Car not responding to FOB key

tldr; Your fob key battery may be fine, but your car battery may be dead.

My cousin from SF was visiting us over last weekend. They wanted us to keep their Honda Odyssey 2016 for a week when they went for their week-long Mexico cruise. Everything was good with the car for the first two days. On the third day, the car alarm went off apparently for no reason. I wasn't home at that time, and my wife unlocked and locked the car with the fob key and everything was good. Then two days later, I wanted to open the car to keep some bags inside. I was shocked to find the car not responding!

The small red LED light on the fob key was still turning on when I pressed the buttons, but the car simply didn't respond. My natural response was to think that something was wrong with the fob key. I noticed that my cousin's son had put some small toy magnets with the key and those were sticking on it. I suspected those magnets messed up something inside the fob key. I have never used a fob key and a keyless ignition so far, so had to google around. The first reason everyone mentioned was that the battery inside the fob key might be dead. Figured out how to open the fob key and change the battery, a CR2032 3 volts battery (costs $2 a piece at Walmart). I tried again, but still no response from the car! I was suspecting that would be the case since the car is brand new and the LED lamp was turning on when I pressed the buttons.

I did not realize that when I opened the fob key, the physical key that the fob key had inside it could actually open the car. (See this video if you don't know how to get the physical key out of the fob key.)

I thought the car doesn't have a slot for the physical key, but had I seen below the driver door handle, I would have seen the slot to insert the physical key and open the door! Alas, the way I had parked the car in a corner with little room to stand next to the driver side door hid that slot when I was standing.

I called couple of my friends who have Honda Odysseys and they were clueless too. Everyone was thinking of complicated reasons like the car having some anti-theft protection that locks the car automatically, etc., No one even suggested trying to open the car with the physical key and check if the car would start!

I finally ended up calling AAA. First they sent a lockout technician. Even he didn't know that the physical key could open the car. He did his usual stuff on the passenger window and opened the car. But he correctly guessed that the car battery might be dead. I got in, pressed the ignition button and there was no response. Then I called AAA again to get battery jump. This guy was the one who finally told me I could use the physical key to open the door! He gave a jump start and then we started looking why the battery died. One of the lamps inside was on! And it was the lamp next to where my cousin's five year old son sat! He had left the lamp on and since I drove the van only during the day, I never noticed it! I turned off all the lamps and then drove the car for half an hour for the battery to recharge. All good after that.

If you ever face this problem, then first open the car with the physical key and check if the car battery is alright.

Practical Implementation of Sharpening the Saw

One of the books that really influences my thinking is Stephen Covey's "The seven habits of highly effective people". In this post I thought I could share how I am implementing the seventh habit of "sharpening the saw".

The story behind the principle is that of two woodcutters (sorry, trees and tree huggers!). The first woodcutter just kept cutting trees for eight hours a day with his saw. The second woodcutter spent the first hour each day sharpening his saw and cut trees only for seven hours each day. At the end of a month, the second woodcutter had vastly outperformed the first and also looked much less tired compared to the first one.

In today's world, especially when it comes to the IT industry, I can see these two woodcutters at all workplaces. The people who look like the first woodcutter work very hard and get quite tired by the end of the day. They don't seem to have a lot of fun at work. They are usually working on putting out fires at work, meaning they work on urgent and pressing matters all the time. They look quite burnt out at the end of the day. Usually they need some alcohol or TV after work to wind themselves down. The people who look like the second woodcutter work hard too, but they seem to be energized by their work and more productive every day. They also seem to have a lot of fun at their jobs and seem to help others a whole lot more. Somehow you feel quite relaxed and are at ease when you are around the people from the second group. They also seem to have enough energy at the end of each work day that they can spend time on more demanding tasks like helping kids with their homework or doing little chores at house in the evenings.

To implement this principle into my life, I decided that I was going to evaluate how much I was learning each day at work. On some days, the projects I do at work provide opportunities for learning something new. On those days, I don't need to separately dedicate an hour first to learn something new. But I found that at least half of my days are spent on just doing mundane work - work based on what I already knew. On these days, I decided I would spend the first hour learning something closely related to work and projects, but not exactly work on the project my boss gave me. What I found out was, though this time was spent on something else, it paid me back multiple times in the long run. Also it kept my brain fresh with ideas and gave me alternate ways of thinking about a problem at work.

Some really smart companies like Google realize the value of this and give their employees 20% of the time to work on their own projects. These companies invest in their employees. But other short-term thinking employers think of this as a waste of time. If our employer is in the latter category, then we need to take charge of ourselves and improve ourselves. After all, no one cares more about our success than ourselves!

