Goal: To improve physical & Mental Resilience / Happiness Maximization
Understand the factors affecting physical performance and factors producing particular emotional/mental state
Trackers Acquired: Fitbit One, Jawbone UP 2 & iPhone 4S
Tracking Variables:
Quality of Sleep (A)
Hours Slept (A)
Mood (M)
Energy Level (M)
Steps taken (A)
Calories Consumed (M + A)
Calories Burned (A)
Nutrition Intake (M + A)
Water Intake (M)
Body Weight (A)
A - Automated Data Collection / M - Manual Entry
Substance selected:
Fish Oil 1000mg Omega-3 / 2 a day
Whey Protein 60g portion / on day of workouts
Multivitamin A,E,C,B1,B2,B3,B6,B12,K / one a day
Vitamin D - 10 / one a day
Caffeine / Red Bull / 3 times a week
Activities:
Running / 5 days a week
Core Strengthening exercises / 3 days a week
Music
Inspiration content
DIY prototyping
Experiment notes: Continously collect data on all the above variables and try to identify correlation between variables. Also calculate the likelihood of a true causal relationship
In the coming weeks, I will update on the data collection, experiment performed and results
from XKCD
All for one thing, performance & happiness maximization.
Who really loves you. You can be damn sure that the people who are there for you when you most need help are the ones that really do love you. It’s easy to love someone when they’re happy and breezing through life. It’s more difficult when that person is so stuck in pain they barely have any love to give. Please remember that the people who really, truly, unconditionally love you, will still have love to give to you, even if you’re temporarily unable to give it back - From thoughtcatalog.com
Exponential technologies are brewing everywhere and at this rate it looks like technology singularity is inevitable. After a lot of reading (abundance, singularityhub..) and watching (transcendent man, solve for X, the singularity..) quite a large amount of videos, I started thinking about where do we see the early signs of things gaining extraordinary momentum. I guess Data Centers can be one of the places to look for.
Having spending most of my time thinking about data centers, there are many areas where 10X improvement is happening not 10%. Almost all technology companies are pushing the envelope for leapfrog improvement not the usual 10%.
Consider the exponential increase in memory density (RAM) of servers. We are about to hit the TB territory and enabling new technologies like in-memory computing. EX : Cisco UCS
Companies like EMC are routinely shipping 10x improvement in storage capacity and performance. A million IOPS in a single system which is unheard of before. It fuels new technologies like realtime analytics, ultra low latency applications
Most Data Center backbone networks leaped from 1GbE to 10GbE/40GbE. Already 100GbE backbones are getting developed.
Systems like vBlock packs amazing density (Recently seen 40 racks migrated to 3 vBlock racks) more than 10X improvement in speed to deploy and big power efficiency
Hardware is nothing without software advancements. Virtualization is a huge leap for computing. The same disruption is coming to the whole data center & you might have heard about the term - Software Defined Data Center. Lot of companies are pushing the Cloud technologies and also API-fication of the world. Technologies are more accessible and getting cheaper than ever.
The real challenge will be using these technologies to solve the biggest problems of the world which visionaries would have already thinking of.
Data Center technologies are accelerating and there is truly abundance.
It's almost 30 days after landing in Liverpool, UK.
UK is beautiful and all the following ones are comments form Liverpool & may not represent rest of the UK
People used to talk about difference in culture between North, Midlands & South but mind u guys before I reach Salem from Sivakasi you can experience hundred gradients of culture. So I can take this one
UK is frugal - Hotel rooms r tiny, people prefer hatchbacks, no luxury like in the US, u ll see more dyson airblades than tissue papers
Didn't see sunlight for a month.. so don't forget to bring your Vitamin D or end up in depression
Coffee tastes good, desserts have right amount of sugar, food tastes better and people carve for spicy stuff here. Naan & Chicken Tikka are seen everywhere in any supermarket shelves.
Nandoos s vry popular & it tastes awesome here than in Bangalore.
People r shy or not interested in you most of the time. But when approached u can get help. Be prepared to say many Thank you than in the US
Opening an bank account is ultra tough & managed to get an offshore account in the end (never thought I will get an offshore so soon n life)
Credit cards from India & US can't be used here. They need something called a CHIP & PIN. Handled cash after a long time instead of plastic & collected multiple kilograms of coins
people r not gadget oriented or materialistic. but food & football matters here.
stuff costs so much & an iphone is cheaper in India than here if you keep complaining about it
pedestrians need to be careful here. But unlike in India, you may be hit by an Audi or BMW more probably. so luxury in accident
turn on TV.. you will end up seeing Brian Cox, Rachel & team top gear more than anyone else.
