Beautiful Game at its best!

While there are many teams that play the game beautifully, Barcelona played it beautifully and won it all. It is indeed a not so common to see teams do both. Their faith in playing attractive football was rewarded so well! And that's why it is such a beautiful game! Needless to say that they had some of the most talented players in the world at their disposal to do that. Their belief in the way they play has to be applauded by any true football lover.

While I couldn't watch the game live, what I heard was a superb performance that left United no chance. While Messi may not have been the star performer of the night, he remains at the very top of the talented individuals that make up this most beautiful spectacle called football! While Ronaldo has loads of talent, Messi comes out more as a team man than Ronaldo who comes out a self centered player who is more interested in himself than the team. His antiques in EPL when he was substituted when United was leading comfortably doesn't go very well of a team man. Also Ronaldo doesn't seem to raise his game on big games like these - while Messi seems to relish the big games.

While ManU has been the most consistent team in England, they were suspect against quality teams like Barcelona and Liverpool. With all their money, I thought the team lacked quality in some departments especially in the midfield. There is no real replacement for someone like Roy Keane and Scholes is not getting any younger. So Sir Alex Ferguson needs to beef up their midfield and defence a bit.

Sunfeast World 10K Bangalore

It is upon us this Sunday, but I am keeping my fingers crossed due to an onslaught of a flu. While the training went well to make it a possible under 65 minute finish, right now I am staring at a "Did Not Run(DNR)" against my name. Anyway I am keeping myself hydrated and upping my vitamin C intake and take a call on race day morning. Otherwise I am all set. Though I didn't want to spend on more gadgets, I ended up buying a Nike running short with an inbuilt underwear which would help reduce the rashes from the cotton underwears. Hopefully that should be my last investment in a running gadget for the year!

If I run or not, my charity collection will continue but I am way below my last years' collection of 50K INR - hopefully I will see more contributions during the week.

About 22000 people are expected to participate in the race, but the race route has not been announced yet, but it is expected to be the same as last years'(see below).

Book Review: Marathon You can Do It !

I bought this book recently from an Indian online vendor, infibeam.com, who delivered the stuff in 10 days which was a big surprise. Though the book is available at $12.21 at amazon, they charged me around $15, which wasn't that bad.

Since I already have Galloway's book on Running, many of the things are familiar to me and in fact the chapters are identical as well. But the core of the book is in the marathon training plans. From that of a beginner to those who want to finish in 4:40, 4:20, 4:00 and up. Also the race time predictor table includes slower times(above 5:00h ) as well. I am finding it a bit difficult to read it in one sitting because the same text appears in many places. And the "aha" factor was already experienced with the earlier book.

The message has been consistent and I guess you just need one of these books, either Galloway's book on Running or Marathon you can do it. If you are a beginner, GBOR suits you well. You have running plans that suits a beginner and advanced folks for 5K,10K and Half Marathons. But if you have already run half marathons or are planning to do a marathon, Marathon You Can Do It may be the right choice.

IPL - A cheap imitation of European Football Leagues

Image via Wikipedia

Being familiar with the way how things are run in European Football Leagues and specifically the English Premier League(EPL), I find the Indian Premier League(IPL) of cricket a cheap imitation that gives a quick entertainment and quick money for the organizers.

Premier League

What is "Premier" about it ? May be the first of its kind in the cricket fraternity ? In the football world, every country will have multiple levels of league championships with the top one being played with the best in the country. Every year few teams that are at the bottom get relegated to the next tier one and the champions in the second rung gets promoted to the first(Premier) league. And there are usually at least 3 tiers of leagues going on at the same time. This also makes it interesting at the top and bottom of the league - top ones fight for the cup whereas the bottom ones fight to avoid the drop. In fact there are other spots to fight for as well in the European leagues like the Champions cup and the Europa cup as well. So in my view, there is nothing "Premier" about IPL - it is the first cricket league may be!

Business Model

The business model of most of the professional clubs are based on the fact that if they can build a world class football team within the budgets they have, they can attract fans and sponsors and media thereby making money out of it. Building the team means running academies that nurture talent not just from local towns, but anywhere else in the world. It is not a short term arrangement where some owners throw money and create a franchise for a month or so to play a shorter version of the game to make some quick money, which seems to be the current business model of IPL. I am not sure if the movie actors are out there because of their love for cricket or to develop the game.

