Home, Sweet Home...

The term "home advantage" is used very often in sports and also with a similar meaning in situations that have nothing to do with sports. In a sport like cricket, playing on home ground means a lot. This is coz the game has a lot to do with the nature of pitch, the pace of the outfield, the weather, the humidity, the moisture etc etc. But this never made sense to me in a game like football. What could a home ground (other than spectator support) be of significance in football?

I got the answer, surprisingly, very close to home. :-). We at office play a game of football every week. There is a regular public ground that we visit and we rarely go to any other ground. Last week, for reasons of overcrowding (and this time the population of India was on display), we had to switch grounds. This new ground we went to, was bigger, but we also had a full complement of players. But before long, we knew the game was going to be very different. We are no great players, but don't suck too much either. Yet, the passes were not as accurate as usual, the ball trappings were not as clean, the flank angels were all awry, and most critically, the auto orientation on where your team players are more importantly the goal was completely missing. It was a fun game because it was well contested and not because of the quality of the game.

This experience of playing away from our "home ground" has definitely improved my appreciation of the home advantage theory being applicable in football too. :-)

Thought Collage...

It has been a long time since I have spent any kind of time on this blog. It has less to do with me not having something to write about, but more because the thoughts I had were too scattered to muster enough content by itself. But I had spent time to write something, this is all the stuff I would have written about. :-)

1. Damn Nakul, porcupine haired baby face from the Shankar movie Boys is the hero of Kadhalil Vizhundhen and Masilamani. What a makeover!
2. Cricket has gotten so boring these days (even the Ashes). Now, am I hearing someone say "I have been saying all along..."
3. Indian Television is getting bolder, just look at Is jungle se mujhe bachao
4. World club football is gonna be all about Real Madrid this year. Ronaldo, Kaka and Benzema alonside legends like Raul, Nistelrooy etc Its gonna be some La Liga 09!
5. Tamil cinema lacks good scripts! Kaunis being remade in tamil, Jab We Met is also being remade in tamil.
6. Swine Flu seems to stick on longer in the desi memory than the mumbai attacks last year. Strange way the desi mind works!!
7. Saw Love Aaj Kal, Sankat City, Palung, Nadodigal, Sarvam, Pasinga, Ghost and Darkness and probably more (I have bad memory :-))
8. Listening to Aadhavan, Whats your Rashee and Eeram. Nothing special, at least, not yet.
9. Fisichella finally gets some points for Force India. Amazing!!

And many more. I should start blogging with some frequency sooner rather than later... ;-)

Loooong Hiatus!

Not a single post in the month of April... I actually achieved it! :-) Though I wasn't gunning for it, I was overwhelmed by work at home, work at office and then some more additional responsibilities at home. :-)

Anywayz... time to get back onto the saddle.

Idea Sirji!

Last weekend, I was watching a football match and also a cricket match and voila, I get another pointless idea and I am bored enough right now to think its important enough. :-)

So, here goes... We have electronic boundary boards showing Ads during football. This means, its not a stagnant single company Ad made of paper and stuck on some cardboard. This is an LED (similar?) board which can show any Ad at runtime. Cricket hasn't gotten that sophisticated yet, but it will get there sooner rather than later. Lets take the case of football first. A live English Premier League game is watched in so many countries. Now, lets take a site like 888. They are a big deal sponsor in EPL and pay quite a bit to get onto these electronic boards. This site is not well known in India and the EPL folks are not going to get as much money(or viewership attention) showing this Ad while telecasting in India when compared to Airtel or similar. Likewise, the India vs SL series is mainly sponsored by IDBI Fortis, a new investment wing of IDBI bank. I am quite sure they have next to no presence in SL and hence this is meant mainly for the indian TV audiences. So, what about the Srilankans ? Wouldn't they be relate more to say, Dilmah Tea ?

In case you haven't got what I am getting at, my idea is that all the boundary boards be made green in colour, so as to make it easily graphicable, for lack of a better word. So, just like in the movies, with the help of Computer Graphics, the green coloured boards can house country specific Ads, hence increasing the sponsorship worth of events and hence more money flowing and more glamourous and all that good stuff.

