I never take enough photos in NYC.
Great Jones Cafe.
Tiny pants near the High Line.
In other news, I’m totally addicted to the Flickr Map feature. I wish mine had more cool purple dots.
Alaska
September 19th, 2009 by
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Went on a cruise from Alaska to Vancouver.
Mendenhall Glacier. Glad I got to see one before they all melt away.
Lighthouse. Must be lonely out there.
Vancouver. I just discovered the “stitch” feature. (Apparently someone found this and posted it on a forum. The internet is awesome.)
Category: photosNo Comments.
Cambodia and Thailand
July 21st, 2009 by
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Some highlights from my recent trip to Cambodia and Thailand:
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Sunrise at Angkor Wat. Waking up at 4AM was a small price to pay. |
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Boating near Kompong Kleang. A non-touristed village on the bank of the Tonle Sap. Locals live on houseboats or in houses high up on stilts. |
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Sunset at Pre Rup. The view from high above the surrounding countryside surpasses my limited engineer’s vocabulary. |
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Our tour guide, Dara. From surviving the Khmer Rouge to social work in underprivileged areas, his stories were both fascinating and inspiring. |
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Motorcycle Taxi through Sukhumvit. No thrill ride compares to weaving through Bangkok’s rush-hour on a two-wheeler. I handily beat the Skytrain in a Top Gear style race. |
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Street Food in Chinatown. Very lively at night and so many places to choose from. |
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Traveling with old friends. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know where you are when you’re in good company. |
Check out more photos on my Flickr (Cambodia, Thailand) and let me know what you think!
Category: photosNo Comments.
Being Effective
June 15th, 2009 by
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There’s a lot of things about being effective at work that college doesn’t teach you. At the risk of sounding like a corporate drone (but a highly efficient corporate drone!), here are some that I’ve found useful.
Document everything. Have easily-accessible references for everything you’ve done (plans, presentations, decisions, notes, designs, etc.). It helps you stay focused and helps other people understand what you’re doing. Next time someone asks you a question about your project, you’ll already have plenty of things to point them to.
Communicate. I’ve found it better to err on the side of over-communication, its helpful to everyone you work with. Similarly, being responsive is also important: a short reply like “I’m looking into it” or “Looks good to me” is better than leaving the person wondering if you even got their e-mail.
Know key metrics and industry trends. This one will be useful when you least expect it. Understanding some numbers (at least to an order of magnitude) can help you prioritize and make better decisions.
Make an agenda. Everyone has attended plenty of directionless and inefficient meetings. Don’t be the reason they have to attend one more.
Try it. It’s easier to evaluate an idea when you have a public proof-of-concept that people can give you feedback on.
Know your priorities and your accomplishments. This one is more important than I thought. When you work on something every day, it’s easy for it to seem routine and to lose sight of (for lack of a better phrase) “the big-picture”. Having your priorities top of mind helps you ensure that you’re making an impact. Knowing your accomplishments helps people understand what that impact is.
Have suggestions of other things that work for you? Think I should write a post with fewer corporate buzzwords? Leave a comment.
Category: productivityNo Comments.
Beer and Analytics
May 28th, 2009 by
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If you’ve been watching the (thrilling) NBA playoffs, you’ve probably seen this Heineken commercial featuring Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend.”
The song was stuck in my head, so I did what any reasonable person would do, I Googled it. Judging from the Google Trends graph below, a lot of other people did too:
The first result was this music video and a gold mine of information. Though the video was posted 10 months ago, most of the 3500+ comments are from the last month. On top of that, somewhere along the line, someone started a comment chain: “Copy and paste if the Heineken commercial during the NBA Playoffs sent you here”.
Somehow, this got me thinking about data and user engagement.
Data is plenty, the value comes from figuring out what it means. As a marketer, you can, at the very least, confirm that some people saw (and remembered!) your commercial (you even know their YouTube usernames). It can only get more interesting from there.
YouTube gives the video uploader access to a variety of statistics about their viewers. Perhaps some folks at Heineken would like to get their hands on that. Perhaps they’d even be willing to pay.
The impact of brand advertising on TV has always been difficult to measure. Aggregating things like YouTube comments and Twitter posts could be one way to make it easier to quantify. However, turning such a vast set of unstructured data into useful insights is no trivial task.
