The N900 review

You know I’m a bit of a gadget freak.

I had the iPhone, I used the Nexus one and now I have landed upon the Nokia N900. I plan to get the iphone 4.0 (just so you know my birthday’s around November) when it’s released. I got the N900 quite before most of the country and I believe it’s going to be launched here for about Rs .28,000 or so. Unless Nokia does a brainwave like the Apple launch and kills their geekiest phone with an overpriced contract. But I hope they won’t.

So what does this phone have? Should you get it? What does it have others don’t?

Read the rest of this entry »

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Delivering Happiness – A review

3 days back I signed up for the advanced copy of Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. Who? What?

Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos.com. This is an online shoe company that has set new standards on customer service. They were recently acquired by Amazon.com for 1.2 Billion dollars.

My interest piqued in them when I read about about Tony attending Ted India and giving a speech. I watched the speech intently and took notes. Becoming a CEO someday is part of the plan, but more importantly building a company that has great culture is the goal.

When I walked in today at work, I saw a copy of Delivering Happiness [Amazon Link] on  the table. I was astounded. We have celebrity bloggers at work and while the main chief had left I asked around and found out that no one saw it or knew who had gotten it.

Carpe Diem.

I HAD to read it and I spent a day sifting through it. I think the last time I did it this religiously was a game guide to Starcraft. Not even my exams had seen such dedication. Noted here are my thoughts on the book.

The Review.

High average prices. High selling margins.

This was the first lesson Tony learns when he starts to sell newspapers and buttons. Tony’s book is a semi autobiographical account of his life. From the time he’s a toddler he has had interesting experiences to share. A good early part of the book devotes its time to Profits. The middle half is Passion and Profits and the finale is Profits, Passion and Purpose.

College years are next and this part had it going on really well, it reminded me of all the reasonswe bunked college classes when in IIT. He was at Harvard, the equivalent in the States. Here’s a quote on his logic,

“On class days, my 8 am alarm was the most unwelcome sound in the world. I would hit the snooze button repeatedly. I would tell my self I could skip the first class of teh day and get the notes from someone else later. Then an hour later, I would convince myself that since that logic worked so well for the first class I could apply it to the second class, so I missed that class as well. By the time I was getting ready to go to my third class, I reasoned that I missed 2 classes so missing one more wasn’t that big a deal. And finally by the time I was supposed to be headed for my last class, I figured there was no point attending only one class when I skipped all others”.

Oh how I relate to this. The only difference, he had classes three days a week between 9 am and 1 pm.

It’s here that Tony’s life gets really interesting. It’s almost a mirror reflection of mine in the start. Which means I have an exciting future to look forward to. He starts in a deadbeat technical job (hi) and then goes on to web design (hi again) but finds out that he’s not really passionate about it even if the money trickles in.

He mentions an important point that I have been wrestling with, “We didn’t know what we wanted to do. We did however know what we didn’t want to do”. That’s not where the comparison stops. He’s a fan of RedBull! For 10 years!

It almost seems like he’s an Asian alter ego of mine. Sans the size probably. Oh and he plays poker. Score three.

The first half is an entertaining read. The second half talks about setting the company up, going almost broke, being a party playa and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. All fun stuff.

The real meat of the book lies in the third part where he talks about Passion, Purpose and what you want your life to mean and how to “find happiness”. He’s no Dalai Lama in this, but this book has more practical advice than most self help books out there. It is, however, nothing ground breaking if you have seen his talks (or 4 of his talks like I have).

Since this was a read only unedited copy, there’s weird formatting and indentation. There’s a nice chipping in by various employees and co founders on their view of things. This is a format that Sam Walton had made famous where people would talk about him in their own words. Here people talk about the company and it’s values. This book was an easy read and an enjoyable one. If you want to pick up tips on how to go about setting up a company and it’s culture and focusing on the most important thing: People and growth, then grab your copy when it comes out in June.

It will give you a good light hearted introduction into the world of business, culture, entrepreneurship and building up of a billion dollar company. It is however, not a cook book or not one that would have many reads (or dog tags) to understand.

Who should read this book?

Anyone who wants to know about Zappos, Tony and one of the greatest companies to work for.

Who should not read this book?

Anyone who wants to miss out on Zappos, Tony and one of the greatest companies to work for.

Company of Heroes is an awesome game.

I met a couple of dudes over the weekend and we gamed at this place in Kuwait called Arena Lan Gaming center. That’s on the secondfloor of the Wataniya mall in the road as Fanar Cinema etc. And the cost of playing there is 1 kd for 3 hours. Pretty decent deal I think ..

Anyway, it was playing the game that really got me super hooked to strategy and rekindled the forgotten love of learning strategy and warfare. The game was Company of Heros and in it I realised what a shitty game Warcraft 3 is in strategy as opposed to this game. This was pure warfare as was fought in the second world war.