There is this one glitch of the actual money paying viewers at the ground seeing just green boards. But I am sure there is some technology that can come to help in this case too.

How does it sound ? Can this fund my EMIs while the recession eats aways more jobs (me next?) ? :-)

HNY 2009!

All you folks have a great year ahead! I will try to be more regular with posts here than I was last year [for better or worse ;-)].

But I am too lazy to actually make it a new year resolution..... Yet! :-)

ControversyTube.com

Most of us visit youtube at least one a week for watching some video or the other. The youtube service was launched with the intent of enabling amateur videographers to get their content online and get some viewership and critical feedback, maybe. But what it has turned out into is the dumping yard for anything and everything legal and illegal, just like bittorrent. :-)

Seeing the obvious interest of people to watch free TV or movie via youtube, the big honchos like viacom and warner brothers have a dedicated team (some warm bodies) of online drones/bots whose only job is to pull down content on sites like youtube that are a copyright violation. Youtube, being the good guy here, pulls down the content the minute someone raises an objection. We, of course would like to see the "objectionable" data... always! So, here is something that comes close to doing this for us, YouTomb. This is a pet project inside MIT which keeps track of all the videos that are pulled down from youtube because of copyright violations.

While this is nice start, I think there is scope for another niche web2.0 company to grow here. :-) Yes, I have another product idea and you can blame it all on this conference call I am stuck in, which I don't want to be in!! Anyway, getting back to topic. What folks (definitely me) would be more interested in would be to view these oh-so-bad banned content. Since it is copyright violation content, no legit site would want to host it. But since almost all such content is usually downloaded by someone and uploaded somewhere, there should be a bunch of insignificant sites/blogs that have the same content. The media mafia is unlikely to have the patience, energy and drive to bring down each and every such lowly site/blog. So, what we need is a service which can keep track of the content that is brought down because of copyright violations and then crawl the world wide web and find all the sites that have this content mirrored.

Since I have the time to come up with such ideas (mostly useless) with no intent of ever doing anything else with the idea, I need a sounding board, and I am gonna start being active here. :-) . Of course, feedback from the readers of this blog is always welcome! :-)

Needed...

Since I have gotten home early from office and since there isn't much to do at home, the devil's workshop is in full gear today. :-)

Here is another startup web2.0 idea exclusively for India ;-). Most of urban India spends at least an hour a day in front of the TV. Most people (including myself) are channel surfers. But this is probably because I don't have an easy way to know what is showing on which channel. I need to hunt for the days paper, and search through the fine print for the program schedule. What I suggest we need is an online TV guide for India, much like this or this or this.

What say ? Will it fly ?

Product Idea

I am a reluctant orkut member. I don't necessarily like the idea of orkut, but apparently many near and dear ones of mine do like it and hence I am on it. Another such social networking website which is gathering some momentum in India is facebook. They have smartly tied up with the yuppie youth channel, MTV, whose VJs try to coax you into getting onto facebook. We also have fringe players (in the world scene) like hi5 which are quite popular in India. Similarly it won't be too far in time when other sites like myspace or bebo, which got bought for $850M by AOL try to expand their horizons and get to India in a big way.

With such a plethora of social networking sites, the story is going to be very similar to the Instant messaging world. It started with AOL, then ICQ, then Yahoo, then MSN, then GTalk, then rediffbol etc etc. People will try all and eventually will have settle on one. They will do so not because they don't have friends on the other IMs but because they do not have the patience to manage multiple apps and also the CPU sap that would result out of running all these apps. Similarly, people will want to receive scraps or whatever from all these sites, but their inability to spend the same kind of quality (questionable) time on each of these social networking sites will hurt them socially, so to speak.

I think, in this crammed world of web innovations, here is a niche space for a company to flourish. How about a website that aggregates your data(scraps) and contacts from popular social networking sites and show them on a single page ? Something like a trillian or an orgoo for the social networking world.

