Welcome to An Unquiet Mind, a fountainhead of explorations at the intersection of reason and emotion.

Mahendra Palsule

December 8, 2009

Personal, blogging

19 comments

This is a good time to look at the highlights of 2009, and share some thoughts about the future.

Highlights Of 2009

This has been a busy year. 75 posts on An Unquiet Mind in 2009 with about 1,500 comments! 46 posts at MakeUseOf.com and 30 on my newly started tech blog, Skeptic Geek, both of which involve several hours of work. Have I become a writing machine? I hope not.

The biggest news was of course, setting up two blogs on my own domain here.Movies_thumb.jpg

The most popular series of posts here was undoubtedly the A-Z of Films Meme, now enshrined on its own page at Favorite Films A to Z. Thanks to all of you, for your participation, critique, suggestions, and involvement, that made it so memorable!

Unlike Krish Ashok and Asuph, I am not a good writer of humor. I did take a stab with my own attempts at satire, with Virtues of Politicians, Rulebook for Indian TV News Producers, The Straight Dope FAQ on Indian Elections 2009, and How To Become A Spiritual Guru.

There were two serious ethical inquiries that garnered a lot of feedback and commentary. The look at Religion vs. Gender Equality and Feminism remains one of the most popular posts. In Mentally Challenged, Raped, Pregnant. Abort?, we confronted difficult moral and legal issues surrounding the trial about an unfortunate victim.

Outside the blog, some of you have approached me via email occasionally for technical assistance with blogging, while I have had the fortune of meeting some of you in real life. Blogging has now permeated my real life. Some of you have placed trust in me, and I hope that I have respected your privacy despite solicitations for contact or other information.

The Social Networking Challenge

Blogging may be getting increasingly popular, but among my network of Indian Bloggers, it faces challenges from micro-blogging and social networking. From my blogroll, outstanding bloggers like Gauri (42), Rambodoc (A Twist of Word and Mind), Paul (Café Philos), Shefaly (La Vie Quotidienne), and Ruhi (Time and Again) have become sporadic. Some are active on Twitter, while others don’t use it at all. Some spend a lot of time inside Facebook, while others have recently started using it. Nita (A Wide Angle View of India) who is not into social-networking, is the most regular on her blog. Others, like Amreekan Desi, Priyank, Gauri, Atul, Prerna, Harini, and Poonam are fairly regular at blogging as well as online social networking in one form or another. Very few, like Asuph, seem to be able to strike A Fine Balance between blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

At present, I am pulled in multiple directions online. Apart from my two personal blogs here and my writing for MakeUseOf, I am active on two Twitter accounts (professionally as @ScepticGeek, personally as @Palsule). I also try to keep up with friends on Facebook, and now spend very little time on FriendFeed, once my beloved network.

I read all blog posts from all of you blogger friends, but I don’t spend time commenting on each of them as much as I’d like to do so. One of my goals for 2010 is to seek that elusive balance between my online activities, though I suspect it will always remain a struggle.

Blogroll Update

The concept of the blogroll held different meanings for different people, and now it has largely become meaningless. There is no point in me having you on my blogroll if you don’t read my blog or engage with me online and the same applies the other way around. There is no point in me sending visitors to your blog if you don’t blog regularly. I actually wonder if there are any such people who come to your blogs via mine. So, I am thinking of doing away with it altogether. Let me know your thoughts.

Blogging Networks

In my initial blogging days, I was an active blogger with Indian Mutiny, which has now gone into print media. Harsha, who introduced and pulled me to that network, no longer blogs himself. I had put a lot of effort and time into serious blogging for Indian Mutiny, particularly with my posts surrounding the Indo-US Nuclear Deal. Once bitten, twice shy, I have stayed away from networks like DesiPundit, DesiCritics, and BlogBharti.

However, current trends indicate that blog networks will play an important role in acting as a platform to take your blog to a wider audience. Some of you are active on these networks. I confess I am largely uneducated about these Indian blog networks and will appreciate your thoughts in this regard.

Subject Matters That Don’t Matter

Looking ahead to 2010, I see cynicism as one of the challenges for this blog. In my first two years, I wrote substantially on current affairs and politics. I have now realized that blogging about Indian politics doesn’t make an iota of difference to anyone in real life. Why take the time to write about it at all? Hence, at least at present, I don’t see myself writing much about current affairs and politics on this blog, except with satire.

I will continue to engage myself and my readers in fundamental issues within the spheres of society, ethics, democracy, psychology, and law. Writing is a means towards clarity of mind, and these posts and your comments help me refine my understanding of such issues.

