Pointy Haired Dilbert - Chandoo.org

It has been a while since I wrote a welcome post to my readers, so here again.

Pointy Haired Dilbert - Chandoo.org is a blog about technology, business, data analytics, excel, photography, advertising and my life. I am Chandoo, an excellent donut eater, coffee drinker extraordinaire, blogger beyond reform, crappy coder, lousy manager, happy husband, lazy photographer, voracious Calvin and Hobbes reader, pathetic skier, sambhar lover, apple user and budding entrepreneur.

I have this site from 2004 July, when I got in to a b-school from busy coding job I had with Xinthe and I needed a way to fight the boredom of endless case studies and all the horror associated with MBA. Over the last 4 years, this blog grew to become something meaningful, large and searchworthy. Now, it has about 557 posts, 2 pages, 38 drafts, contained within 32 categories and 262 tags.

You can read interesting stuff about excel, data analytics, business, advertising, life in IIMs, photography or my personal life. Browse through other categories / tags to see what you can find.

Nowadays, I have been posting almost every working day (weekends are totally reserved for relentless dosa eating, restless world exploring, aimless reading, snoreless sleeping and hopeless flirting with my wife) and trying to keep up with comments. Click here to subscribe to this blog’s feed. You can subscribe to the blog content via e-mail also, just look to the side bar on the right, enter your email-id and click on the little “do me” button next to it.

Also, there are monthly archives from 2004 June. You can access them by clicking these links: May 2008 | April 2008 | March 2008 | February 2008 | January 2008 | December 2007 | November 2007 | October 2007 | August 2007 | July 2007 | June 2007 | May 2007 | April 2007 | March 2007 | February 2007 | January 2007 | December 2006 | November 2006 | October 2006 | September 2006 | August 2006 | July 2006 | June 2006 | May 2006 | April 2006 | March 2006 | February 2006 | January 2006 | December 2005 | November 2005 | October 2005 | September 2005 | August 2005 | July 2005 | June 2005 | May 2005 | April 2005 | March 2005 | February 2005 | January 2005 | December 2004 | November 2004 | October 2004 | September 2004 | August 2004 | July 2004

You can get in touch with me on my personal email id at chandoo dot d at gmail dot com. I am very happy to know that you have found my website took trouble reading this, I would be excited to hear from you, so drop in a note if you feel like. Happy browsing!

or Powerpoint Cartoon #2

On a more personal note, I have migrated this blog to spanking new version of wordpress 2.5, which promptly broke several of my installed plug-ins. I couldnt get enough time in the morning to figureout what went wrong, so checked the blog quickly in IE and Firefox and it seemed to be loading quite well. will fix the nagging plugins later tonight or tomorrow. Meanwhile enjoy my powerpoint cartoons
Read the earlier ppt cartoons

• I have been busy last few days both at office and home. While work is keeping me busy at office, at home I am occupied with learning how to drive.
• 
  I took my permanent license exam today and failed miserably. My examiner was surprised that I failed on so many counts, once I actually joined the opposite lane upon turning left, the examiner almost fainted and told me aloud to change lanes, think I got way too confused and tensed up, well whatever is the case I am going to test another time later next week, hopefully this time it should go through.
• I am going to schedule a server move for PHD probably this weekend. I am just going to move all my stuff from the current server to something more professional and large enough so that I dont have to worry about the increasing traffic and bandwidth for a while.

PS: If you can tell me what is the original source of the above image I will add your blog to my links list on sidebar, first one to respond wins

[Bored at work? Read the earlier blah :1 , 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, n, 11 ]

Xkcd simply rocks, so much so that its one of the first things I check in the morning. See this gem:

Google docs team has announced gadgets, auto-fill support, formula help while typing and several other goodies yesterday. I was experimenting with these stuff and wanted to share a cool idea with you all.

Tracking / Sharing your goals (or resolutions, progress) with everyone using Google Spreadsheet Gadgets:
For the example purpose, let us build a gadget that will track my new year resolution “to run 500 miles in 2008″. When done, the gadget looks something like this: (go ahead, play with it)

Step 1: Create the data format as per your need
I created a table like this, you can create something depending on what you want to track / share:

Step 2: Findout what you want to share and calculate
In my case, I needed 2 metrics, “miles ran so far” and “miles remaining”, the “miles ran so far” is a simple sum of the entire table shown above, the other metric is 500 minus “miles ran so far”. Once you have the values, display them 2 columns as shown below:

Step 3: Generate a gadget for the data you want to share

1. This is even more simple, just click on the gadgets icon on the tool bar on top (shown below) and select gadgets.
   
2. Select the gadget type, I have selected a bar-chart as I wanted to show progress in a stacked chart.
   
3. Next enter data range for the gadget (just as you would do with an excel chart dialog) and press save.
   
4. Finally publish the gadget by selecting the publish option, this will provide html iframe code for the gadget, simply paste the code in your blog, sidebar or coffee mug and you are good to go.
   

If you want to play with my sheet: google spreadsheet gadgets demo, So what are you waiting for, go ahead, play around with google spreadsheet gadgets, flash your gadgets.

Wow, I am overwhelmed by the response the Excel Conditional Formatting Rockstar post generated. I got both lifehacked and del.icio.us home paged on the sameday and Wow, I am so happy for this.

Talk about my server, it was no where near expecting this kind of traffic. First thing today morning, I have called my hosting folks in India and asked them to increase my monthly bandwidth by 800%. I am guessing this should be fine for handling the traffic for the next few days. If not, I may have to go from a reseller hosting service to a full-fledged hosting service like godday or bluehost.

Thanks everyone, readers from Lifehacker and Del.icio.us, you are awesome! Welcome here, go ahead and subscribe to my feed and enjoy many more juicy posts.

• GOOD NEWS, my wife has finally come to US yesterday. I am so happy. It was sad being away from her on our first marriage anniversary. But finally she came, her journey was safe and uneventful.
• Buy walmart shares if you can, now that I have shifted to a hotel bang in front of the giant store. I have been to the store 4 times yesterday alone and picked up stuff till my hands ached.
• The potters have arrived few days back. I have ordered set of first 6 books on Amazon and already in to the series big time. I dont have anything new to say about the books. If you havent read them, may be you should try once, its a different experience.
• Seems like loads of things are happening on market front. They crashed, went up again and seems like they are going to crash again. I made some hurried purchased during the recent crash, my losses arent significant now. The recession seems to here already, few Indian companies have started reducing salaries or worse still revoking the paid salaries. [I am already working in one :P], feels like such an exciting time to be living.
• I am totally crazed up to start my own web business. Exploring few ideas like a craigslist for Indian metros etc. There is nothing much to loose, but so much to gain by doing this. I could learn firsthand the nitti-gritties of running a business, managing servers, users, optimization, databases, services and so much more. If you have some exciting ideas and looking for a crazy soul to partner drop me a mail.
• Work moved to a cruise control mode. Most of the things have become normal now. Hopefully I would move to another project in the coming months.
• Oh yeah, PHD crossed a remarkable milestone(or crossing), my site bandwidth limit for this month is almost over, thats a whopping 2000 megabites served to hungry PHD readers. Well done folks. Please bear with me while I figure out better ways to manage the site by reducing unnecessary images, heavy plugins etc. If you see the site down during the next few days dont panic. Just drop in again on Feb 1st.

[Bored at work? Read the earlier blah :1 , 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, n ]