2013 - With new year comes new Resolutions !!

First, let me wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year !!

Given below are some of the resolutions I plan to abide by in this new year.  I'm not sure how long will I take to achieve any or all of them , goal is to get it perfected around 2 months from now !

1. Wake up early by 6 AM - Well, I've been practicing waking up early (than usual) for the past few days (usually i wake around 7 - 8AM most days , including holidays), and I've found  that the quiet time you get alone in the morning is totally worth the hassle.  And moreover, if this article is any indication, then, most successful people are early risers.  It also gives me sometime to read up on any interesting tech, or explore more on the ideas I might have.

2. Exercise daily for at-least 15 mins - I've been practicing this as well since the past few days.  I've to admit, this adds a huge amount of difference to how positive you are when you start your day.  I have not been lifting weights, but just simple push ups and ab exercises.  Even the small 15 mins duration, helps me boost my self confidence and makes me cheerful at the beginning of the day.  In my opinion, starting a day on a cheerful note does increase your productivity in that day.

3. Join a Gym and work out for at-least 4 days in a week - Now, this is something I've been putting off since a long time.  I'm not sure what the problem is, but seems that I'm too afraid that I'm gonna fail at this. And whenever I make up my mind to enroll, something at the back of my mind tells me not to, and pulls me back. But, with winter around, and chances of going for running/walking are at an all time low, hitting the gym is a must to stay fit.

4. Blog twice a week - This is basically to improve my writing skills as well as bring some thoughts out of me in a creative way.  Not that my English is bad, but I feel I've lot of room for improvisation, especially when it comes to articulating my thoughts/ideas in a creative and simple manner. Also, being a techie, one of the most important aspects of my job is to explain to the non-techies in a way they understand.

5. Avoid unhealthy food - Note that I've written 'Avoid', not 'Stop'.  My goal is to avoid eating junk whenever / where ever I can.  For ex: If I've a bowl of fruits / veggies vs a fried snack, guess what would I pick ? Hope you get the idea.  Indulging once in a while is no issue, but I don't want to gorge only on unhealthy food all the time, especially when I have an alternative.

Anyway, that's about it.  Would love to revisit next year and see how many of the above I got to meet !

Taxonomy of the manager species !

Here's a brief list of the kind of managers I've got the opportunity to work for in my career so far:

1. Control Freak - Thinks he owns you.  Controls every minute detail of your work.  Would throw a tantrum if you don't include him in emails.  Will cause a ruckus if you spring a surprise at him, always wants to be the one in control and hates anyone who challenges his authority.  You can grow as long as you don't threaten his position.

2. The Dude - He still thinks he's in his twenties.  Makes lewd jokes and remarks about fellow colleagues.  Discusses the latest pop videos , movies, rock concerts to show he's one in the gang.  Tries too hard to impress everyone and takes everything as a joke.  Believes in team work.  If you are under one of these "Dude's" find the nearest exit and bail out.  Unless you like splitting tab for the beer at TGIF !

3. The "Delegator" -  Believes everyone knows their job. Gives little guidance or support to the team.  His way of conflict management is to make everyone shake hands with each other. Does little team management.  Acknowledges your existence once in a while (mostly when you put down your papers).  Believes that his job ends at delegation and collecting status reports.  You learn the art of ownership under such people, but he'll do little to take your career forward.

4. The "Wannabe" -  This is by far the worst kind.  Runs his team on the principles laid down by "Philip Kotler" , and quotes frequently from popular "self help" books.  Always on a high of meeting deadlines and always on one toe trying to get things to perfection.  Believes in the company values, would sell his liver if the bosses ask and expects to get the corner office by hook or crook.  Will try everything in his capacity to achieve his goals.  Easy to spot - they come in formals , keep using words like 'in the loop', 'synergize' etc, usually the first to come to office and the last to leave.  Can be seen hanging around on weekends as well, if you dare to step in.  These are another bunch to avoid !

PS: Just my opinion, not intended to offend anybody !!

Melancholy ....

Some days are just off, you just wonder how to pass the time and indulge yourself in random activities.  The activities themselves don't have to bear any meaning for you, you just do something as if your mind is stuck in a cycle of indecision and laziness.  And, before you know - BAM ! Its 2 AM in the morning and you are still staring at your computer monitor ! Where the time flew ? 'Ah life sucks !', you declare and continue staring, randomly browsing, munching away that unhealthy snack that kills you a little every single day, and again make another resolution (in vain). to change yourself and upgrade your life first thing the next morning.

