Thursday, November 16, 2006

Let bygones be begones.......

Folks, today I am in a nostalgic mood, chatted for almost 2 hours with a very old school friend after almost 5 years….….we talked about all the fun we had in the school, the games we played, all the gals who were ours but never were and of course about the first time we got drunk…and most importantly, the way we felt this world to notice us in everyway, eh!
It was the end of my stay in the hostel, my Certificates were in hand and i was supposed to move for further studies soon. By this time i was well accepted in the hostel community and we had our own little gang. Till then we had never drunk, one of my friends had smuggled his father’s scotch bottle, and sometimes we used to take little swigs from it. That’s about it. Then one fine day one of my friends fell for a gal in the school, we managed to convince him to propose to the her. He was hesitant, but we prodded him on (we thought it would be so much fun if she said no), and then we said.... look man if she says yes ,we are going to celebrate by drinking tonight but every bit of penny, ofcourse from him. The poor guy went ahead and of course was promptly rejected (all my friends share my fate in love it seems ….lol) , poor guy was completely heartbroken and came back to the hostel late in the night.
So we thought , what the heck lets get drunk anyways. If not in celebration, then otherwise too, afterall since when drinking requires any excuse? None of us had any experience of making drinks, but my friend who had turned into a devdas overnight, took a swig directly from the bottle.
I missed my school chums and college friends…such lovely years… such carefree times, na duniya ka gum, na zinadagi ki chinta..jaane kahan gaye wo din……. may be the that time was soley our's!!….Though I do wonder why i am turning so nostalgic these days….am i running away from my present? ….am i being an escapist? …Something i accused someone else of being….ahem ahem….

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Marvalleous this world is

I’ve had a bit of analysis-paralysis over what to write next here, and in which order to tackle it. I have a large pile of requested items, in addition to my own list of topics, but I’m not sure how much of what I say will make any sense without a baseline of how people works, thinks, and so forth. So rather than take this blog into the retentively planning stratosphere, I’m just going to start riffing on topics all over the map. I’ll use the comments (or lack thereof) as a guide. The riff-du-jour is whether everybody stifles innovation from their subordinates, which a few people asked about.
I’m not talking about our place in the country in driving/stifling innovation; that’s a whole different beast. But rather just me as lowly software person being able to poke my head up from the drudgery and try something new within our walls.
Dangling from my badge is the TIFR Card, and one of those values reads DAE. This is perhaps the most talked about value internally, and is held up as a measuring stick against people and projects. As a general rule, people who are on more challenging, innovative, exciting projects do better in Focal.Taking a risk with network availability just doesn’t win you a lot of fans.
This applies a genuine, positive, corporate pressure to innovate and try new things. I’ll offer my senior up as an example. In the past one year I’ve moved fairly freely between programs, telling my management far more than I’ve been assigned to something from Upstairs. Two of the programs I worked on were entirely the creation of myself and a few interested cohorts. We drafted our ideas, made our case, networked for resources, gathered like-minded people, and eventually ended up with fairly large initiatives on our hands. I had pleasured woking with TIFR and for the country during this time.
Other people are not so lucky. Risk Taking is a corporate value, but that doesn’t mean everyone at my work place practices it the same way. Different people handle that discomfort in different ways. It can result in some enormous back pressure against being able (or even willing) to take risks and try something different.
So I find this place to be a work heaven that values innovation at a corporate level, but has plenty of places it could improve down in the trenches. It’s not perfect, but it suits my temperament and is one of the things I enjoy about working here.........

the rallying of disparate factions..

It seems like the world started spinning a little faster.. or a lot. I almost don't even know where to start
Well I went to an Il show *finally*. I've been promising them for some ridiculous amount of months that I'd make it out and stuff always gets in the way. It was such a great night, I'm so glad I went. They had a great set and performed perfectly. It was great running into Rainbow too, we got to catch up on so much and it made me feel like there is someone in this damn city I know... even a little.
I quit Khukri yet again. I have no idea why I keep asking for that stupid s**** back, but I'm quite happy to be back across the street. It's nice waking up 20 minutes before and still being able to shower and make it on time heh.
I finally hooked my butt up with some recording equipment, not that I have even a faint clue how the hell to use the programs. Everytime I open them I stare blankly at the screen and then oops.. back on myspace. Thank god, the boys know what they are doing for they have been there for almost a decade or we'd be a mess heh.
Great show coming up! I'm especially excited for this, which is suprising since my collegue's is in less than two days. I'm finding intimate presentation wind up being a lot better of a night. Having to deal with thousands of own unanswered realities, most of which have high technical and scientific reasonings, pushing you and drowning out the demands of what the client's and that you actually went to see... isn't as much fun as it used to be. It's nice to go through a great software job with a bunch of friends and let the group know how great they did after. -->random thinking I guess...
Other groups working on this module is showing a lot of progress, which is good... I wish I had more to say on the subject, but sadly I'm never good with these things nomore on other's business. It's so hard to deal with, I can't even imagine what everyone feels like. When we showed, I worry about their's... but I don't want to say that because I know how painful this must be for them and their group, and they'll just emphasize how bad things are... leaving everyone with not a lot to say. All I and my associates can do is be there to listen, but they never wants to stare to us all. I just keep thinking positively that the outcome will get the majority citizens of our wonderland a lot to know and to their family soon.
I guess that's all I've got for an update.. should probably be asleep right now heh.............