In my previous job, I did not have the luxury of doing my own stuff for the first hour each day, so I actually spent an hour outside of my work hours to do the learning. After about a year of doing that, I was ready to move up and take on a more responsible job. This new job gives me plenty of flexibility to learn at work itself, so I give myself the first hour of my office hours to learn something new. Currently I am working in the fields of data science, machine learning and big data. There is never a lack of things to learn in these fields. I have about a dozen things in my radar to learn next.

Another way to implement this strategy is to participate in a mailing list and try to help out others with their problems. I was active on StackOverflow for about a year when I was learning Solr. It was a very rewarding experience. I could see what challenges people faced in their jobs and solved many practical problems. I would have never even thought of many things had I not looked at StackOverflow. Participating in such platforms helps us learn things that we would have never thought of ourselves to learn. For about a year, this was just a hobby for me, but a year later, a project came up at my company that no one knew how to solve efficiently. It took me a very short time to figure out how to do that project in a scalable manner with Solr. I took on that project and worked on it for a few months. It worked amazingly well and scaled to well over ten times the data my employer initially had (with the same hardware we were using)!

A huge benefit I found by spending the first hour at work learning is that I remain positive for the rest of the day, irrespective of how the work for my employer turns out that day. This is similar to the positive energy you feel if you work out in the mornings. Doing such high RoI (Return on Investment) tasks first thing in the morning helps us tremendously in the long run.

In summary, practicing the habit of "sharpening the saw" has multiple rewards and something we should practice every day in our lives.

Does value investing work?

If you are reading this article, I believe you are a person who already knows about the advantages of diversification, index fund​​s, rebalancing and low expense ratios. I also hope that your own investments are in low cost index funds already, with proper allocations to stocks and bonds, based on your risk tolerance and investment horizon.

(If you did not understand anything I mentioned in the first paragraph, please stop now and do yourself a favor. Read the book "The Bogleheads Guide to Investing" by Taylor Larimore et al. Don't worry, I am not affiliated with the Bogleheads, nor do I get compensated for referring that book, nor there is an Amazon affiliate link in that URL. That book that gets you to almost an under-graduate level in investing. Without understanding that book, I can confidently say that value investing is not for you.)

You probably have been doing some reading or research on alternative investment strategies, obviously to do better than what you think your current passive indexing strategy will probably deliver. Maybe you read some books by Benjamin Graham, or listened to Warren Buffett, or read some books about Buffett or some other value investor, and are thinking of adopting value investing strategies.

I was exactly in your situation. I and my wife have some money in our retirement accounts. Most of that is invested in Vanguard Target 2045 retirement fund, with the rest mostly in Vanguard index funds. I say "most of that" because my employer has an index fund with another company, so I have no option but to pay the 0.31% expense ratio for a total stock market index fund, for which I would pay a paltry 0.05% with Vanguard!

I read Benjamin Graham's "The Intelligent Investor" couple of years back and realized that active investing is a very time consuming process (think 40+ hours a week). I decided to be a passive investor and follow Vanguard 2045 retirement fund (the year chosen based on when I will roughly turn 65). But every now and then, I would wonder if I could do better than this passive investing strategy. I started reading a lot on value investing recently! After about two months of reading over a dozen books and several hours of online research, what I realize is that even people who are full time value investors do not succeed all the time. The ones whom you hear about are the ones who succeeded after several years of value investing. For each successful value investor, there are probably anywhere from tens to hundreds of failures. It is not because value investing principles do not work. They certainly do. But as human beings, we do not always stick to those principles! If you read Graham's book, he says repeatedly that it is easy for him to give guidelines, but difficult for us to follow it in practice. Just ask yourself - did you floss your teeth today? did you exercise for at least 30 minutes today? Two or three years of inferior returns from value investing will drive almost all of us out of value investing into indexing with our tails between our legs!

I have high regard for Warren Buffett and his sage advices on value investing, but trying to use his value investing advice in our own portfolios is impractical. He has unusual intelligence with numbers, excellent memory and has a solid command over estimating odds. He says he got wise by reading a lot - by lot, I mean he reads about 500 pages of financial documents a day! He has the ability to really understand what he reads and remember that too. And finally after several years of value investing, he says in his 80s, that for most individual and institutional investors, index funds are the best! Thank God he finally said that!

