Wondering and wondering

I have always been mesmerized with the infinite capability of human mind. Gone are those days when finding an answer required an expert. In school days I remember stumbling around to find answers for even small little things. It was a quest, talk to cousin for cricket stats, talk to my brother for music related questions, talk to my sis for anything related to movies. And then internet dawned upon us with its infinite wisdom, every answer was a click away. Every single second every single person is contributing in this vast accumulation of knowledge via internet.

But I think now I agree with Bing Ad, much to my chagrin, “What has search overload done to us?"

Whenever I am searching the internet I am trying to find out a way where I don't need to weed out the irrelevant results. I try to be precise but that means the information page should have those same words or what if even if the words are there but the content or information is irrelevant. I thought Wolfarm is the right direction to move in but it is frustrating in that too.

I guess we still need to find out a search engine which changed the world like Apple Lisa did.

A interactive search engine, which will try to interpret my search requirement and then gives the result back unlike today's search where words have lost their meaning.

I have faith in human mind and I am waiting for an Intelligent Voice operated search/answering engine.

Sun rises and sun sets.....

How do you calcultae a length of the day? Don't you feel some days are longer and some are smaller? Some of the nights when I lay down in my bed and think about what I did the whole day, it is so difficult to pin point where the whole day went.

For me if I am able to finish some of the things I wanted to do, it brings a sense of fulfilment. And much to my amazement these things can be really mundane or trivial but it just gives the pleasure of a productive day. Sometimes I can spend weeks or months avoiding something and spend countless hours worrying about those things. In reality if I set on doing those it is not so bad and doesn't really take much time.

Every time I finish my task list (well there is something about me, life without the task lists feels like life without purpose, I know I am pathetic :-), back to my stroy of task list. Finishing a Task list is always so delightful. I feel relaxed and feel a huge burden off my chest. But this ephemeral feeling soon is replaced with a quest of new task list. Is it because I can't really enjoy life and live care free or is it beacuse a regimentated life from early childhood forces me to seek out something to worry about.

I still miss those summer vacations where there was no school, no homework, no schuedle just plain long summer days to fill with imagination and unplanned activities. O life my dear life I wait for one more true summer vacation and I promise I will not waste it on anything productive, I will let it wither away slowly very slowly. I will sit on my porch with no computer or book I will just sit and watch the sun rising and sun setting far far away !

Interesting tools on internet

I am not sure how many people feel the need of a collaborative tools in their day to day life. But I really need them and it is so difficult to decide on one.
For those who aren't sure about collaborative tool, it is a simple collection of tools to share, delegate and track the documents, tasks, mails, views etc etc.

I always find these tools very productive and I am not talking about the work space. I mean I need it with friends, social circle, volunteer projects etc. I like to share my calender, my tasks, interesting articles I found, send some tasks to friends, share videos, photos, invite people to check out something, create projects, share work etc.

There are a lot of companies invested in this and it is so unfortunate to see the innovation is missing in most of them (well I tried a lot of online products available in market ). Even Google is falling quite short in this. They recently game up with googlesites (sites.google.com), it is a step in the right direction but it is still not there.

Some of the simple tools you can try
http://www.basecamphq.com/
simple, easy to configure and provides a lot of features but not so elegant
http://hitask.com/
Elegant, simple, good number of functionalities (Best suited for individuals or small groups)
http://www.dotproject.net/
Best free ware but requires a lot of work in installing configuring. It covers almost all the things you need but the UI etc is not at product level.

If you have come across any good tools let me know, I would like to try !

Time for Mergers

Last 3-4 weeks have created a lot of turmoil for Yahoo. The search engine, email and other services provider company is in news for last 1 year. Founder CEO coming back, constant decline in the search users base, stiff competition from google, profit shrinking, massive layoff plan and then a bid for buy out from Microsoft.
Well Isn't it strange to see in this economy how companies rise and fall. Gone are those days when it used to take years of hard work for people to establish their company to attract any funding from market. Look at GM, Ford and then look at Google.

The dot com boom changed the way investors look at new companies and their prospect. The short term wealth, millionaires over night, 10 people company bought over in billions of dollars, all this has created an illuision in people's mind. Every one wants to be the one betting on the company, which will be valued billions of dollars on the very first day of listing.

Let's take a look at Yahoo, company has been successful in almost every service they provided. They got amazing response from the market but soon their success was well over run by other companies. Yahoo couldn't compete with the innovation Google brought in the market. I might sound like a Google advocate but I just love their thinking in innovation.
Yahoo tried its hand in almost every single thing Google was doing. But the problem in my eyes is they could never come up with innovative service or come up with an exceptional value addition to existing service.

The market is brutal, though yahoo gained the 10$ in market share, employees are promised best severance package etc. But it is almost certain Yahoo will be bought over soon, it may or may not be Microsoft. Time has come for yahoo to show they are different from other companies or they will be another case study for MBA schools.

Honesty

What is honesty?
I wonder sometimes how honest we are? The very definition of honesty has changed.
Every one has its own way of defining what is honesty.

For some people sticking to the good old values and being truthful etc etc is honesty and for some people it is "do whatever you want to do as long it doesn't hurt any one?" Or for some people it is ""do whatever you want to do as long it doesn't hurt the ones you know?"

Isn't it too confusing? When did honesty become a shoe size with every one having different numbers?

The moral degradation of our world can be attributed to our quest of convenience. We have been finding ways to make our life convenient, finding every possible way to make it easier and easier. And along the path we lost a lot of things as simple as honesty. We started with the physical convenience and reached to a state where we want everything convenient even our moral standards.

Some times I look at the problems surrounding us and try to analyze them, every time I find these problems are someway related to degradation of moral values. I wish all of us can realize the simple solution to most of the complex problems is simple, plain 'Honesty'.

One more year

Always the new years starts with fanfare, every one has tons of things on their mind, eating healthy, regular work out, better time management, more fun, spend time with family and so on....

Guess what, the first 2 weeks seem to be very long with all of us trying to fit things in our over filled daily schedules. We are excited and we try to do all the things we have resolved to do this year. But as the time fades so the enthusiasm. It is only 1 week and I am already feeling I have been trying to accomplish a lot (may be I have already done a lot for this year). 

All above I said seems so right... unfortunately it is not 100% correct. Look back at your schedules you will find holes. There are long over stays in front of computer, there are idle chit chats, there are daily routine of channel flipping, watching re-runs.

May be this year instead of putting anything more in the schedule we should start taking out the stuff from schedule like NO TV between 6 PM and 11 PM or NO TV on Saturdays.

Or no checking of emails every 1 minute or close all the browsers when working.

I am sure we will find some time for our self and our loved ones, and who knows some of us might write a book or invent something :-)

what the heck may be I will just kick back relax open my laptop hit the refresh button of my email while flipping the channel on my TV....!!

Skype Crash....!!

Latest crash in the skype Service proved our vulnerability and reliance on high tech industry.
There were number of small to medium size companies with their communication system screeching to a dead silence because skype services were down. Other then those companies there were millions of users stranded with out one of the services they are accustomed to.

Quite strangely the reason Skype came up for meltdown was "too many users restarted their computer".... What ?? Doesn't it seem like some one making a story, though from their news release it looks like one of their software bug kind of got activated with this multi users restarts.
This event made me rethink how closely this information technology world is connected.


Fortunately skype is back on and now I can get all those annoying advertisements from unknown users.