Today I stumbled upon Linkedin’s InMap feature which allows you to “map” out your Linkedin Network. The clouds that you see above represent clusters of my network, where members are tightly connected with others. For example, the green bubble is my Yale SOM mini network. In business school, we are taught that networking is key and modern business school students are told before they enter school to connect with as many people as possible. The fuchsia cloud is the network of my former employer, KBC. As I was leaving the firm I tried connect with as many people as possible and over the years I’ve noticed that as the firm has evolved more people have left and yet remained in touch so the cloud has become more dense. A much looser agglomeration is the blue cloud which are my contacts in the Bangladeshi community which were largely built through my leadership of an organization called NYBAP. This a broader community which is less tied to each other.

Looking at these networks bring some interesting things to mind. First, I noticed that I have almost no connection with my college buddies even though on Facebook I’m regularly in touch. Granted I went to college long before Linkedin, so it wasn’t the way I connected with most of my friends. Secondly, other than my Opower network (orange) I have no notion of regional networks. This is partially because Linkedin doesn’t show them but also because I have not joined a meta network in DC where I would likely plug in. From a networking perspective this is a deficiency and means that I should try to connect with local networks more intensely.

All in all, this quick “map” provides some useful directions to take my professional connection building activities. Its also worth visiting on a regular (annual?) basis. I will try to visit again at the end of 2012 to see if the picture has changed!

I stumbled upon some tumblr powered blogs today and I was quite impressed. I’m of course among the later adopters of new Internet communication crazes. I’ve been late and slow to the blogging party and only recently started doing del.icio.us. Tumblr however seems to fit well with my mood these days. I’ve been reading a lot of different blogs and more news than ever both on the finance and politics side. I’ve been sharing and receiving articles from friends and colleagues via email but some of these I’d like to refer to later without having to write up a formal blog post like this one. As a result I’ve started tumbling at throughput.tumblr.com. I hope the communication is better.

I had just visited the Apple Store to play with the new Iphone 3G and I looked up from one of the seating areas and saw this shot waiting to be taken. I whipped out the camera and captured it.

Later as I was playing around with the Monochrome filter in Apple’s Aperture Software, I transformed the picture. I like how the monochrome highlights the lines of the Great Glass Cube.

I call this “Church meets State” because the church on the other side of 5th avenue seems to be looming over the building which is heralded by American flags.

Where Money meets Manhattan

I love this shot because I was able to capture the definition of this corner building.

Today, I sold my old Powerbook G4 to someone else, bringing to the end my first Mac laptop in the modern (post Jobs’ return to Apple) era. This Mac was where I learned to program PHP and run MYSQL queries, where I first blogged and built my first production level website – www.nybap.org. It lasted for four and half years, much longer than I expected!

Fortunately, last week I purchased a new MacBook Pro 15 inch 2.4GHZ beast which will carry me forward!

Turned another year today and the team at NYBAP was nice enough to take my pic and feed me some cheesecake

Hi. If you are a regular reader or spammer of this blog you’ve may have noticed that the blog has been down for the past couple of days. This all started with a badly botched attempt to upgrade my blog from WordPress 1.5.2 to v.2.0.2. Within minutes of copying over the files per the upgrade instructions, I was getting the dreaded “white screen of death” in php when I tried to load my home page. For the past days I’ve been working with the good folks at Textdrive, posting on their forums, but with no luck.

However this morning, I retraced my steps a little bit and with the help of the WordPress forums and Google, I was able to piece together a hack for my wp-config.php. I’m still not sure why this works but the hack turns off magic_quotes_gpc and disables the WordPress cache. I hope if any WordPress gurus are reading they will comment and shed some light on what these hacks do. Nonetheless, my site is up and running again, so please visit once more.

Now I have to get on to writing something worth reading …