My Digital Thoughts : Shashi's Diary

UPS_The_Last_mile_destroys_the_brand , originally uploaded by shashiBellamkonda . What do I think of a company that efficiently transports a 1lb package for me 2800 miles coast to coast from Sunnyvale . CA to Gaithersburg MD but fails in the last 3 miles to do justice to its brand by making a efficient delivery ? This is the second time that this happened to me that the driver never came to my door and reported an exception in the UPS tracking system that no one was home. The first time was a a few weeks ago. The UPS driver had left no note even though there was someone present the whole day. I had briefly admonished my daughter for not paying attention to the door bell and believed UPS was right. Called them and requested they hold the package for me to pickup. UPS customer service is 1 800 PICK UPS ( 1 800 742 5877 ) but you will not find it easily on their website. The next day I drove from my work in Virginia on a riany day to reach the UPS center at 7.03 only to be told the...

I chanced upon BreakingNewsOn during one of my trolls on the Twitter public timeline when I first began using Twitter and since then I have been following BreakingNewsOn.. They have been great about breaking the news first. Yesterday I was amazed at their breaking of the Benazir Bhutto Assassination Story and generated a lot of buzz on Twitter. I decided that I should write about them and encourage everyone to follow them. I got in touch with BreakingNewsOn’s founder , 20 year old Michael van Poppel and interviewed him on GTalk. Shashi: What is BreakingNewsOn ? Michael: BreakingNewsOn is a "micro-news service" and is specifically aimed at bringing breaking news as soon as possible. I founded BreakingNewsOn on May 20th of this year and its size is growing rapidly. Some more details can also be found at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BreakingNewsOn . When you follow us you should be aware that we may send out a large number of updates in a short period as stories rapi...

My daughter is very tech savvy but she is more responsible with her time than me. She distributes her time between her school activities and reading and writing well so she is not on Twitter yet . When she asks me what the difference between a Geek and a nerd is , I yell for help and Twitter delivers. You will enjoy reading the responses. The answers were intelligent, funny and helpful. I am awed by the people who reponded . If you would like to add the conversation it will be awesome to get your comments. Matze_Jimdo : haha, poor you. maybe: geek = computer related, nerd = general markdavidson : A geek tinkers with stuff. A nerd researches stuff. There's a fine line between a computer nerd and a computer geek. AlbertMaruggi : nerd knows a lot, but can't really find the right application for it and people are a necessary element of this world. How's that? AlbertMaruggi : Geek knows alot and really can't stop talking about it no matter how hard they try, at parties, ...

I have been an Engish speaker for over 4 decades but Slang in the US is another story ( I was born and brought up in India) So when I hear people talking about 'SWAG" My curiousity gets me. I ask on Twitter what "Swag" means and I these friends responded quicly and gave me the exct meaning: @Jestutripup Schwag: bag of marketing goodies or junk you get at conferences, which include pens markers highlighters pads stickers tshirts etc @ ColleenCoplick i'm familiar with SWAG, which are all the freebies & giveaways from wherever. is sCHWag something else or just a diff spelling? @ mkrigsman Schwag is free crap you get a trade shows @ PreppyDude Schwag = free stuff that companies give out for self promotion at 11-12-2007 23:31 @ rslux Swag = "Stuff we all get" = tradeshow giveaways @ WillBrown , schwag is the misc free branded pens, notebooks, etc you get when you go to conventions. @ dacort Schwag is slang for sweet, or cool. At least that's ...

http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/cubegoodies/9d94/ , originally uploaded by shashiBellamkonda . I had told all my Twitter friends that I was moving jobs within Network Solutions and got some awesome encouragement in the form of direct messages, comments on the blog and links from their blogs. Today as i opened a package left at my door i was awestruck to see , Tojosan had sent me a awesome gift to encourage me in my new position. I cannot thank him enough. My family had a good time looking at these and i will take them to work with me in 2008

Frozen Peas Friday Avatar - Frozenpeafund,com , originally uploaded by shashiBellamkonda . Susan Reynolds is the nicest person you can meet online. Not so long ago she announced that she was being tested for breast cancer and all of us had to pause and ponder. Why does this happen to nice people? Please join the Frozen Peas Fund group on Flickr. Donate for breast Cancer Research at http://frozenpeafund.com/ . Here are some people who have been working hard and contributing to this effort. I am sure there are many others I may not have mentioned or do not know about: AnnOhio is a tireless do gooder. Her post on Frozen Peas Friday says she has sacrificed even her regular Friday Avatar ! She is so full of cheer and humor. Connie Reece was instrumental in creating a Flickr group Frozen Peas Fund and has great post on Community vs. Cancer Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting helped set up the Frozen Peas Feed Chris Brogan has included links and his post will tell you how the F...

