Musings From New York

A new writing project

Not that I have a LOT of time on my hands ... well, OK I do - but that's not the point of this post!

Playing WoW, I find a lot of similarities between "real life" and "virtual life" in the field of people & resource management. Some of you know that one of my favorite subjects in my MBA was Managing People in Organizations, and I see a lot of similarities between "corporate" challenges and Guild challenges.

Issues like:

• Mission & Vision
• Culture
• Guild roster makeup (how many Hunters should the guild have? What about druids? ... How useful are Paladins?*)
• How do you handle guild drama? Political agendas being forwarded?
• What checks & controls does one put in place?

For example, the way I see it, the Guild is a Corporation, made up of a Players (the workforce) of different classes (Functional Divisions, Finance, Operations, etc.), competing for money, equipment - "phat lewt" - (assets). Sometimes Guild merge, or disband. Sometimes Players leave, or form alts (cross-training).

Anyway, no deadline on when I'll write this up. It'll definitely be a free-wheeling work-in-progress, and more likely that not, I'll be posting it in the WoW section of the blog.

* Not very

What's in a name?

A great deal as it turns out ...

According to TypePad's notes:

Weblog writers often find their audience serendipitously; therefore, your weblog name should be memorable and unique. Avoid names like "weblog", "ramblings", or "writings", for they will not stand out in directories or listings (if you so desire the traffic).

Be succinct and let your personality shine. Nicknames often work well, as well as catch words from books, sayings, or quotes.

Moreover, the Bitsian Blogger Awards (BBlog) has the following category:

The Killer Name Bblog - Quote - "... in a blog World full of Randoms, Thoughts, Actions, Stray etc., something must be given to a blog with a killer name" - UnQuote

So, I put it to you: should I change my blog name? Is it too bland (I mean, heck, the burgandy & khaki colors epitomize bland, but Gowri knows how much agony I went through to choose 2 colors!)

The subject of BBlogs came up when Divya said she would like to nominate me to certain categories. Honored as I am, I don't think I'd have enough readership to go from the 1st stage to the 2nd.

...

Modesty doesn't really suit me, does it? :)

Places I wish I had been ...

Sigh.

And I suspect, Nikhil too (hint: check out Saturday's schedule from 4-8)

New Link

Who'd have thought it - Nikhil has a blog now too. Although he started it a month ago, I only just found out about it.

Anyway, it's called "Welcome Aboard the Black Pearl", which I suspect spawned out of his Top Spin character (Jack Sparrow), and it's been linked to on the nav bar on the left.

Well ... at least he's not making bad jokes these days ... that's an improvement, right?

Right?

Holiday Photos

Can be found here.

What is Google thinking?

So Google announced its new IM/VoIP client today - Google Talk. This puts it in direct competition with some fairly well entrenched players like Skype (VoIP), MSN, Yahoo, Trillian, etc. I've been struggling to understand why Google has entered this marketspace.

I mean, to me, Google is a search-technology company. They started out with the Web, and their extension to the desktop was inevitable. Indeed, the move seemed to hark back to the heady days of Windows 95, when Microsoft tried to web-enable the operating system. (Nobody really seems to care much about Active Directories these days, eh? At least, not on the PC-side ... there're are a few servers kicking around. Anyway, back to Google ...)

Google's evolution has been through extensions of their core search technology, which now seems to encompass content delivery as well. Here's a sample:

• Google Mail (index your mail and better search through them. Also, raise the stakes by offering large storage capacities for free)
• Desktop Search (search for files, or within files. BTW, this rocks. I've been juggling between MSN's search and Google's for a while, and I think Google trumps MSN ... at least, in its current build. Also, Google released Version 2.0 a few days ago, which incorporates some new functionality, essentially built on search technology & content delivery)
• Blogger (online community development, thereby increasing the number of pages they have indexed, etc.)
• Google Maps (Search for addresses with the added functionality of getting driving directions) - which by enhancement spawned ...
• Google Earth (overlay satellite imagery on the maps)
• A now-aborted plan to index library books, technical documents, etc.

The only non-search-related piece of technology Google's had (or at least, raised brand awareness of) was Picasa & Hello (which are inter-related, BTW). Hello is the only piece of software that allows you WIndows users to upload photos to their Blogger pages. Picasa was an independent company until Google bought them out in 2004, and made their software free. For the record, Picasa rocks.

So in the face of all this, why invest in a collaborative tool such as VoIP? It doesn't make sense. It doesn't seem to support either online content creation, delivery, or indexing! The only way I see it making sense is if Google then creates a voice recognition tool that somehow indexes your voice conversations so that you can search through them. It would be a bold move, but voice-recgonition software have long since been notorious for difficulty in usage.

Time will tell, and all that.

Virus Alert

Warning: My Nokia 6600 phone has picked up a virus. It's been sending weird crap out by text message & by Bluetooth. I'm working with T-Mobile to try to resolve this, but until then please ignore any Spam-y messages from me.

A Big Mystery Solved

In the last ... oh, 6 months of playing WoW, I've always thought "pwned" was a typo. Or an acroym of some sort ("PWN-ed"). My fear of being laughed at by dorks always prevented me from seeking clarification. But at long last, here's a good explanation.

Back in the U S of A

Gods, Air India sucks! ...

I finally arrived home about 5 hours late ... 1 hour's delay in Bangalore, 1 hour's delay in Bombay, about 2 hours' delay in London (where the BAA made us deplane because they wanted to "check the plane"), and 1 hours' delay at immigration at NYC (partly because my seat in Bucket Class was right at the back, thereby putting about 200 people between me and the immigration desks).

Spent Sunday watching 3 weeks' worth of the Daily Show ... of such litte things is worldly bliss made of :) ... Oh, and of course playing WoW ... which turned out to be quite a homecoming. I must say, the welcome back reactions from my fellow Archons was most touching ... and on the Azuregos raid (the blue dragon on the left being Azuregos) on Sunday, I won a Typhoon - my first epic piece (hard to believe that after 60 levels, this was the first purple, but there you have it), which replaces my good ol' trusty Doombringer.

Looks like I'll be travelling out to Scranton again this week, perhaps as early as tonight. That kinda sucks, but it's what I signed up to do, so a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do!

I have a few photos from my trip downloaded onto my PC, as well as a few posts I was drafting before the computer blew up. I'll get around to posting them all sometime over the next couple of days.

Weekend Update

Well, it was a long, and at times, very boring weekend. Why boring? Cos we've moved into an apartment without a PC, Internet, or Cable TV connection (sad, I know), and cos it's a seemingly boring neighborhood as well (to the best of my knowledge, the most exciting place is Jayanagar's 4th Block Shopping Complex, which is quite far away).

Freedom Jam never happened. It was postponed due to security concerns (i.e.: someone was afraid of a terrorist's bomb going off). It's been postponed, but not cancelled. Presumably, it'd take place in a couple of weeks. That was a bit of a gyp. Nonetheless, I spent a very enjoyable day at Arvind & Priya's place ... hanging out, chatting, watching a couple of good movies (Airplane and Hazaar Khwaishon Aisi).

I leave back to the States this Friday - will be back in my apartment Saturday afternoon local time. And (ugh) back to work Monday.