akrish

I just figured it out: the reason why I can never get any work done at home (at my family’s home, not my college home… that would be really bad) anymore.

It’s not that I interact with my family so much that I don’t have time to do anything. I do interact with my family, but when I’m at school I spend a lot of time with my friends. And it’s not that I mentally shut down when at home, taking the time to relax rather than think about anything. I have tons of stuff that I’d like to do, I’m just not able to do it.

The reason is that there are so many distractions at home that I can’t focus on anything for a decent period of time. I’m not talking about distractions that I’m really interested in; things like my friends wanting to hang out, etc. I’m talking about my parents talking, cooking, people coming over, the phone ringing… distractions that don’t affect me in any way whatsoever, expect that they kill my focus.

And it’s not that it just prevents me from doing work, these distractions prevent me from doing pretty much anything remotely intellectual at all. Take just now, I was reading a book (or trying to read it) and in the study my dad was on the phone, in the kitchen my mom was not only talking to my grandmother, but also cleaning up after dinner. Her phone went off and she started talking, and since I’m sitting in between these two rooms, I can’t help but pick up these conversations and lose focus on my reading.

Usually, when I’m at school, I tend to do a lot of my work (except reading) to music, which in some senses is similar to this kind of distraction. But for some reason talking always completely ruins me. It’s why I liked having a single last year, it’s why I don’t like studying with other people or in the library. And I finally realized that it’s why I am completely unproductive at home. I can’t stand when other people are talking, moving around, or doing other stuff while I’m trying to focus/study/think.

I think this is partly why teenagers learn to stay up so late in high school. They get distracted by whatever is going on at home until everyone goes to sleep, and then they start studying. Kind of reminds me of this xkcd comic. But I’m in the habit of going to be pretty early, so after my parents go to bed, I’m usually pretty tired and go to bed around an hour later. That doesn’t give me enough time to really get anything done.

Another part of the problem is that I don’t use my room when I’m at home. Aside from actually sleeping, I live in the family room, so although there is a space for me to go when I want it to be quiet, I don’t usually go there. I guess I should start taking advantage of this more, although the room does share a wall with the kitchen and I can always hear whatever is going on in there. I’ll try getting work done in there, but I have my doubts as to how successful I’ll be.

I wrote about this same problem earlier, but then the problem was very different I think. Now I find that I’m very motivated, and have tons of things that I’d like to do, but am too distracted to actually do them. And if you read that article, I mention that my freshman year I was much more productive at home, but now I can’t see how that was even possible. There’s so much going on in my house all the time (my parents wake up at like 5 and go to bed around 11) that it’s just impossible to find a good time to be productive.

I guess all the stuff I want to do will be backlogged until I get back to school…

I spent last night in Berkeley and drove in from there to work in Palo Alto this morning. As I took the highway 84 exit. I realized that I would have to pay toll to cross the Dumbarton Bridge, and that I only had 1 dollar in my wallet (the toll is $4). A part of me thought that they would just let me pass, because would the seriously make me turn around and find an ATM and how does one turn around in a place like that anyway. So I just kept driving towards the toll and at the last second (literally the last exit off of 84 before the bridge) I took the exit and ended up in some random industrial/marshy place.

I pulled into some parking lot that looked promising (read wasn’t completely empty… and there were many of those) and before going to ask for the whereabouts of an atm, I decided to see how much change was in the car. I found $2.35, so including the dollar in my wallet, I only needed 65 cents to pay the toll. I went to the receptionist (actually security guard) and asked her if there was an atm nearby. She proceeded to give me directions and then asked my why I needed it. I answered truthfully (with minimal exaggeration) and then asked her if she had any change she could give me because I needed to get to work soon. Somehow the combination of my sob story, and my sincere frankness worked and she ended up giving me a dollar.

So, this is how you properly ask a stranger for money (from personal experience… because I have so much of it):

1. Come off as desperate: present an intricate story that is both interesting and slightly humorous while not being to farfetched (it helps if the story is true…).
2. Be subtle: demonstrate that you’re financially stable (lie if you have to). At the same time, make sure that they’re aware of your need. Take what I did, first ask for the location of an ATM (shows that I have money), but then ask if she could just give me a little change.
3. Be friendly: Don’t antagonize your “customer,” it’ll just make them less likely to cooperate
4. Don’t ask for a lot of money: you’ll be much more successful if you ask for change as opposed to asking for like hundreds of dollars obviously

On a more serious note. Some of these principles can be applied to entrepreneurship. Nobody wants to earn revenue purely from ads. If you could somehow convince people to pay you for your service, you could theoretically make a lot of money. So here’s how you do it (for simplicity lets say you have some website the offers some service):

