Day 1 I landed in Quito and started the journey with Mitad Del Mundo which apart from being a monument near the equator line has some nice short scientific demonstrations. Expect to spend about 2-3 hours there. Then I headed to Telefrico (“aerial lift”). The ride is nice and gives a beautiful view of Quito city. Highly recommended. Lastly, I headed to Quito Old Town. Overhyped. There is nothing special about it....
You are standing in a queue waiting to buy food, order drinks, or buy tickets. The queue is long and is moving slowly. You are grumbling about the people standing in the front, why are they asking so many questions, why can’t they make choices beforehand. And then your turn comes. You are prepared. You know what you want. But it took so long to reach here. why not confirm your choices?...
The authors are founders of 37Signals. The book talks about how to go about remote work, its advantages and pitfalls. Here are some key takeaways from the book.
Day 1 We started our journey with Chihuly Garden and Glass, it consists of amazing glass sculptures of various sizes. Worth every penny. Highly recommended for everyone. From there we continued to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Visitor Center, half of it feels like a publicity stunt but the other half is insightful and worthy of a visit. We skipped the Space Needle and did the Space Wheel, instead. Grab to-go boxes and eat them while having a nice view of the city’s skyline....
Bottled water is not only expensive but is harmful to the environment. Therefore, I try to reuse the same bottle while traveling. I used to carry a hard-plastic bottle while traveling and then one day at an airport, I saw another traveler carrying a flexible bottle, it looks like a pouch. Compared to a standard 500mL hard plastic round bottle it is slim and hence a good fit for a travel jacket....
Choosing a travel backpack is a topic of several online debates. Here are some of my learnings. The final decision depends on your preferences. Size First, start with the size, usual sizes are around 25L, 45L, 65L. The 25L is OK for a day or two and you can stretch it for a few days. It is almost what a good office backpack looks like. 45L can last for a few week-long urban trips....
%f in user-facing strings is dangerous. Depending on the architecture, programming language involved, version of that language and compiler optimization flags, results can vary slightly. And if there are multiple languages involved in the serving stack, it is almost impossible to argue with the outcome. If those variations are immaterial, then use %.1f or %.2f to get one or two digits of precision after the decimal point, respectively. Otherwise, don’t use %f at all....
In 2001, Amazon’s share price crashed from 100$ to 6$, they had to do a 15% layoff. But it was Jeff Bezos’s perseverance, tenacity and grit because of which Amazon survived. As several startups from the Bay area to Bangalore get a mark-down of their valuations, the question about how many will survive and eventually produce a [positive] return for their investors is being asked. Between what a startup’s real value is and how viable is its business model, the real question to ask is how committed are the founder(s) to make things works....
Apple Siri, Google Now, Amazon Echo, and Microsoft Cortana have garnered a lot of press lately. But one thing which is still missing out is voice-native user experience. Let me illustrate that with the evolution of user experience on touchscreens. When they first came out, there was a stylus, and that’s it. It was an inferior version of the mouse-keyboard-monitor trio. Then some fantastic interactions were invented. Interactions like double tap to zoom, multi-finger rotation, swipe to like/dislike, pull down to refresh, long-press for options, and a Swype keyboard. All of these were native to a touchscreen-based environment. Porting them back to a mouse-keyboard-monitor trio was of limited utility at based and useless at worst.
What’s not cruel Burning bee hives (homes) of billions of bees for extracting the honey they spent their life gathering Raising hens, in millions, solely for their eggs & meat Slitting throats of millions of animals and let them bleed to death ( halal) Skinning millions of cows for their leather Impregnating millions of cows repeatedly for milk Selective breeding of millions of Turkeys, so that, they provide more meat but are too heavy to survive Neutering thousands of dogs and cats, so that, they can be used as pets Boiling shrimps alive for food Killing deer and bears in the name of population control during the hunting season What’s cruel Whatever happened at the Tiger Temple