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Hello blogging world!

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So I thought I'd finally start a blog and start sharing some of my views, ideas, tips and tidbits related to computers with the rest of the world. I'm Shiv (Shiv Shankar Ramakrishnan) and my job at Microsoft is to watch TV :) Well not really but kind of ... You see I work in the Microsoft TV division and that means apart from computers we folks also get to have TV's in our rooms.

So Microsoft TV, what's that you might ask? Well we do a whole bunch of software for the TV world. If you've subscribed to Digital Cable or Satellite TV then you must have seen what are called as Set Top Boxes which are essentially embedded computers systems (I wonder if one can still call them embedded anymore) attached to the TV and contains software that allows you to do interactive things with the TV like see which program is at what time (called EPG or Electronic Program Guide in TV industry lingo), record TV programs (called DVR Digital Video Recording) etc etc. Essentially its a computer whose output is the TV screen instead of a monitor as with regular computers, the user interacts with it using a Remote and the whole purpose of the software on the box is to enhance the viewer's TV experience. For example it makes things like Video On Demand, Pay Per View etc possible. We also do a lot of back end server work to support all these boxes. Where do you think the EPG information on the boxes comes from? Yup some backend server. We are also doing some pioneering and leading edge work on what is called IPTV. IPTV is to TV as VoIP (Voice over IP) is to telephony. Basically TV over IP networks. Turns out you can do some really interesting things with the TV viewing experience and paradigm when you do TV over IP. Anyway let me not bore you with too much information about MSTV. You can find more information at the official Microsoft TV site.

This blog is not going to be about MSTV but rather my personal views and thoughts about computers in general based on my experience in the industry, though at times I may talk about MSTV. Over the years as any computer professional would, I've also accumulated my own set of tips and tricks, ideas, viewpoints etc about computers. Perhaps now is the time to use this blogging phenomenon to start sharing some of it with the rest of the world. Who knows, I may find people who share my ideas and I can learn of other interesting things.

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