A Time For Gratitude

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude for taking the time to read my blog posts, comment on them, disagree with my perspective, teach me new ways of thinking, and sharing your thoughts.

This blog is where an unquiet mind has shared itself, and you, my friends, have often made it quiet again. Thank you.

November 24, 2009

Personal

15 comments

I am now an editor at Techmeme.

Some online friends connected with me on social networks like Twitter and Facebook already know this, but I was waiting for an official announcement before I wrote about it here. You can also read TechCrunch’s coverage here.Techmeme Logo

If you’re not in the tech field, you’ve probably not heard of Techmeme. It is a news aggregation site that works for technology news where Google News fails. It is a combination of automated aggregation and human editing.

Techmeme is highly regarded in the tech world, and my boss Gabe Rivera was listed as one of the Top 25 Influential People on the Web by Business Week last year.

The Journey

I took a break from the cubicle farms of the IT industry last year. After spending some time with my baby daughter & family, I switched gears to working online. As most of my blogger friends know, I started writing for MakeUseOf.com as a contributor, and am now a staff writer. I still needed additional work to completely replace my full-time day job routine and have finally reached that goal with this opportunity.

The Change

In some ways, the change from the IT world to the online Media world is like my shift from Mumbai to Pune. A suburban local train getting delayed in Mumbai because of an accident meant being late for office rather than concern for the possible loss of human life. A team member getting sick meant the project getting delayed rather than concern about my team member. A world where I was a slave to schedules dictated by others, constraints imposed by others, filled with competition like in a rat-race. A world saturated with ambition, stress, pressures, politics, performance-based incentives, frustrations, commuting long-distance in traffic, and sometimes, disillusionment.

Pune is serene, laid-back, and relaxed. In my real and online life, I can focus on value, enjoy my freedom, use my judgment. I choose my own topics. I can express myself the way I like. I can use my editorial judgment to decide what to publish or exclude. Clean air makes you think clearly, and the comfort of working from home relaxes you.

The Job

Because Techmeme is so highly regarded, it is always under the scanner and keenly watched; at times, even criticized.

Being a human editor is thus a great responsibility, and one that I hope to carry well. My diverse experience in IT helps to fathom the spectrum of news that Techmeme deals with every day. I have always been reading and following online tech news since the early days of the Internet even before Google came into existence. Over the years, my appetite for information and ability to consume it refined to the extent that I was already researching and curating information for my CxO bosses in my IT job. Now, this hobby of mine is my work.

Can it get any better than this?

August 25, 2009

Personal, blogging

20 comments

this is the new home for An unquiet mind.

I have taken the plunge and decided to host my own blogs. My web presence will henceforth be at this new domain, where I am planning to maintain two separate blogs.

I was looking to consolidate my geek blog with my personal blog. I spent a lot of time thinking about and searching for a new domain name that would:

  • Reflect my personality
  • Be appropriate for both An Unquiet Mind’s character as well as a tech blog
  • Be available as a .com domain. This was the hardest part.

So finally, I am the proud new owner of www.skepticgeek.com.

The homepage is not yet hosted, since I am still figuring out how to optimally manage two blogs with Wordpress. The current plan is:

  1. http://skeptic.skepticgeek.com will be An Unquiet Mind
  2. http://geek.skepticgeek.com will be my geek blog
  3. www.skepticgeek.com may be either a static page or the home page of my geek blog.

I wanted to enable readers of both types to follow both blogs independently, including subscribing to a separate, specific RSS feed.

The URL redirection from Wordpress.com will be active for 1 year from today, after which I may discontinue it.

I request those of you who have me on their blogroll to update your links to point to http://skeptic.skepticgeek.com instead of http://mahendrap.wordpress.com.

Do let me know if you find any problems whatsoever with commenting, linking, navigating, etc.

How do you like my new domain name? All feedback and suggestions are most welcome, as always!

August 15, 2009

Personal, blogging

12 comments

Take a look at these numbers:

