blogging – Page 4 – Pertinent Observations

Consolidating blogs

For the last year and a bit, I’ve maintained two other blogs – one on public policy, and the other on data and pricing and other “work stuff”. The idea was to keep the profound “work stuff” separate from all the nonsense that I write on this blog. Dedicated blogs could have dedicated readers who follow me for dedicated stuff, without being burdened by stuff that they wouldn’t normally care about.

Looking back, the experiment hasn’t gone particularly well. The “work blog” especially hardly gets any hits, and that is not something I’m particularly happy with. More importantly, I think people look at me as a “package” – the reason they follow noenthuda is that they expect to read a variety of stuff here, not my views on a particular kind of stuff. And so it perhaps makes no real sense to separate out my three blogs, thus not presenting readers the full repertoire of my fundaes!

You might have noticed that you don’t find my real name anywhere on this blog. I mean if you were to search for it, you might find it linked to the blog, but I’ve so far taken care to not put my name here. This is to ensure some kind of plausible deniability since I write a lot of possibly politically incorrect stuff on this blog. So the stuff I write on petromaxes and goalkeepers should not appear to anyone who wants to read me for my fundaes on “data strategy”. Keeping my three blogs separate allows me to maintain this plausible deniability while also letting my friends know that all three are written by the same person, etc. (I once did a google search for my full name, and this blog was not found on the first page of results. The other two were).

I’ve been thinking about this, and considering the abysmal readership of my other blogs, I’ve come to the conclusion that I should integrate all three of them, here. So starting the first of January, I will be putting all my blogs here, on this blog. I’ll also be importing all my old posts from my other two blogs here, so that you can find everything in one place. And since the cloak of plausible deniability will then be blown, I’m going to take down some of my old possibly incriminating posts. So make the most of the next four days to read my archives!

Writing can be hard

There are certain pieces that are a breeze to write – you start writing, the thoughts flow, the words flow, your fingers do the needful and before you know it you’ve written a thousand words. Once you’ve published you’re feeling all good and high and kicked to take on your next task for the day.

But then there’s writing that can drain you. For example I just wrote a piece on my policy blog. It took forty minutes to write. I kept hitting backspace and cancelling out sentences. It was extremely laboured. And having written that I’m feeling all completely drained out. This blog post on the other hand is unlikely to have that effect.

I realise that there are two kinds of pieces that I write – the first are “flow pieces” – where I do the thinking as I write. I start writing only with an initial sketch, or paragraph, or opening line. And then I build the piece linearly thinking as I write along. These pieces are a breeze and a pleasure to write. And it is incredible the number of insights I stumble upon while writing such pieces.

On the other hand you have “planned pieces” – where you know exactly what you want to communicate and how, and you only have to implement it and put it all together while you’re writing. The problem with such writing is that you would have imagined certain sentences at different points in time while thinking of the ideas and now you try and fit all those sentences into a coherent piece. And that leads to a lot of jigsaw-fitting and labouring and backspacing. It’s hell!

For a while I wanted to write Op-Eds, but I’ve now simply given up on those. It requires me to write in an impersonal formal voice which is something I find extremely hard to summon. And such pieces are more likely than not planned pieces, and writing them can be extremely draining. I’d rather write when I want to, building pieces as I please, and publishing them as blog posts! The effort to write Op-Eds is simply not worth it!

Andrew Gelman has a nice piece on why academic writing is bad. Basically two points – writing is hard, and academic pieces are not selected based on their quality of writing. So the quality of writing in such pieces is far inferior to say writing in a newspaper!

Return gift – combined feed

Today is my happy birthday. After a very long time I’ve turned a power of two (not hard to guess which one!). On this occasion I think it’s my duty to give you all a return gift.

Some of you might know that I have two other blogs – one “work blog” and one “public policy blog”. That might explain why some “funda-posts” have disappeared from this blog which has mostly nonsense nowadays.

While some of you are aware of this, some are not, so I thought it makes sense to offer you a combined RSS feed of all my blogs. Currently I don’t write anywhere else, but in case I do I’m sure to link to it from this blog. If I write elsewhere on a regular basis (like Mint, perhaps) I’ll add the feed to that also to the combined feed so that you need to go to only one place to find all my stuff.

