Whatever...

There is no end to this debate. I have been a faithful android user from 2010 to 2015. I started with using a sleek HTC handset that I bought on Vijaya Dashmi . Every 2 years I have had to change my android phone as the older one could not support a new update or became unusably slow as more apps were installed. Till I moved to an iPhone towards end of 2015.  3 years gone and I am still in favour of the Apple phone I am using - an iPhone 6 plus 16 GB that iPaid a whopping fifty thousand rupees for. It is stable, secure & consistent performer. It has supported all iOS upgrades that Apple has released so far. It is a great business phone because of it's reliability.  But not all is hunky dory after 3 years. With an ever increasing mobile focus from various applications, high definition content and digital media, the 16 GB internal storage is insufficient. I need to backup videos and photographs twice every month. On a 7 day vacation, I invariably run out of space for...

A couple of years ago I wrote this piece about how to work from home. From the stats and comments I received, it looked like a pretty famous topic close to many people's heart. However, after having worked from home for 2 years (and also having worked from office before that), I believe today that working from home ALL THE TIME is not such a good idea.  I am not denying the benefits of WFH entirely. You get to babysit when needed, spend time with parents if required, run errands etc. But, this cannot be the norm! The days you decide to work from your home should be an exception which should be generously allowed by your employer. Like, an acquaintance who worked from home for 6 months to look after her bed ridden mother. Or, like another friend who could work from home while her husband got transferred from city to city. But what changed my mind? Here it is - Networking: one of the main advantages of going to an office facility is when you come face to face with people wh...

I have been working for 11 years now. The first 2 years I spent in a bank. Doing trade finance operations. I used computer like a took back then. I used it to do my job faster and better. Circa 2006, I moved into I.T. Consulting because it was 'the place to be'.  Since then, my life has changed a lot. From being a people person who liked to go out and meet people, I have become a laptop & smart phone person. Having spent close to a decade in IT, I have started believing that a person can achieve a lot and 'get things done'  through just a laptop and a data connection. Well, guess what, I AM WRONG! This feeling has been fuelled further by all the on line utilities like paying bills, bank transactions, shopping, ticket booking and what not. You can even get entertained (or so you think) in front of the laptop! You almost feel like you can live your entire life in front of the laptop and not regret it at all. I don't mean to blame my job entirely for it, si...

So, the world is a global village! Stuff and people moves across continent in days if not hours. Information travels in milliseconds and technology changes every hour. So when someone wears a fine pair of snickers, they don't really care if it was manufactured in a sweatshop in Bangladesh in totally inhuman working conditions. They just buy them in an air conditioned shop (or better still, on line from the comfort of the couch). Everyone is in for a 'good deal'. The person who has provided us with the product or service is in some far away land majority of the time. This has made us all ungrateful. If the Internet  Now, Imagine a world about 50 years ago. People cared more than they do now. Because everyone who catered to you, lived around you. It was a more human world.People cared about other people. Your tailor mattered to you. Even if you had a fight with him, he was still part of your village and your world. So was the carpenter, the mail man, the farmer ...every...

My father is a doctor and will turn 62 in a few months. He contested the Lok Sabha election in March 2014. And all the volunteers who worked for him told him he now needs a smart phone. So that they could connect with him on WhatsApp. So he asked me for advise on buying a smart phone. I, on the other hand, am trying to run away from a hand held device. The only utility that my existing device has is it let's me remain connected with my official email and chat while on the move. I am thinking I will trade my device for my father's conventional mobile phone. I will do it as an experiment. The experiment will server quite a few purposes. One, it will help my father get used to a touch based, low battery smart phone. Two, it will allow me get used to a life without a smart phone. And three, for the time being, we won't add to the unnecessary stuff in the world by just going ahead and buying a new phone for my father. Let's see how that goes.

Today, I was writing the address on an envelope to be sent to the Income Tax PAN services in Pune. The address runs into 6 lines and has more characters than twitter or SMS allows. I am sure this address must be receiving thousands of letters everyday. Why can't the Indian Post think of a way of shortening such popular addresses - something like tinyurl of the postal address? This will save a lot of time for individuals, reduce errors and lead to customer delight! The post box service is one way of looking at it. But it is limited by resources (space available for post boxes) and also latency on part of the addressee. However, a service that shortens the postal address can be driven by an alpha numeric code and is virtually unlimited.  This can be monetised by charging either the sender or the receiver. The receiver may be issued this code at an annual fee or the sender may be asked to paste a premium postage stamp (marginal premium of Re.1) for a shortened address letter. ...

I have been ogling at tablet PCs for quite some time. Though iPad always seemed out of reach, the launch of Samsung Tab looked like the arrival of a affordable option. But my experience with touch-screen android phones was not very good (details in further post). So I kept weighing my options of owning a tablet - should it be the only computing device I have, should I sell of the laptop and buy a tablet, what would be the best combination? And I never came to a clear conclusion. Something always pushed me away from a tablet. A few weeks ago in a casual conversation with a uncle, the answer emerged. A tablet computer was a consumer device. It gives a brilliant content consumption experience. Watching movies, reading blogs posts, playing games is awesome. But when it comes to creation, its a pain in the ass. My uncle owns a iPad2, supposedly the best tablet device of our time. But even he complained that a task as simple as responding to an email was laborious as compared to a laptop. ...