Archive for the ‘Muh Life!!!’ Category

Over 3 weeks!!!

A quick update on the activities over the last 3 weeks!

Week 1: Rome, Pisa

Week 2: Basilica di Superga, Torino

Week 3: Venezia

That has been it! A lot of touring, some very interesting places, Some cities held back in time (Roma), Some interesting incidents, Some very lovely people for Company!  It has overall been 3 awesome, out of the world quality weekends!!!

Some of the photos are here.  The rest are at home… and I will upload them as I find time!!!

And oh! I’m visiting Innsbruck, Austria this weekend!!! B-)  And sadly, I dont have the tickets to any football match of the Euro 2008 cup!!!

Roma and Pisa over the weekend

The Colosseum, Pic courtesy tjsuresh

Off to Rome tonight! I will be spending 2 full days at rome and then visiting Pisa on Monday on the way back to turin.  Lucky us, Monday is a National Holiday for Italy on occassion of Foundation of the Italian Republic (I) .  So, advance wishes for a Happy Birthday, Italy!!

Thanks to colleagues at work, we got the Trenitalia tickets at dirt-cheap rates! 65€ per person for the entire Turin->Rome->Pisa->Turin trip! Thank you guys! Grazie!!!

Thejesh a.k.a. @thej pointed us to Youth hostels in Rome which was again a total boon! Dirt cheap rates for quite decent accomodation!  Thankyou dude…

The Leaning Tower of Pisa, Pic courtesy dgmfotos

Thanks to @Netra, who patched me up with @hanisha who stays in Pisa, we have a guided tour in the works!  This is going to be a good weekend!!!

God bless Social Networking!!! Roma, I cometh!!! Let the Race begin!!! B-)

Buon giorno, Pizza Vegetariana, Grazié, and a truckload of Italiano!

Yeah, I know, my twitter page has been updating things like this for a long time (9 days exactly) and yeah, I’m in Torino, Italy!!!! My first ever Foreign destination!!! W0000000000t!!!!!

After 2 failed and futile and lossy attempts to get here, I finally got to Turin last friday (16-May-2008) after a 10 hr flight to paris, 6 hours of wait and another 2 hours by air to the Casselle International Airport, Torino.

I’m here for the next 2.5 months and am gonna definitely enjoy every single moment of it…  Oh, but the language is a serious PITA issue… Its very very very rare to find an italian that speaks english!  This goes for situations in the office too…  With your manager saying “I go take dump and mail you!“, ROFL’s and LOL’s are always around

And then there’s italian women!  Ooh! Mama!!! Whoa!!! w0000000000t!!! Bling!!!  There… that says it all!!!

Oh! Oh!!! There’s pizza vegetariana… 10 inch radius of awesome goodness!!! Shmmmmmack!!! I just luuuuuuuuuurvvvve it!!!  Oh yeah!!! The best part, getting up in the morning, and having a fight with your roomies on what to make for breakfast and lunch and then deciding that we’ll cook only for lunch and have conflakes for breakfast. Everyday! Thats’s definite fun!!!

And… a truckload of sight-seeing, no… not the women part! the historical monuments, churches, architectures part!!! Sheeesh!!! you dirty people!!! ;-)  We’re already done with the women part!

Had the chance to attend a rock-concert by a local band from Torino called Supsonica… And they played some of the best electro-rock that I’ve heard!!! Loads of electronic, Loads of Guitar and Awesome percussion!

Yeah, its turning out to be a whale of a trip! Plans are on to go to Rome this weekend… Probably to venice the next and the to Hokkenheim for the F1 race thats scheduled next month. And then come back and attend 3 continuous nights of rock-music! This is gonna be loaded.

As far as work goes, the “thing” that I was sent here to do… we’ll I cant work if I cant login to the servers can I???  So that pretty much sums up my stay so far in Torino, Italy.

For quick updates as I feel them, check them out on my twitter page here.  For photos, check out my flickr page here.

And till then, Grazié, and Chao!

BCB6, Moto-dead, life, twitter, et. al.

Catchup with life post…  Lotsa things… quick entries on all those!!!

Lots of things in the last 2 months… the most nerve wrecking thing being the loss of my mom… Something that none of us have been able to come out of…  It so happens that when someone shares a relationship with you thats deeper than being a friend, and suddenly, that person gets sucked out… the void is too hard to handle… neways life moves on… and so do have us…

The next topic of the post: the ever lovely and awesome BCB a.k.a. BarCampBangalore is back!!!  BCB-6 summer edition is happening on april 19th and 20th… The venue is IIM-Bangalore… Be there!!! I’ll be running around fixing up wifi for you peeps… Tats for sure…

The next most important topic of the post: Moto-dead… I’ve spoken about this for a very long time… And mentioned in my blog a couple of times too… This was bound to happen… Motorola Handsets Division being royally kicked out of the Motorola stable… atleast that’s how I choose to see it…

You cant be a blood-sucking leech in this age… you have to contribute or else you cease to exist.  I’d go by Motorola’s top brass’ move to do this… but it could have completely been averted.  They didn’t have to screw up. And screw up with so much perfection that nothing can correct it ever again…

Motorola is perhaps the only company thats been practising the jack of all trades in the mobile segment for quite a while. And guess what! It BACKFIRED!!! What else would you expect??? I may not be Trump but I can see through the lining to say that in today’s age where competing takes balls of steel, you had better not be playing around on the highway!!! You’d definitely get run over!!! Many a time..

