Tag: gtalk

Our documented lives

I think I’ve confessed here several times that I like reading my old blogposts. In fact, I like reading my old blogposts from 2006 onwards – there was an inflexion point towards the end of 2005, and I hate my posts written before that. It was almost I was a completely different person.

Anyway, of late, these nostalgia trips have taken a different direction. Firstly, in 2006-10, I used GTalk fairly extensively, and most conversations are still archived (except for some people who explicitly turned off the saving). So once in a while I pick a random person (most often it’s the person who’s now my wife, and most of my GTalking with her was before we had even met) and check out my conversations with him/her.

Sometimes it just sends me on a bout of nostalgia. Sometimes it reminds me of what I (and these people I used to talk to) was like back then, and wonder how I’ve changed and so forth. At other times these posts remind me of what was “hot gossip” back then (yes, I was a major gossipmonger in my younger days), which, thanks to the fundamental fleetingness of gossip,  I normally don’t remember. When I remember such gossip, it’s a fun exercise to reconcile the subjects of gossip with their present selves.

Another activity I take up randomly from time to time is reading people’s blogs. Some of these have been mostly taken private as these people in question have embarked on successful corporate careers. I still have my LiveJournal account, so that helps me access some of these blogs (and others have kindly shared passwords to their now-private blogs with me).

The kind of trips these take me on is similar to what the old chats inspire – some nostalgia, some recollection of what different people were like back then and how they’ve turned out (I also make sure I read the comments), catching up on gossip of that day and all such.

In a way, I’m quite glad that so many of us live such documented lives! In that sense I quite hate Twitter and Facebook, for it’s bloody hard to search for stuff there (except for Facebook’s this day that year feature), and with a lot of documentation having moved there from blogs and GTalk, it’s quite sad!

PS: Sometimes I indulge in these nostalgic activities jointly with my wife, and occasionally it’s not fun, since she ends up discovering a part of my history which she didn’t know existed. Documentation has its downsides as well!

PPS: It makes me wonder what “oral histories” (I’ve always regarded them as a fraud concept, but I’ll save my description of those for another day) will look like one or two generations down the line, when so much of our documented histories will be available, if we choose to make them available.

Intellectual discussions

So this afternoon a friend came home and we had a nice long discussion on a lot of things. And then it was time for him to leave. But by then, I was in the frame of mind where I was craving intellectual discussions, but there were no avenues for me to execute!

I remember this time five years or so ago, when each day when I would come back home from work, I would open Google Talk and initiate five or six conversations with friends who were online. Some would be stillborn, as the counterparty wouldn’t reply, but my carpet bombing would work and there would be 2-3 conversations that would fructify, and I would have a nice time talking!

Unfortunately, with the decline of Google Talk, there are no avenues for such discussions now. In fact, what killed it was the move to mobile – the original point of Google Talk was that you could signal that you were available by logging on. And so when you signalled thus, someone would ping you, and you would have a conversation.

By moving Google Talk to the mobile phone, where you were online by default, it meant that you were shown online even when you weren’t in a mood to chat. People would occasionally ping you, but then give up. It was like the case of the shepherd boy crying “wolf”. So a green button next to someone’s name on Google Talk means nothing now, in terms of their availability to chat!

Other chatting mechanisms, such as WhatsApp are no better, being “mobile first” and thus “always logged in”. You don’t know who is available when, and who you can possibly ping to have a good conversation.

And then five years back, I stopped logging on to Google Talk and initiating five different conversations. I started logging on to Twitter, instead, and making conversation with people on my timeline . Unfortunately, twitter has been ruined, too. It is so full of outrage, and some of such outrage conducted by otherwise smart people, that I’ve radically cut down on the number of people I follow.

As the world solves some problems, it un-solves others, and creates yet others. And there was a time when I would blog, and visit other blogs, to have intellectual discussions. And now people have stopped commenting on blogs, also!

