Process Orientation

The Spiderwick Chronicles

Do you think life is real enough? Do you think What you see is real or are there forces acting behind the scenes that make shit happen on those entirely bothersome days?

Spiderwick Chronicles opens a world of ogres, fairies, goblins and talking hogs. I think its a story based upon a book of a similar name. Cute little story of three kids and their mom stuck in a small house once inhabited by an eccentric scientist in possession of a book of such strong knowledge; that a strong ogre Mulgarath is after that book.

Studious ogre!!

Worth a watch ... suggest you download it through a torrent and not on an IMAX screen!!

Y! Open

Imagine a platform or a web application that can make sense out of your mail, your other affiliated activities and even track where your friends are all in one go!! It can make schedules for a dinner meet up in one part of the town with your selected friends and suggest other viable venues. That is precisely what Yahoo! is set out to do.

God Speed fellas!

Facebook a matrimony site?

Read this here. How many of you lot have hit on/flirted with the opposite sex on some social networking site or the other? Oh ... c'mon be honest, I know a lot of us have done it. In fact, there was is a social networking site dedicated solely for that purpose. So do not tell me that you haven't, I know that you did (smug smile).

Trust us desis to find a unique usage for the likes of orkut, facebook, myspace, et al!! As they say - Majboori ka naam hain Mahatma Gandhi!!

Pipes, Twits and Feeds

No people I am not referring to a new plumbing assignment or for that matter a new categorization of idiots!

Recently, I wrote a small post on Twitter, and how its micro-blogging utility is taking India by rage. The rabbit hole goes deeper as Alice (by analogy, that's me!!) decides to plunge and find out where this world leads to. After Twitter, I came across a new web service + social networking utility that helps you keep in touch with what your friends are doing ... a small friend feed of sorts. FriendFeed helps you keep track of your friends online digital imprints. A social engineer's dream come true :-)

But what really got my goose (or is it gander?) is that Friendfeed managed to coalesce a lot of my activities in one feed (Last.fm, LinkedIn, Picasa, GTalk, Blogger, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, et al). Thats one mouthful to say the least.

The coup de grâce is delivered in the form of Yahoo! Pipes ... its a web platform where you can fetch content in the form of feeds, RSS, et al and manipulate it. I have yet to come to terms with how to go about setting up a pipe, the moment I do that, youll be the first to know!

Iron Man

In classic Marvel comics style, Iron Man takes you through how eccentric (to the point of being irresponsible and brash) weapons prodigy Tony Stark played by Robert Downey Jr. realizes the sad consequences of his creations and decides to wage a war against his own corporation. Out comes Iron Man, a gold and titanium alloy war suit which every gadget-freak would want to own. Hoooooo - wheeeee!!

As always, Robert Downey rocks with his I-am-so-careless-that-I-could-not-care-less attitude, Gwyneth Paltrow plays a nice subdued Pepper Potts ... whilst the main man is the baddie, Jeff Bridges who has played the corporate head honcho to the hilt. I could not believe my eyes that this was the same Jeff Bridges of the Big Lebowski fame. The movie simply rocks with special effects and a nice movie outline to show how the super hero came into being. Although the fight between Iron Man and Iron Monger (the baddie) could still be a little bit more packed with some FX, the movie is still a must see for all action and comic buffs. 8.3 all the way!!!

PS - Stay on at the theater even after the credits ... there is a special treat at the very end.

Blogs: Enterprise 2.0

We are in the middle of SAP Go-Live! and a lot of the users are facing problems getting acclimatized to the new user interface and work flows of the ERP. We tried multiple ways of doing things to ease the adoption process ... training sessions, training manual, hands-on personnel, et al. Nothing worked as efficiently, as involving the user a little more (hands-on personnel works, but for that then I have to spare valuable SAP resources!!).

Following a lengthy discussion, it was proposed that we create a SAP blog, wherein users would login and post their queries regarding SAP, the answers and the discussion that follows there-in would be through the comments section of each post. The idea was weird at first, but soon employees have started posting their queries.

First time I was involved in using a blog as an enterprise tool for collaborative discussions. Chalk up one more for corporate blogs!!