Three Tips for Beginning Vegetable Gardeners

As a strategic application architect for US Bank Corp. in Minnesota, Kanagaviswanathan Panchapakesan continues almost two decades of management and consulting in the energy, finance, healthcare, insurance, and manufacturing industries. In his leisure time, Kanagaviswanathan Panchapakesan enjoys vegetable gardening.

Beginners planting a vegetable garden can discover a wonderful and fruitful new hobby. In order to achieve success as a gardener, however, keep these three tips in mind:

1. Plants need sun. Choose an area for your garden where the vegetables you plant will have six or more hours of direct sun unless you intend to grow only leafy vegetables such as spinach and lettuce.

2. Plan effectively. If you intend to garden for the first time, starting small will keep you from becoming overwhelmed. Also, using raised beds can help you limit your space to a more manageable size while warming the soil more quickly.

3. Plant at the right time. If you plant seeds directly into the ground you must wait until the soil has warmed up enough for them to germinate. Even if you start your seeds indoors in pots and then transplant the seedlings into the garden, it is important to wait until after the last frost.

Three Tips for Setting up Your Home Theater

Kanagaviswanathan Panchapakesan works for US Bank Corp, in Bloomington, Minnesota, supervising a team responsible for building enterprise services used by internal and external vendors. At home, Kanagaviswanathan Panchapakesan recently set up his own home theater. 

A home theater turns watching television or movies at home into a much more cinematic experience. If you are considering setting up your own home theater, consider these three tips to get the best experience possible: 

1. Rectangular rooms work best for sound. A square room can produce harmonic distortion that may detract from your overall experience. If possible, set up your home theater in a rectangular room, placing the television and main set of speakers along one of the room’s shorter walls. 

2. Find the proper distance. Sitting too close to the screen may cause eye strain and eventual vision problems, while sitting too far away may make it too difficult to make out the picture or any on-screen text. Find your ideal seating distance by measuring the television and multiplying that by 1.5 to 2.5. For example, if you have a 60-inch display, you should ideally sit at least 90 inches away from the screen. 

3. Check viewing angles. While some televisions can be seen clearly from virtually any angle, others require more central, head-on viewing. Before setting up the room, determine the visible angles for your TV to help ensure every seat in the house is as good as the others.

Service Oriented Architecture - Explained

Software and systems architect Kanagaviswanathan Panchapakesan has years of technical experience in defining and advocating best practices, standards, and integration roadmaps for a number of applications. Currently serving as the Strategic Application Architect for US Bank, Kanagaviswanathan Panchapakesan provides software design consultation in SOA (service-oriented architecture).

Simply put, a service-oriented architecture is a collection of services that communicate with each other. The communication involved ranges from the simple transfer of data between two or more services to complex coordination of some activity by the services. A service, as used in this sense, refers to a well-defined, self-contained function that is independent of the state or context of other services.

To put a specific service-oriented architecture together, technology must be employed in connecting the services to each other. The most common connection technology is Web Services. This defines the request and response connections that are used by service consumers and providers.