Heartcrossings

It's a sizeable portion of the population that misses the lockdown  atleast in the UK. Maybe this is true for the rest of the world too.  ..an overwhelming majority of respondents reported that, yeah, actually, they did miss lockdown life – 66.9 per cent of them, to be exact. For all the sadness and boredom born out of the pandemic, many of you experienced significant improvements in day-to-day-life. Away from all the noise, focusing on enjoying things you perhaps didn’t have time to before made for some eye-opening realisations. Even for non-introverts, the pandemic created time in the day that did not exist before and with it the need to be alone. A combination that may have brought out hidden facets of character and rewarding moments of clarity. I never enjoyed traveling for work and like it even less now. All parts of it feel artificial and unnecessary. We did just fine working remotely but now that it is possible to travel, somehow what worked for a couple of years is no ...

Doing right by kids is difficult business as most parents and other adults know. Best intentions only go so far. We bring our baggage and biases into what are able to do for them. Monsieur Lazhar plays out this idea in the context of a group of young kids forced to confront the suicide of their teacher in their classroom.  The adults in the the mix have different ideas of what this trauma means for the kids and how they should be supported. Avoidance and re-direction seem to be the preferred way of the school administration because doing more requires alignment with parents which is hard to come by. The lowest common denominator support in crisis does not help the kids.  Lazhar is the replacement teacher - a refugee from Algeria and is dealing with the loss of loved ones himself. Much of what he attempts to do to help the children is driven by his own need for closure. He is well-intentioned but ends up stirring more emotions among the students than the system is equipped to ...

Great story about a business evolving with the times and staying relevant . The initial idea was to make a fish on a plaque sing and dance - most notably making eye-contact with the owner. A winning gag-gift idea on it's own that went on to acquire a fan following. All that was 2000 and the product continued to adapt to the times:  ..in 2018, Amazon announced they were selling an Alexa-enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass. The talking fish would be able to respond to Alexa voice commands and play Amazon music. Even better, the fish would lip-sync to Alexa’s spoken responses. Billy got even better! It's not often that a big hit like that can continue to stay relevant and on top even after twenty years. Lot of good lessons in marketing in how the company managed to pull that off. 

Very timely reading when feeling sorry for ourselves given what the past few years have put us through. We experienced a variety of problems during the time but having to live in the aftermath of a big volcanic eruption sounds orders of magnitude worse: The ash spewed out by the volcano likely led to a fog that brought an 18-month-long stretch of daytime darkness across Europe, the Middle East, and portions of Asia.   And that was before being hit by the bubonic plague. Yet on the hyper-local scale of a person, where they are born, the societal expectations of a what a "good" or "normal" life might be sets the baseline. When you drop and continue to drop further down from there over time, then you have reason to believe you are living in the worst time possible. In 2019 drying of a flu was no longer the expectation so when that started to happen randomly and in large numbers without any cure in sight, it was a bad time unlike any other some people have memory of.  ...

Some good observations in this story about being child-free or child-less not being nearly as bad as society would have one believe. It is a combination of factors that determine the level of happiness of a parent - did they have the support they needed to enjoy the baby years of their children, did they have strong parental desire to begin with, did they have enough agency to shape the course of their children's future and did the children grow up to the self-assured adults who successfully found their way in the world. There is a time for a family unit to include children and a time for freedom for the parents that comes in the wake of an empty nest. When a person becomes a parent, they lose several degrees of freedom so to score well on all the factors that will ultimately decide whether or not parenthood was a thing that brought happiness and contentment varies a great deal.  So it is no surprise that some folks without children who had a lot more control over their destiny wi...

