The one, obviously non-hispanic lady in the passenger seat of a beat up little Saturn yelled at me while passing. The Saturn was easily less expensive than the bicycle I was riding and possibly less reliable.

This happened yesterday evening, a low traffic Sunday in the purportedly tolerant Riverside area. The insult made me smile, even chuckle a bit unlike the last one directed at my non-citizen status. That incident happened in 2009. Even from two cars behind, the angry gentleman was cultured enough to know I was from India! He had yelled, “This is not India!! You can’t ride your bike like this!” I was controlling the lane on my bicycle on my way to work on a roadway that was barely ten feet wide. Unlike the ladies who yelled at me yesterday, this gentleman from 2009 seemed more affluent since he wore a tie, douchey sunglasses and drove a shiny, black Acura TL.

I do not blame motorists, affluent or otherwise, for being astonished at a bicyclist controlling the lane — few bicyclists and even fewer law enforcement officers are aware of this leeway. I do find the yelling and honking unnecessary, uncivil and threatening. As a bicyclist, I understand my position is of a minority in Jacksonville. This position of minority comes with resistance from the majority, especially since our paths intersect so often. As unacceptable as this resistance should be in a civilized society, it is even more unacceptable when the said resistance involves threats to beat me up like the douche in the Acura promised before the traffic light turned green. And he was not the first one to threaten to assault me for controlling the lane either.

One does not quit riding a bicycle from fear of motorist’s vengeance. I surely did not quit. If your house gets burgled, you don’t start living in a cave with a very large boulder for a door. If market conditions favor, you could change neighborhoods. Mostly, we beef up security, and get additional padlocks and stronger doors and windows; a dog even. For a bicyclist, there isn’t much that can be done to reduce the incidence of abusive behavior from motorists than to simply chug along, participate in City planning and hope the planners in charge are aware of this problem. One can change the route they use but not always. One can change the time they commute but not always. During the 2009 incident, I was commuting to work and an alternate route would add four miles to my two mile commute.

The infrastructure dictates a bicyclist to operate as if operating a vehicle, leaving us at the mercy of the motorist’s attention. Distractors like a cell phones, radios and passengers are worrisome. We negotiate opening doors of parked cars, potholes, merging traffic and insufficient bike-lanes, all designed with cars and motorists in the primary. On narrow roadways, controlling the lane or even riding on the right tire mark are suggested ways to avoid collisions with either opening doors or getting squeezed into the curb by passing cars. I do all of them and have been for years. However, I do not have the audacity and might to promote it … especially to people who are already intimidated by bicycling in traffic. That’s like saving, “Hey, your house got burgled, consider leaving your door open”.

As a renter, I could change where I lived and where I rode my bicycle the most. My stay in Southside had run its course. I moved to Riverside … only to get hit by a JTA bus and called a Mexican.

I didn’t quite mind being called a Mexican as I did getting hit by a bus.

Click here for the High Definition version

The Jacksonville Arboretum is a 120 acre property north of the Regency Mall. It offers a few hours of hikes through some nature trails that seemed inviting last Sunday. I also thought it would be a good subject of my next iPhone-video project, so I brought the tripod along. I have an attachment that can mount my iPhone to the mounting screw of the tripod. The little mounting-plate that carries the mounting screw was sitting in my camera bag on my dresser back home while I set up to do my first panning shot.

The result was a crude set-up of mounting the iPhone on the Glif to the GorillaPod and GorillaPod to the tripod. This is the reason for uneven panning in the video — the best edits from a huge number of failed panning attempts — the missing mounting-plate being the cause of my frustration and anger at the situation and everything around me. Only when I went through the footage in the comfort of my home did I hear me cursing in the background of some of these shots. Cursing at Laya for not being steady, cursing at the tripod etc, all of which have been edited away and replaced by a beautiful song by Sigur Ros.

Constraints are a wonderful teacher of creativity. Only towards the end of the Ravine Trail did I start to embrace the constraint of the missing mounting-plate. Setting up a shot took longer than necessary but it resulted in the panning shot of the meandering stream that emerges from the tiny spring a few hundred yards away. After that shot, I packed away the tripod and the iPhone and focused on Laya, the trail, and the walk. A better, more in-depth movie about the Arboretum will have to wait for another day.