  • This is my 267th post.
  • There are 2962 authentic comments on this blog.
  • My posts have 203 tags in 39 categories.
  • Total views crossed 100K quite a while back.
    These numbers usually don’t mean much to me. But I always use a trick while climbing a mountain. When I am exhausted and feel like I can’t go up any further, I turn and look the other way around. Seeing how much ground we’ve covered and how much height we’ve attained, is a re-energizing technique that works.
    However, the need to look at these numbers now did not arise because I’m exhausted writing on this blog. Since I started An Unquiet Mind over two years back, I have written exclusively here. And now I’ve come to a fork in my path.300px-Janus-Vatican
    Discounting my professional writing at MakeUseOf.com, I have decided to start a separate personal blog exclusively focused on technology, specifically social networking and social media websites and technologies.
    Since I began a writing career, I realized that being an early adopter of new technologies, I needed to participate in online communities of like-minded technology enthusiasts and industry influencers.
    While Twitter has been one vehicle to achieve this, FriendFeed has been more empowering. To retain the intellectual flavor of An Unquiet Mind undiluted, I decided to post technology related content separately. Also, it did not make sense to direct the 90K+ MakeUseOf subscribers interested in cool websites, software, and internet tips to An Unquiet Mind!
    Since I am known as the Social Geek in these tech circles, my technology blog is of A Social Geek. I chose Posterous rather than Wordpress as a platform since it’s flexibility suits my needs better. Feel free to follow/subscribe to A Social Geek if you’re so inclined. Posts from there are also displayed in the sidebar here. Thus, my blogs reflects my two personae on Twitter – @SocialGeek maps to A Social Geek, @Palsule maps here.
    At this milestone I also decided to experiment with a different theme, primarily for one reason: it gave me the push to do the necessary housekeeping of this blog that has been on the backburner for a while. I have reorganized my categories, which are now displayed at the top. Hovering your mouse over them reveals sub-categories too.
    I think this will help An Unquiet Mind remain unquiet about things that matter. I think unquiet minds rule over matter, but never mind.

Image: Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and endings.

August 11, 2009

Personal, blogging

10 comments

Friends, thank you for visiting my blog and for your comments.

I met with an unfortunate accident end of last week, and hence will be out of action for a couple of weeks. Nothing serious, but I need to rest and recover. Thanks for visiting. I will be back soon.

After months of sitting on my computer on a backless settee, I began to realize that my back has a spinal cord, and that it's made up of individual vertebrae.

But that's not what this is about. While my new chair does indeed improve my posture, this is a new posturing using Posterous.com.

I am writing this email using Gmail, sending it to post@posterous.com and attaching the photo of my new chair. After I hit the send button, I sit back in my chair.

I expect Posterous will:

  • Post this email and the photo to my Posterous blog http://socialgeek.posterous.com
  • Post my photo to my Flickr photo stream
  • Post my photo to my Picasa web albums
  • Post this update to my Facebook account (I want to see how it does that, whether it just links, or uploads the photo, etc.)
  • Post this email and photo to my Wordpress.com blog – An Unquiet Mind
  • Post this update to my Friendfeed, which will then tweet an update on Twitter as @SocialGeek
  • Post this update as a tweet on Twitter as @Palsule

Just 1 Email. Now, let's see how it works!

Posted via email from SocialGeek

nextbigthing

A few weeks back, HyperActiveX asked me something on Twitter.

“What is your data flow? Have you mapped it yet?” or something to that effect. This had been on my mind for quite a few months and I always pushed it to the back burner. Quadrant I vs. Quadrant II. The usual story.

But his tweet pushed me over the edge. It led to two MakeUseOf.com posts (How to Define and Manage Your Social Networks), which weren’t popular, but were noticed by a few select people. So here’s a big thank you to HyperActiveX for goading me, and I now have my online social life mapped out on a page.

twitterfeed

Comments are closed for this post, since I want to consolidate/track comments (if any) on that page itself.

(Cartoons courtesy: Geek and Poke)

July 16, 2009

Personal

17 comments

This is a visualization of my online social life. Click on the image to visit it online, from where you can directly jump and connect to any of my online profiles. Read the description below.

Mahendra_Social_Map

The Ecosystem

This is not at all as complicated as it might first appear. The red lines are my manual activities, blue lines show the RSS feeds, and the green lines are automatic notifications/pings/updates. The idea is to automate as much as possible, keeping in mind long term data portability goals.

I write here at An Unquiet Mind and at MakeUseOf.com. I maintain a professional profile on LinkedIn, a personal one at Facebook. My @SocialGeek Twitter account is for technology focused topics, while @Palsule is for personal use. I use Friendfeed and Chi.mp for lifestreaming and aggregation.

Create-Share-Discover-Collect

This model is one way to look at my social life. I create content on two blogs. I share this content via Twitter/Friendfeed/Chi.mp. I discover new content on Friendfeed, Twitter, Google Reader, Blogs, and Facebook. I treasure the content I like via bookmarks, favorites, etc. My treasure is automatically shared via my Lifestream.

Manual Activities

When browsing, I bookmark or favorite various links on the social networks like Digg. I also visit Facebook and Friendfeed. Links in tweets also lead me to new links in my browser. I use dashboard applications like Tweetdeck / Seesmic / etc. for Twitter.

I have hidden obvious event flows (such as links clicked in email/IM) in the interest of overall clarity.

