reflection of self

changing times

2006-08-29T12:06:00.000-05:00

Things are really looking different around here, summer is getting to a close, I am longing to travel back home and friends are moving chasing new opportunities but I seem to be fixed in a place and time I can't get out of.

Yesterday there was some good news from a friend who finally made it to a job that he liked in a company that he liked and I am really happy for him. There is nothing worse than doing what you don't like and I have been in those shoes a few times so I really I really understand his feeling on moving on to something better.

Talking of moving, I need to make this trip to India and am looking forward for it except that I need to make a de-tour to Canada to get my visa stamped out and am in a real fix for finding a date. There is one thing that I am coming to realize and that is traveling teaches you more in life than anything so am looking forward to make these trips in the coming months all ready to learn something new in life.

blog@work

2006-06-23T19:06:00.000-05:00

It's an interesting concept that was first rejected for the threat to workplace secrets and then accepted for the marketing/cool appeal that it has. Well blogging at the workplace was something that was taken to the next level by entrepreneurial startup's starved for cache looking for a way to put there message out to the world, well that and the fact that in the new age of communication where the mediums for communications are breaking down blogging is the new alternative. There are a lot more reasons why blogging has been adapted and even encouraged in the workplace. The phenomenon is most visible with the tech heavy companies but they are by far not the norm, today people across the spectrum are leaning to leverage it for a good cause (corporate propaganda). I for one will admit I fell for one quite some years ago as I followed the blog of the VP of Boeing as he traveled around the world and spread his gospel. It was riveting, for one it was on an industry I knew little about and secondly he was a good writer..or in blog terms a good blogger.

So with so many corporate citizens blogging and tacit approval from companies for there effort is there any value in looking at the question of blogging about work and at work? Well I think there is. Sounds foolish to say it but I work for a top notch software firm that doesn't still belongs to the group of people who would say blog! is that a word? Stuff happens and for good reason.

I have been on both sides of the table and being a blogger do understand the value that it brings to the table and the power that words could change the future/make friends/make sales/etc etc. But and a big But you are still taking about unstructured content and people with free will and free thought writing stuff that in this day and age could make or break the biggest of companies. The problem at the core is in big enough companies the message that the guys in beautiful office wants to put out is not very well understood by the guys in the dingy cubes down the hall. We are in a age where it is widely believed and very much true that the intellectual property that a company holds is more value than the physical product that rolls out its door. So how do you protect this IP that mostly is represented in thoughts and ideas and can certainly put down on paper even in the discrete of ways can give months and even years of work away?

I don't have a good answer, I am still looking at it. One thing I can think of is companies that are embracing blogging are putting resources aside to deal with it, from servers and storage to editors and legal staff who on daily basis would run though the content posted on their servers looking for company secrets. This is one good way to protect your IP, manage it yourself. There is an another way I think companies are handling it, get some guy at the very top to also blog with the other folks in the company. I am no psychologist, but I think it makes a difference, for one more people would read his blog than the other blogs, secondly if he is the one who talk about some juicy stuff first the other guys will be just echoing that and also makes the other think twice about posting some arguable content. Now you are not only looking out for your job and double guessing if you should write it or not but you also don't want to look stupid. This may actually put people off from blogging about work to blogging about themselves or some happenings at work or totally get them off the blogging thing.

The jury is still out for the usefulness of the blogs in corporate environments and my personal opinion is that there is some benefit to it and it should exist in some form. I think today's corporations are not doing enough to explain there products and innovations to the public and more and not less needs to be done in this regard and blogs offer one of many solutions.

let the world change you.. then you can change the world

2006-06-06T14:34:00.000-05:00

I have been wanting to see the movie "The Motorcycle Dairies" for such a long time that when I came across a copy of it in my local library it was too good to pass on it. The quote above is from the cover of the movie an I have to say the movie reflected so much of what I want to do with my travels. The movie is both funny and thought provoking. I had heard about Che Guevara before but never looked too deeply into his life and the movie which was adapted from his book by the same name did portray his journeys across Latin America very well. There was 'or' I should say I did not see too much ideology portrayed in the movie, just the travels, people and the beauty of south america.