And I’d say this with a lot of sadness that a Mobile giant simply went ahead and committed suicide!!! RIP Moto!!! The Razr was an awesome show… nothing else after that… Not one single mobile after that was even worth picking up and holding in my hands…

Coming to the next important topic, my conversation has actually changed places… Keeping in touch with poeple on twitter has become the in thing and the easiest thing in life now… A conversation, although asynchronous, is definitely conversation worth it when the whole discussion is available anywhere and althemore better when the participatory limits dont exist!

Twitter just takes chit-chat to the next level… The erstwhile Yahoo chat rooms concept with a bling from technology… converse from anywhere… anyhow…  Follow me on twitter to know more…

And there ends my hiatus…  Chao…

The beacon in your life!

When you’re sailing, and the sea is rough, and the most powerful beacon close to a shore goes off… what do you do??? give up hope and drown… or… now that you’ve seen the beacon, trust your instincts and give a shot for the shore…

I’ll do the latter… Rest in peace, Mom!!! You’ll be in our memories forever… Love you! Bye bye!!! :’(

Whats life without a fight? they say… But I was never prepared for this! Damn!!!

Tags: mom, life, death

Of Code, Customers and Money!

Disclaimer: This is a rock-solid rant!!! Read on…

The Situation:

We had to give our client an interim delivery on the project we were working on. A phase that involved testing third party code to ensure it was “without defects” so that we would be able to integrate it into our mainstream systems in the coming phases. And guess what… I was completely wrong about the “without defects” part of the previous statement.

Not only was the application badly written, but the third-party team changed the requirements doc without informing us. And to top it all, their build that was delivered to us did’nt contain a properly filled up “Known Issues” document! And my client intends to make it to the market before spring!!!

The Rant:

This is a case of really bad coordination and mismanagement. When there are three entirely different teams working out of 3 geographically different locations, it is IMPERATIVE that everyone is on the same page! Why on earth do we have E-Mail??? Why on earth do we have VOIP??? Why on earth do we have Phones???

If it is still badly coordinated, it boils down to only one thing: “The organization that wants to sell that code doesnt care about the customer!“  When you have something that you intend to sell, the first and foremost expectation should not be to make money!  It is to give something valuable in order to get the money you intend to earn!

And in this project that I’ve been working on, there have been some things that I’ve definitely been shocked to observe.  And I’d take them as stepping stones in handling things in my life here on…

1. You cannot work for just money!  You have to work because you love it.  Working just for money kills the output.  And you will get your money, but someone else will suffer.  And it will boomerang back to you!  Sometime later… But, definitely!
2. Realise that someday, you may have to eat your own cake!  That you made for money!
3. Please take pride in your work!  Life IS full of shit! Nevertheless…
4. When you make something for your customer, make it with a sense of respect.  It’s called duty.  Not JOB!
5. People want to pay!  Believe me! People want to pay.  But they also want something of more worth than the money that leaves their pockets.
6. The best guys in the market thrive because they give the customers an experience! Not a commodity! And there lies everything about money.
7. A customer would shell out a lifetime worth of savings to have an experience. Steve jobs gave people an experience with the iPhone! Nokia gave people experiences with the N-Series! Sony Ericsson gave people experiences with their Walkman phones!  People love experiences.  People cannot love a product.  It is an inanimate piece of sh**!!!

Now, coming back to the crux of my post, organizations become market leaders with the right perspective of a customer experience in mind.  And then, where does it go???  A lot of companies strive to push the envelope in providing a better and a more fruitful experience…  And a lot more dont!!!  They just start looking at the big bucks!  No more quality, no more happy customers.

And their organization is now thriving just on old relationships in business, and on scale that they have as a market leader.  But for how long? When people that are part of the organization fail to attach themselves to it, and they just do their “JOB“, we’re in for a landslide into the abyss…

Wake up big guys, wake up!!!!

BarcampBangalore 5 - The Winter Edition

3 more days and then, its 2 solid days of networking, catching up with the latest crazy things inside of people’s heads, hackdays, gr8 entertainment, cool discussions, hallway talks, and the list is endless…

The BCB5 Winter edtition @ IIM-Bangalore is where you have to be this weekend!  Looking forward to the collectives.  Looking forward with more eagerness to those hallway conversations and networking that happens there!!!

