Response to Leebron’s Latest

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , — sohum on August 20, 2010 at 11:08 am

David Leebron sent another email out to those alumni that had emailed him as well as posted the email up on the web for everyone to tear to pieces read. The letter in it’s entirety is available here. Although that does seem like a temporary URL, so I will include inline quotes from the actual message.

First, it bears reiterating that we are not selling KTRU.  We are selling the 50,000 watt broadcast license and radio tower.  This is not a trivial distinction.  We don’t claim of course that KTRU will reach the same audience, although the ability to reach audiences through the Web and in more places is growing rapidly. Some who wrote in objecting to the sale of the tower and license live well beyond its broadcast range.  They must understand that their access to KTRU will remain unchanged.  The critical question that must be asked is in what ways the student experience will be changed as a result of this decision.  Students will still manage the station (along with its general manager Will Robedee), design its programs and serve as DJs and announcers.  They may reach somewhat fewer people, but their audience will be increasingly global, and their opportunities for experience not significantly diminished. The question is not whether providing the KTRU experience is worth almost $10 million, but rather whether the difference between a Web-based-only format and the 50,000 watts justifies allocating all of those resources solely to KTRU.  In addition, we had to take into account that a radio broadcast license was most likely a declining asset over the long term as a result of changes in technology and consumer preferences for accessing music.

The points in bold are the ones that are interesting, in my opinion, and worth contending. From a birdseye viewpoint, either Leebron doesn’t understand the whole web radio idea or his advisors are misguiding him. The points I and others have made are pretty straightforward: (1) consuming media on the web is an active activity–radio is passive, (2) people don’t really listen to “radio” on the Internet… the Arbitron numbers Leebron references in his first email have much more to do with growing internet access than the web medium taking over, and (3) until the Internet becomes ubiquitous in consumer cars, there is still a market for radio activity (lawl at word juxtaposition, there).

I have lied when I said I have never listened to radio on the Internet. Back when I was in middle school, I tuned into a couple of Shoutcast channels in Winamp from India. I had a 56K connection so my experience was understandably frustrating, but at the same time, the whole idea of Internet radio has been around for ages. It’s not that the idea is good/bad, it’s just that we are not ready to replace conventional radio with Internet radio, yet. We can’t even guarantee 3G connectivity nationwide yet (if all cars were equipped with 3G radios and could use that to stream Internet radio, I guarantee you that latencies would be through the roof since the bandwidth is so low) and we are talking about the Internet taking over conventional radio?

With the proliferation of iPods and other mobile music players, how many people actually listen to radio while sitting down somewhere? The number of people who want to tune into some third party playlist from anywhere outside their car is extremely small, since there’s already music you know and like in those locations. Comparatively, not all cars are equipped with the functionality to easily tap into your mobile music library, which is why people turn to radio instead of carrying around a book full of CDs (all cars these days are equipped with CD players by standard).

Going back to the Internet > radio argument that Leebron makes, there are two technologies we are waiting on. The first is citywide Internet access, or WiMAX or 4G as it is also known as. WiMAX providers exist in a very limited number of cities in the U.S. right now. Houston is one of them, but there is only one provider (Clear) which means that they have a price monopoly (and they sure are charging it, at $40 a month). Let’s talk economics for a second, here. Do you think people will shell out upwards of $25/month when competitive WiMAX is available compared to free radio? According to Arbitron, in 2007, 3.4 percent of radio listeners tuned into satellite radio (think Sirius or XM), which was a paid radio service. That’s a tiny, tiny percentage. Let’s pretend that it has doubled since then (unlikely given economic conditions). Less than 7 percent of listeners of radio actually want to pay money to listen to radio. How viable is it that people will be willing to pay for citywide Internet access to listen to music on the go?

Secondly, there’s the whole client side perspective. If we pretend, for a moment, that ubiquitous Internet access is available for free for the entire population of Houston, you’ve still got the issue of tapping into the resource. The number of users who currently have Internet access built into their cars is minuscule. There’s no trend suggesting that will explode, either. For one, automakers aren’t going to start including built-in WiMAX antennae into their cars until the technology has invaded society. You’ve always got the option of buying a third party service, but going by the above numbers for satellite radio, one can make assumptions about how many people would invest in that technology.

The short of it is that radio isn’t just going to wither away and die overnight. There’s still a market for conventional radio until citywide Internet technology catches up. It will inevitably happen, but it hasn’t happened yet. The selling of this asset is premature at best, and the justification of it by pointing to Internet popularity is invalid. The number of Internet users is always growing. The slow growth of technologies that allow Internet radio from being accessible is what’s keeping radio still alive today, and it’s well and truly alive.

Second, I do want to address the issue of confidentiality and the lack of discussion or consultation regarding this sale.  This is indeed a serious objection.  We have tried since my arrival to have open discussion of both fundamental issues regarding the future of Rice and all important issues that affect students.  These have included every aspect of the Call to Conversation, and especially the expansion of the student body.  This openness was the policy we followed in our discussions about a possible merger with Baylor College of Medicine.  Input from students was critical in determining the size, location and design of our two new colleges and the renovation project in the south colleges.  This is certainly our preferred mode of making decisions, and the standard against which we should be judged.

Well since it is his preferred mode of making decisions, Leebron can hardly complain that we are judging the administration against the standard in this discussion. The only options they have is (a) admitting they were wrong in their process or (b) going back on their decision (which is just an extension of a). They can obviously choose neither of these options, which is most likely, in which case they’ll have to deal with the consequences of destroying the trust.

