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Hi-Tech traffic ticket

Last weekend I had some work in a bank and parked my car just outside the bank. It was a service road and generally cars are parked on the service road in Bangalore. After finishing my work in the bank and coming back to the car, I saw a parking ticket  on the windshield of my car. It was supposed to be No Parking area but as always, there was no sign mentioning it. The cop who gave the ticket was still there and on the ticket it was mentioned that I have to pay Rs. 100 fine within 24 hours. So, went to him to ask where to pay and he said I can pay it to him.

He then took out his blackberry 😯 , entered all my details and then took a print out of the receipt from the mini printer 😯 he had in his hand. The whole process took just some 3 mins or so and no bribes nothing. The money would go straight to state exchequer and not into his pocket. Though I heard sometime back about traffic police using blackberry’s in Bangalore, never got a chance to see it for myself. Was really surprised (and also a bit happy inspite of getting the ticket 🙂 ) to see how hi-tech our Bangalore traffic police have become.

I hope they would show the same amount of seriousness in managing the traffic as well 😛 .

An update (10 sep 2010) – Got another one this morning in a similar way 🙁 . Need to be more careful now.

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BCB9 is around the corner

Barcamp Bangalore is back again after a long gap. I am thinking of attending it this time but depends on the actual date and venue. Though I never presented anything in barcamps, I at least get to know what is going on with the start-ups in Bangalore and pick-up a few new technical things. Looking forward to attending BCB9. More to come later….

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Viral Loop

Just finished the book viral loop by Adam Penenberg. It was a good read and gave a good insight into how most of the companies based on viral growth have succeeded along with details of companies that failed to grow virally. This concept of viral growth and viral factor in a business was something new to me. Though I knew about almost all of the companies (and ofcourse their core business) that the author mentions about, this book gives a new perspective of looking at them. Starting from the days of Tupperware to Facebook, each chapter discusses about the different viral growth companies that came up and how they succeeded or failed. Along with viral factor in a business, the author also talks about how scalability becomes an issue in such businesses and how few of the companies could not survive as they could not handle the scalability issues. Also in a chapter or two, he discusses about the trade-off between the high viral factor and scalable architecture of the business.

On the whole, this is a good read for anyone who would like to know about how all the online businesses and social networks we have now started and are surviving. As a person with keen interest in reading about companies, mergers & acquisitions, start-ups, etc., its a real good addition to my library.

Now slowly I am moving towards slightly different set of books and to begin with, just started reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Came across this book after reading a post by gibberer 🙂 and then also there was a mention about this book in viral loop. I now have a long list of books to read of which some are related to history as well.

Digressing from the topic, I had my first bad experience with macbook pro yesterday 🙁 . I had to do a hard shutdown after it stopped responding 🙁 . Never expected that I would get to see this on my mac so soon……was just watching a movie in vlc and nothing else was running but somehow it decided to freeze. Actually whenever I  run vlc, I see some issue with the video being not clear sometimes or getting stuck for few seconds. Will observe it for few more days and see what could be going wrong…could be an issue with the vlc player for mac as well and not an actual issue with mac itself 🙂 …..yes I do love apple products 😀 .

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Rakesh turns 26

Rakesh/raki/rocky…..turns 26 today 🙂 . Another year older and when I look back at the 25th year, it has been one of the most eventful years in my life.  There have been many developments both in my personal and work life. But today what made me to actually make this post is not those events but this feeling of mine when I got up this morning……..I was still not completely awake and I heard some activity going on in the kitchen already. It’s my mom in the kitchen who started off with her daily chores. Its been 26 years today and every day….every single day, she has been there for us irrespective of how she was.

I still faintly remember how she used to walk me to my school bus stop when I was a kid….of course I also remember how she used to beat me when I refused to go to school 😀 . She gave up her own career so that I can have a good future. Its been 5 years since I left Hyderabad….2 years in IIT and 3 years in bangalore, I was having fun but back in Hyderabad she was always thinking about me. Even now when I go to home, she says its better not to come as she doesn’t like it when I go back to bangalore.

So, this birthday its to my mom because of whom I am what I am today. All I can say is thank you mom 🙂 .