dish antenna

Why set top box implementation in hurry?

Probably we are busy, our children want to watch Cartoon channel, Ladies don’t want to miss the never-ending saga.

There are a lot of projects which are moving in snail pace, but this process is with a deadline.

The worst part of these paid channels is that we continue to watch them with all the advertisements. Oh, OK HBO has new paid channels which boast of with no advertisements. Any more?

Earlier a lot of companies where making money, now the Government has a large share I guess in terms of taxes. Phew.

dish antenna

dish antenna

Bloggers, own your domain

kill

  1. It happened that a post on a facebook CBC group that A blog has plagiarized our member blog post.
  2. Apart from that, I learned from and CBCian “Sylvian” that Google can also own your content and if needed they could use them for their own purpose if needed, that is what policy says.
  3. For what you write, blogger or wordpress or any subdomain owners contribution improves ranking for the domain i.e wordpress.com or blogger.com etc

Here is what I learned, once I moved to my domain. What ever I write or the media belongs to me, all rights reserved.

Who should move to their own domain?

If you are casual blogger, occasional post and probably feel you would not make a dent in the universe, then it is a big no.
People who are trying to creating their own branding in any genre, name it fashion, photography, tech blogger etc, should plan to move.

How can you avoid plagiarism?

If you use wordpress CMS, there is a plugin available “Yoast WordPress SEO” under RSS feeds you could customize your URL, so what happens, if bots copy your content, still it points to your own domain and not his. I am sure, your design company could also write a custom plugin to solve this problem.

RSS feed

Click on the image to have a larger view.

So who is the content owner now?

It is you

What about your ranking for your work?

If you can write for a subdomain owner, why not for you and create own branding image.

What Chennai means to me as a Photographer?

This post is a part of an initiative by Chennai Bloggers’ Club; a Facebook community for like-minded bloggers. Around 30 odd bloggers are writing about, What Chennai Means to Them.
This tag was before taken up by Jothi Vel Moorthi
http://jovemac.blogspot.in/
Who says “who never blogs :-) ” fortunately he does blog occasionally like me.

Mera Bharat Mahan. <3

How I got interested in Photography ?

Photography is my passion now my livelihood. I have faint remembrance of yashica electro 35 a range finder, film camera which was a proud and prestigious possession of my uncle who had just returned from gulf. The best part is that very few camera owners knew about the working technology. Most of them flaunt by taking few clicks of their relatives,friends and soon on. Finally when they are broke would sell them off.

I own one such vintage camera after my marriage. My father in law, who was a proud owner, never sold it nor gifted it to me or rather say that i forcibly took it from him for the love of photography.

For my 1st son’s birthday I bought a Olympus sp 500uz power shot type camera which was slightly better than the point and shoot. That marked the end of film rolls at my place. What I loved this camera was the macro shots and manual controls which a dslr has but had to dig in to menus to get the right settings.

When my 2nd sons was born I was still hanging around with my Olympus, a colleague brought a canon 1000D he took few photos of us. The picture quality and the results prompted me to buy the Dslr.

So I bought my canon 500D been shooting since 2007.

I always wanted to set out early in the morning for my photo shoots. Learnt that I had to kick two of my bad habits

  1. Smoking cigarettes
  2. Consuming alcohol

The side effects of late night alcohol consumption is that, if you tend to wake early you have bad head ache, yes I meant the hang over. Were as for the Cigarettes, if you smoked early morning, you know what happens, Nature call you first. lol.

Now I pass the blog tag to

VJ Eshwar, Loves to write a lot but fails to print the publish button :P

Maruti rating has got to do with JD Power

For a month I have been researching on buying a new hatchback, had a Mahindra Renault Logan petrol GLX for 2 and half years and finally gave up on Mahindra’s marketing strategies of reducing the pricing of car. Imagine what happens to early adopters is a big middle finger.

My criteria was responsive, economical, spacious for 2 adults and 2 kids, good mileage and little occupy little space on parking.