Will this fly ? Anybody interested in funding me ? :-)

Its Working!

I don't know if anybody has ever used my method of getting Google calendar notifications to on your mobile as an SMS. This post of my mine was specifically meant for Airtel Karnataka subscribers and I have blissfully used this feature for all of 1.5 years and was very very happy with my improved productivity, thanks to Google calendar doing the remembering and my mobile doing the reminding.

About a month or so back, as a new year present, the email portal for Airtel Karnataka subscribers stopped working and promptly so did my productivity enhancement tool. I resorted to only email reminders and since I am not always in front of the comp, I have missed many an appointment (movie :-)).

Some 4-5 months into me using this tool of mine, Google introduced reminders to be sent to your mobile and this worked in India with some service providers and unfortunately Airtel Karnataka was not one of them. I did give it a shot then, and as documented, it didn't work. At that time I could care less, as I had my tool working and that was good enough. But after the Airtel folks blocked the email portal, the desperate me just gave the Google calendar to mobile one more shot and to my surprise, it worked! I promptly got an SMS from Google with a reminder I had set in the calendar. Airtel Karnataka is still not listed as a supported carrier, but I guess Google just got lazy (who doesn't!) with document updates.

Go ahead people... give it a shot and get productive! :-)

The R.I.C.E way...

I injured my leg last week playing football and it looked quite bad. I initially thought it was a fracture and that was a scary thought. I have been playing different types of sports for many years but never had a fracture or for that matter the serious kind of injury I had last week (touch wood!). I had a few friends at office who had faced similar injuries in the past assure me that it was not a fracture. This did bolden me when I went to visit the doctor.

He pressed a few of the bones and joints near the ankle area (the problem area) and since I didn't shout out, he figured it was not a fracture. A friend at office did the same to say that it wasn't a fracture. The doctor later told me to take an X-Ray and confirmed after looking at it that it was not a fracture. He later said:

"Have a lot of rest, put some ice near the swelling, put some crepe bandage to keep it tight and ensure that you put your feet "up" i.e. fighting gravity." To my surprise, another colleague of mine later pointed me to this, which is exactly the same stuff that the doctor said. Either I have an office full of orthopedics or this is very common knowledge. The doctor looked earnest in opinion till this point and then the financial reasoning came forth and he asked me to come to his hospital and start on physiotherapy. He didn't want to understand that I have to get to office and to start physiotherapy at 10:30AM is not something that will work for me at all. But nope, he wanted me to do it and didn't encourage me to get it done somewhere closer to my office. I have boldly decided not to do the physiotherapy as suggested and trust the wiki page or some other specialized website for directions on what I could do in "MY" time!

I may regret this decision to not go with the physiotherapy, but the inflexibility of the doctor to place the welfare of the patient ahead of his own business needs didn't appeal to me at all. Yes, we all work for money, but a doctor is not expected to talk like a salesman. In the software industry, we have specialists to do each job. Some of us code, some of us test, some of us manage, some of us sell, some of us do the marketing and so on. Shouldn't the practice of medicine also be similar ? Should a person in a higher position of trust, like a doctor, try to talk you into something that is forced more by the needs of business rather than the needs of the patient ? What does such talk by a doctor do to the faith bestowed on him by the patient? In our hour of desperation and pain, we will tend to listen to "whatever" the good doctor has to say. Misusing this trust points to a question of ethics, at least for me it does!

As previously written, the profession of medicine is so much more different from any other and continues to intrigue me.

p.s: I have very few friends who are doctors. :-)

Slingling From Bangalore

I got my hands on my Slingbox PRO today! A minorly customized coax cable and 5 minutes later, I am Slinging! The pic below is taken with me sitting in my bedroom with my lappy and seeing Star Cricket while I work/browse at the same time...



I have to say, I have not setup any other gadget in as less time (minus the cable customization) as the slingbox. This is a really well engineering product and deserve the good publicity they get. I had my worries with coax being outdated in the US and with PAL/NTSC issues, but luckily all worked well.

Damn.... this is bliss!!