The special circumstances of conducting a bidding process for a broadcast license and negotiating the terms of the transaction required confidentiality. We sought advice about the best ways to conduct this process from those with deep experience in the sale of university-owned broadcast licenses.  They advised that we needed to have a confidential process. This troubled many of us, and we asked ourselves throughout the process whether we could bring students and others into it, but concluded that this would not be compatible with the negotiations we were undertaking and our ability to bring them to a timely conclusion.

This paragraph is long without saying anything at all. What are these “special circumstances” that are alluded to? Who did you consult that had such a deep experience that apparently didn’t do their research on Rice University and it’s ideals? Basically what Leebron’s saying is, “We had to be confidential because the process required confidentiality.” Why did it need to be confidential? What would happen if it weren’t confidential? Is it possible that people would have opposed the sale and hence broken it down? I would suspect that that’s the major reason, which basically means that they had the process be confidential so that none of the stakeholders could comment on the process and potentially derail the process. It seems the administration lied to the University of Houston Regents, as well: “We knew that some Rice students might be upset, but the way it was portrayed [by Rice] was that it was a small and insignificant number and that they would manage it. We never got the impression that it would cause an uproar.”

To me, this paragraph basically admits that the administration was aware that what they were doing was wrong (“this troubled many of us”) but decided to go ahead anyway because they’d rather get the cash than follow the precedent that they had set with involving the student community in discussions. It is an exaggeration, but this is akin to a democratic government suddenly acting in a tyrannical manner, something that should only happen in the deepest of crises.

Going forward, students and others are entitled to hold us to our word that this is not a precedent.  We believe that the confidential process we undertook was a necessity in these very specific and unusual circumstances.  We believe equally that this must be a very rare exception to our commitment to involving students in the decisions which affect student life.  Indeed, we have certainly taken note of the very strong feelings expressed on this issue, and thus might in the future strike a different balance between confidentiality and consultation even when the needs for confidentiality are high.

Like I said before, it doesn’t help restore any confidence if you say, “we heard you and we’ll remember it for next time.” This issue needs to be dealt with. Guarantees need to be made that the administration will not act in this manner in the future. It probably needs to go into the bylaws of the way the board of trustees acts because, frankly speaking, the trust that would allow the university community to believe these words has been shattered.

The bottom of the matter is the fact that the administration should have consulted the KTRU management prior to making a sale. It is entirely possible that the two parties could have sat down at a table and looked at ways to cut costs/increase revenues such that the asset wasn’t being “under-utilized”. Many have come out with suggestions–ranging from daytime programming by KUHC and nighttime programming by KTRU to adding shows that appeal to the masses more, such as to reach a compromise between the service KTRU provides and what Houston at-large wants. If KTRU hadn’t been a willing party in these negotiations, then the administration would have the ammo they required to go through with the sale, regardless, having made a legitimate attempt to engage the management with needs to change the way the station was being run. Instead, the administration chose to consult nobody and conduct all negotiations in secret, hence they are in the middle of this PR mess.

Third, I want to reiterate and perhaps amplify what we have said about the use of the proceeds.  A portion will be used to help fund the construction of the new servery for Will Rice, Lovett and eventually Sid Rich.  This has been a high priority for our students, communicated with passion and frequency over the years. (This is not, as some have assumed, part of the expansion of the student body, but rather part of our plan to improve the quality of our older colleges.)  It will enable us to markedly improve food quality and variety.  The majority of the resources will be applied in ways strongly informed by student input.  We expect this will include first and foremost support for KTRU as Web-based radio so that our students can operate a station on the cutting edge of technology.   We also expect that some of the resources will be used to expand media opportunities for our students more broadly, bringing to more students a more diverse array of choices in this arena.  Other uses, such as lighting an additional playing field, have also been mentioned repeatedly by the students as one of their top priorities, but no decisions have been made, nor will they be made without substantial student input.  It is not irrelevant in this context that the students have voted down KTRU blanket tax increases.  These votes have indeed indicated the need to expand our resources for student opportunities in other areas.

These are all viable uses of of the proceeds, although I would argue that the servery construction is related to the expansion plan. If I am not mistaken, Lovett was expanded to absorb parts of Baker’s New Wing and Will Rice had expansions made as well. These expansions may be marked down as “improvements to older colleges” but they are expansions nonetheless. It makes sense, then, that they will need a larger kitchen to serve the needs of the new residents. However, the question is raised as to why this servery must be built at this very moment in time, with the economy being in the state that it is. Surely, this is a time to be a little more conservative with new construction?

Also, as Danny Mee pointed out in his open letter, in 2004 the Rice Athletics program was losing $10m a year. That number may have grown due to economic conditions, but let’s assume that it has stayed the same. Wouldn’t a better fix be to cut down some of the spending on the athletics program, towards which most of the student population is apathetic anyway, and move that into a budget to improve student life? I can see where the building of an East Servery could theoretically be a pressing matter but other things such as adding lighting to another playing field is something that should probably be attempted when we are working at a budget surplus rather than a deficit.

Last, I want to address those of you who said you would likely withhold future contributions.  We regard each and every contribution as a wonderful act of generosity, and those from alumni as expressions of their love and gratitude for their Rice experience.  You are of course entitled to decide not to provide that support to Rice, and I cannot object to the choice you make.  But frankly, if all our graduates took the view that if the university makes a decision with which they strongly disagree they will not contribute, we would not receive any donations at all, and we would be a much weaker university and able to offer much less to our students. Some of our most generous donors have been people who over time have very strongly disagreed with decisions the university has taken.  But they have understood both that their desire to make our university ever stronger, and stronger forever, as well as their desire to return some of the benefits they feel they have received, argue persuasively for their continued support.  We cannot eschew all change, and all hard decisions, simply because some of our graduates feel so strongly that they threaten to, and perhaps ultimately do, withhold support. It will be a loss, and not only to our current and future students, but in fact to our alumni as well.  We urge you to continue to make your views known to us.  The passion of Rice students and graduates is one of our great strengths.  But so too is the fact that the vast majority of our graduates choose to support the university even when they take issue with particular decisions or directions.

