Why South Africa is not winning many cricket matches?

If you are an ardent cricketer fan for many years and if you had watched the T20 match between South Africa (SA) and Pakistan a few days before. you would have clearly seen the short comings of SA team.

Here are my observations:
1. I wonder what the SA captain De Villiers saw in Albie Morkel to ask him to bowl the 18th over. It is not a good move of a captain.

2. Raza Hasan's conistant length was just simply beyond the SA team to read and negotiate.

3. J.P.Duminy who conceded only 5 runs from his two overs was not given his full quota of 4 overs.
4. The same case applies to Johan Botha too.

Summary:
It is poor captaincy of SA team that I wanted to win. In spite of having some of the most talented batsmen and bowlers, they keep losing because of poor captaincy.

Award winning reporting Tools from InetSoft.

Long before, my husband who was a marketing manager for chemical firm showed me some of his certificates of excellence he received during his period of employment. At that time there was no performance and sales reporting software such as InetSoft's reporting product that enables the top executives to present figures and stats in a stunning and all revealing dashboard supported with easy to convey graphs and images.

Those days, business intelligence reporting has to be computed manually which meant hours if not days of poring over reports sent by the sales and production team.

Though I am not a software woman, I could somewhat understand the versatility of InetSoft’s reporting software, an extraordinary tool cum web application. I read it has won several Readers Choice Awards.

Indian software engineers, have you looked at it yet?

Bugs and more bugs.

Only a couple of hours before, I registered myself as an online maths tutor in http://www.2tion.net/

I browsed through the web site for nearly 30 minutes and was quite impressed with it. I was all appreciation of it and recounted my experience with the site to my husband.

There were so many requests for online tuition for math from several parts of the world including New Zealand, Pakistan etc.

Now, after about 2 hours I again tried to log in to http://www.2tion.net/ as a tutor and was shocked to see an error message that read, 'wrong email'. I just have no clue to what is wrong with the site.

Many Indian web sites that I came across in the past week are bugged and the customer service is very poor on the expected lines.

Very attractive glass jewelry at the Glass of Venice.

I am a big fan of glass products, especially glass jewelry and myriad glass made products such as colorful jars and bowls.

Look at the image below. Who would not love them?

In fact, I think I would prefer to wear them in place of gold jewelry on certain occasions.

Not many people know about Murano, Itlay where the best of glass artisans make stunning glass jewelries. They have been making them for centuries.

Of course, you don't have to travel to Italy to have a look at the range of glass products. Just visit Glass of Venice by opening http://www.glassofvenice.com/
in your browser. I am sure you won't be able to exit the site for several minutes.

Gibson’s new electric guitar is widely acclaimed.

Gibson SG guitar was my son’s choice as he considers it as one of the first-rate guitars. He thinks it is ideal for both beginners and experiences guitar players. 

My son has a habit of frequently changing his guitar based on users’ ratings and reviews.  Whenever he decides to sell his guitar on the market to buy a new one, I always wondered what is wrong with the old guitar which he bought after reading reviews in music related forums and Facebook pages.

He explained to me the features of his latest find, the Gibson SG special electric guitar. While I was able to appreciate to note that it is made of mahogany, none of the other things such as Tune-O-Matic bridge and magnet humbuckers made any sense to me, though I am pretty sure passionate guitar players would admire them.

When he played his favorite song on his new guitar, I could sense an enhanced resonance. I knew his choice of guitar was right.

Travel to Bangalore in just 4 and a half hours.

The train journey to Bangalore by Shatabdi express was refreshing in many ways.

* The train coaches were clean.
* The toilet was spic and span and reminder me of toilet in planes.
* The train ride was the quickest to Bangalore. It just took only 4 hours and 40 minitues!
* There was a television in every coach screening movies, ads and announcing railway stations being passed by.
* The quality of the food was ok though the coffee served was way below the standard.
* Big glass windows made the travel scenic. The windows were fitted with easy to operate blinds.
* In just a couple of stops in between,the train journey was surprisingly fast.

Travel once at least to Bangalore by Shatabdi Express from Madras.

Unique way to ship bikes on cars.

I would not call it as strange but unique when I saw a car carrying bikes on its rear comfortably on a metal rack. Usually, it would be an ugly sight when bicycles lying in a haphazard way in the boot of the car. Bike racks especially hitch bike racks from cracksandracks.com made shipping of bikes is easy. I would say the idea of building such bike racks is brilliant.

Naturally, when someone built the first rack to ship one bike, he would have immediately started working on building a rack that would carry two or more bikes at a time. It is an interesting story of the evolution hitch bike racks and Jason, Scott and Jose, who run the show with vision and dedication.

Moving bicycles and two wheelers on cars and trucks on convenient and safe racks is an exclusive niche and an in-demand service always. I wish someone in India would market them.

Modern teaching methods.

I am ashamed to say that I am lagging behind in the present teaching methods. Almost every teacher that I have been talking to in the past week are fully aware of virtual white boards, simple drag and drop graphs, suing smart boards etc.

Though I have picked some knowledge in this area, I never got used to apply it. I was fascinated by some smart gadgets with which I can focus my teaching papers on a white screen. I never have to use my traditional white board and marker pens!

I recently happen to use such virtual teaching aid in webex.com They are excellent. I wondered how a teacher can get on without them.