Monthly Archives: July 2007

Barcamp Bangalore 4 – Day 2

On July 30, 2007 by Anant With 3 Comments - Blogging, Internet, Rants, Thoughts, Yours Truly

It’s a bit late but I’ll still give my take on day 2.

Frankly, I was disappointed by Day 2. The sessions started off late as it did on Saturday but that was okay I guess. During the introduction, a lot of speakers came forward to announce what they would be talking about and frankly, I thought that it exceeded the possible time constraints as well as the space constraints. But well if it could happen, good for everyone.

The bloggers collective as expected (by me) had a large number of talks. I was skeptical about accommodating so many talks partly because the collective tended to not fragment into those interested in particular topics and not others (As in, if 2 speakers wanted to talk about different topics at the same time, they could not so that the audience does not get split). I was supposed to give a talk on micro-blogging as well.

However, once the talks started, things started getting messy because the talks would overflow and not all the talks had been alloted a time slot (including mine)  I did listen to a couple of nice talks like moblogging, securing your images from being downloaded. I tried to attend a talk on Semantic web and moving towards an Internet with all data related semantically. But unfortunately I reached late so missed a significant bit of the talk.

The highlight of the day for me was a very nice discussion on bloggers getting a chance to have their posts published in the print medium to reach a wider audience. And another nice discussion with Arun Ram during lunch(it ranged from phone comparisons to egos of popular bloggers, Techcrunch, Robert Scobel etc)

Anyway, overall I felt that day 2 was fairly underwhelming for me.

Ps. The campus at IIM is gorgeous :)

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Barcamp Bangalore 4 – Day 1

On July 28, 2007 by Anant With 3 Comments - Blogging, Desicritics, Internet, Yours Truly

I attended my first BarCamp today held in Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.
It was scheduled to start at 9 AM but I overslept and reached there only by 10. But as IST (Indian Stretchable time) goes, I wasn’t late and the registrations and the introduction session was still going on. So I did not miss much :D

I wanted to be a part mainly of the Bloggers collective and the Photo(graphers) Collective, hoping to learn, mostly in the latter and more to give a talk in the former. The bloggers collective started of fairly decently but was delayed as people trickled in fairly slowly and almost everyone had a problem getting the WiFi to work on their laptops.

But once that was done, the first talk on Podcasting took place. I was not interested much in that so I went around helping people configure their laptops to connect to the WLan.

The next talk by Kishore Krishna (aka Kpowerinfinity) was on Widgets but due to some conflicts, it was delayed. So my talk on Blogging Platforms and setting up your own blog was advanced and his postponed to after mine.

My talk started on a fairly positive note with lot of discussion and interaction but once I got on to the setting up a self hosted blog using wordpress, people lost track. The topic got far too technical for most of them so I decided to stop and instead move that to a demo after the talk for those who were interested by making it more basic and easy to follow(the demo did not happen eventually)

After my talk, I moved out from the bloggers collective to check out the other collective. I entered the Internet collective where a talk on MS Silverlight was just about to start. Not much interest there so I moved on to the Startups collective. That was in the fag end with the speak just starting to take questions so I left there too and went back to the bloggers collective. Kishore’s talk was just about over when I reached there and soon we all went for lunch.

Immediately after lunch, the bloggers collective seemed to have disappeared with only a few visible from the earlier 40-50. So I held a discussion on micro-blogging (Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku) with a few of the interested attendees. After that, I discussed the various blogging platforms and what would be a good choice for a non-techie beginner blogger and set up an Livejournal account for her.

That was the end of all blogging topics as the photography collective was having it’s first (and only meet for the day) where a lot of discussion went on and Amoghavarsha and Jace and few others. Learnt lots of basic tips and got a lot of information.

There was a band jam happening later in the evening but having tired myself out earlier, I decided to skip that. Day two of the un-conference is tomorrow. Watch for a report about it tomorrow.

Oh and I got a chance to meet Aaman and Deepti Lamba, the chief editors of Desicritics. That was really great. We discussed the upcoming changes to DC, the current happenings and how it is really growing as a community. That was really great.

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Barcamp Bangalore 4 – Live Blogging

On July 28, 2007 by Anant With 1 Comments - Blogging, Yours Truly

Blogging live from Barcamp in the bloggers. I gave a talk on Blogging platforms which I’m not sure how successful it was because I think I went fairly technical while the crowd was mainly non-tech.

The next talk is by Kpowerinfinity on widgets (technorati, flickr, desktop widgets etc)

I’ll be flitting around to various talks to blog about other talks.

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Oh shit!

