If there had been one great social bookmarking tool I enjoyed using in the last five years it was delicious. The ease of use, knowing the popular bookmarks, easy plugins with Mozilla. Folksonomy or social tagging was a step ahead from the conventional browser based bookmarking. This helped us a lot to access our bookmarks anywhere wherever we need.

Few years back Yahoo acquired this and said it is going to improve this service further.

Now I get a ail from Yahoo today saying they sold of. This company so infamous for acquiring killing some big products, why could they not turnaround this product.  But since Yahoo had plans to pull the plug from delicious, I have already migrated to Google bookmarks which is the only closest thing which is as good as delicious but the missing features are social aspects. I do not know which are the famous links, networking etc. I will live with that anyway until AVOS does something for delicious.

1. Two way syncing also Echoing a particular folder / Subfolder.
2. Very simple and intuitive UI.
3. Also you can create many pairs of folders and you can run the pairs whenever you need to / schedule the synch.

The year 2010, started with the final term of my post graduate program in XLRI but a great term in terms of learning important things for my life. Got some of the great friends in this place and getting a gold medal made the last term very eventful though there was a heartbreak in my previous term. My mother had her day in my convocation, it was one of her long waited sight which I keep hearing from my school days - Finally she was happy that at least once I could get her the sight of getting a medal.  Left XL with a good number of friends who had helped me pass out this place successfully and also a few I was not interested to meet ever in my life. But saying that I do not have any grudges against any of them all forgotten now, all helped me in my learning.

Joined Microsoft in March, started the journey of work for second time. Great team at my work made the remaining part of the year very memorable. I finally shifted my home from Coimbatore this year. Yes, after 44 years of living in Coimbatore, my mother had to shift with me to Hyderabad. This was one big change she herself never expected.

After about 4 months of working in Hyderabad in couple of roles, got an opportunity to work in Redmond for 3 months. End of July, I flew to Seattle. Made new friends in this place and first time ever in my life I started running. All thanks to my coach and my super boss, Matt who coached me in swimming and inspired me with his Iron Man participation. I started swimming regularly and knocked of a minute from my timing log for a 100 yard swimming. Cycling a 100 mile, completing two 5Ks and swimming a 2.5K were some things I would consider as sincere efforts in my training when I was in Seattle. Also learnt a bit of cooking during this time and tried some different cuisines like Lebanese, Ethiopian, Mexican, Thai… Left Seattle gaining a good fitness and determination to run more when I get back to India.

After coming back to India, traveled further for some recruitment trips. This year I had visited all metros in India. Took a vacation with my Mom and visited Taj. The beautiful sight of Taj Mahal is still in my eyes, early morning run at Agra around Taj and entered the place at 6.00 AM. I would rate the sight of Taj early morning as one of the best time to see it. Went around Agra, Mathura and Shikri with Mom. And by the way during this I have also added another few sites to my journey to complete visiting the 28 UNESCO heritage sites in India. I have so far visited 12 of the 28 sites, and in 2011 I hope to add a few more to this.

Learnt some new things in this year - finally I can drive a car now and got my driving licence. I can read Telugu slowly like a first standard kid, I am at this stage only now. I completed my first half marathon in Bangalore with my best friend. Though both of us struggled, since we were running a half marathon in midnight after a long day walking around the city.  The year closed in Mumbai, with my XL friends.

I hope this new year, 2011 would also be a very eventful journey. Lots to learn new and I continue to change for the good..Happy and Prosperous New Year 2011 for all.

The best thing which I enjoyed during my swimming trainings was the amount of time I get everyday to reflect upon my various activities at work and other than work. I felt it was a time for myself to prepare, plan and pursue on my personal development plan. Later I started to increase my mileage by lot of biking and running at Seattle. These two are something which I am doing very dedicatedly even after coming India.

In the past till I was in my engineering I had very little or no time for reflection. But later I found the best things happened in life were because of the time I spent consciously on reflecting upon my actions and thoughts periodically. This could be a weekly or monthly. But the time spent on self-reflection or you can call it as introspection is an investment for your personal improvement. It has brought in lot of change in me and it would be the same for anyone who can put in the time periodically in reflection. This is one of the reason I do not want to miss out my Triathlon practice everyday – either running, swimming or biking.

Anyway I would be running the Bangalore Midnight Marathon on 11th Dec @ 0000hrs. This would be my first half marathon, you can cheer me up by sending your wishes as comments or email. Which would motivate me to practice regularly in the last few weeks and complete the half marathon next month.

More updates about my Half marathon and especially my long biking expeditions recently coming soon Now I need to catch up some work.