No cubicles, only flat desks & that's a culture shock to me.
be prepared to answer tough questions at work, sometimes very straight
& I never know that I can live opposite to an apple store
Disclaimer:I work for EMC India CoE and the robot is result of annual innovation showcase conducted by EMC globally. The robot in particular is incubated by EMC India CoE. The robot is created by the team - Vivek, Arun, Ravi and Maddy with guidance from EMC India Technical leadership.
EMC 's DATA CENTER ROBOT
Data Center energy efficiency & sustainability is getting industry wide attention and becoming an imperative. EMC takes sustainability very seriously. Every year, the innovation showcase invites new ideas for sustainability at EMC. The robot is an offspring of Innovation showcase.
This idea is to build a low cost platform to monitor environmental parameters in a data center. We initially planned to take an arduino with DS18B20 temp sensors around & build a temperature map of the data center. But we need to take care of the indoor location information as well with this method. That looked tedious & error prone. It is a good thermal detector but not good to build a thermal map. So we brainstormed with our team and some one joked about putting it on a Roomba & driving it around. The idea looked frugal because either you can put hundreds of sensors in your data center or take few sensors & walk around. Both are different in technical perspective but the later approach which is very low cost & good enough for quick data center cooling fixes.
We brainstormed a bit on individual systems to build such a robot. We identified off the shelf components for each sub-system. We selected iRobot create for driving platform, arduino for sensor interfacing, DS18B20 temp sensors, Webcam for remote navigation and a netbook for Wifi connectivity.
Robot BoM :
Windows Netbook
USB Webcam
iRobot create with Advanced Battery Pack
Arduino UNO
DS18B20 Sensors
PVC pipe
Pipe Holder fixed to iRobot base
iRobot control cable + serial - USB convertor
Total cost : 200$ (without laptop)
A
typical data center should run anywhere between 18.C to 27.C as per
ASHRAE (revised frequently & changed now). The lower the temperature (below recommended),
higher (above recommended) will be the energy consumption and higher the temperature there will be
a problem of equipment availability. Running the data center at optimum
temperature is a challenging technical effort. Collecting temperature and
humidity data requires array of sensors. The collected data will be analyzed
for opportunities for saving.
The prototype, consists of 3 sensors mounted to a PVC tube as per ASHRAE recommendations
on measurement points. The Robot was also given remote navigation capability
using cameras & remote control software. The Robot collects temperature
data using 3 digital sensors & relay it through a Wi-Fi access point for
post-processing. An EMC algorithm will convert the temperature data
into a thermal map.
The thermal map can be used to easily identify the hot & cold spots of the data center aisles with location information. Fixing a simple cooling leak or a missing blanking panel will save a lot of energy.
We used data center tiles as the standard unit of measurement for navigation. There are two navigation modes - remote control & autonomous.
Remote control uses an opensource software over wifi & live video is streamed as well.
Autonomous mode uses a different software which can take the data center layout as input and navigate in a cycle.
Please contact us for the source code & building instructions
EMC's Annual Innovation Showcase: Our Innovation Showcase is a competition that invites EMC teams or individual employees to submit ideas for solutions to company or customer challenges. The Showcase generates breakthrough ideas for technical innovations and business process improvements that will help EMC, our customers and the Information Technology industry continue to thrive over the long term.
This is a multi-part series on being Innovative. I will share my experience on inspiration for being innovative, tools, the need & leverage etc over a series of few posts.
Most of the time innovation is all about the state of mind while solving a problem. An inspiration system will put you into the right state.
#1 rule - find, build & refresh your inspiration system
An inspiration source can be anything that gives a mental / emotional jolt to you. You need to build a library of them
It can be anything below. The library can't be built in a day but start on now.
Substance - Coffee, RedBull, Booze etc. Identify the substance which works for you.
Music - A song or part of song which gives you the kick, Trance, Ambient, House works best
Videos - ADs, TED, Documentaries, Steve Jobs speech etc
Articles - Start collecting digital & paper articles, newspaper cuts etc
Punchkins - Start collecting onliners that rocks (use evernote to organize)
Compliments, Hurts & Ridicules - Think about Compliments, hurts & ridicules that you got from GF, teacher, parents, relatives, friends
Dream about your ambition or long term goals getting achieved
Pets, Kids, perfumes there are so many out there..
keep the stuff above updated. Constantly flush & renew. Your innovation system will be scattered & don't bother about that. Just try to organize them & pick the right one when needed.
Whenever you need to generate ideas, find inspiration using your system. Push yourself when you are giving up using the system.
Remember creative energy is an exhaustible resource & highly depend on your life circumstance as well. Your items in your system may not work at times when you are tired, depressed etc
MODERATE YOUR PLEASURABLE EXPERIENCES !! Use your inspiration system only when it's required.