If nature teaches us one lesson, it is that of patience.

I am coached in the school of function. My degree in Industrial Engineering was a product of the industrial revolution — the revolution that resulted in mass-produced things that are seemingly emotion-less. This revolution drove some artists to an opposite extreme of architecture and design that I often find superfluous and thus useless, serving no purpose than an emotional one. My education along with my personality leaves little room to appreciate subjective qualities (which I try to discover through explorations in the arts).

Dimitri Fadeyev writes about User Interface and User Experience. His writing weaves around the same topics that interest me: of perception and utility, of form and function. In his blog post, Too Plain, he mentions the reaction of some designers to Apple’s skeuomorphic app designs. iBooks looks like a wood bookshelf while Find My Friends app looks like it is made of stitched leather. His theory is that Apple is trying to strike a balance between a minimalist hardware design—iPhone, and a rich software design, one balancing the other’s lack of emotional appeal. Robert Pirsig would have called the balance between elegant hardware and software quality — the intersection of romantic and classical (subjective and objective). This balance is something the Windows Phone with Metro UI fails to achieve with it’s minimalist hardware and typography centric software.

A designer’s job is to bring human emotions to an emotion-less software. Apple’s skeuomorphic designs appeal differently than Metro UI’s minimalist design. A play on human perception can be seen with the icon for the phone app on most phones. It represents a traditional land-line handset without the chord attached to its end. Traditional land-line phones are getting less and less popular but the image of the handset resonates with us who have grown up in a time when cell-phones were not ubiquitous. Maybe in fifty years or so, when cell phones completely take over the land-line business, the current generation may not relate the handset-icon to making phone calls. A re-design might happen. We may quit making calls altogether. This is already happening with the ‘Save’ floppy-disc icon. Not only are we talking about redesigning it but Apple operating systems are doing away completely with ever having to save an electronic document.

Oftentimes, design distracts from the soundness of the engineering behind it for better or worse. We have all been conned into watching a crappy movie due to its kick-ass trailer. An Aeropress coffee maker lacks the panache of the Chemex but still makes a bitchin’ cup of coffee. Mass produced goods often appear soul-less but it is a product of perception. People who are guided more by intuition than by reason may not find subjective quality in a product mass-produced a gazillion times over simply due to the abundance of it. They would prefer something hand-made and make an emotional connection to it. This handmade product will hold very little promise of soundness and more importantly, consistency of soundness. Consistency of soundness leads to trust which is what consumers really purchase … Patrick Rhone spoke about this on his podcast. Handmade goods do not always carry a history of their construction quality. Soundness of construction of a Shaker Broom may be well known but how can you tell if that coffee table you have been eyeing at the local Arts Market is going to hold up to daily use. The skill to recognize quality is not easy to find or cultivate. Also, good quality products are not always accessible, financially or logistically. If it was, so many would not be shopping at big-box stores for brittle particle-board furniture. One has to trust the craftsman out of a sense of judgement and pure intuition. This can be risky depending on the product at stake.

Further, in Too Plain, Dimitri Fadeyev talks about William Morris’s design aesthetic.

Morris considered Gothic architecture to be the only viable style to build on in England. One interesting aspect of his view was that walls in a Gothic house should never be barren, but instead every inch should be adorned in decorations, tapestries, paintings and furniture so that they all fuse together to create a building as one complete work of art.

When I come across designs that are more decorative than their function demands them to be, I always wonder if any effort that should have been spent in the quality of the function was hurried away and spent on the beautification of the form. I get curious to discover how much the design distracts from the soundness of the engineering. After all, staging a home for a sale is becoming an occupation. A current example is the architectural design of the building my employer leases. This building has wide windows terminating into architecturally decorative arches. While breaking the dull horizontal lines of the exterior, these arches let-in direct sunlight straight into the eyes of some of the employees during certain hours of the day. The arches are impossible to cover up with blinds. Instead of designing functionless arches mimicking the form of Roman aqueducts, the architect’s energy could have been spent in making the layout of offices and cubicles better so one could access the stairwell better — this is currently a logistical nightmare when evacuating during fire-drills.

