granted. You can be busy surfing YouTube clips and getting really angry at the buffering speed one day, and the next, you can be praying that the next time you try the On button, it somehow just magically turns on and everything is normal again. I of course had the shorter end of the stick with the laptop, but the fact that this misfortune in my life — the worst I’d had for maybe a couple years — involved a laptop rather a person in my life, my health, or my livelihood, makes me one of the lucky people on earth.

If this incident happened to me in New Zealand — among the lovely luxurious life I live and see people living around me — I would’ve freaked out and lost it. But it happened to me in India. When I would travel a mile from home, and notice the kid trying to get fed for today by looking for food in the trash can, or the father trying to make end’s meat by pedaling 20KMs a day as a cycle rickshaw driver, or the mother slaving off at washing clothes from the neighborhood so that she can feed her only child, I would feel a little less unfortunate about my situation. Soon enough, I started questioning why I got to be the “lucky foreigner with a half-working laptop” (an incident I would’ve otherwise in my normal habitat described as “the most unfortunate MacBook owner in the world”) when most people couldn’t even dream of having a laptop, let alone a half broken one.

People who live in Western society, like myself, are so fortunate to get carried away with our material goods, that we sometimes forget the fight for the basic necessities of life that some have to face. Our battles are rarely to do with getting food to be fed (or worse, to feed) or finding shelter to live. Instead, they involve fighting tech support, mourning over a broken gadget, dealing with the boss, coping with the unjustice done to us by a billion dollar company, worrying about losing half of our wealth from the stock market (despite the remaining half being substantially more than what most of the world will ever have). Our insignificant battles make us some of the most fortunate people to have ever lived on planet earth, and just thinking about that, it’s a wonder that anyone ever feels unfortunate about anything, let alone things so meaningless.

TED: A Social IQ Test

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 01:13:00 +1300

TED: A Social IQ Test:

As some would know, I have a love and hate relationship with the TED conference. I love it because I get to know about some of the most interesting stuff and people in this world (alas, through Internet video.) I hate it because of its stuck-up rich people top 0.001% of the world audience who want to cure AIDS but think the best way to do it is by going to a $6000 super-exclusive invite-only conference and giving standing ovations to people who are actually curing AIDS. Enough to say, this article, which dedicates 700+ words to an e-mail examining the social ineptness of the TED audience, is an interesting read.

Input (needs) Output

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 23:01:00 +1300

We consume a lot of information in our lives. Newspapers, blogs, tweets, podcasts, articles, videos. This input is necessary and keeps us informed about the world. What else is necessary, though, is the filtering of this input; an output. That output can be talking about a current event incident with your friends around a water-cooler, or writing a blog post with your thoughts on the launch of Apple’s newest product, or tweeting about something with a link and an expression (although, personally, I can tell you that it’s by far the least gratifying of the three.) To put it this way, we need to say, speak, tell, write what we’re hearing, listening, consuming, reading, to know what we’re feeling.

For the last 3 months of life, I haven’t written more than 140 words at a time that have been meant to be read by an audience of more than one (and in e-mails and Twitter too, I’ve tried to restrain where possible). The lack of doing so, I’ve found, has made my life less clearer, more abstract, and and more internal. There was once a time where I used to write at least 500 words a day for Rev2.org, the blog I sold last year. I would cover pretty much every major tech news item, and while as a result I feel my opinions were much more conspicuous, they were convoluted in the fact that I was expected to have an opinion about everything I’d cover, which resulted in somethings I said, sometimes, which I didn’t feel truly passionately about. The contrast, though, has been writing nothing, about nothing, and I’ve come to realize that I need to write to live and to know what I’m thinking, even for myself.

So I’ve decided, through my only outlet — this tumblelog — I’m going to be sharing a lot of what I’ve been consuming, and not only that, I’m going to try and add as much genuine and sincere original input as possible. If you get tired of it, feel free to unfollow, because I’ll admit now that this “sharing” is going to be as much therapeutic for me as it is informational for anyone who dares to read it.

"We spend the first few year’s of a child’s life teaching them to walk and talk, and then..."

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:53:00 +1300

“We spend the first few year’s of a child’s life teaching them to walk and talk, and then the new few years to shut up and sit down.”

- Neil DeGrasse Tyson on PBS Horizon

Definition of Leadership

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:31:32 +1300

Definition of Leadership

"In the journey of life, there are two roads to choose from. The first one is easy — with..."

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:42:19 +1300

“In the journey of life, there are two roads to choose from. The first one is easy — with street signs and shortcuts — it has the approval of the world. The second road is much harder — full of stones and thorns, with no hand to hold, no map to guide — but when you walk on it, you make way for millions of others. Which road are you on?”

Video

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:08:25 +1300

"I’m a tool builder. That’s how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that..."

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:03:10 +1300

“I’m a tool builder. That’s how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be valuable. And then whatever happens is… you can’t really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we’re going. And that’s about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own.”

- Steve Jobs in a very rare Rolling Stone interview from 1994

Boxee's response to NBC's president and CEO, Jeff Zucker

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:43:54 +1300

Boxee's response to NBC's president and CEO, Jeff Zucker:

(via zachklein)

Aziz Ansari: Fresh Air on NPR

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:41:33 +1300

Aziz Ansari: Fresh Air on NPR