I am out of a serious lymph node complication after taking medications for the last one year. I used to get random blackouts in stressful or joyful situations. Physically I was exhausted, lost my stamina, endurance and not much productive either. I fought that out with everybody's help & becoming physically resilient now. I moved up from walking 100mts to running 10kms a week
While I was getting out of that, emotional & mental me was not all right.
I will be very happy & super excited in one moment. Then down to clueless & sadness.
Grand ambitions & Clear execution path in one moment. Then down to fuzzy future & dead end.
Feeling guilty & Feeling shame at times.
I would feel like I couldn't even stand, breathe, don't know where it is paining but whole body will pain.
The tipping point is my UK trip - there was something quite not good when I boarded the plane. I couldn't sleep & felt disoriented. I was not excited as I used to be to visit a new country or about my new career challenge either. I just wanted to reach the hotel & take some rest. When I got inside & closed the door, I felt like a slap. I felt so sad & dark for no reason. I would occasionally gasp for air. Tears were coming for no reason. Roller coaster moods all the time.
The things got worse with every passing day. I can't sleep without tv on, not interested in moving around the city. I couldn't tolerate it so much, I went to see a doc. I was asked a lot of questions about how I feel & quite a lot of background on job, medical, relation, financial status etc. Then they declared it is "depression" after diagnosis.
Freak.. I was reading so many stories about depression including Aaron Swartz, Jody through Zite (I don't know why Zite recommended it to me, may it is too smart that I might need it). But in my case, I never felt suicidal (like others) but felt like life is a dead end many times. I am better off than others suffering from it due to my loved ones. Something inside me is giving me a whole reboot after going through all this.
Circumstances of life can have profound effect on us . Most of the time, those circumstances are created by the choices that we made. It includes health, relationship, financial, professional choices. You can be financially broke, love of your life ditched you, your multi year project got scrapped, or failed miserably in any of your initiatives - all will have effect & it is unavoidable to leave without a scar.
I am thankful that medical science is more advanced & lot of experiences nowadays to learn from in combating depression. But the first step in combating depression is admitting you have one to your loved ones. AR Rahman music, Redbull, friends talk, booze, motivational videos all compliment in recovery but only way is to get professional help & therapy.
I am just building mental resilience to not get into the red zone. I am more conscious of my purpose in life now. Finding the purpose (easily said than done) of life is the way to go if you don't have one. You can't do that in a day & need to persist.
The business of life is to move forward & with a purpose.
Being an Apple user for the last 4 years & I had successfully integrated Mac, iPad & iPhone to my personal & professional life. Many times you will suffer the lack of interfacing to other set of users & devices.. like you can't read SD card from your camera, can't connect your MBA to an ethernet port, connecting MBP to a LCD panel with HDMI & simple things like this.
Over time I had burnt cash to acquire certain set of cables & connectors. You will have always a choice of buying it from apple if you are an early adoptor or wait for OEMs to come up with the same thing at a lower price later..
For iPad/iPhone :
Camera Connection Kit, SQUARE credit card reader, Digital AV adapter
Camera Connection Kit : For reading SD card & Connecting to digital camera/card readers using USB
SQUARE : For taking credit cards from friends who says no cash but card. You may pay a commission if you swipe your Indian card & of course you need an US bank account
Digital AV : Connect to your LCD/projector panel using HDMI. Works well with HDTVs (tested with Sony Bravia & Panasonic Vierra)
For MBP/MBA :
Minidisplay to HDMI, DVI & VGA (all you know). Mono price sells it for very cheap than apple
Of course buy this stuff for MBA or for sure you will be left out without connectivity many times. I am not sure about buying OEM stuff as many complained of having problems. Remember it is just 100MB/s not your giga bit.
The future is going to be super for iOS devices with the introduction of red park cable. You can develop your own devices for your iPad or iPhone.
With the lot of stuff going over cloud, we may not fiddle around with SD, USB etc but there is a long way to go. Same with display tech as well. I am amazed to see videos & music streaming to my Vierra panel with Dlna player for iPad. No cables & it is seemless. Whole new generation of AirPlay enabled devices are coming out as well.
The future is going to be awesome with less connectors to carry around
It's the best business book that I had read recently.... It doesn't matter if you are an entrepreneur or a game changer in a large corporation, BMGEN do wonders for visualizing your business model & communicating it better.
I had created BMGEN building blocks for using it in your presentation. The content is the property of Alex, businessmodelgeneration.com
This project is the first step in creating a low cost lane assist / pedestrian warning system for Indian roads. The objective is to detect cars with just a webcam & roborealm. That was achieved here with a Microsoft Webcam & a Core 2 Duo laptop. Roborealm is wicked cool & damn easy to use. By the way it doesn't need any programming experience.
from XKCD