Skip to main content

Checking out the IPad

I happened to be near Austin's Apple Store last Saturday when hanging out at the Domain with some friends for a girls evening out. At 7:30 pm, 12 hours after it became available, I see a huge line in there and the place was packed with men, mostly young (20s to 30s) all jostling each other for a chance to play with demo i-pads. All of us decided it was too weird to go in and went our way.

I must admit I was a bit disappointed at the experience. As much as I'd like to think we live in times when gender stereo types aren't true anymore and women are as interested & into technology as men, that store sort of brought me back to reality. Why aren't we out there in droves reviewing it?

Maybe its because we've got a better way. After all what's the point in standing in line for hours for a few minutes worth of "I got to play with the I-Pad the day it was released"? There are enough videos and reviews online that give you a sense of what it is about and eventually someone you know is going to buy it so you can take a closer look. We've got better things to do with our time ;)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The next step

One sunny day in 2007, I started as engineer #6 at a scrappy little startup that I knew to be as Google for jobs .  Ten amazing years flew by, working with some of the smartest people I will ever know in life. Some highlights of work I did, that I feel really good about. Tokenization and search quality improvements to Indeed's international search (China/Japan/Korea/Germany)  Performance improvements to indexing and search back-end systems, that improved performance and lowered bandwidth costs.  A complex re-architecture to horizontally shard Indeed's index of resumes Helped grow the jobs recommendation engine through performance and ranking improvements, introducing geohash clustering and other architectural changes. Implemented TLS support for Indeed's service framework Built wrappers around  Hystrix , to ease adoption within Indeed.  Built systems for monitoring and visibility of microservices, mongo and mysql. Gave four public tech talks in confe...
Post a Comment
Read more

What are your future plans? Why are you *still* a developer?

If I had a nickel for every time someone has asked me that question I'd have enough change for a year? Inspired by my friend's post here , I thought I'd write about how I ended up doing what I do now. Then I thought about it some more and decided to write about something else. Is it important to know where you are going in life? If you aren't moving forward in your career does it mean that you are doing something wrong? What does "moving up the ladder" even mean? I am going to attempt to answer these questions for myself. Its almost 5 years since I began my professional career. It has been great so far, lots of ups some downs as well. However, once in a while when I get the title question it still throws me off. It is usually my parents or well meaning relatives, sometimes friends that ask this. I have nothing much to say to them except "I enjoy what I am doing right now, haven't really thought about the future". But the truth is - I have thou...
4 comments
Read more

What's your black triangle?

There is a great post from 1994 about  black triangles  in the context of building large and complex systems. You might think that 1994 sounds like the dark ages, but the principles outlined in that post do stand the test of time. Here is my favorite excerpt from that post: What she later came to realize (and explain to others) was that the black triangle was a pioneer. It wasn’t just that we’d managed to get a triangle onto the screen. That could be done in about a day. It was the journey the triangle had taken to get up on the screen. It had passed through our new modeling tools, through two different intermediate converter programs, had been loaded up as a complete database, and been rendered through a fairly complex scene hierarchy, fully textured and lit (though there were no lights, so the triangle came out looking black). The black triangle demonstrated that the foundation was finally complete the core of a fairly complex system was completed, and we were now ready t...
1 comment
Read more