Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Came across this in a chain mail...made me smile...hope it makes you too...



I think we stand out because of some of our habits...but I guess most of them are good habits like we like to recycle and reuse stuff...which is good..right! Above all most of the above points also indicate that we are caring people... :-)

Chak De India...:-)

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Monday, October 19, 2009

Reality vs Virtuality

Not really sure if the word 'Virtuality' really exists...but I wanted to blab about Reality vs Virtuality...I have been doing a lot of reading on Social Media stuff over the recent past and I realized that today's world is shifting towards Virtuality and we are slowly losing our ground in Reality...

To cite an example, today we have our profiles scattered all over on the web in the form of LinkedIn profiles, Facebook profiles, MySpace profiles, Twitter Tweets, Second Life personalities...gosh...but are we losing our real self while we are busy building our online self...???

People today are more interested in meeting folks in a virtual chat room or restaurant rather than talking to their neighbor who lives next door! Forget talking, I bet they don't even know who their neighbor is...it might be the same person they are corresponding with online but they will never know!

What is it that makes us all cocooned into our rooms fastened to our mouse...creating virtual personalities? What is it that prevents us from going out and meeting our neighbors or friends? What is it that scares us from doing things in reality which we so easily do in the virtual world?

There may be lot of arguments for 'virtuality' where people may say it is a 'safer' option...but really...Safer??? Is it really safe or are we just scared to put our true self out to the world? To what extent do people's online personalities match their real-life persona? Why all this pretense going on?

Today people blog and have online diaries...while in the good old days a diary was a really personal private property! So have people lost the discretion of what is private and what is not? True the virtual world does give the power to the people to choose what they want out there and what not, but is whatever out there really real ...or just an elaborate fragment of somebody's imagination...

There is a lot of different perspectives from which this topic can argued on, but one thing is definitely true...thanks to virtuality...we have lost touch with reality...no arguments about that!

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Keyword based reading…what’s that again???

You must have all heard about ‘Keyword based Searching’, ‘Keyword based Testing’ etc. ‘Keyword based Reading’ is a new phrase coined by Moi…This is a technique which will help you to read up on stuff and get specialized in a orderly way and also harnesses the power of the Internet as you all know we are not living in the age where we just had to depend on the neighborhood library for our daily dose of knowledge. You can use this technique if you are currently working on building your skill-set for the job market or even if you just want to build up your knowledge in a particular field. This technique uses the power of the Internet to sharpen your skills. It is something which everybody already does but I am just putting it in a package...and this is something which works for me…atleast… J

So the process goes like this. Say you want to learn more about the field of Testing.

So as a first step do a research on the set of all the keywords related to the field...in this case System Testing, Unit Testing, Black-box testing, Functional Testing, Regression Testing...etc. So once you have gathered a good set to start from proceed to the next step. Keep this set at a high level and do not have words which are very specific to a sub-field within…

The next step would be to take each keyword and research on the Internet. So document each keyword and the relevant links associated to each of them. It is always good to have a mix of the below for each keyword:

- General info sites like wikis

- Sites with people who have blogged/discussed on the topics

- Sites with podcasts, videos on topics like Youtube, ...

- Sites with white papers

- Sites with online books (good to have a subscription with sites like 24 X 7, Safari)

As a third step, if you are parts of some networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook you might also get additional information related to these topics like webinars, discussion topics etc. Go ahead and attend and be part of these. You can also post questions at different forums to get answers from the expert community. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds of the topic that interests you.

Also to top-off read off-beat things related to the topic like jokes, cartoons etc...if there are any available

So once you have gathered this information go ahead and read and gather as much information as you can. It would be good to first read at a high level and then go deeper in whichever topic appeals to you.

Then finally to ensure that you remember all that you have read, blog about the main points on your personal blog and share with all. If it is something related to a tool or programming language go ahead and download the free trial of the tool if one is available or start cooking…ahem..I meant coding!

Enjoy building your skill-set!

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Blowing life back into my blog after 2 years... :-) Life can get very busy sometimes... ;-)