Today, most of us are spending so much time online and on our smart devices that I feel that the value of physical items in our lives has decreased a lot. A few days ago, a friend took me to a store in the 29th street mall. It was a toy store that opened just for the holidays and on that day, everything in the store was 50% off. Needless to say, most of the store was empty, toys and funny calendars having been bought by people taking advantage of the sale. I bought a nice glass chess set on the cheap and then had a chat with the store owner. Apparently, this was a seasonal store that was closing today. She told me that about eleven hundred such stores open across the country during the holiday season and this one was closing that day. Everything that was left today was going back to the factories. I looked around the store for a while. Most of the good stuff that I’d seen in the shop a few days ago was already gone, but a lot of really interesting games and toys were still there.
philosophy
There are 67 posts filed in philosophy (this is page 5 of 7).
My First Fourteener: The Cheats way to an Existential Dilemma
Today, I made my way to my first fourteener on Pikes peak. My friends and Colorado residents who are reading this will already have guessed that I did not actually complete this monumental feat on foot. I sat on a cog rail for about an hour and half each side and journeyed comfortably to the top of the mountain at 14,110 feet. Regardless of my blatant disregard for physical pain, there was something profound about the place that made me feel rather insignificant while also making me feel part of a greater humanity. The sheer height of the mountain gets your blood racing (as much as it can in sub-zero temperature) and makes you think hard about what your life means in the sea of lives that you are aware teems in the cities below. You can see far and wide, feeling the expanse of the land around you, the great nation of America which has been given an amazing gift in this diverse and challenging piece of the continent. Continue reading
Reading about the past
It’s a cold, windy morning. I am waiting for the bus, sitting on a frozen bench. My face is burning with the gushes of wind that are blowing at me from every direction. My mind is burning with the words in front of me. I am reading a LongRead about the MacDonald murders that happened in 1970 and have haunted the annals of law since the past 40 years. The story is incredulous but something I’ve read and heard many times over. The length to which judicial process allows a person to go to prove their innocence is amazing. I cannot say whether Jeffrey MacDonald is guilty or not, except for the fact that everything in the article points towards it. But what matters is the strength of human resolve. Continue reading
Save yourself from the Ephemeral
As users of the Internet, we change a lot. We move email IDs, we jump from one social networking fad to another, we change bookmarking and read-it-later sites and even crash, delete or just forget blogs that we write on.
Most of the stuff I’ve done in the past 10 years or so on the Internet has been pretty personal. Emails, Orkut or Facebook where privacy settings allowed me to block external users or bookmarking sites that were private by default. But recently, most of my contribution to the Internet has been public – twitter and App.net, my blogs and even my bookmarking has been public. So is true for most of us out there. With the shift in social networks’ view of what data should be totally private, there’s a lot of data that’s in the public domain. This also means that there’s equally that much data that can be lost or can stagnate when an eventuality occurs – a web service shuts down because of acquisition or drying up of funds, your blog crashes and you have to start from scratch, you leave a social network and even though you download all your data and invite all your connections to the new one, some don’t join or you can’t upload any of that data anywhere else (how many social networks out there are interchangeable? None.) or maybe you just stop using a site or service and that data just sits there, alone and forgotten (just ask my bookmarks on del.icio.us). Continue reading
A critique of religion
Recently, while reading a Wikipedia article about a Star Wars villain called Khan Noonien Singh, I stumbled across a reference to John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. Walking that treacherously enlightening path of Wikipedia linked articles, I reached the page about a Frenchman named Collin de Plancy and his book called “Dictionnaire Infernal”. This is a book published in the 1800s, classifies and describes 69 demons according to Christianity and provides detailed drawings of their physical characteristics.
The thing about Shoes.
Today, after I came back from office, I took out my wallet and keys and kept them on the side table. Then, as I was about to take off my shoes, I realized something – I realized the value of wearing shoes. You see, whenever we have a long or an important task ahead of us, we get ready. If it is a mental task like an interview or an exam, we cool our minds and prepare for the next few hours. When we are going for a trek or for camping, we pack the right gear and wear the right kind of boots. Yes, boots.
