Looking back at 2005, Part 2
Continuing from where I had left off, I talked about the feed overload last year. It was the first time I felt tired, just reading the never-ending flow of information.
I’m facing the heat of information overload. My brain going a few degrees over 40 celsius. I’m beginning to believe that I don’t need to read everything that my feed reader has. It’s just getting out of hand.
On managing in-house knowledge, I mentioned:
There are a vast number of industries and businesses that are seriously looking at solutions and ending-up with a half-assed inhouse development either because these systems cost them an arm and a leg, or are too difficult to implement.
Seriously, we all need good and simple managed (intranet) systems, that are fully controllable and customizable by graphical consoles, so that we spend less time building one with the limited knowledge we have, and get back to what we’re good at: “creating and reusing content”.
In September, due to a growing amount of time and pain in doing the backoffice job, I voiced my irritation about being unable to backup my email messages in a clean manner.
If there is one basic feature after Send, Receive and Compose in an email client, it is the Backup. Don’t give me anything else, just give me a backup feature. It would make my life so much easier.
There’s a lot of good in using wikis, but from an administrative point of view, I found out that there are equal number of problems that ‘d make me wary of using them.
Companies always prefer to run on their own servers managed by their own IT departments. So, focus there. Provide a software that can hold its own. And charge for what your software is worth and not by how big the company you’re selling it to. May be I’m an economist’s thud, but I fail to understand the otherwise.
In October, I rekindled my paranoia of identity theft, this time taking it on Google, even in a theory of fiction.
Currently, Google reads all my email, has a full index of my desktop files, knows what photos I have, tracks all my activity when I’m signed-in to Gmail, maintains my search habits, logs my chat and what not. Even if Google says that it is all machine processed (read), it is still read. This is already in. Now, all it takes is one bad apple (human, algorithm, bot, who knows what else) to take things south.
I shared my love for Podcasts and discover an excellent desi-podcast channel, Podbazaar.
Voice defines the tone and mood of conversation, sort of shows people in their real colors and projects a kind of image about the person you’re listening to (if you haven’t met one in person), which is something of a miss when I read blogs.
I love architecture as much as I love technology, if not more, because it defines a dream. And I’m a huge fan of scaled models, right from the days we made kilas of Shivaji for Diwali as kids. I found some pictures of the Dubai airport’s scaled model that were just way too cool.
My first post on Spars, and I must say I’m fascinated by them. So are offshore launches.
In December, I found the results of my attempt to get off the Google highway successful.
Diluting Google juice for me was more important than just putting-up a static page. I was already the number one “Chetan” on Google when I decided to do this. Luckily, it wasn’t so difficult.
That’s all, I guess. 2005 was an interesting year for me.