I’ve used this site called Chimpfeedr for the purpose, and my combined feed is available here (http://mix.chimpfeedr.com/0140e-SKimpy). I recommend that you subscribe to that to be updated on all my writing.

Update: How (in)appropriate that today being the 6th of December, the gift has to do something with RSS!

My first ever published piece of writing

So the first time ever I published something was in 2003, in The Fourth Estate, IIT Madras’s campus magazine. It was a rather scandalous piece. So scandalous that I declined to put my real name as the byline instead preferring to be called “The Wimp”.

I was rummaging through my computer and actually managed to find a soft copy of that issue of The Fourth Estate. I have no clue where I had downloaded it. In any case if any of you is interested, do let me know and I’ll send over the PDF to you. Anyway, here goes the piece. Copypasting from PDF, so might be some formatting issues. I’ve quoted the whole thing verbatim

Continue reading “My first ever published piece of writing”

Me in Pragati on Civil Wars

Last week I wrote an essay in Takshashila Institution’s Pragati where I argued that Civil Wars don’t have a “good side”.

An excerpt:

Thanks to the efforts of individuals such as Pablo Picasso and George Orwell among others, the Spanish Civil War is often portrayed as a conflict between the ‘good’ (the socialist Republic) and the ‘bad’ (the Nationalist forces) – with the malicious Nationalists bombing the poor Republican people. The truth, however, is not so simple. Looking at other, more objective accounts, including Lowe’s, it turns out that it was a war fought between two evil sides (though it’s not clear if the sides were equally evil) – the Nationalists on one side and the Communists on the other, with the people of Spain being the real victims.

Tiananmen Square

My website is under heavy attack – there have been multiple hacking attempts, and looking at some statistics I find that a lot of them seem to be coming from China.

So this post is my humble effort to get my website blocked in China so that these attacks will stop!

Guest post on payment mechanisms

I don’t normally do guest posts on other blogs – the problem with that is that you lose track of the fact that you’ve written it and you have no control over record-keeping of these posts. That doesn’t mean I haven’t done guest posts in the past – I used to guest-blog for this blog called Sportsnob, but would faithfully cross-post every post here (or in the Livejournal predecessor). I also used to guest-blog on the Indian Economy Blog, but then again I would cross-post here.

I remember that Madman Aadisht had taken a break from blogging during placements at IIMB, and because he wanted to keep the blog going, he offered to attend some pre-placement talks on my behalf (IIMB had a complex system of compulsory attendance for pre-placement talks so that companies got a favourable impression of the batch). So I ended up writing some blog posts on his blog (after a revamp, they all appear as if he’s written). I can identify that I wrote this one and possibly this one (Madman was kind of my guru on all things online, which includes blogging and Orkut – he sent me an invite to join Orkut long before it was cool. So I kinda ended up writing like him so it’s hard to distinguish the posts now) and this one for sure and perhaps this one .

I remember writing a few posts on some of Takshashila’s group blogs such as The Broad Mind and Logos, but with no documentation of what I wrote, I stopped writing for those, especially since I have my own blog there now. So it’s been a while since I wrote one.

But then I wrote one today. I have mentioned a fair number of times on this blog that liquidity is a much underappreciated concept in economics (apart from financial economics) and I would like it to be talked about more. So I’ve been doing my bit evangelising the concept of liquidity.

Sangeet is a management guru who runs a rather well-read blog on Platform Thinking, which is basically about putting the concept of liquidity into practice. We’ve been talking a fair bit recently since both of us started eschewing formal full-time jobs around the same time and generally have conversations on a lot of random things, including things on our blogs, which includes platforms.

So after one such conversation on platforms and payment mechanisms, Sangeet asked if I could write a guest post for him. And I’ve obliged. Here is an extract:

So how can a new payment mechanism (such as m-Pesa or Apple Pay) gain traction? There are essentially two ways – one is the Paypal route, where you enter with so big a bang that you quickly have a large chunk of the market, and network effects make it necessary for the rest of the market to adapt to you. Given the plethora of payment options that are present now, it is unlikely that any player will be able to establish this kind of domination without significant investment.