In my humble opinion, the university is much weaker now because the views of the community–both current students and alumni–cannot be taken respectfully when making a large decision that affects a substantial amount of people. Leebron suggests that some of their most generous donors have strongly disagreed with the decisions the university has taken. I’d like to ask how many of these people continued to donate when those decisions were taken without any input whatsoever? The issue here is not as much the decision that has been made but the manner in which it was made. If the administration had attempted to engage alumni prior to making negotiations or even during the process, the final decision would have been an informed one. Even if the university decided at the end that the sale of the KTRU transmission equipment and license was the correct decision, alumni wouldn’t have been as miffed because they did get a chance to voice their concerns and know that the administration heard them.

What we have here is the administration acting unilaterally and then assuming that the community, despite disagreeing with the decision, will continue to donate regardless of the fact that they had no opinion in the matter. I would seriously question the motives behind making large donations to the university fund if the administration continually makes decisions on how to spend that money without making anyone aware of the decision process.

I think Leebron and the administration still have a lot of explaining to do and have to at least make an apology and admit that the process they followed was not in the best taste.

Rice Killing KTRU: A Perfect Crime?

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — sohum on August 19, 2010 at 11:08 am

On a recent visit to New York, I had the opportunity to watch a play titled Perfect Crime. This play claims to be the longest running product on- or off-Broadway and has utilized the same actor in the leading female role for all those years. However, this piece is not a review of that theatrical production, but a look at how the Rice administration may have created another definition for the phrase that is the play’s name: a perfect crime.

What are some of the factors comprising a perfect crime? In the play, the crime was perfect because no one knew that it had happened, or at least that’s what I was able to understand given my limited comprehension when it comes to confusing storylines. I would say that we have a similar situation here with the Rice-KTRU situation, except that the crime that has been committed isn’t legally going to be recognized as a criminal offense.

Let’s take a look at the recent history of the Rice-KTRU conflict. In 1991, KTRU was donated a 50,000 watt transmitter that allowed their signal to be broadcast outside just the vicinity of the Rice campus. From what I understand, the asset itself was titled to Rice University, as were all the related legal documents (FCC license, etc.). There was a tacit understanding back then that Rice, as an educational institution responsible for the intellectual journey of its students, would basically allow a sandbox for the KTRU organization to play in–give them a real radio station to test their talents and share their music while providing the backing that a well-ranked, private educational institution could provide.

In 2000, the Rice administration first flexed its muscles by requiring a certain amount of time being devoted to sports programming of the Rice University sports teams. A fair ask, in my book, except that it wasn’t exactly handled well by both parties. The reports suggest that a conflict ensued when KTRU DJs were required, without prior notification, to operate the station during a sports broadcast during a regularly scheduled show. They retaliated in a not-entirely responsible fashion by playing music over the broadcast during the end of the game. The administration, instead of working with the station manager to alleviate the problem and come up with a more deterministic solution, decided to lockout the students and take control of the station. Protests and petitions followed and eventually the station went back to normal.

It seems, however, that the Rice administration back then was just looking for a reason to try and take over the station. They were waiting for one slip from the station administration to swoop in and take control. They failed back then because of community intervention. They failed and they learned.

Skip forward to 2010, a couple of days ago when the news first broke that Rice had engaged the University of Houston as a buyer for the station transmitter and broadcasting rights. Rice’s official statements suggest that negotiations have been ongoing for several months. An interview with KTRU Station Manager, Kelsey Yule, suggests that “the station was put on the market over a year ago by the administration without student or community input or even notification.” In addition to the fact that no one who ran KTRU knew about the sale of the transmitter is the timing of the actual sale–during Rice’s Orientation Week (O-Week) when the vast majority of students on campus are freshmen along with a few advisers who are upperclassmen or recent grads.

While it could certainly be coincidental that the UH regents just happened to have their meeting at this point in time, a quick look at the regents’ meeting schedule shows that they meet every 3 months. Their last meeting was held in May, a few days after the graduation of the Class of 2010, and at a time where bad press could certainly have tarnished Rice’s reputation, especially in the college rankings that they like to gloat over these days (USNews, Princeton Review, etc.). Instead, the administration waited till the summer had settled in, the number of KTRU DJs was at a minimum and the rankings had come in. The carnage took place during a week where the majority of the students at Rice were just excited to be at college and meet new people, without having to worry about some of the student-led institutions that comprised the university.

No matter how I look at it, it seems obvious to me that this was a meticulously planned and perfectly executed offense by the Rice administration. They took care of all the issues from their previous attempt to take over the station–it was done discretely and without the knowledge of anyone except the negotiating parties compared with the previous attempt, which was as blatant an attempt at a takeover that you could take. The final offensive play here was executed at a time that the defense was sleeping, having already been blindsided by the lack of any knowledge of the negotiations in the first place. Current students involved in KTRU aren’t allowed back on campus until Saturday of this week unless they are involved with O-Week. They can’t move in before then so they obviously wouldn’t have been chilling around on the streets of Houston in case their beloved station was being taken over.

