Karthiverse

It’s been a long time pending task, which I was able to start today without any hiccups. Exercising. As they say, stars aligned today perfectly which allowed me to get up early, I mean really early like 4.00 a.m. I then went to Anna University Athletic ground where I met Moraji, KK and Dheepak.

It was so dark that I couldn’t even see others face. We started our exercise session around 5.30 am and finished around 6.30 am. By the end of the day, my whole body was aching, felt really good and awake. Most of the exercises looked simple, but they were the most difficult ones. The ones looked tough to repeat were the easy ones. Some of the exercises was a combination of our old school Jumping Jacks, squats, planks,Yoga steps and push ups. I think I fared well in other exercises but the worst was the push ups. I just didn’t have any strength in my arms to push myself up after 3-4 push ups. But considering this was Day 1, I felt a bit happy that I was able to do this at this level. (Yeah I know this kinda sucks, but anything is better nothing at this stage).

KK was patiently guided us through the various exercises and we were able to do them quite nicely. I really thought that by the middle of the course I am going to crash and stop doing it, but I surprised myself by pushing myself to do the entire set of exercises. At the end it was really an awesome experience. My goal is to be able to keep doing this and get into good physical shape by end of this year.

Here are a few video clips of the various exercises we did during the day. If you also want to start this routine like this, you can try it – I highly recommend it.

How to do a Proper Push Up

How to do a Proper Jumping Jack

How to do a Plank Exercise

I wish all my friends and my readers a very happy and joyful Deepavali. I thought this time Google will be putting up some kind of Doodle in their homepage, but found none. I also checked their Doodle archives and found that prior to or after 2008, there was no doodle from Google for Deepavali or Diwali. Interestingly enough, it was the year when Obama become the 44th President of the United States of America. Could it be just a coincidence? I don’t know. Anyways, here is the doodle from Google for Diwali from the year 2008.

It more looks like Christmas star than Diwali star, doesn't it?

I also started off this Diwali by opening my ‘windows’ and entering a brave new ‘open’ world. I will see how it goes for a month and see if I need to get back in via ‘windows’. Something tells me that I am not going to miss it much. Lets hope I am right.

As usual, the rain played spoil sport by raining down heavily and not allowing me to bust some crackers which I bought last year (yeah I know, but this year I was looking forward to it). Its still raining as I write this post but I hope as evening settles in, I get the chance to bust some crackers.

Yesterday was  a sad day for the entire IT world as it lost one of the greatest visionary and genius – Steve Jobs.

His story has been one of the legends. Steve Jobs started his company Apple when he was 20 years old, after dropping out of college. After making it  success, he got kicked out of his own company. He went on to start another company Pixar and NeXT, which was then bought by Apple. He became the CEO of Apple again and turned the company around in the next five years by revolutionizing music players and cell phones.

There are few people in the world who make such a difference and Steve Jobs I believe was one such person. As a way of remembering Steve, I am hereby posting his inspiring speech about his life to the young graduates of Standford, in 2005.

Today I came across a website called ‘I Write Like…“. This website has an online tool which lets you compare your style of writing with other famous writers of the world. To find out, all you need to do is, copy your latest blog post, article or your unfinished book content (or even a part of it) and paste it inside the tool. It quickly analyzes and tells you whose style of writing you do you resemble.

I Write Like

When I tried mine by copy-pasting my last blog post into this tool, it tells me that I resemble Cory Doctorow. At first, I didn’t know who he was. So I did a little bit of digging in Wikipedia and found that he is a blogger, journalist, science fiction author and co-editor of Boing Boing. Now how awesome am I! .

After the initial excitement, I decided to test the tool whether it is telling the ‘truth’. So I copied my tech blog post about the recent fire sale of HP TouchPad I wrote recently and pasted the content in this tool and analyzed. Guess what? It still shows that my writing resembles Cory Doctorow.

I think this is a great little website which will definitely increase your interest in writing or blogging. I did a little more digging. I wanted to compare this tool with others similar to it. Surprisingly, as far as I have searched the web, there isn’t a tool that even remotely resembles this tool.

There are tools which tells you whether you made grammatical mistakes, or it tells you whether your content is plagiarized or not, but none of the tools compares your style of writing with other authors. So I went back to their website and found that they have based this tool similar to our SPAM detection algorithm found in our GMail or Outlook.

This tool is created by Dmitry Chestnykh, who runs a company called Coding Robots, who make blogging software and dairies for Mac systems. They have also launched the app in Chrome web store.

So if you are curious to find out whom your writing resembles, just head over to their website and test out your writing style.

Today I was invited to attend the re-launch of a non-profit organization called Social Media Club, Chennai Chapter. According to their website, (@socialmediaclub, @SMCChennai) their primary goal is expand digital literacy, promote standard technologies, encourage ethical behavior and share best practices. They meet in Chennai, last Saturday of every month and discuss topics.

Normally, if you know me, I generally do not attend such meetings. This time I took an exception and decided to go and check it out. In addition, my former colleague Mrs. Suganthi, who has started her own marketing firm (Digitalspread, @digispread), was going to make a presentation about ABC’s of Social Media.

It was being conducted at a place called The Startup Center, at Alsa Mall, Egmore (Google Map link). This Startup Center is run by Vijay Anand, along with others, to promote and nurture new startups and create a viable environment for them flourish.

Although I started well before the time, my bike (which I haven’t used it in a year) refused to start. After coaxing it and kicking it, it relented. I came to the place just as Suganthi started her presentation. It was a okay turnout. Out of the 42 guys who signed up, I believe there were a little more than 15. But still guys who were there are interested in the latest buzz ‘social media’ and wanted to learn more.

Suganthi gave an excellent presentation and gave tips about the do’s and don’ts of social media. Next, Mr. K Srinivasan, who is the founder and CEO of Prime Point Publications. He then gave a different view of social media and how it affects our lives. He also gave some interesting stats which I haven’t still seen in the web. For a guy who will reaching 6o soon, seemed immensely knowledgeable and understood the current ‘social media’ craze.

He gave some interesting points to think over and although his talk was somewhat different to the general theme of the day, there were some interesting analogies that could be derived. He also talked about how as marketers and public relations people who act or react to situations. He is also an avid fan of blogging and has posted more than 140 podcasts about various news.

I was there for four full hours. It was a good interaction. I was also able to meet others who had come and wanted to learn more about social media and how to use it for business. Overall, I thought it was a good event and four hours which I spent and learnt something.

I hope I will be able to attend similar such sessions in the future. Below are some photos I managed to take during the event. I forgot to take a video, but hope to do so next time.

Update : Mr. K. Srinivasan has also blogged about this. It also has his presentation and photos taken during the event. Check it out.