{balki Blog}
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Couple weeks ago I bought this awsome, awsome watch from Fossil and never looked back again.  Although the wife does not like the price tag or the annual subscription idea, I've been trying to convince her really hard.

I am generally a shy person in public situations but this watch has been a great conversation-starter and it is already helping me improve my public image.  All I do is lift my hand up a little bit, as if touching my nose while standing close enough to the stranger and the watch takes over.  I go on and on about the various features and somehow come out as a smart, intelligent person (read 'geek')…  This is just awsome!!

The watch has some great features including:

• News
• Stock Quotes
• Weather (local & other favorite places including a few cities in India!)
• Horoscope
• One-way messaging via MSN Messenger
• Outlook Calendar Synch.

Here is a very thorough review of the watch.

Read another fantastic review of the watch by our company's Chief Architect here.

UPDATE: Here's another article from Howstuffworks.com about how the SPOT watches work and what are the various technologies behind the scenes.

If your are command-prompt type of person and if you haven't heard of SlickRun already, you should download and use it in a hurry.  I got seriously jealous of watching Mr.Hanselman use this tool adroitly throughout the day and finally downloaded it this afternoon and I have been lovin' it ever since.  This is definitely the second best tool that I download this week (after DeveloperExpress's beta version of Refactor).  More to come on Refactor & CodeRush in another blog article…

I was browsing a backrun of the InformationWeek magazine and came across this small set of Blogging Guidelines, which I thought were worthy of sharing with fellow bloggers and readers:

• Make it clear that the views expressed are the individual's.
• Respect the company's confidentiality and proprietary information
• Consult a manager if there's a question about what's appropriate
• Be respectful of others
• Ensure that blogging doesn't interfere with work commitments

(Data: Forrester Research)

Excerpted from Jan 31,2005 issue of InformationWeek

American Century Investments is giving away free book by David Bach - “The Automatic Millionaire”.  All you need to do is fill out some basic information so they can send you literature about IRA investments (not a bad idea for your retirement plans).  Although I am not very keen on IRA, I filled out the details anyways.  Who can resist a free book, right?  That too with the word “Millionaire” in the title.

After considering, waiting, researching, meandering, rethinking for weeks, I decided to start a blog of my own.  My company's Chief Architect Scott Hanselman's weblog was a great inspiration.  I have no clue how he manages to post so many diverse articles.  If I can post even at 1/10th of his rate, I would feel overwhelmingly accomplished.