Leebron, on his Twitter feed, only says “negotiations did require confidentiality.” There’s no explanation behind this statement or why the standard procedure of utilizing NDA’s could not have been employed to keep important stakeholders in the loop. To me, it seems like the administration didn’t want to even effectuate that process because they knew what they were doing was essentially stabbing a student-run club with visibility outside of Rice and that would obviously have some level of opposition. What I can’t understand is how anyone advising the administration could have allowed them for a second to believe that people wouldn’t be hurt by the process followed. And if the administration was aware of this, then it just demonstrates how awfully arrogant they have become. They are, in effect, demeaning themselves by essentially suggesting that the very student population that they strive to educate are too stupid to weigh in on the discussion.

So, was this a perfect crime performed by the Rice administration? The very fact that Rice legally owns all the assets and hence control over its exchange immediately means that the sale itself couldn’t have been a crime. The real crime here is against the current student population and alumni population of the university. The fact that Rice didn’t respect those individuals or entities enough to engage them in the negotiation process. In that regard, this most certainly is a perfect crime. Those individuals couldn’t possibly have expected that an educational institution that they loved and that nurtured them could stab them in the back so quickly.

RIP KTRU… Rice administration has screwed themselves

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on August 17, 2010 at 1:08 pm

As anyone who cares would have known by now, the Rice administration has okayed a $9.5 million deal for the sale of KTRU radio frequency (specifically the license and the tower) to the University of Houston, so that they can set up a classical music channel (KUHC) and convert their current KUHF frequency to a dedicated news channel. Several people have commented on this situation already (see additional links at the end) so I figured I might as well contribute my opinion.

First of all, let me preface this by saying that I was anything but an avid KTRU listener. I didn’t have a car at Rice so I didn’t really have the option to tune into any radio station so the only music I heard when I was a student was on the internet or through recommendations from other people. The one show I did follow somewhat closely was MK Ultra, which was an electronica show hosted by Paul Thompson, my roommate junior and senior year every Friday night that featured 1-hour sets from 2-3 professional DJs in Houston.

That said, most of the problems I have with this whole situation is the procedure that was followed. I first learned about this at around 10pm last night from the aforementioned Paul. There were a total of 2 news articles on the subject, online. One a rumor published by houstonpress and the other a more concrete piece by the Houston Chronicle. This morning, things are much more publicized and out in the open, and the Rice admin is beginning to see how many people they upset by the poor process they followed.

KTRU, as I understand, has existed as a student-run enterprise for 40 years. The new 50,000 watt transmitter has existed for 19 of those 40 years, serving out content to the city of Houston. But the administration didn’t think it would be a good idea to engage students or alumni or really anyone, whilst potentially destroying the work put in by all those volunteers throughout the decades. The decision certainly makes sense from a financial perspective, but it reeks of arrogance and a continued disconnection from the people who actually comprise Rice.

When I decided to attend Rice back in the spring of 2005, the primary factor in my decision was the relatively cheap cost for a great education. In my four years at Rice, the annual tuition grew 16%. That may not seem like a very large number, unless we look at it contextually. The tuition grew about $6000 from 2005-2009. Right now it stands at a bit above $40,000 a year. Over a standard 4-year curriculum, kids that are matriculating today will have to pay about $25,000 more than I did 4 years ago. That is a mind-bogglingly large number, especially given the fact that we are in the middle of an economic recession.

The current administration is trying to shape Rice into something that is completely different from the Rice that I researched when I was applying and the one that I attended. And I don’t think it’s for a particularly appreciable cause, either. It’s not as if a Rice degree in the 90′s or early 00′s was worth less than one now–in fact, ironic as it may be, I think a Rice degree was actually worth more back then than it is now, despite causing a fraction of the cost. Providing smart, young individuals a longer rope than most conventional colleges do actually worked and as the old adage goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Yet, that’s exactly what they’ve done. The administration has trekked down a path of expansion without concern for how it will affect the quality of education for the individual. They’ve built 2 new residential colleges and expanded more within a matter of months but academic buildings are continuously ignored when it comes to upgrades or new additions. The administration is constantly meddling in cultures and traditions that are entrenched in the history of the university and KTRU is just the newest one in what is likely to be just one more in an unending wave of destruction.

In Leebron’s email (which conveniently has not been sent out to all alumni–it didn’t get delivered to my mailbox), he claims that the station will be sold so that the money can be better used to augment facilities that affect more students. Such as using the money to build the new East Servery. If you ask me, it seems like the administration is quickly finding out that it’s plans for gung-ho expansion of the university weren’t thought out very carefully, and with the economy severely affecting their endowments, they’re in a bit of a cash-press. They can’t back down from their major investment in the expansion of the school as that would appear weak, so instead they have targeted a cultural institution that most students won’t care about. In doing so, they’ve successfully cannibalized the KTRU radio station, a goal it seems they shared with the previous administration, and created a new generation of disgruntled alumni.

