I’ve been reading a lot lately about the benefits of writing and blogging even in the absence of readers. These ideas resonate well, and I’d like describe the reasons that drives me to write¹:

I blog because it’s one of the best ways to crystallize ideas, short of brainstorming with other smart people.

I blog because it’s the best (and arguably the cheapest) way to gain practice in productizing nebulous concepts, turning them into products that people may actually want to consume.

I blog because it’s the best way to practice summarizing² long and winding thoughts into short, readable nuggets.

I blog because it forces me to capture the essence of an essay in a short and catchy title.

I blog because it gives me a chance to practice writing in a language other than my mother tongue.

¹ “Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few” (Demotivators)

² “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead” (Mark Twain)

Synchronized green lights are designed to enable streamlined traffic flow in major traffic arteries. When you hit the green wave you know it - it feels like all the ­lights are turning green just for you. Nice as this may be for your ego, it’s just a coincidence. After commuting on a such a road for a while, I found a way for making this work almost every time. If you follow the simple explanation below, you’ll save a lot of time and boost your ego at the same time.

The trick is to pass each traffic light in the “middle of the green”. If you have, say, 60 seconds of green light, you want to pass through the intersection at the 30 second mark. If you manage to do so and go at the maximum speed allowed afterward, you are almost guaranteed to hit the next light in the middle of the green as well. Hitting the middle of the green takes some practice and experience. If you have to slow down, make sure to balance it out by speeding up. Here’s the perfect green wave traversal pattern:

If you don’t go fast enough, it can really hurt. You’ll hit many a red light and your trip will become much longer:

Speeding up might actually hurt you as well. While you may end up hitting a similar time overall, your trip will be a miserable stop-and-go experience, not to mention possibly getting cited. Here’s how it looks:

If the traffic is very heavy, no trick will help and you’ll eventually hit a red light. Another factor that might thwart your mastery of the green wave is road sensors that change traffic light patterns based on car presence. Barring these factors, surfing the green wave by trying to hit the middle of the greens is a fun commute activity that can actually save you time, so go ahead and start practicing!

We all suffer through boring, endless, useless meetings but no one is doing anything about it. Here’s a very effective method for reducing the amount of time spent in meetings. In order to work, this will have to be done with the one or two people who really make decisions in your team/group/department/organization/company.

Step 1: Raise hell about time wasted in meetings. Put a dollar amount on it to make it look really painful.

Step 2: Call a meeting to discuss (this will hopefully be one of the last meetings you’ll attend) with the decision makers (and no one else.)

Step 3: Draw a matrix on the whiteboard - rows for required meetings, columns for required attendees. Forget about optional attendees; they are a distraction. Fill up the table, marking a cell only if this person is absolutely required in that meeting.

Step 4: Eliminate meetings that aren’t absolutely necessary, and participants that are not expected to contribute anything. Passive listeners can always get meeting summaries by email - no need to waste their time and yours.

Step 5: Decide on frequencies - not every meeting has to happen on a weekly basis. If you end up with monthly recurrence or longer, the meeting is probably redundant.

Step 6: Have the decision maker(s) announce the change formally and make sure the new schedules get implemented immediately.

Step 7: Enjoy your newly freed time.

On my bi-annual visit to McDonald’s the other day I noticed this sign posted on the drive-thru window: “Two Apple Pies: $1. One Apple Pie: $0.95.” The first thought that crossed my mind was: Is it possible to deduce the actual cost of a single pie from this data? On the lower end of the scale it can be only 5 cents – in which case they make a huge profit on the first one, and sell the second one at cost. On the higher end it could be 50 cents, earning them a large margin on single pie sales but none on doubles. If many customers buy singles, they strike gold. However, it’s almost totally irrational to buy only one when the second one is only 5 cents more, so let’s assume that almost all customers buy two. So why does McDonald’s part with their precious pies in pairs? Probably because this is a good way to move inventory and make good profit. Let’s see how.

There must be enough irrational, diet conscious, or reading-challenged people to guarantee a large percentage of single-pie purchases. Let’s estimate this number at 20%. Even at the high end of the cost curve, at 50 cents, this would guarantee a 9 cent average margin. Assuming a lower cost of, say, 30 cents, the margin soars to 45 cents on average. Pretty nice! If you compound the psychological effect making people buy more because this deal is “too good to pass on”, I bet this store is making loads of money.

The way the sign looks, this is a local initiative and not centrally mandated policy. If the profit margins are indeed so high, they should seriously consider offering this deal chain-wide.

Science Olympiad is a competition for middle and high school students who get excited by math and science. These are the geeks and hackers of our future; the kids who are good at math and are not ashamed of it. Last Saturday I attended the Bay Area competition, where 500 or so kids competed in events like Science Crime Busters, Ornithology, and Mousetrap Vehicle. Plenty of excitement and love for math and science seen in broad daylight on a weekend; not a common sight.

The picture above is from the closing ceremony. What do we see here? the future of Silicon Valley. Look closely – who do you see in the picture? Happy kids and families from Asia, mainly China and India. This is a self selecting group of people who demonstrate their love for science and math through their deeds, not their words or good intentions. And where are the Caucasians and other ethnicities hiding? They aren’t hiding, they simply didn’t bother to show up. An event like this would interrupt their busy Saturday schedules, and besides, it’s so un-cool. The entire crowd had maybe 10 non Asians.

