This is avinash.vora, and I'm Avinash. I'm on Twitter, Tumblr, News.YC, Reddit and I have an Amazon Wishlist. I like wearing sandals, playing guitar, and consider myself a bit of a hacker (the good kind). Here, you'll find me writing about whatever catches my fancy. Beware, there may be spoilers.
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I honestly didn’t even notice that this site was down for about two weeks. My redundancy index.html kicked in and displayed a message, but I didn’t think to make it clever enough to shoot me an email letting me know. It completely killed traffic for 3 weeks, but it’s nice to know that everything is sorted out now.
Hopefully you don’t find any more kinks, and if you’ve been trying to contact me, everything should work now. Please let me know if you find any major bugs.
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In about three minutes, I generated this beautiful world cloud at Wordle with no effort at all.
I love data visualization—it’s why I am a sucker for site metrics, code_swarm, and other cool ways to visualize data on the web.
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I read Hacker News on a daily basis; it has come to replace all other social news websites for me. The stories and comments are—not to sound cliched—just more insightful and intelligent than its predecessors Reddit and Digg. I don’t catch every good story, though. Only today, there was a story requesting submissions of what others considered their best stories of 2008.
There were some fantastic stories that I had missed. Before I get to my favorite missed story, I found it interesting how many of these stories were not related to the kind of hacking that I imagine the site was originally intended for. A few examples of great stories that weren’t:
…to name a few. The one that really caught my eye was this: a story on how to get into the hottest restaurants in town. The article is brilliantly written, and closes off fantastically:
For as little as $100—that’s $25 each for a meal that would ultimately cost close to $375 per head—I had jumped what was rumored to be a 2,700-person waiting list and gotten into the hardest restaurant in the world that week. Also, I had shot the moon. And I had done it by following a set of rules so old-fashioned that my grandmother could have written them: Dress properly, act dignified, be polite, smile. And spend a little extra for good service—it will pay you back in droves.
Forget Frank Sinatra. Forget James Bond. For the rest of that day, for the time it took me to call everyone I know, for the three hours and 45 minutes it took me to eat my 11-course meal, I was the lights on the top of the Chrysler Building. I was the smile on the Statue of Liberty. I was New York.
I was money.
Forget the content, I love the writing. The Sinatra/Bond reference is a running theme in the essay, and I loved how he crafted it to a brilliant conclusion. But even the idea behind the essay is clever—the bribes were about what I would expect for the caliber of restaurants that he went to in New York, but it’s his admitted changes in demeanor that really struck me. I’ve bribed my way in front of crowds on a scale orders of magnitude smaller than what is described here, but the risk of doing it is something else. The last thing I want is to be that desperate guy who tried to sully the integrity of the bouncer/waiter/etc. of my favorite hangout to save twenty minutes.
Any interesting epic-fail-esque stories of restaurant bribery you have to share? Shoot me an email.
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As a reminder, today is the first-ever Dubai WordPress meetup. Matt is going to be there, and we are meeting at the Montgomery at 18:30 in the Bunkers restaurant. There are more details here.
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Towards the end of every year, normally around Christmas, you hear people begin to create a list of New Year’s resolutions. I have always found that practice a little strange. After all, given that these resolutions are usually important changes you would like to make to your life, why not start now? What is waiting till the 1st of January going to do (of course, unless it is a resolution like using a planner) over starting right now? Even fifteen minutes a day on five things adds up.
So here’s what you should do: grab a pen and a piece of paper, and write down five changes you would like to make to your life. Now, start them immediately.
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Blogger Nick Plante is a fellow Vim user and proponent of MacVim, much like myself. He recently wrote about why he loves Vim, and I loved this:
Why Vim? Because Vim is universal. Because Vim is love.
I’m stealing that.
One of these days I am going to have to write one of these posts myself.
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It turns out that when you put a group of guys in front of a TV hooked up to a SNES with Tetris, you get a whole lot of innuendos. You’d think, “Put it in there!” would get old after a while, but let me tell you, it doesn’t. If you ever have the chance, get a friend and play 2P in B-Type.
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Coming to the end of my university career, I can say that I have sadly not had many ground-breaking teachers in college. Of course, the majority of the ones I have had are brilliant in their fields—I go to a top-tier school that provides me with that as a part of my tuition—and are extremely passionate about the subjects they are talking about, but I don’t think that makes a great teacher.
In a conversation with a friend recently, we narrowed down a list of criteria that, to us, was what we had found had made the teachers we had been privileged to learn from the best teachers we had had. In my mind, it was the following:
It goes without saying that a great teacher knows the subject matter well. After all, it’s hard to imagine a teacher with any credibility who stumbles to teach the material. However, this goes beyond what is in the book. The teachers responsible for my education that really stood out for me personally were the ones who engaged me above the syllabus. In high school, my physics teacher led us in a conversation about the Chandrasekhar Limit, my economics professor asked us to evaluate the problems with agriculture in the EU and my mathematics professor detailed the concept of infinity to us in a very interesting way.
Anyone could have taught me about demand elasticity, but to do that and engage me intellectually in a real world application to how supply and demand elasticity and time affect a commodity market was just one example of how grateful I am to him. I think the issue with learning the more traditionally academic subjects in high school (mathematics, science and economics) is that you have to start off at such a fundamental level; with the notable exception of physics1, college level mathematics2 and economics did not seem to be of tremendous practical use.
