The Perils of CrossFit

Summer 2012 rolled around and I found myself bored with my usual training regimen. I was not only looking to get into shape, but wanted to push myself past physical and mental limitations. About 5 months ago, I joined CrossFit Eagle Rock.

Overall, CrossFit has made me realize several things which extend to other parts of life.

1. You will fail...but there is only 1 way to achieve success, repetition. 
2. There are many reasons to stop...it's up to you to find 1 reason to keep going. The WHY in life is often more important than the WHAT or the HOW. Why are you doing this?
3. Rome wasn't built in 1 day and neither will your fitness. It takes discipline, persistence, and hard work to achieve your goals. 
4. Fly wheel effect. Small victories will lead to incredible results over time. 
5. The power of a team. You're only as good as the people you train with. Your team members give you motivation, encouragement, and a set of benchmarks to measure your progress relative to others.
6. Integrity. Don't cheat. If you do, you'll only be cheating yourself.

Check out this video of one of the endurance classes I took with Jason.

GitHub: A More Efficient Way to Blog

Most of my current activities have been in the area of data mining and machine learning. The best way to keep up with my updates is to follow me @GitHub account.

For developers, GitHub is far more efficient & effective tool for blogging.

Occasionally, I will blog about challenges and / or summaries of conclusive work.

Mars Science Laboratory: We Did It!

After its successful launch on Nov. 26, 2011, and a 36 week (254 days) journey, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover is on the surface of Mars! Curiosity landed on Mars at 10:32 p.m. PDT, Aug. 5, 2012.

This was a special day for all of us @ Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As senior software engineer and a member of the Global Navigation Satellite Systems group for NASA, this was a historic day. Our team has played an integral part in calibrating the landing gear. The calibration of landing gear during descent sequence has been successfully tested by a F-18 a year prior to launch. This was by far the most complicated landing sequence ever attempted. We have provided high rate data clock/orbit products to help Curiosity stay on course. Mission well done!

The complexity of the landing sequence is seen in this video below:

Here is the actual video from the descent:

Congratulations to our colleagues in the web group for designing a great user experience for people around the world to witness this historic event. To find out more about Mars Science Laboratory, visit MSL.

I encourage you to check out our realtime precise point positioning data products (popularized by many Location Based Services) at Global Differential GPS.

President Obama called today and expressed his thoughts, here is the video.

Follow me on twitter (at armjan) for latest news about MSL.

Higher Education Distrupted!

Higher Education is Broken:
In the past few hundred years, everything has evolved with the exception of the classroom. Higher education is broken for the following reasons:

• Rise in tuition has increased over 200% in the past 30 years
• Higher education curriculum has not kept up with certain fast paced industries (technology, marketing, etc), thus graduates have a widening gap between skills acquired in school vs those needed on the job
• Schools of today can't prepare students for the jobs of tomorrow

There has been a response from the entrepreneurial community regarding this problem. 

Introducing Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs)

A MOOC is an online class which is open to the public. Several ventures have launched in the education space such as Udacity, Coursera, and Edx. 

My personal experience with MOOCs came as I enrolled in Sebastian Thrun's Artificial Intelligence & Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course @Coursera during Fall of 2012. The lectures were engaging, less than 15 minutes each. The pace of the courses was challenging yet doable. 

Meetup.com: Death of the Resume

From my personal experience, meetup.com has transformed the job searching and career mentoring dramatically. You can instantly connect with local members of your community based on interest and skill. Meetups can be a great way to find out about new job and career opportunities. Besides the element of networking, meetups will often host a series of talks/workshops to advance your knowledge in a particular topic. Meetups have a good mixture of variety, depth and real people who can help you.

TechSmith Product Review: Jing

If you don't know about Jing, continue reading. Jing is a screen capture utility, from TechSmith (makers of Camtasia), which allows you to share images/video of your screen with others. The free version allows you to record for 5 minutes, which is a great way to keep your message simple and to the point.
Here's where you can find Jing:
http://www.techsmith.com/download/jing/default.asp
Here's a sample of a recent recording I did using Jing:

View on screencast.com »
I've used this method of screensharing for the following use cases:

• Share insights regarding particular products of interest with your peers in a hands on kind of way
• Demo your app to coworkers, customers and investors
• Create short tutorials illustrating users product features and capabilities

I recently came across kera.io (www.kera.io) which takes screen capture in your app to a whole another level. Make sure to check it out.

Making Yourself Irreplacable

Are you invaluable? What about your value to your market place? the people who have the greatest value have used the following 6 factors to get there:

1. Savvy: Knowledge & Intuition 

2. Ability: How well can you do what you're supposed to do

3. Irreplaceability: How easy is it to replace you?

4. Focus: ability to eliminate distractions

5. Connection: build professional relationships

6. Authority: Are you an expert in your field?

Think of your activities throughout the day falling into 2 buckets. Most Valuable Activities (MVA) & Least Valuable Activities (LVA). It goes without saying that you should maximize your MVA while minimizing your LVA.

It is easy to become reactive to your coworkers, losing focus on your long term career focus and career strategy. Write down your destination. Re-assess yourself every few months to determine if your MVAs are helping you get to your ultimate destination.

Have a look at the notes I've taken about how to make yourself irreplaceable http://goo.gl/pbgn6

Harvard Business School Resources

Here's a link to the amazing list of resources available for entrepreneurs from Harvard Business School https://sites.google.com/site/startuptribe/general-information/communications