Categories
Personal Reflections

July 2011

I’ve been away from my blog for such a long time that it’s easiest to get over with in list style:

  • I turned 21! This was my first birthday spent away from family, the first birthday away from school friends – and I was a touch saddened by that. Then again, my awesomesauce friends in Singapore made sure it was a memorable day. Do I consider this a milestone (kilometrestone doesn’t have the same ring to it)? Definitely, especially, because I spent the better part of a year in Singapore.
  • I spent the past two months working on a research project in NTU. I was under the Division of Information Engineering, in a team working on a next-generation touch computing interface called STATINA. My task was one of the branch-offs associated with the touch computing project: to make a continuous speech recognition engine that could work with Asian accents. The basis of my project was on the ubiquitous Cambridge University Engineering Department software toolkit HTK, based on data recorded at NTU. This was fun, as speech recognition has been one of the areas that has drawn me in over the past months and I got something meaty to chew on while contributing to an existing research project. I was glad to have a supportive professor and PhD mentor to provide me guidance throughout the research project. If I had to single out one thing, I think my main contribution would have been using my readings on linguistics to approach the problem from not just a technical standpoint.
  • The research project was under the Summer Research Internship Programme (SRI) run by NTU and sponsored by the Singapore government (I think, at some level). I highly recommend it to everyone for the exposure it gives you to ‘real’ research. Don’t expect to change the world in the eight weeks or so that you get, this is more like a taster. It pays well too – about S$3000 for two months – and you get experience the culture of an alien country. It’s just incredible to meet 50-odd people from around the world and go through this journey of discovering Singapore all over again through the social events organised – we had regular parties and events to bond over in the weeks here. If this video doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what will!
  • I will be leaving Singapore for good – at least for the foreseeable future – on the 4th of August. I’ve lived there just a week or two short of a full calendar year, and all the events of the past year make this one stand out in my life so far prominently. I loved and lost (long distance really doesn’t work out, so it’s better to live in the moment) and loved again and lost and then some more. The past 2-3 weeks have been pretty eventful in ways more than one (and not just because of my birthday) including some wicked parties (71st floor of Swissotel – on a helipad!). I have also been to more traditional, ‘heartland’ Singapore and partaken in activities and food that makes Singaporean citizens cry tears of joy.
  • I dyed my hair blue-black again with less than spectacular results. Not impressed. Semi-permanent dyes seem to give a stronger effect but last less; when they start fading they look hideous. Permanent dyes stick longer but getting the shade just right is hard. Still, almost-there blue-black is better than being a ginger as I once was. Despite the punishing my hair took when I bleached it, I think my hair’s in better health now than it was a year ago.
  • Carry rubber with you at all times. Like, seriously.
  • I found a year-long undergraduate placement in the UK! This had been a huge challenge, as only a handful of companies ever agreed to interview me over phone or video conferencing. I was also actively exploring the option of working in Singapore (most actively pursued, although visa issues were a major hiccup; furthermore, tech companies mostly have business / sales presence here rather than a technical one), Malaysia (Penang is a hotbed of electronics manufacturing), Hong Kong (opportunities were mostly in the business / finance ), Taiwan (d’oh, the electronics industry here is HUGE!). I’m glad to find a company that I really like though, which I will be joining in mid-August. I won’t be returning to my university as this job is based out of Fareham in a company that deals in IC design software and fabrication. And while I’m sure there’s something learn from every internship industrial placement / internship – this is one of the reasons why I opted for a ‘sandwich year’ in the first place – I’m so happy to find a company that offers me a blend of electronics and software work to sink my teeth into. I still need to find accommodation and that’s probably going to eat up my time in the first few weeks back in the UK. Fareham is kinda located midway between the cities of Southampton and Portsmouth, and I for one wouldn’t mind living in the lovely coastal city of Portsmouth.
  • Speaking of Taiwan, I’m currently in Taipei City and will be here about six days. I have friends studying / working here whom I met on my summer internship as well as friends from Surrey University. And the nice-ass (literally, for some of the girls staying here) people I met at the hostel I’m staying. A break from working before joining my new company, which I’m doing with their blessings.
  • I was selected as pro-tem moderator for the Stack Exchange website on Travel. If you have precise question on anything regarded to travel, do head over to Travel.SE and ask there – the community is in its early stages but doing a great job of answering the questions thrown at it. I will do my best to help out in the areas that I am good at answering!
  • I stopped using my newly-acquired notebook for a while but now that I’m back on the road, I’ve started using it again.
  • I will be conducting the DPS Vasant Kunj Grey Matters 2011 Quiz on 6th August with Comprende Vivek Nair – and valuable inputs from others such as Prateek Vijayavargia and Bhavika Aggarwal – before flying out of Delhi on 7th August for London Heathrow. I hope to meet so many people I know from the Delhi quizzing circle once again. It has taken a year too many to get an inter-school quiz going at DPS VK but it’s finally happening and I’m so excited!

