The year that was 2008!!

As i write the last post of 2008 on my blog which has lacked regular updates for past two years. I hope to be more regular in coming year but going what this year has been it looks a big task.

What year this has been. Here is summary of what i have been upto for past 12 months.

1. Excelled well in profession and career.
2. Lived out suit-case for month and half.
3. Discovered "leadership" qualities in me in unusual circumstances.
4. Robbed of company stock options.
5. Tried unsuccessfully to get into grad school for fall session.
6. Saw Malaysian F1 GP live.
7. Visited Bangkok for the first time.

So for the this year .. not a memorable one but definitely taught me many big lessons.

Hope next year is much more fun ... and hoping the same for you all.

Wishing you all a very Happy and Prosperous New Year.

How risk savvy are we?

These are turbulent times wherever we look, western economy’s is in mess, having great ramification on the growing economies like ours.

Reading news articles in past few weeks, seems like the worse effected sector is our IT industry.

Talking to my friends back home and it seems the scene is bad than year 2000/01. People are losing jobs and some say more to come especially for the banking and finance ODC's.

So this brings me to a question, how risk savvy our generation is? Some might ask what does risk has to do with this. Govt. sector is always considered the safe place for employment and private sector as a risky bet. IT sector being largely being private comes with risk with no job guarantee. 

We have reaped the benefit of booming IT industry in past few years, however are we now ready to bear the realty of working in private industry where hire and fire is the rule of the game. 

So are we ready to embrace it as reality in today’s India? looking at news pieces i rather dare not. Look what happened in Graziano Transmissioni case. Not the kind of image we would like to project of investor friendly India.

Somewhere i think we should all remind ourselves, "You win some you lose some". One way i think is to get out of that "conservative" shell and take calculated risks. I believe everyone should once in a while, where ever possible, take calculated risk. This will have cascading effect in my view with making oneself more confident, setting up example for our peers (may be) and more so that we would not be as worried as our pervious generation is whenever we discuss our "risky" strategy/moves.

Having said all that, i still believe in taking calculated risks and not wild unthoughtful risks, just to set the record straight.

Another "hit" from google - Chrome

Yesterday, during my customary first 15 min  time kill spree at work, i encountered a piece of news via Google (of course) , something called chrome. 

A new web browser, again??

No its not another web browser its by Google. Within few minutes i was reading the web magazine which was supposed to be a precursor for "normal" launch of this. As always i was impressed by the concepts they have used to make chrome a reality.

So from yesterday to today i read on several sites from what it will do to when it will be available for download to what are its cool features etc. etc.

I am using it for half a day now and i am impressed from the installation to browsing experience. However, contrary to being fast while streaming it sucks on my machine while loading videos from news sites. Firefox is way better and faster somehow. Is it me or someone else has also faced this?

However this post is not a review of chrome, sorry to disappoint some of you who were hoping it to be another review. This post is about my viewpoint about the views, reviews etc which have flown in the web world about chrome and I think can be generalized.

All the reviews I have read so far about this wonderful browser is just a paraphrasing of what the official website said. There is absolutely nothing new in these reviews. This brings me to raise a fundamental question about -- what are reviews for? And what the consumer/user looks for in the reviews?

Do we as consumers (or users) make our decision to buy (or try) new product on the basis of mere paraphrasing? Having said that, i agree that there are many good sites that actually provides data to support their reviews and are unbiased and so on.  But not all people spend hours in finding the right review that would suit their queries.

Well these are my thoughts for now.....

PS to old timers : I know I haven’t been blogging a lot .. and if you are puzzled about this confusing post .. So am I :P .. Thanks for dropping by. More to come soon.

Happenings!!

What happened ? is the question that comes to my mind (am sure in yours too) when i check my blog sometimes.

May be i just took an unintentional "break" from blogging. I guess its just not me, i see many blogs without activity.

Just to keep you posted guys, i do visit your blogs and comment on some who have updated post.

I will write soon about my Malaysia and Thailand trips which i just concluded last week.

so do keep coming back.