Chennai Book Fair

Visited Chennai Book fair after couple of years. Amazed with the amount of books that were kept on display. It will confuse anyone if they are not clear on what they want to purchase. They also offer 10% discount on almost all the books. But I felt the versatility of these books are very limited. Broadly most of these books can be classified in to these categories :

- Self improvement

- Biography

- Kids related (Learning CDs, books, Rhymes, Drawing)

- Cooking recipes

- Spiritual

- Novels and short story collections in Tamil

Also, most of the books were in Tamil and there were lot of redundancy across shops. There were totally 600 stalls of which only 40 to 50 would be worth visiting and if you are not looking for books/CDs for your kid, then there may be only half of them which will have something interesting for you.

Please keep this in mind :

- Roughly know the kind of book that you want to buy. Do some research in Google around some of the books that are published in the year and their reviews.

- Have a clear budget in mind (Otherwise, you will spend more than you intend to and may not have money to purchase other interesting books you may find in later stalls).

- If you want to buy something in general in some area (Lets say some kid related book), do not buy it in the first shop.

- Have sufficient time. Make note of books that you intend to purchase in the first round and note down the shop number. Once you finalize the books you want to purchase, then go ahead and purchase it.

- If you are planning to buy lot of books, do not get the delivery immediately. You can ask them to keep the books in the shop itself and collect it while you are leaving.

- Most of the shops does not accept credit card. Show carry sufficient cash with you.

- Also, attend the speech given by eminent personalities around 6 PM. It is very educative, entertaining and refreshing.

Even if you are not planning to buy any books, attending and seeing the display of books itself is a totally different experience.

More details about the book fair :

Date : 30th Dec 2009 to 10th Jan 2010

Working Days : 2:30 pm to 8:30 pm

Holidays : 11:00 am to 8:30 pm

Venue : St.George Anglo Indian School,(opp to Pachayappan college)

Poonamalee High Road,

Aminjikarai, Chennai - 30.

Happy Reading!

Job Openings in Globalscholar

GlobalScholar is looking for Senior Software Engineers and Technical Architects.

GlobalScholar is a cutting edge technology company which forms a part of Knowledge Universe (KU), a privately held 5.5 billion USD conglomerate consisting of 50+ companies and growing.

At GlobalScholar, We are developing the most comprehensive education solution using best of the breed technologies on a world-class platform built by the best and the brightest. A career at GlobalScholar India is about being excited every day about your role, your team and the company. We believe we will play a role in the changing the world – and we are “proud of it”. At GlobalScholar you will interact with smart, passionate, committed people who thrive on each other’s energies and ideas, and challenge each other to make the 'impossible' into 'eminently feasible'.

Why GlobalScholar?

How many times would you have cribbed when you had your education, that things could be much better? For once, you have got a chance to be the change you were envisioning. There is so much still to be done, so many hard problems to solve in the education space. We would like you to join our young and enthusiastic team and make history.

At GlobalScholar we try to solve some complex but exciting problems using latest technology. May it be delivering interactive content over satellite or developing robust web services or scaling up an interactive collaboration tool, you serve the millions of users get access to high quality education.

The teams you will be working for will comprise of outstanding software engineers, business analysts, product visionaries and thought leaders from some of the top names in the software industry and the most recognized universities.

GS is looking for Senior Software Engineers and Technical Architects with strong technical and analytical capabilities to deliver challenging new product initiatives.

If you have,

* BE/ME/MS in Computer Science or related field
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*

Talk to us to be a part of the next wave ! At GlobalScholar, we love technology and we would like you to take it to the next level. GlobalScholar offers a very fast career path for the super stars who want to scale up in no time.

Please mail me at tomanikandan@gmail.com if you are interested to join the league :)

Inside Searchcamp.in

Last weekend, I attended Searchcamp.in conference in Tidel park, Chennai along with Sudaakeran. Having wasted the last 2-3 weekends, I was initially planning for a trek with my colleagues but that did not materialize and hence ended up in the conference. Though I got very basic knowledge of how Search Engine works and how people try to do SEO based on my day to day work @Globalscholar, I never got chance to know about it in detail. Because of my lack of interest, I just did implementation without understanding the details in depth.

Searchcamp.in was a great eye opener for me to understand the scope of things that are covered in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). I never thought people spend so much time on SEM as well. I was always of the opinion that people need to spend lot of time and energy to get higher ranking in search engine and that’s what matters. The kind of research people do for SEM, regarding the key words, bounce rate, conversion and other analytics gave a different perspective.