RSS Feeds

An Unquiet Mind feeds go to LinkedIn, Friendfeed, Chi.mp, and Facebook (when it works). My MakeUseOf feed is shown here in the sidebar. I subscribe to feeds using Google Reader.

Automation

I use BackType to track comments I make across the web. Whenever I comment on your blog, or any other site, my comment is picked up by BackType, which sends me a link every day listing all the comments I’ve made. BackType also tweets this link automatically for @SocialGeek. I can follow interesting people’s comments around the web by following them on BackType, and others can follow me too.

When I update my LinkedIn profile, or share an item in Google Reader, it gets pushed to Friendfeed and Chi.mp. Friendfeed automatically tweets the link for @SocialGeek. Whenever I tweet using the Dashboard, Friendfeed posts it to my feed.

When I Digg, Stumble Upon, or bookmark on Delicious, it gets posted to my Friendfeed and Chi.mp. Similarly when I upload or favorite a photo/video in Flickr/You Tube, Friendfeed and Chi.mp catch it.

Principles and Objectives

I am waiting for Twine to let me import my Delicious bookmarks as I’m excited about the semantic web. I am rooting for Open ID, data portability, and the semantic web.

There was a time when ‘ME’ meant my blog, the place I felt was my home on the web. That changed with bookmarks, photos, posts on other sites, various discussions via comments on other blogs, social networking sites like Orkut/Facebook, etc. We entered the decentralized era. But I would still like a place to call my home. That is why I like my Lifestream (to which you can subscribe, just like RSS).

I am not an advocate of Facebook. It is a data silo wielding enormous power and I do not trust it. Friendfeed is an excellent aggregator, and networks me with many interesting people. However, it is also a data silo, as it does not commit to data portability. Hence, I am presently rooting for Chi.mp. With my own free domain name (mahendrapalsule.mp), it aggregates my social presence, while remaining committed to data portability. It is still a new service, and I am hoping they will add more features as quickly as possible.

Questions? Comments? Feedback?

Digg This

Many folks asked me for an update on Pune’s Blog Camp, after the previous photo-post. How was the experience? Was it worth it? Who was there?

Not being diplomatic, I can say that the experience was an interesting one for me, with positives and negatives. I had never been to any blog camp, bar camp, or Tweetup before, so I did not have any expectations, and that probably helped.logo-main-krity

There was an interesting discussion going on even before the blog camp in the comments to Navin Kabra’s PuneTech Why You Should Attend Pune Blog Camp post. At the other end of the spectrum, post-event, the insights from the camp led to Dhananjay Nene’s Why I was disappointed with Pune Blog Camp 2.

Some others have shared their experiences too. Sandeep has a largely positive thank you note at his blog The Mousetrap. Anant has a detailed write up on his blog, Rahul has an update on the Devil’s Workshop, Aniket has shared his awesome feeling about the camp at Melody in Dissonance, while Deep Ganatra raises an important concern about unintentional session-hijacking. Almost all of them have written about the various sessions that took place, so I will not repeat them. Nor will I remember the names of all the presenters! So I will just share a few of my thoughts. You can also read Pune Mirror and TOI’s coverage.

A word of thanks to the organizers is a must. Tarun Chandel led the tone of the camp beautifully, making people get comfortable with his opening presentation and stepping in to facilitate whenever he could. I think the facilitation needed more support – it seemed he was the only one intent on facilitating.

Meeting In Person

BlogCampPune 006There were a few specific people I wanted to meet and that was one of my motivations for going to the camp. There were a few surprises too. I knew about sites like Wogma and Track.in, and it was good to meet online entrepreneurs Meetu Kabra and Arun Prabhudesai in person. I met fellow Twitter contacts like Amit Paranjape, an entrepreneur who shares myriad interests like me, who was busy with his Smartphone throughout the camp as I’d expected! Dhananjay Nene, a software architect, was another Twitter contact and meeting him personally was a surprise as he wasn’t as old as he looked in his avatar!

Friends in need are friends on Friendfeed. I recognized Sandeep Gautam instantly, even if we had only recently started following each other on Friendfeed. Sandeep writes on psychology and neuroscience while being into software development and poetry, at The Mousetrap. Sneha Gore has done a survey-based research into motivations of young bloggers which I found interesting, and meeting Pune Mirror’s Vishal was also good.