Nice to read that partly used hotel soap is being put to good use . The graphic showing the relatively popularity of hotel amenities is also pretty instructive thought its unclear how its possible to track the use of hair dryers and irons - maybe by if they were displaced from their position or not. Being that soap is the most useful amenity, there could be ways to elevate that experience customers seek .  According to the hotel operations staff we spoke with, a small bar of soap is simply one of those only-at-a-hotel offerings that make people feel special. “I go back to, what does a guest room offer the guest that you do not get at home?” says Anton Moore, the general manager of the  Gansevoort  in the meatpacking district of New York. “I think it's one of those things that still resonates with people, to have an individual bar soap wrapped and sitting there in the bathroom. It's a separation—‘Here I am in a luxury hotel’—versus not.” A bar of soap with a soluble wrappe...

Loved reading this story about helping diabetic patients . The problem this solves is one that I have known up close in my extended family. Aunt L was the life of the party and a good singer. She was always called upon to sing something no matter what the occasion and she was glad to oblige. Instead of complicated laces, the entire front of the boot Velcros off, so it’s easy to slip a foot inside. Once on, it redistributes weight off of the ball of the foot, where  83%  of diabetic wounds happen, across the arch and leg so that 80% of patients healed in an average of five and a half weeks, in a clinical study. By comparison, only  21%  of diabetic wounds heal by 12 weeks normally. As a result, Hanft believes that his product could save up to 80,000 limbs each year in the U.S. alone. Not sure if these shoes if available would have saved her from amputation. But this gives hope for others like her who might benefit. Even if the success rates were significantly lower, s...

A kid I mentor told me about Budibase . He is a strong developer so I was intrigued that he would gravitate towards low-code but his rationale makes sense. B said, there is development work that is interesting and can be a passion project. Then there is stuff you do to earn a buck -mundane, enterprise stuff re-solving problems that have been solved many times before. There is nothing to particularly learn or gain from such experience for a real programmer.  So stuff like Budibase fills a very useful gap for folks just like him. Now if someone like me wanted to play and around and make stuff, this could be an option - it would free me from needing developers to bring a concept to reality. So the solution was addressing a pretty diverse set of personas from hobbyist to professional with varying degrees of technology experience.  A long time fan of the low-code movement , it's good to see the fresh crop of solutions in this space and unlike the previous waves, this time it seems...

Reading about this cutely named project made me wonder if it would be possible to take the idea a slightly different direction - interpret the pieces of sound that make up birdsong and learn to understand what they mean (even better be able to communicate back and forth).  The idea of inter-species communication has been around for a while . Universal grammar sounds like the stuff of fairytales. To imagine that it might in infact exist and we simply don't know about it but tapping it to that pool of knowledge unlocks the ability to communicate with many living creatures.  Maybe if we knew what our pets really thought of us - expressed in their own language, we may rethink ideas and opinions we hold dear about pet-ownership (for example). Perhaps we could have a more co-operative relationship with birds in our yard if there was a way to translate what each side wanted to say. The possibilities are infinite and also idyllic - real life and fairytales could converge. 

Fantastic Atlantic essay on the impact of social media on democracy . Long but very worthwhile read covering a myriad of themes. The one that was particularly close to my heart is education of our children and how political polarization and corrosion of trust in institutions is negatively impacting that" The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further. One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade. The calamitous consequences for K-12 education are plainly evident. Every year, things take a turn for the worse with teachers requiring to work like trapeze artists balancing their desire to educate kids while fighting culture wars, identity po...

Reading this article hit me with a severe bout of nostalgia for the mid 90s when I first gained access to the internet.  The words on the screen couldn’t adapt to your presence and your interests as you browsed. Interacting with other humans and having conversations – all that was still what you did with email or USENET or dial-up bulletin boards like The Well. The original Web was more like a magic library, filled with pages that could connect to other pages through miraculous wormholes of links. But the pages themselves were fixed, and everyone browsed alone. That wormhole of links cast a hypnotic spell on me and my wanderings lead me to places I did not anticipate or know about. Every time a new pathway and a new set of discoveries. The joy of  these serendipitous finds was unlike anything I had experienced until then. Then social media happened at all that was amazing and wholesome about the internet devolved into echo-chambers of content that was all about the same...

