tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150996792008-11-03T13:09:10.578-08:00Snapshots of my mind at random points in timeAseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.comBlogger119125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-30905139868300288192007-08-20T07:34:00.000-07:002007-08-20T07:48:56.061-07:00

9:20pm: Posted an ad to sell a used Microsoft Natural Keyboard 9:30pm: Received a call from an interested party. Pickup time arranged. 9:40pm: Transaction complete. 9:41pm: Realized that the seller and the buyer work in the same industry. 9:42pm: The buyer tells the seller that he has visited seller's hometown. Keyboard: $20 Mouse: $12 Meeting someone who knows your hometown rather well:

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-83250544142451153092007-08-15T09:21:00.000-07:002007-08-15T09:31:00.516-07:00

Spelling mistakes in my emails have always been a joke among my friends. So it's heartening to see newspaper editors make spelling mistakes, especially in a mad rush to publish the news frist

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-63075244663423138672007-08-11T12:36:00.000-07:002007-08-11T13:03:52.985-07:00

Call me naive at psychology or call me a marketing newbie for being excited about understanding things, but a lot more interesting things look obvious to me now. From a nice writeup about Pantaloon deliberately making their stores chaotic: "Even the dirty, black-spotted onions serve a function. For the average Indian, dusty and dirty produce means fresh from the farm, he says. Indian shoppers

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-5612374663798287112007-08-07T03:11:00.000-07:002007-08-07T03:45:25.543-07:00

The atmosphere was already tensed up as the taxi reached the airport. I had taken a shared eight-seat airport shuttle to the airport and one of the passengers had an altercation with the rude driver. Not of any initial interest, and purely to add some more description of the situation, the accents and the ethnicity of these two were quite noticeable and different. But given the great diversity in

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-46647997662520446892007-07-10T01:50:00.000-07:002007-07-10T02:21:24.491-07:00

It's been a couple of weeks since I completely moved to Internet TV. And mind you, I watch it like real TV. That is, I watch it from my couch and the TV screen is about 6 feet away from me. For a laid back experience, I use Joost and Amazon Unbox. For a more interactive experience, I use YouTube. In the attached video, I show you how I use my laptop as an internet enabled set top box.

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-6336453962273027322007-06-19T23:53:00.000-07:002007-06-19T23:24:47.121-07:00

What is worse than a website that shows your password in clear text on browser after you use the “forgot password” link? A website that sends you the password in clear text in an email confirming the change. Webex meets this criteria. Alright, what could be worse that this? Earthlink, my ISP, sends you the password in regular mail (good old postman type of mail) on account creation. Now, what

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-11557195066224929882007-06-18T23:50:00.000-07:002007-06-18T23:50:10.011-07:00

It's easy to see value of document management from the eyes of an immigrant. You got to prove everything, residential history, medical history, travel history, work history, educational background and what not. Add to that the regular papers that everyone keeps: automobile records, latest bills or statements, credit records, tax returns etc. When I started filing documents in files a few years

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-17792907779673876832007-05-04T22:05:00.000-07:002007-05-04T22:18:44.693-07:00

This week I got my hands on a Blackberry 8800 that has GPS built in. Here is why I think it's the best bet in the market if you want to make effective use of Mobile maps. Here is a demonstration of how it works with Google Maps. I apologize for the bad video quality. (Video credits: Anu)

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-78996793322993876112007-04-16T10:51:00.000-07:002007-04-16T11:09:39.931-07:00

I have been noticing consistent traffic on two of my posts from many years ago. So this morning I decided to allow comments on them and let the readers contribute. To let this change take affect, I had to re-publish those posts. That’s when I realized that this act of re-publishing updated my site feed and made these two posts show up as new entries on the feed. So, first of all, I apologize

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-32535960410508287022007-04-12T10:44:00.000-07:002007-04-12T11:20:33.812-07:00

I admit that I rarely use blog search. But when it comes to something that the conventional media doesn’t want to cover, I must say that it comes in pretty handy. We might question why conventional media doesn’t want to cover a few things. Two reasons come to my mind immediately. Either the news story is not worth selling to most of people or it is controversial news that people might not want to

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-40122097916482898852007-04-06T12:49:00.000-07:002007-04-06T23:56:45.772-07:00

“You can’t control it, unless you can measure it”. This has worked great for me in the past, especially when it comes to weight. But in this case, I was looking at the feed overload from my subscriptions and I started off by using the statistics that Google Reader gathers, each time we use it.Readership No matter how many posts are published each day on an average feed, I don’t seem to be

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-85049320263389706592007-03-21T09:27:00.000-07:002007-03-21T09:39:49.933-07:00