The business of medicine

I have been meeting quite a few doctors in the last 2-3 weeks. There couldn't be more contrasts in any profession like in the field of medicine.

1. You are earning direct karma points from God for helping people
2. You can goof up and screw lives of people
3. You are the saviour for most and reminder of pain for some
4. Most keep money before the passion of the profession

Some of the doctors I met are established, raking in the moolah and could care less about the patient. There is another lot, though established, is trying to promote their new hospital and hence are nice to you. There are also the ones who are new to this and want to earn some "good" name which will hold them in good stead in the future. Each one did their job with a different demeanor and yet, at the end of the day, I don't see any real big difference from one to another. Its probably because, deep down, I could sense that there was no genuineness in any of them. Everyone had a hidden agenda and everyone had an angle to work. But I also thank all of them just the same, as at the end of the day they all helped in their own way.

One always feels a very special high when we get to hear good stuff from customers who have used the boxes that run the code we write and of course feel the shame when the customer is furious over some bug. Imagine living the life where you can feel this high each day and also face the complaints live from the customer!

The world of medicine... maybe its worth the money.

Life happens

A longish break from this blog. Not planned, not intended, but it happened.

Anywayz, life is back on track, and so is this blog. :-)

A break...

For a few months now, I have been following a strict regimen. The fact that I have stuck to it for so many months has amazed many I know, but none more than yours truly! :-) I have been getting up early, getting to office early, getting back from office early and finally sleeping early. This makes for great work timings and truly frees up time to do a lot more with your evenings, though, to confess, I haven't been doing too much.

Thanks to Deepawali, I have had a few days off now and the weekend still ahead to vile away. Normally, this is vacation time, but for various reasons, we are bound to Bangalore this time. But the last few days I have been having a vacation of a different kind. Almost like a relapse into my disorganized past. :-), with no worry or having to get up early, I have been sleeping very late (3AM+) the last few days. Watching TV, browsing the net and generally doing nothing, and before I realize it, its time for me to force myself to bed. Sigh! The good ol' days. :-)

As much as I am loving this brief peek into the past, I am waiting for Monday, to get back into my groove. Too much of a bad thing can be bad. :-)

Pacey problems

I am tip-toeing some very icy surface here. I don't want to sound too old but at the same time indicate my struggle to catch up with time. :-)

There is a certain pace at which you live your life. I didn't or rather don't realize this till I travel to some place which alters this pace. For e.g. if I am on a long lazy vacation I feel a kind of frustration creeping in. I feel the need for the hustle-bustle of daily life in the city. When I travel abroad, since the social commitments are down to zero, all I end up doing is work. This leads to a different kind of frustration, one that makes we want to get back to everyday family life.

Why am I writing all this? Actually, I don't know. I just realized that it has been a week since I updated this blog. This by itself is not as strange as that I didn't feel an inclination to update it. Its like travel makes me lose the external perspective, makes me lose context with life, the news, the views... and frankly, this disconnect is so damn frustrating!

Anywayz, since I have now noticed it, and fighting procrastination is one of my new year resolutions, I am gonna do something about it. ;-)

Ready To Eat?

I saw a deal a couple of days back in a supermarket for a "buy one get one free" for microwavable dishes. Since these quick food thingies come in very handy these days, I thought of giving it a shot. On hindsight, I shouldn't have.





People.. do you see any similarity between the dishes shown on the cover on the left and the actual cooked dish on the right?? Damn... this could easily win the worst microwaved dish ever, and I take no credit for that! :-|

First Birthday!

Its been a whole year since I started this blog and I almost missed its first birthday!

Here is how it all started and must say some of the first few posts look funny to me now. :-)

Thank you all and yipeeeee..... :-)

Tryst with cooking

Due to unavoidable travel reasons the better halves of dad and myself are not at home. This leaves Dad and myself to do all the work at home.

