Zenning!

If, like me, you are running out of space on your desktop/laptop hard drive, or you require a central storage space to store all your digital stuff – hi-res pictures, HD videos, movies, music, etc – then you certainly have been thinking about getting an external hard drive for yourself. The market is inundated with manufacturers marketing their external hard drives in the sleekest of cases. And it’s not just the conventional storage brands anymore – Western Digital, Seagate, Iomega – offering a range of external hard disks, but the non-storage players have entered this arena too, including HP and Toshiba, offering competent products.

Western Digital My Book Essential 500 GB

Out of all the options available in the market, I decided to get myself the My Book Essential 500 GB from Western Digital. Apart from its big storage, it looks stylish in its black shiny body, with just a small blue LED light on the side.

Some of the things that I loved about the Western Digital My Book Essential:

• The design: its sleek, black shiny body looks stylish
• Cooling vents: To keep the drive cool
• Quiet operation: To hear a sound, you have to bring your ear closer to the vents
• Smart and energy efficient: Turns itself on and off with your computer
• Instant plug-n-play: No need to install any drivers or software to use it
• Book style design: Collect two or more and they cuddle neatly together like books on a shelf

Reliability, Accessibility and Design

Most of the external hard drives end up doing the same thing anyway: provide external storage for backup or extending purposes. Thus, the decision in the end probably comes down to reliability, accessibility and design.

Reliability: Most of the reviews of the WD My Book Essential I read (on Amazon) termed it as reliable. Though there were occurrences of the drive dying out, but the reviewers got it replaced from Western Digital easily under the warranty.

Accessibility: The drive is ready to be used as soon as you unbox it! As for carrying it around, it is designed for the home/office and thus, designed to be stationary at one place (although you can carry it around, if you wish to).

Design: 10 years ago, we could have argued that design should not be a deciding factor for buying a tech gadget. But after Apple scored with designing the best products in the last decade, design has become a crucial part of gadgets today. The My Book Essential scores pretty high on this front with its simple, yet stylish design. Place it on your book shelf or table and it will fit perfectly there.

Setting-up WD My Book Essential: What’s included?

The drive is plug-n-play: Just power it up and plug it in (in that sequence).

The My Book Essential 500 GB includes setup files of a few backup utilities – both for Windows and Mac. The main backup software included is the Memeo AutoBackup. Sadly, its a trial version, which is quite odd, since I read elsewhere on the web that other WD external drives (including others in the My Book series) include the full-version of Memeo AutoBackup (with its serial key printed in the manual).

The file system on the drive is FAT32 by default.

Spice-up your external hard disk!

You can spice up your external hard disk experience by converting the file system to NTFS and installing an alternative free backup software. I will write about them in detail in my next post.

I recently started a blog on Tumblr called Sawant’s Scrapbook and I have to confess, it’s a very slick blogging experience! Tumblr excites me!

Currently, Zenning (this blog of mine) is being served by Wordpress, as it has been since its inception. So, even for a pro user of Wordpress like me, Tumblr shows me that blogging can not only be easier (yes, easier than Wordpress even) but it can be a lot more fun too!

From their about page:

Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme’s HTML.

It’s so much more easy (and did I mention fun?) to post on Tumblr that I am blogging there much more frequently than I do here at Zenning.

For now, I am utilizing my tumble blog as a scrapbook, where I post about anything and everything that I happen to land upon (mostly short posts)! It’s like my place of zen! My idea pad! My lab!! Whereas I will be posting the longer posts – the ones that are more analytical – over here at Zenning. I am pondering over the idea of merging the two, or at least, aggregating the two together.

The only drawback of Tumblr that I have so far come across is that comments on your blog can only be posted by Tumblr users! Now, that’s a major drawback for a service that is positioning itself as a competing blogging/micro-blogging platform against the likes of Wordpress and Blogger.

But despite the drawback, I am in ♥ with Tumblr.

Do check out Sawant’s Scrapbook and follow me on Tumblr.

Last month, a world-wide survey was conducted by the UN.

The only question asked was: ‘Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?’

The survey was a huge failure because…

• In Africa they didn’t know what ‘food’ meant.
• In China they didn’t know what ‘opinion’ meant.
• In Western Europe they didn’t know what ’shortage’ meant.
• In Eastern Europe they didn’t know what ‘honest’ meant.
• In the Middle East they didn’t know what ’solution’ meant.
• In South America they didn’t know what ‘please’ meant.
• In the US they didn’t know what ‘the rest of the world’ meant.

I was just reading this article Why there will be many Twitters (Scripting News) by Dave Winer, where the author makes his case for why he thinks there are going to be many Twitter (clones) out there, and that ultimately one of them is going to be THE Twitter – one platform to rule them all.

But isn’t Twitter already a de facto for micro-blogging? Yes, surely, clones are going to pop up left, right and center, but how can one make something better than Twitter? Twitter’s success lies in its utmost simplicity. More features is just going to make it more complex. Imagine if someone comes up with a Twitter clone, that can have text in bold, italics, or underlined. (That doesn’t sound that bad, hmm.)

