Reception on Bannerghatta Road

Last Friday I had been to the wedding reception of Sudhakar and Shwetha in a hall on Bannerghatta Road. Both Sudhakar and Shwetha are working in my team and moreover they sit in adjacent cubicles, saying "Hiiiiiii" to eachother ;-)

The reception was great and we had a very lavish dinner. Reaching the hall from M.G.Road was one horrendous experience though. I had only heard about this pathetic traffic jams on the Bannerghatta road around the Dairy circle. But this was the first time that I had the privilege of being stuck up in this killer traffic on my bike. There were only 3 occassions which lasted for miniscule seconds, that my bike was on third and fourth gear in the total 6 km stretch that took me 30 minutes to cover !!! That was some ride ....

The road is so narrow that hardly 2 cars can go side by side, and you find 3 cars fighting to get ahead along with some very rashly driven busses. And ofcourse, you will find bikes almost in any place where there is a little bit of space available. It looks like as if all the people living in Bannerghatta road had to go to the center of the city for work and are returning back to their homes at the same time. There are plenty of shops on this road, including granite shops to hardware shops to bakeries and almost anything needed is available. Its a messy market place that doesnt help the traffic at all.

As if this was not enough, there are "HUGE" buildings each hosting nothing less than 2000 employees. These are huge multinationals like IBM, Oracle, Bharti and such. With so many people coming to work in these offices, there definately will be a traffic problem when they all travel at the same time. But the government seems to have lost its civic sense and has started allocating more and more space to other much BIGGER buildings to be constructed on this cramped up road. I was shocked to see the monstrous Covansys buildings. Its so huge, it looks like a townships with atleast 10 HUGE buildings !!! They definately can accommodate close to 50K people. With the traffic already reaching such alarming state, I wonder how this poor road will be able to handle another 50K people tredding on it.

Whats happening to the government here ? Dont they see this road being misused ? All IT companies in the same road. What logic is that ? I can understand if these were some diamond companies which would need them all to be near the quarries. Why cant they have these companies moved to another location ? Cant they stop allowing new buildings to be constructed on this road ? There is just no way the road can be expanded. Which means there is a limit to the number of vehicles it can handle, and seeing the number of vehicles there, I am pretty sure that it has already crossed this limit. But, as has been the case always .. all governments are only "reactive" .. they wait for a calamity to happen to fix the problems .. "proactive" solutions are just meant to be read in the books ...

Tap Guitar Video: Justin King's "Untitled Project"

Amazing guitar work !!! ... Looks like he is not playing the guitar but actually make the guitar dance on his finger tips ... perfect syncronization ...


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Via Wired: "Before the YouTube, I had no idea that there even was such as thing as "tap guitar," as performed by Justin King. It makes me never want to play guitar again." The clip contains some extraordinary guitar work by the musician from Eugene, Oregon.
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Workrave

Have you ever worked on your comp for so long relentlessly that you started experiencing pains in your knuckles and fingers or wrists or neck ? Beware, this is a very good symptom of RSI. One of my roommates had this very bad habit of sinking into his seat with legs stretched out and crossed, bending his back. This caused him pain in his lower back and ankles. This is another very good symptom of RSI.

RSI can be called as the bane of computers. The only good thing about RSI is that it can be avoided but it needs very regular and disciplined attention of yourself. Frequent breaks, small walks, lots of water to drink, moving your limbs, all these so called "exercises" should be mandated at regular intervals to prevent RSI.

I searched for a lot of timer/alarm applets that could help me in maintaining these mandatory breaks, but none were useful. In last week's edition of Deccan Herald, I came across this killer app called "WorkRave" which does exactly what I was looking for.

Fortunately its available on Linux too. It is a very simple app that examines your key strokes and mouse movements and tabulates the time you spend using your keyboard and mouse with breaks not more than 5 seconds. It accumulates the time you spend using the input devices of your comp. The only problem is that it doesn't include the time you spend reading on the web :) . which I think is fine to ignore.

Based on these usage time data, it forces you to take micro-breaks of 20 seconds, after every 10 minutes of computer usage. It also forces you to take a "rest-break" of 5 minutes after every 30 minutes of computer usage. The best part of this calculation is that it accumulates the time spent on the computer and not just the bare real-time intervals like the ordinary timers/alarms. The duration of these breaks and the interval between these breaks is also configurable though I would suggest not to change these defaults drastically.