I realized that to me, wearing shoes means that I am ready for action. Many people in my family and even in my friends often tell me that my practice of wearing shoes in the house long after the day has ended, is kind of irritating. Well, I got this habit from my Dad and as I come to think of it, he is also always prepared for action. 🙂
Being prepared for anything is always important. It is not necessary to wear shoes in your sleep, but mentally, your shoes should always be on and ready for action, because in life, preparation could mean survival.
A Quick Note about the Wisconsin shootings
I’m not one to comment on politics. But events such as the Wisconsin shootings disturb the mind and make you ask questions that sometimes you do not want the answer to.
For those who are looking for updates, follow SepiaMutiny’s twitter account here
Or WISN’s Live Blog here
The questions that I’d like to ask but perhaps do not want the answer to are –
- Why attack religion? Religion is sacrosanct. People take a day out of the week to spend with their families and friends. Besides, isn’t Sunday God’s day in nearly every religion?
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Why attack Sikhs? Do you understand who they are and where they come from? Do you understand their philosophy? Most importantly, do you understand that they are not the perpetrators of violence that you are fighting on foreign shores?
I hope to not get the answers to these questions. I just want them, who act violently, to think about these questions.
Why not this Life?
I was thinking today about how some people spend their entire lives exploring the wild or climbing mountains, not caring about money or taxes on different things, products, or even the energy they consume. This, as opposed to people like us who spend their days in offices and nights dreaming of being our own boss. Every life has its own hardships. Then I thought of those who paint or sing, spending their life in worship of their arts. They often live in poverty, not knowing fame or fortune, but knowing that they are doing what they love.
Why can’t the ordinary person be like that? Why can’t we just break free of death and taxes?
Maybe we can. We have just this one life. We need to use it to do everything we ever thought of doing, otherwise it’s a life well wasted. No point in that.
So, don’t do that job that pays better instead of that which you love. Don’t be stuck in the traffic when you really want to be climbing rocks. Don’t sit writing financial statements when you really want to be writing poetry!
Or maybe I am thinking these thoughts because I have a job and know it pays off the debt.
Open Source Ideas
There are a lot of ideas floating around on the Internet. In fact, the Internet seems to be the single most important communication medium that got people’s voices out in the open. Most of the ideas that we see on the Internet are in some state of execution. People have thought of services, networks, tools or just fun topics and have built websites around them. Those ideas are in a great state. They have been conceived and brought to some level of fruition. But what about ideas without a parent? In other words, what about ideas that have been conceived, but the conceiver doesn’t have the resources – time, money or programming knowledge, to execute them? Do these ideas lay dormant or is something done about them?
A general trend on the Internet is that of asking help. In fact, most earliest forms of the Internet were based exactly on this – scientists, engineers or geeks looking for help to achieve a goal. The Internet thus is a great place to go and ask for whatever it is that you need. If its money that you need, there’s a solution for that. If you’re looking for knowledge or experience, you’ll get that too. So what do you do when you have an idea but lack one of the few things needed to bring that idea into the world?
Money
If money is what you’re after and you have all the technical know-how and the time to do it, you’re in luck. Just head over to a website like kickstarter and you can start your own project. Then, depending on how much of a following you have or the interest you can generate about the idea, you’ll get the money you need to make a wonderful reality from your fledgling ideas. Mind you, kickstarter is just one out of a thousand crowdfunding sites that will get you the money that you need. A quick search on one of my favorite software search websites reveals a comprehensive list of sites you can go to with your idea.
Kickstarter and its alternatives
Learning
Of course, money isn’t everything. Some times you just don’t have the technical know-how of how things are done. This too, is a simple task of putting the time in to learn what’s needed. Don’t know how to code? Head over to Codecademy for free lessons in programming –
Want to make your own cabinet? Learn some carpentry –
Learn Woodworking Videos | Howcast.com – Learn carpentry and how to do simple woodworking projects with the step-by-step instructions in this Howcast video series. Expert Featured Guides
Perhaps you’re not good with DJing but want to learn. You can head over to YouTube… You get my point.
