Here are dialogues from Nagesh‘s films. Can you guess which movie they’re from?
Don’t worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green.
| Dialogue 1 | |
| Dialogue 2 | |
| Dialogue 3 | |
| Dialogue 4 | |
| Dialogue 5 | |
| Dialogue 6 | |
| Dialogue 7 | |
| Dialogue 8 | |
| Dialogue 9 | |
| Dialogue 10 |
Since 1 Jan 2018, I’ve steadily increased my walking average until Aug 2018. Then my legs started aching. So I cut it down until Jan 2019. In Feb, I resumed and was fairly steady until May 2020. To complement workouts like this, products that are aimed for men over 50 can be used.
In May, my wife refused to let me walk for more than an hour a day. It took me a few months to convince her and level up. I ended 2020 averaging a little over 10K steps for the year.
2018: I walked 10K steps almost half the time.
2019: it grew to a bit more, to 56%.
2020: I walked 10K steps a day almost two-thirds of the time.
In 2018, I started being more and more regular until my leg started aching.
2019 was fairly consistent.
2020 is when I applied brakes again — for very different reasons.
I’ve never gone for 5 days without walking even 3K/day before, since 2018. At most, it was 3 days at a stretch.
But when my wife refused to let me walk for more than an hour a day in May 2020, I went on strike! 😉
In 2020, this has gone up slightly to 84 min — but it’s still under an hour-and-half. I spend most of this time on calls or listening to audio books / podcasts.
Instead of spending it with my family.
Naveen is usually to blame. But this happens rarely. I walked 20K steps just 6 times over the last 3 years.
Though the longest walk here indicates over 3 hrs, I’ve never walked 3 hrs in a day.
On 21 Nov, my daughter borrowed my phone and went for her walk. So my phone shows our combined walks, not mine. Many of the other long walks are spread out during the day when I commute by walking in Singapore.
| Date | hrs | km | # | Why? |
| 21-Nov-20 | 3.46 | 15.5 | 1 | My daughter took my phone. These are her + my walking stats. |
| 15-Nov-19 | 2.98 | 11.5 | 2 | Walked to meetings in Singapore. |
| 17-Sep-19 | 2.96 | 10.7 | 3 | Walked to meetings in Singapore. |
| 11-Jul-20 | 2.89 | 13.9 | 4 | Was talking to Pratap & Ganes. |
| 15-Oct-18 | 2.83 | 9.5 | 5 | Walked to meetings in Singapore. |
| 03-Sep-20 | 2.82 | 13.0 | 6 | Was talking to Naveen & my coach. |
Walking at over 5 km/hr speeds the heart up and improves metabolism. (Or so I’ve heard.)
I was steadily going towards 5 km/hr in my early days of walking. I slowed down starting Aug 2018, since my legs were aching. Then I picked up speed in end-2018.
I slowed down again in Nov 2019 — and I don’t remember why.
In Jun 2020, I started walking much faster — mainly to complete 10K steps within the hour my wife gave me. That seems to have had a lasting impact. I walked faster overall in 2020.
In Jun 2020, I walked at over 5 km / hr on 20 / 30 days — a very consistent high speed. I’ve never gotten close to this any other month.
(Clearly, there are adverse effects of being able to convince my wife.)
My top 5 walking speeds were in 2018. In 2020, I’ve managed to walk faster than 6 km / hr just once.
| Fastest days | km/hr |
| 07-Jun-2018 | 6.80 |
| 05-Jan-2019 | 6.65 |
| 16-Mar-2018 | 6.34 |
| 08-Jun-2018 | 6.31 |
| 06-Feb-2018 | 6.19 |
| 05-Jun-2020 | 6.02 |
The normal stride/height ratio is 0.43. I’m 5’8″. My stride is 2.4 ft. That’s almost exactly 0.43 times my height. So all is well.
For every inch I lengthen my stride, I walk ~0.2km/hr faster.
I’ve walked with a stride as long as 32″, which is 3″ more than my 2020 average stride. By walking with a 2″ longer stride, I can be 9.2% faster.
A longer stride means a faster walk. That’s a good cardio exercise.
A faster walk also means that it takes less time. So I’ll get beaten up less.
All it takes is stretching my legs 2″ more. Might hurt a bit. I’ll report on this when I know better.
| Now | New | Change | Benefit | |
| Longer stride | 29″ | 31″ | 2″ | Builds character? |
| Faster walk (kmph) | 4.5 | 5.0 | 0.5 | Better cardio exercise |
| Time to 10K steps (min) | 84 | 77 | -8 | Less scolding from wife |
PostScript: This analysis was done in Excel. Download see the sheet below.