Cars I had in mind where, Hyundai i10, Hyundai i20, Fiat Punto, Chevy Spark with gas, Maruti Alto, Maruti wagon R, Maruti Ritz and Maruti A-star.

The real battle was between Chevy Spark with gas and Maruti A-Star Vxi.

No rants out here. Maruti A-Star finally won my family’s heart, and I was happy that I did have to shell out much on the accessories. The deal had sun film control, PU steering grip, PU car seats, Car body cover, Pricol Remote locking and under chassis painting.

PU – imitation leather.

Finally had to give the feed back when people from popular vehicles people call me up, I said my rating was 6/10 for Maruti. The person who call me said it was a problem, check the rating which I have attached as image. I said Maruti has their rating system for which I will not respond. I had my own rating system were 6/10 was actually good.

These are marketing guys gimmicks. I have a feeling J.D Power satisfaction report has got to with Maruti rating system. Where every customer responds with 8/10 naturally J.D power will have to be biased towards Maruti. Check the link below


http://www.indiacar.com/jd_power/default.htm

check the "customer satisfaction index" for 2008. You will understand what I am referring to.

P.S: I believe Chevy Spark will do better in coming days. I received a call from Spark guys and they wanted to analyze on why they lost a customer. I told them about resale value, mileage. It was indeed a call I didn’t expect. I love their "Chevy" car design, interior, responsiveness and handling. Just that, this time it didn’t work out.

tags: Photography, Chennai, Cars, Maruti, Hyundai, Chevy, Fiat, JD Power, Customer Satisfaction

How Commercial Software, can fight against the Free Softwares?

Before you jumping in to making of a software you looked in to the market and realized there is enough market share. Now you made it, wanted to test them. You made it free as a beta Phase, you now started making commercial version of the same and by retaining the free version with limited features for people to try.

Guess what? A new player comes and provides a me too version of the software for free, only revenue channel being advertisement inside the product.

How do you fight the free version?

Now let us look at same problem solved by the big software companies, I am just taking 2 examples.

  1. Microsoft Windows VS Linux
  2. Camtasia snagit VS Firefox addons Screen Grab VS WINK (Free)

Microsoft Windows – People continue to make fun of the “Blue screen of Death” in Windows, but funny bone people continue to run their machines with the same Microsoft Windows OS at least the majority of them.

When the threat came from Linux for Windows, I remember every media said that it was death of Windows and even now people say that web will be the new OS, that is still speculative.

What did Microsoft Windows do?
If I am not wrong, they came with lot of advertisements to educate users about the benefits of using Windows. They came with Windows XP SP1, SP2 & SP3 and fixed as much as they could. They executed it well.

I believe the marketing spend on Microsoft XP could have been almost or significantly nil when XP sales was at its peak. Word of mouth still holds good in business. Techies still continue to say XP is stable compared to Vista and there is no major innovation in Vista, that people have upgrade to Vista.

To say, we are still dependent on Microsoft for most of our office productivity. Aren’t we?

The second story is the most significant one. Their product is easy to create and it requires less effort and they still continue to be leaders in their USP. I am taking about TechSmith the makers of Camtasia Snagit.

They did face the similar issue of free software from the open source community.

The popularity of Firefox add ons created a market slow down for Camtasia Snagit and on top of that was the Freeware software called WINK, it did almost the same functionality of Snagit and it was free and forums was available for support.

How did TechSmith Camtasia Snagit fight?
Camtasia Snagit 7.2.5 the earlier commercial version of the software was given free.

Do you want to know why they made it free?
The story goes like this in the Indian shop vendors or Medical Shops, If you ask for a medicine and if it is currently out of stock, they will send one of their members to collect the same medicine from the medical store just opposite their store or even few streets away to procure the same and give it to their customers. It is that the customer gets a feeling that any medicine he needs can be obtained. And that he will come back to the same medical store if he needed one.

