While on vacation in the Virgin Islands, our little group took the opportunity to spend a day on Anegada. This little isle is a part of the UK, the northeasternmost of all of the Virgin Islands and “unique in that it is composed exclusively of carbonate rock … and that its relief is only 25 feet compared to the 1100 to 1700 foot relief exhibited by the other [volcanic] islands.” (from Reconnaissance geology of Anegada Island)

Getting to Anegada from St. John requires purchasing a ticket for an approximately 2-hour ferry ride with a stop in the West End of Tortola to clear British customs. You’d think getting on the ferry is a simple thing seeing as how it happens every month and our tickets were purchased in advance, but alas. Observe:

• Lady 1 took our confirmation slips, carefully ripped off and handed us each two paper tickets for the ferry ride to Anegada and back. She then sent us over to Lady 2 located at a very cramped station behind us in line, which required displacing passengers standing there asking Lady 2 what to do,
• Lady 2 swiped our passports, manually entered the ticket numbers next to our names on an Excel spreadsheet, attached the tickets to the back of our passports with scotch tape and sent us back to Lady 1, and
• Lady 1 took our passports again, slowly checked our names against the passenger manifest and then handed us a British customs form to fill out.

FACEPALM. The whole process took twenty minutes when it could have taken five, and minus at least three subroutines. If you don’t know me, inefficiency bothers me, especially the kind that is contrived, poorly-thought-out and has to do with paper or unnecessary paperwork. If you really don’t know me, my irritation first shows up as super-arched eyebrows, but this time I simply turned to my friend Mo and said, “You know, I could stay behind here on St. John and get a job as a process efficiency consultant.” To which Mo giggled and replied, “They’ll fire you for firing them.” Sigh.

We often joke that this is a soon-come-mon attitude typical of the Caribbean, Third World, local DMV, jury duty or any given government agency, but don’t laugh too hard because it is happening at your workplace, too, and costs time, money and sweet sweet sanity.

The oil industry is portrayed as high-tech and it is in many contexts. We have literally achieved deepwater drilling depths unimaginable only a few years ago, while the computing and software required to quickly analyze terabytes of earth and engineering data become cheaper and more commonplace. The new, crazy depositional environments, the borehole tools, the pressures, the temperatures, the chemicals, the economics, the everything. It is truly mind-bending.

But, being brilliant scientists and engineers who work with giant volumes of data and decisions on supercomputers to accurately place wellbores 5 miles below the surface of the earth and capture deep hydrocarbons alone doesn’t make us high-tech. Process efficiency does. By this, I mean the underlying framework as well as the technological and human support required to work well everyday, get work done in a timely fashion, clearly and easily communicate thoughts and results to colleagues and clients, store material for archival and future access and navigate myriad corporate administrative tasks with minimal waste of time and energy. In other words, it’s not what you do, but the way that you do it that ultimately constitutes success (and zen cool).

Sadly, many of us, i.e. technical professionals who work the earth’s subsurface and our management, are good at what we do but not at much else beyond that, so don’t know what (level of) infrastructure and support to ask for and how. Most of us work with the tools we are given, assume what now have is all that is possible and plod along from there. Such a situation can be avoided by even a basic value for and proficiency at other fields – information technology, electronics, project management, effective communication methods, logistics and organization – and seamlessly integrating them into the way we work everyday. This is where most energy companies fall down, all while better-integrated competition and other truly high-tech industries make great strides. I place this squarely at our own feet. If we the “technologists” know what better tools and processes we require, we will be equipped to actively work at and ensure the right kind and quality of support is available to us. A passive, off-the-shelf, it-will-be-fixed-some-day approach, along with the attitude that computing and other support functions are separate from or not as important as the daily technical workflow, will result in being forced to take what is offered and to like it.

Inefficiency drains in so many ways, and it is directly because of under-prioritizing or writing off what are essential requirements. As a university professor who used to work in the oil industry tells his students, “Be awesome at EVERYTHING … you won’t survive in a niche like the ol’ days.” Learn what will make you more efficient and demand the tools and quality of service that get you there.

Places I’ve been in the last two weeks, that is.

D and I were on the US and British Virgin Islands for 8 days. I highly recommend the island of St. John, with day trips to the other islands including Jost van Dyke, Anegada and Tortola, over St. Thomas.

Vacation is supposed to look like this

this

and this:

There were rocks, of the volcanic and carbonate variety, of course.

Here is the full Flickr gallery. Look at it long enough and you will get no work done, which is the point. I want to go back.

Nitin Sawhney tweets, “My dad – One of that generation who came to England with a few pence and a heart full of humility… took all the racist crap for our future.”

These words fill me with love, sadness and anger, directed mainly at Sawhney’s father and mine. Why did these sweet, humble men put their prerogatives and desires aside for the sake of family? What was and is so much greater about others than themselves? Immigrant parents amaze and infuriate me in their innate ability to stifle all that is Them to do for Theirs.

A few years back, Dad said to my brother and me, “I insisted on your education and success so that you may never have to depend on one another.”

