Ravi’s Blog

A humble reminder to folks to get out and vote today It looks like Barack Obama will be leading US and the world for the next 4 years.

I, for one, is looking forward to the change. Barack Obama’s Presidency is going to be great for US image across the world and most importantly, I am hoping his presidency will be good to citizens of USA.

About 2 weeks back, i discovered Aamir khan’s blog. Yes, - the bollywood star - Aamir khan. Surprisingly, i found his blog to be a good read. He reacts to the 100s of comments, delves into his thought process for some characters and blogs. Atleast for now, he’s posting regularly, talking about his upcoming movie (hindi version of Ghajini) and things going on.

Wow! what a game!
Not only did the warriors make playoffs after 13 years but they win their first game!
on road!!
against a #1 seed!!!

Ever since i came to US in 1991, Basketball has been my favorite game to watch (and try to play). It’s easy to understand (unlike football or baseball), it’s fast paced, it’s exciting and Bulls - closest local team my univ - were winning. I loved the bulls and followed them. I came to bay area in Nov 1994. I was excited to find that big 10 player webber was on golden state, golden state made the playoffs the year before. I felt at home Another team making the playoff run. 2 days after i came to bayarea, golden state traded billy owens for rony siekaly starting off an era of failure and futility interlaced with the bizarre. Players known for choking coaches, management known for passing on kobe bryant for todd fuller etc.

My desire to support a local team (and support any team since the bulls 2nd era ended) made me support sacramento for few years.

But it’s great to finally see a good golden state team together, playing well. This playoff win is sweet. It’s not the championship, but it’s sweet. It doesn’t wash away the pain of all the 13 years, but it’s a good start.

I love basketball and i am enjoying being a fan of this golden state team! There, i can say it.

My recommendation - Go hug a warriors fan today It’s going to be a happy, joyous hug. Join the crowd at GSOM.

Last weekend I saw this movie indian move Laage Raho Munna Bhai. I walked in with tempered expectations as this a sequel to a really funny first part. How often do sequels improve on the original? In my opinion - rarely. Given that sequels are very very rare in indian movies, i guessed this would be an average movie at best.
But it was funny as hell. More than being funny, this movie weaved some themes and plot lines to make the movie touching. The story involves a mob boss falling in love with a Radio DJ. He wants to meet her, and manages to win a quiz contest about Gandhi. Yes, Gandhi 1.0 the original - the same one who preached non-violence and love for all human beings. Of course, our mob boss friend tells the DJ that he’s a professor. To keep up his act, he has to really learn about the life and ideals of Gandhi. As he learns about this great man, he starts applying his gandhian principles to tackle the situations he used to tackle with brute force. The movie is funny throughout, but the touching scenes are about the transformation of this mob boss to a gandhian idealist. The movie ends on a high note and is bound to bring a tear or two to viewer’s eyes.
This movie has sub-titles and is playing in the fremont (Naz movie theatres). I’d recommend every one (indian or not) to go watch this movie.

If you are going to watch only one foreign movie this summer, then go see “Lage Raho“

About 45 days back, i posted about a contractor who was unreachable after taking some advance money from me. It took a bit of introspection for me and hesitation to post something negative like that. Eventually, i felt that as a contractor he is different from an employee and he deserve get reviewed online. I caught some flack for blogging about this contractor - private as well as public. I suppose most people were either indifferent or appreciated the warning. So couple of days back someone posted a comment to my blog about a wayne deviney who stole goods from them and got arrested, I was surprised. I went to news.yahoo.com to search for wayne deviney and i found this. The photo is the wayne deviney that i signed contract with. So now i feel that i should have blogged about wayne earlier and not have hesitated as much.
oh as an aside, google news did not find this article, just yahoo news. Oh, i also saved it on my web, so the article can be cached.

