Mani's blog: Mani Chandrasekaran's Weblog

I upgraded my old gen iPhone OS to ver 3.0. I love the new version, lots of neat features like searching emails (finally), copy and paste, landscape keyboard etc etc. Of course, not all the new features are available on my old phone, but the new features are still great.

I did my upgrade via the iTunes update center, the update went through like a breeze. The only problem was, my GPRS edge settings disappeared. I googled around, found that iPhone creates a edge setting to be something else than what you need. The solution, is to create a new profile using the iPhone configuration tool , set the apn host name to be www for Vodafone India, export it to a file, email the config file as an email attachment and send it to yourself. Then you need wifi to connect to your email server, extract the attachments and the edge settings worked again. Other than this, the upgrade was a smooth process ...

It's my birthday today, got a of calls/emails/twitters/sms's (the variety of technologies seem to be increasing every year) today. Many thanks to all of you, who wished me. Its been fruitful year, both professionally and personally !! I am looking forward to this year, lots of momentous changes (hint: the Sun-Oracle thing) seem to be in store this year.

I could not resist commenting on one thing. I go to a restaurant, which is part of a chain of restaurants. On my birthday, I get no less than 10-12 emails from the same group, and the same email from them.

The email format is like this:

From: feedback@abcgroup.in
reply-to:babitaxxx@abcgroup.in
to	manixxxxx@gmail.com
date	Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 3:17 PM
subject	Happy Birthday!

Dear Mani,

We at the ABC Group would like to wish you in advance a very Happy Birthday!

To make this day more special for you, we invite you to celebrate your Birthday at 
any of the ABC outlets listed below...

Do call to make your booking with our customer relations executive on 4111xxxx/4111xxxx. 
(Office hours - 10am to 5pm), who will arrange your table at any of the ABC outlets.

Thanks,

xxxx
Vice President (Operations)

My email id is the same, the names are a little different. Its sometimes, mani, manikandan, mani chandra etc etc. This is precisely, one of things, where a product like Project Mural , can be a good fit, with its Master data management and ETL capabilities. I hope to send an unsolicited solution document to them shortly

I had enrolled in an Executive General Management Programme (EGMP) at Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore last year in May 2008. I successfully completed the course last week, and was awarded the certificate.

The course was great, and the courses that I especially liked were Macroeconomics (Prof Shamal Roy), Financial accounting (Prof Padmini Srinivasan), Microeconomics (Prof Ranganathan), Corporate Strategy (Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan). The professors were generally very good, with a wealth of experience and the great atmosphere at IIMB was a added advantage. The books that were given as course material was generally outstanding !!

A few snaps from IIMB:


Apart from Bangalore, there were also off-campus students viewing through video conference from Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi and Mumbai. I made a lot of great friends, and my batch mates for ten months are some of my best buddies now. I met people from different industries, Manufacturing, Pharma, etc and it was a microcosm of the industrial scene in India. I will definitely recommend this to any person who is in the management stream and wants to brush up on management topics. A person who also deserves great mention is Mr Vedi, program assistant, who worked like clockwork and made sure the programme ran very well. Special mention about the great IIMB food, also requires mentioning, I never knew vegetarian food tastes this good

I had to install a Windows XP partition on my Macbook, to run some windows applications. When I tried to do a partition using Bootcamp, I got a disk error complaining of a "sibling error". Fortunately, following the instructions at http://mahalkita.nanogeex.com/2007/09/28/how-to-fix-the-invalid-sibling-link- error/ solved the problem.

I am 35 years "younger" today, and start my 36th year. I had blogged last year, about crossing the magic year of 35, and having some apprehensions about it. But I am glad, that they turned out to be baseless Its been a wonderful year, with the joy of our life being our daughter, Pavithra !! Family life with my wonderful wife, Gayathry and Pavithra and my transition to Software pre-sales in India last year, has been very enjoyable. Coincidentally, Sun's fiscal year FY08 closes end of this month, and our practice has been slogging really hard to close many deals.
Looking forward to brief you all next year, on my 36th year accomplishments

If you are planning to buy a "hugeeeeee" LCD TV, use the following table (I found the data at the Reliance store) before you buy:

TV Size (inches)	Viewing distance (in feet)
26-30	8-10
32-37	10-12
37-42	12-14
46-52	14-16
> 52	Array Index out of bounds

Our daughter, Pavithra, turned 2 last week. It is an unbelievable joy, watching her grow every day and every minute. She is becoming very cranky, but in an enjoyable sense A big thank you to all the folks and relatives, who wished and blessed her.

Happy Ganesh Chaturthi folks !! We celebrated the festival with the usual splendor (thats my daughter playing in front of the elephant god at my dad's place). Even though, I would have liked to spend a relaxed Sunday with my family, I am off to Indonesia to conduct a Identity managent talk and lab session for partners. I am looking forward to this trip, but hearing of daily undersea quakes in Java is kind of keeping me a little jittery. But hey, I am sure Ganesh-ji will keep me covered under his protection

This image is being served from http://www.cinematical.com/2006/05/17/cannes-report-the-da-vinci-code-meets-the-pres/


As you can see below, I am in the US attending Javaone. I have been reading the news, with increasing concern about the din being made about releasing the movie, "Da Vinci code" in India. It is most likely not going to be released on Friday, May 19th in India. This movie and book, are just works of fiction and entertainment, and I am not happy about this. When people in the US can watch it (the first show started at 12:30 am on Friday), why not in India? We seem to be becoming a society, very prone to protests and kneejerk reactions.
One good thing about Moscone center, where JavaOne is being held, is that there is a theatre, the Metreon that is close by. I watched the movie today, and I must tell you its a good movie. There are good performances by Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou. Of course, its not original to the book and some passages from the book have been sliced. For some reason, I got confused with the other Dan Brown novel, "Demons and Angels" and was expecting a whole bunch of other things
I would definitely recommend this movie, and more so for people, who have read this book before watching the movie. I am pretty sure, saner voices will prevail and the film will be released soon in India !!

One of the things, we have started do for our baby daughter is to start collecting interesting stuff for her to watch - cultural, science and fun stuff. I recently bought the newly released animated film on Lord Hanuman. Hanuman is a very popular Hindu god, and this animated film is absolutely great in showing the antics of baby Hanuman and as an adult. I highly recommend this movie, available in most bookstores in India and here for folks abroad. I believe, the sequel to this film is already in the works.

I am enclosing a few photos of our daughter, Vaidehi, as she completed 4 months. Its a joy watching her doing new things every day. We took these snaps today (Jan 1st 2006) and luckily, she posed for a few snaps
1st photo:
2nd photo:
3rd photo:
4th photo:
5th photo:
6th photo (Dec 2005):

On Tuesday, Aug 16th 2005 9:52 PM, our (gayathry and myself) daughter was born in Chennai. We are calling her "Vaidehi", pronounced like Why-they-hee. This being my first kid, its is an absolutely new experience for me !! Friends tell me, this is the "beginning" and the real fun starts, once she moves into our home in Bangalore from her grandparents house in Chennai. Here are some snaps of her this weekend,
on my lap

smiling !!

and one more

Thanks to all of you for sending in your wishes and blessings.