The field of value investing is very enticing to someone like me, who loves to learn a lot and think of myself as a contrarian! Let's just look at the game I am going to play. Here I am with all this knowledge I acquired by reading so much. I also have a solid engineering and math background. Most people don't understand much about stocks, most people don't take the time to read, most are not as mathematically oriented as me. Most of them buy when market goes up and sell when it goes down. So isn't it obvious that with all this intelligence I got I should do better than the vast majority of others? This kind of thinking is detrimental to our investment returns. What happens in reality is that even with all those qualifications, many have played this game and failed miserably. We don't hear much about them because no newspaper or magazine wants to hear from them! Their interviews won't sell. Even if there is such an interview, most of these investors never admit their mistakes; instead they blame someone or something else. It is very hard to tell in an interview "I thought I could beat the market by doing what I did. Now I realize that the market has beaten me to a pulp. I failed.".

Another important fact is that, historically, value companies have done better than growth companies, but that doesn't mean that same will happen in the future. Growth may very well outperform value over the next thirty years and that may very well be all the time you and I got as our investment time horizon.

Every now and then, someone will come up with some "magic formula" even within the field of value investing. It may even work for a while or even a long time, but I don't want to put my own money into figuring out if they are right or wrong. Beware of all such "magicians", since they usually run magical mutual funds which charge high fees. The magic ensures that they become rich whether we even get the market returns or not!

In conclusion, I believe that for me and a vast majority of regular people who have full time jobs (in fields other than stock market), indexing is the way to go. Spend that little extra time you got every day to doing other things - to learning more about your field of work or spending more time with family and friends or pursuing other hobbies. Manage your money passively with low cost index funds and sleep well :-)

Equality in Indian Religious Practices

People in India are quite devoted when it comes to their religious practices and ceremonies and I have nothing against someone doing something they want, as long as it does not affect others in a negative way. But then Indians want to let others know when they are doing something good, like praying or going on pilgrimages to temples like Sabari malai, etc., This is where I believe they encroach upon the space of others quite liberally.

Where we used to live, there was a church nearby. The Sunday services are always done with loud speakers and the whole surrounding area is forced to hear it. And we moved to another place and now there is another church nearby and the same deal again. Right next to my sister's house, there is a church and every Sunday no one can talk to them on phone since all you can hear is the loud preaching of the church. I do not understand why people have to disturb others when they are praying or doing religious ceremonies. This happens every Sunday and is very annoying. Didn't even Jesus Christ preach that when you pray, you pray in privacy without sounding a trumpet? Trumpets would be less louder and for much shorter duration, than the loud speakers we are forced to hear every Sunday!

Then there are other seasonal celebrations like going to Sabari mala, where people rent out loud speakers and blare the devotional music and their religious chantings out so loud, that one wonders whether these people are looking for peace and harmony, or just plain recognition.

The idea of equal rights in India seems to have a net negative effect on everyone. Everyone has a right to disturb everyone else... Non-Christians are annoyed by the loud Sunday services, Christians are annoyed by loud non-Christian ceremonies, and non-Muslims are annoyed by Muslim service calls. The point is to have everyone follow whatever they want, without disturbing others. Tolerance should not be in tolerating the annoyances caused by others, but should be a "live, and let live" attitude towards others that they can follow whatever they want and do whatever they want, and I am OK with that.

Chennai Furniture Shopping

Bought some furniture for my home recently and want to share a decent experience I had with the furniture stores. The store came highly recommended by my paternal uncle and cousin, who bought all the furniture for their home from that store. The furniture in their home looked quite good and I decided I would order almost exactly the same pieces of furniture and some mattresses from the store.

My first order was a big one. I got two single beds (cots) for my parents. The legs and the beams were all solid wood and the base (on which the mattress rests) was plywood. I got it for Rs. 13K each. Then I purchased a sofa set (one three seater and two one seaters) for 28K and a four-seater dining table for 14K. I also ordered two Kurl-on mattresses (one for 17K and another for 10K) for my parents. The total came to 97K (after discounts). The shop took some cash advance and delivered the items on time and took the remaining amount when they delivered.

My next order was for a double bed and it costed 21K. This order was delivered a day late, but compared to how a lot of things get delayed in India, a day's delay was alright (though I expected better from the store). There were also nominal delivery charges (750 for the first one and 500 for the second).

Ok, now you want to know which store this is. It is:
Sri Venkateswara Furniture,
No 573, Anna Salai, Teynampet, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600006
Tel: 044 4269 2150

(The store is close to Teynampet police station.)

I found the owner Mr. Parthiban both amiable and efficient.

We believe the furniture will last us a long time (few decades at least).

