Friday, June 29, 2007

An Open Request

Come on people , don't just browse around and leave, drop a comment, tell me if you hate the posts or have some views. Drop me a mail if you don't want to comment. Write something, Write anything.

Friday, June 22, 2007

Cost of speaking too much

Well in the latest episode of The Apprentice(here in India), the guy I was kinda rooting for just got fired. And it wasn't because he screwed up in one of the task but simply coz he let his tongue take control of his brain. He let his tongue run out of control and called himself "White trash" in the board room. STUPID. The result he was fired instantaneously. I feel sorry for the guy since he was a talent powerhouse but then again maybe he was not that smart. He not only used a offensive term in the boardroom, he isolated himself from the product he was trying to sell and trashed himself in front of Donald Trump. His reasoning: "He calls himself that sometimes when he is kidding". Come on man, "You are in the board room of apprentice in front of Donald trump, You don't kid around here" He was probably very safe coz of his past performances and may be he was agitated coz of the fact that he didnt perform well in the task. Guess he would learn to shut up and stop calling himself that.

Now the task was to promote the latest Lexus 2007 model which had all these neat features, none of which seemed highlighted in the event of the loosing team. The other team really worked on the brand image of Lexus and the Luxury associated with it. They had a much bigger crowd there and it seemed a really well managed event.

There was a 2nd routine firing, that of the Project Manager Jenn.. Now, not only she didn't do a good job, she was pathetic in the board room. She was like these guys are great and didn't do anything to defend herself or to stand up for her the decisions she took. Adding to the injury was the fact that her opening presentation was poor coz she overlooked Sun's daily movement.

There are a few ticking bombs left there, and things should really heat up if couple of people who clearly aren't upto the mark are let go from the show.

Another intresting turn of event in the show was clear irritation on Trump's face when he was cut down by his over zealous assistant in firing making his points.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

What a Sunday!

Truly an amazing day for Sports Enthusiasts. Hamilton rode beautifully in his Mclaren to win the US GP. Angel Cabrera, a guy whose name wasn't heard by many won the US Open Golf Tournament, overpowering Tiger woods who was staging a comeback of sorts in the 3rd and 4th after having a dismal first two rounds and Real Madrid are spanish league champs once again.

Lets talk about Madrid for a bit here, this is a team which was in shambles till the first half in season, All that money, the great names in the squad were upto no good. This was a team which was truly a shadow of the powerhouse Real Madrid of the past. But they managed a miraculous comeback with an amazing winning streak towards the end of the season to upset holder's Barcelona. Some have celebrated the success by praising the grit and determination of Fabio Capello and his team, others have whined about the One-on-One record deciding the top position instead of the Goal difference in the league.

One thing that was evident was the top fitness level of the team, it was evident that Madrid played much better in the 2nd half than 1st including the dramatic comeback against Espanyol when they were 0-3 down to win the match 4-3.

The same spirit was evident in the second half of the last game against Mallorca when they made a comeback from 0-1 to win the match 3-1. It was amazing that the best player on the field (Becks at that point) had to be subsituted to make the turnaround in the match.

With Becks and Roberto Carlos leaving this season and Reyes uncertain position. It would be interested to see which players will Madrid get for next season and whether Capello would still be there or not as the coach

Blog Migration

I am migrating my Blog from http://talky.blogdrive.com to here. It'll take some time and you might see posts popping up in old dates from no where :)

To see all my posts check out: http://talky.blogdrive.com

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

The Usability factor

Well, I was browsing the CNN Website Education section looking for an article (regarding ASU) of which I had an broken link (which I picked up from a forum)

Now, After the finding the link to be broken after a bit of grumbling I really had 2 options:
1) To give up on the article
2) To find the article myself

Well, I picked option 2 for no certain reason and tried the so-called "search" feature.

Now the problems I faced while using the search feature:
1) By default the search is a web-search and not a CNN.com search. I just don't get this, Why would anybody does this? I won't go to CNN.com to do an Yahoo search(this is what they use). This should be really simple to know, understand and do.
2) No section specific search: So I can't search in education section only
3) By default results are ordered by Date and not Relevance. This was really irritating. I was getting really weird top results due to this as the hits were sorted by date.

Though, I wasn't able to find the article using the search, I thought why not just browse to the date of the article (somewhere in april). I clicked on "more articles" link on the Ed section page and viola I was on a page that looked like had archived content but that was limited till May only. I wasn't able to find a link to older stories :(

A simple example of how Small things when overlooked can cause mayhem to a web site's usability.

Common Sense of Loosing weight

A friend of mine managed to loose humongous amount of weight after he was diagnosed with medical problems. Now, this guy was fat all his life. He used to be live on junk food and called all kinds of names during his school days. But one day when he was diagnosed with several health problems owing to his weight. He resolved to loose weight.

He managed to loose about 50 Kgs. in 10 months. And he is one of fittest persons I know of. He's also working on a book called "Common Sense of loosing weight".

You can read his story [rediff.com].

Check out Rishi's site at: http://www.commonsenseofloosingweight.com/