Users want to engage, and they’ll find creative ways to do it. I always think it’s cool when users find new ways to use a product. But it also shows where there is opportunity for improvement.
In this case, it’s not really something missing from the product, but an opportunity to use the knowledge that TV ads drive online searches to create a more cohesive user experience.
At a very basic level, I’d imagine that Heineken might have benefited from advertising on the YouTube music video. Taking it further, one could probably come up with all sorts of interesting way to combine Heineken, YouTube, Biz Markie and the NBA.
Lots of speculation here and very few conclusions. Would love to hear your thoughts…
Category: advertising5 Comments
Resolution Debt
May 24th, 2009 by
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Sometime in December, I hand-wrote a list of New Year’s resolutions and then promptly forgot about them. Though they were in no order of importance, the first one was a seemingly-reasonable goal to “blog on sameeriyengar.com 1 post/wk”.
By my (completely non-scientific) count, I have posted exactly zero entries since that time (though, thanks to bots that can fill out forms, I have received hundreds of spam comments). In fact, my most recent entry which contains greater than one complete sentence was over one year ago.
This being the end of May, I am now in debt twenty entries. However, instead of breaking my own knee caps, I’ve graciously allowed myself to submit those entries a bit late and see if its still possible to reach an average of 1 post per week by the end of the year.
There’s no shortage of articles with tips for achieving your goals, which is no surprise considering its a common metric for measuring success. One idea that has resonated with me is to think about two things:
- Why do you even care about doing this?
- How is the process of achieving this goal going to impact me?
My theory is that its easier to commit to a goal if the reason and the impact are something you actually care about. It should probably be something slightly more compelling than “well, it would be kinda cool”. For example, I like the idea of having a blog because it will force me to:
- Practice writing. Presenting ideas in a structured way and writing things that people might actually want to read are useful skills.
- Read. Writing something coherent requires that you’ve at least done a little research on the topic.
- Have something more than a photo of half dome come up when you Google for my name.
Since most goals aren’t easy to achieve, it’s also important to consider (and accept!) the consequences of pursuing that goal. For example, some of the things I am willing to accept are:
- Public ridicule. It’s actually a scary thought to post potentially ridiculous things for all to see but that’s part of having a blog. I’m okay with the fact that I’m going to sound stupid sometimes (hopefully not all the time).
- Less TV time. I’m am (somewhat reluctantly) willing to miss some re-runs of Family Guy to spend time writing.
If you see more posts on this blog, you’ll know that, at the very least, these ideas seem to be working for me. And, if not, at least I will have accomplished a respectable 1.9% of my goal.
If you’ve got other goal setting tips, leave a comment! At least I’ll know the spam-bots aren’t the only ones reading this.
Category: productivity8 Comments
Thesis!
May 23rd, 2008 by
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I finished it. I think I forgot what it feels like to not be sleep deprived. But, an unhealthy amount of Mountain Dew, complete lack of social interaction and an intermittently functioning backspace key have produced my master’s report.
It is about a framework for developing Body Sensor Network applications. Using the framework, developers can avoid avoid managing hardware configuration and communication scheduling and focus on application logic.
An excerpt from the introduction:
Wireless Body Sensor Networks (also known as bodynets or Body Area Networks) have the potential to revolutionize healthcare. These networks are comprised of wearable devices with attached sensors that can measure various physiological and environmental signals. Bodynet devices communicate wirelessly with networked gateways (mobile phones, computers and PDAs) which store, analyze and communicate vital information in real-time. A bodynet can be designed to immediately alert emergency personnel to a critical situation like a heart attack or a debilitating fall. Bodynets can also help physicians catch warning signs of a disease earlier or remotely monitor the progress of a recovering surgery patient.
Body Sensor Networks free a patient from the confines of a laboratory but still enable monitoring by researchers and clinicians. Researchers can study illnesses in real world settings without intrusive video equipment. Clinicians can gain a broader view of a patient’s health without increasing office visits.
I am very happy and also very exhausted.
Category: researchNo Comments.
Server Change!
April 15th, 2008 by
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Just when I thought everything was all set up for me to just write stuff, I had to move servers.
I’m now on Hostgator thanks to the recommendation of my buddy alexr. If anything goes down, blame him.
Maybe now I’ll actually start to write posts. Maybe.
Category: uncategorizedNo Comments.
