Bliss of Solitude

For oft, when on my couch I lie,
In vacant or in pensive mood,
    They flash upon that inward eye
   Which is the bliss of solitude

extracted from Daffodils by William Wordsworth

"Blog this" - flickr button

For all the photography enthusiast out there, there is a compelling feature in flickr that will be quite useful for frequent up-loaders. Whenever I upload a photo on flickr, I usually share it with my friends by copying the URL and tweeting it from my twitter client. Perhaps this is the most conventional way and few people I know, also do the same thing. But, there is this button called "Blog this" which can make this a facile job. A first look at this button may be slightly misleading as it says blog this. But this can actually be configured to be used with many things not leaving twitter. Follow the following steps and your done.

Steps:

1. Click on
2. First time users have to configure with twitter or other blogging sites like blogger or wordpress. To configure with twitter, just click on "do that now". Select twitter from the drop down selection box. Authorize flickr to use twitter by clicking "Go to twitter to authorize". Enter your credentials with twitter and click "Allow". You'll be redirected back to flickr. Your done with the configuration.
3. Once this is done, now you can click on "blog this" button, select twitter and tweet your photo right from flickr.

Upload a picture and a couple of clicks and there you go your art have already become the talk of the town.

Web Numbr

Recently, I came across this site/service called Web Numbr which was quite interesting and cool enough to share it. Web Numbr is a service which can be used to track any numbers in the web and plot graph over the same. For example, you can track the stock quote of particular company say YHOO, plot a graph on the same data and all in 3 simple steps. First login with any Open ID. Second, Enter the URL of the page which contains the data you want. And as the last step, select the element on the page which has the number you want. You are done by now. You can also set the polling frequency. I started experimenting with it and created a graph for the number of followers for Sachin Tendulkar in Twitter.

Number of followers for Sachin Tendulkar

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Graph showing the follower count of Sachin Tendulkar on twitter

Dad

It was not so long that I promised myself not to use facebook frequently. Breaking that I do occasionally log on to facebook to look into the photos updated by my friends or FOF.

Last weekend out of my boredom logged on to facebook and clicked the photos tab. I could see lot of photos with people wearing yellow robes. They were all my juniors who had updated their graduation day pictures. I felt poignant about my graduation day. Dad was there beside me during my graduation, but now he is no more. He had always been my best friend. I still remember the day of admission where we had to perambulate the entire campus. He became tired, unable to walk but still continued to slog for my own sake. He has done countless little things for me. Today, I am comfortably placed in life. I can live independently. Though he is not with me anymore, his memories will stay in my heart forever. Love you dad...

Advertising today - My views

For all of you who have pondered about the evolution of advertising, would have definitely startled about its advancements. Advertising is a vital part of any business and this had been true for ages. Its started just as simple as name boards, bill boards and pamphlets. Today it has scaled beyond imagination as radio jingles, eye-catchy commercials TV ads, display and text ads on the Internet. Perhaps for all these advertisements, the advertiser has to pay. Not all but few keen observer would have surely noticed that in recent time two different kinds of advertising strategies have become more common. The first one is "controversy" and the second one is what is called "viral advertising". Controversies are common marketing strategies for cinema. Films without controversies are unlikely these days. "My name is Khan" and "kites" are some good examples for this type of advertising. Viral advertising is very common in social networking sites like twitter or facebook. Advertiser ask people to like or retweet(RT) some status or tweets which end up your friends, friends of friends (FOF) and the whole network doing it. We unconsciously become prey to such advertising strategies.

I want to write something....

My blog usually frames things I like and things happening around me. Though I have not written anything for a considerable period of time, it doesn't mean nothing great has happened in my life but only means that a lot of things are happening that I don't get time to update. The previous statement only shows that the writer is lazy. I always consider the phrase "no time" to be a diplomatic way of saying "I'm just lazy".
Lot of things happening in my life. I always have a passion for traveling. And it happened that I went on a pilgrimage to the holy land visiting Jordan, Israel, Palestine and Egypt. It was a great trip and I had a wonderful chance seeing and learning, an entirely different mosaic of cultures and heritage. Place of Birth of Jesus, the sepulcher of Jesus, the port of Haifa, Pyramids and the River Nile are some of the places I visited and it will be in my memories forever.

Life is a roller coster. Things are being tough after returning to Mother India due to multiple personal reasons. Still, I know life has to go on. Presently, I am engaging myself in things just to keep me busy and shed my laziness. Lot more things happening, will update in coming posts. Keep me subscribed :)

Why work life is important?

These days, I have started interacting a lot with my team mates. This has helped me learn about things around me in a different perspective.. Last week we had gone for a team movie.. The most interesting part was the hot discussions that we had, rather than the movie itself. Our discussions mainly revolved around companies, our work, managers and many more.

One of my team mate, A genius I say, shared his thoughts about,"why he considers his work life in Y! important.."
He had worked for many big names.. such as Intel R&D,Microsoft and Oracle!! He was not quite satisfied with the work in all these places and finally landed up in my team!! I am sure, he would have got a really heavy pay cheque and good benefits in all these companies.. Curious to know what might have disappointed him
I started a conversation with him.. His reply was really intersting.. " Life is not all about pay cheque.. Draw a simple gantt chart for ur life.. Color all the time you sleep in a day, say 8 hours a day thats about 1/3rd of a day. Another 3 to 5 hours for travel and food. With 12 hrs or so remaining 8hrs to 10hrs we spend in office which is major part of the time, we usefully spend in a day. I want this time to be challenging, real value adding and interesting. I really enjoy when I write code that incorporate rich algorithms and those which are revenue impacting."

During this tough period of Y!, I was worrying about my job security.. I was questioning myself about why I should I have to put my heart and soul into a project,which will be scrapped soon.. I thought all my work was in vain!!.. But now I realize, I am taking home lot of experiences.. Technical expertise, how to handle a crisis and lot of other stuff.. His thoughts were really inspiring.. It gave a lot of meaning to the work I do. His thoughts motivates me to work harder and bring meaning to the time I spend in office. Happy to work with him!! Cheers to u man!! U changed my life in a short drive!!