As I mentioned in the post here, i wanted to think through about some guiding principles for the ideas i am planning to work on. It’s not that i don’t have any ideas that are worth working on, or i have some writers block. I do think that i have some very interesting and compelling product ideas. I am very excited by the possibilities and how these products can improve people’s daily lives. Add to that, there’s real, meaningful (100M+) revenue opportunity and while these products may or may not make that much money, big market sizes attract investment.

On my last day at yahoo!, I got the opportunity to spend a bit of time with James Slavet. James is a VP at yahoo! and a rising star. While the title of VP is obviously official, the rising star tag is my own. I had the good fortune to work closely with him and learnt a lot from him in a short duration. Coming back to my last day, the first thing he asked me in our short meeting that day was my definition of success. I stuttered for a response and he went to tell me how he was asked by someone he respects (Let’s call him James++) that same question. Upon an unsatisfactory answer from James, James++ proceeded to say that he was succesful in life. James++ was successful because he has a happy family, great grand children and they all have really good relationships amongst them. The point was to look at success as something beyond prosperity. Just as paul graham pointed out that money is not wealth, prosperity is not success. This was a great insight, simple but something that we don’t pay attention to in the daily rat race.

I was thinking more and more about what would be success for aXooba (pronounced uh-zooba). Building a product, building a product that’s useful, raising money, making revenues, being profitable, selling the company for a good profit for all involved, and a list of other simiar things, don’t quite seem to hit the mark. I suppose ultimately, everyone and every company should determine the definitions of their own success. Since, aXooba is me at this point, I’ll use my definitions of success. I also know for sure, success is not a milestone, it’s a process, a path. It’s not a stage that a company reaches, but a path.

Once i started looking at various companies’ mission statements, i quickly realized that quite a few of these profit making machines are sensitive. All the companies listed there have some sort of vision, mission, that reflect their definition of success and give insight into their values. Of course, some of them (like kellog) just have a set of values posted. Google, of course, did not even get into the semantics of vision/value/principle, but just posted ten things. Google’s mission statement, is quite a lot more succint. Yahoo’s mission statement , also lists out core values. Reading all those, really no company ever comes out and says that their primary and most important goal is to make ton of money. I guess no surprises there. I think the question to think about is, to what extent that company and it’s employees continue to understand and reflect the values.
The important thing is though, is to clearly state those principles and philosophies what ever they might be, early on in the company’s lifecycle. This does not mean that they are not adaptable. It just means that stating the values upfront means you have better chance of attracting people who agree with that philosophy and overall a better chance of sticking to the values.

For aXooba, I don’t know if I have 10 things or 6 core values. I know for sure that not only do i have to set principles, they have to be tied into clear actionable policies/programs/activities company undertakes.
The first one is about customers. The 2nd about giving back.

Finally, I am off blogger for my blog publishing software. It’s such a relief. Now that i have done it, I feel like i should have done this a long time back. I have been fiddling with wordpress code for a while. In fact, I hacked up wordpressMU for a contest inside y!.

My biggest obstacle was transferring all the old posts to wordpress including comments. I did a search on yahoo for “importing comments from blogger to wordpress”. Result #3 is golden!
Skeltoac, put together a script for importing blogger listings along with comments into wordpress. His post includes a link to a illustrated tutorial as well. I followed the directions on skeltoac’s blog. Everything worked really smooth and i didn’t even have to look at the tutorial. In a few seconds, all the posts & comments are imported. Everything is good to go.
Thanks Skeltoac!

Next i worked on updating the UI from the default wordpress UI. Thanks to Nathan Arnold & Sam Tripodi - our super UED & Eng folks - I quickly ended up with this updated UI.
Thanks Nathan! Thanks Sam!

Next up, addressing the feeds. Now that I am off blogger, I can actually syndicate my feed into multiple formats. I also wanted to use feedburner for a while. So I set up all my feeds on feedburner. Life is good.

All I had to do now was spend few minutes fiddling with the re-write engine, redirecting the old URLs to the new ones. that’s it!

I love it!

I love it!