The other option is to make it interoperable. Apple Pay, for example, could introduce an Android App (which might cannibalise on Apple iPhone sales, but increase traction of Apple Pay itself). This could potentially increase the number of devices that can pay using this mechanism, and it thus gives incentive for merchants to install the mechanism that allows them to accept payments using Apple Pay. There is a parallel to this within Apple itself – when the iconic iPod was first introduced, it was only interoperable with Apple computers. After much internal debate, Apple finally introduced iTunes for Windows, and made the iPod interoperable with Windows, in 2003, and that year iPods saw a 235% growth in sales

Perhaps because Sangeet mostly writes long blog posts, or perhaps because I was fairly jobless writing this in the IESE Cafeteria the other day (remember I’m a B-school WAG now), I ended up writing a rather long post. Still I’d encourage you to read the whole thing there.

Business School WAG series – day out with baby bulls

Ten years ago, I was studying in a business school. A few weeks before I joined IIM Bangalore, a friend told me about the concept of a blog. I was told about the existence of blospot and livejournal, and the concept of blogging seemed exciting (I’d just started writing earlier that year and quite enjoyed it). I signed up on blogspot and wrote a post perhaps in June or July 2004 (I’ve deleted the blog, and so have forgotten when). Then I found that most of my IIMB friends were on LiveJournal and I moved my blog to skthewimp.livejournal.com .

My blogging ramped up slowly during my two years at business school – the first increase in momentum was during my summer internship in an investment bank, when my readership improved. A series of fairly controversial posts in the next one year further improved readership. And then the blog did me a lot of good.

I’ve found a client and a couple of other business leads thanks to my blogging. It was also my blogging through which I got to know of the existence of <lj user=”favrito”> eight years ago. Four years ago, I married her, and earlier this year, she decided to go to business school. And I thus became a business school WAG.

My status as a business school WAG was first established two months or so ago when I got an email from “Club – IESE Partners and Families”. These business schools try to take themselves too seriously and sound too politically correct – they could have simply called it the IESE WAG Club (there is merit in the usage of the term WAG (with its origins as “Wives and girlfriends”) as a unisex term). But anyway, I’ve continued to get emails from this club about its various activities. So far none of them have impressed me, but some have freaked me out, such as “day out with kids at the beach”.

My status as IESE WAG was further enhanced earlier this week when I made it to Barcelona, albeit for a short period of time. I visited the school yesterday, where <lj user=”favrito”> introduced me to one and all and sundry, and they eschewed the “three way cheek peck” which is supposedly popular in these parts of Catalunya in favour of the humble handshake. I spent the day in the cafeteria sipping Coke Zero and Dark Hot Chocolate and watching students crib about their performance in placement tests, talk about “arbit CP” that others put in class, and indulge in the kind of nonsense that all business school students indulge in (I surely did ten years ago) which recruiters (mostly business school alumni themselves) pretend doesn’t exist. It was interesting to say the least, but not interesting enough to deserve a blogpost for itself.

I further embellished my credentials as a WAG today, though, as I accompanied <lj user=”favrito”> and some of her classmates on a sort of picnic today. There was a fair number of WAGs at the picnic today, though I suspect I was the only male WAG. And I got introduced to a new “sport” in the course of the picnic today – amateur bullfighting, or as <lj user=”favrito”> described it, “Rajnikanth bullfighting”.

So there is a bullring. And they let a bull into the ring (it was a young bull that was in the arena today). And people can get into the ring by way of a ladder. There are these hiding posts all around the ring, behind which people can stand and be safe from the bull. And more than one human being can be in the ring at that point in time.

And they taunt and tease the bull, inviting him to attack and gore them. The bull is young and his horns aren’t sharp, so it is unlikely that it will cause much damage. But the bull is easily ruffled, and he gives short chases to the humans, who having provoked the bull in the first place try to dodge and evade the bull. Some wusses run to the shelter of one of the hiding posts when the bull is about ten metres away from them. Other wusses (including Yours Truly) don’t even bother entering the bullring, preferring to guzzle on the beer and sangria available and make pertinent observations.

And so it was an unequal battle, with several humans and one bull, though in true Rajnikanth tradition only one human would physically interact with the bull at one point in time (though others would hoot and clap and jeer). I was about to use the word “grapple” in the previous sentence but there was no grappling here – the bull would charge you and try and knock you down, and you would try and evade it. Some people even fell while trying to evade the bull and got hit by it, yet seemed unhurt.

