I hate Microsoft for Windows. So buggy and sometimes so arrogant. But I do respect them a lot for MS Office. This is one product that kicks ass and Excel VBA programming saves us so much time and effort that I have come to love it.
But then this happens and I start doubting it.
How am I supposed to react to this shit?? Duuh??
India bowed out of the Champions Trophy, humiliated by the Ponting & Co. Sachin did not kick Aussie ass, and without him firing I do not think India can beat the men from down under. I think that (the overhyped) Team India is yet to bury the ghosts of World Cup 2003 finals.
Over the weekend, I bought one book and got another. First is PHP Cookbook, for learning PHP. Second is Beyond a Boundary, one of the finest pieces of sports literature, written by CLR James. Review will be posted once I am done reading.
Mike Arrington thinks that Yahoo! Bookmarks has reinvented itself with its latest launch.
I however, beg to differ. I mean Yahoo! clearly has issues to sort out for itself. del.icio.us is clearly a better and easier to use service that Yahoo! Bookmarks and it would make things easier for itself by just integrating both. Clearly people do not like Yahoo! Bookmarks (despite its 10 million strong user base) as much as del.icio.us. I personally signed on to Yahoo! Bookmarks and used to create some 80 odd bookmarks but gave up due to the cumbersome process of bookmarking (that is taken care by the new toolbar) but have added 400 pages to del.icio.us in under 5 months, not a great number but shows how much easier it is to use del.icio.us.
What I like about the new service is the folders option and the snapshot view of the page cached. I wish Yahoo extends the folder feature to del.icio.us and maybe the snapshot view also while retaining the ease of use of del.icio.us. Tomi Poutanen (of Yahoo! Social Bookmarking) says that the major difference between del.icio.us and Yahoo! Bookmarks is that one is for social bookmarking and the latter for personal use. Excuse me!! Why not allow such an option in any one of the service itself. I mean del.icio.us already has an option to not share any bookmarked page. Keep it simple guys.
However, I must say that Yahoo! team is doing a great PR job by answering queries on a blog (not run by them) . Hats off to you guys!! You rock!!
It also highlights how companies take blogs as a serious platform for PR management. I hope a few people (who I know won’t understand) understand the value of blogs.
Unfortunately, a few people (who matter), think so!! I wish they realised the value of blogging.
I mean people like Jonathan Schwartz (President, SUN), Jeremy Zawodny (mySQL Guru, Yahoo), Robert Scoble (ex-Microsoft, PodTech.net), Matt Cutts (SEO geek, Google), Om Malik (GigaOM), and Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) are most famous because of their blogs. Ok, not Schwartz. But you get the point!! Google, Yahoo and Microsoft use blogs as a PR tool and even use it to communicate with developers and uers of its services. A lot of Indian (I know about Infosys for sure) companies use employee blogs to enhance communication between its employees.
I hope some people update their views on blogging. And soon. Meanwhile, I leave you with another Gaping Void cartoon.
Update: An estimated 8% of Fortune 500 companies have official blogs!! You can check out the list here.
I have believed that over the years the quality of the Oasis website – a starting point for other colleges – has gone from bad to worse.
Though no expert at website design, I do have a few points to make about this year’s website. One important aspect of a good website is that it should be easy on the eyes of the viewer. Sadly, the website this year, falls very short on this standard. The colours used are garish and unpleasant. Black with pink. Yucks!! Seems like a webpage of those days when people experimented with geocities. Flashy and very odd. Light backgrounds and gentle colours are expected nowadays.
Second. I do not yet get the BITSian fascination for flash and shockwave objects. Any page designed at BITS has to have a dash of embedded flash objects. Could someone please tell me why??
Third and probably most importantly. Please do not copy and paste text from somewhere. “If you are going to BITS on an assignment, BITS will send you a complimentary car” (from the section on getting here.) I am sorry but I could not believe that this was written by an on-campus BITSian for Oasis website. As Google later revealed, the entire section has been lifted from the BITSAA website, without any attribution whatsoever. When did things become so bad? Could they not find a decent writer within the batches on campus? Come on you guys, before claiming the material as your own with that misused copyright symbol, did you check that BITSAA already has a copyright on it?
A simple website, probably based on some blogging platform like WordPress, would have been recommended by me. Very professional and neat. But then, I am not at BITS and can only do so much.
I have a wish to make here though. I wish that someone from EPC/HPC/Junta takes it on himself/herself or collaborates to get a blog going and provide real time posts from the scene as an when it happens.