Club as an Organization

A club is in fact an institution that is built over time and is run as any business organization with a P&L. The club is not a short term arrangement of players who are bid for from various places like what the IPL is, it is in fact their home while they play for the club. There is a well structured organization and a board that oversees the running of the club. It is not the franchises, but well organized clubs that keeps the leagues going.

Tailoring the Game

The game of football is played exactly like it is played elsewhere and for ages. You don't really need any tailoring to get the fans attracted to the game. May be this is a fundamental flaw with the way cricket is, which doesn't really fit into an entertainment game that can be made part of normal people's life. You either need 5 days or one day to really enjoy the game. But I am not sure if they do justice to the game by tailoring it.

Decision Making

The owners of the Premiership doesn't make decisions about the team, instead they choose a manager to run the club and give them a budget to work with. The manager makes all decisions - he is accountable for the results he promises within the constraints of the club. That means they are the ones who are fired if team doesn't click. The buck stops with the Manager. Owners making decisions about the captain and players are typically rare. Again, this could be a problem with the game itself. Cricket has an accountability issue - where does the buck stop ? With the Captain ? Coach ? Owner or the Selection Committee ?

Home Games are played at Home

If you have terrorists out to shoot the fans, then there is no game - it is that simple. You don't run elsewhere to a second home. It was really funny that IPL is being played in South Africa! But when you are after quick money, these things don't matter.

Fans and Followers

You don't have to hire cheer leaders from elsewhere, they are fans first and cheer leaders next. Again, the short term drive of IPL doesn't help here too.

Conclusion

Cricket needs to discover their own league - not just blindly copy some aspects of the successful leagues in other games just to make money. But they can definitely adopt the basics of building a club and league from them. It cannot be done in one or two seasons, it has to be a long drawn effort. The game is a bit complex to expect it to become as popular as the football leagues of Europe. I am not too sure if T20 has trimmed the game well to make it an entertainment sport, sometimes it appears that it is not really cricket. So don't make cricket look like other games, let cricket be cricket.

Big 10 and Kendra Saarige

I had an opportunity to experience the Big-10 and HoHo aka kendra sarige buses that are supposed to make it easy getting around the down town areas of Bangalore.

Boarded a Big-10 on Bannerghatta Road near Meenakshi Temple. Being early, the bus was not really full, managed to sit after couple of stops. But it was nearly empty when we reached Brigade Road. I took a daily pass since I was planning to hop around a bit. I for one don't like the "Big10" name or brand - it doesn't really convey anything to the commuter except that it will reach Brigade Road or Corporation circle depending upon where you board. A route number would have been more appropriate for the common public who are pretty used to the number system.

Waited at a HoHo stop for a while but then decided to board a normal bus to reach my destination near Trinity Circle. Walked around a bit on the way back and couldn't figure out if there was a HoHo around - Hop on Hop out makes more sense than Big10 - then the rain gods opened up when I hopped on to a mall till the rains subsided. Did some shopping around Brigade road before I came back by Big10. Not sure if the frequency was good or my timing was good, I didn't have to wait long before I got onto one of them. Again, you have to read or ask to know where the bus was headed for.

So Big10 seems a good mode of transport to visit places around Brigade Road and MG road from Bannerghatta side and if you are ok with a bit of walk, you can get around a bit with a day pass. But no idea about HoHo - may be I need to get more information about it next time. But I am coming to believe that the move to introduce air-conditioned volvo buses to BMTC fleet was not a good move from a business perspective. They should have spent that money on Suvarna or Big10 where people can travel with their day passes. It appears that the Volvo is making a big dent to their income though they remain one of the few state run bus corporations that make money.

VMware Vshpere Launch at Bangalore

Image via Wikipedia

Vmware did a launch of their greatest and latest Vsphere product in Bangalore. It was a low key affair with a 2 page print out of the product and no usual goodie stuff. They did provide lunch even though this was a half day affair.

