With temperature in Chennai and rest of India soaring, Chennai’s Elliot’s Beach(also called Besant Nagar beach) presented a soothing relief. This picture was taken few days back around 6:30 AM when fishermen were heading out to sea.
To reduce consumption of energy and to increase consumption of natural light, Daylight saving time in US in 2007 and beyond would come in three weeks early compared to 2006.
This year it comes in effect on March 11, and ends on Nov 4, which adds up to an additional one month. The travel and hospitality industry is widely affected by this change since it they now have to reprogram their systems, a la Y2K style though no major glitches are expected, since there was a fairly long notice of this impending change.
It also affects your calendars and in your laptops and desktops, which are programmed to work as per the old system.Microsoft has released an update to make the neccessary corrections to the calendar as well as setup a helpline to aid customers requiring support. The updates can be installed in easy steps from here . If you are using corporate computing device such as PDA, PC or laptop, it is quite likely these updates would be deployed in your machines by the network team, with our without your explicit concurrence or knowledge, especially those operating in LAN environments.
But if you are not sure about US local time because the whole thing is very confusing , do check out the time in Google by typing a search such as ‘Time in LA’.
14 Nov was billed as World Usability Day.(In India, it has traditionally been celebrated as Children’s Day). So what exactly is the big noise about Usability.
Ever come across a gadget you had to struggle to make use of? Or, a door lock that you had to struggle to open because the lock system was so complex? Or, a TV remote that refused to help? Or, the car fob with so many buttons that you do not know all the functions. Well, in the words of World Usability Day website it is all about ‘making life easy’. Succintly capturing the dilemna, it says:
“Why doesn’t this work right? What am I supposed to do with this now?”
Usability, undoubtably, is something that affects us in our daily lives. It is about user experience in using a product, rather, the ease of it. Imagine,your cousin gifted you a new mobile but you found navigation so clumsy that you had to put it back in the box and started using the old one.
As products get more complex and manufacturers come under pressure to include more and more features, usability tends to become an issue. An arguable opinion is that usability tends to become an issue more often when incremental feature additions are done, rather than in products that are designed from scratch.
Usability affects us in so many different ways that a bunch of professionals calling themselves Usability Professionals have started a movement.They want to develop a scientific opinion on this subject and even want to come up with a ‘Body of Knowledge’, a comprehensive reference, something that exits for project management as well as for business analyst professionals. They even have a website that has great resources, right from the basic definition to stuff on user centred design, events etc. A logical question to arise would be , what is ergonomics then? Well, in my opinion, ergonomics is about comfort, and usability is about ease of use. Maybe they are first cousins.
I also learnt about an event in Hyderabad held on this subject. Some examples from usability perspective) of bad designs are posted on their site. They even had a Boycott Bad Design Contest in which common folks like us were invited to submit nominations for things that are bad in design. The winners are yet to be announced, but all the nominations(with visuals) can be seen here.
My take on usability is , again, arguably, as follows. The product should be designed like Google. Complex from the inside, simple from the outside and yet appear inviting. You can never have enough of such products. What is your take?
On 9th & 10th September, I was Blogcamp India and went through an amazing experience. Large hall, almost 200 or participants, and a spirited coalition of organisers led by Kiruba Shankar, a leading blogger himself.A hall that was WI-FI litup courtesy SIFY, and presence of celebs ( more on that later) and people from all over India, indeed from US and UK as well. It was billed as Unconference, meaning, very flat format, choose-your-own-role type.
I met Amit Agarwal, India’s most famous blogger ( His business card reads: Go to Google.com , Type Amit Agarwal, Click I am feeling lucky) who flew in from Agra, the city of Taj Mahal.Unassuming and very accessible, Amit was seen to be as eager to meet others as others were to catch up with him.
I met some other bloggers, and discovered we worked for the same company! Among them was Jammy, who writes amazing humour with a straight face.