For years, I avoided reading The Joy Luck Club based on the negative reviews of the book. When I was a new immigrant to America, the idea of writing about eastern cultures in a way that perpetuated and confirmed western stereotypes, was entirely unacceptable. Just on that basis, I could have a severely negative response to a book or a movie. The Joy Luck Club I felt would be one of those and I would regret having read it because some things you cannot unread. I had very little if any familiarity with Chinese culture coming from India and I did not want to start out with what reviewers were calling a major distortion. That was over twenty years ago and much has happened during that time. I can't claim to have any deep understanding of that culture even today but I learned things along the way from interactions with co-workers, neighbors and parents of J's friends.  So on a business trip recently,  having a few hours of downtime in a town where there was not much to do, I watche...

I have long been a fan of Stitch Fix UX but never a customer. What they sell is interesting as a concept but I am not among their buyer personas. For a company that gets customer pain so well judging by the style questions they ask at intake, it was disappointing to read this story about their stylists leaving the company.  If the employees are not engaged and satisfied with the job that they do, the negative effects impact the the customer the company seeks to serve.  While the direct buy options seems sensible at first - there should be enough data by now to curate styles to mimic the work of the stylist. The algorithm may even be a good and useful one, but it takes the human touch out of the whole experience. There is a certain type of customer that gravitated to the Stitch Fix service and having a "personal" stylist was likely a big part of the attraction - a human stylist, not an AI that mimicked one. While the direct buy may bring new and different customers into the fo...

Loved reading this writer's perspective on fiction and non-fiction writing. What she does as a professional, I have been doing for a bit as a amateur. Not quite 80 yet but there are days when I feel like my soul could be that old. Like Thomas, I rustle through memories, some scraps more vivid than others and there is also stopping along the present journey to see what is interesting I never know if what I’m writing will add up to anything but I’m always curious to see where my mind goes when it’s off-leash. What does it stop to inspect, what does it return to? What the hell am I doing? What are all these memories doing in here? Then there’s a physical rush, like falling in love, when what I’m doing begins to reveal itself. I had my 80th birthday in 2021. What am I up to? I’m an old woman picking up the pieces of her day, wondering where they might lead, loving the journey. I have yet to experience the " physical rush, like falling in love, when what I’m doing begins to reveal...

Wanting to run away from home is a common childhood fantasy but very few act on it and even fewer with any degree of success. This  excerpt reads like a modern day Walden . The lessons on how to deal with lack of sleep are interesting: ..the lack of sleep starts to make me hallucinate. I hear voices, see silhouettes, sometimes I even feel as if I am flying. I am wiped out. I begin asking myself serious questions as to how this adventure is going to end. The problem is that I never rest. During the day I look for food and build shelters to protect myself from the weather, which takes an insane amount of time. They quickly attract insects, so I have to rebuild them every day. I must adopt a more efficient way of living; there must be something I’m missing. I find the answers by observing Daguet. Roe deer rest day and night for one- or two-hour cycles. I realise that sleeping at night isn’t compulsory, as long as you rest from time to time. Those who live in civilization running aroun...

Learned a new word murmurations and how starlings make works of art in the sky. The visuals are powerful and they hold hidden meaning that humans don't understand but we can still marvel at the beauty. There was also this other story about a picture being worth trillions of words . The way the artist describes his Black Sun project is beautiful: The starlings move as one unified organism that vigorously opposes any outside threat. A strong visual expression is created – like that of an ink drawing or a calligraphic brush stroke – asserting itself against the sky. Shapes and black lines of condensation form within the swarm, resembling waves of interference or mathematical abstractions written across the horizon. The comparison of median American wealth to that of Bezos being a piece of Toblerone to five Mt. Everests one atop the other is way more meaningful in that you feel overwhelmed with the sheer scale of what you are being asked to comprehend. You might leave with a better un...