But the event otherwise was very good though the keynote speaker(Regional Director, India) didn't really bring out the story well. But the other Vmware speakers did a great job and you could see the passion and fire in their belly. It appears they have a solid portfolio to take over the Datacenter from the traditional players. The hardware platform that runs their software being the commoditized x86 servers, it is pretty much a play to dominate the Datacenters of the world. They claim that no workload is out of their scope now and with pretty efficient performance as well.

While they were clearly overshadowed by Amazon with their EC2 cloud services in the cloud space, they seem to have got some story around their products for the cloud. Key differentiator that they claim is in its ablity to move existing legacy applications to the cloud. With the Vsphere product, they can get your apps running in a private cloud within your datacenter which you can move to an external one that runs the same way from a control or management perspective. So you can also move it back and forth as needed, which seems to be a significant value in handling one of the problems of a cloud adoption. Wonder why they let Amazon lead the way in this space with all their infrastructure products.

They also claim Vsphere to be their Operating System for the cloud, though the analogy falls short of a Application Programming Interface(API) feature. Instead of limiting your apps to the resources to a single server resources in a traditional OS, now you have access to all the server resources virtualized and pooled by the Vsphere OS. And they seem to have build a suite of tools around it to get the feel of an OS running an application with all the gains that come out of a virtualized environment. You get a highly available, resource efficient infrastructure to run your apps which can be grouped as a vApp with a profile that can stick with it. But an API is a key part of the OS facility that seems to be missing and that can drive apps on this virtualized infrastructure. But surely, you get a feel that you can run an enterprise datacenter with vSphere.

There are products that can significantly change the rules of the game with their Vsphere portfolio. For example, the Fault Tolerant one where you run another VM lock step with the VM that runs your application, you virtually get the High Availability that is only possible with a highly redundant setup with significant application changes to make it truly available. It can potentially put many of the traditional HA products out of the Datacenter.

And they are driving every other technology in the space to innovate - Cisco has a virtual switch that would help network administrators see the VMs instead of just the servers. The vswitch is no more limited to the server, but the complete pool. Storage side also seems to have progressed further though I did not understand what EMC guy was talking about. In fact the EMC presentation was a poor one - they seem to talk more about virtualization than the storage innovations in the space. Storage vMotion looks cool as well.

Assuming that a complete domination is imminent, the management components of vSphere would potentially become a key piece in future. While Vmware is partnering with others in other spaces like storage and networking, it is interesting to note that they are going it alone with their management products. While every one of the big 4 management vendors have some virtualization support, I am not sure if they realize the opportunity here. They just seem to be riding on their existing customer base who would finally move away some day. So my take here is that infrastructure management space also would fall to Vmware ultimately if other management vendors don't pay attention. In a way, it is a good thing from a customer perspective because management vendors were just making money because infrastructure providers didn't pay much attention to the management aspect. So you could do away with the middlemen in between.

They pooh poohed the competition and at this point of time, they have every right to do it right now. This is a bit of a concern of another vendor dominating the datacenter which seems quite likely as things stand. It is high time others stepped up to get some balance in this space - it is extremely skewed in favor of Vmware right now. Makes one wonder why the hard core research groups of other infrastructure vendors who had most of the technology already missed this huge opportunity.

So it is very obvious that they are attacking the Datacenter, not just the server piece, the whole gamut around it - network, storage and more importantly, the management piece. The holistic approach seems like a sure shot at dominating the Datacenters in the years to come! It is a matter of time before the Datacenters fall to Vmware's advances!

Vote 09 Results

Image by London Summit via Flickr

People in India seems to have made a sane choice in voting back Congress led UPA without the left parties back to power. Surely, they were the better choice. I hope Manmohan Singh would induct some young blood this time in his ministry - Rahul Gandhi, Sindhia, Naveen Pilot and others are ready to take the mantle from the old(60+ years) folks. It is amazing that people(including Manmohan Singh) that are too old for any other profession find ruling the country an easy job. Congress has a great opportunity in turning around the story and giving opportunity to the young and well educated among the leaders a chance to make things better in this counrty.

I am so glad that the "left" has been left alone even by their own people in their dens. While the left parties were influential in bringing significant changes in the social scene in places like Kerala, they seem to have lost their way. Corrupt leaders like Pinarayi Vijayan in Kerala and their violent ways to quell people who are against their ideology are a disgrace to a party in democracy. While violence isn't new, corruption is new to them - they never had any serious corruption charges against their leaders. They are out to make money somehow in their veiled marxist faces - they need dismantle their leadership who are corrupt or colludes with the corrupt.

