Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Ideapad Yoga -- Thoughts and Observations

Last week,  I had the opportunity to take part in a Lenovo hangout session which provided some insight into all things Ideapad Yoga with Windows 8 thrown in. It was an interesting conversation which included some other Lenovo advocates like my self and a couple of Lenovo employees.


During the half an hour session we had,I got a glimpse of  how versatile the yoga was in terms of usage and aesthetics.During a brief Q &A session in the ending,I had the opportunity to ask the reason behind Lenovo naming it as Yoga for which I did not get a satisfactory answer. So I decided to make my bit of research. While it seems to be an apt name for a product which bends in a 360 degree way, I wanted to know that specific elements in  yoga as we know it which would have inspired the designers to go for greater lengths and design such a machine. While I do have a basic idea of all the yoga postures, it would take some time on my part to find out the exact/matching poses with respect to the 4 different modes which Lenovo describes. This has  done for the sake of my personal satisfaction.

The first mode is called as a tent mode.It  is quite   similar to the Adho Mukha Asan . Now Lenovo says that the hinges are patented and can be used for several times. It looks like this mode would act more like a kick stand   which is present on the Microsoft surface. This mode might have more stability while using since both the sides are equal in measurement.





Find something similar in the above two photos? 


The second mode which the Yoga boasts of is the Stand mode. This mode might be more useful while you are resting on your couch and would like to watch your movie collection or have a Skype session with your near and dear ones. Again I found another pose  called Bhunjangasana which has striking similarities to the stand mode








Like all the convertibles, the notebook mode would be the default mode of the Ideapad Yoga. For fun sake I would compare this to another yoga asan called  Padmasan






The last one is a tablet mode for which I could not find a suitable Yoga pose.There might be one of which I am not aware of.Perhaps I would find about it sooner rather than later :) .Which Yoga mode are you?














Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Rail Travel Snafu -- My brush with final destination


Today, I was on my way back home from Hyderabad when an un-thinkable thing happened.Had I read about similar situations like these  in a newspaper ,it would generally mean skimming though it for a second and forgetting about it in the later part of the day.But I guess untill to you don't experience some things on a first hand basis, it would be just be another passing reference. 

I was already half  asleep when I took my windows seat.To pass some time I started reading the times of India.A must have in my luggage during my train journeys. The train was not increasing its acceleration , something which I felt was an uncommon thing. I could here a lot of  sound which was emanating from the wheel set right beneath me in the coach. Some time into the journey while the train still gaining speed, I heard  a defining boom from my underneath. Trying to ignore it I maintained my cool and began to sink back into my slumber -- this is when the mayhem started 


At the other end of the coach ,I noticed a small commotion. It so seemed that smoke was bellowing from somewhere near the bogies and people were really scared like mad.No one had still not forgotten how a fire had engulfed another major train last month. I saw a big red flash but no smoke. I  gained some courage and sat down in my seat. But as a natural tendency of we humans,some panic stricken passengers pulled the emergency chain and the train came to a halt. The loco pilot and the guard came along assuring the passengers saying that nothing was wrong and the train started moving again. A minute or so into the journey - the ceiling fans were running way beyond their usual speed - it meant there was another malfunction in the making .Soon enough two of the fans were burnt  and the train came to an emergency stop once again. 

Removing the DC current supply to the lights and fans would not work either as it was proved otherwise in a third instance. While all the fans were still - one right above me began to whir at a very high-speed bringing in the fear of doom from my mind. It really looked like those final destination  films where your source of  death was right near to you. I made up my mind to leave the coach while to train was standing still. My mind would not rest until I saw the coach while was still tethered to the train -- much to my dismay. There was nothing I could do but complaint about the situation to a senior engineer in the railways. 

I am not sure how far my grievances would be listened. But if I do get an update about why this happened I would perhaps take more precautions for a possible future event of the same magnitude



Thursday, November 1, 2012

The inevitable shift from Wordpress to Blogger


My first  tryst with blogging started around 2003-2004 when I was a student in Hyderabad.Back then, the only blogging tool which I knew was blogger.com .This was due to the varied services which a single Google id would give . To be frank I had no idea what a blog was all about . My daily dose of news from The Hindu was one the reasons behind my blogging début.

One fine afternoon in 2005, I went to a cybercafé along with a friend and opened  a blogger account. What I wrote online on that day must be crap by blogging standards. But I was  young and was not matured enough to understand what a blog would really mean to the readers. Fast forward to 2008 - this was when I delved into the world of blogging in a serious way. Word Press has been a great publishing platform for my blog . In the 3 years I used it -  I liked the very first theme which was automatically selected. Nice clean design and features like word proofing kept me glued to Word Press for some time. But as time progressed and the hit rate increased a lot about certain articles in the blog, I was very keen to learn about reader information. Since some articles like the Ogilvy Internship and Ubuntu experience on the IdeaPad netbook were among the highest traffic sources.



In the meantime I also realized that widget support in Wordpress.com was pathetic. Since I would expect most of them to have real time information and this in turn would mean support for java script ,I was wondering if other platforms should have been  adapted in order to incorporate live content of mine. For example, I’ve been using paper.li to aggregate news information about my favorite stuff on the internet and share it with my friends on twitter. Wordpress.com would not support their respective widget.
For ages I have tried to use an alternative HTML tracking based metrics service -  since Google Analytics was also not supported. For me using a a single open web id to access all of my content  on the web was an easy way of managing all of my social platforms



Unfortunately Word Press would not provide an  in depth analytics platform to deal with metrics and outreach and this lead me to evaluate and use certain third party tools . Going up was the only which I found. But this would not give me the  rich dashboard and intuitive UI as analytics would do so I seriously began to think about jumping the ship to Blogger. Keen to check what blogger was providing I signed into the service after a very long time and much to my surprise the whole thing had changed a lot. There were more options for customized layouts and the new Dynamic appearance layout was definitely a stealer. All of these factors combined, I brought  a page redirect option and  embraced Blogger again .This is where I began my journey here and this is where it would continue forever!