Category: Tips & Tricks


To be very honest, I don’t see a reason why someone should stray away from innovation. Thinking ‘New’ keeps your idea muscle toned for tough challenges. But here’s 3 reasons why you should innovate all the time: not just on the professional front, but also in relationships. After all, as LinkedIn says, relationships matter.

1. Not all ideas from the past scale

Storyboard

Storyboard

There could have been some things that worked very well for you in the past. But everything changes with time, ideas get stale, and they won’t always scale to match the situation – if at all they still work. A 20 picture photo album might have made for a lovely Valentine’s day, but that does not mean that a 200-slide story board – full of pictures and promises – can save a relationship. You have to think fresh! Eat Subway if it takes that :)

2. Not all ideas click (plan for failure)

Courtesy: BrownPaperBags.org

What I tore & stitched back :(

I once had to put some things together in a paper bag (like the McDonalds carry bag – sorry can’t think outside food), and snail mail it. I had to attach a note, and trying to be creative, I decided to use the inside of the bag. So, I cut the edges of the bag to make it one long sheet of paper (kinda rotulus), wrote the message on it (in black so it would be noticed) and stitched it back with tape. Outcome? It hit the trash can – unnoticed. I failed to deliver the message. Don’t be shy of failure, the world today is chasing failure, and the Tata’s are even giving out awards for failing. But make sure you have enough alternatives to compensate for the failure, without really having to start over.
Make yourself a promise:
I will always have 5 alternate ideas or planned for 5  un-happy scenarios (what does not fall on the happy path) before executing an idea

3. Competition is catching up fast

Need I say more?


Conclusion:

Innovate or perish. Sharpen your axe. Work out your idea muscle. Have coffee, or Subway, or whatever helps you think. Do something special for that special one: be it your better half or your project/product. It’s up to you to save it!

Marginalia: If you are planning to make them coffee, remember that if you make a heart with Hershey’s on it, it will sink. Instead, try rangoli (sprinkling) with coffee powder.

Share/Tweet: @prasadgupte: 3 reasons you should keep innovating, even in relationships http://bit.ly/e2uxLh

I’m a cleanliness freak – to the extent of cleaning up my Facebook wall. Over the last week, there’s been a lot of spam with wall messages that read: “Hahaha! Mine is hilarious. Check out yours”? Familiar? Yes, that silly app which tells you how you would look in the future. I never tried it, but tired of the requests, I urged friends to avoid it via a FB update. 13 people liked it, but I only hope its the latter of these 2 messages it conveys: how awful I look, and how useless that app is. (I take everybody’s privacy too seriously, hence some masking)

My Status Update

Still wondering what 13 people really liked?

Publicity fail

That application – whatever its name is – is a complete fail in terms of its messaging. Understand the scenario: that app is sending me a persuading message to try it on a friend’s recommendation. The least I expect is View full article »

It just occurred that we all face criticism one or the other time, and either gulp it down, react strongly or get defensive.  Not only is time wasted reacting to it, valuable inputs are lost when criticism is not consumed. What can be done with it? Is it really helpful? Can it be consumed? Yes, to bring in a change, and to evolve oneself. And here’s how-to.

3 tips on consuming criticism effectively:

1. Accept that its good

If you let criticism hurt your ego, you’re not going anywhere. Understand that it’s really the best source to reflect and learn more about yourself. It will expose things you never knew or sensed. So don’t shy away, and encourage constructive criticism & confrontation!

2. Work on the negatives, forget the compliments

Flattery received (or given) adds up to nothing, ignore it. Compliments tell you what you’re good it, which helps motivate yourself an a bad day. The action items lie hidden in the negatives. Spend time to identify, investigate, verify and plan the change.

3. Know whom to listen to

This is perhaps the most important one. Don’t confuse like-ability and trustworthiness. Not everyone you like, likes you and in this world, there are a ton of people willing to compromise integrity to get their way and put you down. Listen to those whose advice you trust and still use your brains to filter what you hear.

For the record, this post is not the aftermath of some serious criticism or embarrassment :)

7 tips on dealing with situations!

In my last post, I spoke about unwanted surprises in life and how the human mind usually deals with them. In this part, I will share some guidelines that will help retain focus in tough situations. As I said before, I am no authority on this subject, but I will share what I learned (the hard way) & feel.

1. Stay in control

You will often find yourself in a state of shock when you experience something that you never thought of. The sooner you release yourself from this lock, will you find yourself with the capacity to deal with the situation. Motivate yourself to live life and tackle this situation.

  • Do not loose control of your mind, else you will find yourself being too dependent on others.
  • Do not make a compromise or you will find yourself slipping into a dream world, that you will never want to leave in the fear of reality.
  • Do not leave things to time or just dream that someday this will fall in place, or you will repent later for not having tried enough.

2. Don’t mix the past and the current situation & think fresh!

Introspection is the key to dealing with situations. It is always worthwhile going back in time to see what happened, and try to determine factors that must have given rise to the current situation. But it is not at all necessary that those factors alone triggered the situation. Hence, it is as important to deal with these two information elements  (learning from introspection & info about the current situation) separately, as important it is to understand them. View full article »

This is not a blog post, but just sharing the report template used for the final semester dissertation/project at BITS, Pilani. I guess this is common to MS SS & MM courses offered by DLPD (WILPD). This is the result of the numerous email that keep floating during the semester, only adding to the confusion. So I created a Word template that one can use right away, for lazy bums like me who start late. Just define custom properties, and the report template will automatically fill itself up.

