Refreshed

On the 2nd, felt much better, refreshed and relaxed than on the 1st. Was a usual day to begin with, was at the office by about 10/10:30 in the morning and was pretty tied up with the release delivery items that were lined up. Had a very productive first half of the day, and the performance reports of our stack were pretty good considering that most of the system testing is now nearing completion.

Second half of the day went through most of my news feeds. Maybe I will write a post one day about all the blogs that I have subscribed too as well. Any case, Dan Caruso on his Bear On Business blog has a post titled Zayo and the Nameless Blog, where he talked about Brady Rafuse who was his colleague at Level 3 communications and Brady's (comparatively) recently setup named my blog. I went across to that blog and I must say it's a pretty good blog and I immediately felt the need to subscribe to it. One article that caught my attention on Brady's blog was "Budget In the Blink of an Eye" where he talks about his liking for books written by Malcolm Gladwell namely 'Outliers', 'The Tipping Point' and the extremely famous 'Blink'. I had heard of all these books but unfortunately never got a chance to read them. Now I think it's time to lay a hand on all three. Now that we are on books, last december i bought and read Lance Armstrongs 'It's Not About the Bike' and I must say it's pretty inspiring. In fact I was so motivated by that book, that I actually decided to take my fitness regimen to another level by adding up bicycle rides to my daily grime of gym work. I plan to bicycle about 20-25 kms/day over the weekends. I have a nice 20-25 kms loop that i can do near to my house. I actually got my bicycle 'Hercules 6 Speed MTB' all serviced again in the month of december and actually went out in the last 2 weeks of December on my cycling escapades. It felt awesome.  btw: currently I haven't been to the gym for the past 2 weeks...and haven't been on my cycle as well, due to the reunion party, christmas vacation and the new year binge. Oh well, i will definitely be getting back to my exercise routine from Monday onwards. Ok so coming back to books, I also have got Nandan Nilekani's 'Imagining India' that I still haven't started to read. I plan to devour that one soon. So now I have 4 books on my plate to read (not necessarily in order, i may actually read them in parallel)

1. Nandan Nilekani's : Imagining India
2. Malcolm Gladwell's: Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers

I need to see where to buy these books from here in Bangalore, most probably I would have to go to Sapna Bookstore in IndiraNagar or Crosswords.

In the evening headed back for home and reached a bit early 8:00 pm IST, since I had to attend a birthday party of my son Arjun's friend Rudraksh, in our apartment complex. It was a more of a family get-together rather than a full-blown party since most of his friends are out on vacation. His parents actually were telling him to postpone the party for the next weekend so he would have more of his friends who could attend, but you know how kids are these days. What they want they ought to get, so the party was held on the day of his birthday. As I said it was more of a dinner get-together with 4 families together. They being Oriya's the dinner was sourced from a local oriya restaurant nearby and I must say the chicken curry was delicious. The birthday cake had 'black spiderman' (Arjun's comment) and was sourced from Just Bake and it was delicious. Had an interesting time, we discussed quite a bit on varied topics. Couple of interesting topics:-

Honda Civic or the Toyota Corolla Altius which one ? This one came up since the hosts have actually booked a Toyota Corolla Altius which they are expecting to be delivered tomorrow. I actually like both the cars, but obviously haven't done an in-depth research on both the cars (don't need to really ;) but essentially am a Honda fan more than a Toyota fan (I had a Honda Civic when in the US from 1999-2002 so you may guess where I maybe more inclined to) but I must say the Toyota corolla altius does seem a neat package considering the features that are thrown in. I may actually spend time doing a comparison of these sometime. One more item on my plate.

Mobile Telephony in India and it's penetration into rural India ? This topic came about with another gentleman from our apartment complex (strangely enough never got to know his name) whom I met at the dinner. It was interesting discussion where we discussed the current pitfalls (low bandwidth, hey but there's 3G coming, but hey are there enough subscribers for these services) In India, I think most of the telecom subscribers use the basic services (ie voice and SMS). There really isn't a large penetration in VoiceSMS, GPRS, Internet etc, yes there is a growing demand for these services and they will eventually definitely start, but for that in my view they need to be made further affordable. With higher bandwidth becoming a possibility operators would need to focus on keeping the costs down as well for increased market penetration. We also discussed a bit about how Femto is set to hit big time in Europe, discussed if the Femto concept would work in a country like India. In my view, it's difficult since there are not that many broadband subscribers/users in India, so a Femto concept may not see great deal of success in India as in Europe where there is an already existing heavy base of broadband users.

Overall, it was an interesting day, a day that gave me some items to add to my wish-list for the year.

Cheers,
YVR