I am also glad that K Sudhakaran won handsomely at Kannur, my hometown, which was supposed to be the den of Marxist party in Kerala. Marxist party has officially been supporting the killings that they and the RSS/BJP keep indulging in the region. Sudhakaran was one of those few leaders who could take them on in this area. I aplaud his courage and hope he can make significant contribution to the constituency though the party supported violence may not go away that soon. I wish him all the best!

I also see a leader in Rahul Gandhi if he can keep his feet on the ground and work towards improving the fate of the poor in the country. The basic indicators of the quality of life, literacy rate, infant mortality etc. are way too low in Amethi, Rahul's constituency, compared to other places like Kerala. Take a cue from Kerala where things are far better with respect to standards of living.

While democracy has its limitations in a country where there are signifcant section of the people who are illiterate and below poverty, overall the people have made a good choice this time and hope things will get better in this country!

Home made Laptop Carrier

I have been commuting with a back pack on my cycle since I started 3 months back. Since my shoulders aren't in such a great shape, I have not been carrying my laptop along with me. It was a good excuse to keep it at work. Also, I have an HP laptop at work and a Dell one at home and the docking station at home suits only the Dell one.

The downside of buying a better cycle was that it doesn't come with a rack(carrier) or a bell which is needed for normal commuting. These come default on a normal cycle in India. These are designed for the pure thrill of cycling - nothing should come in between. It is not for the Copenhagen or Amsterdam or the normal Indian style or of cycling instead it is for lycra and helmet clad roadies and off-roadies. So carrying stuff on the cycle was indeed a problem while commuting and doing errands. And I am not cut out for long rides and off-roading and stuff, it is pure commute and a bit of loafing around. Hopefully things would become better with more of my ilk commuting along with the normal cycle guy on the road.

So I bought a rack from BOTS, Decathlon Modular System(DMS) carrier, at Rs.1599 was 10% of the bike cost - pretty expensive indeed. But the carrier remained useless because they don't provide a bungee chord with it - in fact they expect you to buy more modules to fit into the rack. I didn't want to spend any more money on this and was in fact looking for a rope to tie stuff around.

Then I stumbled on this great website where they listed some DIY panniers - neat stuff actually. The one that was really practical for me was the one that used a laptop bag as a pannier. Not being a DIY kind of guy myself(though I have a descent toolkit), this was the easiest one as well. While it is not so elegant, the laptop is smoothly shifted out from your shoulder to the rack with the original bag and the strap, nothing comes in between. You also get two hooks when you take the bag off that can be used for other purposes . But I still don't want to carry my laptop back home and hence I am just carrying around other stuff in it for a while, may be test it a bit before I lug the laptop along with it. I still needed some fine tuning to ensure that the bag doesn't come in between the pedal and doesn't touch the tires on the other side.

But I think I hurried in buying a rack without considering all aspects. This is too heavy and expensive one for my kind of usage. And I don't think I will buy another add on for this. It is expensive, not usable as it is, and also comes a bit short and narrow to use it as a general carrier. So I will not recommend it for anyone until the seller gives you some add-ons free with it, at least the bungee chord. I would recommend a cheaper Indian one and add your own stuff.

Things that Human Beings could have lived without

The things I wish human beings never invented that would have made the planet a better place.

1. Plastic - While the short term utility of it seems significant and we don't seem to think we can live without it, I wish it was never invented. It is creating a mess of this planet
   
   
2. Oil - another thing we can't imagine life without, it is polluting the whole planet like nothing else and you need to dig down the crust of the earth to get it.
   
   
3. Gold - I don't understand the value of it to be mining it out of the earth. Just for for ornamental value and it is expensive too! For that matter mining in general would have been something that would have made the environment far better.
   
   
4. Concrete - it is being used instead of environment friendly materials for building, may be we couldn't have built the multistorey buildings that quickly, but another bad thing on planet earth
   
   
5. Diary - how the hell can one drink another animal's milk and create a multi-billion industry ? We are stuck to it forever it appears.
   

What's on your list ?