Category: life

Learning a new Language – An Idea

Here is an idea I was thinking about. I am planning on to have a creative idea every day of my life. A major one every week and a minor small improv every day. So, the idea goes. It’s for people who are learning a new language like me (learning Arabic). It would be a site which would create a visual flash cards for the words you want to get translated. It’s not what you imagine, let me explain.

  1. The user types in a word he wants it to be translated in some foreign language she is learning. For example, “Book” and I am trying to create a visual flash card for me.
  2. The program would then fetch the translation for that word. Which would be “kitab”. Or in Arabic – ΩƒΨͺΨ§Ψ¨
  3. Then the program would go and fetch a CC licensed images for “book” from Flickr. This is what you would be seeing.
  4. Now the user can associate this Arabic word with the image she would pick.
  5. And it gets saved into the user’s learning queue, which they can look at it anytime they want to.
  6. To add a community touch to it, you can pick out the most selected image for any given word by other people. Something like what Amazon would do suggesting a book.
  7. So, over a period of time, with enough users – the site would have established a very certain amount of images which represent a word in any particular language.
  8. Now to take it to a next level – Say I have collected these 200 words with best images that match them and I want to print them and carry them so that I can read it on my commute to my work. Bingo, the site would generate a “xml” of your learning queue and you can take it to Ink2 (disclaimer – I work at Ink2) and upload your xml and get a print of all your flash cards.
  9. Now let’s take it to another step. You must have heard about Google Gears. So what you can do is to make this app offline and sync it to the main server when it connects online. Meaning a user can create his own visual flash cards queue locally with her own photos and then sync it up with the server.

Now, I need to get back to put this idea into action and convince my boss to see gold in this! πŸ˜‰

Long time

It’s been a long time I wrote anything here on my blog. But the past 1 month has been an amazing one for me. There have been so many changes that happened and so many things that I welcome. For starters, I started reading “The Artist’s Way”. It’s an amazing book. I haven’t gone past 1st chapter yet, but the “Artist Pages” part from the 1st chapter is changing my world. Everyday, I wake up and write 3 pages of my streaming mind. It clears off my mind and helps me all day. May be that is why I didn’t had anything to write to on my blog

Another amazing thing was we happen to watch the movie “The Secret” from one of our friends. This movie completely changed my life. I have been listening to the audio book and it’s such an amazing concept. I am going to make ‘The Secret’ part of my life.

We are moving to India next month for about 6-8 months. Me and Sangita want to remember all the stories about our journey and stay there. So, today we created a new blog for our stories. It’s going to be here – http://indiastory.wordpress.com/

Programmer’s block

I am not sure if there it is well known, but I know I am going through it now. I feel like I haven’t been able to write any creative programming solution to a problem off late. Yes, I did code a lot – but none of the stuff was new, creative or challenging. It’s some old solution picked out from my memory and dished out. I am having a terrible phase of programmer’s block. I can’t think of new solutions, new problems. Any time I want to do something cool, I am hindered by my lack of skills. I have some great ideas that can be turned into good sites – but my dwindling skills in ruby on rails is stopping me. Everytime I think of my projects, I think of how I have to finish reading my RoR book.

This lock-in situation is not leading me anywhere. I am kinda blocked and I really don’t know what to do? Yes, ajax is interesting, javascript can be fun, ruby is amazing – but you enjoy them only if you are writing programs that solve real problems not just some hello world program. So, how can I pull my head out of this dirt and get started? What other tools I can use?

Learning is such an impediment sometimes. Right now the thing between me and my projects is lack of skills. I need to work more on building my skills. But when I am still building skills, I am losing interest in the subject. How can I balance the learning of tools and keep my interest in the work? How can I create creative targets for myself and achieve them?

In the book ‘Flow’ – the author mentions key ingredients of getting in flow.

  1. small sequence of tasks leading to a goal
  2. set of rules/principles that contain these tasks
  3. attention & focus on these tasks
  4. skills matching each of these tasks

I have everything except the 4th. Without skills to match my to-do project list, I feel lacking something important. Everything can’t be achieved through trial and error. How do I get over with this block? How?

Bummed out

Today turned out to be such a bummer day. I lost my temper at something very trivial in the evening. I was feeling bad about it already, then another thing came along. Since I didn’t do a good job and it’s been almost 3 months and very little progress – today I was relieved of the tech group I was part of. Bummed out. Then I came to know that the hotel I booked for my mom and relatives through Expedia was a farce. Apparently in India, they don’t honor the reservations you make online – even if you are willing to pay the amount they say! Bummed out again.