In 2020 I made 3 resolutions.
On self-improvement, I completed a Landmark course and an Art of Living course. Both had a huge productivity impact. (Mail me for details.)
On software, I starting playing Minecraft and moved from Gmail to Windows 10 Mail. More on this.
On training, we built a data storytelling course and intend to train 100,000 people. (You can register for a free 90-min online workshop.)
In 2021, I’m taking up 3 new goals.
Hope you have an amazing 2021!
My most-used apps in 2020 were:
The new utilities I started using recently are:
The gadgets I bought this year are:
This month, I sold half my Indian equity mutual funds and was researching funds to invest in. I was looking for something safe & long term.
As I was exploring 10-year Gilt Funds (mutual funds that invest in the Indian Government’s 10-year bond), I noticed that they had a pretty high yield — mostly over 10%.
I took a closer look at ICICI Prudential’s Constant Maturity Gilt Fund. (They had the lowest expense ratio.) The annualized returns over the last 5 years were 10.77%, and it’s never fallen below 10% in the last 5 years.
But the strange thing is that the underlying 10-year bond always yielded less than 10% in the last 10 years.
So, how does a mutual fund that buys only one bond yield more than that bond’s ever done in the last 10 years?
(I went ahead and invested. But this is going to worry me to no end.)
With Office 365, PowerPoint supports SVG editing. This is really powerful. It means you can draw in PowerPoint and render it on the web — including as interactive or animated visuals.
For example, the SVG in this simulator was created just with PowerPoint.
The process is simple. Draw anything. Select any shapes and right-click. Select Save As Picture… and choose SVG.
For example, you can use PowerPoint to create Smart Art, export it as SVG, and embed it into a page. See this example on CodePen.
The SVG is fairly well structured and easy to edit. The code generated for these 2 simple shapes:
… is quite straight-forward — just two SVG shapes.
<rect x="125.5" y="185.5" width="107" height="107" stroke="#2F528F" stroke-width="1.33333" stroke-miterlimit="8" fill="#4472C4"/>
<path d="M243.5 292.5 297 185.5 350.5 292.5Z" stroke="#2F528F" stroke-width="1.33333" stroke-miterlimit="8" fill="#4472C4" fill-rule="evenodd"/>
I was worried about the lack of SVG authoring tools in Windows. (InkScape is not usable, and Adobe’s tools are complex and expensive.) PowerPoint fits perfectly.
Given the blazing speed of Node.js these days, I expected HTML parsing to be faster on Node than on Python.
So I compared lxml with htmlparser2 — the fastest libraries on Python and JS in parsing the reddit home page (~700KB).
Looks like lxml is much faster. I’m likely to stick around with Python for pure HTML parsing (without JavaScript) for a while longer.
In [1]: from lxml.html import parse
In [2]: %timeit tree = parse('reddit.html')
8.69 ms ± 190 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100 loops each)const { Parser } = require("htmlparser2");
const { DomHandler } = require("domhandler");
const fs = require('fs');
const html = fs.readFileSync('reddit.html');
const handler = new DomHandler(function (error, dom) { });
const start = +new Date();
for (var i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
const parser = new Parser();
parser.write(html);
parser.end();
}
const end = +new Date();
console.log((end - start) / 100);
Note: If I run the htmlparser2 code 100 times instead of 10, it only takes 7ms per loop. The more the number of loops, the faster it parses. I guess Node.js optimizes repeated loops. But I’m only interested in the first iteration, since I’ll be parsing files only once.
I’ve been active on Minecraft for the last 6 months, thanks to my daughter. She keeps watching game videos for hours. I thought I’d see what the big deal was, and made one myself.
In this 5-minute clip, I’m mining for Ancient Debris in the Nether by placing beds — which explode when used in the Nether. That’s a quick way to clear large areas and is cheaper than TNT. Ancient Debris is used to make Netherite Scrap which makes Netherite ingots that can upgrade to Netherite weapons and armor — the strongest things in Minecraft.
Why do I care? Well, when my friend’s son said “You’re the only adult I know who plays Minecraft”, I felt 20 years younger 😊.
Since 2018, I’ve been walking ~10,000 steps a day. Here’s my journey.
My Goodreads 2020 Reading Challenge target is 50 books. I’m at 45/50, with little hope of getting to 50. (I managed 25/24 in 2019.)
The 10 non-fiction books I read (most useful first) are below.
I also started, by haven’t finished these four:
I read these 25 works of fiction — mostly by Brandon Sanderson (my current favorite author) and Brent Weeks.
… and these 10 comic books/series.
At the moment, I’m at 45 books, with little hope of completing 5 more this month unless I pick up comics. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do 😉