The cycle of melancholy that seeps into your life every once in a while, is a cruel master.  It makes you its slave. It eats away any form of energy you would have.  It engulfs your mind, clouds your judgement, pulls you back into boring and lifeless routine activities. It prevents you from accomplishing anything, and makes you surrender yourself involuntarily to it.  But from time to time, it does ensure that you remind yourself how of miserable you are as a person and while you do it laughs and jeers at you.

Yet, it happens to all of us, happens to the best of us, happens to the worst of us, and almost anybody who fits the description of a mortal human being.  Melancholy is perhaps one of the constants of life, like change.  It cannot be avoided, it cannot be planned for.  Its always lurking in the corner, sneering, waiting for the right opportunity to pounce on you at a time when you least expect it.  And when it does arrive, it saps at your motivation and slowly gnaws its teeth at your character.  

The only escape from its dark, cold and foreboding touch, that I know of , is to wait.  Simply wait until it settles away, don't try too hard to push it.  It begs you to do it, it derives pleasure as you try to shake it off from you.  It laughs at your efforts on curing yourself.  It loves a fight as it knows its gonna win at the end.  So, instead, make it your friend.  You don't need to necessarily like it.  Treat it as one of those friends / relatives who you have to shake hands with once a year at the family gathering.  You hate it, but you have to deal with it and move on.  Just wait for the unpleasantness to get over, and then slowly, collect back what's left of yourself and surge past it.  Melancholy hurts, just minimize the damage you allow it to do on you.

(link for the image : http://www.phocabulary.com/melancholy)

Self Leadership and Imagination

I recently attended a two week workshop on general soft skills / cross culture and related subjects' training.  Two topics really made me look up and take notice.  The others were good too, but the below topics really caught my attention.

1. Self leadership

2. Fostering creativity

I will not describe or discuss here as to what was taught to us in the workshop.  But I will just put down my own independent thoughts on the above topics from my perspective.

1. Self Leadership: 
I think this is perhaps one of the most interesting topics that has caught my attention recently.  We often complain of how much change we would like to bring in a "system" given the chance.  We often complain about the lack of leadership skills shown by others who hold such positions.  But when you do some introspection you realize that, leadership is in fact, not so easy.  And you realize it the hard way , when you try to "lead" yourself into "change".  The "change" could be anything , it could be as simple as "waking up early in the morning".  You can make a plan and start the process of "self leadership" into accepting yourself into this simple change, and you'll realize how hard it is ! It takes great amount of force to pull yourself out of routine and adjust yourself to a new reality. Most of us give up somewhere along the way, and say "it just isn't possible" or simple, procrastinate it so you wont feel guilty of totally giving up.  Whatever the case maybe, you need to ask yourself this - "If its so hard leading yourself, how do you think you'll be able to lead others ?"  Note that, I'm talking about "leading" and not "managing", they are totally different from each other.  Managing people is rather easy, but leading them, is hard.  And to those, who think they're already better leaders, or they think they can be better leaders, I would say your litmus test is when you start "self leadership" !  Try leading yourself into accepting a simple change from yourself towards improvement and you can gauge how good your leadership skills are !

2. Fostering creativity: 
Now this is another interesting misconception that I see most people have.  I see how often people believe that they are not "creative", and it takes some genius to be really creative.  After attending the workshop, I feel that this notion of "lone genius" is really misguided.  Creativity exists in all of us, its just that we let it go into hibernation, simply because we find it easier to adjust to routine and stay in our comfort zone.  For ex: We were asked to paint a dragon with water colors.  Now, even though I was fairly good at drawing long long time ago, I did not know I still had it in me.  But when I took those brushes and started painting, I felt I did a fairly decent job.  Now what sparked this ? In my opinion, its just that I was not afraid of the results / or in other words "failure", there was no one to judge me, and I had no critic to tell me whether it was good or bad.  I was like a child, exploring what I could  do with those brushes.  That's creativity.  Creativity exists in all of us  , but it only sparks when we set our minds free, get out of the "routine" box , stop thinking of risks and feasibility and worry about acceptance .  When we do that, we can see that we explore so many avenues which we initially thought did not exist.

Intellectual property use / abuse ?

