New joinee to my family!

14th of November was one of the happiest days of my life…my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby boy! My son was born at noon, Sunday, 14th of November 2010…damn…it took me a while to get used to saying those two beautiful words you know….”MY SON!”

This is my first kid, so naturally I’m super excited about it! We’re yet to decide on what to name him but I do want to pick a short and sweet name for my kid

I guess the steady feeling of responsibility will slowly take the place of my current excitement, which is good. Because this is my first kid, I have a lot to learn and adapt. I’m on top of the world seeing my lovely son! Being a father is one of the greatest feeling for me so far.

So….it’s been two weeks now, since my son has been born. Thank God, the baby is doing great and so is my wife. Just thought of sharing my happiness with all of you!

Where am I now?

It’s been over a month now that I have left Manhattan Associates. 13th of August was the day I departed from that company. It was a great place to work indeed. I learnt a lot in that company, and ofcourse, contributed a lot as well

Now, where am I working and what am I upto?! I have joined Sterling Commerce on the 19th of August as a Senior Consultant! So this is my 6th year in the Supply Chain Domain It’s been a great experience so far for me in this company. The training was very well planned and organized. The facilities being employee friendly is a big plus. I foresee a great learning and future here for me.

Sterling Commerce was aquired by IBM recently…that’s something the whole world knows. So this probably means a lot more than I can expect, because IBM is like an ocean in itself!

So, it’s all good so far and I’m looking forward to a lot of great things ahead!

My Journey with Manhattan is soon coming to an end…

If you’ve guessed it, then yes you are right. I have resigned from my services at Manhattan Associates and 13th of August will be my last working day here.

I have been with this company for 5 years and 2 months now…that’s a LONG time! The recent blog post that I wrote about Job Hoppers, was inspired by my thoughts while I was re-evaluating my career at Manhattan Associates. After a good amount of thorough & deep thinking, I decided that my career now needed to progress in a different place.

It’s all about growth. It’s all about progress. You simply have to be very focussed on your growth and this should (and will) lead to increasing your personal productivity to very great heights. Boredom is one thing that can bring your productivity and growth down. Boredom affects your work and productivity very negatively and you should not allow yourself to remain in boredom for a long time. The worst part about it is, it’s amazing how slowly you start losing out on your capabilities as you go on working within this boredom zone.

You have to change and look for even bigger challenges. If you are capable of pushing yourself to climb Mount Everest…and instead of actually working towards that, if you keep yourself contented (and even worse, busy) with climbing small walls, where is the fun in that? What’s the sense of achievement in that? Pushing to your greater limits is what will enable you to overcome them and move further..and farther! It doesn’t matter what you are working on or which company you are working for…critical evaluation of your progress and growth is very very important. This is something that I am absolutely convinced about!

I simply LOVE this quote by Joshua J Marine:

Challenges are what makes life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful

I am currently busy handing off my work here to others so that I can move on to my next job. I’ll write more about it after my last working day here!

Please stay away from my GMail ID!

Guys, please stay away from my GMail ID, vijayendravrao@gmail.com!!! This account has been compromised and cracked. I got 2 confirmed incidents from my friends related to my account. One of them got my wedding invitation (!!!) which apparently “I had sent” him. He opened the attachment and his system crashed. Another of my friends got a mail having “Hot Katrina Pics” as attachments. He opened the attachments and his system went bonkers!

Well, why did I decide to put this on my blog and not send mails to all my GMail contacts? 2 reasons:

1) I get atleast 50 views for each of my blog posts so I thought this is a good central place to publish this alert to everyone.

2) I checked my account yesterday and every single bit of data has been wiped out of my account! My contacts, my e-mails, my folders…everything is gone!

So that puts GMail straight out of the door for good and it’s not coming back for sure. I won’t be using GMail anymore and will continue to use Yahoo Mail as my personal mail account. In case anyone of you have been a victim of any obscene mails or chat messages from this ID, please accept my sincere apologies.

I will never be using this ID henceforth so if you recieve any mails from my GMail ID, please delete them. If you recieve any chat message pop-ups, please don’t respond.

Long story short, please please stay away from my GMail ID vijayendravrao@gmail.com…

Are you a Job Hopper?!