1. Be subtle: your site shouldn’t come off as desperate. Don’t make the sight glaringly about money, it should be something in the background that just gets done.
2. Be friendly: Make your website really easy to use. Along those lines make it easy for people to pay you. If they have to jump through hoops just to pay, they won’t.
3. Don’t ask for a lot of money: If I charge a lot for my service, then less people will want it. (simple economics. as price rises demand declines). This also depends on who your target audience is. If your targeting enterprise customers, you can charge much much more than if your targeting ordinary people

Anyway, this is turning into a pretty long rambling post about nothing really that interesting so I guess I’ll end it.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson (courtesy of CalvinandHobbes.com)

I stumbled on this comic just now looking for a different Calvin and Hobbes strip that unfortunately I wasn’t able to find. But this comic reminded me of the good ol’ summers that I used to have when I was a kid when I would by dying of boredom and excited to go back to school (yes I was a nerd even then). The summers where I would sit around in the heat all day reading, watching tv, sweating. Where my friends and I would have water fights, go swimming, play sports and on the whole be spontaneous.

We used to have this tradition in elementary and middle school where after the last day of school my friends, my brother’s friends, my brother and I would all come to our house and have an intense water fight. We’d just run around my house with super soakers (which by the way seem to have changed a lot since I last had one), hoses and water balloons and we’d all be dripping and shivering after a couple of hours.

Since none of us could drive, during the days when our parents worked we weren’t able to hang out with each other so everyone got bored, but it was the best boredom one could imagine. There were no cares, no deadlines, no internships, no summer school, no applications and it was truly amazing.

I already wrote about what I’m doing this summer so I won’t really talk about here (you can read about it here though). But since high school, summer was about getting ahead in school, getting into college, and learning how to be an adult (i.e. working). In high school, I took classes, tutored, taught clarinet, tried to get a job, studied for SATs, worked on college applications and even though there was a lot more free time than during the school year, it wasn’t the same as the summers of elementary and middle school. And now in college, I’ve spent both my summers working full time for pretty much the entire summer because I’m supposed to get ready for adult life.

It’s not like I don’t enjoy these summers where I am doing things. In fact I think if I were given a couple of weeks with nothing to do, I’d probably spend most of it programming anyway. It’s just that I think I would like a couple of weeks with nothing to do, and then I’d have the ability to spend that time however I want (programming…) and it would be really relaxing. I also think the not being able to drive around would be interesting, because I’d get a lot more time to myself which I need every now and then (especially when I’m trying to relax).

So things have certainly changed, but I wouldn’t say for the worse. Now I’m able to take care of myself, I’m rarely ever bored during these summers, and I still have some time to play sports and hang out with my friends. It also really makes me enjoy the weekends.

On a random note. I used to read Calvin and Hobbes pretty religiously. I have a lot of the comic books at home and really like Watterson’s creativity. Calvin’s imagination is amazing and I really enjoy a lot of the adventures that he has. Also I find his philosophies and social commentaries pretty interesting. If you haven’t read much of this comic I highly recommend it.

No this isn’t about learning a programming language. This is about learning spoken languages…

My family hails from South India, and for both my parents and both sets of grandparents Tamil is the native language. And for as long as I can remember, I’ve been able to understand Tamil, but have been very inept at speaking (meaning pretty much that I can’t say a full sentence but can answer questions with a couple of words on occasion). This weekend my brother and I were struggling to speak Tamil to our mom, dad, aunt and uncle, and my friend Vivek who is pretty fluent was just breezing along. We all started thinking about why it’s so hard to speak when both of us can understand so easily.

One of the main reasons that we discovered was that verb conjugations are really challenging in Tamil. Both of us are fluent in spanish (after learning it for several years in school) and understand a lot about verb tenses and conjugations but we are still unable to understand the tamil conjugations. Part of it may be that when learning spanish, we are taught all the conjugations and them seem to be similar for pretty much all the verbs, whereas the way that we learn tamil is just from hearing bits and pieces every now and then, so we never have a chance to fully learn all of the conjugations. At the same time, from what I hear it seems that there are so many special case verbs that it wouldn’t really matter if I knew all the conjugations anyway.

Another reason was that Tamil is such an old language that there are so many different dialects and my mom, dad, Vivek, and my aunt all had different ways of saying the exact same thing. Somehow they all were able to understand each other and I was able to understand all of them as well, but this completely confused my brother and I when it came to trying to speak.

Also, similar to Spanish, there are different ways of saying things depending on who you’re addressing. For example, depending on who I’m talking to, the command sit down can be okachi, okazhu, or okazhungo if the person is younger than me, my peer, or my elder respectively. (Note: the “zh” is like a really strange sound that I’ve heard only in tamil. It doesn’t have a good translation to the English alphabet but most Tamil written in english does employ that to represent the character. It’s kind of a mix between and ‘l’ and and ‘r’ sound that both my and my brother find kind of hard to say. Read this for a bit more information). And using the first two constructs is very disrespectful if you’re talking to an elder, so you have to be careful.

