browngeek

My bank, Bank of America, shows a credit card ad as their landing page when logging off from their site. I’ve always found it extremely annoying. For one, I hate these big stupid ads. Secondly, I *already* own their credit card. Surely, they should know this?

Well, today, when I signed off, instead of the annoying ad page, I get an obscene error. Some “Server Error in ‘/NonCard’ Application….please create a customerrors tag within a “web.config” configuration….”. Looks like they use still use JSPs. I can sympathize with that. But thats no excuse for such an obscene error.

The first time I saw Muse live was in the 2006 Download Festival. Beck headlined. But Muse stole the show with their short 30-min set. Ever since, I’ve been looking forward the see them live, in their own show.

It happened last week. Muse was in town. And they killed the sold-out Bill Graham civic center crowd with their 2-hour double-encore set. The energy from the band was incredible. These guys are so talented and know how to thrill a crowd. Just check out the video - its an impromptu riff-jam introducing the hit Stockholm Syndrome. You will agree they are the best band to watch live.

Two down, three to go..

I once asked a friend - “What is the goal in life for people?”
Its a rather open-ended question with no real answer. Being the philosopher he was, he tried to answer it -
“People want to leave behind a mark. Some sort of a legacy to remind others of their existence. Most people reproduce offspring for that purpose. Other people leave behind their contributions to society.”

I also believe that there are smaller, incremental impacts you can make. Often times, these are unintentional. I was pleasantly surprised recently to find out that I had left one. No, not a child.

I was practicing the Scrum methodology at my previous job. My intention was to introduce the agile software development process there. The scrum team consisted of 6 members. I was the “Scrum Master”. We had 30-day sprints. We diligently conducted the daily scrum meetings, prepared the task-plans and had demos each iteration. Although team was pretty excited about Scrum, the response from my managerial peers was lackluster. We had just completed the 5th iteration when I resigned my job to pursue other opportunities. And I was quite sure that that would be the end of Scrum there.

Fast forward 8 months. I recently met a couple of the original Scrum team members (now friends) for lunch. I almost spit out the soup when they mentioned in passing that they were still doing the 30-day iterations. There was no Scrum Master, but the daily scrum meetings, the huddles, the demos, the refactoring, were still going. Being agile just clicked and they never stopped. Whats more, the managers, impressed by the team’s perseverance, are wanting to adopt Scrum for other projects.

It was quite a surprise. I had left behind a mark. Unintended.

Moral of the story: Passion is contagious. It leaves behind a mark.

Google is hosting its (first?) Developer Day on May 31st, 2007. The MV agenda looked interesting enough for me to sign-up for the event. Expectedly, I got a confirmation email to my GMail account. Unexpectedly, however, when I opened the email, GCal did not prompt with “Would you like to Add this Event to your calender…”.

Why not? Well, the email text did not include the date of the event.
Oversight? Possibly.
Did it render the GMail-GCal integration useless? You bet.

Have you ever planned a trip and had to use some obscene paint tool (Microsoft Paint) to plot out the different points of interest? I sure have and it sucked.

Well, finally, there is something much better. And its about time! Google Maps just launched the My Maps feature that lets anyone create maps - mark points of interest, add descriptions, photos and videos. And as you would expect from Google, they even have some quirky icons you can use to mark the points in the map. You can also plot the route with a line (though the line cannot yet have any notion of direction) and add any obscure shapes.

I gave it a spin by creating a map of my recent Australian trip. Creating the map is a breeze if you know how to click and drag.

Check out the Oz map here.
While you are there, also check out the awesome Our Earth as Art map.