Respect the TV

Wednesday, July 27, 2005



...so said Vivek. Confused over what I heard, I asked "what did you say?". With his head fixed in the direction of the TV, he repeated in an emphatic tone, "Respect the TV", indicating that none of us should chat in front of the TV. Wondering what he was watching ? -- multitasking Tour De France and F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Haaaaa..so much respect for the idiot box. Do you guys do that?


Do Bloggers suffer burnout?
I think I did. Not so much because of writing but because of reading so many blogs in a day. I started wondering if Blogging was an obsession and if I could stay without it for a few days. I did just fine the last 5 days with no blogging and no checking the stats and without the frenzy of reading tons of sites like a maniac. End of the day my head would spin in a dizzy having read non-stop throughout the day assimilating all the information, making a note of interesting stuff, posting to del.icio.us and I would just come crashing. I was burnt out from the information overload and decided to retreat into a quiet world. It helped and now I'm back with a more organized approach to read and write!

Cold

Friday, July 22, 2005



I'm sick with running nose, cold, sneezing and a handful of tissues! I was just going through my blog archives from 2003 and found this quote.


William Gladstone said "If you are cold, tea will warm you; if you are too heated; it will cool you; if you are depressed, it will cheer you; if you are exhausted, it will calm you".


So true. I had a cup of tea and I feel so much better now. I'm contemplating on taking a month long vacation from blogging. Just contemplating ...

Will U.S come to terms with reality?



It required a 9/11 for U.S to acknowledge that its long term ally was not so "nice" as it projects all the time. When India harped for decades that it was terrorism on our borders along Kashmir and Punjab, they turned a blind eye and continued to support - you know who. Only when your fingers get burnt do you acknowledge at times. After 7/7 there was a good article in The Times of India that said :


India a lab for terror strikes

By Chidanand Rajghatta/TNN

Washington: Has the failure of western intelligence agencies to recognise India as a victim of terrorism and their lack of interest in terrorist modus operandi in India over the past 15 years brought them grief in recent years? It would appear so, going by the action replay of terrorist acts in India that one is now witnessing in various parts of the world.The serial blasts that shook London on Thursday show again that India has been used as a laboratory by terrorists.


The world may forget but Indians wouldn't - the serial bomb blasts of Mumbai in 1993! It was ok then because it was India where hundreds die every month. If you are smart, you know the point I'm driving home. Good articles on the same topic ---

  1. Why Do They Hate Us? Not Because of Iraq

  2. If It's a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution - By Thomas L. Friedman

How I remember birthdays?

Thursday, July 21, 2005



Of late, people are amazed at how I remember dates. I don't use an organizer or any fancy gadget or any website that sends me reminders every morning. Some people find it difficult to remember dates while they can recollect a whole lot of other things very easily such as faces and names. I have a fasciation for dates but I'm very bad at remembering names.
Here's my memory mapping secrets for dates (umm not really):


  1. Rule 1: Association
    As a kid, we remember a lot of things and this number wanes gradually as we grow old. The key to remembering newer dates is to map them to what you already know like your friend's and family birthdays. Naturally, the dates I can remember easily are those that fall in the months of January, February, April, May, July and September (family birthdays). It takes an effort to remember the rest.

    The first step is to group the dates and remember them in patterns. For instance, Jan 21, April 21, May 6, June 21, July 13 and September 25 come naturally to me. So when I came across dates such as Jan 22, April 24, May 8 or September 23 it was easy to associate.

    People who share birthdays or anniversaries are the easiest.If they occur on a National holiday such as August 15th or Jan 26th all the more easier!


  2. Rule 2: Recency or the last year rule
    Every morning when I wake up, I make it a point to see what date is. It is a mental action item to do it around 7:30 a.m. or just before I go to bed the previous night. I then do a quick mental run to see if the date seems familiar. If I have done something substantial such as wishing someone on their birthday or anniversary last year, I generally remember that by way of what responses to e-mails or calls that I received. Don't ask me how. I just have a vague remeberance. The more frequently I do that, which is successively over the next few years, it becomes a habit. Usually, if I don't remember it in the morning, the likelihood that I would through the rest of the day is very bleak!


