Monday, December 18, 2006

BarCamp3 @ Hyderabad

BarCampHyderabad3 is in the third in the series of Barcamps being organized in Hyderabad. This time, it’s about Web 2.0 communities, and organized at the Infosys campus.

Starting with Bharat and DD Ganguly from DimDim, there were many speakers this time compared to the previous one, but mostly are duos from the same company – Jay Pullur and Ramesh from Pramati, Kapil and Vishnu from Slideshare, Brijesh and Jaiganesh from Infosys, and Ashish and Vignesh from my employer, Cordys.

The theme of this bar camp was, in my opinion, debate! Yes, there were debates almost for every presentation right from the beginning. The initial one (kick-off by Ramesh Loganathan) was itself delayed by about 40 minutes with many talks and questions in between. Bharat started his presentation on DimDim but never completed it, and was taken over by DimDim’s CEO DD Ganguly. The most argued one was Jay Pullur’s session on rich web-desktop, which took more than an hour to recede.

The one with least questions might be Janakiraman (on MSN Live Bots - a re-telecast from DEVCON 2006), which is mainly because we were busy laughing on the Bollywood BOT and its cute answers :-)

The most techie stuff was a presentation by Vishnu on Java-Ruby and the most interesting was Ashish’s presentation on Web 2.0 People. His presentation is completely non-technical and mind boggling. I didn’t see the presentation when he prepared it, waiting for a surprise and I got it as I wanted :-)

The grand finale was by Vignesh, whose presentation was one of the very best I’ve seen in recent times. It was so good that the discussion still continued even after the presentation was over! We almost felt its yet another “Cordys Day” :-)

For someone who attended BarCamp2, this must be a disappointing experience, for there are no sponsors, no freebies and no T-shirts.

But leaving the rest, there was at least some good memories of visiting a nice campus (Infosys), a couple of T-Shirts from Slideshare and some good questions to ponder, triggered by Ashish :-)

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Why Third Monkey?

So, why did I name it the third-monkey? Because “third monkey” was taken by someone already! :-)

Well, seriously there is no specific reason for that. Instead of the traditional name blogs and blogs with no reasonable names, I thought something different is good for a start!

But, again, why third monkey? There is this famous joke about “monkeys in a tree”. There are many corny versions of it, but the one that was the most popular is this:

Q: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?

A: Because he was dead.

Q: Why did the second monkey fall out of the tree?

A: Because he was stapled to the first monkey!

Q: Why did the third monkey fall out of the tree?

A: Peer pressure!!

It suited well, so I took the name :-)

The many other versions can be googled, but I found this the funniest:

Why did the first monkey fall out of the tree?
It died.

Why did the second monkey fall out of the tree?
It forgot to let go of the first monkey.

Why did the third monkey fall out of the tree?
Monkey see, monkey do.

Why did the fourth monkey fall out of the tree?
Peer pressure.

Why did the tree fall down?
Because it thought it was a monkey.

Why did the boy fall off his bike?
He was hit by four falling monkeys and a tree.

Have fun!

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Surprise!

If not for my first blog on DEVCON 2006 (too good story to miss the blog space), this could have been my first webblog!

Yes, it’s truly surprising to see myself start blogging. Originally created on June 30th, 2006 and after being inactive for a long time (6 months???), I decided it would be worth the wait, so let me get started!

I would like to post articles in this blog about anything and everything, which might mean like Work, People, Strategy, Knowledge, Learning, Growth, Innovation, Music, Fun, Experiences...Confused? Then let it be :-)

I've read somewhere about blogging which said:

The fastest way to understand blogging is to try it out the phenomenon that's transforming web and media to a participatory activity.

What will happen if you start participating? Who knows...it might be fun though :-)

A Disclaimer - The content of this blog is heavily dependent on my mood swings!