 Also, there were number of companies that were floated and thriving on this alone. The Search Camp community has people from varied background - Hardcore technologist to Pure marketing personnel to media managers to content creators to local businesses. This shows that it is not purely technical and involves lot of methodical planning and creativity to get good ranking in search engines. 

 Some of the trivias :

• Search engine considers how long for the future the domain is purchased
  
• Number of Subdomains affect the ranking as well.
  
• Tag clouds help in improving the ranking.
  
• Web page loading time and usability affects the ranking.
  
• URL Cannibilization  - Duplicate contents from the same domain fighting for the ranking.
  

Good Things :

• Collaborative. Discussion was given importance which made knowledge sharing easy.
  
• Ample space for networking
  
• Diverse gang. Got input from various angles. Business team to content creators to SEO experts to Developers.
  
• High energy shown by people like Kiruba Shankar and Adam Lasnik.
  
• Again thanks to Kiruba, very friendly atmosphere and small games.
  

 Things that could have been done better :

• Very high level introduction of SEO for newbie’s on the first day. This was scheduled for second day but did not happen.
  
• 60% of the speakers were really good and had good knowledge about their talks. Rest of them were not so authoritative and were struggling to answer. They were also just reading from the presentation without adding any useful points.
  
• Technical glitches around Stephen Spencer. This one was really a bad experience because his talk gave lot of important points and things to do research. Thanks to Webex or the wifi network, presentations were not streamed properly. Little bit of work beforehand would have saved this.
  
• Audio quality. Mics were getting disfunctional now and then, which made concentration lot difficult.
  

Overall, Thanks to Searchcamp.in for giving me a chance to learn. It sowed me the seed to learn more things about SEO and I am defly going to try out new things with it and keep you guys posted. This is the first step. :-)

Back 2 Blogging

Ppl, I am going to start blogging again very soon. Going to start with a conference I attended last weekend. Keep watching the space.

Things to do before attending a technical conference

Hello all,

Back after a lonnnnnnnnnggggggg time... I am in Riva del garda, Italy now..Came here last sunday and staying here till friday. Going to Paris on saturday and returning to sweet Bangalore on sunday.

I came here for a conference on Artificial Intelligence. Wanted to tell some points which will be of useful to ppl who go for conference.

1. First and foremost. Check for the power/switch type of the country you going. I came here without knowing the switch type and had real trouble finding a adapter that works. It is really difficult to search for something without knowing the local language.
2. Check about the internet connection in your hotel. Yeah. All hotels say they have internet connection. But check explicitly whether they have broadband internet connection in all rooms. I checked in to the hotel and asked for internet connection. They said it is there in the room. They were mentioning only about the Dial up connection all the time. That too they expect you to have a dial up connection that works in Italy. :( Hence make sure that the hotel has a working broadband internet connection before making the reservation.
3. Check what are the things that are covered in your Hotel tarriff. This will help you in spending unnecessary money. Most hotels here provide u with complimentary breakfast and in some they give dinner also. Hence make sure that you know of this and utilize it to reduce the overall expenses. (That too if the company is not paying for your food. :-))
4. Try to get to the airport nearest to your destination. My travel agent booked me to Venice which is like 4 hours drive from here. There is a closer airport at 2 hours distance which obviously my travel agents system did not tell. Also, make sure that you know about your train/bus timings. I had to wait for 1-2 hours at 2-3 places. Hence make sure that you are landing in to the nearest airport and you know the route you going to take along with all the timings.
5. Check how the calling card works. The first thing you may want to do is call ur home and tell tht u r safe... Hence make sure that you buy a calling card in the airport or online..Check with someone who already lived in the country to know more about other communication.Don't rely on the Airtel calling card selling guy who tells 60 minutes calling time for anywhere to India. Though in reality, it may be much less.
6. As my friend Aravind pointed out, have a book which lists some basic question in English and local language. Though you don't have to learn it, you can point out to ppl and get it answered in directions. Yeah..Not an easy way..But I believe most of them doesn't talk English. 80% of the ppl I talked here can't speak/understand English.
7. If you are going for some presentation, make sure that you have a headstart so that you spend time looking for other things in the country and not spend time in the presentation.
8. If you have wireless router, bring it along with you so that you can connect to some common network access and share it with others.
9. Try not to reach your destination on sunday evening. This is the time where almost everything is closed and you will have difficult time to get anything you want.
10. Look for the map of the area. It will be really helpful to move around.

