Thought Garage

Windows Live Spaces, the Microsoft’s Blogging platform will be shutdown early next year (16th March to be precise) and is offering to migrate your current blog to Wordpress.com . The email I received announcing this is quite confusing. The email subject says ‘Changes coming to your Windows Live Space’. I expected that it may have been upgraded with more features.  But they are simply shutting it down, and they appear to have trouble saying it. We are very excited to announce our collaboration with a premier and innovative blogging service, WordPress.com , to offer you an upgraded blogging experience. We'll help you migrate your current Windows Live Spaces blog to WordPress.com or you can download it to save for later. On March 16th, 2011 your current space will close . With the new release of Windows Live services, we've made a series of changes and improvements across our products. We chose to partner to provide our users with a fantastic blogging solution. However...

I read great stories and reports about Plano that Plano is one of the best and arguably one of the most affluent cities. I wonder why City maintains these volleyball courts in Russelcreek park in such a horrible and unsafe conditions for so long. One of our friends complained back in August 2009 about the plight of these courts. It appears nothing has been done and conditions have only gone worse since then. Looking at these grounds, I am quite sure that no city official paid a visit to these grounds since that complaint made or made sure otherwise these grounds are maintained well and safer. Hope at least they can take a look at these pictures and do something. Please do send an email to Plano city officials with these pictures or pass the URL to them. Hope, we will have better and safer grounds soon. The East Court : Hope this pole stay strong for few more days…! ( Pole on the east side) The East Court : West side pole. You can also see the condition of the net. We...

Groupon 's Unsubscribe screen asks you to ‘Punish’ a team member that recommended Email Subscriptions whenever you unsubscribe to those Email notifications. Nice, personal, playful and bring you back to interacting with their site, even after you decided to go away. Loved it.

A book published in 1825 about the Geography of the world, places, people, cultures and so on. I was quite curious to read how and what the people at that time imagined or came to know about the world and more about how they perceived it. Put the context that it was in 1800s and you will be rather surprised and shocked to read it. I loved it. Thanks to Hemanth for sharing the link. Link : Google Picasa Album : Geography Book

There is a good list of FREE books on Programming at Stack overflow here . Since they are available for FREE, you may be tempted to download all of them at once thinking you could read any time later. You may probably never even look at them again. So download one book at a time and read it like it matters. And Keep going. Good luck ! And one more link, just received in MSDN Flash, a collection of “7 Freely available E-Books essential for .NET Programmers and Architects” by Anoop Madhusudhan .

“ I promise not to exclude from consideration any idea based on its source, but to consider ideas across schools and heritages in order to find the ones that best suit the current situation.” -- The Oath of Non-Allegiance, Alistair Cockburn Sold. And Signed.

Alistair Cockburn reading the poem, “ Every story has two sides.. ”

After a few hours with the iPad, I realized that I was feeling a sensation I'd only remembered once before: back in 1995 when someone showed me the World Wide Web. There's no dramatic new technology, we've seen tablets before just as we'd seen hypertext before. But the overall package was game-changer. I don't know if the iPad will be The Device, but I do think that this kind of device will make huge difference to how we read and watch things in the future Source : http://martinfowler.com/bliki/iPad.html

Why did China, India and Brazil all emerge so much more rapidly from the global financial crisis than advanced economies did? In a presentation in Denver to the National Association for Business Economics, Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence, now of New York University, offered several reasons: These economies learned bitter lessons in the 1997-98 crisis that afflicted them more than advanced economies. They were in “a good initial position” with relatively low leverage, and thus didn’t get hit with the severe “balance sheet recession” that hit the U.S. They hadn’t any complex securitized financial instruments. They had built up large foreign-exchange reserves. Their central banks responded, much as advanced countries’ central banks did, with speed and agility to the credit tightening. Their economic managers displayed “a high degree of competence.” Source: WSJ

As per Nielsen report, Kindle owners are more wealthier, older and educated compared to younger and majorly male  iPad owners. Source : Nielsen

Just noticed that with Windows Live Essentials 2011 upgrade, Windows Live Writer also gets Ribbon style interface that became so famous and productive with MS Office applications. If you have been using WLW for a while but haven’t used any MS Office applications that feature ribbon style interface, you are in for a big surprise and little bit of confusion.  If you are looking for all your Picture effects, they are split into two different sections: borders and effects. Click on Image to make these Picture tools/Format section visible.

If you haven't noticed this "Do The Math" widget already, Amazon appears to be offering a Textbook Buyback store where you can sell your books back to Amazon. Amazon is including the price at which a particular book can be bought back and showing the effective price you may have to pay if you just want to read it once and return to the store. Quite a saver for many books that we normally read just once and ready to return.

I have installed MS Office 2010 recently on top of Windows 7. Thought I would share a few first impressions and reflections here. Simply put, Office apps are lot more visually pleasing in Office 2010 and greatly productive as they have always been. If there is one functionality I would request in MS Office, it would be the ability to publish documents in to ePub format as well. PDF support is already built in, starting from 2007. I do not know exactly when the first office was officially released, but based on Wikipedia entry, it was some time in the fall of 1990. That would mean, it’s 20 years since the first release.  Lots of things have changed since I first looked at Office applications in 1995.   Source:  Page 50, Info World, 19th November 1990 via Google Books Of all software applications I worked on, MS Excel is still the application I love the most for its power, functionality and brutal simplicity while note taking application OneNote comes second. Outl...