Additional Links

Facebook: save ktru
Twitter: @savektru @ktruriceradio
Web: savektru.org petition
Blogs: BurnDownBlog houstonpress

the fake con

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , — sohum on May 03, 2010 at 7:05 am

If you’ve ever had to purchase a product in India that requires at least some level of continued customer interaction, you’ve probably come across what I’m labeling here as a fake con. What exactly is a fake con? It is something that, throughout the process of the event, feels like a con but ends up being legitimate. Doesn’t sound great and it isn’t, either. This is how a sample fake con goes:

  1. You contact Company X about Product Y.
  2. The sales rep. of the company does a good job convincing you of buying the product. You decide to go ahead and buy it.
  3. The sales rep. promises delivery of Product Y the next day. An experienced fake conner will realize this could raise suspicion and promises delivery in 48 hours or something to that effect.
  4. The intended date of delivery swings around and there’s no sign of delivery.
  5. You get in touch with the sales rep. in the afternoon, after lunch. He promises delivery in the evening.
  6. Evening turns into night but there’s no sign of delivery.
  7. You get in touch with the sales rep. in the late evening, just before dinner. He promises delivery the next morning.
  8. You give the sales rep. a piece of your mind, but you were expecting some sort of delay in delivery (this is India after all).
  9. The next day, you repeat steps 5-7. You are now getting annoyed.
  10. The day after, the sales rep. phone appears to be out of service. In reality, the sales rep. is just ignoring your calls.
  11. You try calling customer service but of course they have no record of your application for Product Y. In fact, you have to call several different customer service centers and give a lot of information. The standard response is that they will tell you to wait another period of the initial waiting period (for example, 48 hours).

This is how it is so far. There are now two paths you can follow. If you happen to know someone senior level in Company X, you get in touch with them. Power hierarchy works as good as it always does and:

12. You get delivery of the product that day.

Your saga thus ends. You never hear back from the original sales representative. He has clearly been humbled. However, not everyone has the benefit of this situation so what probably happens is:

12. You make more calls, more complaints.
13. You finally realize the hopelessness of your situation and give up trying.
14. You get delivery of the product a few days later.

As you can see, it feels like you are getting swindled the whole way, but what is actually happening is that the level of service is extremely poor. The product and company are legitimate, it is just that the sales team is too disconnected from the delivery/engineering team and in general they are just too lazy. There is no respect for a customer’s time and no guaranteed response time.

Most recently, this happened with us with TATA, whose high-speed internet service plan we were trying to get so that I could VPN effectively. Just a few days prior to that, a similar thing happened to my cousin when he was trying to buy a car. It’s happened for ages and I have no doubt it’ll happen for ages more. There just seems to be no semblance of professionalism and accountability in some customer-facing industries in India.

traveling on the job and my life’s shortest flight

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on April 18, 2010 at 12:04 pm

Last week I had the opportunity to travel to Chicago and Wisconsin for National Instruments’ LabVIEW Developer Education Days. This is basically an event that NI holds throughout the country in several different locations to spread awareness of a few new features in the LabVIEW environment and how users may use it. There are two tracks–an intermediate track and an advanced track. This is usually an event put together by the regional sales staff, and they usually fly out an R&D Engineer to head up the advanced track sessions. This is not only because R&D works on the features being demonstrated on a day-to-day basis, but because it offers an awesome opportunity for R&D to see how customers actually react to their product.

So, I was flown in to Chicago on Monday morning as part of this effort. On Monday I met one of our customers in the Chicago area, DMC, and had an opportunity to see what sorts of things they are working on. I also gave a short presentation and demo of the feature I’ve been working on, which is basically the ability to add third party licensing & activation to users developing extensions to LabVIEW.

Tuesday was the first developer education day, in Chicago, hosted at Harper College. Harper is a community college but it had a pretty large campus. In fact, they even had a lake! Their convention center was very slick, and had an amphitheater. Anyhow, the developer day itself went pretty well. In the morning, I presented Graphical Scripting, which is a LabVIEW feature that allows users to generate LabVIEW code from LabVIEW programs. This may not make a lot of sense, and unfortunately I cannot think of any analogies outside of the programming domain. Think of it as similar to writing Java code that generates Java code. This basically allows you to automate certain repetitive code patterns.

The afternoon session that I presented was on Advanced Control and PID. I will confess that this is not a topic that I am very familiar with, but the presentation gave me the opportunity to learn about the topic. As software engineers (especially a new one like myself), I don’t really have the opportunity of seeing a real world usage of LabVIEW. The control presentation and a few chats with the attendees afterwards showed me how LabVIEW users use the various parts of the LabVIEW system in their work. It was pretty cool.

After the event on Tuesday, we packed up and shipped our presentation materials to Milwaukee. Ended up having dinner at an Asian restaurant near our hotel (I think it was called Big Bowl or something like that). Since there was nothing else to really do, we ended up catching a movie at a nearby theater–She’s Out Of My League. It was a pretty funny movie… not on the level of The Hangover or Hot Tub Time Machine, though!

On Wednesday, unfortunately the customer visit I had scheduled got cancelled. In the morning I went with the Chicago sales engineers to a company called EcoloCap, which has apparently been developing a high-efficiency, low-cost, environmentally-friendly fuel called “M-Fuel”. They have a bunch of information published, if anyone wants to read more about it. In the afternoon, I visited the public section of Fermi Particle Acceleration Lab. Fermi can be considered as the precursor to CERN. It was a pretty interesting outlook, and gave me an idea as to how NI technology can be used in big physics. Unfortunately, we had no visits scheduled there so I couldn’t get a deeper understanding of how everything worked.

We then drove to Milwaukee (or maybe it was a place called Waukesha… I don’t know) where our Wisconsin Dev Day was going to be held. Luckily we could set up at any time (at Chicago we had to set up at 6:30am on the day of the conference). After checking into our rooms, we waited for all the sales engineers to arrive before setting up. It did not take that long to set up, luckily. We rounded the day off by having dinner at a nearby seafood grill. The food was quite delicious!

Thursday followed much of the same schedule as the Tuesday Developer Day. The turnout was a bit smaller, but higher than the normal Milwaukee Dev Day, I was told. Nothing spectacular/unique to report on that day. After the event we packed up, said good bye to the Chicago sales engineers and relaxed for most of the rest of the evening (except for dinner, of course).

