And we're back

For several very good reasons, I made a move to wordpress about an year back. But the google ranking for this blog never went down. It ranked second on a search for "akshay dhavle" after more than a year of having a single post saying the blog had moved!

90% of the traffic to the new blog was referral traffic from agileanalysis.blogspot.com :(

The other stupid mistake I made was two merge my business analysis blog with my everything else blog. It diluted the content significantly.

So here we are. I am back to the "new & improved" blogger platform which is essentially as crappy as it was earlier if not worse. I hate the templates, I hate the lack of customizations, I hate how much "post-production" work I have to do after writing a post just to make headings and paragraphs work the way they are supposed to. I hope it'll get better.

But I am happy that I will be posting more regularly about business analysis.

The Sichuan Restaurant

I am in Bangalore for an agile training for a client. I'm staying near our office in Koramangala so I went to this chinese restaurant called "Sichuan" near Raheja Residency for dinner. First of all let me say that its a really good restaurant. If I had to nitpick, it was a bit warm in there but that's about it. Food, ambience, service, rates, everything is very nice.

I had a soup and a main course that was delicious. Even the fresh lime soda was nice. So I am absolutely positive that they can serve excellent desserts as well.

But... there's a Natural's ice cream store just next door!! (Natural's is a very well established brand in India). I overheard the waiter ask at least 4 customers if they'd like to have dessert and they all very frankly told the waiter that they would have it next door. No offense meant and none taken either!

The Sichuan restaurant clearly has two choices.

1. Make better dessert than the Naturals chain
   OR
2. Strike a deal with naturals so that they either serve natural's ice cream at the restaurant / give some kind of discount on naturals ice cream if you've dined at Sichuan

What would you do as the owner of the Sichuan restaurant?

Livescribe Pulse Smartpen

Ooooh! Ooooooh! I love it!!

This is the most awesomest thing I have bought this year.

There are enough reviews online for me not to write one of my own. But I'll mention the most useful features here:

• Captures everything I write / draw. This is the basic promise. A very well kept one.


• Captures good audio. It's not crystal clear or anything, but is it works well in a meeting setting. I recorded three interviews today, alongwith notes. After I get the headset that someone took by mistake, I'll experiment with the more clear 3D recording capabilities.


• It links the audio and notes together so you can replay what you were saying when you wrote a particular word.


• It searches. Even cursive handwriting.


• And then there's other fun stuff like drawing a paper piano and playing it. Or using a calculator by tapping the paper calculator on the inside cover of the starter notebook. Or drawing a cross for navigating the pen's main menus. Or bookmarking audio at specific points.


• It uses dot paper for all the magic. But you are not restricted to the notebooks supplied by the company. You can print your own dot paper for free using any half decent printer!
  

All in all this is going to be very useful. The 2GB storage is more than enough. My 1:02:14 audio session used 12MB. So if you download the data even once a week, you'll be alright.

I'm loving it!