How about a clone that is funded by some major media network – Time Warner, Fox, NBC – and they get celebrities to ‘tweet’ on their Twitter? That surely is going to draw away the hordes of followers who only live to idolize these celebrities and follow them on wherever they are. For example, if Ashton Kutcher – the first twillionaire – shifts to a Twitter-clone, he is surely going to walk away with his million followers on Twitter. Oprah will take her followers if she decides to build her own social platform. Yes, Twitter might lose so many followers. But that’s all a big IF!

Celebrity endorsements are definitely good for any social website out there, but a social website needs much more than celebrities. In the case of micro-blogging, it needs simplicity; it needs ease of use; it needs ubiquity; it needs active user base; it needs to evoke an industry around it. Twitter has been able to do all that without much effort, especially the last part, and it continues to grow at astounding rates.

Twitter is not a success because of celebrities tweeting on it. It’s because Twitter is a success that celebrities are tweeting on it.

Have a look at what fast food joints advertise and what do they deliver in these comparison pictures from: Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality.

Each item was purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing 
was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort. It is an accurate 
representation in every case. Shiny, neon-orange, liquefied pump-cheese, and all.

Here are three of my favorite ones:

Wendy’s Chicken Club

KFC Famous Bowl

McDonald’s Sausage Breakfast Burrito

Check out the rest: Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality

It’s been some time since I blogged. I am running so short of time nowadays. Friends feel ignored; my projects are pending; almost no time for socializing. The main reason of my busyness is a project called yellO that I have been part of since March ‘08 (full-time since August ‘08). This unique and one-of-its-kind portal (and magazine) of local services in Pakistan is finally ready for show time!

It’s something big!

We have been working on yellO for almost an year now. It’s been an exhilarating experience for me to be part of the development, design and strategy formation processes of one of the most authentic and superb piece of web application/portal to surface from this part of the world.

We had tough days. We had boring days. We had frustrating days. We had days on which we almost thought to give up on it since we were too bored working on the same thing everyday for so many months! But now that yellO’s development is complete (for launch) and it’s all ready to go live, I am really satisfied with the outcome. And quite excited too!

The Visionary

I remember that I was a bit reluctant when Samir – the visionary behind yellO – had asked me to join team yellO. I had other offers too at that time and they were offering better package than what I was being offered for yellO. But in the end, it was Samir’s passion and fervor, and his desire to bring positive change in the world – the same ideals that I myself follow – that sealed my decision in favor of yellO.

The Team

The most important component in realizing a vision is the team that is responsible for turning an idea into reality. And the team assembled for yellO had all the characteristics of a winning team!

Adeel, the lead developer, and Saad, the lead designer, have both remained an indispensable asset for yellO. Zulfiqar has been an amazing artist and (print) designer. Aamir has been great at handling graphics and publishing stuff. Mudassir is new but he’s learning to walk the tight rope of the Linux administration world well. Young Shahrukh is intelligent and full of curiosity, and he is a great asset for the community building part of yellO. In the past, Ali Raza, Asim, Waleed and Faraz have worked for some time on yellO before parting in search of other opportunities.

As for me myself, I have been responsible for handling all the stakeholders, mentioned above; making sure that we followed the timelines and that everyone was working in congruency. Also, I tend to the strategic aspect of yellO as, officially, I am the Strategy Director for yellO.

All in all it has been a great fun and an exciting experience building a major venture like yellO.

Join yellO today and start adding and reviewing interesting places on the map.

Wow! This multi-touch design kicks ass!

Not sure who has provided those statistics on Google, but I think it is true … and funny. My main activity on Google is to find useful information. But I have to agree that I do use it for spelling checking, very rarely though.

Palm is back! After almost going into obscurity, Palm makes a sexy and stylish return with a new phone dubbed as the Palm Pre. Here’s a glance on what the Pre looks like:

This hot new gadget from Palm is slated to be available in the first half of 2009. So get ready. It looks like a worthy competitor to both the Blackberry range and the iPhone. Is this the iPhone killer?

Sounds sweet? Find out more with these 7 most useful Palm Pre resources:

Palm Pre – Palm
Palm Pre: Everything you ever wanted to know – Engadget
First impressions: Palm Pre | CES 2009 – CNET Blogs
Palm Pre Preview: Simply amazing – Gizmodo
Hands-On: A closer look at the Palm Pre and WebOS – PC World
In a nutshell: Palm Pre vs. iPhone vs. G1 – Gizmodo
The Pre’s got mojo: a developer speaks about Palm’s new SDK – Ars Technica

Darwin said:

It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent …
but those most adaptive to change.
– Charles Darwin

Darwin said it for living species, but I find this as much true for businesses and organizations too. So Mr. Darwin, would you be so kind enough to allow me to evolve your theory to fit the business world? Oh my, thank you Mr. Darwin.

So here it is, the evolution of the survival theory:

It’s not the strongest of the species businesses that survives, nor the most intelligent …
but those most adaptive to change.
– Charles Darwin Sawant Shah

Gracias.