So Today the news came Ray Ozzie is going to leave the Company. This is just not the one thing in the company this year. Here goes the bleeding list of Top guys who has left the company now – Robert Bach, President of Entertainment & Devices(House of Xbox, Zune etc.) who would be leaving soon, Steven Elop, President of Microsoft Business Division (House of Office Suite), James Allard, Chief Experience Officer of Entertainment & Devices Division, Rebecca Norlander, Partner Engineering Manager for AdCenter platform( James Allard’s better half), The list is not complete if I miss some of the technical fellows and distinguished engineers who are the pillars of the company, but left Microsoft for good. Gary Flake, Brad Lovering are some of the TFs who are leaving the company.

As Mini-Microsoft, this is like seriously a Boom-Boom-Boom time for the company to prove that we are still going strong and back on growth. Kevin Turner said the company is back on growth with strong growth in revenues because of Windows 7. I hope Windows Phone 7 and Kinect proves to be successful like Windows 7 to prove the market wrong and against the Goldman Sachs downgrading recently

But this case is applicable for everybody these days – as everyone store most of your data in PCs/Laptops or Mobile phones. You have multiple storage devices and every damn thing you can imagine is now stored in digital form. So like how we used to insure our properties in life it is essential to have backups for all the data you are having in your PCs or other devices. At least those critical data which you would need – in case of losing that – you would be in a terrible state. Have them in a proper backup schedule.

External Hard Disks / Flash Drives

There are plenty of options for backup these days – The external hard disk rates have fallen so much – every body who can afford a PC would definitely can spend additional thousand rupees to have a external storage device to backup.  Pros : Easy way to maintain  - Lots of software available for free that would help in doing sync every time you connect to the device.  Cons: You must be very disciplined to follow the backup schedule every time so that you don’t have obsolete data in your backup when you lose original data. Also you must take additional care in maintaining the external storage device not to be damaged. ( Who will guard the guards problem – Who will take care of the backup data)

Cloud Storage

In the last 4 years I have used multiple online services for my data backup, which in a way gave the advantage of mobility of my data – access my important data anywhere /  and everywhere whenever needed. Maintaining my important files I would need in any case ( Prioritizing is so important in data maintenance also ) online is better because I don’t need to take care of the storage device – which is maintained dedicatedly by a company.  I used to be amazed with Gmail when they launched the Gigabyte storage in mailbox five years before. So I used to store my important files as mail attachments. All my contacts/ some application details etc. were stored in the form of mail attachments. Again the problem was maintaining versions/ sync up the latest one were not possible. Then I was using the online storage providers who were offering for free like – eSnips, Scribd to store some of my documents and files.

But in the last 2 years the best backup and online storage which I am using which is available for free for many – though people are not aware of it – is the SkyDrive. It is a service by Microsoft ( many Microsoft employees don’t know who’s service is SkyDrive). At present SkyDrive is part of the Windows Live Suite of offerings by Microsoft – which provides 25GB of online storage (25 GB is not a small amount of space you are getting for free).  Biggest advantage is you can just drag and drop files into SkyDrive in browser. That makes it very cool to maintain.

The even more cool feature in the Windows Live suite is the use of Windows Live Mesh Client in your PC. You can configure a maximum of 2GB of documents to be automatically synced to the cloud i.e SkyDrive. So as an when documents are edited/added/deleted in those configured folders files are made sync with the SkyDrive making the SkyDrive an online backup for your important files. This is my latest backup device I am using in the last 2 years and found it very useful and comfortable without any headache. You can give a try – Also for prioritizing files – I maintain those bulky files like photos in online photo-storage not in SkyDrive. You can use any of the photo storage providers like Flickr / Picasa. These things need not be an online sync as mostly you would not be editing the photos every time and you dont need  a continuous syncing.  Also I store my favourites ( Links ) not in my PC rather I store in the cloud – I use del.icio.us, a service acquired by Yahoo. I maintain about 700 favourites tagged in multiple ways and easily searchable. Also it available for public to access it so that they can also use my favourites. For storing it every time I have installed a plug-in for internet explorer. I use the same short cut (Cntl+D) for tagging and it stores the link in my online account instead of browser.

My Picks for Cloud Backups :  Documents/ General Files – SkyDrive, Photos – Flickr/Picasa, Links – Del.icio.us.

So do use any of the backup methods suggested above to save your data without losing it.

In Subramoney, PV Subramanian has quoted almost most of the things I had followed and felt the real pleasure in doing so – a simple life. You Must definitely read the post.