iGeek Blog

The Year is ending soon, new one is going to begin. In '09 I've seen lot of ups & downs in world around me, whether its family, friends or its professional world, nothing was just stable as it should. Lot of bad and good things happened.

Lets have a recap of the Year 2009.

Family & Friends
Some incidents in family drawn my family in a bit trouble. It was the hard time. But as time passed, all got back to normal.

I lost my Nana this year. He got paralysis attack. He was aged. The good thing was, we took the initiative for Eye donation. We donated his eyes to the Eye bank. I wrote about it here earlier: Eye Donation: Our little efforts will give someone new life

Apart from that just few months back I lost one of my close friend, Jatin. He got an heart attack & passed away. Just few months back from that time, we used to go office together on a bike, as his office was at the little distance from mine. We were in contact since we were in primary school. RIP Jatin.

Just after few days I lost him, I heard about the death of one my colleague at my office. She worked at my office, but she left long ago. We were not in contact since long, and all of a sudden, Dhaval, who was the common friend with her, called me & gave the news that Jignisha died in Dubai due to food poisoning.

Health
Beginning of the year was just good. Me and Rahul joined the health club thinking about loosing some some kgs. We joined in the end of 2008, but we were succeed to continue with it in 2009 as well. achievement huh.. :). It lasted till the middle of Feb. You will feel good when number of people tell you that,"Oh Jignesh, you really looking slimmer." And it feels really good when girls say it. I was lucky to get those comments. I lost near 2 inches from the tummy. Satisfactory. But for some reasons we failed to continue it for long.

Only Salad in Lunch for consecutively about 8 months !! Yes, thats true. In those span of 8 months, 90-95% of my lunch Salad only. Having lunch with mates at my work place is always a fun. Those days, when I had salad & others having ordinary food. I had to answer everyone in office, why I am on it. Some of the comments I got from others were very interesting. Some of them were like:
"Are you sick? Has doctor asked not to eat anything else ?"
"Are you going through some Ayurvedic treatment or what ?"
"You are one of healthiest people here. C'mon.. share your food with me. I need it. You take my food."
"I got now, why your skin is so fair, because you take lots of Salad a day. Salad keeps you skin shiny & healthy, keep it up."
But apart from all above, the Truth is, I decided to have salad in Lunch to avoid the sleepiness after heavy lunch and good thing was it really worked.

Magento
Since I joined the current organization, I never worked on the Magento E-Commerce. But this year I got an opportunity to work on it. It was hard, was totally different from the other frameworks I worked earlier. But Hitesh, one of my friends & colleague in my Team helped me a lot to start with. I'm very much thankful to him and the other people who supported me. I bought a domain: jigneshpatel.co.in & I started a blog on Magento: Magento Coder. Based on the statistics my blog was getting good number hits. Getting comments from other developers & replying to them has became part of daily activity.

E63
After a long time, I was able to buy a new Handset. After spending a good amount of money for body and battery still I was not satisfied with the reliability with my old mate Nokia 3230. Finally I handed it over to my Uncle and got the new one. Since I needed a Wifi enabled phone having qwetry or touch keypad, Nokia E63 was the perfect choice for me as the price was also near the budget. Hoping for an iPhone in near future.

Magnet
Magnet, my current work place, I joined it more than two years ago and I've seen lot of things happening in here since beginning, but 2009 was a bit unexpected. Upper level management decided some bigger changes in Management. The upper layer has been changed totally. Company had gone through some tough times. For me, the bad thing was.. some best friends left. At some point of time I felt, I was alone. Gone were the days which will never come back. Because of some reasons I have decided to leave Magnet. Just after few days route to my work place will be changed.

If you look at the Google Suggestions, while typing 'Why are indians' & typing the 'Why are americans' in the Google Search box, will get the below.

After looking at that Why people search only negative things for americans?

Its about a year we started an initiative for the Eye Donation. For few days, my team at my work place were involved a bit in this thing. But some how we were not able to continue with the same. We created an online group, got some valuable contacts, those can help us to make the people around us aware about the Eye donation.

After few days, few people were not with us in the team, as they left the organization. The conversation between us became very less & because of that, this thing was almost forgotten.

Let me just give you the few details about the eye donation, especially when a person die because of any reason, how you can give your valuable time for the Eye Donation.

The eyes of a died person can be donated within few hours after the time of death. In case if you are at the place of funeral, you can do something, like I did when my Nana got expired.

Last Sunday, my Nana left this world, due to Paralysis attack before 10 days back. It happened in Mid day time. I reached there at about 12:00 pm. All the related things were going on as usual as per the procedures in Hinduism.

After spending about an hour, I got myself sticked about the 'Eye Donation'. On the other moment, I asked my dad to come aside to talk, who was also sitting there just near to me.
I asked him about eye donation. He just said, "sure we can do, but just confirm a person aged about 75 can donate eyes ?"

