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!
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!
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.
Cost cutting has been on top of the priority list for all the companies in this tough economic times. Every one watching out for new ways of cutting expences. Here are some trivial approaches that most of the companies follow that confirms a company is in the first level of cost cutting -
- Cutting on office supplies and making it minimum.
- Cutting on corporate lunch / outings
- Minimizing the corporate travel costs
- Creating new (documented) process for support activities (like upgrading a laptop?)
But two aggressive steps that can immediately decrease the operational costs are:
- Outsourcing the new wave that caught as number one option for cost cutting.
- Trimming the work force and bringing down the scope of work
All these are done and seen. In recent days I have seen companies being more innovative in cutting cost. Here are some examples -
- Cognizant gives the concept of WFH a new dimension by introducing 20:20:20 programme.
- Infosys is asking each employee to show a one time cost saving of $10
These are some very simple examples of how hard times can drive innovation.
About an year ago I remember looking into a online tutorial using Screencast. After that I didn’t pay much attention until recently I saw this article on Mashable. Out of these I have tried CamStudio and Wink. Both are quick and easy to use.
Although the primary use of Screencasting is for creating tutorials but I feel this can be used by every one who communicates with some one remotely. This would surely give a new dimension to our communication channel.
I like to listen to music in any spare time I get , while I am alone driving car, on Metra, doing some routing task .. etc. But definitely not everywhere. I was wondering where all I can listen to music and was stumped looking at the H2OAudio . I wonder how many of you are open to this idea!
GTD – Getting Things Done is a popular work and life management system mastered by David Allen. He preaches and practices GTD for his day-to-day activities. It has been regarded as one of the best tools to achieve stress free productivity. It touches few well known management concepts like time management, goal setting, etc. But I felt the core five step program – Collect, Process, Organize, Review and Do makes perfect sense.
I found this interesting website – Thinking Machine for playing chess. Surprising to see its written in applet. They have also used processing – a programming language for graphics which is cool.
Recently I came across an interesting article about Accenture’s innovation on performance coach in Business 2.0 magazine. I haven’t really seen a consulting firm investing in a product of this sort 
New we have to wait and see how intelligent this system can be to really optimize a meeting???