TechSmith didn’t want end users to try free software instead allowed users to try the previous commercial version for free.

I use Camtasia Snagit free edition as I experience the reliable, proven and easy to use screen capturing/recording software. BTW, I have already tried the software and its features, and even know each and every interface. It is just that it is easy to use, Comfortable. The only feeling being left out, that I am unable to use the advanced features, which are available in the current commercial version.

For the extra mileage they have contributed few projects called Jing Project and ScreenCast
That takes care of community etc etc

Final Notes: Winning over Free is difficult, but not impossible. If you believe in Free, you can’t win over Free. Undo the learning and fight against Free. If you wish to.

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Kung Fu Panda – A lesson for teachers

Kung Fu Panda

Kung Fu Panda

I had written a post long back A perfect Teacher, until recently I watched the movie Kung Fu Panda, my whole perception changed about teaching.
Lesson 1: What ever happens is not a mistake

Lesson 2: Believe in the person you want to teach

Lesson 3: Identify, what the candidate is interested on, find a new method and teach

Finally Lesson 4: There is no special ingredient.

The final lesson about the special ingredient is the most important one.

Imagine you are on the 100 meters dash, competing with a world record athlete , what is the difference or the distance between you and professional athlete while winning the race.

It can’t be 100 meters for sure, the difference is nothing but impact of lesson 3, and lesson 2

Lesson 3 is nothing but practice, dedication on what you want to achieve.

Practice makes a man perfect, that involves failures. Those are the stepping stone to success.

Lesson 2 is Believe in yourself first, and never give up, even when the whole world is totally against you. When you start believing in your self first, rest of the world will start believing in you.

No one can inject knowledge, Unless you wish to acquire them.

Lesson 1 may seemed incidental, but not true. Unless you wanted things to happen the way expected.

No one can stop your growth, unless you wanted to.

Egg logic – apply to reduce Fuel price

The below mail was forward, I think it is worth a read for people who want to reduce the price of Petrol. If not many, I would like to still support this movement. Wish there was some website to educate people.

A man eats two eggs each morning for breakfast.  When he goes to the
grocery  store he pays 60 cents a dozen. Since a dozen eggs won’t last
a week he normally buys two dozen at a time. One day while buying eggs he
notices that the price has risen to 72 cents. The  next time he buys
groceries, eggs are 76 cents a dozen.

When asked to explain the price of eggs the store owner says, “The price
has gone up and I have to raise my price accordingly”. This store buys 100
dozen eggs a day.  He checked around for a better price and all the
distributors have raised their prices. The distributors have begun to buy
from the huge egg farms.  The small egg farms have been driven out of
business.  The huge egg farms sell 100,000 dozen eggs a day to distributors.
With no competition, they can set the price as they see fit. The
distributors then have to raise their prices to t he grocery stores. And on
and on and on.

As the man kept buying eggs the price kept going up. He saw the big egg
trucks delivering 100 dozen eggs each day. Nothing changed there.   He
checked out the huge egg farms and found they were selling 100,000
dozen eggs to the distributors daily. Nothing had changed but the price of
eggs.

Then week before Thanksgiving the price of eggs shot up to $1.00 a
dozen. Again  he asked the grocery owner why and was told, “Cakes and
baking for the holiday”.  The huge egg farmers know there will be a lot of
baking going on and more eggs will be used. Hence, the price of eggs goes
up. Expect the same thing at Christmas and other times when family cooking,
baking, etc. happen.

This pattern continues until the price of eggs is 2.00 a dozen. The man
says, ” There must be something we can do about the price of eggs”.

He starts talking to all the people in his town and they decide to stop
buying  eggs. This didn’t work because everyone needed eggs.

Finally, the man suggested only buying what you need.  He ate 2 eggs a
day. On the way home from work he would stop at the grocery and buy two
eggs. Everyone in town started buying 2 or 3 eggs a day.