I have been using this for a week now and I am surprised to see how fast time flies while working on the comp. Another good statistic this app gives is the total time spent in a day on the comp. I was shocked to see that I was spending only 55 - 60 % of my time at office on the computer !!! That's something like I spent around 4 hours on the computer in the 8 hours that I spend in office. Just compare this percentage to that of the guy sitting at the bank teller counter ? ;-) Ofcourse, you can include another hour for time spent on reading things on the browser and some code, but that too isn't a very great figure to look at.

You like it or not, if you are using computers at your work, you better start using this app. Try it out and you too will be surprised at the things that you will discover about yourself :-)

Organizations

[ This is my 100 th blog !!! :-) ... and its been 25 months since I started blogging, thats a cool average of 4 posts per month, thanks to the World Cup coverage :p ]

There are so many stages in the life of an organization, well atleast for a software organization. I have been lucky to have worked in most of the stages and these stages can easily be categorised into 3 stages viz., start-ups, growth companies and the bloated companies. Ofcourse, this classification is only for the product companies and not the services industry.

If you happen to be part of a startup at the early stages of your career, you should consider yourself really lucky. There is definately nothing more motivating than the passion that is exhibited in a start-up. A small group of people, somewhere around 10 to 30, which would have eventually started off by a smaller group of friends or commoners, would comprise a start-up. There is usually a single product that is the core aim of all the people involved, and the majority of them are into developing it as programmers. Some of the people here would be involved in doing multiple tasks, like hiring, taking care of the financials, promoting the software, and every other nitty gritty job that the rest expect to be present when they come to work. There is very focussed effort on the single product which is their bread earner, and everybody is very passionate and motivated towards achieving that goal. You need to be very hard working and most importantly, dream about your software to be shining in glory in the coming future. The challenge here is to prove your concepts as early as possible and earn the funds. Then stand up to the expectations and deliver.

The growth companies are usually 5 to 10 times the size of the start-ups. With people ranging from 200 to 500 in number. These usually have a very good array of products which are sold very much in relation to eachother. They have dedicated divisions for each type of work, including sales, marketing, finance, HR, and ofcourse the developer work-force, with fewer managers. The hierarchy of managers is very minimal. Though the main intention is to earn more revenue, more focus is given on acquiring more market share as well. Products are improved to attract more users and the developers and managers are more technically inclined. Its usually the VPs, and the CXOs who are more worried about the company financials. There are a very less number of people who cater to the "business" aspects that govering the company. The challenge here is to make sure you start growing into the right market segments keeping into mind the future direction of the company. The products need to grow towards the needs of these segments. Understanding this and aligning the team towards these concepts is the challenge.

The bloated companies are a complete contrast to the earlier 2. These are companies that just dont have a huge array of products but rather, a whole suite of products that pertain to various market segments, called verticals. Its a completely different ball game here with the competetion getting tougher and the deals getting bigger. There is a lot of emphasis given to the business aspects of the company. Product development and growth are driven by the business [ read as revenue ] needs to a large extent. The hierarchy of managers is quite large, and is based on the business requirements. Each manager heading a particular business segment and each business segment more or less working as a "growth company" in itself. The challenges are high but of a different nature compared to the earlier 2 categories. Here the challenges are more related to consolidation, both within the organization and to the outside world, making sure that there are no competetive products from the same company !!!

Each category of organizations have their own challenges and one needs to learn to have their focus set right based on the kind of organization they work for. Though the daily work done by a given job position might be the same in all the three categories, its the means by which those visions are reached that differentiate these organizations. These are just some of my personal thoughts on the things that I have seen in the years that I have spent in this industry.

Blood Donation Camp

Kodagu Farmer, originally uploaded by Sarfraaz.

This weekend was a very tiring and exhausting time !!!

I had been on a trek to Kumara Parvatha with another 15 of my friends. I had never been with such a huge crowd and was expecting lots of fun. We all gathered at 11 in the night at the City Bus Stand to catch a bus to Somwarpet. We reached there early Saturday morning and after breakfast, took another bus to Pushpagiri, the place where we were supposed to start our walk. The plan was to reach one Bhattara mane [ which means, the "cook's house" in Kannada ] by evening. Rest there for the night and trek to the peak the next day and return back.