I recently read a blog post (which I will cite shortly) that tried to convey the point “do not hire job hoppers…they make horrible employees”. Trust me, I completely subscribe to this school of thought and strongly believe that a job hopper will certainly make a horrible employee. I’ve been in my present company for 5 years now!

A Job Hopper is someone who is very selfish in their goals and they simply cannot care less about the companys’ short-term and long-term goals. Most of the cases will involve money. A Job Hopper will be very clear about their monetary expectations…they simply want more. They don’t care how long they stick on to a single company or a single domain. They don’t care about a company’s principles and certainly not the company’s vision. They just want more and more money and higher designations, faster.

Mark Suster mentions this in good amount of detail in his blog post:

What is the definition of a job hopper?

It’s kind of like that famous saying about art, “you know it when you see it.” If you’re 30 and have had 6 jobs since college you’re 98% likely to be a job hopper. You’re probably disloyal. You don’t have staying power. You’re in it more for yourself than your company. OR … you make bad decisions about which companies you join. Yes, if you were a startup CEO I would probably cut you some slack. Yes, 2% of you have legitimate reasons for having 5 jobs. But in a competitive job market you’re less likely to get the chance to tell me your sob story.

Are you 25 and worked for 3 companies – each 18 months? You’re on the borderline. If they are Google, Facebook and then a startup – you’re fine. That’s less than 1%. If you’re 42 and the longest you’ve EVER worked at a company is 3 years – TOAST. That means you’ve likely had 7 short-term jobs since college.

On the other hand, there was one more blog post (almost in reponse to the above post) that said “Please job hop as much as possible“! This blog also makes some good strong points. Here are a couple of points from this blog:

1. There is nothing wrong with putting your monetary future first. I find it very unsettling for people with millions in the bank to tell others not to go out and find the best deal. Just like neither of them hand out money.. my time is my money. So if you don’t feel like your employer is paying you what you think you’re worth for your work, then yes you should go out and find new employment. No one has a crystal ball, and no one knows how your workload will be, but when an employer tells you 3 months after hire, that you will need to wear many hats, basically they are saying they are giving you the workload of another employee. Also yes startups/companies do expect you to work overtime, with no additional pay, and which in return basically reduces your yearly salary. But money should definitely not be your only motivation, which leads me to point 2…

2. Yes a person can achieve and learn a lot in 1 year. I doubt either of these guys are ignorant to how fast iterations go, or how fast technology changes in a year.. so to suggest that young people need more than a year to learn anything is insane. I’ve probably learned the most working on a short project with one of the smartest engineers, pair programming, in a 6 month period, and for a two year time of maintenance on an app, learned absolutely nothing. With two week sprints, and pretty much a new version of the product coming out every 3 months, you will learn a lot. This has less to do with the time you are at a company and more to do with who you work with, and work under. A well oiled car is meant to have interchangeable pieces.. but there is always an engine that keeps it going. Your engine should not be the junior level guys you are expecting to come and go or usually the people under 30.

This made me think of one more important point. Who is a “Real Job Hopper”? It is very important to clearly understand this term before using/abusing it without thought. What sort of a profile would you classify as a true Job Hopper? Just by seeing more than average number of companies in a person’s resume do we label that person as a Job Hopper? Are the reasons for the job changes important or relevant? Let’s discuss this in a little more detail.

Staying in a company for a long time has a good amount of benefits and advantages. You will get your feet deep into the functional domain the company is into. You get a very good understanding of the domain you work on. The domain can be anything, for example, Supply Chain Management, Finance, Foreign Exchange and so on. Next, your company will recognize you as someone who is sincere and loyal and this will have its own rewards. You will have a good voice in speaking to the management to chart out a good career path for yourself. As you grow higher up the management ladder, you being sincere and loyal to the company becomes very very important. Not that it’s not important when you are a developer or a junior developer but the degree of importance to you being aligned with the company’s principles and vision becomes all the more important as you go higher.

Apparently, most companies prefer to hire a CEO from within their company rather than from the outside. Why? Their deep roots within the company would allow them to take very healthy decisions for the betterment of the company. So moving higher up the management ladder would not be very difficult if you stay put in your company for extended periods of time.