The grocery store owner began complaining that he had too many eggs in
his cooler.  He told the distributor that he didn’t need any eggs.  Maybe
wouldn’t need any all week.

The distributor had eggs piling up at his warehouse.  He told the huge
egg farms that he didn’t have any room for eggs would not need any for at
least two weeks.

At the egg farm, the chickens just kept on laying eggs.   To relieve
the pressure, the huge egg farm told the distributor that they could buy
the eggs at a lower price.

The distributor said, ” I don’t have the room for  the %$&^*&% eggs
even if they were free”.   T he distributor told the grocery store owner
that he would lower the price of the eggs if the store would start buying
again.

The grocery store owner said, “I don’t have room for more eggs. The
customers  are only buying 2 or 3 eggs at a time.  Now if you were to
drop the price of eggs back down to the original price, the customers would
start buying by the dozen again”.

The distributors sent that proposal to the huge egg farmers but the egg
farmers liked the price they were getting for their eggs but, those
chickens just kept on laying.  Fin ally, the egg farmers lowered the price
of their eggs.

But only a few cents.

The customers still bought 2 or 3 eggs at a time. They said, “when the
price of  eggs gets down to where it was before, we will start buying by
the dozen.”

Slowly the price of eggs started dropping.  The distributors had to
slash their prices to make room for the eggs coming from the egg farmers.

The egg farmers cut their prices because the distributors wouldn’t buy
at a higher price than they were selling eggs for. Anyway, they had full
warehouses and wouldn’t need eggs for quite a while.

And those chickens kept on laying.

Eventually, the egg farmers cut their prices because they were throwing
away eggs they couldn’t sell.

The distributors started buying again because the eggs were priced to
where the  stores could afford to sell them at the lower price.

And the customers starting buying by the dozen again.

Now, transpose this analogy to the gasoline industry.

What if everyone only bought $10.00 worth of gas each time they pulled
to the pump?  The dealer’s tanks would stay semi full all the time.  The
dealers wouldn’t have room for the gas coming from the huge tank farms.
The tank farms wouldn’t  have room for the gas coming from the refining
plants. And the refining plants wouldn’t have room for the oil being off
loaded from the huge tankers  coming from the oil fiends.

Just $10.00 each time you buy gas. Don’t fill it up.  You may have to
stop for gas twice a week but, the price should come down.

Think about it.

As an added note…When I buy $10.00 worth of gas that leaves my tank a
little under quarter full. The way prices are jumping around, you can
buy gas for $2.65 a gallon and then the next morning it can be $2.15.
If you have your tank full of $2.65 gas you don’t have room for the $2.15
gas.

You might not  understand the  economics of only buying two eggs at a time
but,

you can’t buy cheaper gas if your tank is full of the high priced stuff.

Also, don’t buy anything else at the gas station; don’t give them any
more of your hard earned money than what you spend on gas, until the prices
come down…”

just think of this concept for a while.

………………please pass this concept around….reaching out to
the mass ..the world …..the universe

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FaceBook killer – Bravo Google Friend Connect

Seems like Google wants to embrace the non social networking sites to be part of social networking sites.

If you thought Myspace, Ning and Facebook made a killing, Please welcome the new Kid on the Block – Google Friend Connect. Do check the introduction video for more elaborate answers.

I see a lot of traffic to be increased to the personal or corporate websites too. All you need to do is sign up then embed few piece of code in to your website and let your friends and customers do the talking (bring the traffic back to you)

How does the traffic happen?
When ever a visitor visits a site and interact, their interactions are being reflected as updates in to the social networking sites which they belong. The updates are not mandatory, if wished, the interactions are reflected.

Corporate sites could integrate friend connect to have more authentic users

Personal websites could bring all friends buzzing among themselves and create new friends too

Bravo Google
An approach to fight spam is unleashed.

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Are we still Indians?

The question which raises in mind, because of two issues which I came across the “The Times” daily, seems to be better than “The Hindu”. Content is the King.