Friday, the last day of my trip, featured three customer visits. I visited Dyne Systems in the morning, FasTek over lunch and Soliton after lunch. Each of the three customers gave me an idea of what they did with their products and with NI technology and then I gave them a short presentation and demo of how the feature I was working on could help them make some moolah. After all that was done, I was dropped off at the Milwaukee General airport (MKE), where I took the shortest flight of my life.

The flight was between Milwaukee and Chicago O’Hare. Our plane left the ground at 4:07pm and touched down at O’Hare at 4:25pm. An 18 minute flight. I don’t want to think about how much that cost! Unfortunately, the wait at Chicago was a little more than 3 hours. I spent the time in one of the restaurants where I had a leisurely-paced dinner with a couple of beers while watching some baseball. Probably the only baseball I’ll watch all year!

I touched down in Austin at around 10:30pm and got a SuperShuttle pretty quickly (which is weird, kinda, usually the wait is around 20 minutes). Got back home at around 11:15pm and was very tired but ended up watching the Tuesday episode of Lost. Still have to catch up with HIMYM, Modern Family and 24, though.

Anyways, after two back-to-back 9-hour sleeping nights, I feel good again! Unfortunately for my health, the NBA Playoffs began this weekend which means 20 hours of basketball (a quadruple-header each day)!

taxes and technology

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on March 08, 2010 at 1:03 am

I don’t think I’ve griped about my iPod Touch potentially dying last week. Apparently my iPod freaked out when I plugged it into my entertainment center last weekend to play some Ke$ha (yes, this was probably my mistake). The iPod was unsyncable through iTunes for some reason and since we had people over and I didn’t really feel like troubleshooting, I let YouTube and my collection of music on the hard disk take over. Later last week I took my iPod into work to listen to some music. Unfortunately, it would play only one song. I repeat, only one song. At the end of the song, I’d hear approximately 0.83 seconds of the next song and then the music app quit.

Any other app I opened did not work either. Just boot up and shut down immediately. I did a reboot on the system a couple of times and there was no improvement. Finally, I got the chance this weekend to try and figure out what the problem was. When I plugged the iPod in, it told me I needed to update my software. When trying to update my software, it said that it could not backup my profile. I had all my music on my computer and all my apps are on my iPhone now so I thought, what the hell, let’s just do a full-scale restore operation. Restore failed. A couple of times.

Luckily I was watching TV at the time (I think Modern Family or The Office or maybe even an NBA game or something) so I had the patience to keep trying. Finally, the restore went through. However, it then promptly hung when I tried to name my iPod (configuring it as a brand new device). I quit iTunes forcefully and upon restarting, it gave me the “Cannot Sync” message, forcing me to restore it again. I had to do about 2-3 clean restores before I was finally able to configure the device to work (I think). Once I finally managed to name my iPod (going with the generic sohum’s iPod instead of something as exciting as sohummm or maybe even iSohum) I decided that I had had enough of iTunes.

Fortunately for me, I had stumbled upon an article a couple of weeks ago about how an iPod user wanted to divorce iTunes. If you recall my “iTunes kills the iPhone experience” blog, you will note that I was in much the same position (except that I would never be able to overlook iTunes’ many flaws to ever marry it in the first place). One of the alternatives was MediaMonkey, which I promptly downloaded, installed and fired up. While the interface isn’t as clean-cut as iTunes, it is infinitely more performant. It took me about 25-30 minutes to set up my sync list and then I clicked one button and it was ready to go, quietly doing its stuff in the background. The last time I tried to use iTunes to set up a new iPod with my music (my iPhone, in that case), I had to live through about 2 hours of iTunes trying to figure out whether each song in my library should be included on the “gapless” playback list before my computer was usable.

I don’t change my music all that often–just add new tunes here and there, so it seems MediaMonkey is the perfect hands-off tool for me to sync my iPod without having to deal with the crapware that is iTunes. I’m not interested in buying crippled, low bitrate music from iTunes and even if I did, I would do it directly through my iPod (if that’s possible).

Anyways, that’s the technology part of this blog. Tomorrow will be a test of whether my iPod is truly fixed or whether it was just pretending to do so.

The other thing I wanted to touch upon was taxes. Yep, tax season is coming up! While at Rice, the international student office kindly set us up with a license of the CINTAX (hilarious name, yes?) software to help us crunch the numbers. It had always seemed like such a painful and tedious process? Doing it on my own this year showed that it is actually not that complicated, especially if you have a simple financial situation, as I do. First of all, since I’m still technically a non-resident (in fact, an NR student, to be precise) I don’t really qualify for any extra deductions/exemptions. The tax treaty with India (Article 21(2) to be exact) allows me to get the standard deduction ($5,700) and my lowly income allows me to get the standard exemption ($3,650). However, this may be the final year that I will have such a simple process since next year I will be in H-1B status for part of the year, meaning that I may need to split my taxes or do something exciting like that. I will probably need to consult professional help at that point in time, but for now I am rejoicing in having solved one of those annoying life problems. :P

Anyways, I got a lot of information from a website called VisaTaxes.com, if any of you are international students and have stumbled upon this blog because of tax season. Here are a few more keywords to hook you into this blog (is this unethical?): 1040NR, 1040NR-EZ, Form 8843. Grin. :)

C’est tout!

the customer ain’t king

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on December 09, 2009 at 10:12 pm

This is a rant directed towards NBA League Pass.

