QOTM: OctoberFest :)

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Happy Birthday Func1....its been nice maintaining u

My Blog celebrated its birthday 2 days bak and I could not even write up something :-(
had been quite bzee lately!
Func1 celebrated its birthday on Sept 27th. I hope i have Many Many Happy returns of the day I created Func1. That was the very day Func1 did a Hello World [:)]
Its like Wilson in the movie castaway. I really really really relate Wilson and Func1.
AND I don;t wanna lose Func1 like Tom hanks loses Wilson in the Movie (LOL).
Well...lets see....

Adios for now :)

Whatz an Equal opportunity employer ??

Last week I met a Bangalorean in Frankfurt. had an interesting discussion over tea with him.
He told me he quit his former company Philips because it was just not

An Equal Opportunity Employer.

Hell I always heard this phrase and never knew what it meant. over the course of the discussion I came to know that he was not being treated on par with employees from Philips parent office.

He explained how good Texas Instruments(his current employer) is in that respect.
He tells me there is no discrimination at all in treatment of employees across geographies.
Now that is something I was interested to know.
The arrangement and treatment for employees on travel to subsidiary offices would be equal through out the world. So an employee of TI from say Timbuktoo would stay in the same hotel as an employee of Ti US office :-).

Medical benefits, Commuting expenses are same across the length and breadth of the company. Except of course senior management. I have worked with two MNCs before my current employer and had observed pretty much these things before. Not that I miss those services in the current place I call home :-).
But yes these are good things to have. Also this friend of mine said he would not leave Ti as he would never find a better place than this.
Well Itz what appears to be the place to be :)). That apart, my experience teaches me that someone gives you respect demands respect and thats what equal opportunity is all about.
Somebody treats you fair enough, nobody would ever wanna leave such a work place.
Most causes of attrition are disparity between Managers and Developers.
Well I don't read much into www.joelonsoftware.com since those are not right in the context India is in. But then Joel says everybody should get a private cubicle for creative work. That might be true in the US or Europe. But in india it simply boils down to a small private cubicle.
What joel says might be far fetched in India. But like my friend said who does not like some respect for a job well done.
In my experience Asian companies tend to think of short term gains and have make shift office spaces. Getting into the market before anyone has them pushing the Panic Buttons. This leaves them with very little scope for some after thought about Employees.

Huh...Talk about Creativity ! All that goes straight out of the window!

Disclaimer :These are my Opinions only and subject to change if things go sour :))

~P.

QOTM : September

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance. -- James Bryant Conant

RammStein !

Nowadays there are very few bugs reported in our system software. And sometimes I wait for bugs to be reported listlessly. But these depend on the Testers Might also :) . Anyways sometimes I get agitated when no bugs are reported (needless to say) which means the Testing effort has not been good enough. Today was no different with zero Handset (protocol related ) crashes reported.

So on one such listless days today, I was listening to the german band Rammsteins music. I had always liked the music since I first heard their songs in Engg first year. I googled a little about their history and came upto a Tragic Event.

Rammstein gets its name from the German town of Ramstein, which was the site of an airshow disaster in 1988. The band's signature song, the eponymous "Rammstein", is a commemoration of the tragedy that took place at the Ramstein Air Base. Then I went on to check about the Rammstein airshow disaster.

Looks like one of those unfortunate air shows. The pictures explain the Pilot error which caused him to ram into the other planes in the heart formation.
I think that explains the sad tones in Rammstein muzik.My Heart and Thoughts go to the people who lost dear ones to the Air Show tragedy.

signing off on a sombre note!

~P

Sunny side down...:(

The Sun Marketing team planned to stop work on the UltraSparcIIIi to focus on other servers which are making money. They want to focus on AMD based Servers which are have got better sales. After numerous lay-offs and product repositioning they still seem to be in Red.
The illustrious company which gave the Tech world numerous Firsts such a Solaris OS, Java and Applet technology just could not market the products right. Maybe Vinod Khosla who was one of the founders and MBA from Stanford could have given shape to the listless behaviour of Sun.
It has a linux strategy which actually appears to be conflicting with its Solaris OS based servers.
It also has AMD based servers which are in direct competition against its Sparc based processors.
Hope it stalls the redundancys.

~P

Orkut : The Monster Magnet

Since 2 months I have been glued to Orkut. Its that online community with which we can catch up with old pals of yesteryears.
Whoa ... its like Maggy(Hot_n_Sweet_n_ChilliSauce)...its Different!

You can find out about a person his tastes. What he is upto currently....all and sundry you would ever wanna know about ur friends.
It also has a Todays Fortune section which is bit funny. Like say my Todays Fortune cookie says

Today's fortune:You are going to have a very comfortable old age

Now what the Hell does that mean ?....how can todays fortune speak of my old age. Still no hard feelings for orkut...it does a monstrous service for FREE ( Free as in Free Beer :) ) .

Also Funny are orkut error messages...If there is a page loading error it simply says...

Bad Server No Donut for you !

When was the last time any website gave you some humour on some internal error :). Orkut is proving to be a Magnet to many people with which they can stay in touch with their kinda people even though being Miles away. I have seen one particular person with 1000 connections which is the max noof friends orkut network allows ( after all its freeware ! ).

Keep the good work going orkut.

~P