Amazing third-party iPhone apps
July 5, 2007
Changing Jobs: An article worth reading
June 20, 2007
Mr. Gopalakrishnan succeeds Mr. Ratan Tata as Chairman of Tata Sons Ltd., the holding company for many of the Tata Bluechips – like Tata Steel, Tata Motors,Tata Power, Tata Chemicals, Voltas, etc. Possibly, he is the first non-Tata person to head the Tata Empire.
The below article, written by him, is really interesting !
The grass isn’t always greener on the other side !!
Move from one job to another – but only for the right reasons.
It’s yet another day at office. As I logged on to the marketing and advertising sites for the latest updates, as usual, I found the headlines dominated by “who’s moving from one company to another after a short stint”, and I wondered, “why are so many people leaving one job for another ? Is it passe now to work with just one company for a sufficiently long period” ?
Whenever I ask this question to people who leave a company, the answers I get are
“Oh, I am getting a 200% hike in salary”;
“Well, I am jumping three levels in my designation”;
“Well, they are going to send me abroad in six months”.
Then, I look around at all the people who are considered successful today and who have reached the top – be it a media agency, an advertising agency or a company. I find that most of these people are the ones who have stuck to the company, ground their heels and worked their way to the top.
And, as I look around for people who changed their jobs constantly, I find they have stagnated at some level, in obscurity !
In this absolutely ruthless, dynamic and competitive environment, there are still no short-cuts to success or to making money. The only thing that continues to pay, as earlier, is Loyalty and Hardwork. Yes, it pays ! Sometimes – immediately, sometimes – after a lot of time. But, it does pay.
Does this mean that one should stick to an organisation and wait for that golden moment ? Of course not. After a long stint, there always comes a time for moving, in most organisations. But, it is important to move for the right reasons – rather than superficial ones, like money, designation or an overseas trip.
Remember, no company recruits for charity.
More often than not, when you are offered an unseemly hike in salary or designation that is disproportionate to what that company offers its current employees, there is always an unseen bait attached.
The result ?
You will, in the long-term, have reached exactly the same levels or maybe lower levels, than what you would have in your current company.
A lot of people leave an organisation because they are “unhappy”. What is this so-called-unhappiness? I have been working for donkey’s years, and there has never been a day when I am not unhappy about something in my work – environment, boss, rude colleague, fussy clients, etc.
Unhappiness in a workplace, to a large extent, is transient.
If you look hard enough, there is always something to be unhappy about. But, more importantly, do I come to work to be “happy” in the truest sense ? If I think hard, the answer is ”No”.
Happiness is something you find with family, friends, may be a close circle of colleagues who have become friends.
What you come to work for is to earn, build a reputation, satisfy your ambitions, be appreciated for your work ethics, face challenges and get the job done.
So, the next time you are tempted to move, ask yourself “why are you moving” and “what are you moving into” ?
Some questions are
· Am I ready and capable of handling the new responsibility ? If yes,what could be the possible reasons my current company has not offered me the same responsibility
· Who are the people who currently handle this responsibility in the current and the new company ? Am I as good as the best among them ?
· As the new job offer has a different profile, why have I not given the current company the option to offer me this profile
· Why is the new company offering me the job ? Do they want me for my skills, or is there an ulterior motive ?
An honest answer to these will eventually decide where you go in your career – either to the top of the pile, in the long-term (at the cost of short-term blips), or to become another average employee who gets lost with time in the wilderness ?
- By -
Dr. Gopalkrishnan
Chairman – TATA Sons.
31 Different Ways To Lace Shoes
June 20, 2007
Well, I recently had the joy of trying to teach a little boy I baby sit for to tie his shoes. He really loves the lacing part, so I looked up shoe lacing and printed out some fun examples from this site.
There are 31 ways to lace shoes. Some are easy and some are harder, but all of them are pretty darn cool. I like the Zipper method myself, but I was teaching the Over Under Lacing, because it was still a basic concept. It was diverse enough though and my little boy thought it was really neat.
Secret behind Rajini’s colour
June 18, 2007
If you have watched Sivaji..You have observed the fair complexion of Rajinikanth in the song Oka bandi Sunlight.Everyone thought it was make-up that made Superstar Rajinikanth look like a European in that song, but the secret is about a year of computer graphics.
“We used cutting edge grafting technology and it was Shankar’s brain child,” revealed the film’s cinematographer KV Anand. “For the first time grafting technology has been used for an Indian film which was made possible by a Chennai based company Indian Arts who had worked in Shankar’s earlier films,” he said. One of the dancers, Jacky, was chosen by Shankar and Rajini’s skin tone was matched with her’s. The six and a half minute song was shot in Spain.
“Each shot of Rajni’s in the song was once again shot with Jacky and was sent to Indian Arts. Since the lighting varies in indoor and outdoor, to match the skin tone, expressions, lip and body movements of the two was a challenging task,” explained Anand. A total of 6700 frames were been for post production. Rajinikanth himself was amazed after watching the song.
also checkout:
Sivaji Review
Top 40 sites according to FeedBurner stats
June 18, 2007
FeedBurner is a popular RSS feed manager, with over 600.000 feeds in their roster. One of the advantages it offers is tracking the statistics for your RSS feed usage. Publishers can also choose to go public with this data, and many of them are displaying the number of their RSS subscribers, according to FeedBurner, on their site. (for example, on this site, it’s the little chicklet in the right side of the header; click it, and you will get an option to subscribe to the RSS feed for FranticIndustries in the feed reader of your choice)
However, FeedBurner, for some reason, isn’t trying to be a popularity measuring tool. They have the data. They have the capabilities. Yet, they’re not maintaining any sort of top list of feeds with the most subscribers. The number of RSS subscribers is not the ultimate way to measure the popularity of a website, but it’s a really important metric. If FeedBurner were to maintain such a top list, it would be at least as important as Technorati and Alexa’s top lists.
Besides waiting for FeedBurner to actually do a top list, the second best thing I could do is to create my own list of top blogs according to their FeedBurner RSS subscriber data. Maybe this experiment encourages the folks at FeedBurner to do the same thing themselves.
Bear in mind that this list is obtained in completely unscientific ways, as I simply checked out the number of RSS subscribers for blogs I know to be very popular (over 500 of them) and who have their RSS subscriber number public, and created the list from those numbers. I might have (and probably did) miss some – if you have a correction, please let me know so I can add it to the list. In any case, this list is not meant to be a definitive metric of any kind. It’s just here to tickle curiosity.
*I’ve focused on English blogs only, anything else would be far to complicated for me to do
**the numbers below are live, which means they can change over time, and the rankings might become wrong. However, it will be fun to see who went up and who went down from this point
***I chose to go with 40 sites because roughly after that number there’s a huge number of sites with similar numbers of RSS subscribers, so it gets much harder sorting them all out
****Update: I’ve updated the list with some of the suggestions from the comments, so it’s now a bit bigger than Top40, but also a bit more accurate.
So, here it is, the top 40 sites according to the number of their RSS subscriptions, as measured by FeedBurner:
4. Interesting Thing of the Day
13. How to Change the World by Guy Kawasaki
22. Jeff Clavier’s Software Only
25. My Personal Finance Journey
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As you can see, this site – while not doing bad – is still far from the top 50. I’m putting it here in the hope that some day, it’ll be in this highly respected company. If you’d like to help me get there, now is the time to subscribe to my RSS feed.
Source : www.franticindustries.com
Bill Gates Home
June 18, 2007
