ExpertDabbler

Here’s one case study from the book ‘Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’. Madurai folks can feel proud!

I am sucked into the big bad world of iPad apps for now. Whether I will fully recover from the apps onslaught remains unsure, but I wanted to make sure I learnt some lessons from our thathas through biographies. And Ben Franklin was one such inspiring American grand dad we all could do well to learn from. Not to mention iPad facilitated that.

Thanks to the iBooks store, and the Kindle app in iPad , a lot of books which are part of Project Gutenburg is just begging you to download and read. Okay, How and why Ben Franklin? Ben Franklin is the Kula Deivam of my idol Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger is the type of person who unhesitatingly calls some of Warren Buffett’s investing ideas ’stupid’ ( I can’t imagine that) and Warren for once, listens. So, if someone like him can idolize somebody, then i figured that person should be someone we could all learn from a great deal from. So that’s how I zeroed in on Benjamin Franklin and his autobiography simply titled ‘The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin’.

And Big Ben does not disappoint. Here are some excerpts. And before reading this excerpts, have this in mind. Ben Franklin was the 17th child to his father. He had all but formal schooling till he was 12 years of age. And before he died he could read, write, converse in multiple languages, got his name as an inventor, a writer, a publisher, scientist, and a great statesman. The knowledge he acquired was mostly self-taught.

About this time I met with an odd volume of the ‘Spectator’. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try’d to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By
comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of
which I was extremely ambitious. My time for these exercises and for reading was at night, after work or before it began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evading as much as I could the common attendance on public worship which my father used to exact on me when I was under his care, and which indeed I still thought a duty, though I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time to practise it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r9R8B-p1Ok

Not sure if there is god or not but there sure is godliness in some human beings.

I have been reading a lot on the iPad vs. Kindle debate. Now, here’s the deal :

Kindle costs less (at least the 6 inch version), the battery lasts longer, the display is easier on the eyes.
iPad let’s the user browse, listen to music, watch videos, offers a plethora of apps to download. I can still download books from Amazon via the kindle app, or buy from Oreilly online via the stanza app.
It is obvious that the latter is more than an ebook reader. The latter is more a generalist than a specialist. It is like comparing an 18-200 mm SIGMA to a Canon 50mm macro.
The businesses themselves clearly get it, that is why Kindle app is available in iPad.
The people themselves clearly get it, I am less likely to read on the iPad while waiting for my D70 in Velachery bus stop in broad day light.
The only folks who seem to ignore it are the professional columnists and the folks who comment on techcrunch.

I went to the ipad store in valley fair mall yesterday as a sceptic and tried out the IPad. Next thing i know, i was hit with such a force that my logical, analytical side simply collapsed.

$600 USD for a gadget which is neither a laptop, nor a netbook, nor a ipod nor a kindle? Am i crazy enough to break my head with that stupid itunes?

Say whatever you want, I saw the resolution and the interactions and I have to admit I never felt so good about any tech. gadget I’ve encountered so far. So, this may not be the wisest decision i ever made but what the hell!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

We might talk more about this when ‘Raavan’ is released five days from now.

I would love to invest in this start-up. At least, i’ll buy stocks if this company goes public.
Curious to know about the company? The company is called Shastha Foods!

I first used their products in 2007 when i came to the U.S. the first time and now after three years, my love has only grown for their idly batter, dosai batter, adai batter and the latest moong dal batter.

Shastha plays a main role in my self-cooking survival kit.

Anyone who has interacted with Buffett will tell you he has a special gift for quick calculations.
Chris Stavrou, a New York money manager and longtime Berkshire Hathaway shareholder, remembers his first meeting with Buffett.

“I asked him whether he ever used a calculator.” Buffett replied, “I never owned one and wouldn’t know how to use one.”
“But how do you do more complicated calculations?” Stavrou pressed. “Are you gifted?”
“No, no,” Buffett said. “It’s just that I’ve been working with numbers for a long time. It’s number
sense.”
“Can you give me an example? Like what’s 99 times 99?”
Without missing a beat, Buffett replied, “9,801.”
Stavrou asked Buffett how he knew that. He answered that he had read Feynman’s autobiography. Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate in physics, was a member of the U.S. atomic bomb project team. In his autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, he describes his technique for doing complex math in his head. So of Warren Buffett we can deduce that either (1) he remembers everything he reads, or (2) he can do calculations in his head with lightning speed.

Stavrou pressed for one more example. “If the price of a painting goes from $250 to $50 million in one hundred years, what’s the annual rate of return?” Once again Buffett’s answer was instantaneous: “13.0 percent.” The astonished Stavrou asked, “How did you do that?” Buffett pointed out that any compound interest table would reveal the answer. (So should we deduce that he’s a walking interest table? Maybe.) Another way to approach the problem, said Buffett, was “to go by the number of times it doubles ($250 doubles about 17.6 times to get to $50 million, a double every 5.7 years, or about 13 percent a year).” Simple, he seemed to say.

- From The Warren Buffett Portflio.