Random Notes

Joi Ito's is a liberal Japanese voice on the net (he is better known as an investor in some of the more interesting Internet technology companies - Technorati, flickr, MovableType etc.) His post on the anti-Japanese protests in China and the remarks that it provoked among his readers are interesting reading. (He also linked to this post about the reaction of Chinese bloggers).

Tyler Cowen has a brilliant summary of some of the commentaries on the weblogs on the American threat of using tariffs to force the Chinese to revalue their currency (even shorter summary - A lousy idea).

Elsewhere, he also expressed the belief (albeit a faith-based one) that sooner or later China is likely invade Taiwan and parsed a dense economic paper that concluded that a wealthier China may not necessarily lead to democratization. So much for the Chinese stock markets .....

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Desperate to finish that book? But can't master the discipline or the creative juices right now?

Here are 50 strategies for making you work.
Here is some more.

I am told that Bird by Bird is excellent too.

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Longtime readers may be familiar with my interest in China. Lately, it has been hard to keep up and I have mostly given up trying - except for in a few areas.

One of my interest areas is the evolving confluence of interest between Indian IT industry and China - thanks to the Chinese determination to catch up with the IT industry in India and the impact of the falling US dollar and rising wages for the Indian IT companies.

There were two interesting stories on this subject in FT and WSJ last month. The Financial Times story captured the start-up frustrations of the Indian IT companies that have set up development centers in China. There seems to be two main problems - 1. Inability to quickly find and hire a large number of English speaking developers in any Chinese city in order to quickly scale up for new projects 2. Lack of good project managers. It included an interesting interview with an Mphasis manager who said that for the time being they are looking to get experienced managers from from India to lead large projects. There was a story in Wall Street Journal in the same week that profiled a Chinese software company that has hired a few executives to (among other things) rewrite the e-mails from their developers to their US clients. These exectives are also trying to wise up the developers on the 'American way' (e.g. Dont be profusely sorry to an American when you do something slightly wrong. It doesnt go down as well in the English language and the client may think you are faking it). It interviewed some of the people inside this company and they talked about how determined they are to win big business from North America and how they are looking at this cost as an invesment worth making.

I think it will be a few years before we know how successful China's push towards IT services is going to be.

But earlier this month CNET published a short interview with Sudip Banerjee of Wipro. I thought it was very interesting and covered some of the same ground. Check it out.

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Surfing through PHPkid's weblog, I ran into this joke about IT project estimation.

It reminded me of this excellent post that I read sometime back on the trade-offs between scope, time and cost in project management (some talk about the same stuff in terms of time, cost and performance) . Obviously, most of us do not have the luxary of 'hiring' the right clients - but we do have the responsibility of setting the expectations rights (wherever possible).

Incidentally, Johm Musser of Columbia University has the most comprehensive online resource on project management that I have seen.

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We had a great time in the blogger meet up on April 2nd and it was nice being able to put in faces and physical-world personalities to the names and weblogs that I read regularly. But one of the people who attended the lunch on April 2nd, asked me on an e-mail later, if I didn't find it slightly curious that even after a week, most of the bloggers have not posted a report of the event on their weblogs. I thought this was partly because of the general hecticness of everyday life in the North East and partly because of the Indian diffidence about bridging the gap between the public and the personal space.

Not having any such qualms,, I had actually started doing an elaborate write-up. But it is now two weeks after the fact - as I try to start again where I left off the week before, I feel a little silly chiming in so late.

Right outside the window, the spring flowers look spectacularly pretty in the evening sun. The sun is reflecting off my computer screen. Everything has taken on a golden hew. We have had a spectacular week. I think the weather is also telling me to follow the trend ...

In lieu of a post, I am going to link to some photos of the event by Kerim Friedman posted. There are some more pics here in Seshu's weblog.

Prashant has linked to the webloggers who attended through this post on his weblog.

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I thought this was quite funny. (Via Kingshuk)

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Well, conversations about peak oil are back in currency.

The Oil Drum is a new weblog anchored around the idea that an energy crisis is inevitable - wheather it happens now or 5 years later is beside the point. It is run by two pseudonymous academics who see "Petroleum economy as the fundamental lynchpin of our present democratic society." (via Kevin Drum via Majikthise).

They linked to this very good primer on peak oil.

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Doug Henwood's Wall Street is now availble free for download under a Creative Common license (Here are the recent Crooked Timber and Brad Delong posts on the subject)
Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson is also available free for download.

(links via Mefi)

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I'll eventually write a detailed post about the blogger meet. In the mean time, here are a few links that recently caught my attention:

Blogging and journalism
LA Times media critic thinks that bloggers don't deserve first amendment protection. Jack Shafer (an unlikely person) wrote a spirited rejoinder. Soon after -as if on demand- LA Times laid an egg. Shafer didnt miss a beat.

I have now started feeling rather sorry for Eric Slater. (For those of you who dont follow the US media scene as obsessively, I should note here that LAT is actually a damn good newspaper)

Extremely loud and incredibly close
I heard interesting things about Extremely loud and Incredibly close in the blogger meet last saturday (more about that later today). This NYT page has a good review and links to author profile, extract etc.

Photography
There are three different Dayanita Singh exhibitions happening in the North east over the next few months. The one in Sepia will be over on April 16th. If you are in the neighbourhood, you ought to try to squeeze in a visit.

Talking of photography - check out the personal projects of Karina Laval and Kevin Cooley.(via Joerg CoLberg )

Saul Bellow
In case you didnt know, Saul Bellow is dead. I loved this throwaway line in his obituary:

I am currently feeling proud of my current state of residence.

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Keep in mind that Bay leaf closes at 3 PM. So, we only have 1.30 PM to 3 PM. Beyond that, we may need to move to a nearby watering hole. If you have RSVPed, please do try to land up - rain or no rain!!

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