Blogs are the new black

Interestingly, as I’m poking around the market looking for my next job, I’m being told by many people that I should start a blog.  I find this funny since I’ve had a blog since 2001 and there’s nothing special about it, but apparently blogging for professional visibility is all the rage now. 

Unfortunately this blog is rather . . . unprofessional, so it would probably make sense for me to get a new one and spout internet industry profundities from there.  But what the hell?  I’m a firm believe that injecting a little bit of private information into the public domain is sketchy, but injecting *a lot* of private information actually ultimately builds trust (like your credit report).  So for the time being, I’ll keep blogging here.

Also interesting: one of the reasons I stopped blogging was time constraints, but also the Chinese government broke me of the habit.  I was in China this summer and their firewalls blocked my access.  Then I queued up thoughts and never got around to posting them.  Then I stalled.  Oh well. Stupid China.  Free speech most frequently crumples under the tyranny of apathy and laziness.

Hong Kong

I’m in Hong Kong right now, Asia’s answer to New York. Plenty of skyscrapers, lots of restaraunts, and 3 bedroom apartments that cost $1.3M and are smaller than my high-school bedroom. I really like it. Basically the place is several little islands with steep tree-covered hills and skyscrapers jam-packed into the thin strips of landfill between the water and the mountain. So you get fantastic skylines and views all over the place, plus lots of green and waterfront.

Interestingly, this may be the most popuplation dense place I’ve ever been, with half the population of New York squeezed into about 1/8th the land. Like the LA freeway in rush hour, there are many sidewalks that are simply unnavagable at peak times. My New York weaving and dodging skills are inadequate here.

Since everyone’s apartments are too small, the wealthy residents spend most meals in innumerable excellent eateries, coffee shops and bars; sampling a fusion of some of the world’s best cuisine. Tomorrow’s objective: dim sum.

Also interesting: getting here from New York involved a direct, 17-hour flight that seemed to pass directly over the North Pole. I wanted to spend more time checking out the top of Greenland, but the flight attendants kept hassling me about letting light into the plane. I can’t wait for global warming to kick in and finally make all these Greenland real estate investments I’ve been making to pay off.

Time zone: GMT+1

Now I’m back in Prague, after three harrowing days in New York, a 7 hours-on-the-tarmac flight out of JFK, and many bus, tram and subway rides later. Now that the exchange rate is 15 crowns to the dollar (as opposed to 36 when I first came in 2002), Prague is a rather expensive place to be. Taxi ride home: $25. Drink at the fancy hotel bar: $16. Internet: 1 crown a minute. Hence the brevity of this post.

In essence, the inflation-happy low-interest-rate US Fed has been robbing me of my extravagant Czech vacation, and you my reader, of blog post reading pleasure. Curse you Greenspan Legacy!

India post-mortem part 1

A lot of people have been asking me what I thought of India, and my emerging stock response is that I liked it OK, but I just couldn’t deal with the random failure. Essentially, most things in India work 85% of the time. So you can’t discount them altogether as being dysfunctional and work around them. Lots of times the phone or the power or the laundry service will work as it should. But at random, fairly frequent intervals, systems will break down, things won’t work, and there you’ll be, wondering how you’ll get clean clothes or make a phone call or get into the city or whatever it is you’re trying to do. It’s not chaos. Lots of people describe India as chaotic. It’s not that. It’s spontaneous dysfunction. Like little chaos tornados frequently touch down, and whatever you planned to do that day becomes irrelevant.

Presumably native Indians evolve systems to cope with these frequent little failures. They develop a laid-back attitude, or probably have several levels of back-up plans for any given endeavor. I’m sure the phenomenon is manageable with the appropriate foresight. But as an American who’s used to picking up a phone and hearing a dial tone with 99.9999% confidence, it’s tough to handle, and sufficiently aggravating to make me lukewarm on the place.

rocking palo alto

hmm. apparently i’d forgotten that my internship stipend didn’t cover my hotel / car expense while in california – so I rented a room off craigslist to stay on the cheap. now I’m living in some teenager’s bedroom while he’s off in school, sharing a bathroom with the family’s two other kids. free wifi though.