BUT, you have to be very careful where you stay and work for a long number of years. It’s very easy to become sluggish and settle into a comfort zone and stay back in a single company for a long period of time. It’s very easy to fool yourself into believing that staying back in a single company will eventually get you benefits. I’ve seen this happen to many people…many good people in fact! How can you know that you are not wasting your time in your current workplace? How do you come to a solid decision that it is worth staying back longer, or its time to move on to another company? How do you know how long is not too long?

I think 4 years is a good time frame to decide whether to stay on or move on. Having worked in a company for 4 years, you would be in a good position to judge the kind of work atmosphere your company provides, the kind of growth opportunities the company provides to its employees, the kind of recognitions you get for your work, the way appraisals happen in your company and so on. In 4 years if the company has given you absolutely no growth or benefits for your work, if the company has a policy that everyone will be treated equally irrespective of their contribution to the company, if the company does not care about your career path and career growth and does not even show any signs of working with you to give you a growth path, if you wake up every day and hate your life for having to go to work because you have absolutely no signs of growth in your career…it’s time to change. Oh yeah it is time to change! If you just answered yes to all of the points that I just mentioned, then just move on. If you stay put at the same place your career will rot for sure.

You have to be careful to constantly judge your job and company so that you do not end up ruining precious years of your career. In 4 years you would have got a very good understanding of how the company treats its employees. So when the management makes some promises to you regarding your career growth, you will have a solid foundation of 4 years to judge whether those promises are valid or that you’re just being taken for a ride.

So the next time you decide to call someone a Job Hopper, I suggest you make sure they had good reasons for changing jobs And also, be careful how long you decide to stay in a company

Know your basics!

I recently conducted a set of interviews during a recruitment process at the company where I’m currently working. There were about 60 candidates for about 4 to 5 openings and I met some of them. I have to admit. I was totally disappointed and even angry with some.

Manhattan Associates needs developers with some seriously good technical skills. The nature of work we do in this company requires developers to have strong knowledge in Core Java, J2EE and the related technologies. So naturally I targeted the fundamentals in my questions. Anyone can look-up the API documentations or even Google a few things out to get their work done. However, if a developer is weak in his/her fundamentals, then that’s NOT good. What if the developer is pathetic in their basics? Well, read on…

Here are some of the questions that I asked and the answers that I got. Simple questions which needed simple answers but I got some annoyingly amazing ones!

———————————————————————————————

Question: How many bytes can an int variable type hold?
Answer: I’m not sure, maybe 32?

Question: What do we use the instanceof operator for?
Answer: To create new objects.

Question: We have a real life scenario, where in we have a car and a garage. The car is parked inside the garage. Can you model these into two objects and relate them in design?

Answer: We have two classes. Car and Garage. Car extends Garage. Because the car is parked inside the garage and it extends the garage.

Question: Why is the finally block used?
Answer: To create and throw exceptions.

Question: What is the difference between Vector and ArrayList?
Answer: Vector is old and ArrayList is new. No other difference.

Question: Can you pass the object of a sub-class into a method that accepts the superclass type?
Answer: No, that would break Polymorphism!

———————————————————————————————

I mean…this is way beyond unacceptable. These were developers that were working in Java for about 2 to 3 years!!! Can you believe that? They do not know the basics! Out of all of those that I met, only 2 were good and one of them was really good. I selected them. Thank God…finally!

There are a lot of developers who do not even bother to work towards getting their skills right. Like I had written about this a while ago, they don’t even bother to find out what they lack or even that they lack something! Imagine what kind of code quality can such developers come out with. It’s because of such developers that we have efforts like Code OffSets in place!

If you are a person whose bookshelf is filled with books like “Java for Dummies”, “Learn J2EE in 21 days”, then you’re gonna have a really tough time in your career as a developer. If you are in the software field and are making a living writing code, at least get your basics right and strong!!