This went on for a short period, and soon there were so many people in the bullring that there was no merit in entering it – the bull would surely get confused. And then we retired to this resort somewhere else in rural Catalunya for lunch and more drinks.

Later in the evening, at this resort, I visited the urinal. It was fairly busy at that point in time, with all stalls occupied. The guy to the left of me and the guy to my right had both brought a beer bottle along – they held the beer bottle in one hand and their penises with the other as they input and output liquids simultaneously.

I had half a mind to indicate to them that they could just eliminate the middleman, but then I thought it wasn’t appropriate for a business school WAG to give such advice, and moved on!

I plan to make a series on life as a business school WAG. Not sure how regular this will be though since I don’t plan to spend too much time in Barcelona.

A month of detox

I cheated a little bit this morning. Since it’s been a month now since I got off Twitter and Facebook, I logged in to both for about a minute each, to check if I have any messages. The ones on Facebook weren’t of much use – just some general messages. There was one DM on twitter which had value, and I sent the guy an email explaining I don’t use twitter any more. I presently logged out.

The one month off Twitter and Facebook has so far gone off fantastically. For starters it’s given me plenty of time to read, meet people, talk to people and other useful stuff. And apart from some interesting links that people post on Twitter, I haven’t really missed either of them.

There have been times when there have been thoughts that would have earlier led to a tweet. However, given that the option exists no more, I end up doing one of two things – if there is substance to the tweet and I can elaborate on it, then I do so and it results in a blog post (you must have noticed that the frequency of blogging has gone up significantly in the last one month).

If it’s not really blog worthy but just something that I want to share with someone, I think of whose attention I would have liked to have caught by putting that tweet. In most cases I have found that there is a small set of people whose attention I would have liked to catch with a tweet – every time I tweeted, I would think of how a particular set of people would respond. So what I do when I have something to say and a particular set of people to say it to is to just message it to them.

While this gives a much better chance of them responding to the message than if they just saw it on their timeline (or missed seeing it), it also has the added benefit of starting conversations. Which is not a bad thing at all. In the last one month I’ve seen that my usage of WhatsApp and Google Talk has gone up significantly.

The only thing I miss about twitter is the interesting links that people post. I’ve tried a few things to remedy that. Firstly I tried to see if I could write a script that crawls my timeline, gets popular links (based on a set of defined metrics), and then bookmarks the top five each day. I went some way with the code (pasted below the fold here) but couldn’t figure how to post the linked articles to Pocket (my article bookmarker of choice). So I ended up tweeting those chosen links (!!) with a #looksinteresting hashtag, so that ifttt does the job of adding to Pocket.

It went for a bit till multiple people told me the tweets were spammy. And then I realized I needed to tweak the algorithm, and it needed significant improvement. And then I realized the solution was at hand – Flipboard.

If you have an android phone or an iPad and not used FlipBoard you’re really missing something. it’s a great app that curates articles based on your indicated areas of interest and history, and one of the sources it can get links from is your own Twitter and Facebook accounts. It is generally good in terms of its algo and good links usually bubble up there.

When I went off Twitter and Facebook on the 6th of August (in a fit of rage, outraged by all the outrage and negativity on the two media) I wanted complete isolation. And thus I deleted Twitter and Facebook from my FlipBoard also. Now I realized that adding back twitter on FlipBoard will allow me to access the nice links shared there without really getting addicted back to twitter, or partaking all the outrage.

For the last two weeks it’s worked like a charm. That twitter is present only on FlipBoard, which I use not more than twice a day (once in the morning, once at night), means that I’ve had the best of both worlds. And not being on twitter has meant that i’ve been able to get a fair bit of work done, finished three books (my first attempt at reading fiction in ten years fizzled out midway, though – Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness failed to sustain my interest beyond about 40% (I have it on kindle) ), written dozens of blog posts across the three blogs and had more meaningful conversations with people.

I hereby extend my sabbatical from Twitter and Facebook for another month.

Below the fold is the code I wrote. It’s in R. I hope you can make some sense of it.

Continue reading “A month of detox”