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Monday, July 24, 2006

Stop, start, restart ...

I don't know why ... but I just tend to stop doing things for no reason at all - take blogging for example.
I won't give reasons that I am too busy working nowadays and stuff ... because, I can, if I want, take some time out for blogging everyday ...

But then, every now and then, I just tend to stop it - and it takes a great deal of effort to start back - but once it has started, I am sure it will go the distance...

This did not really prompt me to write the blog, but its worth talking about anyways.
The story is about a little 6 year old boy who fell into a very narrow well type structure and was stuck there for more than 50 hours before the rescue team managed to dig a tunnel from a parallel larger well and rescue him ...

The child was going to be saved eventually and would be unharmed - everybody knew that, but what was really sickening was how the media made such a fuss about it with all the sensationalising, that it was worse than the hundreds of soaps doing the rounds on air these days.

A couple of news channels, showed nothing else but 11 hours of continuous footage of the scene while the army was trying to rescue the child.
The child was ofcourse rescued eventually and as I had predicted, got quite some amount in cash ... and I do believe, will get all his education and stuff sponsored eventually.

Then there was the other thing recently about the Govt. banning quite a few blog sites in the wake of the Mumbai terror blasts.
They originally wanted about 17 sites to be blocked, but as the technology to do this does not exist, the ISPs ended up blocking the entire domain and so, all the blogger sites ... this one included.

Apparently a couple of blogs were being used by SIMI activists to plan other attacks.
In my opinion, all this mess happens due to pure idiots existing in the Govt Technology dept who would not know the difference between an operating system and a web browser.

On the plus side, it turned out to be great business for proxy sites (esp. kproxy) and a lot of people ended up learning inadvertently, about proxies and how blocking of sites is just not possible in most of the cases ...
So much for sheer stupidness and tonnes of revenue loss ...

Anywho, this was just a wake up post for me ... nothing to really muse about in that sense ...
But now that I am up and atom, should have better things to muse about soon ... :)

Monday, July 03, 2006

Job and life as it stands !

Today was the "big" day - apparently - when you go to work on your first ever job - and all the works.
At home, everybody except you is excited - calls keep coming from distant relatives who are all like - "Your first day at work? Best of Luck !!!"
And though you were pretty excited at one particular point of the time in the distant past, you fail to see what all the big deal is about.

So there, amidst the worst rains of the season, I stepped out of the house to go to - where else - WORK ! (Sounds pretty funny now ...)

So, in as few words as possible - this is how it went ...
Well, reached there almost on time at 9:07 a.m (can always damn the traffics and the roads!) but nothing seemed to be happening till 9:30 - thats when we have our Day Start meeting.
Being the first day, all the freshers had to come out and introduce themselves and also tell a funny to make everybody laugh.

After everybody had their turn, the day kicked off officially.

Lots of stuff was going on today - from setting up your workspaces to tonnes of meetings in which each of the project leads came and explained the projects they were working on.
Couple of forms to be filled up - setting up of company email accounts, working environments and stuff like that.

We also had an interesting coding challenge - which I managed to figure out partially - which was followed by an excruciating open book C# test - which I must admit was extremely difficult.

This test took most of the day - along with the occasional meeting and some formalities to be completed. And the pace of answering the test questions came to a crawl towards the end ...

Towards the end of the day, there was a birthday party with two awesome cakes - so it was fun. Then we helped out going through some papers before finally heading home at 9.

But even now that life has taken a huge turn with 10+ hour working days under artificial lighting and temperature control (with no bunking possible whatsoever), the place where I am working at is a darn good place to be.

The thing that hit me just as I was leaving was that - I have to go home now, hit the sack, get up and come back - aaaaarghh !!!!

All said and done, this is probably one of the coolest places to work.
All the people are young, in our age group and extremely friendly.
You don't have to bother about wearing a T Shirt which does not have a collar or that your jeans are blue in colour.
You can walk in wearing floaters and steal one of the many bean bags lying around to work on.
You can have all your instant messengers running throughout and even catch up with friends elsewhere - as long as you get your work done on time.

So it begins ... I guess :p