A few weeks ago I complained about ridiculous blackout restrictions that prevented me from watching the Rockets here in Austin, just about 200 miles away. Since people had been complaining for ages without the NBA or anyone who could do anything giving a shit, I decided to stifle my voice and instead purchase a pricey NBA League Pass package. I bought the cheapest one available–that allows me to watch games that are not blacked out by regional restrictions for any 7 teams. It came out to something like $90 for regular season, which isn’t all that bad since that’s equivalent approximately a month and a half of cable for me (which I’ll be downgrading as soon as I can, since the only reason I bought this, more expensive, package is because it has the regional Fox Sports channels, which I found out later they blackout for NBA).

My experience with League Pass has been decent. I’ve been annoyed at the fact that they use a proprietary Flash player which means that I cannot do anything to change the ratio (they output 4:3 whereas my TV is a widescreen 16:9), the scores that take up about half the screen and the fact that they don’t show actual half-time shows. These issues I can understand because (a) they wouldn’t want to provide free advertising to the half-time show sponsors and (b) the entire system was designed by UI dimwits.

What I cannot accept, though, is the fact that sometimes games will just not show. And the reason is that whoever is behind their intricate UI setting up the streams has messed up what channel outputs what game. I had this occur sometime a few weeks back when the Rockets were playing a no-name team. That didn’t matter so much. Tonight, we’re playing the Cavs and were playing them pretty well. Of course, League Pass decided to output the Hornets-Timberwolves game. It went down to the last second–but I don’t give a crap about either of those teams. I was hopeful that the problem would be fixed after the Hornets game was finished and the pivotal fourth quarter began in the Rockets game, but now I have a blank screen staring at me that says “NBA League Pass Broadband Channel 1″. Googling a few forums, I found that the Rockets game is actually playing on the Spurs-Kings channel (who knows what channel that game is being played on?). Of course, the awesome part about this is since Austin is in the Spurs’ hometown sphere of influence, its blacked out on my League Pass. So my options for watching the game are basically down to one: watch an illegal stream from some site (justin.tv, ustream.tv, myp2p.eu pop into mind immediately).

Argh.

But wait, there’s more! The last time, in my frustration, I sent the folks at League Pass an angry email. I got a response about a week later saying sorry because of technical difficulties. Today their chat line happened to be open so I logged in to that. After waiting for about half an hour and posing my query, the representative, “Rebecca” told me that it was a technical issue that they had been notified of and that they couldn’t do anything. I guess their chat line is open for far more pressing issues such as “OMG I can’t install Flash”, which can be solved by using the great Google.

Thank god myp2p pointed me to a Chinese stream. Too bad I can’t understand the commentary…

ready, set, rant!

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on October 03, 2009 at 11:10 pm

It has been a bloody long time since I have made an entry into this blog. My French Euro Trip series has been abandoned with 3 days to spare. Any enthusiasts can see the rest of the photos in my Facebook album. If you’re not my Facebook friend, then I probably do not want to share any more of the details of the trip with you, anyway. ;)

So the subject of this post is, quite simply, “rant”. A number of things have annoyed me in the last few days so I have decided that instead of keeping them all in my head, I will transfer them over to teh interwebs where they will stay published forever (or until a server crashes, or I delete it, or something). Without further ado, let the bashing begin!

1. Satellite TV in general, DirecTV in particular

I know satellite TV is still this kinda new thing (yeah, right) and I was excited to see all the discounts I could get on a new DirecTV installation. So, last week, I finally decided to take the plunge on getting TV in my apartment and signed up for a DirecTV account. I think it was actually around 10 days ago. I was able to get about $21 off on their “new user” discounts in addition to a $10 discount for using a referral code from someone at NI. So I was saving a sweet $31 a month for 12 months, and getting TV at about $40/month. Or rather, going to get all this. Of the several appointment days available, I decided to choose the Saturday 8am-12pm slot, since I was gonna be at work the rest of the time.

My first mistake, perhaps? Turns out Saturday is a super-busy day (who woulda thunk it?). So naturally, DirecTV’s local field office should have been a little bit better staffed, right? Wrong. Pity me, who woke up at 8am, excited for the smell of new TV. It wasn’t until 12.15pm that I felt miffed enough to call and when I called, I was told I would be called within 20 minutes. I received a call from the local office to confirm that a technician was present. I told them quite curtly that there was no technician present, while reminding her that it was already 30 minutes past my rather-large-time-range appointment. She said she’d call back in 20 minutes but only a fool’d believe her. I was a fool.

Luckily I was able to get a lot of stuff done in the mean time, such as getting a “permission form” signed from Riata that allowed me to get a satellite in my patio, as well as getting some batteries from the Food Mart nearby and figuring out a rent check error with Riata. I also figured out rent/expenses issues with Hubert at that point.

Still nothing. I called DirecTV again at around 1.30pm and asked them, in kinder terms, “What the hell?” They told me they’d get in touch with their local office again (with whom their only method of communication happens to be, wait for it, …. email). This time the local office called me, apologetically, saying that the technician was late (no, shit!) and that he’d be there in 35 minutes. I got some other errands done and finally the technician arrived.

And after waiting for more than 5 hours for him, our meeting lasted less than 5 minutes. Apparently the satellites are located in the “southern sky” whereas our patio can only see satellites in, well, the rest of the freaking sky. So, no DirecTV. I called and cancelled and checked Dish Network’s availability. Looks like they used to be in the “northern sky”, which would have been perfect, but they are now operating in the “southeastern sky” area. So no Dish. So… no satellite. Humph. I have sold my soul to AT&T (see next gripe).