Usage:

  1. Download the file from either of the 2 links:
    - DocStoc (latest)
    - Box.Net
  2. On Windows, right-click, go to ‘Properties’, then the ‘Custom’ tab
  3. You will see all the fields used in the document like Report Title, Mentor Name, Student ID, etc.
  4. If not, in MS WORD 2007, go to ‘Prepare’ > ‘Properties’ from the OFFICE menu. Then ‘Document Properties’ > ‘Advanced Properties’ on the yellow band and ‘Custom’ tab on the pop-up.
  5. To modify a value,
    - Click on the field name in the field list
    - Change the ‘Value’ above
    - Click ‘Modify’
    - Repeat this procedure for all fields
  6. Do not delete any of the fields.
  7. Open the document now, select all the text (CTRL + A) and press F9.

I have taken care of the fonts, page numbers, table of contents, etc. You can copy-paste one of the existing chapters to create a new one. However, if something is missing as per the checklist, please bring it to everyone’s attention. We can discuss this via comments below.

Wishing you all good luck without your report & viva!

This intelligent template is dedicated to Sonal Purandare who motivated me to get started on the report and offered immense support in difficult times.

As is evident from several posts on my blog, I am a total food freak! I am also a regular burrper. I have written several valuable reviews at Burrp and also received written appreciation from Burrp. A couple of months back I was thinking of copying food review from Burrp to my blog. Since that was going to be tedious, I went looking for a RSS feed from Burrp. It was sad they don’t offer it, but I wrote them my feedback. Now I was left with no option but to think out of the box!

The Need

The Need

And then the Web 2.0 enthusiast in me came to life! I had been using a service called Feed43 to process several feeds and remembered that it allows creating a feed out of any page on the internet. I checked the HTML source code of my Burrp profile page to find that reviews were quite structured in terms of markup. So why not let Feed43 read out the page and create a feed for my reviews? This way I won’t have to copy anything manually. Moreover, whenever I post a review to Burrp, it will be available on my blog in less than 6 hours (that’s the refresh rate for free feeds at Feed43) View full article »

Off-late, I have had too much social presence on the internet. How do I manage it? Ping.fm! This service lets you pre-configure & then simultaneously update multiple social media sites by pinging Ping.fm which can be done via email, SMS (to a UK number – noooooh!) or a Jabber/Gtalk bot. Now that’s enough for the aam zindagi, but when you live the mentos (or should I say prasadgupte) zindagi, you might just want some processing to be done before you post to multiple services. That’s where TarPipe kicks-in! Here is a short tutorial.

Tarpipe lets you build custom workflows through an intuitive UI (like Yahoo pipes) to control how, where, and what part of your data is to be published. In my example, I’m creating a workflow to upload a photo to Facebook via email and then post its URL to Twitter & FriendFeed. I avoided using a URL shortening service to KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

My First TarPipe Workflow

My First TarPipe Workflow

I first drag a Email Decoder connector onto the canvas, and then Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed. Note that bubble on the left side of a connector indicates ‘input’ & the one on the right side indicates ‘output’.

So when I connect the Mail Attachment bubble to the Photo in Facebook, it means that the attachment (a photo) will act as input to Facebook. On similar lines, the message body acts as the caption for the photo. The URL for the photo, generated by Facebook, will be available as output which I will use as a link in Twitter. The photo-thumbnail goes to Friendfeed along with the title & link. The title in either case comes directly from the email. View full article »

Type in English, Save as Marathi

Type in English, Save as Marathi

Last week I stumbled upon this amazing service called Google Transliteration that can be accessed through a bookmarklet (jargon explained at the bottom). You can use this to type in one of the Indic languages in any text input box on the internet! (whether it really gets saved depends on the website :) ) Language currently supported: Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu & Urdu.

Update (21-Feb-10):
After reading this post, one my valued readers questioned the utility of this service! And this is what I wrote back:
Few years back acquiring Indic fonts, and learning to use Indic keyboard layout was a challenge. Google eased that with a web service which takes away reluctance to reply in local languages.
With such a service, an application developer need not provide for transliteration as a feature (its a feature in Gmail). Creating a database with double-byte storage is enough to record input in any language.

Also, Transliteration can help people understand how words are pronounced when they are familiar with a different script. However, this may not work when the same word is spelled in multiple ways. eg. Mohammed [Read more]
With CJV languages, transliteration will often yield only an approximate result.

View full article »

Gmail confirms this fact

Gmail confirms this in a cute way

Did you know that Gmail lets you add any number of dots (.) and plus (+) signs in your email address? I didn’t. This was recently brought to my notice by a colleague, Narendra Wagh. The best part was the way Gmail conveys the fact. View full article »

For the last decade, I have been scuffling to find a tool that will reduce the quality of several images at once. Before Picasa Web Albums was available, I used to manually reduce the quality of my scanned or digital images to meet two constraints: available server space and bandwidth (offered by a free host) I used evaluation versions of a couple of tools, that didn’t live too long. In this post I will explain how Picasa lets you compress several images at once so that they can be attached to email; also, creating a Gift CD – a great way to share pictures with so-called ‘computer illiterates’! View full article »

prasadgupte | 1999-2012