Categories
personal dev

Getting sucked in by a new job

Fast Company has an amazing article titled “Thrown into the Deep end”. This is about an Internet company guy, decides to leave and join his competitor as CEO, when his older company had been acquired by Google and shelved. The article is not about what he was before and after. The article is about how he got sucked into the new job, how he felt like having been thrown into the deep end of an olympic sized swimming pool in the middle of winter ! Good read.

[link]

Categories
personal finance

10 steps to planning for retirement


A new financial  blog I stumbled into today .. No BS Finance. Nice name too. Follow the 10 steps to planning for retirement series. Very nice and practical.

[link]

Categories
technology

Lack of Professionals blogging

NY Times technology division has a nice write up on how and why there is a dearth of blogs about business travellers. After reading it, I would say that the reasons given are exactly the same reasons, why a large number of professionals in other fields also do not blog. We are always paranoid about our anonymity getting lost somewhere in the middle. For instance, one business traveller says that,  sometimes just disclosing which city I am visiting can give my competition ideas. These are just some ideas that float through all our minds. We would not be writing as candidly, if we knew our bosses were reading it. Add to the fact that there were a slew of people who got chucked out of their jobs after their employers found references to them in their blogs.

Oh well, do read the article though. It is a good read. [Link]

Categories
productivity

Down with piles

Oh no, we are not talking about the medical problem piles .. we are talking about the piles of clutter on your workspace. Look around you now. Are you a piler ?

Keith (from to-done.com ), who now writes a regular monday column in lifehacker has a nice article on how/why to reduce clutter and piles around you. Good read. I am going to try this out sometime this week. (yeah yeah, he says do it NOW!).

Read the article here.

(Thanks lifehacker ).

Categories
technology

Body Area Network

Ok. The name defenitely sounds cheezy. But that seems to be one of the 15 new tech concepts for 2006 according to Popular Mechanics Magazine. Lets see what that means:

Body Area Network (BAN)
Like everything else, implantable medical devices are going wireless. A new in-body antenna chip from Zarlink Semiconductor is in preproduction, and should appear in pacemakers and hearing implants this year. By transmitting data to and receiving instructions from nearby base stations, BAN chips can reprogram your heartbeat at your doctor’s office or make a diagnosis from a bedside wireless monitor at home.

Wow. That defenitely sounds dangerous to me. What if the heart beat programmer gets into the wrong hands.

Possible bad scenario:

Hey .. I dont like you, let me lower your heart rate to … heh heh zero.

Possible good scenario:

Romeo to his girlfriend: hey dear, let me make your heart go …. ooomph.  🙂

There are some other interesting tech concepts too. Read the full article at the PM magazine website here.

Categories
misc

Dining room in a box

Yes. The title says it all. An entire dining table set for 6 – Japanese style which fits inside a box.
Check this out here .

(Thanks Cory, from BoingBoing)

Categories
technology

I. Cringely from PBS predictions for 2006

Check out I, Cringely’s predictions on technology for 2006. He does this every year, and he has been doing this for years now. Each year, he also evaluates his predictions from last year. Apparently he usually averages about 80+%, his truth percentage has dropped to 73% for 2005. Check it out anyway. Makes an interesting read.

Read the full article here.

Categories
technology

The war is on …

Ok. I am now officially on an apple roll 🙂

According to this money.cnn.com article, Steve Jobs is now on a war footing – not against Wintel (they just kissed and madeup), not against Microsoft (they still do the MS office for macs). But against a whole lot of companies like Adobe, Yahoo, Google etc. Their new iLife software suite makes things so much cooler and easier, that it is creating jitters around. The iLife suite has a webpage creator which can do blogs by drag-and-drop. The new iTunes can create podcasts. Hmm. Curiouser and Curiouser.

Read the full article here.

Categories
software

Zoho Writer

Very very cool online wordprocessing tool. You can import word and open office files in. But again, like the point I made in my OpenOffice post, the coolest clincher I see in this app is the export-to-pdf feature. I tested this out and it is brilliant. Amazing.

You need to see this for yourself. Click here (zoho.com).

For some weird reason – Zoho reached out to me to remove the link – apparently the back links are hurting their Google rankings (or some such reason). The respect that I had for them has decreased substantially with this. Why would a company get in touch with a blogger who has written well about you.

 

Categories
personal dev

Wow. Its all Apple news today ….

Check out a minute by minute commentary of the latest MacWorld talk by Steve Jobs. I have always been very impressed with this presentations. This one keeps up the standard.

Check it out here at your friendly engadget site.