Kapil’s Korner

Mom is a gardener at heart. She’s the one who believes that singing to her plants helps them grow better. She takes care of her garden just like it was one of her kids.

The recent attraction in her little garden has been this really attractive green mirchi [chilli].

And then there are some beautiful flowers at full blossom in this lovely monsoon season. See the water droplets.

Oh, and I managed to notice some tweeters in the garden too.

Last weekend was a bore. Sick and down with no action at all. Read a lot and caught up with ‘How I met your mother’ season 2, finally.

To kill the sickness blues I went DVD shopping. And I was in a total retro mood thanks to my current read – Bollywood by Mihir Bose.

Mother India – Seen this & thought it should be in the collection.

Pyaasa - Not seen but very keen to see Guru Dutt’s work and Waheeda Rehman perform the role of a prostitute.

Shree 420 and Awaara - The Raj Kapoor classics. Have seen them in bits and pieces on cable TV. But this time going to watch it end to end.

Hopefully should be catching up with the movies soon and will share my thoughts here. Meanwhile do tell me what’s been your favourite classic movie from Bollywood or the Hollywood collections.

Everybody is on it. Everybody loves it. But not everyone can manage it. As much as we all love Facebook, I think at times it can be annoying to see holiday photos where 100 are of animals and trees with just 2 where your friend is also seen. Or those Farmville and Mafia War updates which you really can’t do much about.

So here’s a quick guide on how to be a good ‘facebooker’ and it will probably even get you more popular in your network.

Photos – We love them but let’s also respect them.
When your friends let you click photos it’s because they know you respect their privacy. So make sure not all goes online, especially the ones you wouldn’t like somebody to get embarrassed about. There is always email to share it with a few selected friends.

Just because you loved your holiday spot doesn’t mean you can torture your network to see a 100+ photos. Select a few best which gives your friends a good idea of the fun time you had. At least spare them the over-exposed blurry shots. Trust me, they’ll appreciate that very much.

Add a personal touch to your photo uploads. A description line telling where you are, why you clicked this photo or describing a random object always helps people connect more. Should get you more comments too.

Status updates – Quality matters, not quantity.
Status updates every 1 hour don’t make your profile interesting. Besides when your friends login, they only see your latest one. So ideally you should wait about 12 hours before you make yet another status update.

And think twice before you make that update. It not only talks about your state of mind but also draws a personality picture. And you surely don’t want that one to be messed up.

Original content – nothing beats that.
If you’re the creative sorts who generates original content like a music piece, poetry or a painting go ahead and upload. It will get you more views and comments than all those email forwards going around the place.

If you’ve got a flickr photo album, a twitter account or a bookshelf at shelfari – connect it to Facebook. Will make your timeline a lot more interesting.

Avoid the ‘Select All’ button.
Took a fun quiz? Your farm just got bigger? GREAT. But is everyone on your network interested? Always make sure you are not clicking the ‘Select All’ button for just about everything you come across. Filtering helps and avoids annoying everyone on your list.

And last but not the least remember whatever you share on Facebook is probably being seen by all those people you’ve given access too. And some people have good memory so don’t put up something you would be sorry about later.

Last evening I managed to put the regular office work on hold and got myself out to go and listen to a few successful entrepreneurs share their magic stories. Of course it wasn’t magic. There is an idea, lots of hard work and luck which goes into putting them where they are today.

Some of the lessons from the evening:

Execution matters

Great, if you’ve got a brilliant idea. But if not executed well even the most unique one will fail. So having a great idea is only the start, a dedicated execution plan is what will get you to the real goal. Reminds me of this – 1% Inspiration. 99% Perspiration.

Keep it flexible

As much as we like business plans to be firm at the same time they need to be flexible enough to change as per market scenarios, consumer expectations.

Focus on the right thing

Often businesses lose direction because they are focused more on the competition rather than keeping a tab on changing consumer preferences.

Be human

Business is all about relationships. So you could be an IITian or a college drop-out but if you don’t have the right interpersonal skills and the humility to deal with people, you probably won’t go too far.

Be passionate

Entrepreneurship is not a moment of time. It’s a path you’ve chosen to walk. If you loose passion mid-way that’s the end of the game. Watch Narayana Murthy talk about Passion.

Accept failure

Entrepreneurship is all about risk taking. If failure is not your cup of tea, start-ups are not for you.

The mantra:

Passion. Perseverance. Patience.

And I thought it also needed the 4th P – Profit.

The Economic Times -  Power of Ideas got Narayana Murthy to share some of this thoughts on entrepreneurship. My favourites are Passion & Innovation. But you can see all the videos here at the powerofideasET – YouTube Channel.

Are you a successful entrepreneur? Would love to hear some of the lessons you learned while setting up your business. Use the comments area to share your story.

It’s often seen that people spend too much time doing the most basic computing operations. Here is a list of some of my favourite tools which power my PC at work.

Launchy

Always a problem finding the right file? Look no further. Launchy has been the most useful piece of software to get me directly to a file/folder or application by just typing out it’s name. Of course you need to make sure you index your hard disk, the right way. [Download]

ObjectDock

Is your desktop messed up with short-cuts to files & folders? Get ObjectDock, the Mac look alike taskbar. Easy access to folders and other applications without cluttering your desktop. [Download]

IrfanView
Simple, light-weight image editor. Crop, re-size your images quickly without having to load a heavy application like Adobe Photoshop for simple actions. Also with a few plug-ins it will let you view some of the more complex image formats without those heavy software installs. [Download]

Dropbox
A popular online storage which I only recently started using and it’s been super useful. I don’t bother with file transfers to the USB pen-drive anymore. Just copy the file in the Dropbox folder and it syncs with my Macbook at home. So I have access to important files at all time. [Website]

GTD wallpaper
If you don’t fancy those lovely desktop wallpapers here is something which is great to sort the files and shortcuts on the desktop. [Download]

And here is a bonus:

AvaFind/Google Desktop
If you’ve been unsatisfied with the search results given by Windows default search engine then get yourself one of these application. Google Desktop does a superb job of indexing content of the files, email applications so you can probably end up finding that needle in the haystack. [Ava Find Home Page / Google Desktop Download]

What’s your favourite piece of software that makes computing easier for you? Share your thoughts in the comments area.

The Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival 2010 is currently underway in the scenic Cannes, France. Earlier in the week the awards for Press & Outdoor were announced. If you’re interested in seeing the award winning work, see AdsoftheWorld archives.

But what I am going to share is some of the work which caught my attention and is surely worth seeing. [Click on image to view full-sized images]

CafiAspirina
A copywriter’s delight.

Hot Wheels
Can’t resist it but this is one of those “I wish I had done it” sorts.

Nissan Auto Insurance
Smart. That’s all I’ll say.

Bangalore Traffic Police
Mudra’s silver win at the Cannes

Super non-stick pans
Have always enjoyed ambient stuff done so well.

Film winners will be announced this weekend, so will share my picks later next week.

Last night the MacBook refused to go online. After a 2 hour struggle it just won’t work.

So I gave up. Which lead me to dig out the DVD of Harishchandrachi Factory [Theatrical Trailer] – A Marathi film depicting the struggle of Dadasaheb Phalke in making Raja Harishchandra in 1913, India’s first feature film, thus the birth of Indian cinema. The film was selected as the official entry from India at the Oscars. I was particularly interested in watching this film because I am currently reading Bollywood: A History by Mihir Bose which traces the birth of Indian Cinema.

A 90 minute entertaining film made with a lot of character from those days. It traces the path which Dadasaheb Phalke had to walk to fulfill his dream to make India’s first “moving picture”. Some learning from the film -

At a time when a government job was the most secured profession or to do something tried and tested like setting up a printing press for him was so much easier. But he instead thought against the wave and decided to make India’s first motion film.

Your dream needs to be fueled by your own passion, first. Dadasaheb Phalke almost sold out his house to pursue his dream and even left his pregnant wife and went away for 2 months to London.

Dadasaheb fought against all odds – an almost lost eyesight, limited financial resources, friends and neighbours declaring him mental and almost taking him to the Thane Mental hospital. And then they were all proved wrong.

Ideas don’t come when you sit with a pen and paper and wait for them. Ideas come when you least expect them.

And lastly, a man set out to achieve something can’t do much without the support of his loved ones and a few kind hearted souls around him.

I strongly suggest you go pick up the DVD of this movie and watch it. Has English sub-titles for people like me who are not completely at ease with Marathi.

After an almost 2 year contemplation of taking the leap, last month I bit into the Apple. Using the latest edition 13″MacBook Pro for about a week now. This is not intended to be a review, there are better experts out there who will tell you more about it. I am only going to share my initial experience of having moved to the Mac finally.

1. The sleek & sexy hold me baby looks make it very attractive and at the same time you are completely on the watch to make sure that the surface is not scratched.
2. Trackpad lets you do some rather nifty things like page scrolls, application selection, Zoom in/out with just a combination of 2, 3 & 4 fingers and some pinching. Great fun.
3. Back-lit keyboard which means no more typos when typing late into the night. And no more disturbing lamp light for the wife.
4. Awesome audio quality is making me pull out the iPod from it’s dock and play it on the MacBook more often.
5. A no nonsense set-up is truly a blessing after going thru Window’s multiple set-up screens. The Macbook was online with just one password entry. No IP address, No DNS etc.
6. Surprisingly the Mac OS does NOT come with a built in support for some standard Video formats like AVI and MPEGs. You yet need to get the popular Windows utility – VLC for that purpose.
7. The Mac OS has a very useful dock which gives you quick access to your set of key applications and documents. But at times gets a bit confusing to know which applications are currently active.
8. What I really miss on the MacBook from the Windows Keyboard are these keys – Home/End & Page Up/Page Down.
9. Print Screen is not easy either – needs a little app to take care of it.
10. The promised battery life was supposed to be 10 hours. But I am not sure under what conditions is this. I’ve got about web browsing on Wifi and music playing and it gives me about 6 hours approximately.

So that’s about it. I am sure knowing Mac’s usability ratings these would be just some minor getting used to features and then there shall be no looking back at the Windows. Looking forward to a higher output on the personal projects with the new MacBook.

This is what my character would look like if my life was a comic strip.
Illustration by: Kunal Gagwani

#1
The talented Indian movie comedian Johnny Walker was a teetotaler all his life. Then why did he get the name of a whiskey brand? Read here

#2
Wish you could put more into that SMS? Read why text messages are limited to 160 characters?

#3
Fucking (pronounced “fook-ing”) is an Austrian village located in the western Upper Austria. The village is located 33 kilometres (21 mi) north of Salzburg, four kilometres (2.5 mi) east of the German border.

We had a vote last year on whether to rename the town, but decided to keep it as it is. After all, Fucking has existed for 800 years, probably when a Mr Fuck or the Fuck family moved into the area. The ‘ing’ was added as a word for settlement.

Read More.

#4
Using Gmail? Well, you can only send out 500 messages per day. Read more about Gmail’s Limitations for sending messages.

#5
Do you know what’s a Flugelbinder? See this photo and you’ll be surprised it had to have such a difficult name.

Did you learn something new in the past few weeks? Care to share with all, put it in the comments area.