Anoop John

I have been stretched to my physical limits with very long days for the past few days before this 1st. However it has been more than compensated by a series of unproductive days since then. Not that I am unhappy about it :). I needed the break and this has helped me recharge my batteries.

Yet another busy day comes to an end. I spent my morning as a driver as there was a dearth of staff with driving abilities. I came back to office around noon after the morning errands. The whole of afternoon, internet was down and I spent time with the software team. In between when internet connection was live I spent time trying to figure out how to set up raaga.com on Ubuntu 8.04. I had set it up for one of my customers a few days back. I was able to set it up on my laptop today. Now I got to get around to writing an article on this and post it on Zyxware.com.

I woke up early today (relatively) to pick up Anivar Aravind from the railway station. I got there in time and picked up Anivar and took him home. We had breakfast and then sat down to get the press release to the media ready. By 12:15 we were not done and I had to go to P. A. Aziz College of Engineering to see if we could hold a meeting there this friday. I went with Prasad to the college while Anivar and Ashik, who had dropped by, worked on the Press release.

Some time back I had blogged about building owners manipulating the interpretation of building codes to construct illegal structures near roads being widened in Trivandrum. The Corporation of Trivandrum decided to take stern action against this and decided to demolish all buildings that had been built without proper sanctions near the roads being widened. The demolishing team turned off the local electric power distribution for their work and this left Zyxware in almost 1 1/2 days without electricity.

As is wont I came back from church had food and took straight to my bed. I had a lot of pending sleep to make up. Around 3:00PM Aashik dropped by and he set up Malayalam on Fedora on one of our customer's PCs. I went back to sleep after it was done and woke up around 8 totally fresh and ready to have a go at my pending work :). However I was dismayed to find that a colony of ants, I had no clue from where, had decided to move into my laptop while I was sleeping.

There has been a news item in AOL recently that Microsoft has roped in Mammooty for their e-literacy campaign in Kerala. It does not take a marketing guru to identify that their e-literacy campaign is nothing but an e-literacy campaign wrapped neatly around a marketing campaign for Microsoft products. I don't have anything against this and on the contrary I support similar marketing campaigns where value is given directly to the consumers rather than giving money to the media alone. However there is an aspect of deception in this Microsoft Campaign and this is what we the Free Software Community is protesting about.

I am part of a few Free Software communities online. I actively participate in a few, participate slightly in a few and watch and listen in a few more. These are random thoughts that came to my mind on improving the Quality of Service (QOS) of these user groups with respect to a member seeking service from the group, and am sharing this with everybody. This is a work in progress and by no means complete. Do suggest your tips if you have any.

We had organized and conducted our second seminar in an Engineering College today - at Mar Baselios College of Engineering, Trivandrum. The first one was the GLUG meet at Barton Hill. All the arrangements for the meeting including the permissions were done by Rajiv R. Nair and Manuel Jose of MBCET. Other members of the group including myself had to just walk in to the college and give our talks. I was pretty happy with the Barton Hill talk and was even more satisfied with the MBCET talk.

I really like to interact with students. I know that the future of the world is with the students of today and to be able to make any significant change in the world you have to reach out to the students. Another specific reason why I like to interact with students is that it gives me an opportunity to share my experiences and possibly inspire young entrepreneurs among them to set out on their own. I believe that only those people who are willing to take that extra risk will be able to make that extra impact in this world. Today I met one such future entrepreneur at my office.

I already have another blog Thondom Raughts which I use to publish reasonably long articles about my thoughts on specific topics that are interesting to me. Though I use the blog primarily as a tool to bring more clarity to my thought I have found it satisfying to see that people do read my blog and have interactive comment sessions.