Hope this helps! Feel free to add things in comments that I missed.
Mani.

Austin Downtown - May 14th 2006

First day in Austin started pretty early. Got up at 6 o'clock..Yeah..you have to believe me..I become a early bird ;) Didn't find anything interesting to do...Browsing online till other folks are awake. At 8:30 or sthing got ready and started pestering my friends to get up :-) Yeah..You guessed it. They are not early bird like me. Had breakfast in the hotel itself and decided to go to Mount Bonnell and Austin Downtown...Went to Sibi's place on the way to see if he is free to join us. As usual, Sibi was pretty busy going through Orkut to add more friends :-) and hence we went ahead with out him.

The good thing is it was cloudy and was a nice time to go out. But the bad thing is we missed the way to Mount Bonnell..Google directions may be right but we missed couple of exits and took a wrong turn at couple of places...We decided to skip Mount Bonnell and go to Down town directly. Went around the place at least 7 times to find a place to park the car...We see sign boards for visitor's parking but if we take it nothing will be there...Somehow managed to parked the car in the visitor's parking area and went to "The Capitol". It was really a beautiful place surrounded by lush green lawns and trees. There was not much crowd inside the building...The building is wonderfully constructed. In the centre of a hall the acousitic is set such that if you talk something, it echoes and heard loudly. It was really cool piece of engineering... The place is magnificient with respect to the architecture and the maintenance. No restriction on places and we were free to move almost every part of the building. I liked this a lot.

Then just walked down the downtown lane... Not many skyskrappers...It is more or less like our Mount road...Buildings are only 14-15 floors max. Didn't give me the feeling that I am in US downtown. :-) Nevertheless, it was good. Again, I liked the calm nature of the place very much.

We came back to the hotel. Prepared a quick lunch and had it. It started raining heavily. Our plan was to start to Mount Bonnell after lunch but because of the rain we were thinking about cancelling it. Then, decided to take this as adventure and started to Mount Bonnell...Find the place without much hassle this time. Its such a beautiful place...weather is chill with light drizzle..The mount is overlooking a very big lake Travis(It should be rather consider as river..It is very big). I didn't want to come out of the place but my friends pulled me with them because of the rain.

Went to Sibi's place from there and played cricket in a Tennis ground. It was cool. It was bright till 8:15 PM Austin time..Hence played cricket for long time and then had a sumptuous dinner at Sibi's place. Thanks Sibi for that wonderful dinner. Went back to hotel and slept early. Gr8 start for my US trip.

Bangalore to Austin

Warning : It is going to be a lengthy one..

Its been quite a while since I wrote blogs...Its very strange..But not many things were happening...But I am in new place now..Every day some thing or other is different..Hence thought it is gud time to restart again..(Thanks Aravind for suggesting this).

I am in US now. Came on May 13th (Saturday)... Let me start telling the details from Bangalore to Austin...(I hope its not like the comedy film Chennai to Pondicherry :-))

My iteneary to Austin is a bit of the mess...I don't know wht my travel agent had in mind or wht I did to him... He really made us took a detour... From Bangalore to Delhi to Amsterdam to Minneapolis to Austin.. huh

Started from Bangalore on May 12th evening around 4ish from my place... My parents came to Bangalore on friday morning to send me off..(Thollai theernthuthunu nenachanga pola!!!) Luckily (Is it really luck?) I have Raj (My Trilogy colleague) also coming with me to US.


Reached airport 1 and half hours before..(Thats punctual..Learn it from me guys)... My parents were there...Hence just chitchatting with them for some time...Went inside the security check...painless... I had seen Bangalore airport fill of ppl..I waited for almost 2 hours in the queue for security check. Hence I was happy to see that there was very little crowd and no big queue...They had remodelled the airport properly to get little extra space...This is cool...

Get in to the airport well before time. Flight started a bit late for some traffic reasons...(Some useful bit of information from our pilot...In india distance between 2 flights while take off is 6 Nautical miles but in other nation it is usually 1 nautical mile). Had dinner(Is it really a dinner or snacks.. :-)). Reached the Delhi domestic airport. Took the internal transit bus to International airport.The fun time starts here. Our flight is at 1 PM. We reached the international airport only around 12 and there was a big crowd ahead of us. We ran for our baggage security check. Checked in just before they closed the check in counter. Completed the immigration check..There was a big queue for security check ahead of us... Thanks to some airline staff he moved us from the end to somewht closer to the beginning of the queue(Thats why you should go late always!!!)