2. AT&T U-Verse: An arm and a leg for TV

After my failure with satellite and my ever-growing appetite for television (in particular, trash TV) I decided to look at my options. Basically it was down to the two “cable”-esque providers: Time Warner Cable and AT&T. I wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of dealing with either of them, to be honest. I have heard very bad things about TWC and I have experienced very unprofessional behaviour from AT&T. I don’t think I ever disclosed the shenanigans that took place when I first moved to Austin and tried to get my own Internet.

Basically, to save some time, I decided to order my AT&T internet from Houston a few days before I reached Austin. That way, I hypothesized, I would minimize the amount of non-Internet time. As it happened, AT&T’s dysfunctional website decided to eat my apartment number and hence the modem+router never got delivered. When I tried to call them to ask them to call FedEx and have it redelivered, I found out that their phone department and internet department is not connected. This is absolutely ridiculous, in my opinion. What’s the point of having a tech support line for online orders, then?

Once I got all that cleared out and billing time came around, I received two bills–one for the account that was never created and one for the fixed account. To make matters worse, the second account took me for a business and hence charged me nearly double. A long phone call later, everything seemed to be figured out, but I’ll be keeping an eye on my next few billing cycles.

Anyways, I finally brought the wallet out for AT&T U-Verse and went with a pretty expensive plan that is supposed to give me $200 cashback after I activate. At this point, you are probably asking me why I fell for the AT&T trick again, and I have no valid response. I am hoping that somehow the stars will align and everything will miraculously work. Unfortunately, there has already been a slight issue, since right after I placed my order, the confirmation page said, “If you have an AT&T DSL service at that location, that account will be cancelled.” I immediately opened up a tech support chat window to figure out what’s up.

Turns out AT&T has TWO SEPARATE INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS. It’s as if they are purposely inventing stuff to confuse the consumer further. I have an AT&T High Speed Internet account, whereas since I’m going with AT&T U-Verse for TV, supposedly my account will be transferred to an AT&T U-Verse Internet account. I foresee further issues.

–

That’s it. I grew tired after those two rants, but I was planning to rant on the Indian cricket team. Then I realized that I never really cared about the ICC Champions Trophy, so I didn’t care that India got knocked out early. I am a little unhappy, though, that I will miss out on the opportunity to watch/DVR the Twenty20 Champions League or India-Australia ODI series later this year. Oh well, I guess Dish/DirecTV are saving me some money, after all.

blast from the past

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , — sohum on July 27, 2009 at 4:07 am

I was looking through the desktop and my backed up files today, looking at all the literary content I had generated in high school. This reminded me of my college application process, and I gleefully began reading the essays I had written. This essay, titled “The Bathroom”, was unequivocally my favourite one. It was written for Harvey Mudd College and (surprisingly) my application was accepted. Enjoy!

—

The Bathroom

There are two places where my mind is idle and completely open to ideas—in the bed while I am dreaming and in the bathroom while I am…doing the obvious. The latter does require some state of non-constipation to ensure that my mental energy is being used somewhat efficiently. It is an unfortunate by-product of life that one cannot remember dreams for a long enough time to record them—but with a pen and some paper, miracles can occur in (or on) a toilet. Anyhow, let me progress with the evidence for my shifty argument, lest I waste too many of my precious words on this introduction.

As I have mentioned above, if I can successfully channel my mental energies into areas of creativity, in the bathroom of course, great things can happen. When in a toilet, there is nothing much to grab my attention and thus my mind begins to wander. Ideas begin to formulate, develop and disappear and for a second it seems that I am but day-dreaming. How can I capture my ingenious thoughts? This is when the writing stationary and my consciousness comes in—I can now record my ideas and make sense of them afterwards!

I can interact with my thoughts in a way that was previously impossible—I can tinker with them and put them into proper words. What sets bathroom free-write apart from the post-write of dreams is the fact that the writer is already awake and ready to write. There is no risk of forgetting ideas or running out of time with them (unless you are in a particular hurry) and as a result, there is a progression of sorts. It is important to remember, however, that one must not force the development of ideas whilst actually in a bathroom. Everything must drop into place naturally.

Apart from being a great place to communicate with my brain, the bathroom is also an exemplary demonstration of the great human skill of multi-tasking. One can cleanse bodily systems and get work done—at the very same time! This is especially true if you are an unorganized worker, procrastinator or just a person with dirty habits. I, of course, am none of the three; I am a enlightened person who understands the true potential of a bathroom. It is almost derogatory to call such a mentally stimulating place a restroom—it is a place where the mind is extremely active.

Before I climb out, soaking, of this essay on a seemingly disastrous subject, I would like to helpfully point out my tasteful choice of subject and of course my honesty in the execution of this essay. I am sure this essay was…different, and I am hoping that that was for positive reasons. I sincerely do hope that this essay provides me with an opportunity to exhibit my creativity, my superb skills in writing and of course my modesty.

a few notes

Filed under: life — Tags: , , — sohum on July 01, 2009 at 12:07 pm

I don’t have time for a long post now, but here are a few slices of information as to what will be coming up on sohummm. There will be some spectacularly long overdue food memories–especially of mangoes, meat and some of my cooking escapades. There will be a couple of movie reviews, namely of Angels & Demons, X-Men Origins: Wolverine and New York. With regards to that, I’m going to try to be a little more standardized in my movie reviews in an attempt to make it a more common feature of this website.

So that’s what’s coming up. Maybe a few cricket-related things here and there, but don’t hold your breath. Don’t hold your breath, generally speaking, unless you’re swimming underwater or something.

Older Posts »