The Human touch!

Today morning, I went to the railway station to send off few folks. It was 6:00 in the morning and the station was so crowded. The train came at around 6:20, my folks got in and the train started leaving the station in another 2 mins.

When I was walking back to my car on the platform, I saw people waving their hands and shouting to stop the train. What the heck? Then I saw an old lay who just missed to get into the train and people (strangers) were trying to help her. When the train guard in the last coach saw these people shouting and waving their hands to stop the train, SMILED and communicated over radio to his co-worker in the front of the train to stop the train. I saw smiles on almost everyone who were waiting for other trains.

What touched me was - the willingness of people to help a person whom they are not connected with. These kind of willingness to help was very common in the place where I grew up but it has slowly started to subside these days. The fast paced life, running behind the monetary benefits, greediness, etc made us to become more ego-centric.

It takes a little to help but the satisfaction and gratitude goes a long way!

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#TH!NKtweet - 140 bite sized lessons

#TH!NKtweet is a book authored by Rajesh Setty in the style of tweets. The book's detailed caption says it all - "140-bite sized lessons for fast paced world".

I got to read the book. I always get impressed by the ideas and simple thoughts of the author. But an idea about reaching to the world with his ideas using twitter style is terrific. It hardly took 30 mins - 1 hour to read the complete book. As usual his wise thoughts about personal life, business, networking are simple and powerful.


Extras:
The author is well known for his ideas for better life. It is so easy to understand things when he explains it in his style. Read his blog and you will certainly understand what I am saying. I just made announcement about his book Upbeat.

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UPBEAT by Rajesh Setty

It's not very usual to see a post like this in my blog. Thanks to Rajesh Setty who has given me an opportunity to announce about his new book to the world. I have been following his blog for more than a year and I love his writing.

He has decided to make use of the blogs as one of the marketing medium for his recent book Upbeat and requested for volunteers on his site. I was one of the luckier people to get a chance to announce about the book to the world. And Rajesh has not asked for a free service; he has some goodies as gifts for taking part in the Virtual Blog Tour. Thus I am here to make an announcement about his book,

Author Bio:
Rajesh’s mission in life is to bring good ideas to life. With love!
Rajesh is involved in a few companies in some combination as a founder, operating executive, board member and/or an investor. Apart from that, he has written a few books and is working on a number of them. His first book was published at the age of thirteen. While he is not building companies or writing, he enjoys speaking at conferences and company events.
You can read his latest thoughts on his blog Life Beyond Code or on Twitter at UpbeatNow. If you are really curious to know the events that shaped his thinking, you can read his story so far here.
Rajesh lives in the Silicon Valley with his wife Kavitha and son Sumukh

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Quick thoughts on the shortcomings of BusinessObjects!

I was reading this comparison between Microstratgey 9 and BusinessObjects XI 3.1 by Microstratgey.

http://www.microstrategy.com/quicktours/businessobjects/index.asp

I understand that this article will not talk about the strengths of BusinessObjects as it was compiled by Microstrategy. But few things that I wish BusinessObjects can bring in are

- The consistency across the different reporting panels for webintelligence
- Reusable components for webintelligence. Like data provider reuse or report reuse.
- Consolidate the number of information delivery tools to two or three.
- The long term wish would be to have one information delivery tool which could be catered to all types of information delivery needs. Like the application should be able to adapt and metamorph it’s interface based on the user :-)

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Respect your rivals and their abilities!

I was reading this news about Shahid Afridi and how he played those crucial innings in the recently completed T20 worls chamipnships. He has attributed his success to his learning on respecting the bowlers. It is a very simple thought but when you give it a thought, it can be applied in every day aspect of life to make it better.

When you start respecting your rivals,
- you start evaluating their strengths and weaknesses
- you start working on improving your weaknesses to overcome their strengths
- you acknowledge the strengths of your rivals which makes the competition healthier
- you accept your losses as the result of your weaknesses and the strengths of your rivals. Thus you mature and become more composed.
- you don't succumb to the losses in life

And respecting not only rivals, but everyone whether it is a junior at office or a servant at home will make us better people. Respect and equality goes hand-on-hand and brings peace and healthy relationships in life.

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SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 - Webi - Summary Cells

It's been so many months since SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 has been launched. But since most of our projects run on XI R2, I did not explore much on XI R3.1. Recently I got a trial version of SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 installed.

Ok, let us jump to what I wanted to write about. XI 3.1 webintelligence has added 3 new predefined cells to be used in reports.

1) Query Summary
2) Prompt Summary
3) Report Filter Summary



We were able to achieve the same thing by writing some cumbersome formulas. But adding these as a simple drag and drop option is a cool thing. It helps much more in promoting the tool as "casual user friendly" tool. It basically helps the dependency of an IT person or time to learn to use the formulas.



These kind of intuitive features would increase the adaptability of the tool by the business users.

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How do I write more?

All these days, I was not posting any entries related to what I come across at work, thinking that it may not be interesting for the readers. But I have decided to write posts related to my work for two reasons,

1) Will help me to write more as I come across so many things that are interesting to write about.

2) May be, sometime in the future, I may get noticed as a technology blogger than a personal blogger. Long term goal!!

I do business intelligence solution implementation to make a living, especially using SAP BusinessObjects products. So I expect my technology posts to be of the same nature.

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Random thoughts..

