Alpesh Nakar's Blog

For me and the Aussies – ITs Australia Day! Oye! Oye! Oye! Ozzie! Ozzie! Ozzie! Happy Australia Day mate!

For me and the Indians – ITs Indian Republic Day. Happy Indian Republic day! Jai Hind!

For me, my wife and my son – Aussie Anniversary – We naturalised as Australians on this day in 2006. So every year on this day its triple celebration!

Good on you guys! Well done! Congrats! It’s been worth staying up until 0120 hours!

Well done! Off I am to bed now Gotta go to work at 0700 hours!

Congrats again! You deserve the ICC 20-20 World Cup!

Fellow Indian readers and visitors – wish you all Happy Independence Day for India.

Just as you all have a day off, so do I living here in Brisbane, where we have Show Holiday. Just visit Ekka Website to know more.

Jai Hind!

Is here! Code named Windows Live Folder, Windows Live SkyDrive has been announced officially.

If you didn’t know, you had to be in U.S to be able to get Windows Live Folders (which you could easily be in by changing the regional settings )

However, the good news is that it has been made available for India and U.K. Wow that’s cool.

New Features:

• An upgraded look and feel — new graphics to go along with your new features!
• “Also on SkyDrive” — easily get back to the SkyDrives you’ve recently visited
• Thumbnail images — we heard you loud and clear, and now you can see thumbnails of your image files
• Drag and drop your files — sick of our five-at-a-time upload limit? Drag and drop your files right onto your SkyDrive
• Embed your stuff anywhere — with just a few clicks, post your files and folders anywhere you can post html

Sign up now! | Source

Continuing from my earlier post on Google services, I look at how another Google Labs product has helped me in my ITsphere.

Before I got hooked on to Google Reader, I had tried many rss feed readers / aggregators. This post tracks my path to the final destination.

I would like to highlight the fact that I have not been into blogosphere for long. It’s less then a year *grins*

I started off with FireFox ‘bookmarking’ some feeds. And then IE7 beta got released and since I wasn’t really into rss feeds, I ported across to IE7 beta. Then the unstoppable happened!!! I was adding feeds by the dozens and since IE7 was in beta, I had to find a better alternative.  My quest to find an alternative, that I could use anywhere, anytime Not limited to one workstation. Honestly, I did not once think that Google Services would cater to my RSS Feed need. It just did not happen.

Well, so what was the alternative? It was Squeet! Yeah – the best solution I found then. Its your feeds in email, so nothing like it. Subscribed, received in Outlook, rules took care of everything else! They also had nice add-ons for IE7 & Firefox. It is rather unfortunate, that I had to move away from Squeet – in a way that is how I found Google Reader!!! Hooray! I was receiving rss feeds-Squeet-emails regularly and as I kept adding the feeds, Squeet matched it with performance. As a backup, I had some sites in IE 7 beta. After couple of months, I noticed IE 7 show new feed items. At that time, I was too busy with our Microsoft Operations Manager rollout, so had not noticed that emails from Squeet had been heading south! Hmm, I tried to login into my account and it was locked out – at Squeet. Well, the reason was that a lot of emails had been bouncing off. There was no reason, since I got all my emails. This was my work email. Also I have subscribed to a couple of SharePoint discussion groups and had been regularly receiving emails on them.

So absolutely no reason for rss feeds-Squeet-emails to fail. Well, I got the account unlocked couple of times. In the meantime I had started exploring live.com. Great clean concept, used only for rss feeds. I was able to import my opml, easily and without any dramas. Basically it had this Share Point look and web part concept ( the concept that I love). BUT! There is always a but! I found organizing my feeds bit too horrible!

So I moved on to Great News! Fantastic. I just loved it! However, this was workstation bound. And then… I came across Google Reader! Literally came across. Seriously, I have not considered any other RSS Feed readers out there. I love Gmail and I just got into Google Reader. I know, this post is supposed to by about Google Services, but bear in mind, there is always a reason, why you end with Google Services and this is what I am highlighting. Other products and services fail to deliver, their marketing and promises baseless, and Google Services don’t rave and rant, but deliver! Trust me, did you ever know or for now know, when will Google Reader come out of Google Labs, to be a fully functional Google Service like Google Search or Google Product like Writely? They will deliver and let you scramble for it aka gmail!