Similarly, few residential homes seem to be built for living and moving effectively between rooms; few are designed to embrace the sights and sounds outside while balancing insulation and privacy inside. They are built for form and their names reflect it: the Queen Anne, the Craftsman, the Bungalow, the Ranch, the Suburban and so on. However, some designs like Shotgun Style homes are based on the flow of people between rooms, not the exterior design aesthetic. Either way, the appeal puts a design heritage in the primary and finding the most elegant solution of accommodation in the secondary. This reversed logic appears narcissistic to me and makes me revolt away from the form completely despite the few functional merits they may carry.

The excess of form would not bother me as much if function was not compromised. I am not bothered by Apple’s skeuomorphic app design as long as the software functions seamlessly and the mass-produced hardware is elegant and robust. I am not bothered by Metro UI’s lack of ‘emotion’ either (I do find subjective pleasure in using some skeuomorphed apps when my human instincts find familiarity in the software’s design). When using Windows Vista at work, I customize the look and feel of the operating system so that it may be least intrusive in my work-flow, which is primary. I hide the pixel-robbing Excel ribbons, resorting to a handful of small icons and to my memory of key-board shortcuts so I can maximize viewing the rows and columns of a large Excel document. As a response to multi-tasking and constant distractions, I keep my desk uncluttered and knolled.

The abundance of function-less form overwhelms my senses. Inefficiencies of a poorly laid out building, jittery software, jam-packed menus and buttons in excel, throw-away appliances, wasteful use of space and many more get noticed constantly. My brain aggregates them all. My actions compensate for these inefficiencies, subconsciously finding equilibrium. I am, therefore, attracted to concepts of minimalism, to japanese aesthetics, utilitarian bicycles, easy recipes, plain clothing, cellular hiatus, and so on. And I am happy as long as I have an Apple product within easy reach.

This video is in Standard Definition. Please visit the Vimeo site for the High Definition version

Photography, videography and web-design go hand in hand. Artists wanting to control the entire experience of the viewer end up with good design all around. John Carey from Fifty Foot Shadows does this better than I can ever hope to do. I religiously use his images as wallpapers on my laptop and phone. They act as a constant source of inspiration and reflection within. This video by him — Waiting — captures the essence of a train-station in India better than any. It was impromptu, unplanned and beautiful. Taken with a handy iPhone, it shows a sliver of life at that railway station better than any photograph taken there would. It tells a story. For me, it is a time machine.

I spent a majority of my life thinking analytically, like an engineer. Artists like John Carey inspire me to look deep and discover my artistic instinct so I may recognize a notable moment when I see it. Devices like my new iPhone make capturing that moment effortless and possible, either by video or photo.

The video above is only my first attempt in capturing a snippet of a part of life that is dear to me. I frequently meet with my good friends Alex, his wife, Dyana, and their daughter, Maya for breakfast on the weekends. We chat, laugh, share, and watch Maya draw. The restaurant is only a few miles away and I typically ride my bicycle to it. It is such an important part of the morning and sets the mood and pace of the remaining day.

I grew up in India and left what I called my home when I was twenty two years old. I visit every few years. My recent visit was February this year. I designed all the furniture in that home. I learned to drive while I lived there, found my first girlfriend and went through my engineering days in that home. The surrounding hills were home to heavy storms during Monsoon which is my favorite season of the year. The smog of time has covered everything now. There is a patina on the home and there is a patina on my personality from being away for seven years. I could not call it home anymore. The furniture that I designed had been reshaped and redesigned to cater to my brother’s life and my aging parents. The nearest hill-top is a twenty minute climb away. It used to be my usual perch of solitude. It was different this time. The zen I once found there was gone. The streets knew I did not belong. They rushed along hurriedly while I watched. I know from the February visit that home is where Laya is, home is the floor where my simple futon sits and home is where my bicycle resides. Home is where my heart is.

2.

