Thursday, March 31, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
How Did You Discover Your Ideal Career?
When you don't have a job in IT, working at a help desk sounds good. Until you have to deal with end users all day. Or get to support users on alpha-level software someone like the CEO decided must be deployed before it was ready.When you work at a help desk, working in data center operations sounds good. Until you have to work 3rd shift for 3 yrs as projects are deployed and be on call the other 24 hrs in a day.
When you work in IT operations, being a DBA sounds good. Until you have to deal with databases designed by college coders who've never heard of database design and have huge DB corruption issues due to poor coding. These issues go on month after month and your DBs are constantly going down and require selective restores using crappy tools.
When you are a DBA, being a coder sounds good. Until you are provided deadlines that have nothing to do with the amount of effort or time to actually complete a class or program. You are always 3 months behind on projects due to poor planning or decisions made by others, like marketing.
When you are in Operations, a DBA, or a coder then being a technical architect sounds good. For the most part it is, until a project you designed turns into a huge failure and you are fired (so I hear). It doesn't matter that 3 of the 10 vendors lied about capabilities. You get the blame. Or worse, you are constantly designing, but nobody ever gets enough budget to deploy these designs.
When you've been fired from an IT Arch role, being an IT project manager sounds good. Hopefully by the time you get here, you've learned from all the mistakes made at help desks, operations, DBAs, coders, and technical architects and you can properly budget and schedule IT projects. Then again, most IT project managers seem to skip half these preliminary jobs.
After you've done most of these, then you either become a CIO or get fed up working for someone else and you start your own company. Then you are the boss, but not really. Now you are a consultant, being lead around by a 2 yr experienced IT project manager trying to make a name for themselves by squeezing budget from your contract and blaming your company for any shortcuts they demanded to keep costs lower or other things they did wrong. "You didn't tell me that" is constant emergency text message at 3am.
The grass is always greener ... there are days when I wish I were loading semi-trucks with boxes of PVC pipe fittings again. Perhaps I'll start a landscaping business. Based on the amount those folks charge, I think I'd have greater satisfaction seeing the grass all cut to the same level.
via lifehacker.com
I love how TheFu takes you through a complete IT life-cycle, all so not-as-a-matter-of-fact ly
Sunday, March 20, 2011
The Most Aggressive Defense Of Teachers You’ll Hear This Year
via front.moveon.org
Seen this all over the place today....
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Date a girl who reads.
"Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.
She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.
Buy her another cup of coffee.
Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.
It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.
She has to give it a shot somehow.
Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.
Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.
Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries.
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.
You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.
Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
Or better yet, date a girl who writes."
Dont remember why I did not mention this the first time I came across this a couple weeks back....but here it is again, after I landed on the page once again.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
In Perspective: 1.76 lakh crore INR or 39.27 billion USD
Most of us know that this figure is the CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General) loss estimate caused by the 2G spectrum scam, one of the biggest scams in India, or at least that's what I would want to say. This post is just to actually convert some of the numbers (:D) that have come out in certain reports and putting them in perspective to, well, whatever.
Total loss estimate: Rs. 1.76 lakh crore = Rs.1,760,000,000,000 = Rs. 1.76 trillion = $ 39.21 billion!
Using this amount as the GDP of a country(List of countries sorted by GDP on Wikipedia), that country in the world would be
- 79th (2010, IMF)
- 77th (2009, World Bank)
- 80th (2010, CIA World Factbook)
This is a country richer than Uruguay, Bahrain and Jordan. Basically, a decently rich country! Also, this amount would've put India 10th in each of this lists (India is currently at the 11th).
Moreover, this was back in 2007. So, if we calculate the NPV of this amount with an IRR of.... Nah, I don't think I'm getting paid enough to do that kind of Math!
Lets step aside from the big picture and look at the (relatively) smaller picture, the earnings (can I call it that?) of Mr. A. Raja, the former telecom minister who enabled all of this mess.
Raja (which is Hindi for King, just literally though) is believed to have made about Rs. 3000 crore. Lets do the same Math for him, shall we?
Raja's estimated earnings = Rs. 3000 crore = Rs. 30,000,000,000 = Rs. 30 billion = $668.31 million.
What does somebody do with so much illegal money? Philanthropy?
Interesting reads on the 2G scam:
- Timeline of the scam (this blog also has numerous other posts, but the sources....well, lets just say the writer doesn't like citations a lot)
- Where Raja stored his money
- Wikipedia article on 2G spectrum scam (with more links :D)
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Wadah Khanfar: A historic moment in the Arab world (TED)
via youtube.com
"Spectacular and inspiring TED talk from Wadah Kanfar of Al Jazeera. I've had a hard time articulating to my friends and family in the US how I feel about the uprisings going on throughout the Arab world but his talk captures the basic sentiment remarkably well." - Bob Monroe
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