I have realized that no matter how many times I pray I only get what I rightfully deserve

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Spot your home...

I found an awesome website today... and located my home thru satellite...

My house can be located at http://www.wikimapia.org/#y=13125185&x=80130327&z=18&l=0&m=a by looking for "Manosawthi Illam"... Thats my home...

C if u can spot your house, school, college, university etc... Dont forget to come back & give your feedback.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Has "IT" started real-time?

This discussion was hot very recently - RESERVATIONS - and I had devoted a blog on this too.

I guess the corporate world had started reacting to this. Check out the following screenshot from Naukri.

This section called "Affirmative action" seems like a new one (sorry, I didn't login to Naukri for a while). It needs me to say my community/caste there. So have any of the Indian companies started take this factor into their recrutiment criteria already? Or these brokers like Naukri taking some precuationary steps?

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Yahoo Hack Days

Most people would be aware of Google's 70/20/10 working principle but not much about Yahoo's Hack Day. Here is an overview of what it is...

Yahoo has a couple of regional "Hack Days", which are day long events when engineers stop everything they are doing and just build stuff they think is cool. The goal? Take something from idea through prototype in 24 hours.

It's the second year Yahoo is organising an event of this kind. This time Yahoo got serious about Hack Days and made it Yahoo-wide. Every Yahoo engineer was invited to participate. Anyone, with an idea was encouraged to gather a team up and spend a day coding.

Ok, Why am I saying all this on my personal blog??? Nope, it really isn't a crap... You'll agree this shortly...

Congratulations to the winners, listed below. And more congratulations to those that built stuff that we’ll see in future public products.

Winners:
Best Overall: Swati Raju, Dan Rose, and Peter Anick
Best User Experience: Deepa Joshi, Paul Yiu, Cecil Balzen
Most Money: Aaron Stein, Joshua Rangsikitpho, Sumit Chachra, Steve Spencer, Cody Simms, Dave Zito, Yu Shan Chuang
The “Why Did You Wait for Hack Day?” award: (a tie)
#1: Shankar Venkataraman, Subodh Shakya
#2: Gordon Luk, Mirek Grymuza, Vince Maniago
People’s Choice: Mega Hack Team (Leonard Lin, Gordon Luk, Edward Ho, Kevin Cheng, Daniel Raffel, Cameron Marlow, Jonathan Trevor

Well, well, well... I'm very proud to see an Indian in almost every category. Well done guys!!! Pls pass this msg to fellow-indians...

Related Article:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/18/yahoo-hack-day-pure-innovation/

Monday, June 19, 2006

Pankhudi - Has its style...

I had experience working with NGO's in the past. But today was a different encounter...

Divya, an Orkuttien whom I befriended recently said about Pankhudi and its vision. I'll give more insights about Pankhudi in the forthcoming weeks as I understand them

For now, I have understood that its short term vision lies around children (under 14) and their education standards. They seem to be building a decentralized kind of organisation as opposed to conventional NGOs. Pankhudi members like to be called themselves as "friends" rather than "social workers"

I had met quite some interesting personalities... especially Divya... I just can't digest the fact that I had met her in person for the first time today. She is such an adaptable personality. BTW, she works at Infosys, Chennai.

Infact the pace at which she befriends people is just stumbling. When we entered the slum, the kids just couldn't hold their happiness seeing this lady. She is the one full of energy and had been the most happening person all thru the day.

Well, there were around 10 more members I met today about whom I will need some time to write anything.

I was accompanied with two of my friends (Karthik & Balaji) for this first meeting. I'm glad that both of them liked the experience too. We three joined the main team at around 3:40 PM when they were discussing about some events for the forthcoming weeks. It is just vague for me now as what they were speaking but Divya promised to update us on this.

After some briefing, we moved to the target slum - Saidapet - "Thideer Nagar" and surrounding ones. Pankhudi members is in touch with people here for the past couple of weeks and so it was slightly an easier deal today to ensure the comfort level of the localites.

Started off with some funny kiddo games (clapping, ring-a-roses etc etc), some of us split to discuss the issue with the adults there. One important progress today is the interest shown by localites to allot some space inorder to make this interaction with kids easier. I guess some of them have started understanding the importance of this initiative. But for them, we are NOT from Pankhudi... we are JUST a group of friends wanting to spend some time with them.

Well, it was REALLY a different experience today. Thanks Divya for the invitation to Pankhudi.

Hey, btw, did I forget to say that I have a video shot today of the kids dancing & singing. Click here to view the video.

Friday, June 16, 2006

Find the celebrity in YOU !!!

Well, the title says it all... Did you ever imagine you resemble a CELEBRITY? Yes, a real-time celebrity...

I incidentally happened to visit this mind-blowing "MyHeritage" website today. All you have to do is provide the system with one of your photos and the system instantly processes and lets you know if you resemble any celebrity. If so, it also displays the celebrity pic with more details from Wikipedia

Hold on.... I can hear you... yes, I checked mine and here is the result:

Yes, it is Tony Danza. Being curious to know more about this celebrity, I clicked on more info and gathered the following information.


Hmmm, although I'm not quite sure if I really resemble Tony, it is quite interesting. If you would like to know about the celebrity whom you resemble, pls dont forget to visit the MyHeritage link. Click Here

Find the Celebrity in You. Upload a photo and discover which celebrity you resemble the most. But don't forget to leave a feedback here as whom you resembled and how satisfying the results are...

Awaiting all your feedback!!!

PS: I came across another really interesting tool about which I might blog this weekend. So don't forget to check that out!!!