I visited my cousin and his family in 2009 for Thanksgiving. His son was two years old and already understood English, Bengali and German. Mathis is a smart cookie and he liked classical music. After dinner, it would be my turn to engage him while his parents earned a well deserved break. I would open up my laptop and play Chip N’ Dale cartoons on youtube. Mathis would eventually get bored and demand that I play Flamenco music. I would and this made Mathis happy. Mathis, in an effort to show his love, wanted to hug all things tangible and intangible. When playing classical music through their stereo system, Mathis would want to hug the music. We would point to the speakers but that was not what he wanted. He wanted to hug the music, not the sound and he could not find it. This made him sad. We would hug him back instead.

3.

Five Points Coffee and Spice was a unique place. It was a place that did not attract all people. It was a place that did not demand you to comply with it. It was a blank canvas. You painted it to what you wanted it to be. It did not paint it for you. It did not tell you what to wear, who to speak to and when to leave. Furniture made its way into the shop magically. Chairs mismatched tables and no one cared. It provided a venue and it provided coffee. It let you bring the culture and the conversation. It was a place to make connections or find solitude. It was a milieu of different and often contrasting communities and it enabled you to melt with these communities if you so desired. In some unexplainable way, the coffee shop made it OK for people to be who they wanted to be within its four walls. The coffee shop has ceased to exist as of yesterday.

I discovered the coffee shop a little over two years ago. I made innumerable friends through it. We connected on facebook too but the real interactions happened at the shop. I have spent as much time alone and in a corner reading or contemplating as I have till 3 AM with a large group. I was able to find the zen that I could no longer bring to the hill-top in India. This was home and a part of my heart lived within its walls. I am deeply saddened from losing this venue. It is not my place to say why this business closed down. Running ones own business is difficult in today’s economy. Managing it on a shoe-string budget is no cake. The economy could have been better, the management could have been more timely, the air-conditioning could have continued working, the building could have been newer, the plumbing better. All these things could have happened, should have happened but did not happen. We can point fingers till eternity but can not ignore the immediate damage to Alva who is affected by it the most. After all, what was a second home to us was his first home.

A bunch of us are now sort-of homeless. We waited till past midnight last night outside the shop, we signed our names on the wall with chalk. The shop left a mark on us, in the minds of the young and the old. We hugged each other one last time with hopes of holding on to the the world inside the shop like Mathis tried hugging the music. We consoled each other when it is we who needed consoling. We are zombies thirsty for the culture and venue that we formed around the shop, the culture and venue that is gone. We are like children and our crayons are taken away. We are to find a new second home. We are forced to find a new hill-top and hope our zen follows us there. Well past midnight, we sat in the shop, silent and somber not knowing what our silence would achieve. We felt aimless and hopeless.

We finally left when nothing was left to be said and nowhere was left to be photographed.

“Don’t be sad because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” — Dr. Seuss

The air is cool and the road behind me, empty. Laya prances around in the in the distance. Her paws are hidden behind the blades of the grass. All the dogs and their owners have left. We are alone here. She finds her way back to me and sits down. We both watch the drama unfold in the western sky as it changes colors unhurriedly. I remember last Saturday when her and I witnessed the sunrise on the river — similar display of colors but a different sentiment. The sentiment then was of a refreshing and invigorating beginning of a fresh day. The sentiment now is that of relaxing and of dimming, of reducing activities and unbinding. Now is the time to dissolve the turbulence of my life and find stillness. It is the stillness that will balance volatility like a stable pot balances a boiling broth.

Moreover, now is the time to stop writing in my notebook, look upwards and finish gazing.

pallu is an Indian word for the part of a woman’s saree that hangs over the shoulder in the back

This is a major facelift to this bicycle that took me on a long journey. I learnt a lot on this journey … about people, places but mostly about myself. This xtracycle in particular and bicycles in general are in the top of the list of the best things to have happened to me yet.

Bias is the first drawback of a meeting. The main idea of planning a meeting is to get the project to a higher more intellectual state of solution by involving the team-members. Yet, the biggest drawback of these meetings is the human factor. Some people are shy, some exuberant and some forceful. Therefore, some ideas get heard more than the others and there is no equal voting on these ideas. Using a sports analogy (purely out of social conditioning), the playing-ground is biased towards social presence. A good meeting-conductor and time-keeper can reduce this bias but only so much and there aren’t many good meeting-managers in my experience.