Catch u there.  Look for my live updates on twitter, and the photos on flickr!

Chao…

Tags: bcb5, barcampbangalore5

iNokia???

Nokia just launched their 8GB loaded N81 at London today. And guess what, it’s got the click-wheel equivalent of Apple’s iPhone called navi™Wheel. And, to add more, they have a touch screen with Tactile Feedback… Sounds very “iPhoney“!!!

But then, yeah… This is Kickass stuff… Nokia’s own patent this… The naviWheel is manufactured by Synaptics… And that means it’s gonna be really sleeky and perfect in operation… Nice to know about it…

Other features on the phone are the sweet Symbian 9.2 with Series60 3rd Edition FP1, a fireblazing 369MHz Arm 11 core, and all the usual goodies of BlueTooth, stereo speakers, dedicated music keys, et. al…

But coming back to the main focus of the post, Nokia is taking on Apple seriously, much similar to the way it attacked Microsoft when MS came out with it’s Windows Mobile 6.0 OS. And yes, the dent has been made in Microsoft’s Smartphone market share with the new E-Series phones coming out. Now, Nokia seems to be gearing up for war against the big Pirates!!! Apple!!! 8GB storage with music, with touch screen, with tactile feedback, sounds exactly like the iphone…

Nokia Rocks!!! Vinay has more on that here…

And, on that note, I delved into the act of getting myself an E61i!!! A little late in the race because of my pockets, but then, hey, I got the coolest latest colour in town!!! Shiny Black!!! And it simply Rocks!!!

Image Copyright e-series.org

Tags: Nokia, Touch+Screen, Tactile+Feedback, Apple, iPhone, E61i, N81

The Cruise is err… ummm… on????

Until a week ago, had someone asked me if I blogged, I would have perhaps completely denied existence of the word… But then hey, life has been too hectic… or should I put it, exciting!!! It’s been extremely stressing out for the last month and a half…

The dream of continuing in Symbian on their multimedia project dint come true, but then, I did get another lovely project with Motorola. Nice to work on their latest series of mobile phones… And this project is fun… Integrating Voice Recognition into the phone… Basically, your phone can be operated on voice commands… Now, the fun part is that, we’re Indian, and the phone, “phoren”… EN-IN IS NO WAY CLOSE TO EN-US and not even an iota of chance with EN-UK!!! And this has been giving us real fun and it has been ROTFL for us at work!!!

And hey, I got to go really wild with Nisarga taking customers to Bheemeshwari… And yeah, conducted a complete outbound-learning programme for Oracle… A first for Nisarga and a definite First for me!!! Which now puts NisargaIndia in the elite group of organizations imparting Outbound-learning programmes in the city…

Take it this way: Standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking a lovely valley, getting blindfolded and asked to bank on your colleague’s to get you back to safety… Give it a thought and imagine how much you can learn about yourself and your team…

And for those Wildlife and trek Hungry, Nisarga is just out to announce a set of Open Camps this month-end. All OpenCamps will be on weekends and will be on a first-come first-served basis… Keep a lookout on the website for more detail. I’ll try to get the camp details published via RSS once I’m done cleaning up all the old stuff that’s been closed and done with…

And the highlight of the last one month, Mom chose to celebrate her 50th birthday with me!!!! She came down to Bangalore with a shopping list and another list of temples to visit!!! But hey, it was awesome fun… watching her bargain with the shopkeepers… They must’ve had the day of their lives!!! Took her to Chamundi and to Srirangapatna… Which was fun… I LOVE YOU MOM!!!!!

And on that note, I close this post…

The Cruise is definitely On…

Back to Blogging!!!! Wings Rocked!!!!

Havent blogged at all in a while… and a whole lot of reasons that have kept me busy!!! Wings to be exact!!! An event that NisargaIndia conducted for differently-abled people from Bangalore.

Phase 1 of Wings kicked off on 30th August with Parasailing for partially blind, fully blind people and then the second slot happened on saturday, 1st September with deaf, dumb and autistic children participating in the event.

For us (Karthik, Rajendra and I), it was a really special event for this had been in our minds since over a year and finally, we got a chance to execute it and it went on perfect to the “T”.

And for me, I realised how pathetic a life we all live when I interacted with the students from the “National Association of the Blind“. I realised the true meaning of the term “differently-abled”. It’s basically called so because, when you interact with these people, you realise that they’re the actual people that are abled and we’re not!!! It was so amazing and gratifying to see the students enjoy themselves thoroughly when they were given their first open-air flight!!!

And for us, the breathtaking moments were one too many!!! A capture of some of the expressions:

For more pics, check out here…

And on other very interesting terms, I completed one year at Sasken counting 307 days on bench, and the rest 58 in a valid project!!! Where I actually did productive work!!! Hoooot!!! Yaaaaay!!!

Chao…

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