Reading this story about new story about AI in medicine reminded me of a dear friend of the family who passed away several yeas ago. D was an astrologer of considerable repute and getting an audience with him took many months of effort. He predictions were accurate and his demeanor calming. People usually went away feeling better after they saw him even if the news was not that great.  D routinely predicted when a person might experience a cardiac event and likelihood of surviving it. I know of a few people who made it like he said they might and others that did not. He was older than my grandfather and lived to be almost hundred years old. The man was an institution and had helped generations of people - his approach was very methodical. They article talks about a    neural network to learn from 10 years of standard clinical patient data, 22 factors such as patients' age, weight, race and prescription drug use   In similar vein D used a large number of data points ...

Sad to see the iPod going and gone . There was a certain beauty to the simplicity of it and being just about one thing in the age of relentless distraction. Having grown up in the time of Walkman cassette players, the iPod was the Walkman made small, cute and delightful. You could get closer and cozier with with the music that you loved.  For many people like myself there is not a single thing not to love about the iPod. Then the center of gravity moved over to the phone. Music was crowded out but other things craving attention. It became the also-ran. The rationale for the iPod's death makes sense from Apple's point of view - they are meant to run a business not feed the consumer's nostalgia for childhood and simpler times: “At Apple, every single thing that was tried — at least under Steve — needed to ship because it was existential. You couldn’t not make the iPhone successful because you were cannibalizing the iPod business.” The iPod was not existential for Apple and it...

I want to read the book after reading this interview . What Cain says about moving on vs moving forward is true for anyone who has trouble getting over the guilt of feeling sad over things that took place way back in the past. The longer the sadness lasts after the event, the harder it becomes to justify specially if the reason for the sadness itself does not rise up to a level of significance at global scale. The person is likely to feel that they need to get over themselves, the feelings are unwarranted and that they are being ungrateful for the good they have in life.  If such a person were to give themselves permission to live their lives integrating that sadness as a thing that needs to be borne for reasons they likely can't even fathom themselves, maybe better outcomes might result. It will a weight to carry, recall without guilt because all weight must be set aside sometimes to catch a breath. Repeating this process of heaving the weight and then putting it down for a bit mi...

I can't imagine working this job feels like anything but an endless vacation. When the task is to create a box to package a jar of Manuka honey and the output is described in these terms, it does seem like the dream job for the creative and crafty: Upon twisting a tab on the base of the flower, the interlocked, crosshatched petals unfurl, causing dramatic movement & wonder when revealing the jar. The jar is secured by two straps. The first strap is the ‘seatbelt’ that securely holds the jar inside the box during transit and general movement. It is threaded through and around the base of the box and finished with a tamper evident tear tab. Upon releasing the first strap, there is another that cradles the honey jar, pulling this, it allows the consumer to lift the jar out and discover the precious cargo inside Watching the video is a mesmerizing experience. I spent a lot of time on Thinkpack's website marveling at the beautiful objects of art that were merely meant to be pac...

I loved reading Rachel Long's Portent over and over because I don't know what to make of it. Certainly, I can't get into the poet's mind as she wrote this - it a mystery box with a key code the reader has to guess one turn at a time to arrive at her meaning. But there is something visible here that does not need a hard unlocking process. There are words that convey meaning to the reader and it's theirs to shape as they will.  There is indeed something to be said for love stymying social mobility. The two goals are almost orthogonal. There has always been the concept of either marrying for love or for money. The two almost never coincide. If and when they do, the magic bubble bursts and only one of the two remains.  The couple falls on hard times and recover from it drawing from their reservoir of love. The tide of fortune might turn but the glory days of the past might never return. Love may fade as the the couple redoubles their focus on material advancement becaus...