  3. Rule 3: Grouping Dates
    This rule works best to enrol newer dates into your memory. Birthdays of people from a similar profession or friends who are associated in some way to each other are easier to remember. One such group is March 20th to 22nd, July 9th to July 15th, Sept 21 to Sept 25th.


  4. Rule 4: Day of the week
    This is an offbeat rule which hascome in handy at times. There are events and the day of the week and the month that it occurred the previous year that I remember distinctly. Such dates even if I make an effort I generally fail at it. So if it happened on a Sunday last year, it would be on a Monday this year. This cannot and will not work for long!



Despite all this, there are dates that sound quite familiar like july 19th and I can't figure out what it represents. It is probably also worth mentioning that it is selective filtering. Not anything and everything goes in. Either the date or the person associated has to be special in some way (obviously done subconsciously) to get registered.

Technical (Java) Interview Experiences and tips - I

Wednesday, July 20, 2005



I'm much more composed now than I was 6 hours back. The last post which I decided not to take down speaks volumes about my state of mind then. I wrote that minutes after that grilling 55 min interview.

Just a little background on what's going on. I'm looking out for a job because we are relocating to a new city and I began interviewing with prospective employers today. I went through a similar experience just 3 months back. For whatever reason, this experience is frustrating and teaching me so many lessons. So I decided to hell with anonymity and decided to blog about it here. Some Do's and Dont's. The process of getting a Project Lead job in India involves the following steps :

Precursor

1. Making a resume and I confess I'm not very creative at it.
2. Posting a resume in a job portal or through referrals.
3. Answering to hundreds of e-mails from thousands of consultants within hours of posting the profile.
4. Hundreds of calls come for administrators and network guys if you are looking for a project lead position. Everything is software and IT for consultants. Its their job and they don't give a damn.

Finally when something materializes, REAL interview calls start coming in. The criteria for every company varies. You can judge the kind of organization you are getting into by the way interviews are organized and conducted. Just like they say you can judge a man by the company he keeps, you can judge a company by the HR personnel the company employs.

Every company typically has about 4-5 round of interviews of which atleast 2-3 are technical nature varying in complexity.

What went wrong today?

Interviewee - that's me :

1. preparedness : If you are not prepared, do NOT agree to take an interview. If you do, then only 2 things can happen. Either you try to prove that you are smarter than the interviewer or you end up saying "I don't know" for the answers you know too because you are not confident.

2. Location : The place where I took the interview was just not right. It was in the open with 37 deg C Sun rays right over my head that made my temperature and temper rise.

Otherwise I think I did a good job.

Interviewer:

1. If you ever happen to interview someone, please review the role you are interviewing the person for. Asking the person what each member in "system.out.prinln" does not make any sense. How many times do you really care before writing system.out.println as to what it does?

2. No Googling: Please please do not Google for Java Interview Questions and ask questions from there. People are smart enough to do the same before taking an interview.

3. Ask questions relevant to what is needed to get the job done and what you encounter daily in the project. Ask design and architecture related questions for a project lead and not what is the difference between classes111.zip and classes12.zip.
Test for spontaneity and practical application, not theoretical knowledge.

4. Focus not on you: Your motto is to judge how good the person you are interviewing is. Your motto is NOT to prove that you are better than the person you are interviewing. I'm sure you get more chances and avenues to do that on a different forum.

5. Do NOT test syntax : In this age of Rapid Application Development, asking someone for the syntax of something is the most stupid thing one can do. IDEs do that for you. Use your gray cells to remember design patterns and better stuff.

6. Test the aptitude : Aptitude to be able to judge the right solution and the attitude to get the solutions by any means is what you need to test. Understand that one would not have answers to all the problems and one need not know anything.

7. Area of Expertise : Interview and explore their knowledge on an area of expertise extensively. A little knowledge of everything is not what you need. My interview this afternoons spanned from normalization techniques of databases to textbook definition of joins to Rational Unified Processes to Project Manegemnt tools to Reflection API of Java. What are you trying to judge by interviewing on all such varied topics? Have a focus area and attack that!

8. Problem Solving Approaches : The way a person thinks comes out best when you ask him/ger to solve a problem. I like ThoughtWorks way of interviewing. First they give youa problem to solve and then in the later round, ask you to critique it and improve the solution.

frustrated



Damn damn damn. 55 mins of goddamn technical interview. I'm exhausted. My desire to do some stuff on my own is growing by the day! I mean, seriously, wtf, such an ordeal within 3 months is definitely not welcome.