The second drawback of meetings is a time-drain of its attendees. Not everyone has equal proportion of inputs and involvement in a meeting. They are made to sit around and twiddle their thumbs till their part arrives. This not only de-values the time of said attendees but also gives birth to a culture of using laptops and blackberries during meetings, disrupting the time of those involved.

Meetings generate a bad reputation for this reason. I see it as a meeting-room problem. Meeting rooms are larger areas in a building and therefore few in number. Hence their availability is sought after restricting the topic of discussion to time and space. Some meeting-rooms are noting but conference calls which restrict time alone. A default replacement to meeting-rooms is the inbox of your email client. Many use this medium due to scheduling conflicts. Even I recommended it earlier in this post. Email is also somewhat inefficient. People with little involvement get copied in emails and they spend hours sorting ‘noise’ in their inboxes before they can get work done.

Inbox — in relation to work-flow — generally becomes another disaster born out of the inefficient process of meetings. Team members do not quit thinking about the project after the meeting is adjourned. They communicate with the rest of the team in emails or mini-meetings plagued by the similar problems of regular meetings. Project management tools have gained popularity due to this. 37 Signals even recognized emails as their true competition in this blog post.

Technology removes the human element from creating bias. Trolls are an exception and can be tackled. Today, I was at a bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee meeting that was plagued with these inefficiencies. All attendees are not even connected by email chains. There is no good way to join the discussions other than making it to the meeting once a month on a Thursday evening. The attendees wait all month generating ideas and dump them out at this one meeting. This dump is generally not focused to the main issues and add noise to an already complicated process. This committee has not achieved anything, if not very little in the past decade.

Here is my recommendation to the BPAC to become more effective in generating ideas and getting actions.

-get a website

-get a forum with membership

-make members use real names, not alias.

-have a section for generating ideas where someone posts a short writeup with a relevant title.

-each month, members up-vote this idea or down-vote it, like Reddit, Stackexchange etc do it. One vote per week. They start a preliminary discussion on these ideas in the form of comments to this writeup.

-Anonymous users only get to comment once a day.

-five top-voted ideas become the agenda for the next meeting.

-unless an idea is accomplished, it stays active.

-ideas active for three months get flagged and become the first topic of discussion at each meeting. They have to be either made primary focus and resolved or deleted off the list.

People are ready to give in their time to build and manage such a service. It was evident from how many people volunteered their services today. We appear to be stuck in the 1920s with an action committee meeting once a month with no communication between meetings.

To build a quality product at your workplace or with city planning, we must get out of our own ways. We must ditch the meeting-room.

Physics works within the boundaries of this philosophy. Conservation of energy states that the total amount of enery in an isolated system remains constant over time…energy created somewhere = energy destroyed somewhere and vice versa. Biology does this too (a simple example being the water cycle). We pluck a plant’s produce and slaughter an animal to feed our body’s metabolism. This fuels our mind and our muscles. We use our mind and muscles to do work creating a product of value — good or not-good value. The actions going into our work has equal reactions — products and byproducts. Think byproducts like plastics in landfills and pollution in the atmosphere due to use of gasoline which has many positive and negative applications.

Net-balance between the value of nature’s things (raw materials) to the value of products and byproducts created from nature’s things can be simply maintained by not changing anything around us (quarrying, mining, drilling for oil and natural gasses, dredging, deforesting, etc). Change is natural. Its pace is somewhat accelerated by human-doings in the quest for better. The part to worry is the net-balance in the destruction-creation-recycling cycle — the net balance betwen ying and yang. Increasing levels of pollution, isolated cases of radiation due to testing and failed reactors, holes in the ozone layer, climate change and species extinct quicker than normal are all examples of negative net-balance of nature’s things. These are a direct reflection of a negative net-balance of human-doings.

There is the concept of universal forced equality, especially in Hindu teachings. It states that your low-quality actions and thoughts will have guaranteed ramifications in the form of punishment rendered. It is the concept of the supreme power wielding its mighty sword to bring balance. This sort of puts more burden of achieving net-balance in the metaphorical hands of the said supreme power than in the hands of human-doings.

