Being a gamer and someone who takes his challenges much seriously, it’s particularly harder for me to accept that I am giving up on ‘InFamous: Second Son‘. This is a great game, the greatest exclusive perhaps on the PS4 made by Sucker Punch, and I am sad not only because I wasn’t able to beat the ‘He Who Dwells’ boss fight, but I would be left deprived of the most amazing game experiences just for not beating this boss fight. It hurts. But I tried my best – I watched videos and read tips online, and concluded that I am not ready yet to jump platforms over lava AND engage with multiple targets at the same time. The last time I faced such a difficult challenge in a boss fight was with Kessler in ‘InFamous’ on PS3 and I quit after like spending months trying to beat him. Thankfully, that fight was the last boss fight of the game and I had played the game mostly. Maybe I will return to Second Son in the distant future, but for now, I am giving it complete rest because I need some rest too.
General
Returning To Rotman In A Mentoring Role
Yesterday I was invited at the Rotman School of Management’s Business Edge program for mentoring the current cohort during the Informational Interview BootCamp. It was my pleasure to enlighten the cohort since I’ve heavily invested in using this tool for networking within my industry and I have managed to make some awesome connections. Through the Business Edge program I also get to work with a diverse batch of internationally educated alumnae who bring their varied industry experience from all parts of the world! It’s always a pleasure to be invited back to the program as a graduate and today was one such special day. The format of the BootCamp matches individual professionals with a program graduate based on their future career interest & line of work.
The BootCamp, which is held once for every cohort at the Rotman campus, brings together a varied blend of experienced graduates from Business Edge’s fine legacy and lends a no-risk-no-obligation opportunity to practice the principles of informational interviews. This was also a great setting for me to meet my fellow graduates from past cohorts – or as I call it, networking within a diverse network. This is also that occasion when I get to mingle, meet, and to share my aspirations and career learnings one-on-one with the illustrious Rotman faculty, especially Sabina and Val. To put it all in a nutshell, yesterday was a memorable day for me!
Revisiting The Old ‘Blogspot’ Times
While perusing the Internet I stumbled upon my old blog write-ups from 2002-2005 which were created on Blogger. It felt good going back to those writings to get a personal sense of how much times have changed me. The posts were more or less written as diary notes quite mindless of the anxiety that it was meant for public viewing. In a way, I’m glad I wrote them because it evokes a sense of nostalgia in me. Take, for instance, this note from my amazing 2002 holiday in Hong Kong where I was still applying my latent photographic skills using my Dad’s old film Pentax camera. It also mentions some connections from that era which I have left behind (or rather they have moved forward) and had I not mentioned them in this post I assure you I’d have no realization left of them. Honestly, it feels great to come across a missing testimony of my time from the past decade which was lost in the surge of the Internet before social media completely swooped down upon my existence. It also brings the heartache as to why I stopped personal blogging.
This one’s pretty interesting. One of my last personal notes was in 2005 where I state that the Mumbai Metro would start in 2013 and it did start services on the Versova-Ghatkopar line almost a decade later in 2014. Now for those of you wondering why I stopped blogging on Blogspot, time constraints apart this account was probably the last one I operated on a public domain before moving on to blogging on my personal domain, in that, I was the first individuals to adapt to WordPress as a blogging tool for its wide array of plugins. Sadly those early posts have been lost due to a server crash in 2005! And before I started blogging on bhooshan.com it served as a canvas for my creative urges, but not as a full-fledged online portfolio, which has now moved to bhooshan.net.
Now the question remains, what should I do about my old Blogger account? Well, the verdict is still out. :-)
Groopy – Designing a Community Mobile Experience
When the launch of the Business Edge Alumni Network was proposed I became involved in designing the brand identity for the group beginning with my research on the diverse community. This network is a place for industry professionals to leverage their collective aspirations and experience in advancing career growth within Canada. The network today is coexisting through the WhatsApp platform which entails several privacy issues. I believed, this privacy concern needed to be addressed, where the need to give personal information to make connections online could be prevented while the data could live on the encrypted servers. Most importantly, my goal was to integrate a community professionally moving away from the core definition of ‘social networking’. The overall focus of this inspired me to conceptualize a mobile app which I named ‘Groopy’.
Background
Social media has built a phenomenal character for users in a ‘social networking’ environment and allowing them easy transaction of personal data such as text, images, video, and opinions in general. My first concept banked upon connecting people outside of the typical ‘social networking’ definition, a professional network that is nurtured in exchanging views but those which are not meant to be ‘shared’ outside the realm of the network due to its structure of belonging only within the current stream of thought. Thus the goal of Groopy is to connect groups of people on an enterprise platform as illustrated below, and it’s an antithesis of a social network.
An overview of how Groopy differs from conventional Social Media.
Dear UPS, This Should Be Your Delivery Strategy!
No matter how hard I try I always seem a bummer when it comes to receiving packages at home, especially with UPS’ odd delivery acts. Here’s a journey map with a ‘mood meter’ to illustrate my purchase experience.
The Ups and Downs
I browsed a book I liked at a local bookstore and bought it on Amazon from the mobile app. I received an email that my package has been shipped with UPS with a tracking number and an approximate delivery date. I wait for the package to arrive on the same day but nothing happens. Surprisingly, UPS has stuck a note at the entrance (embarrassingly for the world to see) that I missed the package, and the reason provided was that the customer wasn’t available to receive the package!