This blog post would be gone soon. I'm just taking out my frustration. It was goddamn HOT outside and my head is fried
literally!

What makes a presentation great?

Tuesday, July 19, 2005



Today afternoon, I along with a 100 other people sat through a 2 hour long business update presentation. The presentation commenced at 2:30 p.m. and it was intended for all the employees. I got very fidgety after 15 minutes. Contrary to my expectations, the lead presenter, someone with very commendable credentials wasn't a great speaker. I had cultivated this wrong notion that people up the ladder are great speakers! They might be great strategists, great visonaries, great businessmen but not necessarily great speakers.

Here are some do's and dont's of obvious flaws that I observed and compiled during the 2 hour presentation of about 6 speakers:


  1. Content:
    It is not mandatory for every presentation to use PowerPoint. Content of any presentation goes beyond PP. The amount of preparation and the research one does eventually shows in the confidence of the speaker. Content is the king.

    • Golden Rule: One point per slide. Do not clutter your slides with text. This distracts the audience to read all that's up there.

    • Put only the gist in the slide. The rest is for the speakers to talk about.

    • Font size: Make it a 28-32 pt. Neither too small nor too big enough to read. This afternoon's presentation required magnifying lenses.

    • When there are too many related facts to compare, make a graphical representation.

    • Display the entire slide at once. Do NOT use any fancy fly-in fly-out text. It is exciting at first but distracts the audience and gets too annoying.

    • Organize your content in a logical flow. If you have too much of information to share and too little time, then focus only on the salient points.

    • Do some ground work and get the facts right. You don't want to get on the wrong foot by delivering incorrect information.



  2. Delivery :
    Even if the presentation is rich in content, if not delivered right, all the hard work goes down the drain. by delivery I mean the demeanour of the person speaking.

    • Golden rule: Do NOT read the slides. MSPP is just a tool to guide you. The presentation is in your head.

    • Talk slowly. Indians have a very habit of talking fast. Blah blah blah no periods at all. One has to be very attentive so as to not lose track.

    • Having said that, it does not mean you can be very slow. Space your words right and get the pace. Pause briefly between sentences and make it consistent.

    • Variations in pitch is very important. Talking in the same tone throughout makes it drab.

    • Humour is a key component. You instantly win the attention of the audience if you start your speech on a funny note.

    • No "umm's mmmmm's aaaaa's".

    • Enthusiasm is contagious. If you can show the energy and enthusiasm radiating in your face, great!



  3. Posture :
    Most people don't pay attention to it, but positioning yourself physically right is a vital factor too!

    • Stand erect. Move your hands. Pace up and down if you feel uncomfortable. Don't overdo it.

    • Glance across the hall at everyone. Just don't look at only one side of the room.

    • A very trivial one but positioning your microphone correct is important too. Else you would be fiddling with it throughout.

    • Arriving a little early at the venue to hook your laptop and be prepared is always desirable.



Weekend started yesterday ....

Friday, July 15, 2005



Finding my cubicle at work is like wading your way thr a maze. Unlike every morning, the maze wasn't buzzing with activity today. 30 odd coworkers from my team are out today and tomorrow on a fun team building trip to Kabini. Kabini is not very far from Kushal Nagar. They plan to go on a safari ride, sleep in the tents, do a bit of trekking and have fun. I couldn't go on this trip as we are heading to Madurai tonight. The workplace was deserted today and I was in no mood to work either..wish I could have taken the day off! 10 more days to go.

Check these links :

1. CEO Blogs List - Interesting that U.S still tops the number and is way ahead of the rest.
2. Consider the outsource


The work is getting done faster and better, Prestowitz argues, because Indians are not only hungrier than we are, but better educated. China, India, Japan and Europe all churn out more science and engineering degrees than we do. Worse -- and downright embarrassing -- is the state of American education. Globally, our 12th-graders rank only in the 10th percentile in math (that's 10th percentile, not 10th). Our students also rank first in their assessment of their own performance: we're not only poorly prepared, we have delusions of grandeur.


