Enlightened ... There are no special effects.

Another cold day, here at Farmington Hills, MI. It looks like it might rain. I am stuck in my hotel room on this Saturday too. I have no car as I my US driving license expired a few years ago and I do not have an Indian driving license. The place is a typical suburbia with little public transportation facility. My co-workers staying in the same hotel want to go out for lunch. I think it is fine as I'm getting sick of my own cooking and reheating of frozen food. For every decision after that, you need an extra information, called weather. Should I wear the thermals, should I wear just a sweater or do I need a jacket? Can we go by taxi or just walk the distance? You need to know the weather before you venture out, be it by car or by any other mode of transportation. In tropical countries like India, there is not much to decide. At best, you may have to carry an umbrella if think you need it. So, you need to know the weather. What is the best way to know the weather? I ...

After a meeting today, I shot off the minutes of the meeting as an email. The content was limited to the attendees, decisions made and subsequent tasks. I noticed my project manager creates the MoM as a Word document, places it in a folder for the project in a file server. I wonder what is the right approach. Mine ensures that the notes are visible with no extra effort. The recipients can always search for it in their emails; Google Desktop would index it and the purpose of the minutes is served. Everyone is informed, and the information is available whenever needed. What about the project manager's approach? The information is always there, but do people read it and comment about it? I doubt. This is probably the CMM/ISO kind of quality. Not my kind!

The task is simple. Make changes to an existing activity diagram created in Visio. The changes small, remove a few activities and related connectors. Add a decision and connectors to existing activities. Sounds very simple, easy to understand etc., When it comes to resizing, I don't know why it gets so complex. I agree I didn't read the bloody user manual. But GUI is supposed to make it easy that you don't need a user manual. All I'm trying is to position a few text by the side of connectors and decision objects and resize the objects so that they look similar to the ones that exist already in the diagram. To move a text, I need to click on the object first. Did that and no complaints on that. To select the text block, I need to click on text tool in the tool-bar. Why don't the right click menu or the UML diagram tool has any link to this? To resize the object, I removed all the protections Still it resizes proportionally. I do not know how to change thi...

Now I'm in the US, my evenings are spent in front of TV like most Americans. I try to limit my interest to couple of re-re-...-re-runs of Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond. Occasionally I channel surf during commercial breaks. In one such surfing I bumped into a game-show / quiz program - Are you smarter than a fifth grader? My initial reaction was, it is another program for stereo-typing. One participant was an African American woman who thought US is in the Eastern Hemisphere. Another was a blond who didn't know how to get the radius from diameter. As there was no defined political correctness or incorrectness about jokes on blonds, there were jokes on blond dumbness. The anchor person didn't get such a freedom with the African American woman. The aim of participant selection looked as if, it is make fun of them. May be that's what guarantees viewership! On to more serious thoughts. I compared the questions with the curriculum I'm familiar with - that of CBSE ...

My comments to What is happening with IT I used to think that our attitude toward white man is the reason, for stretching our work-times for client calls. But I came to realize that we are a service oriented country and that’s the way we are. I had been on the other side of the outsourcing line where I outsourced a project to a vendor. The vendor worked just like any other software company; the developer showed up over weekends to finish project etc., There is nothing about white man or black man. I do agree with you that our youngsters have no concept of fun outside of work. This worries me. I worked with a developer who felt very sad when the organization announced 5 day weeks for 2 and and 4th week every month. He had nothing to do on a Saturday. At some point all the consulting companies encouraged these people to virtually live in office without realizing the negative effects of it. We all will come out of it. As far as comparing Microsoft and Infy, I do not think Infy is a los...

BPO Wants the real you This is ironic. There is a section of BPO that lives by impersonation. The tele-sales or customer support done from India does accent training and changes the names to suit the market. If a corporation can fake a superficial identity of an individual, it is business strategy or tactic. If the same is done by an individual, it is a crime.

Out there is an article on "stuff" that is out there, but not perceived. I could have been an physicist with my B.S in Physics (cleared Properties of Matter in the third attempt). But I am not even an arm-chair physicist as I just do not have the required number of connections in my brain to comprehend papers like that. But this is an interesting one. Bhagawan once said, "The manifested is knowable and the unmanifested is unknowable." I'm sure the scientists mentioned in the article would agree. But what is this unmanifested? Rig Veda says - (from Sacred Texts web-site ). 1. THEN was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water? 2 Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day's and night's divider. That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever. ...

I had four international relocations between India and US in a span of some seven years. Tasks in almost all these relocations had a line item - "Sell off stuff that you can't carry". This line item gave me a lot of experience and insight into the mind of the bargaining customers. It was the last big relocation that gave all the interesting experiences. Selling my household items in the US was a bigger task simply because there were more items to sell. I went through the normal grind of posting ads in Indian grocery stores and Microsoft's intranet through a friend. The probable buyers came from the usual ethnicities - Indian, American and Chinese. I would consider the Americans as the most reasonable customers. When the price I quoted didn't meet their offer, they just moved on. They probably had more important things to do than extract a bargain. Successful transactions were completed in less than 5 minutes. One executive from Microsoft even gifted me co...

Your code OOP or POO Since I started with functional languages and programmed in Pascal and C in my first couple of years of experience, I didn't get too carried away with OOP ... for extended periods. The obsession usually lasted for a month or so before I got practical. The other day, I interviewed a guy who has been a business analyst. He had all the technical jargons of the past 10 years in his resume. If he could show some UML, I would have considered him for an analyst role. If he could write code, I would have considered him for a tech lead role. If he could do both, I would have him take my job. The person threw bull and jargons at me at an alarming frequency. Every sentence had stake holders or components or some such shit that are candidates for stop words in a management meeting. Since he started talking about a requirement for logging, I asked him to design a logging system. If he could just copy Log4J, I would have been happy. If he could write a simple functi...