I have been hooked to Google Reader ever since and more so now, primarily because of the following reasons:

1. Web-Based: This eliminates my biggest hurdle of 24x7x365 access.
2. OPML: Import/Export was painless.
3. Manage Subscriptions: Bewdy! I was able to tag, manage my subscriptions as easily as you apply labels in Gmail.
4. Read View: Plain and simple, with a choice of expanded and list view. Automagically mark a feed read as soon as you move to the next feed.
5. Add Subscription: Never been so easy! Type in the Website address and voila!! – choose the tag or ‘folder’
6. List View: You can see updated subscriptions or all. Your subscriptions within the folders can be seen as a group or individual within the folder.
7. Marking – You can star (favorite) your feeds like Gmail.
8. Sharing – Does any other reader do this? For an example hit on My SharePoint Blog and check out what I mean by Sharing. This is awesome! You can even subscribe to my ‘shared feeds’ Basically, I share the feed and then if you have subscribed to the feeds, you will be notified. Another option for me to share – grab a code and put it on my blog/site and people can see what I have been upto
9. ITs my news reader Back when I was in India, I did not open any Website, any newspaper but my Google Reader, because it works and displays like a charm on my iPaq!!!! I was on top of all my feeds

Need I say more? What news reader rss feed aggregator you use?

Next in series – the mother of all Google Services, gMail!

My SharePointBlog

Its been almost a week, since I have been back.

Quick stats:

• Skimmed through hundreds of feed items in Google Reader. Yes skimmed. Why? Read on
• Read through 15 work emails - what 15?!!!

Yeah, you are right! I was on top of emails, thanks to HP iPaq 6300 series, Exchange 2003 SP2 – Push Email and last but not least – probably- cheapest gprs connectivity in the world.

You know how much it cost me? Wanna make a guess? 1…2…3… Ok, have you come up with an answer? Honestly email me or comment your answer. Would love to read it!! Come on…

Well I bought pre-paid with talk time of AU 30$. (I still have some talk time left… with international roaming in Australia!)

Ok, the point of the post…. GPRS. Well, to get activated, I called up the customer care. I was given2 options… Free GPRS to providers site. Settings will be sent via sms. (No good for me, its not a NOKIA) and option 2 – the real one – called Mobile Office would cost me as follows:

Activation – AU $ 1.5 (You read it right, although I could not believe it when I heard it!!)

Data Cost – (hold on….) Wanna make a guess…?  1…2…3… Ok… AU $ 0.20 per day UNLIMITED!!!! I almost dropped the PDA!! I was like, “Are you sure?” She said yes!

I am sure, corporates use exchange push mail and gprs, and they may or may not be using this. However this business model is targeting teens, grads – their first job most likely to be a call center – who have 100% disposable income and they are not interested in push mail and gprs, but ringones, wallpapers, etc which costs extra.

Well, whoever benefits from this, including me, its something that should be available here in Australia too. I just don’t believe, how we get ripped for downloading mails, or checking mails.

That brings me to another point and which is an upcoming post. In India, I did not only access office (exchange) mails, rss feeds but also my personal domain emails, gmail and live mails – benefits of google and gprs.

Well, what do you do at 0200 hours sitting in a hospital lounge?!!!

Yahoo!!! And I am at work…. geeezzzz… Ain’t I committed to work

It so happens that I working on a dream project. Developing Intranets in Schools using Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services v3 and we are (as is with any project) very short on timelines. We go live on June 01 2007 and to take a day off is seriously not an option for me.

I am just over 30+ and that’s one year less… At 30+, I am doing well in terms of family, financially and healthwise.

I am not looking forward to anything in terms of gifts for the day, since my wife and my son have given me what no one could – lots of love and support – from day one since we migrated here in Australia.

Milestone I have achieved in my life so far (with my family)

1. Migration to Australia – May 2003
2. First Job at Ironside State School – July 2003
3. Enrolled in Masters of Business Administration & Masters of Information Technology – QUT – July 2003 
4. Moved to Current Employer – September 2004
5. Purchased first home (withing 3K of Brisbane CBD) – April 2005
6. Naturalised as Australian Citizen – January 2006
7. Purchased second home ( within 2K of Brisbane CBD) – January 2007
8. Celebrated Wife’s Graduation as a Teacher - March 2007
9. Secured job as Senior Project Officer to develop intranets in school on SharePoint! – April 2007
10. … (Secret )

That’s quite a lot Well, I am going to be spending some quite time with my family today evening at a swank India Restaurant here in Brisbane, unless my wife has some other plans

Thought, I’d share some of my life-line with you guys and gals.