The weekend is over! However, its one of the rare ones where I’m actually feeling a tad accomplished many thanks to getting a good start to the house spring cleaning. The thought of what remains of the cleaning is daunting though 
. The bright spot rather spots of the weekend were the visit to the zoo (a treat to the eyes) and Indian classical music concert (a long overdue treat to the ears)! The visit to Brookfield zoo brought out many emotions – it was our family’s way of welcoming spring/summer/fall outings for the year. Reconnecting with nature after 5 months of being stuck indoors was awesome.The majestic bird condor, the very active sea lions, the beautiful peacock, tiny squirrel monkeys and of course my son’s non-stop chatter and questions about everything made my day. After 5 hours of walking, I wasn’t sure if my 4 year old would be a willing company for the concert. He of course proved me wrong and did a wonderful job of sitting quietly much to the surprise of our neighbors. To my untrained but enthusiastic ears, the music was a great treat indeed. The main artist Sri.Unnikrishnan was wonderful singing Tamil and Telugu krithis. I didn’t stay long enough to hear if he sang any dasara haadus. I didn’t dare test my son’s patience after close to 2hrs. All in all a great day. Hope my work week goes this well! Until next time, ciao!
This is my first post ever! I couldn’t think of a better topic to post than what has kept me away (atleast that’s what I tell myself) from online world – my kids!
N is going to be four this month end. Among his other “achievements” in these wonderful 4 years, his latest is that he is picking up pace with his reading. I wanted to capture his progress partly because it would make a wonderful road down the memory lane and partly so I can drive Subbie 
. Here are some of the books he has read by himself with a little help. Ofcourse, these are part of Level 1 Easy reading series:
Big Dog … Little Dog – Dr.Seuss
Cat in the Hat – Dr.Seuss
I like Mess by Marcia Leonard
Strike Four by Harriet Ziefert
Tiny goes Camping by Cari Meister
What is a princess - Disney
WOW, didn’t remember I had this photo on Flickr! Cool blog feature on flickr. Its really been a long time since I visited my photo-stream. Now I have to rethink on Picassa v/s Flickr?
As every one know 2009 was the year for social networking. The increased popularity of micro blogging on twitter and social networking on facebook has brought down the number of blogs (IMHO) . I am a victim this new trend. I haven’t been to my blog site for more than 6 months and during this time my site was down which I did not notice until Raghu mentioned it (as he hosts my site) and also I forgot my login id and password So as per our popular twitter tag let us #blameitontwitter!
Now the twitter craze is settling down and I may not buzz as often as tweet, so decided to get back to blogs.
Its another interesting book that I bought few years back and was in my waiting list. One good thing about non-fictions are you will get lots to learn in the course of reading the book.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping point unveils some interesting facts that was unknow for long time..well atlease for me. He surely has a different perspective of analyzing things. This book is based on 3 basic principles of epidemic transmission, Power of context, law of few and stickiness.We can find lots of examples on each of the principle.
Over all its an excellent book and i’m looking forward to read outliers soon.
Yes ..this was the question that started ringing in my ears when I first heard of Mind maps while reading or implementing GTD. Then started exploring few software (obviously free / open source). It was interesting.
First I tried out mindmeister which is a web based tool that can be used for real time collaboration. The visuals are cool and its very easy to use. With in couple of mins I could create my first map. It uses lot of other cool concepts like open id, file sharing for collaboration, Google Gears offline library for offline support, browser add-ons, etc. This adds a new flavor to the social networking tools.
Then I tried a stand alone (again a free ware) application – FreeMind written in java! This can be used for creating maps for own use. It has all the features for creating a multi layered maps and also link multiple maps to create a nice flow. Many times the app was slowing down while loading the saved maps. (but may be an issue with my laptop)
But still it was not convincing enough. Wanted to know what is that can be achieved by these tools that can not be done with powerpoint, visio or excell (to list and track tasks) ???
Here are some things that I realized after spending some time:
- Simplicity: yeah it is very easy to draw what ever you visualize.
- Information rich: We can put in lot of information in to one simple map
- al flow: We can give a al flow to our thoughts
- Layered view: We can collapse or expand at any node level helping us in having a desired level of abstraction of data.
I’m convinced now to use it!
Last week when we were out shopping my wife insisted on getting some houseplants. I just knew it had a good ornamental value but not sure about the other advantages. So came home and googled (as any other curious minds) and found this nice article on houseplants. Wow.. good to know the advantages! and good we picked one of the recommended plants.
I was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s – The Tipping Point and came across a section in which he talks about the a survey that shows the importance of having a strong social network. Here the excerpt from the book -
“In his classic 1974 study Getting a Job, Granovetter looked at several hundred professional and technical workers from the Boston suburb of Newton, interviewing them in some detail on their employment history. He found that 36 percent of those he talked to found their job through a personal connection. Another 18.8 percent used formal means — advertisements, headhunters and roughly 20 percent applied directly. “
Suddenly I could see lights flashing in my mind. I could easily agree with this theory as I have personally seen the importance of having an acquaintance and the power of “word of mouth”.
I could easily see a parallel between this book and the driving force behind the modern day social networking site linkedin.
I bought this book almost 2 years ago but now I got a chance to read it. (yes this is the previous version of the book) I am thinking why I did not read this book earlier. The author has a clear message in this book. The three parts Chasing It, Figuring It and Finding It is well balanced with information and keeps the reader thinking all the time.
Here are few selling points that I could recollect -
- Case In Point – The crash dummies considered in the case study is interesting and after few pages we will be completely involved with the characters and their financial health.
- Although the major part of this book revolves around the Eisenberg Uncertainty Principles there are some other highlights like The ten commandments and Mr Four Percent which are interesting.
- As most of us are aware of the formula mortgage/Rental spending can go up to 1/3 of the take home salary. Here we can find some detailed discussion on this topic.
- The best part of the book is George Kinder’s Three Big Ones. As given in the book we can realize our “Number”.
- The bottom lines and The number quick and dirty is a good way of concluding the book.
Almost every page has a reference to a book and most of which I haven’t heard. This shows the authors book knowledge. I may try to browse through some of the referred books. But before that I may have to read the next version of “The Number“.
I can give a 4.5/5 stars for this book.
After deleting my spam email folders on Yahoo and Gmail now I have started cleaning the spam comments on my blog. I think every one would be doing this and it would have become an involuntary act by now. Today while deleting my spams suddenly All the spam messages are obvious scam messages but still we keep getting them… Why??? I was curious to know why do people spend so much time, money and energy on creating these spam messages? I wanted to know the economics behind SPAM messages.
Here is some info about why people continue to spam our email boxes. Although we have organizations like spamhaus trying to fight against this we still do not have a permanent solution.