Learned a new phrase reading this branding story about Bumble . Dating apps are uniquely positioned to influence and tinker with societal norms and they have been doing that for a while . For the generation that grew up with dating apps being the primary if not sole vehicle to romance and partnership, the vocabulary from the app experience seeps into their private world.  I have seen this play out in the lives of many young people I know. There are rules around exclusivity and what that means, when it is too soon and too late. What is means when two people say that they are in a relationship and also norms of break-up and life beyond. There is a lot that seems to be codified using the vocabulary set up by these apps. While alternating between the feelings of abundance and hope versus frustration and confusion, a lot of young people yearn to meet the love of their lives by accident - a bookstore, a train station, the laundromat or anywhere else in real life. That is probably a gap ...

Came across this article about no code data governance  while researching something for a client. The thinking is directionally accurate but assumes a near perfect environment where this becomes possible. Reality is that the time to reach perfection is untenable for most businesses so systems and applications get stood up that address the burning, time sensitive need. A vendor rolls in with the tools and services and rigs up what it takes. Across a large enterprise there are any number of such "pockets of brilliance" where some problems are being answered perfectly by solutions built just to that. In such an environment which is more norm than exception deploying a low-code/no-code data governance solution is unlikely to work.  What I have seen work better is customers making data governance table stakes in how any work is done that has to do with production, consumption and movement of data. That build an enterprise data environment where certain guardrails are built in ...

Trying to imagine a world in which on a long road-trip or coming into a new city a driver could pick up a local virtually to be a passenger and have them be a navigator and guide . It could make life interesting and the trip easier if all goes well. One could sign-up to be virtual ride-along companions and be paid for the services rendered.  On the other hand, a person would sign up to see all the interesting road-trips where a passenger is welcome to enjoy the ride for a fee and hop on virtually. You could travel the world without ever leaving your couch. Professional drivers could drive routes that have high interest among virtual tourists and sign any number of them on.  There is no limit to how many virtual riders can be in the car. Like we flip channels today, we could flip between rides in different countries anytime we get bored of the scenery. If the virtual passengers are put on mute and can only watch the scenery, it would not be a terrible distraction for the driver...

I was talking to a client recently whose business is going through a major rebranding exercise. A well-run family business many decades old, they are struggling to stay relevant among many new entrants and disruptors to their business. The core question is what made them special when they started and whatever that is - does it still make them special.  What need were they fulfilling well for the customer and do customers have the same need or are they able to fill the new needs that have arisen since. None of these questions are easy to answer on their own but to get it to gel with their rebranding efforts makes it even harder. Looking at  current branding trends , it seems that they are going with the quirky style. Quirky branding incorporates everything from hand drawn illustrations and bizarre imagery to overlapping elements, asymmetry and chaotic design. It’s a trend that’s been adopted by a wide range of brands – including in traditional industries such as finance and hea...

We met a local university professor of French at my neighbor's party last night. E is from DRC and has lived in our neighborhood for the last few years. A very unassuming man with a big smile, he is always easy to talk to. Given the times we live in, it was no surprise the conversation turned to events in Ukraine. There was an older gentleman B in the group whose grandparents escaped the Bolshevik revolution and arrived in New York. They were from an Ukrainian village close to a town that has been the news lately. While B has no family he knows of in that country, the war is more personal for him than it is for the average person with no connections there. E said in his very quiet and polite manner, that his country has been in a war for decades and no one in the world knows or cares about what is going on there. Congo is irrelevant, makes no breaking news and does not garner the support of the world for its troubles. The number of deaths per day is not a number anyone wants to de...

Watched The Power of the Dog recently and wasn't sure what made it Oscar-worthy. The key characters felt two-dimensional and story did not get into a good flow-state until half the way in. By then Georgie had decided to marry Rose while George's brother Phil was being habitually nasty and malcontent. Rose's son Pete was gay. That's how far you got into the heads of anyone that mattered in the story.  Cumberbatch has done very complex roles before so clearly he was not the reason why his character failed to communicate. He was able to deliver Stephen Hawking with as much authenticity as Patrick Melrose so lack of range is clearly not his problem. Watching the out-takes where in one scene Jane Campion directs him, she comes across as someone who is hard to work and collaborate with.  So perhaps she was stifling his spirit and that of Dunst - she failed to impress as well despite having a lot to work with in the character of Rose. The rest of the story drags along in a li...