So I just called Jaldip, well we used to call him Jaldipbhai. Now this person is so much into thing for this noble cause. He was the only person, because of him I am involved a bit in all this activities. So I called him to get the contacts with whom I can talk for the eye donation of my 'Nana'. I know that, wherever in this world, he could be, he will definitely do something to help me. So after the conversation with him, he took the responsibilities & called the respective authority.

In few minutes, he called me back gave me the contact details & then I called them & provide the necessary information about the died person to the Eye Bank Services, Nagri Hospital, Ahmedabad. They confirmed, they would be there in about 30 minutes.

We waited, they came within about 45 minutes as the distance of the place was far a bit from the hospital. A young lady of about my age & another aged lady as an assistance or something were here now. They came inside the room where the body was kept.

As I expected, everybody was trying to get closer to process, which was going to be stared to take the eyes from the body. They asked to go outside the room except both of them & said it would take about 30 minutes to complete the whole process. So now they started with it & we waited for a while.

As they said, they completed the thing in the given time, they took blood samples as well from the hand of a body. They said about the certificate, which will be provided in one & half month of time from the date. They left the place.Again everything got resumed as usual.

So Eye Donation is really done now. I was feeling great. I can say it was my first major involvement in the eye donation. This donated eyes will make two persons new lives. Another good thing was, nobody opposed in this noble cause. Otherwise I have heard, somebody will always be there in against, because of the wrong believes.

Read this nice story, written by Jaldip only. I would like to thanks him & my friends for his support & everything. This is just a beginning for us. I request you people, please come forward for this noble cause.

I feel jealous when someone proudly so say it.. "I'm sitting next to ZCE!", because I am not that much lucky. However I am sitting somewhat nearer to ZCE.

Well, The ZCE is Anil, my friend at my life and my TL at my work place. And the person sitting next to him is Hitesh. Anil became the ZCE last week, its proud for me and the same should be for the PHP cum Web Developers from Gujarat. He is just a second person from Gujarat to be a ZCE, his roommate also achieved the same on the same day. So now we have three Gujju ZCE.

I have seen Anil's hard-work and dedication to become the ZCE from last year. He really deserve it. Nothing more I can say. Congrates Dude...

Congratulations Rahman,
Music maestro A R Rahman has become the first Indian to win an Oscars.
He won the 2 Oscars for music in 'Slumdog Milllionaire'.
First Oscar for 'Best Original Score' - 'Jai Ho..' and second for 'Best Original Song' - 'O saya..' .
After winning Golden Globe and the BAFTA, he was the favoutite to win the Oscar.
Jai Ho....

Have you noticed the hand-postures which I'm talking about ? Is there any different in that from person to person or any fact behind that? Just notice and think about that. How'z your posture look a like? What I guess is, these postures can tell a little bit about a person, don't know whether any survey has been done for this thing so far.

He's my one of the favorite musician. Now he's become the 1st Indian ever to win a Golden Globe Award. He bring the pride for India. He was nominated for the Best Original Music Score for the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

This movie has been emerged as favorite one for the prestigious Oscar. So the next is that only. It won other awards for the Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Motion. Congrats Rahman.. Congrats INDIA.

Its the last day of the year 2008. I m confused, I should be happy or not!
So many things happened for me in the last year. Some of the things from those, I will not get in future.. that's sure. If today one can restart the year 2008, I will be agreed. Doing that I want to enjoy it again, want to fix the mistakes I did in that span of a year. But unfortunately, its not possible.

Today I want to decide, anyhow I will make the year 2009 more enjoyable than the 2008 for me. Bye.. 2008..

Welcome.. 2009. Let me be a part of all happiness you going to give you the world.

Today.. is my day, its my birthday. And I'm happy. The reason is obvious.
But another reason for being happy is the PC release of Grand Theft Auto 4. Yes Its going to be launched on 18th Nov 2008 in North America. I'm waiting for it. Yes, I'm a big fan of the GTA series of games. Now let see in how many days I will get it in India. Cheers.. :)

Congratulations Obama, and America! Obama has been elected the 44th President of the United States. American Dreams will be fulfilled by Obama, dont know very well how, but world is talking like that only.

As I am in IT field, I am interested to know how he will be beneficial to me. Comprehensive immigration reform, including the H1-B visa programme will be a ‘top priority’ of the Barack Obama administration, the Democratic presidential candidate has said. But still the issue of H1-B visas not cleared.

As he said, "I will support a temporary increase in the H-1B visa program as a stopgap measure until we can reform our immigration system comprehensively." He has also talked about creating more jobs for American workers here at home.

Asked about his views on the demand to increase the number of H1-B visas by several US companies including Microsoft, Mr. Obama said he supported comprehensive immigration reform to attract some of the world's most talented people to America.