One thing that did catch my mind was how little of any change has come to this part of the world since the book was written in 1952. Large parts of the continent are in the same state facing the same problems. I think change is a very different word for this part of the world, there is a wealth of culture, knowledge and identity in individual tribes and the indigenous people living here and change for then may be as simple as not being discriminated and not being robbed of there land and values. The marginalization just seems to be going up as people are finding more minerals and oil in the rich lands of the Incas and want to plunder more of it to feed the economic wheels of Asia and the other western countries.

At the end of the day my worry is that the people are more precious than the minerals/oil that exist below the land that the people live on and this message may be lost somewhere in the noise of modernization and free markets.

Webaroo and the coming Internet change

2006-05-30T22:47:00.000-05:00

Predicting the future is not an exact science and I am no crystal ball gazer, but I will take a shot at predicting the future of the Internet based on what I see as the current state of the Internet today along with some of the cropping problems and also some new technologies that are being put out there that in my view could aid the coming changes.

So what is Webaroo and why is this guy so important? I was actually pointed to this company by a friend of mine who works there, having been a startup with some stellar founders and some neat technology, it got me interested. Well interested enough that it got me thinking about how this could play out in the Internet of today. First a quick snapshot of what these guys do. They currently offer a way to search Internet content even when you are offline, and the way they do it is to take the live internet content, shrink it down on to a size that can fit on your laptop (for now, the technology hasn't gone on to shrink the vast tons of content on to flash memory level sizes) so then you could perform searches (I prefer to use the word google!) when you are offline (for the broadband/always on/Wi-Fi junkies, Yes there is still something called offline). So the point is you can carry your searchable data even to places that don't have Internet access and still search/browse it. The reason I am stressing search more than anything is because that seem to the market that has the most money making potential.

So now you have got yourself thinking.. firstly offline data gets stale very fast and the current data storage requirements are going to mean that we can't carry this offline data everywhere. Well there are some solutions in the current architecture. With regard to stale data you could refresh your data every time you connect to the internet and most of the data (other than current affairs) like restaurant listing, shop catalogs, movie listings, online dictionaries, company websites, etc don't change on an hourly basis, but have a change rate that is more weekly/monthly. This lets the offline data be useful over long periods of time. The second problem of data storage is solved by breaking up the data into categories or tag based content as some web 2.0 folks would like to call it and download only relevant data in small sized files. So you only pick what kind of data you want and build on it. Such small sized files could also fit into current cell phones and PDA's (only windows based ones mind you, the technology is not Mac/Linux friendly.. something I will get into later).

But how new is this concept of offline browsing? Well not new at all, we have had offline data storage of emails and even complete websites for a long time, but the difference now is the size, the possibility of shrinking so much content into so little space using some nifty algorithms is the key differentiator. Even today, the dark fiber that is used to move the 1's and 0's is still a very costly component of the whole Internet experience and hence any technology that helps shrink the data and hence reduce the bandwidth requirements is a very good technology to have. Digressing a little from the topic I think that anything that makes data gathering an efficient process (not just shrinking) is a required technology today, and a good reason why the most efficient search engine of today attract way more traffic then the rest.

Now that I have laid out the technology let me lay down the case of the changing Internet. The world wide web when it started off was more like a small united happy family with everyone very willing to share their data and express opinions that were mutually acceptable if not agreeable, but with Internet now spanning all corner of the globe and a wide variety of people accessing and contributing data to it in a diverse mix of languages, we are reaching a point where in isolated information pockets are being created. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Diversity is great for the Internet and a good measure of its usefulness. But it also creates a situation where people would like to have subnets of information that they could control. Another recent phenomenon that is more troubling is the increased interference of government agencies in policing the Internet. Governments across the world are creating new policies that tend to control what you can and cannot do on the Internet. A good case in point is the way China patrols the information flow on “its” Internet. There are also new taxes and data tapping activities that the government is imposing on the free medium and hence pushing it to a breaking point.

