Author: Prasad Ajinkya

Prasad Ajinkya is the Big Fat Geek and often he spends his time working on the WordPress or Google eco-system. He loves to solve business problems with technology.

Enchanted: Recapturing Innocence lost

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When I was a small kid, I used to absolutely love reading fairy tales. My grandfather had bought these two hardbound volumes from the seven seas yonder that were absolutely full of them. I never managed to completely read the book end to end, but I had read a lot of them.

Then came school, junior college, engineering, work, mba, work and with all of them, the facts about life. Now I am a person who can safely say is well-grounded in reality. So much so that I have more or less stopped watching cartoons, even Tom & Jerry, which my father still loves and laughs out loud like a small child when watching the same.

Disney and this new movie, Enchanted brings out that mirthful child in all of us. I had an absolute rollicking time throughout this movie.

The plot is simple, a fairy tale couple (prince and princess, with their chipmunk friend) are thrown into reality by the wicked witch step-mother. The princess is hurtled into Earth and this guy who is your normal Joe, who also happens to be a divorce lawyer. As the plot thickens, by and by, reality also has its effect on the fairy tale world and I wont spoil it, please watch the movie :-)

After a long time have I seen an all out movie, the likes of Cinderella or Snow White, et al. A musical cartoon flick which turns into a romantic comedy movie. Very nicely done. I think I will try to get my hands on the digital version of this movie. Definitely an 8.0

Creating a personal blog

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Blogger logo

So, a lot of us like to blog, and of course would it not be super cool if we had our own blog url and all the jazz effects at of course a minimal of a cost.

Well, now we can. And even the most basic of a computer user can go ahead and have his personal url blog … here’s how you do it.

  1. Go to a domains seller. I bought mine from Aalphanet. Needless to say, you will have to register first.
  2. Search for an available domain eg- kidakaka.com
  3. If available, go for the kill, purchase it. A .com comes for somewhere around Rs. 450.00 per annum, a .in comes at half the price.
  4. Once that is done, buy the Manage Domain rights for your domain. This costs an additional Rs. 45.00 per year.
  5. Now start a blog on the blogger platform
  6. In the Settings->Publishing->Advanced settings, go to the your own domain name, and provide the same.
  7. The complete instructions are given here, but this is what you do simply –
    1. Enter you domain name in the Advanced tab
    2. In your Manage DNS section of domain dashboard, make a CNAME entry for your domain to point to ghs.google.com
  8. It should take an hour and two and Voila!!

The blog now is hosted on the blogger platform, but the url is yours. A customized personal blog for less than Rs. 500.00 a year.

Business World

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Theres a section of Business World which is Quick take, the question of the next week’s issue was posted to me via through a friend.

The Indian IT industry has several set backs –

  1. Lack real technology work – with around 60% of the work lying in the AMC and Testing (Support) bracket, there is dearth of scope for your average Indian techie to get their digits (pun intended) dirty in some concrete techie work.
  2. Project orientation – Most of the biggies in the Indian IT industry are service oriented, and more concerned with projects for foriegn customers. Their business orientation is towards projects, so much so that the entire organization bases its financials upon projects and their profitability. It may seem as a sweeping statement, but think about it, projects for the same client cumulate into an account. Accounts cumulate into a Geography. How this is bad is that there is no focus on IT products in the market.
  3. PPP of economies – How can one sustain themselves on pure projects alone? Esp. those that are based on a foreign economy. The moment the domestic economy starts doing better than the foreign economy (read those of the clients), the cost of the project rises (either for the firm or for the client). To remain competitive vis-a-vis other foriegn IT vendors, the indian firm will have to drop rates, losing profitability.
  4. Attrition – With an average attrition of around 15%, the costs of a project are constantly going up. Whenever a resource switches to a new firm, he gets a pay hike. A pay hike translates into more costs for the same resource. More costs without increasing revenues results in reduction of profitability.

That was my answer, I was a little surprised to learn that theres such a small amount of people who agree with me. No matter, it will be a good thing for India if I am wrong ;-).

Wager!!

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Hectic day today … no seriously! Have a late night conference all regarding work. Hope it finishes within an hour or so, while my roomies (who are all single and loving it) are celebrating the V day, I will be discussing business and revenue models.

Read a nice post on entrepreneurship, here.

Today, I made a wager on the daily sales of one of your brandstores. We had launched a sabse sasta din offer on Sapient Brandstore. My MD was saying that the daily revenues will barely cross a lakh. I informed him that it would be much more than that. Rs. 500 more to my CTC!!

Valentine’s Day

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So its that time of the year again. When all the retailers and big brands of the world try to woo the lucky couples off to a romantic time and great gifts!! Fly a couple and get 10 tickets free, buy for two and get 10% off … is it really all just a marketing gimmick? Open any newspaper or surf to any channel, and you will see what I am hinting at.

Abstract from Wikipedia –

Saint Valentine (in Latin, Valentinus) is the name of several martyred saints of ancient Rome. Of the Saint Valentine whose feast is on February 14, nothing is known except his name and that he was buried at the Via Flaminia north of Rome on February 14. It is even uncertain whether the feast of that day celebrates only one saint or two or more saints of the same name. For this reason this liturgical commemoration was not kept in the Roman Catholic calendar of saints for universal liturgical veneration as revised in 1969.[2] Traditional Roman Catholics continue to venerate St. Valentine on his feast day, February 14.

Funny, isnt it? If so little is actually known about the group of saints who gave their life for the masses, still this day is celebrated on such a vast scale.