The Roads Less Travelled …

Installed Flock 0.7 (beta) version in my attempts to find the perfect browser for my tastes.

The wysiwyg editor for blogging definitely looks cooler than the performancing plugin on firefox, and the flickr toolbar on top is nice. The news reader is good; a funkier version of Sage perhaps. But so far the bookmarking tools have left a lot to be desired.

Overall the beta release is a much more polished version than the numerous developer previews that I installed earlier.

Will prolly post a detailed review after using this for some more time.

update 1: I really disappointed with the application’s ability to work with exisiting posts. Does not allow me to edit posts that I had created earlier :(. Also everytime I edit a post it takes a long time to retrieve it from my blog. Wonder why they do not hold a local cached copy of the blog in the HDD. If wordpress could import my entire blogspot blog this should not be too difficult.

update 2: The snippet bar in the bottom of the page is sheer brilliance. Something that I was hoping someone would do for a long time. You can drag photos and text snippets both into it, save them and reuse them in blog posts and other places. Amazing!!! Though I have not used this feature extensively, I am hoping that there is some kind ordering/tagging mechanism in place because these snippet holders soon become too cluttered to do any proper work with.

update 3: The flickr uploader is also slick though has not yet offered anything out of the ordinary from the numerous uploaders existing all over the web.

Blogged with Flock

This blog has not been updated in quite a long time, and though it can be justified on the workload at IIMA it just tells half of the story. More important is fact that I get very little time to devote to things that I normally blog about; books, movies and football.

However, that’s not to say that life is uninteresting in IIMA. On one side there is the famed course load of the first term (cases, quizzes and assignments) that stretches your mental limits to the extent you never thought existed. For me there are also the rigors of coming back to the student life itself; the uncertainty, learning new things everyday, new people. In addition, there is the competitiveness with 280 students slugging it out on every quiz. After almost 2 months, infinite quizzes (yes, I have actually lost count), 3 WAC reports and a
mid-term here, I am fairly certain I have stabilized in my current environs. Most classes actually seem to be interesting with the case study method allowing for a greater degree of class participation than ever in my educational career.

Then there are the extra-curricular activities. There is a fair concentration of quizzing enthusiasts in this place and we manage to meet up regularly; meaning I am back to one of first loves. And junta regularly plays soccer. In addition, I have in the past 2 months managed to catch a few movies too; Lucia y el Sexo, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Touch of Evil and The Talented Mr. Ripley are some of the good ones I have seen. With the premier league well underway, I saw my first Manchester United match of the season yesterday and have generally kept track of the football happenings. Hopefully will blog about my views on the various comings and goings once the transfer window is closed.

Having left my entire collection of books back in Bangalore (a situation I am rectifying in the term break), I frankly do not have anything outrageously interesting to read. Just finished reading The Goal, which was a recommended reading in the Operations course. Though I cannot really rave about the literary merits of the book, I have to say that it presents a new way of teaching basic concepts. Almost a textbook in terms of the material it deals with, it can pass off as a novel, though how interesting terms like throughput and bottlenecks are to normal users I do not know.