Apart from the social issues there are also economic issues that are driving change in the Internet today and a primary case being the traditional telephone companies that still own the fat pipes that carry the data wanting a bigger economic payoff off the Internet, having totally missed the bus to innovate. The upstarts like Google, EBay and Yahoo that have led this online boom, have in some cases become an object of hate for the quick money they make.

So where does all this leave us with Webaroo and the Internet. Technologies like these have the potential to be very disruptive, something that could rock the whole boat. Let me explain it with the example. China today has a closed doors policy where western media is controlled, but the ability of using technologies like Webaroo to very easily transmit huge amounts of data (data that is not openly accessible) to people’s computers for offline access could potentially get around what is today a state control of information. It is not to say that such a things is not possible today, but new changes in technology are always welcome and something like Webaroo could be the tipping point.

Technologies like Webaroo are double edged swords, they in one hand hold the potential of doing a lot of good, like providing users with data that they previously never had access and the same time hasten the creation of subnets within the current internet and ultimately help create new private internets. Companies and to some extent people have tried to create new independent Internets. Now why would someone do that? Well there is the case of safeguarding your capital flow (case in point being someone like google creating there own internet so that they don’t share there revenue with anyone else) and also the case for controlling the media flows in the network. This is not an openly acceptable thing until people have a seamless access to data that may come to reside in the various sub-internets and this is where I see something like Webaroo aiding people in pulling data (and vast amount of it) from various disconnected sources. This will make people more open to the idea of having disparate non-connected globs of data to replace the current ubiquitous thing we call Internet.

And if you are thinking that creating something like is not possible, well you only need to look around the number of corporate ad supported free Internet access points that have spring up all over the country and in some cases covering as much as a whole community. There is money and motives to make this a possibility and now technology to convince people that it is ok to do so.

Change is coming to the Internet and a lot of new technologies are being built to bring this change. For all the discussion Webaroo may not be the disruptive technology that we have talked about. Every startup has a phase that it needs to though where people either accept or reject it. Webaroo is still too new and untested to say if it is the IT technology, the next best thing to rock the house. Time is the only true indicators of how this startup will play out, far too many great ideas have never seen the light of the day due to bad timing, but one thing of certainty is the coming change in the Internet and then again crystal ball gazing isn’t exactly science.

Salsa..Manu Chao..Patogonia..

2006-05-18T10:25:00.000-05:00

Talk about a South American overload. I have been getting myself into so many things lately that time at my end is just flying by. I have been listening to Manu Chao's music for sometime now and just love the music even though I don't understand most of the lyrics its great music to listen to. A friend of mine once tried to translate some of it to me but I need to pick up Spanish myself, it’s on my to-do list hopefully I will get to that some day. Last week I also signed up for Salsa classes that a group within my company was organizing and we had our first class two nights back and it was great stuff, the introductory class was slow to start off with basic steps but the pace really picked up and had a nice end to the day. I really need to practice this thing, its not so easy as it seems and believe it or not its also a great way to exercise, you are always moving your legs and shoulders. Everyone in the group were sweating and out of step by the end of first hour. Got my next class coming up soon so looking forward to it. I also need to take some time out and finish the book In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin that I started, I am midway though the book and its really fascinating to read of all the stories and people you could encounter in a land that’s pretty much the end of the world. There is a lot of loneliness surrounded with the place that just makes you want to know more about it. I definitely need to visit it someday but for now I can only finish this book and dream of a journey to the place. Its really funny though I was reading this other book by Pico Iyer called Falling off the map and there is a chapter where the writer makes a trip to Argentina and on to Patagonia and his description of the place seem to just blend in with what Chatwin had to say about the place, given that the 2 books were written in different times its great to see a co-relation. I have been reading a lot lately and will have to start blogging my views on the things I read, well that’s next.. If I get though the books that is. Chao