Since the first day I started penning down this blog, I have always thought of it as a tool which would help me to learn few things whether it is new words or some details about the cars. But what I realized over a period of time is something different - it makes me feel proud and stand alone from others and gives me an identity in the cyber world.

I have never seriously thought of getting more traffic to my blog. But eventually I won few regular readers to my site. But I really did not make it a point to post regularly to keep them visiting my blog on a regular basis. Like my life the theme of the blog was never focused on one thing, it was about everything that I watch, read & like.

Setting goals and achieving them has never been the style of my life. I regret for not having done that all my life. But again I never spend much time to think and worry about the past. I take life as it comes; I think that is good to lead a happier life but achieving goals would make me feel more proud and also would make me search for my passion of my life.

I have so many random thoughts that flash across my mind every now and then. I think I can write these thoughts and read them later to understand the pattern of my thought process.

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Fiat launches Grande Punto in India

As I said earlier, Fiat launched Grande Punto in the Indian market. Fiat India has surprised the Indian automobile market by tagging it with ex-showroom price ranging between 399,000 INR and 600,000 INR.

If I think of cars available in Indian market at that range,

- Maruti Suzuki Swift (Petrol & Diesel)
- Tata Indica Vista (Petrol & Diesel)
- Hyundai i10 (Petrol)

But the Fiat Grande Punto is at par with Hyundai i20, Skoda Fabia & Honda Jazz by design, technical specifications & size. I have never been to a Tata Motors showroom to check out a fiat car. I still hear problems about after sales service for Fiat cars at Tata Motors service centers.

Honda has just priced their car Honda Jazz (Petrol) for approximately more than 400,000 INR. That means one could buy two Grande Puntos at the price of one Honda Jazz. In fact one can buy a Fiat Linea Diesel for the same price of a Honda Jazz.

Honda Jazz is overpriced compared to Skoda Fabia and Hyundai i20. So how does Grande Punto fares with Fabia & i20? The base petrol version of Grande Punto is underpowered with 1.2 L engine and with max power of 68 bhp. The 1.4 L petrol version is on par with Fabia, i20 & Jazz in terms of max power - 90 bhp.

And the Fiat website does not provide the price details of 1.4 L separately. That's a little confusing too.

I believe the 1.4 L Grande Punto would cost almost same as i20 & Fabia Petrol. The coming days would reveal more about the pricing and also about the response for this machine in Indian market.

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Support for Mahendra Singh Dhoni

Times Now India is trying to make our beloved captain M S Dhoni the scapegoat for India's exit from the T20 world cup 2009. Dhoni made a mistake of sending Jadeja ahead of Yuvraj Singh. But is that a mistake? If it had worked for Dhoni, he would have been hailed for bringing Jadeja for the crucial tie.

Dhoni accepted that he had made mistakes but I believe it was just not India's day. One stupid reporter from Times Now was shouting as if Dhoni has commited a crime. It more looked like the big fat ugly fella has some personal vengeance against Dhoni. As a sport lover, I understand winning and losing is part and parcel of sports, but looks like the reporter could not take the loss sportively.

As a reporter, he must be able to analyze things and must give benefit of doubts before start accusing anyone for Christ's sake. The chief at Times Now has to be blamed for his reporters being insensitive and conveying speculative news to the public.

Hereby I declare my 100% support for Indian cricket team captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni. I believe his commitment to the game is at par with any sports person I have ever come across.

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India - out of T20 world cup 2009

Am not here to write about how the match progressed or so. I was just thinking what would be going on in few of the player's minds. This is just my imagination and meant for humor and humor only. JUST FOR LAUGHS!

Ravindu Jadeja - "I had wasted so many balls which helped England winning the match and worst, I had let my team down. Will I be kicked by the Indian fans?"

M.S.Dhoni - "Did I make a wrong decision of sending Jadeja ahead of Yuvi or myself? Once things like the batting order change always used to favor me. Am I running out of luck?"

Yuvraj Singh - "What if I had saved the four of the last ball of the England innings. We just lost by three runs. Anyway I can always blame that it was Dhoni's fault not to send me ahead of Jadeja. I could have won the match easily for India if I was sent up in the order to bat"

Harbhajan Singh - "Oh man, If I had not bowled that wide in the last ball of the England innings, we would have won this match. Hmmmm, anyway it was Yuvraj who missed the ball"

Rudra Pratap Singh - "Does Dhoni hate me? I did so well in T20 games for so long and he did not pick me for the earlier games. In this game I bowled impressively; but when I had an over left, Dhoni did not choose me to bowl in the death. I need to somehow pass this to the media; Should I start writing in a blog?"


Ok, finally my two cents on the match - India lost because they had opted to send in Jadeja earlier instead of Yuvraj Singh.

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Crimes at Bengaluru

I am not sure if the crime rate has gone up or not in my city Bangalore but what I know is that the criminals have become experts and a thing or two could be learned from them for their planning and execution skills. It may not take long before some B-school starts analyzing the robberies that are taking place in the country.

Today's highlight is the robbery of a jewelery shop by digging a tunnel into the shop from a drainage - in 3 hours gap and that too in the broad day light. These guys must have planned this for a long time, as they have tunneled to reach the exact spot that they wanted.

What could have been the inspiration for these guys? The Bank job movie or the Italian Job. The divide between the poor and rich is getting wider in India; With the population of over a billion; lot of them being poor; lot of urban migration; the crime rate in the urban places may go up.

BTW read about the robbery in detail here.

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