Mouli's thoughts and musics over two decades
Presentation Zen my favorite presentation critique/info site has a great post today on places to get some good quotations from. Ofcourse topping the list is the Tom Peters site.
Go on, steal some quotes .. and make your presentation snazzy.
Gina Trapani, Queen of Lifehacker.com has a great post on laptop tips. Good set of must-do tips if one has a laptop.
Psychologytoday has an excellent (albeit pretty long) article on how to get good sleep. It gives some excellent detailed information on how and why insomnia happens. More interesting is some of the medical data given (which I did not know before) about how we get drowsy and feel sleepy (or other wise).
The following paragraph is amazing – most of us who have night-outs during college can relate to this. Looks like there is a medical reasoning behind this.
Circadian rhythm guides the body through cycles of sleep and alertness. Ironically, it issues its strongest alerting force in a burst lasting from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., perfect for dinner-party repartee (although you may not remember the bon mots — short-term memory is sharpest around 7 in the morning). After 8 p.m., alertness begins to fade, permitting us to doze off. This same system makes us sleepiest in the early morning, from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. Stay up all night studying for an exam and circadian forces will make you drowsy near dawn. Stick it out for two more hours, though, and you’ll start picking up steam again. “You don’t need sleep to actually get alert,” Spielman points out.
Also, about the way our brain functions with respect to day and night (light and dark).
The circadian system is tied, albeit imperfectly, to cycles of light and dark. We have dedicated sensors on the retina that deliver the daytime/nighttime message directly to the pineal gland tucked deep inside the brain. In response to darkness, this tiny nodule of brain tissue produces the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, broadcasting the sandman’s message to brain areas that govern everything from body temperature to protein synthesis to hormone production to alertness.
Wow, just the other day, I read in Keiths column (in todone.com ) that watching tv or working on the computer just before sleeping is a bad idea – because the bright light emanating from either of these can fool the brain into thinking that it is day time.Read the full article here. [link]
(thanks lifehack.org)
Doug from diyplanner.com has an excellent writeup on whether or not to de-tech. De-tech is by the way a nice cool term for moving away from technology. He explains in the post as to how, one should not think that we should move away from technology completely. We should open. De-teching is not a religion.
The best advice I can possibly give those people looking to the “Analog Revolution” for some sort of salvation or release from their shackles: don’t take anything too seriously –it’s not a religion, or even an idealogical movement– and don’t look at de-teching as an all-or-nothing affair. Keep your mind open, and don’t automatically assume that technology must or must not be used to solve your issues and lead a creative and productive life.
An excellent article in Lifehack.org which narrows down the 2 or 3 main causes of procrastination, and gives advise on how to tackle the root causes, so that procrastination does not occur at all in the first place.
Ever gotten an email that you want to trace the sender. Check the following link out which gives you detailed instructions on how to do this (even with free email engines like gmail/yahoo/hotmail) with beautiful screenshots.
Gina Trapani from Lifehacker is at it again. Close on the heals to the Google Pack, Lifehacker has released a lifehacker pack – an amazing set of must-have programs. Check it out.
A wonderful article in Information week, where a reporter spends a week down in India, touring the software giants and seeing how much of opportunities abound and how much more of challenges and hurdles exist.
The closing paragraph:
Microland showed us a 14-page job description for a staff position, filled with details about the technical capabilities required. The attention to detail, technical and management skills, and professionalism demonstrated by these organizations–and their talk of 30% savings–had a calming effect on my IT colleagues listening to their pitches. There are still questions to be answered through reference checks and pilot programs, but I’d say India’s outsourcers have a good chance of winning another customer.
Guy Kawasaki has a fantastic list of things that is a must if you want to do a really good speech. I have not heard him speak, but he is famed to be a very good speaker himself. He says that it took him 20 years to get to the point where he is. The post is titled “how to get a standing ovation” very aptly. All of us would want something like that.
Lifehacker, in its infinite wisdom, has a post giving us ideas on how to find the best free photos on flickr. Searching for a nice graphic for your ppt, or your desktop wallpaper, or maybe just the event that you had missed while you were out of town. Scroll down to the comments and check out the first link – the commenter searches for nature photos – and yes he does find some very good ones.
Ramit is at it again, with his second installment in his personal finance makeover for 2006. I have got to admit that he is good. Check out some of the stuff he says about how important saving at a young age is. Highly recommended read. And if you havnt read this first installment read that too.
first article [link]
second article [link]
Remember Tew, the young college guy who was making money the enterprising way – yeah the milliondollar webpage guy. This was a guy who was selling small pixels of his webpage for $100. ANd his target was a million dollars. And oh yes, he did it – until yesterday, hackers cripped the website and asked for a ransom ! I think the site is back up now. Tew promptly informed the FBI, the smart guy he is. Good luck dude. I think it was a great way to have earned your money – you deserve to keep it.
I am going to change the way I update this blog a it. Instead of updating it during various times during the day, I am going to collect all the links during the day, and then blog it once.
Are you a geek ? Are you proud of it ? zdnet has a nice article on how geekiness as a personality trait is becoming increasingly popular, with more and more gadgets such as Ipods and smart phones coming.
Do you drink coffee ? Do you at times forget about the coffee that you just brought and get immersed in work ? Then you should check out this gadget – an USB coffee warmer !
Ok. Lets assume that you are good at email. You are always to the point. You write in bullets. You change your subject lines at the right moment – to avoid long threads getting lost. But are you frustrated that people around you, are not that good at email. Lifehacker has some really cool and subtle ways to teach your co-workers, friends, emailers, how to use email efficiently.
A white board which you can move around anywhere you want, and even stick it to the wall nearest to you. Hm. Stick it to the wall .. where have I heard this before. Oh yeah, the 3M folks are making this one too.
Just came across this software. Just amazing. Have you ever been in a situation (or situations) where you have just had an hour long discussion in front of a white board (and your company does not have one of those electronic white boards) – and you want the scribbles on the white board for later reference. Ok, if you are the geek that we all are, you would whip out your digital camera and take a snap. These do come out ok. But check out the following link. This is a software which will take in the digital snap, crop the white board, do color correction, keystone correction etc – and give you the output as if you were working on a white sheet of paper.
Check out the before-and-after link.
My favourite presentation tips site – PresentationZen has a post up which gives some inexpensive and some free resources to get quality images for PPTs. These make your presentations look very professional.