I'm confused, whether he is beneficial for people like me, who wants to go US for $s.

It took not more than 10 days to decide the shifting the Nano plant from Singur(WB) to Sanand(GJ). All it happened because of a bit effort shown by the CM of Gujarat, Narendra Modi. It was just an SMS.. "Swagatam" by CM to TATA, which leads TATA motors to Gujarat for setup of the Nano car plant.
The Nano project will open the gateway to global invest-ments in manufacturing, engineering and automobile sector, will create about 1500 jobs. Nano is just beginning, will see more business houses following the same.

Congratulations NaMo.. Congratulaitons Gujarat.

Last Monday, Ashok sir took a very good session on 'Effective Time Management'.
One of the key things he explained was about 'Important Urgent Matrix', also called 'The Time Management Matrix'.
Currently I have started categorized my weekly tasks with this matrix.
As per the matrix, Tasks you have decided or assigned can be categorized as urgent or not urgent & important or not important. So we have 4 quadrants.
Now its up to you to choose the perfect quadrant for each task you decided to do.



Few examples for each quadrant.

Quadrant 1: Crises, Projects with short deadline
Quadrant 2: Planning, Recreation, Analysis
Quadrant 3: Interruptions like phone calls, Replying emails, Some meetings
Quadrant 4: Some time-pass mails, Chatting, Watching meaningless TV Shows, In short all the things which wastes your valuable time.

Based on The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) by Stephen R. Covey

Ahmedabad, the economical capital of Gujarat was hit by series of more than 17 bomb blasts on Saturday, Jul 27, 2008.

Few minutes before the blasts.

Around 6:25 pm, Shailesh called me, "What you doing yaar, lets have some snacks, I'm hungry."
"I'm sleeping, let me sleep", I replied on the phone.
"Ok, I will be at your home, after few minutes.", he said.
I told him. "k, fine, come after 10-15 minutes, I'll be ready."

"As I need to fix my spectacles' frame, lets have some snacks, & after that we will go to the the "Drashti chasma ghar", I told him.
He said, "OK".

On the bike, We about to reach 'Karnavalti vada-pau', near the location of first blast and suddenly bike started coughing, Shailesh found that the bike was in reserved. He told me to give some fuel for the bike first. I agreed & he changed the path towards the patrol-pump instead of 'Karnavalti vada-pau'. We went through Lilanagar, the area was normal as usual. Patrol-pump was in totally different direction from the 'Drashti chasma ghar'. I don't know why, but now Shailesh was not in mood to go to the pump. He turned the bike towards Thakkarbapa nagar. As we reached there, the area was crowded with lots of people near 'Kuldevi Tea-stall'. Also more and more people were rushing to the location. But we thought, there might be small issue between some people & they were fighting. So we reached to the shop of spectacles, I gave my spectacles to the person in the shop. Inbetween, people inside the shop were talking about the crowd, they told me, there was a bomb blast there. In just 2 minutes the person fixed my specs & returned me.

Now we were outside the shop, on the main road, everybody talking about the blasts, somebody told us there were blasts near 'Sardar Patel Diamond Market' & in Sarangpur area as well. I called my dad on his cell, but the line was jammed. So I called on land-line phone at my home. I told about the blasts to my mom, as she wasn't aware about the blasts.

We left the bike there only, and started a walk towards the 'Kuldevi Tea-stall' with the people, as road was blocked for the vehicles. We reached the sight of blasts. This was the place, at which me & my friends enjoyed Tea lots of time. But this time, Terrorists enjoyed the blasts over there. Police pulled the people back, so we also had to pulled ourselves back & we left the place. We were eager to know about the other blasts near 'Sardar Patel Diamond Market'. We decided to go over there on the bike. We reached near that, but road was blocked. Now, instead of going anywhere, we decieded to go home. So we had to choose the long path which leads towards our home. At about 7:10 pm we reached the home. At that time news channels were giving news about 5-6 blasts in Ahmedabad.

At the end of the day, figure of blasts reached to 17 and death toll rised to 40.

4 of the total blasts were in Bapunagar area only, In which I live.

Two blasts were outside the main building of 'Sardar Patel Diamond Market', which you will find always crowded with diamond merchants. After the first blast at this location, police found a live bomb & was trying to take the people away from it & suddenly it blasted, but luckily nobody injured.
Other two blasts were near 'Kuldevi Tea-stall'.
Another live bomb was found in Lilanagar, which is a sub-area of Bapunagar, luckily it was defused.
All three locations I mentioned above are just few meters away from my Home. Its like, these locations are on the perimeter of a circle and I live in the center point of that circle.

Not only me, nobody in Ahmedabad can forget this evening.

Here are some differences, I noticed between Bill Gates & Steve Jobs.