Why does it matter? It doesn’t, really, but isn’t it amazing that they amounted to about 2% of the crowd, an order of magnitude less than their makeup in the Bay Area population?

I risk sounding racist here, but nothing is farther from the truth. I’m writing this out of sheer admiration to the Asian parents who encourage their kids to participate in the Science Olympiad. Largely an immigrant generation, they made it to the US by virtue of their education, not through a birthright. These brave people arguably understand the value of education far better than the “natives”. Being enterprising newcomers, they leverage the excellent schools and the volunteer workforce to better their children’s future.

I’ve seen the future of Silicon Valley, and I’m happy to report that it’s multicultural, passionate, and hard working. I’m so glad that at least one group of people cares enough about science and math, as this is the greatest hope for this area and indeed the entire country.

Last night I attended an SVPMA meeting featuring Google’s Shreyas Doshi. Shreyas is a very smart and articulate guy; one thing that caught my attention during his talk is this quote (probably misquoted, but close enough): “The role of a product manager is to discover the right product to make”.
Product management is hard to define, and this quote actually captures the essence of it in a very succinct way (which, as a nice bonus, makes it a good product definition in and of itself). a thorough discovery process involves coming up with a plan, searching for clues, utilizing resources, experimenting, following the wrong leads, gathering facts, putting puzzle pieces together, and coming up with the desired finding. This is pretty much what a good product manager does. Add to that dealing with difficult people and leading with no formal authority, and you’ve got a complete picture of a day in the life of a product manager.

Straight from the masters of NLP at Apple comes another amazing, extraordinary, incredible, awesome, and cool presentation. I posted one of these before, but this one is even better.

I happen to live about 2 miles away from the Apple headquarters. On my way to the gym I often see Apple employees walking through the campus, carrying a shiny Macbook Air or one of the other Macbook variants. Am I going to see them carrying an iPad on their way to the next meeting?

The device is undoubtedly way cool, and I definitely want one. It won’t fit in my pocket, so I’m going to have to lug it around in a bag. But I already carry a phone and a laptop, so why should I? to replace the Kindle I don’t have, I guess. Or maybe to replace all three of them?

The mass-market use case is not yet clear (to me at least), but the greatest achievement here is Apple’s new A4 chip, which reportedly is extremely fast. This finally lets Apple be totally self reliant, just the way they (rightfully) like it. In a year or so we’re going to see the A4 and its descendants replace the iPhone and Macbook CPUs, and maybe even penetrate non-Apple products.

Two companies entered the prestigious “I’m officially scared of Apple” club today - Intel and AMD. The banter in their executive boardrooms might be giddy and condescending, but they should be revising their 5-year plans instead.

iPad

The San Francisco Bay Area is ripe with intelligent people. Some of them choose to broadcast their personality through their car. I assembled this handy guide to let you instantly learn more about the owner by reading a few simple signs on their car:

Mystery Spot sticker: I’m a sucker to believe this tourist trap is a natural phenomenon. Not only that, I’m also stupid enough to promote this money-sucking operation while destroying my car’s paint coat. I’m going to end up taking a financial hit when selling the car, but I don’t know it yet.

Cryptic license plate: I’m oh-so-cool and witty. You guys don’t even know which side to start reading my license plate from, do you. In fact I’m so smart that I’m the only one who can figure out what it means, which kind of defeats the purpose. Heck, I had to spend 10 minutes explaining what GTK4DRK to my best buddy. But hey, I only pay the DMV 40 bucks a year for that so it’s totally worth it.

Jesus fish: I’m a believer, and I want to make sure everyone knows that. Jesus has a small problem - he is not famous enough, so I’m doing my part by advertising him using this cute little fish I stuck on my car’s buttocks.

Jesus fish with little feet: I’m a non believer, and I want everyone to know that. Jesus didn’t exist, but Darwin did and he said that my ancestors were fish with feet. You won’t understand that, so just keep thinking about your legless fish and let me keep cruising peacefully in my Prius (see below).

26.2 sticker: I ran a marathon, did you? you didn’t? wimp! I bet you didn’t even know that a marathon is 26.2 miles, did you. Oh wait, so what’s the point of putting this sticker on my back pane. Whatever.

Toyota Prius: I want you to think that I care about the environment. I drive my Prius to the steakhouse, ignoring the fact that eating meat contributes much more to global warming than driving any type of car. I also ignore the fact that it takes 10 years of driving a Prius to balance the greenhouse gas emissions caused by making its battery, and that the car’s extra cost could be put into much better use by buying carbon offsets.

Toyota Prius with a carpool lane sticker: I paid $3000 extra for this car just because it has this yellow sticker, so I can ride in the car pool lane. I’ll soon have to shell out a few more grands to replace the battery, but you didn’t hear it from me. Who cares, when I’m going to make it home 10 minutes before you. Keep sitting in traffic, sucker.

A Porsche: Boy, do I have a solution to this damn midlife crisis! I just bought myself this amazing car. So what if I can barely fit in the driver’s seat, maintenance is going to cost me a fortune, and I can’t really use third gear or higher because I already have 4 speeding tickets and I don’t want to get my license suspended. This makes me look so young and cool that I simply must have it.

A large helping of optimism for the new year in this great little video about the power of entrepreneurship.