I fired away my previous post while still riding the Metro yesterday. As I was riding back home I saw this sign in the Metro which explains the "No Eating Rule". That makes sense . I am curious from you if your city has a Metro - is there a "No eating Rule" . if there isn't have you seen any rats in your Metro. Cheers!

I think the rule is really dumb. I say this as the girl in the seat in front is eating pretzels. Fine those who litter the metro heavily but people snacking its a essential activity. Of course last year a teenager was handcuffed for eating french fries on the metro- come on we live in a civlized world and we have better things to do than stop people from eating. I think my metro eating rule violater has finished her snack. My few cents.

| View | Upload your own As Twitter was down today I was exploring both Jaiku and Pownce when i saw this comment from "Joanbit" on jaiku 'Com millorar les nostres presentacions: http://www.slideshare.net/selias22/taking-your-slide-deck-to-the-next-level/". Thanks Joanbit Excellent slideshow

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I was really struggling to put my thoughts into a Tweet and as I kept misspelling words so that they would fit I was fervently hoping my daughter wouldn't read this post.If she did my authority to tell her to dot her "i"s and cross her "t"s would just disappear :). Then I had horrible thoughts of the punishment the "Language" Police would inflict on me. Of course the consoling thought was that if I created a new word it may find itself in the Washington Post like w00t did I braved myself and asked this question on Twitter. Do you think the language police will be after me because I have to have typos to make the message fit the 140 character Twitter limit? And here is the support I got: hoovers @shashib, the language police will have to read you your Miranda rights in 140 characters or less mariana_66 @shashib: i'm always spelling creatively on twitter & txt - i have a lot to say & have trouble fitting it into 140 chars! It's good p...

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If only you knew this was not garbage , originally uploaded by shashiBellamkonda . If only you knew this was not garbage I don't want newspapers to die. Thats my quality time and sometimes that morphs into family time. The plastic wrapped package above is today's (12/12/2007) Washington Post. It does not deserve this place. Newspapers particularly good ones(IMHO) like the Washington Post have a place in our life. About an hour ago as we were having breakfast - my wife, daughter and me had a discussion on how nice the Cookies in the food section looked ( Thats what you can see on the top in this picture). The conversation was going to evolve around how we could make the weekend a fun activity and make some of these cookies. I am heavily plugged in to the Internet and to me a Newspaper is like a RSS reader. It usually does a good job of collecting news and information and if it doesnt I just move on. I felt passionate enough on this to stop and take this picture. Washi...

I am not sure how I got this link. But it was on my screen yesterday. It must have been an intervention of positive forces that made me click on the link. The video is inspiring and awesome, in fact I am behind 6 Million people who already viewed this video. Watch and get inspired. Randy Pausch's Home page is here He also lead some cool projects for novices / School students called Alice project Guys like him are the reason why there is innovation, humanity and kindness. hats off to Randy Pausch Update : Another inspirational link from Jess Kutch : @shashib Saw your tweets on living out childhood dreams, and thought you might enjoy this: http://tinyurl.com/2wogx3 ( Great story there too)

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This is a quote from Boris Jordan writing in the Washington post’s Outlook Section today . I totally associate with the experience of Boris Jordan because I lived in Moscow in the early 90’s. I was there from the pre- “Perestroika” days where I experienced the same problems that local people experienced with food shortages, empty shops and no production. I experienced the “country switched from a communist regime to a rudimentary free-market democracy virtually overnight.” When I first landed in Moscow in 1989 as an employee of a USSR-Indian joint venture restaurant the dollar was worth .70 kopeks officially and sold on the streets for 15 rubles. We left India with essentials like toothpaste, soaps etc in large numbers in our luggage which were in short supply in the USSR ( I am using the USSR because the Soviet Union was still intact). In those days the typical commute was a 5 min walk to the Shukinskaya metro. The Moscow Metro was very efficient and we made the commute from our Metr...

I get a good laugh as I watch the humorous comments on Twitter. This lead me to tweet:- " Who should we vote for the "most humorous on Twitter"? Any Nominations? " The response to this Tweet was great so it started getting difficult to manage. So the next thing was to make this a Poll. In the interest of not being self promoting I decided to ask help for someone to host this poll. The first offer for help was from @Technomom (She is a real hero - despite having a fall the next day she collected the info and launched the polls). please direct any brickbats at me as I am solely responsible. We got 33 nomnations and at last count 80 people had voted. There were no rules. It was all for fun. Just made some logistic decisions. No limit to number of people you could nominate. Closed the nominations at mid-night . I am sure we missed several good and funny people who didn't get the word on time (My apologies for not preparing well for this :) I may have started a cat...