adarsh bhat’s blog

If there’s any body who knows how to make software fascinating, it’s got to be Apple. This amazing key note address by Jobs at WWDC 2006 is an absolute must-watch.

No matter what they told me about sleeping well in the flight, the jet lag thing hit me quite hard. For the first three days, I’d feel sleepy at the wrong times and hungry at the wrong times.

Come 3:30 in the afternoon, and I’d be raring to go to bed. I couldn’t sleep after three in the morning. If I didn’t sleep in the afternoon, I’d be so sleepy by 9 that I wouldn’t care about dinner any more. Eating breakfast at morning felt like swallowing iron pellets (my cooking is not to blame).

Things are normal now. The drastic change from day 3 to day 4 surprised me a bit.

I had an important presentation to make at work this morning. I woke up at 4 in the morning to prepare for my presentation which was scheduled to start at 9:30 AM.

In the course of my presentation, there was one topic that I had to present that was a little hard to understand. It wasn’t rocket science, but I had had difficulty getting people to fully understand it in the past. I wanted to use a real world metaphor to make it really easy and memorable.

I came up with a metaphor that involved islands and populations. Of course, the real thing had to do with document management and the way some of our older customers had WorkSite deployed in their systems.

I don’t claim to be an expert on this kind of a thing. So I approached out our graphics artist Caroline Keem for help yesterday, since she deals with these things as part of her everyday work. Although Caroline didn’t give me a specific metaphor to use, she did change the course of my thinking.

Sometimes it is best not to use metaphors. Because the bad thing about metaphors is that after a certian point, they tend to break down. We can’t always explain things using real world objects, because hey, that’s not really a desktop there… those are not really folders in there… If you use a metaphor and it breaks down, you’re going to get in to trouble explaining the differences between the metaphor and the problem at hand, later on.

So I decided not to go too creative with the metaphor. While still staying in the document management business, I decided to tell a story (“a document management fairy tale that my grandmother told me”) that involved paper documents instead of e-documents — the silly story of Mr. and Mrs. Bunny, who came to Chicago from their burrow in the forest to start a new law firm.

When I started off the first line of the story and mentioned Mr. and Mrs. Bunny, one of the guys in the meeting said, “Adarsh, we’re all guys in here.” To which all the women in the room went, “Hello.. What’s that supposed to mean?”

Although I had a bit of trepidation about how the story would be received, I think it went quite well. (Reminder to self: I need to work on my narration skills.) It did its bit in lightening the mood and people came up with some really funny jokes along the way. The story also served as an easy way of referring to the complicated concept. When people had questions they simply talked about “the bunny thing” instead of using vague explanations.

The comments I received at the end of the presentation were very positive. Like they say, all’s well that ends well.

Hey, my lil cup cakes. I’ve reached Chicago in one piece. And so has the laptop that had the pleasure of traveling as check-in baggage.

The journey seemed surprisingly pleasant, despite the hour long delay at the Bangalore airport and the two hour delay at Heathrow. No, the terrorists didn’t bomb my plane. Thanks.

The apartment seems nice. Will post some pictures when I have my camera.

Here I am, rattling away at my keyboard at 3 AM. And still claiming that I’m not jetlagged.

I got my last hair cut this morning. I felt sorry for the barber. He kept looking for hair to cut, but didn’t find any. But he still pretended to cut my hair just to make me feel better. Thanks, Mr. barber – It’s not your fault. He felt really bad charging 35 rupees for doing nothing.

That’s one thing I don’t need to go through again. There is not much fear of hair growing on my head any more.

Internet Explorer hath its gotchas.

Update: Turns out it is my fault (this one time). Visual Studio debugger watch window hath its gotchas.