Disclaimer: I am not in any way affiliated with the store, the owner or will get any compensation for promoting the store. I am just a happy customer who likes to share both my positive and negative experiences with my shopping in India via this blog (since there is no Yelp in India yet).

Poorvika Mobiles - Bad Experience

Went to Poorvika mobiles in Valasaravakkam, Chennai on a Friday to get an airtel sim card. The process was usual - they took my aadhaar card original, photocopied it and then took two photos from me. I also got an Idea sim card for free (which I do not intend to use). Since the sale had to happen, the process was very quick and efficient. The promise was that in 24 hours the sim card will be activated... And as is usually the case with India, 24 hours later the sim was not activated! I went to the store and inquired about it. They still had my application with them. The excuse they gave was that the guy who was supposed to pick up the forms to the airtel office did not show up! Now I have to wait for two more days (till Monday) for the sim to be activated. This is just plain inefficient. I cannot understand why people cannot keep their word. In any case, this is just a post to warn others who are considering going to Poorvika that they may be just as inefficient as any other store.

UPDATE: I know that "free" usually means trouble. What has happened now is that Poorvika has sent the Idea sim card for activation first and is delaying the Airtel sim card. I believe this is a sneaky marketing ploy to get customers to buy Idea plans, instead of what they actually wanted. I am guessing Airtel sim card activation is now going to take much longer.

I am going to strongly advise my friends and family to avoid Poorvika Mobiles from now.

Coimbatore Experiences

Happened to travel from Chennai to Coimbatore to attend my nephew's wedding last week and thought I would record my experiences here.

We took Spice Jet from Chennai to Coimbatore. The ticket fare was for hand luggage only and the four of us (me, wife, my dad, my 5-yr old son) all comfortably took all we wanted in hand luggage itself. The weight restriction is 7 kg per person for one piece of luggage, plus 2 kg allowance for laptop bag, hand bag, or some small luggage. The flight was little more than an hour. Once we landed in Coimbatore, I tried to take a prepaid taxi to Kavundam Palayam, which is where our hotel was booked. The prepaid taxi rate was Rs. 600, which I thought was very expensive. So I enquired around and found the number for another taxi service, phone number 0422 6060 303. This cab service is called VK-CABBIE or something and costed us only 330. So this was a wise choice. Later I heard from others that there is something called red taxi, which is even less expensive.

Our hotel was Balu hotel on Mettupalayam road. It was about 1 km towards kavundam palayam signal from Ooty bus stand on mettu palayam road. The hotel was quite mediocre. It has a bar attached to it and if you happen to stay in one of the rooms close to the hotel reception, then cigarette smoke at night is going to suffocate you. Also all the rooms are smoking rooms, so if you travel with kids or hate passive smoking like me, then avoid this hotel. Avoid using the water bottle they provide. It is not a new one; they just fill water and keep it full and it looks exactly like a new bottle, until you open it and realize the seal is broken. The toilets were not cleaned properly. But there were some advantages. There is a coffee/tea shop just downstairs so we could satisfy our caffeine addiction twice a day. There is also a medical shop in the same building and we had to buy a lot of medicines, so that was quite convenient.

The wedding was in Kalpana Kalyana Mandapam. The wedding hall was nice and big, but then the construction of hand wash and the dining hall was just plain stupid. You have to get down half a floor for the handwash and then several steep steps to go down to the dining hall. Lot of old folks had a tough time and even normal people had to be careful when using the steep steps.

The food was catered by Malamurthy catering and was excellent. All the items were really good and I did not find a single item that was bad. This is really rare in India and I would consider it as a highlight of our whole trip.

Return trip was by IndiGo and we had check-in allowance, so checked in our suitcases. Once we landed in Chennai, we took fast track prepaid taxi. There was a guy with fast track uniform who took our luggage as soon as we stepped out of the airport with the fast track bill. I thought he was the driver. He was walking too fast for us, so I had to rush up to make sure he is not stealing something from our luggage! Only when he loaded our luggage to the taxi, the driver guy came and this guy stood next to me and said "Sir, thank you, sir" and looked like a drooling dog... I realized this guy just wants some money for pushing our super light cart for a couple of hundred feet. This is just plain cheating from fast track. I told him how I was taken for a ride by him and gave him 20 rupees. Not sure why fast track has to do this. In retrospect, I should have just used Ola cabs or Uber for airport pickup. Prepaid taxis have become a rip off in Chennai airport and Chennai Central and I hope the competition just eats them alive and they go out of business soon.