-- an interesting change in perspective on outsourcing from what was an year ago. If you recall the Cafferty File conversation or Lou Dobb's show Exporting America where the quality of outsourced work was criticised so much! Will America wake up in time to the China challenege and not lose its edge?

Getting that dream job

Thursday, July 14, 2005



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How to Give Up Coffee and How to Become an Early Riser - Part I

Tuesday, July 12, 2005



How incredible is it that I find articles on the traits I'm quite infamous for in the family, on the same day. There are only 2 possible explanations when I wake up with a grouchy mood, headaches, a long face and snap at everyone throughout the day - either I didn't get enough sleep or didn't have my morning tea.

There is a mental program that sends signals "your day hasn't started yet" if the 100 ml of tea doesn't go in by 7:30 a.m. It gets worse. I get a kick only if the morning cup of tea that I consume is made by me. I don't adopt any special procedure..It is the regular Taj Mahal/Lipton/RedLabel mixture with 2 spoons of sugar, a little milk, crushed ginger sprinkled with cardamom powder for flavor. Satisfaction guaranteed. Thinking what a spoilt brat am I? Tea has been my favorite beverage since childhood. Mom wouldn't allow us kids to have tea. So I would sneak in every morning and steal a bit from her cup. On getting caught, she would hold my ears :(

Well as Steve says, Caffeine is the modern drug of choice in the work world, easily accessible, socially acceptable, readily affordable, and of course perfectly legal. This is so true. I cultivated a bad habit when I joined my new workplace April this year. I started drinking coffee (black without milk and sugar unlike what Indians are used to) 3 times a day because of easy accessibility. Everytime my colleagues would go to get coffee and would ask me to accompany them, I had a cup. Soon I was consuming more than my body could take! I had to STOP because of the adverse side effects like acidity and it killed my hunger and my digestive system went for a toss. Here are a few steps that I followed to fight my temptation:

How to give up Coffee:

Should you give up coffee?
Anything had in unreasonably large amounts is harmful. With time it becomes an addiction. If you notice side effects like decrease in appetite or concentration, then its time. I know of people who don't drink coffee in the evenings because they would end up staying wide awake through the night! More importantly, if you can't live a day without coffee at predetermined times and fight the urge, then its time to kick the habit or have it in reasonable portions!

Method 1:
Reduce the Quantity:

Instead of stopping the intake abruptly and traumatising oneself, reducing the quantity gradually over a week helps. That way you don't give room for any psychotic feeling that triggers false feelings of headaches due to lack of caffeine!

Method 2:
Break the habit:


Most coffee/tea drinkers develop a rhythm and a timetable like 9:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m., 3:30 p.m. and so on when they have to have coffee come what may. It is important to break this habit and do something else. If your coworkers call you, then don't accompany them for a few days for the coffee break if you can't resist the temptation. This is what I did. If you can resist, then drink something else like water or eat cookies! Or if you feel like drinking something warmer, switch from coffee to a hot beverage like cocoa or some other energy drink.

Method 3:

There really is no method 3. It is more of a mental challenge. Every time I felt like having coffee/tea at work, I remembered all those days I suffered and challenged myself, "Don't I have even this much of self control? Am I so addicted" And remembered the one satisfying cup consumed in the morning.

For 2 weeks now, I'm surviving on just a cup of tea - down from 5 a day!

Getting Things Done or GTD



Getting Things Done by David Allen , is the most talked about self-help book in town (and by town I mean blogs). There are numerous references to it in 43folders, lifehack, SlackerManager and such. I haven't read the book yet but decided to start off with The Weekly Reviews by David Allen. This Weekly Review took me by surprise. And I'm sure if you are a organised person, you would feel the same too. Here I share with you what Vivek and I do to get things done at our home! We are not great at it as before but we manage to pull it off.
Listed below are the points from David Allen's Weekly Review and what we do below for each one of those.


  1. Loose Papers

    All our drawers, cupboards and file cabinets were filled with tons and tons of paper, notepads, training material from seminars and miscellaneous bills of the past 6 years. To begin with, we set aside one Saturday and just got on to the task. This is the difficult part - taking out time on a weekend and just doing it. Once you begin, you are determined to get it done. Firstly, I took an empty shoebox and partitioned it inside into 3 and labelled it credit card bills, telephone bills and electricity bills. Each partition was just big enough to hold 6 bills. From our collection of all the bills, we just retained the recent 6 months and got rid of the rest. Similarly for all the other items. As a practice after that, when a new bill comes in, instead of getting strewed around, it goes in the box and the old one goes into the trash.
    This exercise has made us more organised and the ability to find anything immediately.