These days I am thinking of getting a new cell phone that'll let me browse the Internet. I have been out of the loop of mobile Internet and hence am unaware of the parameters I should evaluate while choosing a phone. Smart phones (as call the PDA widescreen phones) are usually expensive and that puts me under more pressure to make the right choice the first time around. I wonder if I were in a

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-56939708648018176432007-03-09T10:59:00.000-08:002007-03-09T11:27:52.739-08:00

Geni is a great site to build your family tree, and it's easy to use. Start by adding nodes in your family tree, optionally adding email addresses of the people you are adding. The people with email addresses are automatically notified and they could possibly expand the tree further. Interesting and very addictive. Implicitly, it's a specialized social network where your "connections" are your "

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-66511525736259907782007-02-21T15:56:00.000-08:002007-02-21T16:22:36.728-08:00

“There are stocks and then there are stocks”. That’s how my investments teacher, Hilary Hsu, usually ends his stock related anecdotes, emphasizing that each stock is unique in its risk characteristic and a naïve investor, like most of us, should be careful. “There are a feeds and then there are feeds” is what comes to my mind every time I start thinking about this whole feed-cleanup business

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-9083039955391058492007-02-13T09:07:00.000-08:002007-02-13T10:06:15.518-08:00

They say man can't have enough of anything. And true it is. With some of my basic problems with feed reader solved, I am yearning for more now. But first, here is how Yahoo! Pipes solves my first problem with feed readers i.e. selectively limiting the number of stories. I used Pipes to detect duplicates too. This helps in eliminating duplicate stories among some feeds that report similar news.

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-75138586124809604002007-02-09T09:59:00.000-08:002007-02-10T10:43:21.604-08:00

As I was writing the previous post two days ago, and thinking about my info glut, Yahoo! Pipes was being released. It's a way to create "drag and drop" mashups of data feeds. And it surely is a great way to capture my requirements from a Feed Reader. Here is my attempt at having a sane information feed custom built to my requirements: Feed. Here is the link to the Pipe in case you want to copy

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-88818818896739393292007-02-07T11:20:00.000-08:002007-02-07T11:57:31.043-08:00

Every morning, as I take a seat on the bus, I hastily skim through my copy of the ‘financial’ newspaper, searching for news that might interest me. At the same time I am aware that I have a total of about 15 minutes to do so, before the bus reaches my destination. In case, I find something that interests me and I can’t finish it up, I do spend time later during the day. But still, the newspaper

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-39204508939533273712007-01-07T21:42:00.000-08:002007-01-07T21:56:29.525-08:00

"Back in 1996, Dee Hock said: Noise becomes data when it has a cognitive pattern. Data becomes information when it's assembled together into a coherent whole with can be related to other information. Information becomes knowledge when it is integrated with other information in a form that useful for making decisions and determining actions. Knowledge becomes understanding when related to other

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-29246028267938333982006-12-14T11:50:00.000-08:002006-12-19T15:01:46.569-08:00

Traveling home this Diwali, I was waiting in a line at to get my boarding pass at Bangkok airport. There were two counters issuing boarding passes to the passengers. The problem was that each of the two had an individual line, line A & line B, and line A was going much slower than line B. Our airlines staffer friend at counter A was asking the other guy for guidance all the time. To top that,

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-1155579210103739352006-08-14T11:12:00.000-07:002006-08-14T12:09:17.563-07:00

The employers we work in provide an infrastructural substrate for our creativity. And I am not even talking about office space, phone, Internet connection, stationary or quiet atmosphere. I am talking about the softer issues. The management is an infrastructure to on which employees’ creativity can be fostered. The systemization of incentive system is like the oiled machinery on which employees

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-1150250726942913852006-06-13T19:04:00.000-07:002006-06-13T19:07:55.473-07:00

Service infrastructure is typically characterized by two of the following things - High upfront investment, but potential for long term gains - Pricing being a function of perceived value to the customer rather than the cost of the transaction With passage of time, as the customers get used to the existence of the service, they attach less and less value to the service. By this time, the

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-1148437311260408512006-05-23T19:21:00.000-07:002006-06-13T19:00:05.356-07:00

Infrastructure is something that we can rely upon, in our daily lives. It forms the basis of various activities that we do everyday. It's also assumed to be always around. This reduces the perceived value attached to its existence, but its absence hurts, right away. Common examples of infrastructure include roads, electricity & phones. Infrastructure need not be a utility, for example

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-1128213281763427462005-10-01T17:34:00.000-07:002005-10-01T22:22:35.396-07:00

Eicher city map was the last time I saw the map of our colony.

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-1128212569675654652005-09-25T22:22:00.000-07:002005-10-01T17:26:12.850-07:00

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15099679.post-1128211988169103052005-09-10T17:13:00.000-07:002005-10-01T17:27:28.220-07:00

Aseem Bajajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02175298906169151125noreply@blogger.com1