Myyy Prrecioussssssss……

There are many things that can negatively affect us from being productive and creative. One of them is the constant attempt to withhold information and knowledge. Constantly being worried about the secrets you believe you need to guard, thinking of ways to keep your secrets from being out in the open, strenuously trying to avoid others from getting hold of your “secrets”…a mind working on such things can rarely or almost never think of or work on creative ideas and problems. This mindset is bad and simply doesn’t work well. It didn’t work well for Gollum as well if you can remember, did it?!

Knowledge is power. In the course of our development experience, we would have learnt a lot (I suppose!). We would have come up with many tips and tricks to do things faster, in a better way. For example, you might have automated your routine tasks of opening your applications sequentially, because you would open them more or less the same way every single day when you come in to work. You might have automated the way you build your source code and handle the server start-up. Or you might have faced some problem and would have come up with a solution, which could be very helpful for everyone in your team. It could be anything. But each one of us mostly does come up with something or the other that can definitely be helpful to more than one person…other than you. If it’s going to help other people, then why would you want to hide it?

Many people try to guard information so obsessively that it’s almost sickening to everyone working with them. Such people hide information as if they sharing it with others would have had them thrown to prison! Unless you really, truly have some highly classified or sensitive information or the like, which you are legally not allowed sharing, what value would you probably gain by hiding information and knowledge? It does not benefit anyone…wait a minute, it does not benefit you too! How? If you are the holder of important information, would it not enhance your position in your community? Would you not be seen as someone sought after?

Well, firstly, people who hide information that can help others are simply hated. Trust me. You have information. People can save time, energy, frustration and also maybe money, with the information that you have and you do not share. They end up having to go through all the same trouble. If this is you, then good luck trying to find anyone who would like to work with you. So the damage done to your image is very bad. Secondly, your mind would be trained to try and “safe guard” knowledge. So your mind would be more or less like a closed cage. So you would be certainly less receptive to new knowledge and more learning. A closed mind can only think of safeguarding what it believes it has within. Learning will drastically come down. Even if you do learn, you would do it to try and become better than others. You will certainly fail to get a lot deeper into the subject and learn it the way it has to be learnt. I have seen this happen to a few developers, including myself for sometime a few years ago! Moreover, if you are irreplaceable, you will never be promoted!

Dave discusses this point in a pretty neat way in his post about the 7 habits of highly dysfunctional enterprise developers:

There is no point in holding on to useful information that could make others better developers. That is, unless you’re trying to stay in the same job forever. Ask yourself, who do you want to work with on your next job? The person who helped you write that complex algorithm on their lunch break, or the guy who hissed at you when you walked into his cube: “Mine! Stay away, filthy Hobbitses”.

This ideal of sharing knowledge and information is the very essence of the Open Source world. There are too many wonderful problems that are waiting to be solved in this world and it’s a real pity if people will have to end up re-inventing the wheel again and again. You don’t want to end up having to re-invent the keyboard, for example…you simply have to use it and do something more useful!

Not only do you get accepted as a better person when you share information, it will also help build a more collaborative and cohesive working team. People interacting very well with each other deliver projects with much higher quality and less stress levels. You face a problem, spend many hours trying to resolve it, and then you do resolve it. After sometime you get to know that your colleague had also faced the same problem yesterday but he deliberately did not share this with the team and kept the solution to himself…Myyy Preh-sshhusss…!. Wouldn’t you hate to work with such a person? Think of the amount of productive time lost. This kind of mentality affects the project also in the long run with such productive hours being wasted. That’s a bigger problem…for no good reason.

This is one of the reasons why Hackers simply love Open Source software. Among the Hacker community, it would be considered almost a sin to NOT share knowledge. Richard Stallman gives a wonderful analogy in the video “The Code”:

Development is very much like cooking. It’s a way to accomplish something. You come up with a recipe, you like the taste and then you share it with your friends. Your friends like it too. Some may even make the taste better by making some small changes to the recipe. They share it with you and everyone enjoys the whole process and the great taste. This process just keeps getting better. Now imagine if someone went to great lengths to ensure that if you shared something with anyone, you would be called a traitor and would be thrown into prison for many years. It’s the same with code.

