Design Gotchas

Apple is known for its cool, innovative and user-friendly designs and rightly so: iPods and iPhones have revolutionized the otherwise lackluster electronic consumer product market. However, it is equally surprising when a design conscious company makes some very obvious design blunders. I recently bought an iMac and as much as I was amazed by the beauty of the product, I was disappointed to see the extra-ordinarily short keyboard and mouse wires. Even if I place the desktop at an arm length, the mouse wire comes really short. Sometimes I like to place the keyboard on the tray, in which case the keyboard wire falls short. Honestly, this is frustrating. Moreover, I was hoping to not get a laptop-sized keyboard with a Desktop computer. Maybe they could have packaged an ergonomically designed keyboard with Bluetooth (so that I can reduce the wire clutter on the table).

I am reminded of another product design annoyance from an otherwise design conscious company - Ikea. Ikea never stops to amaze the new shopper setting a step in their store and even for the regular shoppers it is a pleasant experience looking at the diverse and beautifully arranged room settings. On my first visit several years back, while I was enjoying the unique experience, I remember almost feeling disoriented in the big showroom; easy navigation in a store with large real estate is a rare phenomenon. In any case, the design gotcha that was most glaringly obvious was when I went to the check-out counter. The conveyor belt was quite narrow and it was difficult to place even modestly small items on the belt. It could be a small thing but it was definitely a bit annoying to try manage putting all the products on the belt. If you have been to Ikea, I'd be interested in knowing your thoughts.

1st Customer of HYC

Today, I drove my first customer of Help-You-Carry. She was an old lady living in San Jose. She had gotten information about HYC from Los Gatos Senior Center and she wanted to utilize the driving+shopping service, as she couldnt drive herself. My wife had accompanied me this time and that helped: the lady was using a walker and having my wife helped in overall logistics. Also, while the lady was shopping in the Target store, my wife and I did some of our own shopping. Overall it took about 3+ hrs from the time we left our home to the time when we were back.  It felt really good to be able to help someone!

Does California owe money to you?

Heard this on a local news channel:

Go to the following site and enter your name/city information to see if you are owed some money (at least I wasn't)

http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/

Thank you Apple for listening!

I have had the iPhone for more than a year now and I was experience dropped calls very often. More often than note, my phone will go to voicemail and I will hear the voicemail beep roughly about 10-15mins after the call was placed. Obviously, my wife was not happy about this. But I carried on with my iphone hoping Apple will fix the "minor" glitch. And so it did.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/softwareupdate/

Amongst the list of new updates, Apple mentions at the end of the list:

 "Decrease in call setup failures and dropped calls"

Thank you Apple for listening!

Volunteer Lawyers

I just came to know about this wonderful volunteer program that provides 20 min free legal consultation. Its called "Lawyers in the Library" program.  It runs out of King Library in San Jose. There are other locations as well. The following link also contains pointers to similar volunteer efforts.

Check out:

http://www.sjlibrary.org/about/locations/king/lawyers.htm

Counter intuitive!

As many of us already know, California State is in deep red. At a high level, I wonder why the 8th biggest economy in the world is $41 billion in deficit. Sure we had the housing bubble, reduced corporation tax due to lesser profits.... but does that all add up to $41 billion. I am curious to know the reason for the shortfall. I quickly googled it but have not yet been able to find any analysis on the issue. So, I turned to the source of information:

http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgeting/budget_faqs/

There is a lot of information and I will be analyzing it in coming days but for starters lets look at the sheet that details of the distribution of California State employees for different functions.

http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/pdf/BudgetSummary/BS_SCH4.pdf

Number of "Executives" is proposed to increase from 14,303 to 14,787 from 2007 to 2009 (a 3.3% increase).

Number of "Resources" (a very vague term) is proposed to increase from 14,509 to 15,616 (a 7.6% increase).

During the same time the number of K-12 teachers is proposed to decrease from 2903 to 2848 (a 1.8% decrease).

Now, when the state is going through a financial crisis, I am wondering why we are creating more "Executive" level positions. Moreover, I am curious to understand what functions "Resourcing" covers. Decreasing the number of teachers, quite unfortunately, seems to be the easiest thing to do but I wonder if anyone considers the long-term impact of such decisions.

What is Leadership?

Leadership is a loaded word; it means so many different things to different people that often the essence of the word is lost in lofty definitions. My tryst with leadership comes from my job as a manager at my workplace where day in and day out I am in situations where someone looks up to me to make a call. I may not know the right answer; in fact there may be none but that is where the leadership gets defined. I not only need to make the decision but I need to get everyone on board with it. Leadership is about passion of one becoming passion of many and that I believe defines the essence of being a true leader. Leadership is about character and integrity... it is about having the backbone, accepting when you make a mistake and also sticking by your call which you firmly believe in even if you meet with resistance. Leadership is about inspiring the backbenchers, making them believe they also can. 

I embrace leadership more naturally now than I used to earlier and it is fun!