Negatives

  • Despite what the self-analysis kit says, the camp was not centered around a theme or purpose. Blogging is a wide umbrella term for any camp to succeed without having a theme – SEO, journalism, the ubiquitous ‘musings’ – some theme is needed for greater audience-presenter harmony.
  • Despite all the marketing-SEO focused presentations, the Golden Rule of SEO was not emphasized at all, or I missed it altogether. Content is king. Period.BlogCampPune 005
  • No talk of the future of blogging. Yongfook, author of the popular open-source self-hosted Lifestreaming application SweetCron has proclaimed The Blog is Dead. Wired magazine advised not to start a new blog, and to pull the plug if you already had one. ReadWriteWeb asked if the future of blogging is lifetreaming. I thought these topics will come up in a ‘blog camp’, but either they didn’t or I missed them.
  • Sometimes, I felt disenchanted with the perspective of an SEO/Marketing oriented pro-blogger that looks at readers as pure numbers and statistics on a graph. Rather than a birds-eye view of traffic flowing on a freeway, I prefer seeking the company of people actually driving those cars – those who take the time to comment and share their ideas and opinions on my posts. But that’s just me.
  • Despite the monetization related talks, there was no talk about writing. I take the blame for this. As a professional writer who is making money out of writing on a blog, and not looking at promotion, marketing, or SEO, I could have talked about how you can earn money as a blog writer without being keen on SEO.

Positives

  • Meeting lots and lots of bloggers! And especially meeting the few I wrote about above.
  • The passion and entrepreneurship of youth that I witnessed was inspiring. Young people in their 20s have .com domains and are discussing SEO. Wow. I actually felt out of place.
  • Navin and Vishal’s presentation on what newspapers can learn from blogs and vice versa.
  • Sandeep’s presentation on niche science blogging.
  • Regional focus – Shantanu Oak talked about Devanagri spell-checking.
  • Seeing lots and lots of newbie or wannabe bloggers.

Lessons

  • BlogCampPune 016Bloggers should be on Twitter if they want to expand visibility of their blog.
  • Some folks try to make money out of blogging. The clever folks make money from bloggers.
  • The ‘blogger elite’ usually doesn’t comment on each other’s blogs. They use Twitter to keep in touch with each other.
  • I personally feel there should be disclaimers within the presentations on monetization, when a lot of impressionable young peo
    ple are in the audience. I could sense that many such people got the feeling that one can easily make money out of blogging, if one is geeky enough and knows a few ‘secrets’.
  • In a blog camp, the law of two feet is very important. I did it successfully – rather than being felt obliged to listen to sessions that I was not interested in, I preferred spending one-to-one time with people, which is what worked best for me.
  • If I go to a blog camp again, I will present. In retrospect, I could have shared:

A few days back, Asuph asked how one can reduce the page rank of one’s blog and I replied. I would have loved to see the reactions if this exchange had happened at the blog camp!

Thus, all in all, an interesting experience. Will I go to another camp? If it is not centered around a specific theme, definitely not. Else, depends on the theme!

A few weeks back, when I realized that the world’s largest automaker was heading towards bankruptcy, I did a nostalgic photo-post of General Motors World Headquarters at the Renaissance Center and Detroit. This week, Six Flags, one of the world’s largest amusement park company in the world announced that it is filing for bankruptcy. It seems that in this economic downturn, people don’t want to spend their hard-earned money to get amused. So here is another nostalgic photo-post of a day at an amusement park that was loosely affiliated with Six Flags.

Cedar Point at Sandusky, Ohio currently holds the world record for the maximum number of roller coasters, one of which is the world’s second tallest and second fastest roller coaster. It has been voted The Best Amusement Park In The World for 11 consecutive years (yes, over Disneyworld in Florida). This is how the park looks from the air (not my photo):

It was a cloudy, rainy day that we went to Cedar Point. We were anxious, but the rides were fortunately open and running. Click on any of the pictures to get the higher resolution.

Cedar Point Cable CarsCedar Point Generic 1

The cable car runs through the entire length of the park, since walking around the whole day can become quite tiring!

Cedar Point Generic 2Cedar Point Generic 3

It was a bit difficult to get good outdoor photographs because the light was poor in rainy conditions.

Cedar Point Up DownCedar Point Antique Car

The Top Thrill Dragster has been the most thrilling experience of my life. Paragliding at the foot of the Himalayas didn’t come anywhere close. 0 to 120 mph (193 kmph) in 4 seconds. A 90 degree climb up to 420 feet (~ 50 stories) and a 90 degree straight fall while spiraling 270 degrees. All over in just 17 seconds. I managed to capture a train climbing, at the top, and descending:

Top Thrill Dragster UpTop Thrill Dragster TopTop Thrill Dragster Down

See more pictures of this demon here. The official page has more technical information as well as additional multimedia. And if you want to know how it actually feels like, I found this on YouTube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPjN7zArwiI&fmt=18&rel=0]