Completed the security check and entered the flight by 1:30...The flight was packed. I had a window seat and Raj was next to me. Around 2 the flight started...We had a individual TV/Video. Started watching the movie "My best friend's wedding". They served some food. Ate it..and started watching the movie again. Had breakfast after some time and slept at around 6 or 7 in our time (Changing my body time for US to prevent Jet lag :-))

Got up on reaching Amsterdam. Local time was around 4:30 in the morning. But it was bright outside.. It was such a lovely, beautiful place...The place is very green...Bad that we didn't get a chance to go out from that place. Our next flight was in next 4 hours or so...Freshen up..Went around the airport...There were very few ppl in the airport...May be its too early...All the shops were open..But nothing interesting to buy..(yeah...u r right..all r expensive). Was really tired..less than 2 hours of sleep..Went to the departure gate and tried to slept there for half an hour and then they called for security and disturbed my sleep...

Security check there was funny...Raj and me went together and they asked lots of questions...

Security : Where are you coming from?

We : Delhi..But actually coming from Bangalore

Security : How long do you know each other?

We : 4 years..Working together

Security : How are you related?

We : friends

Security : Let me ask you some questions now!!! (Aren't the above statements ??? ) How many luggages you checked in?

we : totally 3...

Security : Whom did it belong to?

Raj: one is mine and the other two are Mani's

Security : Did you accept any closed packages or anything at all from any one?

We : NO

Security : Did you keep your luggage unattended?

We : No

Security : How did you come to the airport?

We : taxi

Security : Do you carry a laptop?

We : Yes.

Security : Whose laptop is that?

We : Our company laptop

Security : How long are you using it?

We : 1 year.

Security : Anyone else use the laptop other than you?

We : NO

Ahh!!! Then he went and talked with some one else and then asked us to enter the airport..He is asking more or less the same questions to everyone I guess...I don't whats the point or what information he gets out of it.

Entered the flight...Started sleeping immediately...Had something brunch or lunch or dinner..Lost track of it...Got up some time and started watching some humor movies...Reached Minneapolis half an hour before the time...There was some queue in the immigration check..The security guy asked me to show my passport and the other documents..He asked me whether is it a Blanket L1..Yeah dude!!! can't you read from the passport. Asked me to go to some other room. Waited for some 10-15 minutes there and then he got the same set of documents from me..He asked for one document which I don't have a duplicate...I asked him to make a duplicate and give it to me...The xerox machine didn't work...Atlast he made a duplicate and gave it to me..Then his computer didn't work to make the stamping..(C'mon guys!!! provide better systems in the immigration pls)...Came out..My baggage was there...No body else was there in that area. Only couple of FBI guys. They asked to put the luggage in the scanner. They wanted to open the luggage..I did..They started examining all the stuffs...In a minute or 2, they cut open all packets...Then they said you are good to go... Don't know wht they checked in tht 2 minutes..Except gave trouble for me to pack things again...

Came out and put my luggage for my flight to Austin...Raj was missing from the scene... Took a leisure walk out to my next departure gate. Saw Raj on the way...He was bit confused about where I went. We have to wait for more than 5 hours for our next flight to Austin...While waiting there, they changed the departure gate. But minneapolis is a beautiful place...It was raining lightly outside...Beautiful scene to watch...(Going to Minneapolis again on Memorial day...Hoping to catch up some place there!!!)


Flight to Austin was prettie okie...Determined not to sleep to avoid jet lag. Reached Austin and took a cab to the hotel...Checked in... My other colleague Senthil was there already... Was very hungry and very sleepy...Prepared food in no time..Had good food. Went out to meet Sibi along with Senthil and Raj...Sibi was not there..Came back and slept around 9 PM CST. Good sleep. Got up at 2 AM in the morning...Wholly crap...I don't want to go thru the jetlag...Wanted to desperately catch sleep...Again went to sleep at 2:30 AM..Not bad I guess...Wake up at 6 AM and was going through mails and those stuffs....

Pretty good...First look of the US

1. People are really friendly.
2. Very neat place.
3. Roads are broad.
4. Surrounded by beautiful nature.

Things that are different from expected
1. sky skrappers. I thought the whole of US is full of skyskrappers...But it was missing.


More to come :

Trip to Downtown Austin
First day in the office
Bay area
Napa valley