On July 23, 2007 by Anant With 6 Comments - Life, Randomness, Thoughts, Yours Truly

I’m so screwed.. This is a shock to me.. Can’t believe this is happening..

Okay, this was exceptionally humorous and surreal.

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Bangalore Bloggers Meet

On July 22, 2007 by Anant With 20 Comments - Blogging

The Bangalore Bloggers Meet happened. And it ROCKED. More than 40 bloggers from Bangalore, Mumbai and two from Germany (who are in Bangalore) as well as a couple of non-bloggers (journalists, short-film makers) gathered in Brew HaHa and had a blast.

For the first half an hour or so, everyone introduced themselves. And the sheer variety was impressive in itself. Once the intros were done, we ordered coffees from a good selection of delicious menu and got on with discussions on various topics.

The first point on the agenda was to decide the agenda for the Barcamp later this month. A lot of topics for discussion were decided upon during which your’s truly volunteered to give a talk on various blog platforms, and how to start up on blogging.

Then someone (with deep apologies because I forget the name RK) gave a talk on micro-financing blogging(something which was not of my interest) while demoed Pownce to a few people. Then people discussed starting a campaign for social awareness. Lastly, just before we broke up, I floated an idea to start a site for Bangalore Bloggers where bloggers from Bangalore would contribute articles, as well as aggregated contents from all contributors would be available for reading (a la livejournal friends page)

The meeting went about an hour or so more than scheduled but I am sure no one was complaining. After the break up, some of us went down to purple haze for beer where Sanjukta ended up getting high and Snigdha wanting to dance but for the lack of a dance floor :D

Oh and it was Sridhar’s birthday so he got “pseudo” birthday bumps ;)

Pics from the meet:

DSC02307 DSC02311 DSC02310 DSC02308 DSC02311

More pics from the meet at Blogaloreans

Others bloggers who covered the meet”

Prashanth, Neha, Adheeth, Jerry, Kpowerinfinity (Sorry I don’t remember your name :( ), Sridhar, Bikram

Edit: Updated Adheeth’s name

Edit: Corrected RK’s talk topic and update with his name. My apologies RK

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Live from Bangalore Bloggers meet

On July 21, 2007 by Anant With 8 Comments - Blogging, Yours Truly

I’m blogging live from the Bangalore Bloggers Meet in Brewhaha. There are more than 40 people here.. Lots of different bloggers from a range of places from India and a couple of them from Germany.

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Pedantic

On July 18, 2007 by Anant With 5 Comments - Friends, Humour, Randomness, Yours Truly

I’ve just started reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It’s a book about the incorrect usage of punctuation in the written language today and the misinterpretation the incorrect punctuation might cause. I’ve only completed it partly but it seems quite interesting except for the failing attempts of the author at humor. It gets grating at times.

Why am I writing about this? Well as a warning. More than a couple of my friends refer to me as a “Grammar Nazi” and well let this be a warning that I am arming myself further to interrupt and correct you when you make a punctuation error :P

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Acknowledgement or a confession

On July 11, 2007 by Anant With 0 Comments - Life, Randomness, Thoughts, Work, Yours Truly

Since i was about 2 months old, I’ve had a condition which made the involuntary nervous control of my neck muscles weak. Due to this, I do not have complete control over my neck and unconsciously “shake” it from one side to the other.

Unfortunately since its not under my control, I never realize when I’m shaking my head. Most people understandably find it weird or funny, but surprisingly to me some people think I’m mocking them during a conversation (as I shockingly found out recently) which of course is not my intention.

And it’s not like I’ve not tried getting it treated. My parents and I have consulted more than 50 docs over the years without success. I have tried allopathy, homeopathy, ayurveda, physiotherapy, yoga, concentration exercises etc. And yes, (very unlike me) even meditation. But as obvious, to no avail :(

While most people ignore it, many tend to make fun by giving me names, mimicking it or joking about it behind my back. As a kid, I’d get upset (quite a bit) with anyone who made fun. But as I’ve grown up, I’ve started to ignore it all, even suppressing a very strong feeling to confront a colleague who was making fun. Ultimately decided that someone like that is not worth me getting upset (and it being a weekend also helped :) )

why am I writing all this? And out of the blue? I don’t know. But I just felt like “venting” when a guy who goes by the same bus as me mimicked me.

Maybe it is this that has made me the social inept and introvert that I am. It’s not that I am short of self-confidence (or according to mom, I’m over confident) but I’ve somehow held back on interacting with people, very importantly, acquaintances (people I know but who I don’t consider friends)

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