It's all about the risk

2006-05-09T19:30:00.000-05:00

It's not me to go way out of my comfort zone to sign up for things that I have never done before. But over the last couple of months I have been doing a lot of reading and most of what I have read has got me rethinking about how I have approached things in life before. I am not afraid to say that I have been on the wrong side of the tracks a few times in the past when its come to taking risks and hindsight is a good thing when you can learn off it. So I guess it all started off when I made the effort to search out and sign up for the AMC event couple of weeks back and went though with it. When you read about people achieving things big and small, you are usually thinking what makes them tick, what is it that people do different that makes them different. I did have an opportunity to put that question though to Arlene Blum when she came to an independent bookstore down my street to read from her new book Breaking Trail. Arlene Blum is an exceptional climber and someone who's life is very inspirational and when I asked her what was the push that got her started she said that it just sort of happened one small thing after an another. It wasn't the convincing answer I was looking for but now I know why. It is strange, things don't happen because you want them to happen, they happen because you make them happen. I know it sounds like a circle of words but think about it, you go past a river every single day looking at people kayaking and enjoying the water and you want to be a part of that group, but it take a lot more than thinking to actually one day stop at the place, walk into the rental office and sign up for a class, knowing bloody well that you don't know how to swim leave alone kayak, but still you want to be a part of it. That's exactly what I did and that takes me back to the start of the blog. The kayaking class itself that I signed up for went off real well, apart from the small detail that I in my new risk taking mood, signed up as a volunteer in a kayak roll over event. Though I had my life jacket on and knew that I wouldn’t drop to the bottom of the river which was barely 7 feet, the very first time you flip and go totally underwater the mind just races and all logic looses reason and everything that is every taught to you just blanks out. A breath of air is all you are thinking about. The experience was well needed and a lesson well learnt that I hopefully would use very few times. The bug of kayaking has definitely bitten me and the thrill of being on the river on a sunny day is something that I am looking forward to.

cleanup weekend

2006-05-02T19:30:00.000-05:00

It’s been a real busy weekend and I that's been a very good thing for me. Over the last few weeks I have had the feeling of just slacking away in the weekends when I decided I need to do good on some of the newyear resolutions. So a few weeks back when I received my monthly AMC trip listings mail I searched out this activity to cleanup the Charles river walkway. As it turned out the walkway I was assigned to clean along with the other great people that you see in the picture on the side happened to be just down my street. It also helped that the weather was just awesome that staying at home was not an option. Community cleanings are really great as I found out, its got a lot of things going for it, firstly we really did cleanup this place by picking up trash, plastic container, bottles, shopping carts (yep there were surprises for us) and whole of stuff that should have rightfully been in a dumping yard. It was also a great opportunity to meet up with some great people some of whom lived in the area. Its always fun meeting new people you never know when a good conversation will startup and you find mutual interests kicking off new projects. The cleanup itself went off pretty quickly after which we headed off to a free lunch bbq, nothing like free food to make people work fast ;)

If I was thinking that was quite some time out for the weekend then I was pretty wrong, I had my friend over for dinner that day and the next day we decided to catch up with an another friend for some brunch in Boston. It was a lazy day and we didn't push it too much, strolled around for couple of hours while waiting for some table and some good food and two cups of coffee later we headed back to home. I am happy I had my fair share of sun and fun for the weekend, it’s been poring rain for the last 2 days and work hasn't been fun at all. I am now just looking for the next weekend to roll in and to catch up with some people I met last weekend.

Gas at $3

2006-04-25T10:14:00.000-05:00

It’s been a year since I talked about the price of gas and looks like in all this time nothing much has changed. Well not nothing.. I am back blogging so that feels good. But I really felt what all that talk and media coverage is all about when I pulled into a gas station today. Though there is a lot of pessimism around oil and living standards (both seem to be linked in a cyclic loop). I think there is something good that could come out this. For one all the talk of renewable sources of electricity some of the projects are maturing and the products coming main stream. For anyone who has been paying attention to the stock markets and especially the European markets and the solar stocks that play in them (the lucky few who got in early) are definitely seeing the writing on the wall. Europe's appetite for solar power is growing and the production is not able to keep pace with it. A classic case of supply and demand, but this consumption is not driven by some select group of people buying solar power to make a statement, its more a conscious decision by the general population to adopt a new technology amid all the economics of oil that is making solar power an interesting alternative. I say interesting alternative because the price per KW of solar power is still too high to make it an outright buy, but the price is falling with better technology like use of holograms for reflecting light and more compact designs that make it more usable in homes and a good deal of help from governments that are helping drive the adoption of solar power.