As an example. We were trying to say something like “when I was young, I spoke tamil well.” I think my first take was “this (item) is a boy, he understands tamil.” I used 3rd person instead of first, used the wrong pronoun and of course the wrong verb tenses all over the place. I guess that’s not too bad because probably a lot of my family would understand what I’m trying to say (mostly because they can tell that I can’t speak well so they’ll pay more attention and think a little harder about finding some meaning). Eventually we were taught how to say the sentence, but my dad had a different way of conjugation “was” then Vivek did, so we pretty much stayed thoroughly confused.

As an interesting programming parallel. Our difficulty in learning Tamil can be compared to the difficulty someone has one first trying to write programs in a new language. Despite having read all the tutorials and seen a lot of code in the language, one still struggles to write programs until a firm grasp of writing the language has been acquired. Whenever I’m learning a new programming language, I always have to glance back at tutorials, look at reference books, and read function documentation for the first couple of programs that I write, even though I’m able to read and understand code in that language. When I’m writing code, I have to pay more attention to all the quirks of the language that I can just neglect without losing the meaning while I’m reading. Similarly with Tamil, I can understand very well because I ignore the quirks (verb conjugations, articles and pronouns, dialect-ual differences, etc.) but when I try to speak, I do have to get those things right, and I don’t know them well until I’ve spoken a lot.

This post is probably long overdue. Events took place in early June 2008…

After finishing my finals, I moved out of my house (someone is subletting my room) and pretty much immediately started working. In like my second week, I took Thursday and Friday off (no PTO) and my family and I headed out to Boston for my brother’s graduation (yes from college. I can barely believe it). The flight there was absolutely horrible… first of all we had a layover and that completely sucks and secondly our second flight got delayed because there was some storm somewhere I forget the details now. What’s even worse I don’t really like to be in really cramped spaces for long times. Not that I’m claustrophobic, I’m just really fidgety and move around a lot.

Anyway we landed at like midnight in Boston and only checked into our hotel/went to bed by like 2 and we were supposed to get to the graduation the next day at 7. So my dad says we’re all waking up at 6 and yada yada yada I was really tired the next day (except not like in Seinfeld). So the next day was Friday, and it looked pretty cloudy and we were kinda worried because the graduation was outdoors. We ended up getting there at like 8 and then my dad tells me that graduation doesn’t start until 10 and I was kinda pissed because I didn’t want to be sitting there for two hours. And then the rain started… And it poured for a good 30 minutes or so. Fortunately MIT was prepared and they provided ponchos for everyone so no one got wet, but it was amazing. I haven’t seen that much rain in a really long time (El nino, 4th grade to be precise) and I realized that living anywhere else is incredibly different from California.

So the graduation came and went, it was really nice to see my brother graduate and all that and I met some of the guys I interned with last summer and some other people I knew from MIT which was good. My dad took some pictures maybe I’ll put them up here sometime. We ended up hanging out as a family for the afternoon (brother included) and got food walked around the Prudential Center (it was still looking kinda crappy outside) and then my brother and his friends had organized a dinner with all the families so we went to that. The dinner was actually really fun, I met a couple of my brothers friends and got to talk to a lot of people from completely different backgrounds and experiences than mine or my families. Plus we had a lot of really good food (Maggiano’s family style… awesome).

The next day we didn’t really have anything planned so we just wandered around Boston/Cambridge and I got to see a lot of places I’d never seen before (this was my third trip to Boston but the other two I didn’t see that much). We wandered around Newberry Street (which I thought was really amazing, kind of like a downtown Palo Alto but like better in so many ways). We looked at an apartment my brother was trying to live in next year, walked through campus so I could see all the cs buildings (I thought they have a way bigger cs building than we do, but now that I think of it Soda is a lot bigger than it looks. At any rate the building is really nice with a gym and a cafeteria). Went into some of the other buildings and for the most part I really liked what I saw. We ate dinner at some pizza place on Newberry street that made a pretty good slice and that pretty much made my day.

My parents and I left pretty early the next morning and were back in time for an eventful Sunday (I don’t remember what events but just that it was eventful) and that was that. But for some reason I had a really good time on this trip. Maybe it was that I was completely carefree and didn’t worry about anything work related. But something made me really like Boston and the trip made me want to live on the East Coast even more than I already wanted to before. Granted California is awesome and I love it, but I think I need to get out of here for a little while and go somewhere else and recently that somewhere else has become Boston. So now I just have to get into grad school there… unfortunately that’s pretty tough.

Going to new york at the end of my internship and I’m pretty excited for that trip too. I recently realized that I really like travelling!