I am just back from a 2 day enjoyable marketing workshop which was aimed at introducing the various departments, spread across the nation. It gave me a good opportunity to know the team members closely and their roles and responsibilities in the commune. The workshop was organised in the pleasant surroundings of the Retreat Hotel at Madh Island near Mumbai.
General
Long Live Surfunion
For those of you wondering what happened to SurfUnion, here’s some bad news – the forum got affected in last week’s hacker attack with all its data destroyed. I called up Ron who had been its caretaker for many months and could sense the shock and awe over the phone, that dismayed look on his face. The plans to resurrect it are being put on hold for the time being.
Sadly, Surfunion died an unsung death. In its last days, there was little traffic and virtually nothing being generated which would have created some amount of interest amongst the community. Eventually it was left to survive on its own, with even its creators staying away from it. The greatest achievement of SU however would always be the network it created of local designers (Mumbai members had a strong presence on the forum) through MegaMeets.
Good Bye and Good Luck SurfUnion. I will miss you always!
Resurrection
Murphy’s Law – “If anything can go wrong, it will”. My belief in this quote was strengthened last week, in a mail from my host informing me about a serious security breach by an hacker. The maniac rid 16 servers of its valuable data and left me high and dry. I did not have a backup of my blog entries, nor did my respected hosting service. Luckily I had a backup till March 2006 which I am now presenting to you. Please understand that some sections of the blog are yet to be made live and some content might need some polishing. I will take care of those problems eventually.
After such a terrible loss (I am partly responsible for it as well), there was no chance about staying with Webhostplus. After extensive reviews, I shortlisted Bluehost for my website. As of today, the service seems to be pretty good.
The loss is irreversible, the trauma is unbearable but it was good lesson for me to learn – always take backups on the PC! The resurrection is completed and it’s not happening again, I promise.
Flash Accessibility Workshop
This was yet another attempt on my part to get familiar with Accessibility. The term means a lot but to me it refers to usability of computer systems by people with disabilities or age related limitations. I was notified about this seminar which looked at Macromedia (formerly) Flash as a delivery tool and how one can make it accessible – Designing Accessible eLEarning Applications with Flash. The title was intriguing because I never thought one could make it accessible the way HTML/xHTML behaves and hence I decided to participate.
South Africa clinch a Historic Match
Exactly a decade ago, during the 1996 cricket world cup, Sri Lanka scored a massive 398 against Kenya in a one day international (ODI) game at their home ground. That score was challenged so many times but never broken and most recently by New Zealand who scored 397 against Zimbabwe. The record was finally crumbled today first by the Aussies who scored a massive 434-4 in their 50 overs and then the South Africans got the better of them by scoring 438-9 chasing and clinching the series.
I always look forward to watching these 2 countries play cricket since the result cannot be predicted so easily. The ranking apart I think they are the best teams in world cricket today. It was Ponting’s day first who scored his highest ODI score of 164 off just 105 balls hitting 9 sixes and one thought that the Aussies always rose to big occasions like this one. At this point the South Africans looked like they had given up already and I never thought they would give a fight back. It was a daunting task to score 435 off just 300 deliveries and we all know the bowling attack of the Aussies.
There are a few parallels which I want to draw from this match particularly with relation to India. This was the same Wanderers (Johannesburg) ground where we played our 2003 world cup finals against Australia. If you recall, the Aussies batted first and made a mockery of us. The bowling attack of Srinath-Khan-Nehra seemed overtly aggressive and gave away too many runs. Srinath in particular was hammered and came back with the most expensive figures for any bowler in a world cup match. In the end the score of 359-4 seemed too much and we lost that game. We lived up to our reputation of losing the BIG matches. This is the same ground and almost the same team playing under captain Ricky Ponting and Smith’s South Africans have blown their heads off. THAT to me is the difference between a good team and a world class team. When the bets are drawn on who wins the 2007 world cup edition, I will put my money on South Africa. As for this new record – they took 10 years to break the old one and this one will take ages to break.