Then there was Atul Chitnis, the senior daddy of blogging, who has been at it since the nineties.
. By way of sharing URLs, people proved that the time tested custom of exchanging business cards can sometimes appear so passe and unfashionable. “Everything’s there”, said a guy, as he mailed his blog URL to me, meaning, his contact details are on his blog and available at a click!
On Day Two, we had Sunil Gavaskar delighting the crowd with the effortless ease with which he connected to the medium. Sunil does podcasts on cricket for Yahoo, which incidentally was the lead sponsor for the event.
Blogging had its own set of converts. Mrs Geeta Padmanabhan, who wrote a beautiful piece in The Hindu Metro Plus a few days after the Blogcamp, is herself a convert to blogging. She has started her blog titled Grandma’s Tales which kicked off with great elan.
SIFY had WI-FI litup the venue, thank you SIFY, since that enabled Bloggers with laptop to make online postings. Those not having a machine of their own, had the option of using one of the machines SIFY had helpfully arranged.
Overall, a very good experience.
Finally, the Blogging Capital of India, Chennai is having its own bloggers meet. Titled BlogCamp, it will be held in the campus of IIT Madras. Some of the stars of blogosphere, such as Robert Scoble (former employee of Microsoft, currently VP of Podtech and perhaps the best known corporate blogger) are likely to be present apart from our own desi stars.
The event itself is perhaps the first of its kind in India. The details are available at the event website, http://www.blogcamp.in
The word INNOVATION is part of daily management lingo. People mean different things by this word. To see what I mean by this difference, look at the dictionary meaning and thesaurus meaning for INNOVATION. Are they indeed the same? I bet you would find the thesaurus meaning much more stretched in meaning.
We will start a journey at this blog to comment upon the latest known thoughts on Innovation. We shall start soon with a book by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble titled 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution. If you have any thoughts, let the debate begin right here! To me however, plain and simple, a hand wound charger for a mobile phone is ample proof that Innovation is alive! It also suggests that innovation has a context. This device might appear utterly useless to most of us, but do go and check the villages where there are power supply issues ( No I did not mean Delhi, though I agree the resemblances are close!) and the marginal importance of such a contraption comes out. That is what I mean by context.
Let’s talk innovation!!!
At recent annual festival of the company I work for, met a bunch of brilliant sketch artists. They could draw your sketch in just about 20 mins and right there. No wonder, there was a rush and after a forty minute wait, I got the chair too. Leave it here to judge you if this is indeed me, but I was mighty impressed. The reproduction here is through the lens of a phone, and therefore is not the very best.
Well, Mr Fanoos, aka Storm number 5 to hit Chennai his season tis knocking at the doors. Fanoos is a word of Persian origin and means a lamp.Well, from the satellite images, it does not seem to be giving any indications of bringing light to Chennai. Like all other storms this seasons, Fanoos also seems bent on nearshoring itself around a weekend. Good luck Chennai. Next week will see another post on the aftermath, and hopefully, some pictures.Chennai’s weather has become extremely stressful. Hopefully, when Fanoos dissappears, we will see the bright light of good weather!
Those of us who cross the Adyar river every day expect calm waters below. In fact we expect it to be way below the bridge. Well, that may not be the case always. These pictures were taken on Saturday last (4 Dec). There were many onlookers who wanted to see the Adyar in such mighty state. The water was not stagnant and calm, but moving very rapidly. It was just a few meters below this Thiru-Vi-Ka bridge. The Hindu published a picture on the front page of the same river but at Saidapet. That image can be seen at the Hindu site by clicking here.
on Effectively using RTI Levers to Expedite EPFO Processes: My Experiences
on Effectively using RTI Levers to Expedite EPFO Processes: My Experiences
on Effectively using RTI Levers to Expedite EPFO Processes: My Experiences on Effectively using RTI Levers to Expedite EPFO Processes: My Experiences
on Diwali Shopping, Mars and Venus