I understand Warcraft 3 is a fantasy world, but so is Starcraft and you realise the 2 things that make Warcraft 3 an inferior strategical game is the “teleport scroll” and the “massive hp units”. I mulled over the games I played and realised how quickly strategy and warfare are very essential in all RTS combat games. There are some basic components to the game that I realise cover ground in almost all Real Time Strategy games. Hautamaki, one of the greatest writers of the starcraft world, mentioned the Power and Mass equations. Now that is slightly too detailed to note down here but what I’ll do is distill information to give you the basic underlying skills/actions needed to play in RTS games.

a) Resource Generation (Macromanagement)
Simply put, if you don’t have resources you can’t make an army. You don’t make an army you die. So gathering resources are of primary importance but you know the more important thing in this? It is to decide whether you wish to mass in large numbers early and attack or you power (tech) your way up the ladder to get yourself higher/tougher weapons of destruction. The tradeoff being that you need more resources, have a smaller army that can defend/fight off an assault.

b) Tactics of Operations (Micro)
This includes everything from flanking, to diverting, conning the enemy, taunting him and hitting from higher ranges by using the terrain options. In company of heros you see that the tank has higher armour concentration in the front of the tank, therefore to hit the tank you would have to hit from the back, I took out a tank by drawing the enemy tank towards me while my riflemen with sticky bombs went from the back to hit them. That is the art of flanking. This way of battle is important because it keeps your units alive and more important renders the enemys ones useless. It’s also important to keep a mixed army so you don’t get run over by hard counters.

c) Recon (Scout)
This is of primary importance to know what the enemy is up to. If you see him powering his way to tanks, you can start capturing map area and resources, if you see him massing an army coming to assault you, you can either follow suit or power your way with defence structure massing. But generally there would be a hard counter to that, so the point is Recon is very important to both know where the enemy is, what his plans are and hit at the right time to ensure damage.

Anyway Im super excited about the game and hope to get a good enough computer to run it or head to Arena to play it.

I saw Quantum of Solace and I am disappointed.

Casino Royale was fantastic. They brought back Bond from just the techno juggling smooth operator sleeping with everything that has boobs to a rugged man on a mission with Daniel Craig who actually shows a sensitive angle to his tough exterior. As an avid Bond fan, I went into this movie with so much hope and I was let down. It was my birthday treat to a couple of losers but I couldn’t help feeling I could have treated them better.

The story is far too complicated and it looks like the directors were trying too hard to get some shit together. I get it, Bond’s angry, he wants revenge, but did they have to make a mockery of this? Don’t get me wrong, the movie’s not ALL that bad, but after a stunning treat like Casino Royale this looked like a noob contender. It is some tightly gripping action scene clips put together by combining a mindless jump over continents with some vague revenge theme.

The pros

• Brilliant action scenes
• HOT bond female, Olga has me checking her website images now
• Daniel Craig doesn’t disappoint in his role.
• Quick paced
• Superior minority report type touch screen technology
• Cool Sony Ericsson technology (I love that phone)
• Bond kills everyone man (that is so cool)
• Brilliant Action scenes (oh wait did I mention that already?)

The cons

• What the eff is Felix Lighter doing in the movie?
• Villian was given such a pussy role
• Over crunched edited too much story has to be here type scenes
• 10,000 BC fart of different countries without explaining how they get there.
• CIA are a bunch of dumbasses (forgiven since Bush is the President)
• M lacks the charm she carried in the other movies Bond seems more assured than her

Here are some comments from RottenTomatoes.com and Imdb that reflect my thoughts.

Quantum of Solace offers next to no solace, if we mean respite, but in plunging its hero into a revenge-displacement grudge mission, it has the compensation of a rock-solid dramatic idea, and the intelligence to run and run with it.

Perhaps this is a tactically ruthless and designedly impersonal Bond movie, a clever tease getting us ready for the returning solvents – next time round – of charm, humour and eccentricity

I get that this new Bond is supposed to be more brutal and vicious, but is he also brain dead and stupid?

The emotional power, intelligence and sheer stylishness of Casino Royale has been lost amidst the noisy blur of sub-Bourne action sequences.

Bond gets his cards frozen yet travels from Austria to Italy somehow. He teams up with a guy he hated and thought had betrayed him to get some shitty help. And the guy dies and is dumped (literally). The opera scene has no relevance except to lead on to another shooting scene.

This was like a high gadget hindi movie with a hot female lead and an actor that loves to kill. I’m pretty sure the Indian heros couldn’t have matched up to Daniel Craig, but seriously, watch Casino Royale again and wait for the next Bond movie, you can pass up on this one. You can oogle at Olga with these pictures, that’s what I did once I got back.

Isn’t she lovely?

all top on Alltop!

If you haven’t heard of Alltop yet, then you are missing out on the best website in years to give you an aggregated content.

Alltop is basically your destination for “ALL THE TOP Blogs/websites” around the net talking about a particular topic. Let’s say you wanted to know about India for example. By clicking on http://india.alltop.com, you instantly get access to some of the best websites on India. Whether it’s the news about India, changes in India etc, you get it all on one page (someday I’ll get this website on, as soon as I figure out my area of expertise).

As an avid aggregator fan (I work for a travel search aggregator – iXiGO.com, I love using Google Reader as an RSS aggregator), naturally I spent a lot of time on the website. I liked the initial zen look a lot more than the current one (mainly because the new one’s seems complicated), but you got to hand it to Guy to pick up the best people to do this job – Electric Pulp.

Guy Kawasaki is behind this website, just like he started truemors and some of people I know are already on to it. He’s got a new book out called Reality Check as well and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. His previous one called “Art of the start” remains one of my favourites of today. Give it a visit, I’m going to post my best picks in the next post (I recommend the Egos section…)