People skills with AI

Sun, 17 May 2026 22:45:57 +0800

I advise people that people skills are important in the AI era.

Now, I’m using AI to help me with people skills.

This morning, I wrote a script to export my WhatsApp conversations this year. That makes it easy to feed it into AI models.

Then I used my Local MCP connector and asked Claude:

Who are people in my life that most deserve an unreasonable gesture of thanks and what would that be?

It went through my WhatsApp messages – including threads I had not read. Including a group discussing four 90-minute hands-on AI workshops I’m running for IIM alumni in Singapore on Saturday afternoons:

23 May: Context engineering
20 Jun: AI tools & workflows
25 Jul: Agentic analysis
22 Aug: AI strategy

Nayana Jain prepared a series of LinkedIn / WhatsApp posts to promote this workshop series and also created a poster for the workshops - and the best part of it was they were AI-generated. AI didn’t do a great job at the logo, so she asked for and got the IIMPACT logo (which isn’t public) and fed it to the model to re-generate it.

All of this is something I wasn’t even aware of until Claude pointed it out.

I sent a note thanking her.

And, evidently, AI is teaching me how to be human.

Launching applications

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Opening programs from the Start - All Programs menu is painful. For many years, I relied on the quick launch bar.

But it’s space constrained. There are only so many applications you can place there. I want space enough for frequently used documents as well. Recently, I decided that I need all the space on the screen. So my task bar is on auto hide, and that makes the quick launch bar a little tougher to use as well. And finally, I can’t use the quick launch bar with the keyboard. That’s important.

So I switched to the pinned menus on the Start Menu.

This works better with the keyboard. I access Word, I just type the Ctrl-Esc, W. Excel: Ctrl-Esc, E. But I run short of letters soon. I have trouble between Powerpoint and processing, for instance. And I can’t store documents.

I tried Enso Launcher and Launchy, both of which are great products, but I just can’t stand the thought of them hogging up all the memory that they do. Launchy in particular.

Given that I almost always have one or two command prompts open, I write my own little tool to do the job now. It’s a command line launcher I’ve written in Perl. I call it “o”. At the first run, it indexes my hard disk. (Well, not all of it. I’ve picked what I need.) Now, if I want to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I just type:

> o harry potter hallows

If I wanted to pick a Harry Potter book, I could:

> o harry potter
    0: D:/Entertainment/Books/Hugo Awards/2001 - J K Rowling - Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire.rar
    1: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.1.Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone.pdf
    2: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.2.Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets.pdf
    3: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.3.Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban.pdf
    4: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.4.Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.doc
    5: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.5.Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.pdf
    6: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.6.Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.pdf
    7: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.7.Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.pdf
    8: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.The Harry Potter Encyclopedia.doc
    9: D:/My Pictures/2005-06 London/2005-07-16 06 Waterstones Oxford Street Harry Potter release.JPG
    ... more
> (0-9, q, any word): prince
D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.6.Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.pdf

The program lists the files matching the words I typed, and lets me filter within that.

I just wrote this yesterday, and already, I’ve used it dozens of times. Here’s the source.

PS: While I was at it, I downloaded a Flickr uploader for Perl. So I can now upload images with the command line. This easily saves me at least 5 minutes per article.

Comments

Karthik A 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: Oc here
I got equally bugged long back and wrote a python program called fo (folder opener ;-)

Here it is - crude but worked pretty well \
@setlocal enableextensions & python -x %~f0 %* & goto :EOF \
import os
import ConfigParser
import sys

CONFIGFILENAME = “config.ini”
CONFIGFILENAME1 = “config1.ini”
cleanInp = ‘’
scuth = {}
\
Load all the config file details in a hash \
cfgFile = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
cfgFile.read(CONFIGFILENAME)
cfgFileFP = open(CONFIGFILENAME,‘r+’)

scuts = cfgFile.items(“shortcuts”)

\
load into a dictionary \
for (x,y) in scuts:
scuth[x]=y

print “““Folder and file rapid opener (FO)
————————————
Ctrl-Alt-C - to start
@shortcut,path - to add a shortcut
x - exit
————————————”””

while cleanInp != ‘x’:
inp = raw_input(“Your wish Master!:”)
cleanInp = inp.strip()
if cleanInp.find(’@’) == -1:
try:
os.startfile(scuth[cleanInp])
except:
pass
else:
tmp = cleanInp.split("@")[1]
tmp1 = tmp.split(",")
cfgFile.set(“shortcuts”,tmp1[0], tmp1[1])
cfgFile.write(cfgFileFP)
q
Sathish 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: Anand,

Did you try slickrun.. It is extremely slick..
S Anand 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: @OC: Hey, didn’t realise you were into python. Neat!

@Sathish: How much memory does Slickrun use up? Given some of the apps I’m running on my 1GB laptop, I’m having to count each byte!
oracle 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: The method I use:

enable google desktop by ctrl-ctrl

in the search bar first few alphabets of the app..invariably it shows me the app i need.
Saurabh 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: I used to use Launchy before switching to Mac an year book and have been using QuickSilver since then. Dont use the Apple Spotlight, neither the Google Desktop thing..QS does all the work - launching apps, searching for files and quickly accessing them, a nice article abt a great QS trick (for Mac users) here : http://www.43folders.com/2005/06/13/quicksilver-the-comma-trick

BTW Processing.org seems to be interesting, plan to check it out soon!

Cheers!
S Anand 11 Aug 2008 5:35 am: @Sathish: 7MB is not too bad. Launchy was taking up over 25MB in my case.

Python vs Perl

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Python vs Perl. Sums up my feelings perfectly: Python may be better for larger projects, but for my meddling, I’ll stick to Perl. It’s served me well for 10 years.

Until 1999, I used Perl a fair bit, but no more than Java or C or anything else. My first “real-life” use of Perl was in 2000, when I was processing 600MB of IBES data. Access and SPSS couldn’t handle the load. Perl slurped all the data in a few seconds, though. A few years later, when processing bank data (3GB worth, this time), Perl again was the only saviour. In fact, between Excel and Perl (and CPAN), I think I have all the data analysis power I’ve ever needed. This blog, for instance, is written in an Excel spreadsheet, exported to XML, and converted into the blog format by Perl.

scripting on S Anand

People skills with AI

Launching applications

Comments

@setlocal enableextensions & python -x %~f0 %* & goto :EOF \

Load all the config file details in a hash \

load into a dictionary \

Python vs Perl