Unrelated -- interesting pic from Flickr


I think I'm pretty terrible at management but observed something I found curious and useful so here it is:

We recently went through a monster workload at the Portal when we launched the Sanitation Portal (www.indiasanitationportal.org) and the Hindi Water Portal (hindi.indiawaterportal.org) in Delhi, during the same week.

As things got pretty hairy, I noticed that at different points different ways of looking at the problem became important and then vanished pretty quickly. Here are some of them. Most of these are in the nature of responses to a feeling of uneasiness that things were getting out of control:

-- earlier on it was just working on particular subitems with no particular order or structure
-- as the event came closer things became more panicky and a project management structure with task lists and time lines became necessary. Even this happened in different ways, during one week, I was just tracking things in an impressionistic way, keeping percentage completion targets and getting a sense of how much along the way I was.
-- at one point the relevant thing to do was to have a long conversation with the people involved with the project and impress on them that they would be held responsible for getting certain things done and so on.

Notes: at various points I wrote out detailed spreadsheets that tracked the relevant items for that phase, which were used only for a very short time and didn't feel relevant a few days later. An important part of the usefulness of the exercise seems to be in going through all the issues in the course of creating the tracking structure for that phase rather than having the same structure work throughout the entire course of the project. The process of seeing what the useful thing to do at a particular time came without a structure and arose internally in the mind on its own and creates a confidence of its own that its the right thing, since there is no thinking that created it.
There was a painful night before one of the launches when the feeling was of sheer terror. I guess that also counts as one of the phases, when you don't find a way of managing the situation.

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Couple of self-help links I came across:
http://litemind.com/overcoming-procrastination-self-talk/ A nice analysis of procrastination

A personal development website:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/

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I started a new blog for students of English :
http://englishfaculty.blogspot.com

My brother-in-law works in film production, and I chanced upon a notebook that gives a little bit of idea of the mechanics of how films are made. Its mildly interesting and educative, check out the video below :

A heartbreaking work of staggering genius

Well not quite, but I wanted to talk about my neice's drawings. See the above. It's of a giraffes (big giraffe and small giraffe, as she told me), in case you didn't get it. I'm really struck with how she managed to capture the essential giraffe-ness without paying attention to exact replication. Watching her sketch is amazing -- she draws fluently and confidently without hesitation, quite extraordinary I feel, for someone her age (5 or 6). And she likes to tell stories that she makes up which again I find really amazing. The stories are (as yet) quite lame, but she is so absorbed in telling them that it is clear that there is something non-trivial going on and she has a real talent for it. Presumably with time the stories will get better. Sometimes she combines the two, telling a story of what she is sketching which is a real pleasure.

Getting back to her style of drawing, it is reminscent of a couple of Picasso's painting that I like -- the Flowers one:



and the Don Quixote one:

A very Indian thing -- 5 cars parked in a row with no space between or beside, at the apt. complex where my wife's sister stays in Chennai. Does it give the US-ites among you'll nightmares ?

PIX: Unrelated, from the Sun Temple at Konarak


A bunch of new stuff from a short visit to Chennai -- will try to post things over the next few days.

First off, thoughts triggered by the railway journey:

1.) Why is it that land and sea based transport is nowhere as fast as air transport. There must be some physics principle that is at the the heart of this question. Can you identify it ?

2.) In the earlier days of rail transport there used to be pieces of rail track, 30 or 40 feet long, and bolted together (it used to be cited in physics text books as an example of expansion and contraction, that there had to be a small space here to accomadate the expansion). Yesterday in some stretches I couldn't see these boltings and the track looked to be a seamless piece. Probably there was some small welding that was not visible from the running train. I remember reading about this sometime earlier.

3.) Poll: How many of you have taken the time to figure out the mechanism that allows tracks to join up and separate. I mean the junction kind of things, where two rail tracks intersect and go on, and an incoming train on one of the tracks can switch to the other one. I confess that I only did this recently. Its quite a clever system. I wish things like this were explored early on in school, it would make the education more practical and relevant.