$ thought | blog

If you are reading this post in RSS feed reader, then I think you should visit this post on the blog. I have now hosted blog at new place. I owe a big Thank to WordPress for providing me great services for over two years. I believe that wordpress is the most powerful yet simple blogging service of all. I wanted to move to new hosting provider on the first day of 2008 but somehow couldn't make it. I have now migrated all the blog with posts and comments.

I have more things to add to this place now. I will keep you posted about that in coming days. I am even going to put another blog (personal) for my personal, friends and family updates. You can find that here.

More is coming on the way.

ThoughtWorks is holding a Gaming tournament in Pune office. The event is open for all interested gamers. The event details and registration details are available here. The event is having limited spots and its invitation based. So hurry up and get signed up for the same.

The idea of the tournament is to select winner across three categories of games. The three categories are arcade (Need for Speed), strategy (Age of Empires) and action (Counter Strike). Based on the nature of games, the teams or individuals will compete against each other to get the winning spot. If you feel you're ready for burning some rubber, conquering territories or saving hostages please do drop by the official site and register yourself.

For any questions or queries, you can contact me at "sachin" at thoughtworks dot com

At ThoughtWorks Pune office, we were observing a regular pattern in Stand-up. Everybody will start to speak with “Yesterday, I did this… I did that…” and whole team used to feel it more of a status update and not giving idea and sharing the context. To address this issue, one of our team-mate came with a suggestion to avoid using word “Yesterday” in the stand-up. Now you don’t have word yesterday with you, you will be automatically forced to give a update which involves not only yesterday’s work but more than that. This worked great until following conversation happened…
(Names of the team-members are changed)
Friday, 14 Sept, 9:30 IST
…
Ganpat: “Yesterday, I worked on …”
Keshubabu: “Ganpat, don’t use word 'yesterday' or at least avoid using that…”
Ganpat: “Ok. Day-before-today I worked on…”
Whole team: !!!!!!!!!!!

That was a funny incident but, we really experienced value coming out of avoiding using word ‘Yesterday’. This helped us to achieve sharing of context of the story and not just yesterday’s work.

IRCTC is an online railway reservation portal. I always admired the functionality provided by this portal. It simplified life of millions of people by providing very prompt and efficient services in ticket booking and information. From technical perspective, this is really amazing; how they are knitting all the reservation information and maintaining speed of operation as well. I was always fan of this site, until the black day arrived two days back.

I occasionally travel by train. Most of the times, I take benefit of online ticket booking services from IRCTC. I was surprised by the fresh look of the site. I wasn’t knowing that enlightenment was about to end after I logged in the portal. I couldn’t see the reservation form at all! I thought, something is wrong in the server or network and somehow page is not loaded completely. I investigated a little bit and came to know that, the portal is not designed to work with non-IE browsers. I had to reboot machine to Windows and book the ticket but that was very disappointing exercise in all.

This happened because they designed site for only IE browsers. This is the problem I always wanted to hightlight through my previous posts like this and this.

I have already dropped a letter to concerned officials requesting Non-IE compatible website and waiting for response. Government and Public services portals should be designed very carefully considering there might be consumers of those services from every corner of the country. Everybody might be using different software to access those services and it is not impossible to cater all of them. Just follow Standards (...and stick to them)!

From past few days we are looking that news channels are crazy over marriage of Abhishek Bachhan and Aishwarya Rai. I don't remember that even world cup was covered with this details. Right from animated graphics of marriage invitation card to list of people who were invited were furnished in great detail. I don't see any value of such news and coverage being added to lay man's life. This neither give any moral boost nor gives any direction.

Day by day media is turning to be very irresponsible and spicy. Small and unimportant news are covered for longer duration sometimes even whole day! A normal person doesn’t even care about such news.

Today, Janhavi Kapoor (also known as Haya Razvi), a struggling model and actress claimed that she was married once to Abhishek Bachhan in private. Abhishek promised to marry her and now he denies that and getting married to Aishwarya Rai. This crazy lady went ahead and in front of media she cut down her wrist and collapses on ground. This is all needed for media to go crazy and they covered this looser actress for next whole day! Every hour the lady kept changing her statements like it was child play, news channels kept broadcasting this to the world. This was height of stupidity and irresponsibility!

This is not the first incident when some small event is getting enormous media hype. Intimate scene of Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor, Madhur Bhandarkar and Preeti Jain case and the king of all events "Prince"! Sometimes, really disturbing and violent images are transmitted for whole day without thinking much about its impact on normal person. When I talk about impact of news, first thing comes to mind is Mumbai blast. All channels were showing the half minute long footage which shows people are carrying a really deformed human body from busted railway compartment to some other place. That evening million people were travelling across the city. This incident happened and immediately all cell phone networks were jammed, phone lines were dead and communication media was stopped. Did anybody from these news channel thought of those women, children who were watching this ridicules half minute video footage and expecting their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons coming home? We are kind of forgetting the impact of news on normal person’s life. Showing the same violent footage over and over sometimes makes you numb about the event. The sensible feeling of humanity for such events becomes weaker and weaker. Audience starts anticipating more violence. There is no censor or commissioning body which decides what to be shown and for how much time!

Something stupid happens in corner of Mumbai and thousand of reporters start gathering around and starts asking million questions to people around the spot where incident happened. I wonder if they check any credibility of person with whom they are talking. They keep asking senseless questions about the event and create a spicy version of whole scene. There will be no wonder if they are cooking up some stories to make their headlines! To increase the TRP of the show and keep people entertaining, these people are finding weirdest and most useless events which a normal person even can’t imagine.

I see today’s news channels as commodity sellers. They are viewing news as commodity. Larger they produce better they earn revenue. I remember of a Bond movie which showcases an over ambitious News maker who first write news and then makes it happen. Over a period of time, his news starts shooting the bars of violence and set new horror marks. It will be really sad if we see something like that coming true anytime soon in reality!