The situation regarding solar power is ironic, America has probably the most amount of $$ invested in research and development and currently consumes the maximum amount of non-renewable resources and also faces the looming threat of further supply disruptions from countries like Venezuela, yet there seem to be too many distractions that are keeping people from embracing it. On the other hand the continent across the pond is racing faster to adopt this new technology of power generation and is moving faster in both government regulations and people's attitude’s towards alternatives.

cars, america and the lost cause

2005-04-15T19:18:00.000-05:00

It is really interesting to see the position on which the big guys of Detroit find themselves in today. Falling sales, bad reputation for quality, lack of exciting cars, higher pension costs of aging work force and last but not the least the rising power of the guys from Asia. I wasn't around when these guys were making the cars that were changing the phase of American landscape and lifestyle forever. Given that today there are more cars in American then people and the majority of them are American brands does not properly reflect the success and the image that these guys are being shown in today. Sympathy is not what am tending to, rather the one factor that is putting these guys out of business.. UNION, yes you heard me right, for years now America has fought wars and drawn policy and traded blows in the global space to keep communism at bay and the very idea that a capitalist driven world, free of organized unions is the best model of doing business has been championed for so many years. So you will ask me where do unions fit into the whole picture? Today the only car companies that have any semblance of large scale unions are the likes of GM and Ford and they are dictating the company's future like what it should pay out as medical cost to retiring workers and on the other side of the ocean, the Asians who always seemed to have a labor trouble have learnt there lessons and acted on it. So it is very ironic to see this picture today and ask yourself is the cause was lost before the fight itself, or was there never a cause it was business all the way stupid. As to the outcome its pretty clear, there will be more similar looking cars all around you, but I for one would like to have a wee bit more choice than the Camry’s and civics’ of the world.

pour me an another laugh

2005-04-13T17:14:00.000-05:00

For America politics is not just something you do once every four years its more like a daily pastime and what better way to talk about it than to laugh about it (well of the many virtues of democracy). Public figures have a lot of there but kicked and the guys in D.C have there kicked more than the guys in L.A, but some the best of jokes I have ever heard was about the Clinton's and well they do bring me laughs even today and well so no guessing that I decided to provide some space on my blog to list some of them and I am thankful to Daniel Kurtzman from About for collecting them in the first place, you can follow the link for the complete set. so here it goes..

by Jay Leno ( one of my best late night show hosts ever)

"Did you know Bill and Hillary Clinton were born under the same sign? Know what sign? 'For Sale.'"

"CNN found that Hillary Clinton is the most admired woman in America. Women admire her because she's strong and successful. Men admire her because she allows her husband to cheat and get away with it."

"Senator Hillary Clinton was (at Bush's speech).. And it was the first time that she was at a presidential address as a member of congress. Of course Bill loved it, it was like having a Hillary cam. He knew where she was the whole time. He was keeping an eye on her from the motel. 'Trixy bring me another brew, will ya? She is going to be about another 20 minutes.'"

"According to New York publishers, Bill Clinton will get more money for his book than Hillary Clinton got for hers. Well, duh. At least his book has some sex in it."

Craig Kilborn-
"Hillary Clinton has finished writing her book where she says her marriage couldn't be stronger, and Bill just finished his book titled 'Chicks I Nailed While Hillary was Writing Her Book.'"

"Word has it that Hillary Clinton will finish her memoirs much earlier than Bill. Hillary's book is called 'Get Off Of Her and Start Writing.'"

