Wasssup Whatsapp ?!

A year ago before Whatsapp was in the US news as a billion dollar aquisition, my co-sister asked me to download the app on my iPhone. Apparently it was a big hit with her parents and their side of the family. They described it as a Venn diagram with multiple circles and how easy it was to communicate through that with wifi without getting charged for texts etc. etc.

Promptly paid a modest $ for the app and downloaded it. Then it got interesting. The phone was buzzing non stop with messages that were more like FB status updates and likes. 

In the US the order of priority is Email, Phone call, Text or Phone call, email text depending on who you talk to. The logic being this.. If you want to reach out to someone you can call someone and leave a voicemail. You can also email them if they are at office. However if they are in a meeting and they cannot talk to you and they are using their computer, you can always text them. 

In fact over the course of years, we used to text co-workers while on conference calls as a "strategy" of sorts. 

Whatsapp somehow disrupted that priority order by treating messages as texts. So there is no separating the wheat from the chaff. 

So I dropped off from Whatsapp. Well my father-in-law whose name was actually the group in Whatsapp quit it himself because he realized that the constant ringing was not good for his sleep. Between US, India and Australia, it is always evening somewhere but that disrupts your sleep.

Recently though, Whatsapp became a necessity of sorts, only because the folks we needed to reach were using that instead of Facebook or gmail. The app was put to good use in India, but the minute we came back here, turned it off again. 

When you get a ring that is sending you some advertisement or quote from some famous person, even if it is Emeril Lagasse, it can be annoying at 3AM.  

Apparently, I have the concept all wrong. One has to treat it like email. Set it to sleep in the night and open it just like FB and respond when you feel like it. 

That said, this novice is still figuring it out. I still dont see what all the hoopla is about given we have Facebook already and our internet connection screams and the data plan is good enough to get texts and updates on FB or gmail where we are. Guessing it is a bigger deal in places where internet plans are not that great or data plans are expensive. 

Maybe using Whastsapp will bring me into different circles in the Venn diagram!

If you have added me to this thing recently, please bear with me as I figure it out over time...

There should be an App for that!

Okay, it has been a rant here that the kids are more interested in watching hours of Tamil Variety TV programs or nail polish videos on Youtube. 

Wile checking the history recently, had found that the two of them had watched more than 7 hours worth of Nail Polish videos on youtube in just one week! 

So when all other attempts to steer them to subjects like Geography and science during the hours after they just make it back from school had failed... there was only one thing left to do!

Find Geography quiz and science quiz apps on the iPad and play with them. It has been a very successful program, if one can call it that! The Geography rehabilitation program.. 

Today I watched with pride as Jr. correctly identified the Capital of Azerbaijan as Baku and the little one said Brunei's capital is Bandar Seri Begawan... Life has its little moments! They are able to identify capitals and flags reasonably well. 

Next step, they have to actually be able to point to them on the world map. That is a work in progress. 

All this app business gave me an idea, given there is no App for making them eat a quick breakfast. 

We should have an App that shows them a mish mash of nail polish videos, my little pony, good luck charlie, an occasional geo quiz question, and every 90 seconds those should be interrupted by a video of daddy saying "take another vai (mouthful)!" or "another spoon" or "chew and swallow" or "why is the throat not moving!" .. the App should let me pre record 3 or 4 such 10 second videos which the kids have to hit with a snooze type button (or we could rename it the "I ate" button. 

That app alone has the potential to improve the quality of our life 347.5%! 

Sometimes I wish my day job was to write apps.. would at least write some for my kids. Unless there are some crash courses for old engineers whose last programming exercise was with Fortran 77 or C++ in the late nineties. 

Let me know if there is a weekend course for app writing in the local area or online.. 

The new hook

The kids are now hooked to "Cut the Rope"..

It is amazing how they pick up this game step by step.

It is pretty tricky and one has to have a good intuition for predicting trajectories to play this..

Currently restricted to 15 minutes maximum play time per day on weekdays and 30 minutes on weekends..

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How does one?

Go make an electronic story book in app form for a Tamizh story?

Would like to try my hand at making an animated story which my grandmother told us, which was told to her by her grandmother..

That means this story is at least a 100+ years old, probably older

The story is about an "eee" ஈ (housefly) who forgot its name and went asking different people/things if they knew its name.

Any suggestions for software, methods etc. greatly appreciated!

Would like to make this a weekend project of sorts.

While in grad school I helped create many educational self teach programs using a software called "Authorware Pro" on a Macintosh Quadra (yep, that was ages ago.. before internet days) and it was given good reviews by many students who used it.

It was difficult even to find these on google search and some of the pages open only on Internet Explorer and don't open on firefox. Was also sad to see my name not on the credits for some stuff I really put my heart and soul into, but I digress.. It does not matter now.

Things have come a long way since those days, what with Flash and Youtube and of course the internet!

Hopefully you will see an animated story titled:

"Kozhu Kozhu Kanne, en peyar enna?"

கொழு கொழு கன்னே, என் பெயர் என்ன?

(plump plump calf, what is my name?)

and the calf says "Theriyaadhe!" தெரியாதே ! (I don't know!)

and off he goes to the next person with the same answer till he finally gets his name!

Jr. and the little one absolutely love this story when my mom narrates it to them and my nephew thinks I am the greatest story teller in the world for my embellished version of this story!

This old dog is up for some new tricks!

So, please, point me toward the right tools..

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Waking up .. at the right moment

Today has been a great day.

No, the wife is in her usual weekend clean up mode and the kids are doing the same things they do..

But there has been a marked change in me. No grumpiness for not being able to catch up on lost sleep from the last week.

There has been a positive attitude to things.

The last week has been very tiring with 2 AM phone calls and lots of work.

Decided to download an iPhone App called "sleep cycle".

This app uses the accelerometer in the iPhone, figures out when you are in deep sleep and when you are rolling around in the bed and times it so that you wake up when you are in deep sleep. The alarm sounds are wonderful and they gradually fade in to high volume.

As an added bonus, it keeps all the statistics and allows you to send the graphs to your gmail account!

In all my life no one has ever done a wonderful job of waking me up like this!

Thank you Sleep Cycle!

Thank you iPhone 3GS !

Thank you Technology !

Now all those <6 hour sleep nights are not going to be that bad after all!

There are other reasons for the exuberance.. but that will be explained later..

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