Brown Motion

Houston we have a problem!  Well not quite Houston.  It is really the Isthmus of Suez.  As the world finally begins to bask in the glow of the covid vaccine we are confronted with a new reality. Potential delays on all those 100" flat screens coming to a living room near you.  Price gouging on your favorite matcha drinks because the raw material is in tins stuck on a boat.  No beef.  Because it is sitting on some really large ship stuck in the traffic on water.  Somewhere near Egypt. What? LOL. It turns out a massive container ship called Ever Given (irony of that name is just too good to be true) is sitting askew blocking the very canal it was supposed to traverse in under two weeks.  It carries millions of tons of produce, packaged goods and livestock.  So do 100 other vessels on their way through the same highway called the Suez Canal.  Now all stuck because this one boat could not make it across. Beside dusty and destitute villages t...

 All in a weekend's work. Work had become non-sensical and we (as in my best half and yours truly) were feeling somewhat stressed out.   Just as the tunnel seemed too dark and long, a nice warm weekend presented itself in SF bay area.   That made the weekend especially joyous. Saturday was spent scouring our favorite haunt in South Bay for some delectable food, vadas and parathas and sweet gajrela. All consumed in small tapas style.  First at a local park in the south bay then by a man made lake on the peninsula. Stop Asian Hate rallies were being held in the locales we visited - citizenry pushing back at the scars being inflicted by an increasingly divided nation.  All in all the Vitamin D got a boost.   Sunday was a gentle walk along a local lake with birds of a feather and then some spotted along the trail.  An egret and a grey heron stoked the atmosphere otherwise filled with 20 other species chirping and squawking by the lake. ...

 but what you can 'not do'! This is my translation of what would be an anti-Kennedy quote but also the takeaway from a book I recently read. Titled 'Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing' by Olga Mecking, an ex-pat something or the other now living in the Netherlands (I learned from her writing that it is no longer Holland since that name is of two provinces in the small country and not the entire country) it talks about a Seinfeldian utopia except applied in daily life. Apparently the happy Dutch have cracked the code.  They are happy because they have found ways to do nothing.  Sometimes.  In first few pages she sets out to sell her book by indicating to the reader that she is not a wellness guru.  Far from it.  However, her book is also distinct and unique in a way that no other self help book is.  In that it is not. It is bit ironic that the reading of said book requires you to exert some grey matter, yet it advises against the use of th...

 The human mind as I have posited prior on multiple occasions is at best bizarre.  Capable of emotion that is uniquely human and conceiving of ideas that would thwart any genus'. We can explore galaxies and kill one of our own in the millions.  By free will. On more mundane front we also do strange things.. Like believe in almighty god.  Or Santa Claus! Keep interviewing Demi Lovato.  She is an addict.  She can sing.  Okay so what is left to discuss?  What is the obsession? We like to discuss English Royalty.  Who said, what, when to whom and why?  It is akin to Holmes asking why the dog did not bark perhaps? Great mystery? The NYT did a recent write up on why human mind keeps seeing the Tasmanian Tiger, a decidedly extinct species last seen on an island off the coast of SE Australia.  Are we done talking about it yet? Not till we remain fascinated with Demi.  Yeah that other one too - the one that is a hippie by some count....

 I have to deal with a lot of people at work.  Manage complex programs with lot of moving parts. There are approaches to managing this work which is focused on developing solutions to solve modern problems.  Used to be called waterfall way of developing solutions few years ago and then things changed. As technology started playing an unusually large part in shaping the future of how we go about our lives so came new jargon. The software makers adopted a way of managing new work under a philosophy called Agile.  Therefore other businesses in part to emulate their tech brethren also jumped ship ditching the waterfalls and went the way of hiring Release Train Engineers (people who have no idea of how to run a locomotive) and Scrum Masters. Anyway folks in the biz will catch my drift.  It is basically lot of mumbo jumbo which rarely provides the touted value, but looks sexy in marketing collateral or in board rooms across America.  We are an agile organization ...