I think it follows strongly from my previous point that a teacher with no passion for his subject as well as a passion for teaching itself is going to struggle with maintaining the respect and attention of his or her students. I’d say that this is the biggest shortcoming of most of the college professors I have had. I get the feeling that they are teaching because they have to, not because they want to. Learning how to calculate the competitive equilibrium of a system should be a fantastic thing—the concept is not only important but the ideas behind are brilliant—but become the usual tedium of copying down examples and key points from lecture slides.
A passionate teacher is able to engage his or her students with the same love and appreciation of the subject that they have. Speaking from personal experience, I enjoyed the subjects taught by passionate professors far more than those without. Much like the rest of these points, this fits in perfectly—a passionate teacher will know the material better. A passionate teacher is going to enjoy teaching his or her students, the material and will be much easier to learn the material from.
It seems like almost a no-brainer, but I think the importance of humor in the classroom is understated—particularly by those who haven’t sat in one in a long time. A small joke thrown in at the correct time not only maintains the attention of the students but keeps them interested through the more tedious parts of the syllabus. I think this takes talent; the ability to instinctively know when and what to say to cause a room full of people a generation away from you to laugh isn’t easy. After all, a teacher—with only a small stretch of the imagination—is a performer too.
I get the feeling traditional teaching methods try to place and emphasis on the divide between the teacher and the students; I personally think that leads to an estranged relationship between the two. The fun and humorous teachers were the ones that were closest to—they weren’t, though—what I would call a friend. While I don’t know if this was just a sampling of my high school, I think it helps if the age gap between the teachers and the students is smaller. After all, it makes sense to be able to connect with a teacher on a wide variety of age-specific topics. No one is going to laugh if your 50-year old biology professor makes a Mork and Mindy reference.
In the conversation that led to this post, my friend talked about a professor he took a class with that had a very strange3 system for encouraging students to take good lecture notes. At the start of every lecture, a sheet was handed out that had all the major topics of the day as headings. For a non-trivial portion of the total grade of the class, students had to take notes on the sheet and hand them in at the end of lecture to get graded. Abstracted away as it was in the conversation, it seemed totalitarian, but coupled with the rest of what makes a great teacher, my friend told me he actually loved that aspect of the class. He had great lecture notes, there was no incentive to miss lecture, and the professor was extremely engaging and passionate.
My high school economics professor had a system which he had used since he started teaching the subject: every year, he would start off by moving just a little faster than the syllabus required. He was observant enough to ensure that no student was falling behind, but by the end of the year, we’d have completed the material over a month ahead of time. The rest of the time was spent on practice. We do an in-class test for one class, then come in the next day and go over it. And so on, and so forth. What landed up happening was that almost everyone got a A; those who didn’t missed the mark by just a few points. Coupled with his ability to keep us entertained and never letting boredom settle in—yes, even during marco-economics—many students refereed to him as one of the best teachers in the school. And if their word didn’t mean much, then the grades should: he had one of the highest grade averages in the school in a traditionally challenging subject.
We called this system that these teachers set up a ‘non-gameable system’. It was a system that ensured students couldn’t get away without learning. Note this is very different to a system that prevents gaming in the form of cheating—while a non-gameable sytem might, as a byproduct, prevent cheating, it shouldn’t aim to. There are degrees to which a system like this works. For example, assigning weekly homework and giving a significant proportion of the grade should technically be non-gameable, but students will tend to work together or copy solutions and not learn. However, requiring a few paragraphs explaining the week’s readings at the end of the week should work well.
The quality and effectiveness of the system depends on the professor and his implementation of it. Someone who doesn’t match the other criteria I have prevent here will be—to me—extremely difficult to learn from. However, with two identical professors but for their choice of implementing a non-gameable system, I would choose the one who does every time.
While this seems to be a blueprint of what makes a perfect teacher, I prefer to think of it more as what made my most impressive teachers such great educators in every aspect. I am confident that many people are going to disagree with this in some way, whether it may be by seeing this analysis as too strong or too weak, or just irrelevant. To those people I ask that you let me know what you think. In fact, email me if you have any thoughts on this matter at all—after all (if I may slip into my philosopher shoes), if our future generations are the ones that will walk our shoes better than we did, are teachers not the ones that point out the paths4?
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I think the United States made the right choice. I think Michigan made the right choice.
I think California made the wrong choice.
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In a moment of extreme envy after finding out how much better AT&T’s service is better than Comcast’s—and the fact that I can’t switch—I wanted to make my life with Comcast a little better. A big problem I have is forwarding through commercials of recorded shows; there’s no way to gauge how far you need to go, and it’s a big pain to go way past, rewind back and so forth. My solution was to program a 30-second forward skip button onto the remote. 30 seconds is a key number, since commercials (and hence commercial blocks) are in multiples of 30 seconds.
The guide I initially followed is here, but it doesn’t work. I don’t know if it is because the firmware updates regularly or it was just wrong, but you need to skip the fourth step. In the spirit of laziness, I’ll reprint the steps here in the correct order. You’ll need to have Comcast’s Motorola cable box for this to work:
And you’re done. I mapped the “A” button that’s under the 15-second backwards skip, since they’re in the same vicinity and until I did this hack, I had never used the button. Just in case, I take no responsibility for anything that might happen to you or your property as a result of this hack, but if it makes you feel better, I’ve been using this to the extreme delight of my housemates and myself.
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