Bill Gates	Steve Jobs
He is a PC	He is a Mac
He does rethinking after launching new product	He does inventive thinking, then launch new product.
Always try to add cool features to pathetic old things	Always find new cool things
Presentations
He wears Suit with Tie and well polished shoes or wears Sweater in cold.	He always wears cool black jersey with full sleeves, blue denim jeans and sports shoes
His speech is more vague and filled with abstractions	He's relaxed so the audience is relaxed
His slides contains lot many characters and small images	His slides contain very less no. of characters and bigger images
Uses Blue, Green, Yellow etc. colors in slides.	Uses White and Black & Blue colors mostely
Uses terms like "rich capabilities," "rich fonts," "rich way".	Uses terms like "cool way," "cool features", "amaizing..".
Drinks water in a glass.	He puts the neck of a sports water bottle in his mouth and drinks water
Others
Has a home with lots of Windows	His Home, may be called iHome with no Windows
Has windows explorer, can run on Mac, in which Bill gates can hide himself.	Has a Finder which can find Bill gates as well.

Fun Fridays at Magnet are always great. But this time it was extreme, as the Dance Competition was organized.
Most of us don't know dancing, but we can. The theme was 'Back to 70s', then how we can do it, in damn Couple Dancing?

On the 19th & 20th of January '07 Ahmedabad Magneteers were in Mumbai to attend a wedding of The Chairman of Magnet, Nirav Mehta. Wedding was on 19th.
On 20th we just hanged out there with a bit of planned plan.

Snaps are here..


These are the videos, taken while Steamer Ka Safar started from Gateway of India.

The Crunchies is an internet and technology competition without geographic boundaries. No companies are restricted from consideration. Certain awards have specified criteria (i.e. best unfunded start-up or best start-up launched in 2007) but, otherwise, all companies and products are eligible for consideration based on their business accomplishments made during calendar 2007.

Best Overall: Facebook

Facebook revolutionized the idea of what social networking could be.

Best technology innovation / achievement: Earthmine

Best Clean Tech Startup: Tesla Motors

Tesla’s green sports car has captured the imagination of a public who had come to expect electric cars to be dull are boring. Due to be released this year, the company has pre-orders from some of the biggest names in Entertainment and Technology.

Hulu put television online. Their broadcasting system was modeled on the success of social video sites and drawn the praise of its previous critics.

Digg’s simple voting system defined the emerging social media revolution. Getting “dugg” quickly became a badge of honor and established a coveted place in the geek lexicon.

Twitter, the new addictive microblogging platform. It wasn’t until after the South by Southwest conference that people realized the value of the incredibly simple microblogging platform.

Based in London, Tariq Karim and Freddy Mini’s Netvibes has made waves in the U.S. as a top personalized web portal.

Meebo made instant messaging ubiquitous by bringing it online. They then developed it into a platform where anyone could add chat to their applications.

Zoho’s comprehensive online suite of 14 business applications ranging from document editing to CRM continues to lead the way in the move away from desktop computing to working in the cloud.

SmugMug is professional photo site. SmugMug’s attention to detail and design can command as much as $150 per year from their users.

Best business model: Zazzle

Looking for a Star Wars hat or memorable mug? Zazzle is an on-demand factory of consumer goods for top brands. It also lets consumers become producers by uploading their own images onto that T-shirt, mug, or mousepad. . Consumers can also receive a commission on products that they sell and design themselves

Founded and developed solely by Gabe Rivera, Techmeme serves as the front page of the tech blogosphere. The site’s advanced algorithms identify the day’s top stories by making sense of conversations across the web’s best blogs.

Does this really need any explanation? At 23 Mark has built one of the world’s leading online destinations that has recently been valued at $15 billion. A remarkable achievement for anyone, let alone someone at the still relatively young 23. A well deserved award.

Schnieder has lead the company from its roots as a open source alternative to Movable Type into a multi-million dollar enterprise that saves the world from blog spam and offers a free hosted blogging solution that competes with Google’s Blogger.

iMedix combines search and social networking to change the way people find health information online. Users are encouraged to help each other by sharing health experiences and links from around the web.

The open source blogging platform that powers the long tale and turned into a multi-million dollar spam fighting and hosted blogging service.

StumbleUpon’s service lets users bookmark and discover new sites they love. With only a $1.5 million investment in 2005, StumbleUpon gew to over 4 million Stumblers and was bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million

CEO Jim Greer describes Kongregate as XBox live for casual games. This site hosts some of the webs most addictive casual games. Remember Desktop Tower Defense? Moreover, the games are not only played by users, but also created by them in exchange for a share of advertising revenue and other rewards.

Most likely to make the world a better place: DonorsChose

This is one of the video taken during Sari & Tie wearing game on the Monday Blast 2007 at Magnet.



This video was taken on one of the Fun Fridays we have in Magnet.
Pumping the Balloons..Game