QR codes and predictions

I was reading this post by Joel way back in Sep 2000 (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000037.html)  and this particular paragraph was very interesting:

"About two months ago, Wired magazine had a different technology for going to a URL automatically from an ad. It was some kind of weird thing where you held up the page to your digital camera, took a digital picture, and ran this wacked out software that navigated your browser to the Altoids home page. So now instead of typing 7 letters I have to find my digital camera, turn it on, wait for it to boot up, take a picture of the page, turn off the camera, wait for it to flush its memory to flash, remove the flash card from the camera, take the network card out of the PCMCIA slot, put the compact flash into it's holder, plug it into the PCMCIA slot, find the picture, run the software which I previously installed, oh, don't get me started. It would be a half-hour trauma just to go to the damn Altoids web site, where you can't even buy an Altoids, for heaven's sake. Curious."

Isn't that what smart phones and QR codes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code) do today? Ideas may not always fail because they are stupid. They could fail just because the conditions weren't right at that time.

Linked In metrics

Just looked at my linked in metrics and I see that I have appeared in search results 43 times in the last 90 days and there are 40 visits to my profile. My initial thought was that a 93% conversion from search results to profile views. However, looking at the data again, I realized that this is not a case of direct conversion. Of the 43 searches in which my profile appeared as a result, I am not sure of the ones where folks clicked on my profile. There are chances of folks who are already connected to me or 1/2 level of connections who have clicked on other links on the site and arrived at my profile. Now, I need to look at the referrer metrics if available for free accounts and figure out what the traffic sources are.

As an aside, I've thought about adding my linked in profile to the blog and realized that I'd like to keep my writing and professional work separate. It is the same person doing it. However, the motivations in both places are very different. Folks who want to connect both will just have to spend some more time looking for my resume. I figure that a lot of people are not going to be interested in making the connection in the first place. Surfers on the web suffer from a high level of ADD and that should lower the probability of people who are trying to make the connection even further (I was thinking of saying reduce the chance, but lower the probability just has a better 'ring' to it).

Eat Pray Love

Just watched the movie yesterday and I gotta say that it hit the spot someplace. I've always wondered what I am really doing with my life. I am sure a lot of us are asking ourselves the question all the time. If you are not, good luck to you since you either know what you are up to or clueless about your ignorance.

There were so many things about the characters in the movie that was touching. A woman who has lost herself in her marriage and when she gets out of it, is not sure what she is; the snarky Richard from Texas; Ketut the Balinese medicine man; her lovely friend Sofi. As the landlady in Italy says, in the end the most important thing is "familia". Liz is touched by this diverse set of people and in turn touches their lives and becomes a part of their family.

In the protagonist's path to self-discovery, she has suddenly touched something in me. It's not an emptiness, nor is it a sudden awareness of what I want. It could just be that I was able to identify with a lot of things in the movie. This one quote was the highlight of the movie for me - "When you set out in the world to help yourself, sometimes you end up helping... Tutti", where Tutti in Italian is "everyone".

PS: YMMV!

Review: 34 Bubblegums and Candies

Weird that I couldn't find this title on Amazon! There were no reviews and I didn't hear about the book before I bought it. That makes it an abnormal purchase for me.

I've heard that the book's cover art plays a part in a purchase decision. I've never personally done that before. Things that normally matter to me are the author, any reviews I've already had from trusted people (read as people who's taste match mine) and the summary behind books. Yes!! I normally read the summary. This one was an exception. Two things that made me get the book - the funny/weird title and the cover art. An impulse buy at Landmark that was worth it.

The author has done a great job with the stories. They are funny. Enough to have me laughing in the cab and the other folks pooling with me give a quizzical look. Overall a very thought provoking collection of short (at times, really short) stories that I enjoyed reading. If someone's reading my blog, you can catch the author's writing at her blog

Human Effect on the Environment

It's past 12 in the night and I am still sitting awake. Just doing some random browsing when I hear a noise. It took me a couple of minutes before I realized that it was cawing of crows - at 12 in the night. I guess our effect on how and why do things is not just on us, it is directly affecting with the sleep and hunting patterns of birds.

Twitter gadget - IE 7 - Blogger = Not working

Just noticed that my twitter updates on Blogger are working fine on Firefox and Opera but not on IE7. IE7 just shows a link to my profile on Twitter but not the live updates.

On a side note, wishing everyone a Merry Christmas (http://xkcd.com/521/). That link is courtesy Vyshnavi. That just shows that I really need to catch up on my comics RSS feed.

My experiment with status message... *FAIL*

I tried an experiment with my Google Talk status reading "I'm in love!!". It was based on this post on kwippy.com that such IM statuses are good conversation starters and people who haven't been in touch over a long period may respond to such statuses. I had the status message on for nearly a couple of hours. My verdict of the experiment: FAIL.


I got one person pinging me asking what I was in love with. Duh! This makes me wonder if it is the experiment or is it just ME? As a side note, I thought no one reads this blog. A friend of mine told me a couple of weeks back that she decided to try out Twitter after reading my tweets in the blog.