So, by around 9 am in the morning we started our walk towards Bhattara Mane, which was 20 kms away. There was a light drizzle, which we expected to increase a lot as the day progressed. All of us took a long plastic cover to cover ourselves and our back packs. None of us even dreamt how useful this piece of plastic cover would be later in the day. We followed a tar road for some distance and then a jeep track and treaded for almost 2 hours till we reached a stream. This stream was the starting point for the forest. We had to cross through this stream with knee deep fast flowing water.

As soon as we set foot on the soil after this stream, we were all very delightfully greeted by the blood sucking leeches !!! The forest had just begun. It was very dark with hardly any sunlight reaching us down through the thick forest. It was a uphill road, and the gradient slowly started increasing, and within no time, we found ourselves walking up a 45 degree gradient. It was to be like this and more steep as we walked further. We did have some small streams to pass through which were a good source of cold, chill, pure, sweet drinking water. The worst part was that, we could not take a breather anywhere on this path, since the moment we stop, the leeches very obediently stuck to our shoes and legs and started feasting on us. So, the only place we could have some respite was in the stream. This would eventually make our shoes wet, which in turn was an invitation to the leeches. But, we had no other way to survive in this place and we took this chance.

We kept on walking this uphill road for a total of 3 hours when we reached a rocky area. We all stopped here at around 2 pm and the first thing we did was to check the leeches we had on us. There were leeches on almost everybody. I too had some on my shoes and legs and removed the ones that I could see. I was sure that there still were some leeches up my leg where I could not see and didn't want to remove them for the simple reason that I would bleed more and spoil my jeans. This turned out to be a very bad decision for which I had to pay a very high price later on. Some of my friends had leeches on their back and their shirts were all red in blood. Some new comers were so scared just by the sight of this that they even planned to call up the military folks to bring some helicopter so that they could be rescued by air from this place.

Soon after lunch, we continued our trek. We were greeted with a beautiful misty open land with grass all over. It was one hell of a beautiful sight. Worth all the pain we suffered to reach this divine place. The air was so cool, fresh and we could feel ourselves walking in the clouds. The visibility was reduced to just 10 feet now. Very very beautiful !!! A breath taking place to be in. From here started the downhill path. After about 30 minutes of walk, we were tested with some very heavy rains. The rain started increasing in speed and we could feel the rain drops actually hitting us like pointed swords !!! Thanks to the plastic covers that we had bought earlier in the day, we could atleast cover our faces and limbs and also save our bags from getting a lot wet. This was the most painful part of the trek. We could not see any further than about 15 to 20 feet ahead, and just had to put our foot forward on the path we saw, which usually was the path taken by the water, and we eventually ended up walking along the water down the hill. This made it more tough, with most of us skidding down and we had to put a lot of strength and control our balance with our thighs and knees. The heavy bags on our backs were not helping. After walking like this for close to 3 and half hours, we at last reached the destined Bhattara Mane !! Oh, what a relief it was to see some human habitation and the house !! Uuuuufffffff....

We were lucky enough to reach this place before sunset. After reaching Bhattara Mane we started de-leeching [ a new term, that means to remove off all the leeches you have been carrying along the path :p ]. I had close to 14 leeches on me !!! A new world record for myself. Never had so many on me ever. And my legs were all red !!! With blood flowing all over. I took half an hour to clean up all the blood but it never stopped oozing out. Oh, what an unsolicited "Blood donation Camp" had I ventured into !!! :-) The leeches made merry on my legs and sucked a lot of my blood. Later on in the night we had our dinner and everybody just crashed for the night. I had a very innovative night dress :-) A plastic bag to cover both my bleeding legs, so that the blood doesn't spill on the bedding, and newspapers stuck on the wounds to help them dry faster. No amount of cotton on the wounds was sufficient as it would get wet in blood and fall off eventually. [ Sorry, if this was all so yucky to read :p ]