Emigration and diaspora mean more than personal survival, but survival of the race. The impetus has to be more than duty or, why would my parents leave beloved yet going-nowhere India for the west and take all kinds of crap, racist and otherwise, to support their families and us? It cannot be because their lives didn’t matter and they were but sacrificial stepping stones on the way to us as the end. They ensured that many of their kind wouldn’t get left behind in the future, that we would survive and thrive in the new world order. Our emigrant parents were visionaries and matter so much more in the large scheme of things, if they were to choose to think about it that way.

Of course, many who left didn’t expect permanent new lives abroad and never returning to the motherland. They weren’t seers at all, but kids like my brother and me. How could they know Opportunity would become Home?

It’s more than because I am not one yet, but people like my parents perplex me. And I am betting this privilege I enjoy is what they wanted.

If you use Google’s feedreader known as Reader or pay any attention to the internet, you may have heard that Google Reader will no longer exist at mid-year. These are some of my comments on its retirement.

1. Read my friend Bob Plankers’s post in its entirety: What Content Creators and Consumers Should Do Now That Google Reader Is Dead. It’s very well-written and thorough.

Now is not a good time to evaluate a new cloud-based news reading product because they“re all performing sub-optimally. [If you want to prepare, do] milk the free trials. It“ll also be telling who makes changes and who doesn’t. The clients that don’t change probably should be looked at as being abandoned by their developers.

… You might use this opportunity to export all your data [via Google Takeout] so you have it backed up on your own terms.

… if you’re using any of the Google products for your blog, like Blogger or Blogspot, you should be looking at your options and setting yourself up to move in the future. If you aren’t using your own domain that should be high on your to-do list, because it means you have more control over what happens to your readers. Use DNS to always present your readers a host name that you control, even if it means paying for a higher tier of service in a blogging platform.

2. My answer to “a free service is a crappy service” is “a crappy service is crappy data.” In other words, “if you’re not paying for a service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product, the real customers are advertisers” is a weak excuse to make a subpar offering. If I were Google or Facebook and wanted to collect accurate information on my users for my real customers, I’d make an even better free product. It keeps the sheep mindless free-loading users happy and coming back for more, and collects real, more valuable data. For example, a share from Reader to Google+ or Twitter usually includes my explanatory note and comments from my friends; this is more nuanced feedback on customer habits and better input to models. Again, a Dislike button on Facebook would be more telling. Who you’re friends with on Facebook vs. Twitter vs. Google+ is a veritable goldmine of data right there. I could go on. As it stands, the data I have provided to Google and social media outlets have fallen on deaf ears in Ad-Model-Crunching Land because none of this advertising speaks to me, it’s annoying and I haven’t made a single purchase through sidebar ads or suggested posts.

Wait a whole second, are you suggesting that I pay for a better service so that the service provider can get better information on and more targeted ads to me? That’s rich.

3. Aldo Cortesi says, “Reader was undeniably a good product … Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation.” Why would a subsidized product stop a competitor from innovating? Surely, other better feedreaders could have taken over even in the face of Google’s market share and because of its neglect of Reader. I asked this of Cortesi, along with more information about Google’s competitor stifling, but I guess it’s fashionable not to respond to Twit-plebes or not to have a comments’ section on your blog these days.

4. A good indicator of what Google wants to keep and grow is the bar at the top: Google+, Search, Maps, Play, Watch (YouTube), Drive. Google+ is first. Removing my main posting mechanism, i.e. Share from Reader, to Google+ will make me use it less. +1s are the equivalent of likes; they are forms of passive interaction and not active content upload. Expect Plus to go the way of Buzz, Wave, Fuzz, Zzzz, etc.

5. Note to feedreaders waiting in the wings: Build on the good points of Reader’s user interface:

• Maximum use of screen real estate with the compact view. I am not a fan of the Feedly magazine look, especially when most blogs don’t post pictures. Yay, small useless rectangular white boxes all over my screen.
• Give me the option to decide what’s important. Please don’t take random articles from various feed folders and place them at the top as FEATURED!!!1!  A list of Latest to Oldest sorted by All Feeds and Folders is great and sufficient.
• Please offer a way to subscribe to a blog without a feedreader button (tsk tsk) easily and immediately, like a bookmarklet.
• Feel free not to be the one-stop shop. It’s okay if my friends’ tweets and Facebook posts from their favorite restaurants are not interspersed with content-filled articles and posts I’d like to cache and read while waiting to get my face drilled or when on a long flight.
• As a blogger, I love starring and storing posts and notes for future reference. A simple list like Stuff I’ve Starred would be wonderful. A feed for Stuff I’ve Starred would make me hug you.

Feedly is a good-enough replacement for now, although Firefox shuns the add-on from time to time forcing me to re-install it (no, thank you, I will not switch to Chrome). Will report back with Feedly for iPod and iPad after I’ve played with it for a while. Meanwhile, if you find good desktop+tablet+smartphone feedreader options and workarounds, please let me know in the comments below.