Birth of geography

A couple notes on the Internet front:

1) it’s difficult to understate the quality difference between being here in Silicon Valley, next to the servers serving the content, vs. being in Bangalore with many many thousands of miles in between.  The speed of light is not fast enough. 

2) Bangalore Internet is “tailored” to show me India content.  A google search invariably produces all this local Indian nonsense, instead of the US top ten PE deals in 2007 that I wanted to find. 

3) In the US you perceive the Internet to be constantly updating – e-mails stream in all day, news headlines update, things happen.  But in India, the Internet dies for the day while the Americans sleep.  You come into work and your inbox has 50 e-mails, but nothing new all day.  There are no blog posts or instant messages.  It is static. 

4) the US internet works most of the time, and mostly pretty well.  In India, there are constant outages, slowdowns, service problems.  It’s not the warm happy feeling of being constantly plugged into the grid.  It’s a probability: 80% of the time, you’ll get what you need to happen.  Other times, bring a book.

5) US websites use your IP address to know you’re coming from India, and are reluctant to accept your credit card orders or serve you streaming TV.  Indians are second-class internet citizens, unaware of the content they’re missing.

6) Ad targeting breaks down, and keeps serving me ads for US citizenship services, and Hindu dating sites.

Goin’ back to Cali

Long time no blog.  There are several reasons for this: 1) The internet in Bangalore became so slow it was unuseable, and/or it crashed.  2) I was busy flying 36+ hours from India to London to LA to San Jose 3) I was busy scrambling around Indian trinket shops trying to find that one perfect wooden elephant with the carved elephant inside.  All the shops have them, now I have at least 10 versions of the same.

Since my glorious American return, I’ve visited Denny’s, McDonalds, Starbucks, In-n-out, and Costco within a 24-hour period.  I’ve been enjoying the various Californian sights including: grizzled tatooed shaved-head man with a goatee, driving his pretty girlfriend around in a convertible sportscar BMW.  Paparazzi chasing a starlet’s friend through the Burbank airport.  Silicon Valley billboards for firewall equipment, network hardware, and database software.  Cars cars everywhere.  Blazing fast internet.

Now I’m in a Palo Alto cafe, about to do some presentation writing, e-mailing and general geekery.  It’s good to be back, I have to admit.

Brain factory

Image via Wikipedia

One interesting thing Infosys does is hiring.  They hire thousands of employees per month.  Thousands.  They’re past 90,000 employees now, and growing at 30% per year.  To handle this phenomenon, they’ve built factory-like training facilities like this one in Mysore: NYT Article. Employees come by the hordes and gruel their way through a four-month live-in training regime.  They’re housed in more than 15,000 rooms on campus (making Infosys the largest hotel chain in India).  Then they’re stamped with the Infoscion seal of approval and sent forth to program the world’s mundane business applications.  The joke around Bangalore is that the security signs at Infosys say “Warning: Trespassers will be hired.” 

Also interesting is the enormous strain these huge employers put on the public infrastructure of their cities.  There’s a bus depot taking thousands of Infosys employees around the city everyday.  Once the bus caravans hit the streets at 5:30-6:00, traffic is bottlenecked behind them until at least 7:30.  City infrastructure can’t keep up with demand, so the companies themselves take a very proactive role in pressing for better roads, etc.  It’s not clear, with their Special Economic Zones, how much the tech companies actually shoulder in terms of a tax burden, but I’m guessing it’s not enough to pay for the necessary improvements. 

The processes and scale of this undertaking are truly impressive.  Not sure how much longer they can grow like this . . .

New photos posted

Behold!

Around town and Nandi Hills: http://flickr.com/photos/brianvladi/sets/72157606056206905/

Goa: http://flickr.com/photos/brianvladi/sets/72157606016003071/

Optimal Accent?

I’ve decided that the reason Indians can speak so fast is that their English pronunciation is heavy on the consonants. They really enunciate their syllables, rather than swallowing them like most Americans would. Consequently, a constant stream of hyper fast words is intelligible (well, not to me, but to them).

Along a similar line, I’m beginning to wonder which basic English accent is going to rule supreme in 80 years or so.  I’d say American English has a head start in terms of global media consumption, but the Indians certainly have demography on their side.  I bet my childrens’ children will aspire to a perfect Delhi pronunciation.