  2. Empty your head
    I cannot claim to be very good at this but Vivek is. He has a diary of all the new projects that he wants to pursue and someday maybe's that he jots down by the date. I believe he also frequently reviews them and takes action when he is ready to start off on something. The persuasive effect on onself is high when you see something in writing.


  3. Be Creative and Courageous
    David writes -- Any new wonderful, hair-brained, creative, thought-provoking, risk taking ideas to add into your system.
    This is in a way related to the earlier point.
    There is a ideas notepad that V maintains and some of his ideas goes back to 5 years. He experiments what is feasible at work! It is amazing when you look back at those notes how your thought process has evolved and can work either ways. Periods when there was a spike in creativity!


  4. Process Your Notes
    I review notes scribbled during seminars/trainings and if appropriate it gets processed into a readable format and goes up in the blog space within a week's time.


  5. Review Action Lists
    Ta-Da List from 37 Signals is a great way of managing one's to-do lists online. I was more used to the primitive method of maintaining one in my to-do list yellow pad, running the obvious risk of not being reminded at the the right time.


  6. Friday afternoon Planning
    This was something that was programmed into my head that I have lost touch with and haven't been doing lately. Every Friday afternoon at 3:00 p.m. I would make a list of things to be done the next week, review the items that were planned for the week that passed by and the status on each of them. I would strike off whatever was achieved. This always gave me the confidence to be better prepared for Mondays and the week ahead.



I know its easier said than done. Probably the reason why this book is such a hit. None of the tips are a no-brainer. It is all a habit and using the right tools to manage one's time and activities!

Whining and Countdown

Friday, July 08, 2005



Official Communication came in today. 15 more days here at work. I'm happy to leave. The last few weeks hasn't been exactly pleasant. It has nothing to do with the people I work with but the entire situation and the kind of work I'm doing now is something I don't love and is not fun at all. Laundry work of some DIRTY code (yes code due to some BAD BAD design)! Sometimes I think I'm a total misfit to work in organisations because of my expectation of everything to be of high standards which 90% of the times is not :( Damn Perfection is an illusion..

Do women in general whine so much or is it just me? To make matters worse, I'm not even allowed to talk about how bad I feel about this whole situation so I'm just SCREAMING here and want to disappear into oblivion.

Beach Reading - Summer Reading for Smart Leaders

BlogMap



I followed the instructions in How to add a BlogMap to your blog and added a BlogMap (above the Flickr Section on the sidebar). BlogMap is a service from FeeMap that displays the geographical location of a blogger. It is neat. However, if your location is outside the U.S. you can Google to determine your latitude and longitude. BlogMap also gives the locations of your neighbouring bloggers. How does it help? I don't know..I don't network with other bloggers but I thot it was cool and added it!

Secret Corner on the Web

Wednesday, July 06, 2005



There are times when you feel like punching the nose of someone (for the record I was never violent) or swearing out loud or blog about it with an identity. But one cannot do these for obvious reasons like keeping the job, out of courtesy etc. Some people take out their frustrations by writing on a piece of paper and when they are totally satisfied with the outcome, feel relaxed and get back to normalcy!

I discovered one such site called iWorkWithFools this morning. It is slightly similar in concept to the famous/infamous blog Post Secret but not as picturesque as it. This site has people anonymously describing their experiences at work with tough/dumb/moron (or as the site calls "fools" that I disagree with) peers, subordinates and bosses. I read a few posts and then said to myself "Vivek is right. I'm insane to be reading this and poop stories. I definitely have better things to do in life." I hate to agree but some experiences were what some of us encounter in our everyday work life too but gossip about only in private! So much of animosity, hatred is demotivating to read!

Portland, Oregon

Monday, July 04, 2005



NY Times : Livable shade of green.


When President Bush travels to the Group of 8 summit meeting this week, he'll stiff Tony Blair and other leaders who are appealing for firm action on global warming.
Skip to next paragraph

"Kyoto would have wrecked our economy," Mr. Bush told a Danish interviewer recently, referring to the accord to curb carbon emissions. Maybe that was a plausible argument a few years ago, but now the city of Portland is proving it flat wrong.