Disconnected Life

The last forty eight hours were spent without internet connection, perhaps the first time I’ve spent an extended period of time at home without being connected. At first, it was incredibly peaceful, as without distractions it gave me enough time to finish off in 2 days all the 3 books (none of them very heavy, mind you, and all were “funda books”) that I’d brought home from the British Library. What was incredible was the amount of time I had in general, for everything. With the internet on, there are way too many distractions. Tweetdeck buzzes every minute. You are keen to “unbold” every mail as soon as it arrives in your inbox. Out of sheer habit, you periodically check out facebook and cricinfo. Lots of time gets wasted, no doubt.

I’d be lying, however, if I were to seay that I didn’t miss the net at all. Foremost was the need to check email, which I did though my phone periodically. I didn’t bother, however, unbolding all the stuff that was there. I only checked the mails that I thought were important, and the rest were “cleared” after I got back my connection this morning (the outage was because I’d applied for a new data plan, and the worthies at BSNL (bless them) decided I should go through some pain for having put them though the pain of changing the plan).

Then, there was some research I was trying to do yesterday, and I was looking for some data, which I wasn’t able to get since there was no internet. I went out of touch with my usual gtalk/twitter friends, but since it was only for a day I don’t really mind that. Most importantly, I missed regular updates of Ranji trophy scores, since those weren’t available anywhere else. It was too much of a hassle to be only via the phone (I don’t have 3G) for extended periods of time. There was also a lot of writing I did in the period, and all those blog posts are now sitting on my hard disk. I’ll upload them one by one with sufficient gaps so that I don’t flood you.

The worst part of no internet was the loss of the “option value” to stay connected. The best part was that it gave me a lot of time to do whatever I else really wanted to do without all the distractions the internet brings. I hope to go on an “internet break” for some time every day, switching off my modem for a few hours. Hopefully that’ll help me make better use of my time. For now, I’m glad to have the 4Mbps connection!

Introducing Pinky

So given that the new missus has moved into my life, and my home (and to add some cheese “and my hort”), I think it is quite appropriate that she moves into this blog also. You might have already seen her first post, which she wrote this afternoon. You can expect her to be more prolific in the days going forward. Till then, you can read her old writings here.

This might be a good opportunity to tell the world about how we met. It all started out with this post on my blog (I seriously miss those good old pre-twitter days, when I could peacefully write blog posts that were one line long; keeping with the tradition, the missus refuses to get onto twitter). And then she happened to like this one. Orkut.. GTalk.. Tharkari.. Gandhi Bazaar.. … ………………… Marriage.

Coming back, both of us will be writing here, on the same page. The same feed that you are currently subscribing to will enable you to subscribe to both our writings. The first line of the feed has the name of the author, and in any case I think our writing styles are so different that you should be able to figure out who has written what.

Recession notes

Over the weekend I spoke to a few friends, over phone and GTalk. And enquired about their business. Some interesting insights:

  • On Saturday, I spoke to this guy who is a banker in the City of London. He says that one major fallout of the global economic crisis is that the financial markets have become highly inefficient.
  • Knowing that they won’t get bonuses, he says, bankers have no incentive to arbitrage these inefficiencies. Sadly, people refuse to believe that investment bankers perform socially useful and productive work
  • Yesterday, I was talking to this guy who runs a manufacturing SME. He says that apart from one really bad month (January) when orders fell over 50%, he is doing quite well.
  • Thanks to the downturn, a few manufacturing shops have shut down in various places in Europe. Now, the erstwhile customers of these erstwhile manufacturing shops are looking towards India for their sourcing. My friend is hopeful of bagging one such contract.
  • Thanks to the downturn, firms are integrating their manufacturing. For example, a prominent stationery manufacturer has decided to manufacture 100% of its products from its plants in India. My friend has been a long-term supplier to the india plant of this particular manufacturer, and now expects to get more business from them.

Interesting stuff overall.