It makes a lot of sense doesn’t it? Now let me give you another analogy. Suppose you had been to a new, distant place for some purpose, either personal or business. You face many hurdles when you were there, there were many experiences that you would have had, positive and negative. You come back home. Now let’s say your colleague is getting ready to go to that same place shortly. Imagine how much immensely it would help him/her if they got to know beforehand what to lookout for, what to expect, what were the bad things and what were the good things that you knew should not be missed in that place. Yes? It would make his trip a lot smoother and enjoyable. What would YOU get by making his trip a lot better? The good will of your colleague and the rapport this would help you build up in your workplace. The respect you gain when people look at you as someone who truly helps them is immense.

Every problem has to be solved once and only once. So the solutions simply have to be shared! Sharing information and knowledge is a great way to nurture a great, collaborative and productive work environment. You will learn more. You will grow faster. You will gain a lot more in the end. You share with people and everyone will share with you wholeheartedly, and in the process you will end up learning a lot more than you would’ve learned in isolation.

You can become truly great by genuinely helping people. As you sow…so shall you reap…simple law of nature

The Power of Doing what you love

Loving what you do and doing what you love, which comes first? Probably both are related deeply but I guess one results in another. For me, it’s easy to answer this question because I absolutely love what I do. I love computers so this is something that really keeps me excited. It’s like a pure love affair. You end up thinking about what you love all the time of your existence. It gives meaning to life and helps in being hyper productive in what we do. This is one of the best by-products of doing what you love…sustained thinking. As the famous quote goes…

No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.
- Voltaire

Wonderful quote…and it also has a very deep meaning. Probably the one person we all would immediately relate to this quote is Sir Isaac Newton. He was known to be lost in his thinking and studies for days together, without even proper food and sleep. Quoting from the book “Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking”:

In his later years, Isaac Newton was asked how he had arrived at his theory of universal gravitation. “By thinking on it continually,” was his matter-of-fact response. “Continual thinking” for Newton was almost beyond mortal capacity. He could abandon himself to his studies with a passion and ecstasy that others experience in love affairs. The object of his study could become an obsession, possessing him nonstop, and leaving him without food or sleep, beyond fatigue, and on the edge of breakdown.

This is of course, beyond normal human capacity but this is what is needed for being innovative. The power of sustained thought is what you achieve when you are in “The Zone”. A lot of extreme levels of productivity that Hackers achieve are because of their abilities to remain in The Zone for extended time periods. If you work on something that you love, getting into this Zone and remaining there for extended time periods is quite easy. Also, constantly thinking about your art enables you to utilize the power of your sub-conscious mind. Many times you might have gone off to sleep thinking about some problem that you had been struggling/working with through the day. You wake up in the morning and you instantly seem to have solved that problem! The solution just comes to your mind! As if some kind of a magic! How does this happen? When you are asleep, your sub-conscious mind picks up the problem and works on it. Imagine if this were to happen almost all the time. How much more creative and productive this can help you to turn yourselves into! If someone who works merely to pay their bills, probably it’s impossible achieve these elevated levels of the mind. It’s just sad how many people just wake up and go to work naively without having any clue why they are doing whatever they are doing, expect that it pays their bills.

I read a very interesting and a very motivating commencement address that was given by Steve Jobs at Stanford University, a few years ago, in 2005:

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

When Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, the very company that he had founded, it was as if he was thrown into the sea and the only life support he had was his love for what he was doing. As Steve says in this same speech:

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

Firstly, unless you are passionate in what you do, you cannot build a company like Apple. Secondly, if you do not love what you do, these kind of setbacks block the vision about your future because you would have no clue what to do! It’s so easy to run behind the material success, money, fame…what not. Do what you love and do it to the best of your abilities. Success is just a by-product but your life should walk along the path of your love and passion. If you wake up every morning and have to drag yourself to work every single morning and then you come back home at night having hated what you did with your life that day, then you are just wasting your life. Go do something else!

This is what makes a Hacker, essentially, a Hacker! Ask any Hacker why they chose to work with computers and almost every time, you will get almost the same answer…”because it’s fun!” Love for working with computers is what makes a Hacker. This is why they can be so creative and so dedicated to computer science. This is why they can sit and hack for hours together. This is why software development seems like a beautiful art to them. They always keep working on their art, learning new ways to carry out their artistic works. They read and study and work on new technologies.

