Appreciate Yourself

How many times when you do something you feel that enthusiasm and sense of achievement? Do you feel that when you complete your project? Do you feel that when you have made that dish which required 3-4 hours of your time and tasted out of the world and your family can’t stop appreciating that effort of yours? Do you feel that when you are at top of that tallest lighthouse in the town? These are the tasks that you do once in a while and feel good about it and celebrate. What about the everyday tasks that you do? Do you ever feel the same sense of achievement in completing your day to day repetitive tasks?
A project that is successfully completed did not happen in one day. It takes every little step towards the success of that wonderful project. It takes your daily efforts and commitment to achieve that success which you aim for. We all celebrate the success but often do not even notice these small steps that we are taking towards that big success. Sometimes the road to success is so lengthy that some of us forget to praise ourselves on the way. And that lack of appreciation makes some of us feel that they are no good anymore. They feel that they cannot achieve anything and has a huge negative impact.
We all need to learn to appreciate ourselves and everyone around us for those little efforts that we all put in to move towards that ultimate goal. Mostly it happens with the women who are home makers and children whose parents are overly concerned about their grades. Women who are home makers, I believe are working 24 hours a day and 7 days a week to ensure that her family is free of any day to day worries. She is the one who can be a cook, nurse, driver, banker, carpenter, laundry women, plumber, cleaner and many more such roles as needed. So she should be really proud of achieving this everyday without getting noticed. She is the backbone of her family and she is the reason behind every success in her family. So if no one is appreciating her, she should learn to appreciate herself.
Parents should learn to appreciate every little thing that their kids learn every day and remember they are stepping towards the goal. Students should learn to appreciate themselves on every new lesson that they learn. This lesson might not be from their academic books but can be anything from riding a bike to playing a game to hearing about a new story that has some message or learning about those Great people and their biographies or about that new stone or stamp or flag or dance or music or painting or anything for that matter.
Most importantly we should all learn to appreciate every member of our family. We should appreciate parents, spouse, and kids for every small thing that they do daily to make our life worthwhile and make us feel confident so that we can take one more step towards that goal without any worries. So learn to appreciate everyone around you but first learn to appreciate yourself.

Future of Web

Looking say 12-13 years back, did anyone think of current form of web? I am talking about very early days of internet- when, to put up the web page on the internet people had to learn a markup language or contact a web site designer, when sending email was so fascinating. There was instant messenger, chat rooms where you could log in and talk to your friends who were available at that time.
Today with Web 2.0, especially with social networking sites like facebook, MySpace, twitter, flicker, blogs, Wikipedia, the face of web has changed completely. It has evaluated to its current form in around a decade's time. It has become more collaborative. Now uploading your data on web has become very easy with RSS. Sharing content, movies, pictures has become so easy that any common man who is not aware of underlying technology can share his views, broadcast the message to all his friends in one go, upload and share pictures/videos very easily. Internet is now accessible through cell phone too, which keeps people connected all the time.
In the very early days internet was just linking of machines (PCs). It has rapidly changed to linking of pages and making the same information accessible from mobile phones and other such devices. Same information is now available in different formats like text as well as audio and conversion happens on the go, as per the need.
What next? Future of web (for that matter web3.0) is very fascinating as well as scary. Technically it would mean linking of data in the page and not just the page. It focuses on building intelligence into the current form of web wherein by typing 'pune' the web would know that it's some location in India. It would have all other information available related to pune like its weather, landmarks etc. This is what is called as semantic web. Any word that appears web will know what it means. And it would be linking things related to that particular word together. Another aspect of future web is every day machines that we use like car, washing machine etc (anything you can think of, can be your pen) would be window the web. Everything would be chip based and would be connected to web. This is part of augmented reality.
All this is coming up really fast and 10 years from now we might have many of these things in place. You might have some small gadget in your pocket (I will call it your buddy) always, who is going to guide you for everything. Say you are hungry and want to have a MacD. You just express your thoughts and your buddy is going to give you information on the nearest MacD restaurant, traffic conditions, cost of the burger, weather conditions outside, approx time it will take for the delivery of burger at MacD and lot more. This is really fascinating but it has other side too. It would make everyone very much dependant. Also there would be some evil forces that could also use the same media adversely. Whatever it might be but at this time, this seems to be very attractive to explore and work upon.

Accessibility Vs Usability

There seems to be lot of confusion between accessibility and usability and what comes first. While working on different web projects we usually emphasize on ease of use. For that we customize our web pages for different types of users such that the users do not have to traverse through several pages to get to the topic of his/her interest.We not only provide the information but we make that a wonderful experience for the user.
For example, I go to canteen everyday and take orange juice. For this I have to stand in queue, place the order and wait for the juice to be delivered. Vendor observes this for few days and one day as soon as he looks at me entering the canteen, he prepares the juice and provides me the glass when I reach the counter. Not only that, he ensures that the juice is presented in such a way every day that I wait to go and have the juice. Vendor does the same thing for all different types of users by observing there behavior over a period of time. He keeps on refining the process. That is creating a user friendly environment and that is what usability is all about.
Then what is accessibility. Now take a similar example for a user who is not able to go out till canteen to have the juice. Vendor provides the on call delivery to his/her desk. That is how he ensures to make his service accessible to everyone at anytime.
What comes first, accessibility or usability? This can still be debated. But there are now legal implications of not addressing accessibility issues. There are guidelines which need to be followed to ensure that all the web pages are accessible to differently abled users. So every site now has to be accessible as well as usable. Infosys iProwe helps users to address the accessibility issue for their web pages. I always thought that usability was important in this competitive environment and now realize that accessibility is equally important.