  1. Hogenakkal dispute – border for Tamilnadu and Karnataka
  2. IPL – Indian Premier League

There is no dispute in this world which cannot be solved by just talking
All it takes is members from both sides to talk about their issues and come to a conclusion for the wellness of the society.

This is not the first time in the NEWS about Hogenakkal, Tamil people residing in Karnataka have under gone the troubles, Vandalism to Tamil people’s property is outrageous, with cops being on their side and the political system adding fuel to the fire.

Whom are we fighting against?
Aren’t we brothers and sisters, fighting is good for good relations. We have seen them with siblings. But destroying your own brother’s/sister’s property is not tolerable. Parents have only one thing in mind, their children well being. So what is the political parties behaving as parents do?

So coming to the IPL – Dravid remarked that after hitting a four in his own country, India, there were no cheers from the crowd. What a shame being brothers and sisters. Well about Sreesanth and Harbajan Singh I would say that happens in Cricket, I have got the beating from my friends and some times have given blows to my close pals, players have the right spirit – sportive ones.

I feel Political systems in India have turned us in to enemies in terms of borders,landmarks, divisions,caste, creed for their own benefit of making money and remaining in power.

What can make politicians run for their lives or at least change them to do some thing good for people of India?
People refraining to VOTE

The current political motives is exposing to the outside world about our own unity. There needs to be significant change in the way we think about being Indian. Were is all the taxpayers money getting into. Just wishing if some money put to educate people to unite.

Mera Bharat Mahan

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Time to think about the Girl child & career oriented Women

Women in command

[Credits: Mastronardi]

I don’t blame the women nor the girl child in the first place. I blame myself being part of this, and I think it is the right time to make some changes to help them out.

When was the last time you burned midnight oil to help your Mom or Wife, when they were having a normal fever?

  1. I love my mom very much, it is that I take her granted that I don’t heed to her advice, some times don’t even suggest to take care of her health.
  2. In my family any thing in terms of health goes wrong with men (my dad, me and my son). Women (My mom, My wife) seemed to worry a lot, and some times they don’t worry about their own health and burn midnight oil to help us out from running temperature.

About the girl child:
Looking at the number NEWS in India, that raising a girl child is often considered burden. Their main worry is Dowry system, which is slowly getting wiped out.

  1. Girl child getting aborted
  2. Girl child getting killed just after birth
  3. Girl child being in worst child labor
  4. Girl child being consider less superior in schools
  5. Girl child molestation in schools
  6. Girl child rape
  7. and what not

What are women for?
Don’t blame me for saying women are sex toys, women have a primary goal in life. To give birth to a child. The trait for women is women and not men, their physical appearance when compared to men make them weaker to abide to what men commands. Just because of a command, does the women have to abide by it, think it over, usually (mother/ sisters – in laws) plead or force them to obey the orders.

So what are men for?
Men have more responsibilities, taking care of their children and women, so lies lot of sub tasks as men are usually consider stronger when compared to women generally termed “weaker sex” it is in terms of physical appearance.

About Career Oriented woman:
As India is becoming the fastest growing nations in the world and there is good increase in the women entrepreneur in every field. Well that is good welcome. The sorry state is that women get married after mid 30′s, by worrying about their career. And some don’t even marry, well looking at the above problems they faced during their growing years, they become more matured in state of mind of not getting in to relation. Some feel when in need they get… Well that is true for women and not men.

What does that mean, if women get married late?
Scientifically proven that women have good fertility below or early 30 years of age.


What will happen when girl child numbers get reduced?
Inference: If we are not going to have girl child in the first place and don’t treat them with respect. They will have more options to command over men. Because as the number of women are less, and men being at large, What will be the state of men?

It is time for men to think and act wisely by striking the right balance of nature. Let women survive or shall face the inevitable truth of balance of nature.

Reference: http://captaincassowary.blogspot.com/2007/01/hard-truth-japan-is-dying.html

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