I guess google is bored of the index size game. They don’t want to play that game any more. Interesting how businesses react to pressure. So far they had it easy with competition trying to catch up. At the sign of first big challenge, they fold and withdraw from competition.
Yet another drama as the world of indian cricket evolves. Cricinfo’s chronology of this drama is a great summary to help you get caught up.
It all makes for great drama. It’s horrible how the BCCI leaks confidential reports prepared by the coach. I mean, they hired greg chappell to do a job. He is making his assessments and giving them back to the board. The least the BCCI can do is to keep things confidential. How can a coach be honest about his opinions if everything he says is going to be leaked to the press? The full greg chappell email is here
Anyway, as i was discussing with venkat ghanta this morning, the way greg chappell is handling this issue, it will have a net positive impact on indian cricket.
There can be two outcomes for this issue.
Either ganguly continues to be the captain - in which case, he is going to raise his effort levels and performance (as evidenced by sept 15th section quoted below)
Ganguly labours to his first century in 20 months and tells the media that he was asked to step down before the Test and that he found “extra determination” for this innings.
Or he is going to be replaced in favor of a different captain. I don’t know if the next captain is going to be better than Ganguly - for all his faults, he is pretty successful - but the team will be better overall.
Let’s see what’s going to happen.
I know this might be a bit late in the game to be thinking about re-financing. But, I just woke up and tried to re-finance my house. I had one of those monthly adjustable, LIBOR based, interest only loans. Things were good in 2001, 2002, 2003. My payments were just getting reduced and at one point, i was only paying an interest of 2.625%.
The last 2 years though, everything started moving in the opposite direction. 04 was okay, but in 05 things began to hurt. I started looking around for “good re-finance” deals in june/july. I kicked myself a little bit for not re-financing in october 04 and not selling some of my y! stock at 38+.
The story has a positive ending though. Venkat Ghanta pointed me to Addison Avenue. They are a credit union based out of palo alto. They have great rates. I got locked in at about 1% lower than my monthly adjustable for a 3/1 ARM. I got my rate locked in on tuesday morning before the FOMC meeting which was even better. You can still get a 3/1 ARM for 4.625% which is pretty good. Here’s the rate sheet. You can submit the loan online if you want. If you go in to the cupertino branch, talk to Curtis Riddle and tell him that you saw addison avenue off my blog.
I am being defaulted to the “personalized” version of home page for google. I wonder if i am in a fairly small test bucket or if everyone else is seeing the same.
About 2 weeks back I started seeing these links on the upper right to my account, etc. Now they seem to have extended the test to make my-google mainstream.
I have never been a big fan of my-yahoo and not too much of a fan for my-google. I wish i can turn it off somehow.
UPDATE: I need a english language refresher.
From: Jeffrey Friedl [mailto:jfriedl@regex.info]
Sent: Friday, September 23, 2005 3:56 AM
To: Ravi Dronamraju
Subject: s/it’s/its/$blog->post->title =~s/it’s/its/
(About Google’s homepage)
I have been reading a lot about web 2.0 and talking about it with a lot of colleagues. The wikipedia definition of web 2.0 is pretty good. For a large part though, whenever the word “web 2.0″ is tossed out, it is used to mean some personal opinion of how things should be.
Seems like there are a set of practices companies on the internet should adopt as the users on the internet get more sophisticated. These are no different than the practices that a non-internet company - for example, a restaurant - should adopt. Here’s web 2.0 defined for restaurants — restaurant 2.0
My bad humor aside, All these things are stuff that every business should be doing anyway. Creating value for consumer, not engaging in practices that piss the customer off, listening to your customers, allowing them to engage your business in a manner that is convenient to them - all these are fundamentally good business practices. Several companies in the past have applied them and succeeded.
Southwest airlines, made customer convenience and service the focus. You can bring your own food into the flight (mash ups), buy tickets online. If you missed a flight - it’s OK - they’ll let you on the next one at no extra cost. I am sure there are plenty of business publications that researched into the southwest success story.
The web 2.0 phenomenon, is just a new industry coming to terms with old realities.
I have been meaning to talk about this for a while, but didn’t get around to it. Some time earlier this year (april/may) i started out in a new role for yahoo! search. My role has evolved since the time i posted about it last. Our team’s charter has expanded to include supporting yahoo! search through the transition to the web 2.0 model. Speaking of team, we made great progress with our team. I am very proud of the team that came together and progress we are making.
One thing i love my about my new role is how much i am learning. I am working with some very smart folks - most of them without blogs - and learning a lot from them. I end up interacting with various teams, both inside and outside yahoo! search. I will probably work closely with this guy, and this guy.
I used work with a lot of smart folks when i was in autos too. I think the difference i do see now, is that a big part of the role for the folks i work with is to think about future. People have time to think (apart from executing towards a project) and discuss. It could also be a factor of changing times at yahoo!. There is a lot more emphasis these days about good product values, innovation, community benifit - at all levels.
To be honest, i haven’t felt this positive about yahoo! since 1998. We have great products, immense focus on creating even better products and being useful to the people.
I should have kept up to date with jeremy’s blog. He already blogged about this issue. I agree with his stance. I disagree with these practices and dislike them. But, it seems like this is a faily common evil practice around.
Anyway, I think i have a decent guess about how my messenger got upgraded. I re-installed Yahoo Music Engine because i was having some issues with the existing one. This i think “bundled” the new messenger.
There are a lot of neat things with the new messenger, but to me it feels like this messenger has feature bloat.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. ~Leonardo DaVinci
Is it possible to have a feature rich client that is simple and uncluttered?
argghh!! what the heck is live words! I found out about this and turned it off just now..
For some reason i got automatically “upgraded” to the new yahoo messenger with voice. Arrggh!!! I hate that. I don’t want an upgrade that’s shoved down my throat like that. Not only they have uglier icons, the number of default plugins has quadrupled. I now have a pane at the bottom that has email, search and yahoo! main site, there’s a 2nd pane with all sorts of stuff on it, buzz (ugh!!), 360, Yahoo music (new name for launchcast). Ofcourse I went in and turned off all those plugins. I wonder why they can’t remember by plugin choices when doing an upgrade?
Not just the tabs, the main messenger window itself has several new “information icons” added. As if the messenger experience is not already cluttered, they made it even more cluttered. First off there is a recently blogged icon, (a flower). Then, as you hover, it pops up a window automatically (there is no option to turn it off - how annoying). Not just that they add a new option - messenger tips in your im window - and it’s also on by default!!!!
arghh!!!!