Rahul gives unsolicited advice

I realised on Friday, as I was cycling back from work, that I had just spent a month living in Cambridge. That was pretty much all I spent thinking about on my way back home. It has been a very interesting month. I stayed at an AirBnB for a week and a half before I leased a place. I'm not too picky but I also got lucky. It's apparently common for people to spend 2+ weeks, if not a full month, searching and moving into a place. The next thing, and the last thing, to complete my move to Cambridge was to buy a bicycle, which happened about two weeks back. A colleague at work thankfully lent me a spare bicycle he had until I had bought my own (Thanks Peter!). It feels a little weird. Living in Cambridge. Don't get me wrong, the town itself is lovely, I love my coworkers. It's a little cold for my liking but hey, I saw that coming. What else could I have expected moving from Chennai, India. It feels weird because I know that there is no end in sight. Well, none ...

I studied at the Indian Institute of Technology at Chennai (Previously Madras). It was a 5 year program on a campus that was lush green. 600 acres, filled with trees, a lake which we weren't allowed to go near for fear of injuring ourselves. And deers. Ohh, and monkeys. Lots and lots of monkeys. Now, in Cambridge, I am reminded of my days at IITM. Not because there are monkeys or deers in Cambridge. Not because of the trees either. There are definitely a lot of trees in Cambridge but it's not the same as IITM. It's because of the people I see around here. It's also because how I was behaving the first couple of days. The first few days here (even now a few times), I was walking about the city center taking pictures of everything, in awe of the beauty, the architecture and overall serenity. And then I noticed others passing next to me, others who might be students in Cambridge, who have gotten used to this city and it's beauty. That's what reminded me ...

I landed in Cambridge, United Kingdom on Wednesday. I was in the car for about a couple of hours from London Heathrow to the office in Cambridge. On the ride here, as I was looking at at the beautiful countryside, I started realising how lucky I am. I call it luck. Some might call it blessed. Others might call it privilege. I'm just going to call it luck. I have been lucky enough to visit a number of places around the world. As I was telling a friend of mine about my impending move, they mentioned how this would be the fourth continent I'd be moving to and I had to stop for a second and take that in. I've traveled around India. I'm not even going to count the trips that me and my family made around the country. After I started college, I got to go to Trivandrum, a beach city in the southern end of the country, to Nainital which sits in the Himalayas in the north. I got the chance to intern in Melbourne, Australia and I got to celebrate New Year's there. I got ...

Running into URLs that are broken or return a 404 Not Found error happens pretty regularly for me, especially if the URL is related to academia. I also know about the Internet Archive or Wayback Machine (http://archive.org/) , a non-profit organization that stores snapshots of the internet (well, parts of it), on regularly basis. Today, I finally put one and one together and looked for a Firefox addon to easily search the Wayback Machine for the broken URL. The search turned up a bunch of results but updating/tuning the search eventually led me to what I think is the official Firefox addon by the Internet Archive ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wayback-machine_new/ ).

Are you loud? That's the only question I am going to ask in this post. If you are, how loud are you? Loud enough to be heard by ~10 people in a small-ish room? Loud enough to be heard by ~100-ish people in a small conference room? Loud enough to be heard by ~1000s of people in a large conference hall? (I think no one is that loud!). I am watching a talk from PyCon US 2019 which is what prompted this question. In a lot of speaking events, the first barrier between you and the talk attendees is sound. If they cannot hear you, it will not matter how good your topic is, it will not matter how good you are at communicating. I, thankfully, am loud. Loud enough to be heard by 100s of people in a small conference room. I know it because I have conducted a few workshops at local Python events and conferences and I got good feedback from the attendees. Even though I'm loud enough, I will resort to using a sound system. If one exists, and if it works reasonably well enough, I...

If you don't know, TurboTax is a popular tax filing product in the USA. TurboTax has been found to intentionally hide it's free-to-use product from the general public. TurboTax offers a free product for tax payers who belong to a certain income bracket. But, it actively works on preventing the product from being found online. To do so, it employs dark patterns. Specifically, it tells search engines to not index and therefore not display the free version of the software. Search engines are what we use everyday to find the website that we are interested in accessing. There are few that remember the exact URL that needs to be accessed. Therefore, if a website wants to be hidden from the general public, it can tell search engines that it does not want to be found. See the coverage by ProPublica for more information - https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hides-its-free-file-page-from-search-engines . What I'm interested in knowing now is if this cov...

I just came across a very interesting story Hertz is suing Accenture for not delivering. Hertz hired Accenture to enable Digital Transformation. Specifically, Accenture was to revamp Hertz's online presence. Alas, Accenture didn't deliver on the statement of work and it asked for more money in order to complete the project. I don't remember the last time I remember a tech consultancy firm was sued for doing a bad job. I have heard about tech consultancies doing such a horrible job that all of their work had to thrown out. Actually getting sued is a first as far as I can remember. Ohh. The actual amount. Hertz is suing Accenture for the 32 Million $ that was spent and additional fees Hertz had to spend to rectify Accenture's mistakes. The actual lawsuit can be found here -  https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_lawsuit/ [PDF] The Register's coverage of the story can be found here - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture...

Here's a quote from an article on working from home and productivity hacking from the article - "I Let a Stranger Watch Me Work for a Day — And I’ve Never Been More Productive" . ... , I work from home. ... , let me assure you of one cold, hard fact: getting shit done without anyone but your staggeringly beautiful cat to hold you accountable is hard. Rampant procrastination, on the other hand, is easy. Without the social pressure to be productive enforced in more traditional workplaces, it’s all too easy to succumb to tempting diversions like ... Because of this, I often find myself wishing I had a regular office job. That way, I’d at least be part of some sort of team; a team whose judgment I’d be so pathologically fearful of that I’d rush to get the job done with sparkling focus and productivity in a time frame that would make my boss weep with pride. I’m not even being delusional with that fantasy — studies show people are...

I came across this interesting graphic on the Author's website that will hopefully get you interested in the book - Word by Word by Kory Stamper https://korystamper.wordpress.com/word-by-word/ There are things around us that we usually don't pay attention to. Things that have a rich and interesting story behind them if we took the time and energy to read up on them. This book, Word by Word, opens up the world of dictionaries, the people who make them and the English language. Before I talk about the book, let me talk about why I read this book. I've been interested in reading Strunk & White's Elements of Style for a while now. I'm interested in the English language and I'm interested in writing better and Elements of Style is one of the books I've come across a number of times as a good starting point to better my writing. When I was discussing this with a work colleague (Hi Jonathan!), he recommended that I read Word by Word instead. Now...

I'm reading Word by Word by Kory Stomper which is funny, insightful and delightful. I highly recommend it. One of the words I came across in the book is "cowlick". I didn't know that "cowlick" is actually a word defined in the dictionary. Specfically Merriam-Webster defines "cowlick" as a lock or tuft of hair growing in a different direction from the rest of the hair This reminded me of the comic strip Side note : I'm a little sad that images of the comic strip I've come across don't mention the original creator of the strip. I'm not sure if the watermark was stripped (likely) or if the original creator never added the watermark in the first place (highly unlikely.) Also, a "Tract" i...