"Hillary Clinton's 506-page memoirs comes out next week. So much of her personality shines through, that in the end, you'll want to sleep with an intern."

Conan O'Brien-
"The A&E network is making a movie about Senator Hillary Clinton and they want Sharon Stone to play Hillary Clinton. Which explains why President Clinton has volunteered to play himself."

David Letterman--
"Hillary's got this huge book, it's a memoir of her life and times at the White House. In the book she says when Bill told her he was having an affair, she said 'I could hardly breath, I was gulping for air.' No, I'm sorry, that's what Monica said."

Given all this comedy I can't wait till the next series of Last Comic Standing, the last one was just awsome and I am all hopes for the next one. As for the jokes will have more posted soon.

I have feed

2005-04-13T16:32:00.000-05:00

I had been reading a lot about RSS feed over the last couple of months and even noticed more and more people proclaim they had XML feed for their blogs, but had never considered making the move to getting myself a feed reader. Well that would have been still the case had it not been for an article at Randy Beseler's blog at Boeing, something got me really excited to try it out and I am glad I did. For starters I got myself this cool application called feeddemon and I should say its a real nice piece of software to have around, and what a difference it's made, I have over the last few days been reading so much news off the reader that I haven't paid a visit to the actual websites itself. What was amazing too was that one of the first pieces I read off the reader was an interview with Hakon Lie the creator of CSS, who happens to currently be the CTO at Opera and I have to admit I really like the Opera browser, it had become my de facto browser till firefox came along. Funny how things always link to one another..

why we hold on to old memories

2005-04-10T02:07:00.000-05:00

I have over the last few days have had lots of memories and the old memories were stirred up further when an old friend of mine sent me a few of his recent photographs and I happened to see some pictures of a bunch of friends from my first job. This really bought back found memories, remembering of a time when life was more than a day at the office and friends more than a bunch of unanswered emails. Though I know that I will never get to see those carefree days again, something within me doesn't wasn't to let go. A philosophical self of me thinks that memories are the only things that will every be yours and more often then naught the ones that stick in your mind are not yours but of friends and family. As I sit at my window watching the season change from the crisp chill of winter to the sunny days of spring I realize I need to write down more of my memories to muse over at a later day, but well some phone calls first...

power of bloggers

2005-04-06T21:32:00.000-05:00

I have to admit I am more of a blog reader than a writer but that is about to change and a good reason for that is the way the blog is becoming a part of everyday lifestyle. My general observation of the blogging community is that the quality of writing is good and the speed with which information moves seems to be faster than any other medium there is out there. I recently read an article (on a blog of course!) that blog's have become such a necessity as an information tool that companies new and old are using it for a verity of reasons from marketing to taking a standpoint. That brings me to title of this very blog "power of bloggers", is blogging getting so big that its now a question of "it has to be done" rather than "do it if you like it". I say this because blogs are making some of the other medium obsolete and there is information here (albeit even opportunites for networking that you would not find elsewhere) that could make a big difference in out lives. There was a time I remember when you would be left obsolete if you didn't read the many journals and reports that were published month after month, today the way information is flowing, blogs seem to be doing a very good job as a filtering process where in all the right information flows from blogsite to blogsite and gets corrected, modified and reduced in the process and hence making the information very effective.

The trend is definitaly in and I see the writing on the wall big and clear. A new information medium has arrived.

the world of bloggers

2004-12-12T23:46:00.000-05:00

The idea that setting up a blog is a easy thing is a misnomer like non other, being a relative late entrant to the world of blogging, i am forced to utlize more of my gray matter in pursuit of a blog name that i can reflect on and also has the notion of being cool, so here it is "idyllicblog" well the story of how i came about picking it a blog by itself so i will leave it at that

As to how this blog is going to turn out is a big question which i hope time will answer in a positive note given the many "zombie" email accounts that i have left hanging out there in the "ethernet" world.

I still have no idea of the content that the blog will come to hold over the course of time, but for all those fellow blogger, a fraternity that is like non other, I will try to have something here everytime to visit this page and so the blogging starts