Random ramblings

Before Alok comes all the way to Hyderabad and flogs me for not fulfilling my promise of writing a post, let me just do it.

As for the post, it is going to be very random, so please do not try to find any connection in the writeups.

As they say, it is not possible for anybody to find friendship over the internet. But, I beg to disagree with all the sceptics. The reasson I say this is because I for one have found really great friends and people, specially in the blogging world.

Take Alok for example - we only know each other through his and his daughter's blogs and through some chats on gtalk, but he has become the missing elder brother to me - someone I always missed in my life. He has been there to guide me when I get stuck, and his suggestions - both personal and professional - have been invaluable.

Or take Corinne - she has helped me rediscover myself in a way. We had a real long chat today - and by the end of it I felt as if all my troubles are too small to be worried about. I am really looking forward to meet them soon :).

Or take my friends from the Satyam blogging world - and now from the Manor. We all have been interacting with each other through our Intranet blogs, and later started on our individual blogs as well. And when the Satyam blog went down for a couple of weeks, we found that we were missing our interactions and friendly banter. To not miss out on all that, we all put our heads together and started our own collaborative blog on the Internet. Though we did meet in person later (although not all of us have met each other yet:(), but we will never forget where our friendship started.

Enough of this yapping. As usual, I failed to fulfill my promise of going to the early morning ride of Hussain Sagar. I dutifully shutdown my laptop at 12 AM yesterday night, but sleep evaded me. After all, it is not easy to change old habits in one night. Finally slept at 6 only to wake up at 8:30, as I had to appear for the SAIL Management Trainee (Tech) exam at 9:30 at Hindu Public School, Sanath Nagar and I did not know where it was or how long it would take to reach there.

My plan was to leave early and cycle to the centre, but because of my laziness and lack of sleep I had to ditch it in favour of reaching the centre on time :D.

As far as the exam itself, I am pretty sure that I am going to make the cutoff (in my mind that is). The sections on verbal, quant, reasoning, and general awareness all wet fine - but the Section on Computer Science went kaput. Out of the 100 questions, the majority were on either probability or Automata. Now, Automata was my favourite subject in engineering, but it has been like 4 years since I actually read the book - let alone design a machine. So, all i had was a deja Vu sensation of knowing the answer and yet not knowing it for sure. And for the sake of negative marking I left those questions alone. Probability is a different story all together. I never understood its concepts - so there was no use of even looking at the questions. So simply put, no scorer for me :P.

Things at the home front are also looking up finally (Thank God for that), so am a bit relieved.

We had a team meeting with our PM on Friday and we asked him why is it that technical guys are not being pushed for onsite roles and what are his expectations from us. And his answer is as follows -

Any person who is 6 months old in the project should

1. Know all technologies we work on (That includes Oracle SQL, PL/SQL, Forms 6i, Reports 6i, Discoverer reports, Optio reports, Java, Unix, and also server administrations of Zylab and Planet Press);
2. Know the functionality of each and every module (both standard and customized); and
3. Know all customizations we have in our project.

Politely speaking, the answer is a big NO ;).

He also issued a veiled threat saying that in the current scenario we should be happy with what we have got. As if....

After the meeting, we were (as usual) making fun of the management approach, and we have figured a way of answering any question by contineously speaking for atleast 15-20 minutes. For example - if someone asks you, "How are you", here is how you should answer if you want to rise - "This is a relative question. It depends upon the individual perspective of the person. For example - the person in front of me may think that I am feeling sleepy, while the truth is that I am perfectly well slept and alert as a bull. So, the correct way to put this across is to include the perspective also......(Keep blabbering on so that next time the person does not dare ask you anything)"

But then, as they always say, "Chalta hai".... n apne bhi din ainge chote, so tension nai lene ka.

Hope I did not bore you so much that you do not visit this space the next time.....

This is Hashir, signing off

Over and out