Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Go Live - What a show!!

Go live events can be magnum opus!! My previous post about Go live gives a glimpse of what is to come. In its silent way, it paints some bright colors on a grand canvas which can turn into a visual delight. It promises of thrilling roadblocks and the adventure of overcoming them all. Stories of countless sleepless nights. Visions of bleary eyed geeks continuously churning out code at the speed of characters dropping in rain making hot fixes and patches. Noises of people talking over phone sounding alerts, dissipating anxiety and clamouring to make the delivery on time. Possibility of overshooting deadline and last minute chances of a rollback. It's not for no reason that people have a plan B ready for an exigency. One never knows what might go wrong!

Alas, nothing of that sort happened!!!

Sorry readers, but my first Go live event as an onsite co-ordinator is hardly an interesting story. We have always been conservative in our estimates - sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly (are we fortunate??). Not quite surprising given that we are working with a French client.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Nostalgia

It was triggered by my friend's blog who wrote about his trip to goa sometime back. It reminded me of such a similarly memorable and adventurous trip to Shimla. I remembered that once I had captured that in an email and had shared with my friends. That's where it started. I was looking at my past mails and I realized I was a pretty good writer (atleast compared to what I'm now!!). Do let me know what you think of the pieces I've written.


A Friend (On Friendship day)
------------------------------
We are distant
yet so near
Thanks for showing
all that care

In things that we do
and don't share
You have always been
more than fair

Your generous gesture
in time of need
Raise my spirits
it certainly did!!

Friends like you are
hard to come by
Thanks for being that
friend of mine.

Next is a mail to my friend that I wrote in my college days. Can't believe how lonely was I back then!!! Looking back, I'm more amused than sorry about this - the reason I'm reproducing it here.

Here are few questions I'd like answered about the optimizing problem.

a. What is the exact problem definition? Am I given a set of hydrofoils
and I have to select the best one among them? Or is it that the program
starts with few shapes and learns to generate a (the best???) hydro foil?

b...

Well I'm not fine. I'm very upset. Save you, I've been receiving mails
from my friends only far and in between. It's making me sick. You know the
feeling when you are just not able to express what's happening in your
life and with you. You are just not able to talk. There is this friend (my
best friend) who talks to me only when we meet!! The rest of the year
when he is in college, he literally vanishes in the air. And he remains
out of touch. Then there is another who writes to me only when he needs
me. And there is this one who became my friend only recently. As long as
we were together, I thought he needed me only as badly as I needed
him. But now I realise that it's not true. He doesn't have time (I don't
know what he's busy in) to write me a line! And the rest are similar.

For the past few days, I'm experiencing a low. Even movies don't excite or
amuse. I watched 5 movies in 3 days; but it's of no help. I can't
concentrate on studies. May be because I've stopped working on the things
that interest me ( eg the GA problem or the computers). But what to do? I
wanted to get immersed into books to run away from all these. But I can't
borrow books from CL because they have lost my library card!!

Don't know whether to laugh or cry over all these. I'd to give vent to my
feelings. That's why I'm telling all these to you. I'm feeling lost and
lonely....

Can't write more. Bye.

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Go Live

Finally the week has arrived - the week of go-live. If we don't encounter any other roadblocks, we would be going live on tuesday. What is in store for me? Only time will tell.
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Saturday, March 1, 2008

Attachment

I see you - that's a Hindi movie which I would never watch given a choice... i.e. if I'm in India. Can you believe it I'm watching that now in Paris (2M Monde)!! In a place far from home, anything that reminds of home becomes bearable... as much to the extent that it turns interesting!!! (FYI, I prefer reading newspaper to watching television. The only things I watch on TV ,if anything , are music channels, finance news or technology review magazines. But here even English newspapers are exotic commodities.) What else can I do? In a place where you don't know anybody, where you don't know the language, even venturing out doesn't seem too tempting. After all, how long can you keep visiting the same place? (I visited the tourist places in my last visit. I think I should have kept something for my next visit. But who knew then that I would come here again?)

Which brings me to a very philosophical question - is achievement really as great a virtue as it's made out to be? If one's has achieved everything, what would keep one going?


PS: If you like whacky comedy, do watch Wayne's world and Wayne's World 2 - Mike Myers at his best!