My take on life - 9

When I moved to Bangalore, my brother and sister came here with me. However, sometime back both of them got admitted into MBA colleges in Pune and Mumbai respectively and I have been living alone. This has lead to a sort of tv-addiction. I come back from work and switch on the tv and bham! two hours have gone past just like that. Or on a weekend I take my lunch and sit in front of the tv and bham! it is soon dinner time.

To get out of this groove, I unplugged the cable that brings me cable television from the TV. Then I went one step further. I took a bit of string and the cable to one of the window rods. Now when I want to watch the tv, I will have to get up, untie the knot and plug the cable into the tv. Since this is too much work, I will not do it . However, there are some serials (like Simpsons) for which I would do that much work. This will reduce my casual tv surfing to null.

It has been two days now and this experiment has been successful till now.

He-he .. look at this. British pensioners regret not having more sex, says poll.

Seven out of 10 people aged 65 and over said they would make more time to make love if they could have their days again.

[snip]
[snip]

Sex was followed by travelling the world (57 per cent) and changing professions (43 per cent) as the most popular wishes pensioners had if they could go back in time.

Other regrets included saving for a pension (40 per cent), standing up to their boss (33 per cent), marry someone else (21 per cent), spending more cash on luxuries (19 per cent) and setting up a business (16 per cent).

You have heard what the more experienced have to say. Now go out and have more sex and travel more - leave those angle brackets alone for now

An update on my hiring and retaining post. This discussion was also happening on the pmclininc mailing list. One of the posters said that the good managers measure their job satisfaction using this list of questions

• Do I know what is expected of me?
• Do I have the right materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
• At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
• In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
• Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
• Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
• At work, do my opinions seem to count?
• Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
• Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
• Do I have a best friend at work?
• In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
• This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

There has been a thread going on in the india-gii list about hiring and retaining talented coders in india. Here is the email that the original poster had posted

Over the past few weeks I've met with several people who are all
having the same headaches

1. Hiring talented coders
2. Retaining talented coders

The first is usually down to lack of talent (coders directly out of
college just don't have the "new " skills (for example) in things like
ajax, ruby, but have core knowledge of things like C, and what I call
"old" languages), and also salaries wanted, especially if you are
trying to sell abroad and compete with pricing abroad, i.e brazil,
russia, ukraine offer lower prices these days.  

My thoughts about this

When hiring freshers, I don't think you should look for what languages
they know. Instead you should
- try to gauge how much of the fundamentals they know
- if they (freshers) are self-learners

Point 1 can be checked by asking them about sorting/searching
algorithms or networking or process management (basically the topics
which are covered in their operating system course or their data
structures course).

Point 2 can be checked by seeing if they have contributed to any free
software project and actually asking them to show their code (it is
after all free software and there is no NDA).  If a fresher has worked
on an open source project, it usually means
- he knows about version control
- he knows about mailing lists
- he can work without much supervision
- he can work with a distributed team
- and most importantly, he can work with a team

In the email, the original poster had also mentioned this point

the big guns (tcs, infosys etc) hire like 10K users in a go, and its
seems that the prospects of getting a good wife/husband are directly
linked to the name of the company on the CV (again this maybe biased,
but am seeing it more and more).

WTF!! ROTFL!!

Yahoo Forges Local News Offering with CBS. I am in Yahoo! Media Operations and it is hard for me to tell people exactly what I work on. However, I was a part of the team that made the news possible. Nice work!

Almost 2 months back, I got myself an ipod shuffle. After using it for some time, I am totally in love with it. I can now understand why the Macheads sell out their souls to Apple - the bargain is well worth it .

I was thinking about why portable devices like ipod and mobile phones are so close to their owners and I came up with this list.

• They are truly personal. You can customize them (think mobile wallpapers, ringtones, playlists) quite a lot.
• The are small and portable (duh!)
• They can serve multiple purposes. A mobile phone can also serve as a watch, address book, radio, m3 player, camera. A ipod can also be used as a memory stick, FM transmitter and it can also fit in your car's music system.
• These devices become useful as soon as you buy them. You can start using a mobile phone as soon as you insert your sim card into it and you can start using your ipod as soon as you transfer music into it. Instant karma!
• They have long battery life.

This list is just something to keep in mind when I am designing my Killer App (TM).

I discover wonderful things through webcomics. Today, I was reading this comic, where I saw a mention of Miyamoto Musashi. I checked out his wikipedia entry, where a I found a link to his book The Book of Five Rings and that is what I am reading now.