Didn’t expect the list to be this long when I sat down to write it! The past few weeks have been a roller coaster ride of emotions, feelings, and experiences and there’s more yet to come where that came from. Year 42/2 seems to be heading to be an interesting one too.

Categories
Technology

Where’s the beef, Blogger.com?

There’s one good reason commenting on a blog hosted on Blogger.com makes me mad: despite being linked to a Google account, it’s the one Google service that doesn’t automatically log you in. With blogs, this means once you’ve entered a comment, you’re redirected to a login page and then redirected back to comment page

Wait, I didn’t get the option to subscribe to follow-up comments via email! Now that I have had to re-login, I see the option for that. So…leave another comment just to enable email updates? And the comment field cannot be empty? I’ll probably have to delete the second comment because it will probably be worthless? Fuck you very much, Blogger. FUCK YOU!

I abandoned Blogger.com’s blog hosting service long ago to get full creative control over my blog. Blogger’s service is not bad per se as much as it is utterly neglected. For the purpose of making press releases and pretending to still being the cool kids on the blog block, they put together a half-decent effort in Blogger In Draft. What isn’t so cool is that Google takes months / years to push these improvements out of perpetual beta testing. The majority of Blogger users don’t know, don’t care, or can’t be bothered with the hassle of shifting to another blogging platform even when they feel features are lacking. Even though the features have been developed as ‘Blogger In Draft’, they simply aren’t pushed out for greater public use!

Don’t get me started about the schizophrenic look Blogger blogs are forced to adopt because of the platform. Why should I be taken to a separate site altogether to post comments (as it sometimes does)? I know that’s an option offered to the user but why the fuck would you even offer it to your users if you care about a pleasant user experience! Why does clicking on an ‘About Me’ link take me to another, differently-styled site altogether? Honestly, WTF is the point of ‘Google Friend Connect’? Yay, I clicked a button. Now what? Where’s the beef?

Blogger.com templates are the metaphorical equivalent of Ronald Weasley wearing dress robes from the last century. Giving users the choice to change colours and set background images sends everyone back to the Geocities-era. This is not ‘customisation’! I am fed up of the same old two-column, here’s-a-set-of-links-in-sidebar design when I visit Blogger.com hosted blogs. The problem isn’t that it’s ‘plain’, but the platform itself limits what you can do. I have never come across a single Blogger.com blog whose design has delighted me when reading text on it. Add to that the verbal diarrhoea – and the users are blame for this – of chat boxes, buttons, ‘visitor maps’, virtual pets, ‘award showcases’ and whatnot.

(Even worse-off are those who still don’t know / care about shifting away from LiveJournal, who have to deal with a seriously antiquated system. On second thoughts, perhaps I don’t want all those spinning GIFs of Edward Cullen or whatever-the-fuck-the-name-of-Wolf-Boy-is to run over WordPress.com.)

Then there are bugs such as the one I mentioned that have been around for ages, yet there’s no way to file bug reports with Google. Sure, they probably have a ‘contact us’ form somewhere that is only revealed after browsing through ten pages in Blogger help and many patronising Are you sure you haven’t seen this help FAQ… screens. Going by my experience with Google customer support, they probably print out all those contact form submissions from they shiny Chromebooks using Google Cloud Print and use it to wipe their ass. Who gives a shit about user experience?

If Google really is dog-fooding the Blogger service (as it often brags about it does with other projects its developing), then how can they not notice the that are frustrating about the user experience for years now? How can they not see – even if they continue to have millions of users – that their community is decaying?