Newly released data show that Portland, America's environmental laboratory, has achieved stunning reductions in carbon emissions. It has reduced emissions below the levels of 1990, the benchmark for the Kyoto accord, while booming economically.

What's more, officials in Portland insist that the campaign to cut carbon emissions has entailed no significant economic price, and on the contrary has brought the city huge benefits: less tax money spent on energy, more convenient transportation, a greener city, and expertise in energy efficiency that is helping local businesses win contracts worldwide.


That's Portland for you. Portland is one of the cities I liked the most in the U.S. Chicago was the other one. But I liked both of them for different reasons. The scenic view from the plane when you ride into Portalnd, Oregon is breathtaking. One gets a good scenic view of Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens at a distance. As the plane approaches Portland, you can see Columbia River flowing across the city. This part of the country has a great climate all through the year unlike most northern cities. Though I have heard some people find it very depressing when it rains incessantly during some months. When it is not raining there is a perpetual cast of clouds leading to a gloomy climate that tourists would find romantic.




When I first drove from Portland to Beaverton, I wondered is this for real or am I dreaming. Greeny landscape for miles and miles meticulously covered with all kinds of trees. It was around the same time of the year last year. Summer time. Lots and lots of tourists, the light rail mass transit system was packed with people, musicians playing on the streets. The first impression you get of this city is that it is a very diverse in both culture and landscape. In short, it is very lively that brings in the desire to live for fun!

One distinctive thing that I noticed was a rather high Indian population in the area - probably because of the number of technology companies and the weather. A high concentration of Indian restaurants. Beaverton is home to organisations like Nike, IBM. If you can take a tour of the Nike campus, then nothing like it. Every building is named after a sports player sponsored by Nike like Mia Hamm, Tiger Woods, Pete Sampras.

If you haven't been to Oregon, then you should. Take care when you book your ticket or board the plane. There is one Portland in Maine as well. V once told me a story of how a woman got on his plane to Portland, OR when her destination was the one in Maine. Poor lady! Oh and yes do visit the Powell's Book Store. You can spend a full day in the company of books and you won't get tired. Saying they have a huge collection is an understatement. Another place worth going for fun is the Saturday Market under the bridge.

An Evening at Pinch of Jazz with T & A

Friday, July 01, 2005



Sick and out of blogging action for 3 days. It sounds like quite a few people I know have been down with this pattern of constipation-dysentery-vomiting and the cycle repeats itself. I don't know if its the food or the weather or water! Well whatever it is, the experience was bad.

Last Sunday, V and I caught up with Tim and Adam at the Taj Residency, and then drove home with them. Thanks Kelly for the thoughtful gifts. After taking them through a tour of our apartment, we settled down to catch up with what's been going on with each of us. I made them taste Rasagollas. Adam commented it tastes or rather feels like bread. Tim was tight-lipped. I learnt later that he wasn't a big dessert fan. An hour later, we left for Pinch of Jazz. Adam, who used to be professional photographer, was clicking away pictures of everything - a man clad in a rain coat driving a scooter,
road side children, overly crowded (normal 4-5) autorickshaws, the skyway bridge at KR Puram. There was one image of a tempo with people standing on the steps that he was trying to capture and then stopped wondering "Where the hell is the driver?" Yes, he got confused! He was so engrossed in taking pics middle of the road that Tim commented thank god he didn't get hit.

Adam wished to ride in a autorickshaw and I offered to ride with him. Tim backed away saying that he would rather drive in the car. Later he got enthusiastic as well. So we got down at Ulsoor Lake and drove a short distance by auto till Pinch of Jazz. The ride was normal with just 1 upward motion and back on our seats. I hope they enjoyed it.

We spent a couple of hours at Pinch of Jazz. Pinch of Jazz is located in Manipal Center on Dickenson Road. This was also the house of "Orange County" restaurant. The place has been renovated now and a live band plays there on some evenings every week. There was one playing that evening as well. The ambience is good but the food is not. We were met there by a few more friends. Talked, clicked pictures, talked, ate, talked and the evening ended. It was a good evening! It will be another year or probably more before I see them again.

How is Taste of Chicago this year?