I find that, in recent times, one of the most abused area in tech business, to make a quick buck is Intellectual Property Rights (IPR).  Not a day goes by without reading some tech company suing some other company over some insignificant piece of design, which I honestly doubt the creators would've even stolen consciously ! From protecting ownership, this IP has become more of a tool for cash-strapped companies to make a quick buck.  You know , kind of , legal extortion ! I feel as if this IPR, while on one hand protects the rights of ownership for the individual, is stifling creativity and innovation.
       Lets take the simple example of touch screen phones.  Now, Apple invaded the mobile phone market around 5 years back with its iphone 2G, and changed the landscape forever.  Not only did it bring up a barrage of copycats, it also, brought with it a slew of lawsuits, with every company suing every other company.   So, how do the other companies escape the charge , if they can't afford the royalty ? They just have to re-do everything from scratch.  You already have this touch screen technology here, but instead of building upon it and improving it, most other companies are spending so much of resources on just re-inventing the same thing, albeit with some minor difference ! Google has a search algorithm which gives excellent results, but can MS improve on that ? Or can anyone improve on that ? NO !  MS has an in-house group spending millions of dollars to do the same thing which google has already accomplished ! Why ? Because the algorthm is an IP of Google.  You either cough up millions of dollars in royalty, or make your own thing from scratch.
     Now, please dont mistake me here.  I'm not saying its right to steal the hardwork of others.  But, I wonder, if our progress will be the same, if we start restricting sharing of knowledge using tools like IP and copyright ? What if Newton had patented the 3 basic laws of physics or if Alexander fleming had patented penicillin ? Would the world have been the same ? Netwton wasn't wrong when he said, "If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants", I wonder, can anyone else in this day and age, dare make such a statement ? Well, they can't if they do, the giants will sue them to eternity.
     Although it seems more like a hope as of now, I wish these tech companies learn to live together and still go in for a healthy competition and not sue one other over crazy insignificant IPs.  It doesn't help the industry as a whole, and can only make it stagnant instead of taking it forward. Here's to hoping for a healthy competition .... signing off for now .... catch you in some time :)

Project Skyrim

My immediate goal in my free time is to complete and wrap up Skyrim.  I've clocked in upwards of 40 hours and nowhere near the end.  If info on the interwebz are to be believed , I still have around 60-80 hours of game to burn.  Now, I'm the sort of person, who can't take up another game until I finish one.  So, I've this huge back log of other games waiting to be played.  And then, there's the release of Mass Effect 3 looming in my face.

So, I'm starting "Project Skyrim", which is basically completion of the game as soon as possible (2 weeks).  I'm planning to ensure that I can dedicate as much of my free time at home as possible to complete this.  Which means, giving up on watching movies, facebook, idle browsing, and reading up on game tech.  However, Skyrim being a mammoth game, I can't complete each and every quest and get every piece of that finesse armor/equipment available in the game.  So, this is what I plan to complete in the coming weeks, before I start up another game.
1. Thieves guild quests
2. Dark Brotherhood quests
3. Imperial legion quests
4. Bard college quests
5. Main quest

I plan to re-visit the game when it has a DLC and go on with other random quests and get all those rare equipment and armors in the game.

Lets see how my project goes.  Wish me luck....off to play Skyrim now !

Oh Well....I got promoted !!

YAY !!

Got promoted to Senior Engineer.  Nice happy occasion.  It was quite some time since I had been promoted - maybe 3 years I guess.  Spoke to some of my family members, but I had to sugarcoat my new role - you know, Senior Engineer in India, is a post, you get after 2 years into the job.  Not after 8 years.  Funny how much difference the cultures make.

Anyway, this is good news for a many reasons.  First, I don't need to worry about the next promotion for atleast another couple of years.  So , it means, I can just focus on my job, and not worry about impressing anyone.   Second, I don't need to work my ass off pulling 16 hour work days.  Working for 10 hours as I do generally and pulling in a late night whenever the work demands should suffice.  Its really refreshing to get out of the rat race and finally be able to do what I want.  Which is write good programs, learn some interesting stuff on directx, learn some basic photography with my DSLR, and get to explore this country I'm living in currently - Korea.  Not to mention , spend more time with my wife and daughter along the way :)

Oh by the way, I plan to shift this blog wordpress from blogspot in sometime.  Still figuring things out on how to use Wordpress.  The main reason of the shift is the wordpress support on android and well, I see that its much more robust than blogger.  Only downer is that it doesn't allow me to post google ads.  Not that, I've too many readers here who would make me rich.  Are there ? lol !  Also, another idea is to keep this blog as it is, and have another blog in wordpress to talk mostly about my technical ramblings.  Let me see how it all works out.

Anyway, signing off for now....good night !