Executing
That covers learning new trades to get things done. But what if after all of this learning and finding the funding, you just don’t have the time? Well, perhaps you need to visit the Digital Point Forums. You can find someone to do your job for you and you can agree on a price too –
Or perhaps, you want someone local. Then how about just advertising in Craigslist or issuing a call on Twitter for help. People do come forward.
Ideating
That all talks about how easy it is with the Internet to find the right resources to actualize an idea. But what if you’ve hit a block right there? What if you’re out of ideas? You’re creative genes are bursting, you want to go ahead and make something magnificent. But, what? What to make? That’s one of the biggest issues you’ll face if you’ve not dipped a toe into creative problem solving ever before this.
Most would suggest to look around you. Indeed, this is the best way of getting ideas. Find a problem around you and start working towards a solution. It may not be original, it may not be perfect, but at least you’re doing something. Maybe you’ll approach it differently than others and something of value will come out of it. Maybe not. But at the very least, you’ll have learnt something and you would have solved a problem that you yourself or someone in your friends or family faces everyday. They’ll be thankful.
But what if?! What if you look around don’t find anything worth fixing? Perhaps people around you are already working on problems and you don’t want to disrupt their work. Perhaps you live in Utopia where everything is awesome. Then what? Once again, the Internet to the rescue!
When software first got written in the world of computers, it was done by large corporations. The kind which, at the end of the day, look at the balance sheet and decide if they’ve done well. All of this software was thus, hidden from the public’s eyes. No one should know what was the code lest they steal it and make their own software. Then someone sitting in an office, bored out of their life, had the brilliant idea to write code and release it freely and openly to the world. This was the birth of OpenSource software. Open source software comes with a special license. You as a user can look at it, run it, modify it and then pass it on, with attribution. It’s a gift to the world because way too much stuff on the Internet now happens on open source software.
Just like someone had that brilliant idea, a couple of people had another brilliant idea. They were busy people, working, building, coding or just living on. They wanted to see things happen in the world, but did not have the time or the inclination to get cracking on their ideas. Thus was born, the Open Source Idea. People on the Internet, giving away for free, the single most powerful thing in the world – an idea.
Where can you find such ideas? Everywhere! From cynical blog posts about what’s wrong with social networking to news reports about the latest problem the world is facing, it’s all about ideas. Ideas that people know need to be matured into a product, but do not have the time or the knowledge to do so. Some examples are –
When I saw this website, I was instantly struck by the name. The author is an entrepreneur and makes a living off of bringing ideas to fruition. Then why would he be asking people to steal his ideas? Simply because he has too many! Every now and then you meet a person who has his life so full that every day brings new ideas to the fore. But a person can only do so much in a day, so Andrew Magliozzi lets people have his ideas, in the hope that they’ll create something useful out of them and the world will be able to enjoy that idea in its matured form.
Dribbble – Show and tell for designers –
At the risk of sounding like a hipster, I’d say that Dribbble is one of the best things to happen to the Internet. People, in their infinite wisdom, make really crappy software. The software itself is actually nice, but the interface is so bad that one doesn’t feel like using it. By letting designers have a permanent place on the Internet, the makers of Dribbble have given a marketplace to ideas that look great. So, the next time you’re looking for an icon for your next great app, look around on Dribbble. You might find something worthwhile.
Ideas We Like | How To Split An Atom –
This is another great site. Though not officially an idea source, reading through Steve Spalding’s blog will literally open your brain to some new ideas about the Internet. It’s really worth a read.
Last, one of my favorite websites just to look at what people are doing in the world –
OpenIDEO is the epitome of open source ideas. People come together to look at a problem and everybody gives their input. In fact, you can look at their latest problem and can start contributing right away. OpenIDEO lists all their challenges and the level at which each challenge sits right now. So, you can contribute by saying your two cents about how to solve a problem or can help them along the way at any of the many steps it needs to take an idea from inception to realization. The beauty of it is that every problem takes on “big challenges for social good”.
Everybody has ideas about how to fix things. In the world we live in, it is the completion of an idea that is valued and thank god there are so many resources to help us on every step, from seeking the money to bring the idea to fruit to seeking the inspiration to develop an idea itself. I hope all my readers enjoyed this post and I hope you will look at the world as I see it – a series of problems and solutions, each following the other, until an idea becomes a reality.