I don’t think I can take any more for today.

What is Dharma?

Swami says –

β€œWhat is Dharma? Let me summarize it. First, treat your parents with love, reverence and fortitude. Second, act as you speak, speak as you feel and do not play false to your conscience. Third, be calm and levelheaded and maintain equipoise. And finally listen to the voice within!”

Slowing down

In the past couple of weeks I have been working a little harder to reach certain goals, milestones and dreams. This has displaced my personal life a bit and also cause me extreme stress. What was surprising was that outside I was very normal, but within I was living with a feeling of rushing all the time. This caused some physical abnomalities that my body warned me about.

Now I have decided to slow down. I am following the Ayurvedic lifestyle. Sleeping early, being very careful about what I eat and regular meditation. Also abhyanga makes it much more peaceful.

This doesn’t mean that all the work I was trying to finish has disappeared. I have just slowed down and the work which I have unfinished will either be delegated or broken down into small pieces. I have a huge learning curve to jump in both Javascript and Ruby. In the coming weeks I will start my postings on my learnings

Re-vitalizing

Today I had a meeting with David after a long gap. I always come out inspired when I meet him. Even though we pretty much worked on our own, just being in that highly charged environment leaves me inspired. It revitalized me!

I have been thinking a lot about education, learning and application of learned knowledge. These 3 topics are kinda close to me. I have been planning to work on a business idea using all these 3 from the past 1 year. I think I am getting closer to it so that I can start working on it. I am always intrigued by how we learn. And how we retain and further use it. I recently came across a very comprehensive article on learning stuff – called “hacking knowledge”

http://oedb.org/library/college-basics/hacking-knowledge

So, my plan is to try out everything that is listed on it and write my own experience about it. See how I would fare in it and which tools I would add to my own toolbox.

Great Day!

Today was such a good day for me. It was warm all day. I took off from work to finish up a lot of backlogged work on various projects – just to get a hold on where things are. I was amazed as how much it changes everything when the weather is so warm. I am not a big fan of working from home, but today was totally different. I did two things different though –

1. Did Sun Salutations – a yoga procedure -in the morning.
2. Immediately start working without checking whats happening on net/blogs/news etc.

I never realized that how much sun salutations can charge me up. I just finished reading “Perfect Health” and in it Deepak Chopra talks about how exercise should give a person energy rather than sap it out of him/her. This is a super charger for me. Another thing was that I spend about 1 hr going through the news and popular links of the day etc. This kinda distracts me and I end up starting my work very late.

So, I finally managed to prepare well for my Arabic class in the evening. Over all it was such a productive and energized day. Kinda ironic that I had to take a day off to get such a day.

State of Mind

I am a learner. A constant learner. I read like 3 books at a time. Most of them I never finish, but I gather enough to enrich my mind. I am also someone who grapples with day to day activities. I have about 3 active projects going on and 5 in the ideas form. I have a task list which never ends. I am mostly thankful for having so much stuff. But being a sensitive person I am, I also tend to fall into guilt trap when I don’t live up to my expectations. I have a lot of stuff to do and my mind cannot relax – constantly reminding me how much I should be doing.

Recently while I was reading a book called “Reawakening the Spirit at Work” by Jack Hawley – I came across something very powerful. He says, if we strip off our tools, techniques etc and go ahead with the task at hand. The very primary and first tool/talent/thing we need is “State of Mind”. In other words – Our state of mind is our first tool at anytime. This is such a powerful thing. I also happen to learn from Wayne Dyer’s books that – “Change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”. Combined these 2 – I can say, we have the capacity to change the state of mind. And this has very positive effect on how I deal with things.

All I need to do is to be conscious of it. I need to be aware that my state of mind is my ultimate tool and before I use any other tool out there – I should change the state of my mind to something higher than the task at hand. This gives me a total new power and a new way to look at tasks at hand. This is also similar to what Steven Covey says about “Beginning with the end in mind”[sic]. When I think of bringing my state of mind to higher levels all I think is that I am constantly feeling how I would feel if I finish that task. This is such an empowering feeling that it changes the way I handle things or tasks.

So remember next time you have unlimited things on your list. It’s not just GTD you need – but you need a positive change in state of mind.