We built government-systems to create laws and uphold rights. We built church-systems to create uniform platforms for morals and values. We let static unchanging systems govern us. When things go wrong, we blame the system. The system barely budges in its state of static inertia. Negative net-balance keeps on generating. The burden is on us to neutralize the net-balance. The burden is on us to find the minimum appropriate needed to fulfill our lives in the now and here. This can start right now in the chair you sit while you read this. It can start with a glory-less minuscule activity.

It can start by switching that light off when you leave the room.

There is art in my apartment — paintings and photographs. They are almost short videos; moments captured between the opening and closing of the aperture of a camera, some further abstractly translated into a painting. Art does not render a visible service to us. The function of objects of art are not always easy to define though their effects on us can be felt. Good art carries gravity by evoking emotions and providing an insight into our own selves. I prefer simple objects that have form and function in harmony. The paintings I own are devoid of an ornamental frame. The photography is encased in grey matting and black frames that have two functions: to hold the photograph and to get out of the way of viewing the photograph.

Things inevitably surround us as a part of life in this society. These things perform a service and occupy our visual and mental attention. The gravity of these things are of particular importance. I have never been a fan of decoration. Form inharmonious to its function is a sign of imbalanced quality. The seemingly decorative things in my possession frequently come under the chopping block to be analyzed for their relevance.

The hub covers of my car’s wheels got axed. There were three covers and only two matched. One wheel stood shamelessly naked. The only function they served was aesthetic. I took them off and cleaned the ten year old brake dust and muck from the matt finished black steel wheels with a bug and tar remover. Then, I used good old Pledge all surface spray cleaner to get a nice shine on them ‘rims’. Heck, they are shiny enough to paste some rimblems on the fenders, proudly declaring 14″ wheels, but they would be purely aesthetic too. I also shined the sidewalls of the tires with a tire-shine product.

The next one is a prolonged duel with purists of a paper book or zine. I cannot correlate the act of holding pulped and processed trees in one’s own hands to the importance of content they carry. A physical book is nothing but an interface designed with convenience of printing and distribution in mind. A good interface should get out of the way of the user who wants to acquire content. Today’s widespread access to internet in our computers, tablet devices and cell phones are quickly making distribution instantaneous and therefore, the logistics of printing obsolete. A comparable example lies in the music industry where digital formats of songs in .mp3 are released along with CDs and vinyl. We have not completely arrived with e-reading technology; it is just not as affordable and traditionally ubiquitous as a paper book. We are, however, getting close at an exponential pace. Even though I own an e-book reader, I have recently bought a half dozen paper books (not available in e-book format) and recently subscribed to paper magazines: Stack America.

The longest one under scrutiny is the collar of a shirt. We need clothes to protect vital heat, protect our bodies from the sun and keep dust and dirt off of us. When I ask the relevance of a collar, the first answer is usually, “it is to hold a tie”. To this, I respond, “but the tie has no function, so the collar’s function is to hold something of no function, thereby rendering the collar function-less”. Most people don’t pay close attention to the function of form. Most people don’t spend time editing and curating things they use either. It is often times easier to give in to tradition than fight it. Yvonne Chouinard, founder of Patagonia spent a lot of time hiking, surfing and mountaineering, shaping him into an editor and curator of things he used. He promoted rugby shirts for climbing. The tough fabric of rugby shirts could take the abuse of a hard climb while the collar kept the ropes and straps from rubbing against a bare neck. In this regard, the only use I have found for a shirt’s collar is to keep the annoying but useful seatbelt from rubbing against my neck while driving a car.

I have to wear a collared shirt to work. It is one of the company dress policies. Only men have to adhere to it; the dress-policy for women is not as stringent. Neither the collar nor the policy makes anyone work any harder or better. It surely does not make me smarter or productive. A collared shirt is merely a sign of tradition that people feel comfortable around — hardly enough reason to wear it. It may be a personal choice to wear it but a mandate generates a sore point.

My response to the policy is to wear as many polo shirts I can find. It has the comfort of a v-necked t-shirt with an extra piece of cloth around the neck resting on the shoulder. During a Florida summer, I can be found sporting the quintessential frat-boy look, albeit the popped collar.