I have had people ask me if I have been preparing for interviews whenever they see me reading some technical materials/books. If you have to read and study only so that you can take interviews, it’s really sad. There is something wrong and you definitely need to do some soul searching. If you do not do what you love…and do not love what you do, you will just spend your life being a very average person…and probably even frustrated to be living so. We should always be happy…but never content.

So…What is it that you would love to do and what have you been doing now?

Happy New Year 2010!!!

Wish you a very Nappy New Year 2010!

I was trying to look back and think of all those significant things that I have achieved during the year 2009 and an important realization struck me! I guess I should have a real reason to feel satisfied and fulfilled if I would actually achieve all the goals and resolutions that I had started out with in the beginning of 2009. But, the problem was, no documentation of the goals. So…where do I look and what do I compare my achievements with? Even further, how do I even know that I can confidently tell myself that I have achieved something?

Most people end up having the same resolution over and over again every single year. I have done this for many years so I know how this works in the mind. This is why I have realized how important it is to actually write down our goals at the beginning of the year and set out to achieve them. In our day to day “busy” life, we lose track of our time and forget our goals, and before we realize…It’s the end of the year!!! This is not something I think we should allow to happen to us. So, trust me, writing down really helps. It does not matter what your goals are and whether anyone would even approve them or not. It’s all about YOU and what YOU want to do in life. This is also very important. The first thing is you have to know that your goals are how YOU see them to be worthwhile because the word “success” actually is very relative.

I think it’s critical we write down the goals and almost very frequently, I am thinking weekly on my part, keep comparing what we did over that time period and re-align our lifestyles so that we go in the direction of actually achieving our goals. So, this calls for another important factor. Our goals should be achievable. If we plan to go towards something that’s achievable, then we can work towards maintaining the steady enthusiasm towards achieving them. If we make impractical goals, then as we would progress through the year, all we end up with is frustration and finally we throw in the towel and continue to be what we used to be, forever. This will also burden us with the stress and frustration that we gave up. Sad if we had to live this way!

This constant monitoring and re-alignment in lifestyle will make a major impact to our life over time. It’s like as if you carry out a self-appraisal as frequently as you decide to. Imagine how long this will go in making our dreams come true. If we are actually serious about having a continuous progressive life, this would really help us I believe. Every year you can make progress steadily towards what you wanna be in life and that’s magnificent in itself! At the end of every year, if you keep achieving all your goals steadily, that in itself will inspire you to make more challenging and fulfilling goals in the coming years!

Let’s strive to make 2010 really progressive and successful so that on 31st December 2010, we can truly feel satisfied and celebrate our success!

RSS Bandit – Review

I’ve been using RSS Bandit for almost 3 weeks now and found it to be a fantastic tool! The ease of use is just amazing. If you are used to MS Outlook, then this tool will appear just the same. RSS Bandit is basically an RSS Feed Reader and what I liked about it the most was that, it is a desktop application. Following are my top 10 favorite features:

1) When you minimize the application, it elegantly hides itself in the system icon tray. So this does not add additional burden on your task bar.

2) You can create groups and sub-groups for different categories like news updates, blog updates, updates from social networking sites and so on.

3) You can have multiple tabbed panes within the main window, just like IE7 and above.

4) You can type in URLs the way you would do in a web browser.

5) You can search the web directly with a search box provided and that invokes Google search in a new tab, which I find very useful, and, this also has an integrated download manager.

6) You can set-up the time intervals at which you would like the messages to be updated (meaning, the feeds to be refreshed).

7) You can set up username and passwords for individual feeds or even groups.

8 ) You can define custom styles for visualizing the feed windows.

9) When you exit the application and open it sometime later, every single tabs/links that you had opened will be restored as is. This feature rocks! I normally keep 10 windows open at any time and this feature is really useful whenever I have to close this application and re-open it again sometime later, or even the next day.

10) Any links that you visit from within this application, feeds for any/all of those pages would be automatically detected and presented to you in a neat list so that you can just directly subscribe to it even after you have exited that page.

So RSS Bandit is something I would highly recommend if you don’t want to have a RSS reader in a web page, with an added login related headaches. You can download this application and try it to see how good it really is!