Almost all the work at home is kinda manageable except for cooking. My dad is somewhat of a strict one when it comes to food. He needs his rice everyday and hence shortcuts like instant noodles don't fly with him. Hence I had to transform myself from a one dish wonder (I am known to make some mean puliyogare) to chef principal. . As they say, necessity is the mother of all invention and though I don't want to deem what I cooked as an invention(that could only be derogatory), I did manage to cook rasam for us. I think I give myself a 10 on 10 for the effort if not for the taste. . I went slightly overboard with the chili powder and slightly less with salt. I also had to deal with some very adamant dal which just wouldn't boil. But all in all, we have survived two days on this and the third day is not looking too bad either.

Maybe I should try my hand at something more grand next... how about Sambar?? Yes Yes Yes... from my Point Of View Sambar is grand!!

Categorized As:

• Me
• Timepass

India *causing* brain drain?

I was party to an incident yesterday. This is around 7:30PM and I am just stepping out of the office. As I was walking out, I see that right in front of our office two foreigners and a lady are haggling with an auto rickshaw driver. The reason I spent more time than I usually do is because the lady arguing with the driver looked a lot like a colleague of mine. The lady then throws her hand in the air and walks away. At this time, I felt I just had to see if the driver was haggling for more money and give a piece of my mind to him. And as I guessed it was our auto driver trying to fleece some extra bucks from the tourists. I asked them where they had to go and it was a place close to the Bangalore domestic airport. My office is about 15 minutes drive from the airport, this means their place is some 5 kms from where we were. I was surprised that the tourists actually knew that they have to pay 1.5 times the meter charge. First thing is that this 1.5 times comes into effect only after 9PM. So, they were already being fleeced. The auto driver was asking for Rs.200 which is just ridiculous. I felt I just had to help them and I volunteered to drop them to their place. They were initially very hesitant and then later agreed.

On the way to their place, I got talking with them and realized that they were not tourists. They were french and were working in India. What surprised me was that they are going to be in India for 1 year! They worked for this company called idiom, whose website apparently needs authorization! They are into some kind of designing, publication etc. Anywayz, they are french and idiom does not have any office in France. In fact, google around and idiom is actively hiring people from outside India. This is classic outsourcing but this time around India is NOT the source of the out! They in fact said "We have good salary by India standards, but we have to pay french taxes which means we don't save much money. We therefore can't pay Rs.200 to get to our house". When I asked why are they working out of India, the answer came "Work is good". Here are people from developed nations coming in and working in India for Indian salaries because work is good. I am sure this is an aberration, but nonetheless, I sincerely hope this is a trend in the making!

Categorized As:

• Currentaffairs
• Me

Home sweet home

Finally home and feels great to be back! The last month or so has been hectic at work and hate that as being the reason for me not doing things that I wanna do, including blogging. But none the less, the time has come to pass and am back in my comfort zone.

The travel back was a lot more comfortable than expected, maybe because I was looking forward to being back. Also, I had a 20 hour waiting time in Singapore designed specifically for folks who want to spend some time around Singapore. Me of course have done these 1 day Singapore trips thrice already and chose to spend the time at the airport itself. If you remember my onward to US journey experience, there were just 2 of us Indians in the flight from Singapore to Hong Kong. Most coincidentally, the same chap was on the same itinerary as me on the way back too. We looked at each other, both were surprised for a bit and then continued to be strangers. It was a weird coincidence though.

Spent yesterday catching up on the previews of all the new movies and desi music videos and also cricket. Right now I am watching the India vs Australia match and the match is right now at the boring middle stage where nothing seems to be happening. Come to think of if, I have come to read a couple of articles, one I remember to be from boycott, on how boring this championship has been. And seeing the crowds for yesterdays match, it was quite clear that there was some truth in the articles. I tell you... each passing year and I see cricket losing its steam and cricketers their charm. Oh well... I guess India will have to get good in some other sport which has more than 8 teams playing it!

In all the TV viewing yesterday I could that there were many new ads peppering the screen. One of the one that caught the eye was the India exclusive Xbox Ad! Watch it!




Microsoft spending money for an India only Ad? Wow! Indian market in the Microsoft radar is good. But it also means that Microsoft will come pretty hard on all the pirated XPs around.