Reading the comments on this article where women shared their own stories was eye-opening. The one I particularly relate to is about seeing work that is easily and plainly visible to me but to no one else. This is just as true at home as it is at work. Given such natural talent, it is routine for me to find work where none exists for the rest of the world. Now I am starting to wonder if this "talent" grew on me as I was for the longest time the sole provider for my family unit of two - me and J. Maybe I wanted to have value beyond putting food on the table and paying bills because at some level I was conditioned to believe those are not things that make a woman's life whole and meaningful.  So when I cleaned up the clutter, swept the floor, cooked food, upcycled stuff and so on, there was a sense of validation of my womanhood. I can see this play out for women who can feel they are emasculating their male partner by out-earning them. To regain the "loss" of wom...

Watching Nightmare Alley is not advised for an evening of uncomplicated relaxation. It is a thought-provoking movie about filling an aching void in life. Some have it bigger and more painful than others but what they choose to do with it is not always in proportion, Stan Carlisle in the movie, has a lot going for him but he does not know when he has it as good as he can possibly have it. That would be the right time to stop and consolidate gains. But that is not what Stan is about. He architect's his life's tragedy.  To the viewer he is the anti-hero but in his own mind he is settling unfinished and unresolved business in his own lofe, helping people come to terms with their sins and mistakes. That and a desire for greatness drives what he does. It is also what bring people into his orbit. The way del Toro tells the story of Stan, it is impossible to feel sympathy for him. This is not because he is painted entirely in black - the character simply does not provoke a sympathetic...

Fish can count and humans can now try tiger burger - that's the first couple of things I read in my RSS feed when I wrapped up my work day. It was oddly fitting as the day had been such that I wondered if some folks simply could not count or pretended inability to avoid making hard decisions. In dealing with difficult clients it is sometimes the best choice to walk away but an assortment of reasons prevent teams from doing so. It's when every one down to the rookie who is shadowing the project team sees the writing on the wall - a year out we will regret the day we agreed to do this work instead of walking away from it. And yet, we stayed on based on a "hope and prayer" strategy. That is when you know something is deeply flawed about the situation. Maybe if we had fish instead of people in charge of our collective destiny we may have fared better. Maybe if we changed our line of work to growing lion burgers fried in elephant oil we would have less to be concerned ab...

Watching Francis Ford Coppola break down his iconic movies is no less entertaining than the movies he talks about. It made me think about lessons ordinary folk living mundane lives working unexciting jobs could stand to learn from what Coppola had to say. The one line I found amusing and thought-provoking was about not needing be in a terrific series of crisis to deliver and be successful. Good work can be done without needing to execute heroics all the time. He says that in the context of making the first Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Different set of reasons for the unending crises but extraordinary outcomes.  This is relatable for the rest of us too. People do pull extraordinary stunts to get through difficult patches in their lives - personal and professional, often over-rotating on doing what feels like the right right. Once the adrenalin rush dies down and sanity returns, the world looks very different. The intensity of feeling fades and those "heroic" actions seem unn...

When J was was much younger, I made episodic efforts to get her to learn some basic programming and work with data. My own programming days were well behind me by then so those efforts bore little fruit. Notwithstanding, I continued to espouse the cause of learning to code as a basic skill no different from reading and math.  Clive Thompson has it exactly right as far as why coding is good for anyone no matter what you personal and professional interests in life - there is no one who could not benefit from automating grunt work out of their lives. He says to those who do not intend to become career programmers: But there’s a whole other possibility — which is to learn just a bit of coding. This can have a surprisingly delightful impact on your life. Because while it’s hard to become a hard-core professional programmer, it’s quite easy to — like me — learn juusssssst enough to do something quite valuable: To automate incredibly tedious, boring tasks in life. I hope at some point a ...