S Anand

Packaging can make a huge difference to products. It really hit me when I saw this bottle of Heinz’s ketchup. My two big problems with normal ketchup bottles are: (a) the sauce spills to the side of the bottle and sticks to the cap, and (b) it’s tough to pour the last bits of sauce – you have to hit the bottle a lot. Now, I didn’t know I had these problems. But when I saw this bottle, it hit me. You keep the bottle upside down – so it’s easy to pour the last bits of sauce. And they way the nozzle valve is designed, the sauce doesn’t stick to the cap. Perfect! Since then, I don’t buy any other ketchup bottle. Even if I WANT ketchup, I don’t buy it unless I get this bottle. Packaging made be brand loyal. (Caveat: I’m not REALLY brand loyal. I’d buy any ketchup with this packaging. But only Heinz has it right now.) ...

Grow by shrinking a market. For every dollar of revenue Microsoft made, it took away six dollars of revenue from their competitors. Every dollar of Microsoft’s gain caused an asymmetrical amount of pain in the marketplace. They made money by shrinking the market.

Speed up your torrents. Particularly, get rid of the Event ID 4226 problem.

Windows XP commands for the command prompt. Comments sathish 11 Apr 2006 11:18 am: this is a cool link

Beautiful people are paid more because of a positive feedback mechanism. Employers expect them to perform better. They expect themselves to perform better. And these come across. Comments Madhu 10 Apr 2006 7:12 am: he he.. my research deals with whether board of directors have any impact on CG et al. I should probably consider the looks of the board as an important parameter S Anand 12 Apr 2006 7:10 pm: It’s supposed to be a stronger effect with women. You could factor that in :-) Madhu 14 Apr 2006 7:28 am: and probably suggestion reservation for women in the board;)

The Personal MBA. John Kaufman says reading (and practicing) these 42 books should be as good as any MBA (and that an MBA is, perhaps excessively, expensive). Some of these books are worth a read in any case. Master Yourself Mastery by George Leonard Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton Manage Your Life and Work Getting Things Done by David Allen The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey Learn the Fundamentals ...

Martijn’s Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search is back. It doesn’t let you search the quotes themselves, but a (pretty detailed) description of each cartoon instead. (Mine searches Calvin and Hobbes quotes). Comments Anonymous 21 Oct 2006 8:55 am: if you know calvin and hobbes u know how many are there. I have been looking for March 24, 1994 for an ages and this helped me to find it in a minute. great site I do recomend

Reducing your memory usage in Firefox.

On a related note, 60% of the search queries that lead to my site this year were Calvin and Hobbes quotes. “i can’t help but wonder what kind of desperate straits would drive a man to invent this thing.” topped the list (Calvin referring to a yo-yo), with i always catch these trick questions following closely. People searching for Excel related stuff were next (20%): excel indirect(address(, row() excel offset address and the like. ...

The seven plus or minus two rule. That’s all your brain can remember.

Google Related Links. Google’s following Yahoo’s lead in Y!Q.

On the IMDb top 250, you normally see a correlation between the number of votes and the rating for a movie. Better rated movies are more watched. The outliers are interesting. The movies that are popular despite not having a high rating are: The Matrix The Sixth Sense Gladiator Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith Pirates of the Caribbean I can understand why The Sixth Sense, Pirates of the Caribbean and especially The Matrix are on this list – geeks would have watched these and voted on IMDb, though their voting need not have been high. But why are Gladiator and Sixth Sense on that list? ...

Live Plasma. An interesting way to explore music and movies. Great visual design too.

What programmers do.

Chennai on Google Earth in high resolution. Mylapore and other areas near the coast are not yet in hi-res, though.

Stock transactions by Bill Gates. He periodically sells a few million of Microsoft shares. Wonder what he does with the $300 million or so every week.

Domain name analysis. All two-letter and three-letter acronyms are taken. About 80% of 4-letter acronyms are taken. All common names are taken. 90% of common full names are taken. And more.

Marriages in Britain are lasting longer. But part of the reason is that there are fewer marriages. More people just live together. The ones that do marry are older (30 years, as against 26 years a decade ago) and probably more religious.

Why people rush out of a plane at Bangalore but not at Delhi. via Kaps

The sun and moon look smaller than you think. The apparent large size of the Sun and Moon as we see them in the sky is a psychological illusion. There are several different explanations for this. If you take a picture of the moon with a camera lens that has the same field of view as Celestia, you may be surprised at the small size of its image. Here is something you might try: a finger at arm’s length is about two degrees wide for most people. That means that you can fit four moons side by side. Go outside and check it. Now have a direct look at your finger indoors. Can you still believe that four moons will fit on it? ...