Next day morning, was one of the most pleasant mornings I have ever woken up to. Lovely mist all around us and a hot cup of tea in your hand. Just fantastic !!! Luckily, my wounds had almost dried up and I was able to walk a bit. The climate was cool and nice, and not very chill and it wasn't raining either. So, that made it even more beautiful. Unfortunately, the forest officials refused to permit us to go to the peak, because of the rains, and we had to trek back the same day without going to the peak. From Bhattara Mane, we figured out that the trek we had treaded the other day was about 20 kms and we had climbed almost 1800 feet high !!! That was really something great for us. We now had to trek further down towards Kukke Subramanya which was 5 kms down the hill through another forest !! I was praying that I don't get any more leeches. But, smelling the wounds on my legs, they were attracted even more and I had another 10 more of them sucking on me. A new record of almost quarter century of leeches in one single trek !!!

Climbing down was more painful the second day. I was almost dehydrated and couldn't stop anywhere to drink water because of the leeches. We didn't even have any streams on this path. It was very tiring and exhausting to say the least. I was so fedup of walking down the hill, that even if they had staircases down that track I couldn't climb down them !!! My thighs and knees had gone through a great ordeal and they badly needed lots of rest. It was such a relief to enter the town, and find so many people around. And was even more reliving to know that there were no more leeches on the roads :) We rested the whole day there as it rained a lot in the evening and we got our much needed rest. Later in the night we took a bus back to Bangalore as planned.

It was only when I reached Bangalore and was getting down the staircase of my house that I realised how much my walking style had changed. Half way through the stairs I found myself getting down side ways, as if I am still walking down a mountainous path :-) ... Long live Kumara Parvata !!!

Mussskurale

Express yourself, originally uploaded by Sarfraaz.

There are so many TV channels now a days, that the viewer despises even a single second that he has to spend watching an ad on TV. The moment an ad flashes on the screen, there goes the remote with the channel surfing in full speed. The surfing doesnt stop on any channel that has ads going on at that instant, and only after scanning all your favourite and second favourite channels and still failing to find a channel without ads, does one return back, hopefully, to the same channel where he started his surfing.

In such a competetive environment, it really is a herculean task to make an ad that not only succeeds in capturing the attention of the viewer, but also gives away the right image and purpose of the product. Think more into it and you will realise how much of creative effort is spent into ads, and the amount of creative energy that gets wasted just because there are so many channels to watch. One can have an endless debate if the huge number of channels is rather a boon or a bane to the advertising industry.

In these tough times, I found one ad that intrigued me to watch its full length [ I guess, its about 3 to 4 minutes long ], and brought a smile on my face and in the end even succeeded in giving me the proper message of the product. Its the "Happydent White", Muskurale ad. The concept, the picturisation are just perfect for the promotion of the product. I watched it twice or thrice to get the full length meaning of this ad, and praise the innovative ideas in this ad. The most fundo shot is the one with 2 guys sitting on the sides of the car with bright white sparkling teeth as headlights !!! You wont realize that there are actual people sitting on the car unless you watch it carefully. You can even find guys in the chandlier and under water, showing off their sparkling white teeth and lighting up the whole place and city. Perfect rendition of the product qualities.

One more ad that I liked, more for the way they promoted the ad itself, and not for the ad was the Cadbury's "Miss Palampur" ad. Showing Amitabh dressing up well to go and meet Miss Palampur and not telling anything more, was a very good preview for the ad. This definately left a lot of things untold and I am sure had the viewer captured. Initially I thought this was some new TV serial ad and was excited that Amitabh would be back in another TV serial. But, when they actually showed the full ad it was fun. The whole village gathers at Amitabh's house, all dressed up to meet and impress "Miss Palampur", and when an old granny asks where the newly crowned queen is, we get to see a cow coming out of the house wearing the "Miss Palampur" gown :p Funny promotion of the ad, though it doesnt really match the product.

Another good ad is the HSBC ad, where a young girl buys a used/torn/worn-out jeans for the rugged look of it. But when she brings that home, her mom misunderstands it to be torn, and gets down to stitch the jeans. This very nicely shows the concept of people having 2 perspectives for the same object. A very good way of promoting the same group of HSBC products that cater to a varied interests of people.

So, the next time you think of switching channels, spare a moment for the enormous amount of creative effort that is spent in making these great ads, well atleast the few great ads.