Notes

Pandas Series can have string indices (similar to how array indices in general are numbers). numpy.array is just a convenience function to create an ndarray. You can also create an array using numpy.ndarray but that is not recommended. Can I try out the following? Scatter plot of movie ratings vs their bias.

I am a fitness noob, but was a bigger one around the same time last year. I used to run once in a while in a small park near my place, but my form wasn’t correct. I would land on the front half of my feet, that would cause so much pain in between my knees and calves that I’d always have to rest for 2-3 days before going out. I didn’t know that my form was off - instead I thought my legs weren’t strong enough to run - until later. It was once I watched a bunch of Youtube videos did I start running correctly and enjoying it along the way. I have since run decent distances on Alki and Elliot Bay trails, and a half marathon in just 2h35m, a number I am personally proud of. ...

I used to blog, but then I quit because it was time-consuming. It used to take me a lot of time to coherently put down my ideas, often requiring multiple iterations to get the grammar right. And the latter was necessary because I am a grammar nazi and didn’t have tools like Grammarly back then. I, however, feel that it’s important to write for many reasons. One, my future self will be interested to know what I was thinking today. And even though pictures and tweets can serve a similar purpose, they can’t beat a well-thought blog post. Two, it gives clarity to thoughts. As Jeff Besoz says, “There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.” Of course, six isn’t a strict number, and the same should apply to a three hundred word blog post! Third, it improves my production vs consumption balance. I consume way more content than what I produce, a side-effect of the always online mindset of the contemporary world. This isn’t healthy, and writing can help fix it to a minor extent. ...

Note: This post is in continuation to an older one, The Eurotrip countdown, where I talked about how I ended up going to Europe. Well, this time I certainly outdid myself. I came back from Europe in May last year, but it wasn’t until today morning that I finished going through all my photos and uploading them to Picasa with captions. True, there more than six hundred of them, but sixteen months is way too much! ...

This post happens to be unique as it is the first I am writing outside India! I have been backpacking alone for a month in Western Europe- a long vacation (not so long in non-Indian SI units, of course) that has been full of many new experiences. While a detailed post and/or photo album will follow, let me first talk about how I ended up planning this trip, the challenges I faced, etc. ...

This post was written sometime last year, but didn’t publish it until now. When I joined my first job out of college, I was one of the youngest members of my team. I then had a gala time teasing my seniors about their “old age” even though none of them had crossed thirty. That, however, was a long time ago and three years since, I can offer more meaningful insights for this discussion. ...

In the closed meeting rooms of offices, we solemnly discuss_ sprint backlogs_ and technological debts. Why not talk similarly about a hobby that you pursue a little more seriously? With the tune of Misty Mountains playing in the back of my head, I search for words to illustrate the kind of debt that I, a serious movie-watcher, owe to myself! This is majorly about The Lord Of The Rings. I first saw the movie and then read the book but I still felt I had just skimmed the surface of an epic which has enthralled so many. I always wanted to revise the trilogy but only got around to start doing it during my current Diwali visit to Ahmedabad. I don’t intend to finish it, something that is no small task given the humongous variety of characters, events and perspectives that constitute the LOTR. Rather, I intend to watch the movies again, paying more attention to details, and also go through the book as time permits. ...

An avid reader during childhood, I have seen a huge shift in my reading habits since long. The detective novels and random non-fiction books have largely been replaced by posts from Facebook, Twitter, Quora and other random places on the internet. So when I began reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, a gift from a close friend who said the book might help me make sense of my entrepreneurial thoughts, I wasn’t too excited. However, now that I have read the entire thing, I have begun to appreciate what the world lost when Jobs died a couple of years ago. ...

If you blog, you too might have faced the question of what blogging platform to use to put up your thoughts in front of the world. In this post, I offer my two cents on the topic, especially for those who are either about to start blogging or looking for alternatives on being fed up with their current blog-hosting website. When I wrote my first blog post, I put it up on Blogger. For a long time, I cared little to promote my blog or get more subscribers. When I later felt that I’d rather connect with the outside world through my blog than via Facebook (which I think is for the people who love showing off) or Twitter (where the 140 character-limit was too restraining sometimes), I decided to first improve the aesthetics of my blog. And thus began my urge to jump ship to some other blogging platform! ...

I would like to point out, in the very beginning itself, that this post is not an attempt to demystify the big maze of social networking or to deplore about how much time mankind (literally) wastes on that! Almost everyone has his views about the topic, as you’d expect one to have about what all is wrong with our country, and so much has already been said about it and every angle explored in such detail that another post doing the same makes little sense! Rather, I’d like to recollect my experiences with social networking. ...