Wednesday blues -> brights

Wednesday morning. Yawn! Today is a beautiful example of how
thoughtful the gods can be when they decide to poke their god like
noses into the affairs of mortals like you. Unlike the extreme
thoughtlessness of the ICICI and the BCCI and the Australian Cricket
Comittee that decided to hold a cricket tournament in the Netherlands
in Autumn!!!!

I mean how dumb can it get!!!

It’s even dumber than Lotus Notes.

I mean consider. What do the English do during their year. March to
July they play cricket. But come August, they put away stumps, bats,
wickets, pack off those stout and dour umpires to Scotland, and decide
to murder each other on the rugby field.

Digression:
I mean it could be because of the cold, but whenever I see a rugby
game, within minutes of play commencing all the players are lying on
top of each other. Or hugging each other rather brutally, or like the
local puppies in a gully literally falling over each other. Somedays
it gets pretty embarassing. When they stop resembling puppies and take
to clutching each others private parts with great abandon.

And I have rarely seen a rugby match played in the Sun. Chances are
in a rugby match the full field is mud. It starts out as good grass,
but due to the RAIN, it turns to mud.

Yes! In those angreez countries it rains. A lot.

If the BCCI were not aware of this little piece of information, they
could have just called up Flintoff and asked him. Or Tim Corbett, or
even Zaheer Khan, who spent his time playing county cricket.

But in a wonderful example of whimsy they held it in the Netherlands.

Result:

On an average each match has had about ten overs bowled before the
ball was lost irretrievably in the larger size lake that the grounds
had become.

Players are getting rather water logged what with all the rain.

And the matches get over before I even get home. Arrrghhhhh!!!!

Plus, Netherlands is below sea level. Chances of water draining out
from the pitch are pretty bleak. I mean where does it drain out to.
These guys actually pump rain water out into the sea, being below sea
level.

I mean! Come on! Does this make sense. (O.K. I meant the cricket matches….)

Man oh man oh man…. What a bunch of dweebs.

Oh! Plus links are down. SO no work till they come back on. Am gonna
use this time to update the blog and write a lot of stuff that I
always wanted to write about….

August 25th, 2004 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 1 Comments

yes! yes! yes!

somebody somewhere finally read my mind and posted this great critique of lotus notes on the web…. wow! beautiful. here’s the link to it. I shall now quote out juicy parts of the article which shall stand monument in this web of dreams, against such a boorish software like lotus notes, and all the idiots who actually go and purchase it. They are only unrivalled in stupidity by those who go out and purchase exchange server

August 11th, 2004 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 2 Comments

these cheese balls…

recently i got this mail from my batch coord, who was nominally in charge of my batch during training last year. Yes! It’s been a year since I joined tcs. A coincidence that I am posting a mail from my batch-coord on the day I joined. Guess not…. try reading it…..



Dear T30 friends,

Hope this mail finds you in the best of spirits. It is almost an year/six months since you have left the training centre. The debates, the interactions and of course the arguments we had in class are still fresh in my memory. I do remember some of you especially because of your very communicative silence! How are you doing in your project? What is your current assignment and responsibility? Who is your PL?



Our team is trying to collect information about the effectiveness of the Initial Learning Programme. I on behalf of the ILP team invite you to help us in this initiative. Your feedback would definitely help us to align ourselves better to your need as well as the company’s need. Now that you have acquired knowledge and experience to look back at your ILP in an objective manner we value your feedback all the more.



Do respond to this mail and let us maintain the contact we have made now. In your reply please include the name and mail id of your Project Leader. We plan to obtain feedback about the effectiveness of ILP from you as well as your PL. We will send you the feedback form when you reply to this mail.



Cheers to you all.

this mail was sent on 7-8 and it reached me on 8-8. yes. it takes email a full day for travelling the distance from trivandrum all the way down to chennai… hoo… boy…..



so i wrote her a reply….



Hi Preetha,

Nice to hear from you. Yes! It has been a whole year since we attended training. It was quite a pleasant time. In fact, the most pleasant time that I realize in retrospect, you could have in TCS. Ah! Trivandrum! There we were, all assured that life was bright, and nice, and full of intelligent people and software that worked. Of course, this was before we met our PLs, MLs and most of the rest of TCS. Or used Lotus Notes. Lots of our PLs are bright, but Lotus Notes is another story altogether. The mail you sent me, took 24 hours to reach me. Yes!!!! 24 hours. For all the cost of setting up a mail server at your end, another mail server at my end, giving you a comp, giving me another one, TCS could have given you a plain Indian Postal Service Envelope, and hey! job done.

Yes! TCS is a great place to work in. How great? I am actively enrolling my detractors in the buddy lao-kush-ho-jao scheme. My motto has been to take them down along with me. ;-). No. But seriosly. I do enjoy working. It’s a treat. It’s a dream come true. Of sorts….

Trivandrum was great. So were the permanent faculty there. The visiting ones were… truthful. But what act of courage prompted an organization like tcs, to actually put a group of youngsters in one place all together and impart some kind of training? Seeing that on an average, the age of the TCS workforce is 35. Yeah! Atleast in my office. Amit (who was most popular student, as you may well remember), is in my office. We spend our spare time, trying to figure out what we will look like when we are old.

Well well well… chatting aside. I mean I am a proffessional now. With the panopaly of office a ff and a ss in the proffessional. So to return to more pressing matters.

How am I doing in my project? Great.

What is my current assignment and responsibility? I could tell you that but that would be a violation of the Tata Security Policy and also an oath that I took at my GL’s knee.

Who is my pl? Manish Pinge

How effective was ILP?

What do I reply to that. You people did a great job. That was the best time I will ever have in TCS. But other than the Personality Development Class, I have yet to utilize even one skill that was taught to me at ILP. It seems to me to be the silliest thing ever conceivable, but really, to work effectively in TCS you don’t need to know C. What you need to know is how to fill timesheets. Software engineering is a farce. And I trill all over when doing the supremely intellectual pursuit of IQMS. Bull! What I do is run around and ask IDM why my mail client/ server/ donkey’s ears aren’t working. Oh! provided IDM is there. Otherwise I call up extension 2179 and wait for them. I also do stuff, like Centre Level Activites, in order for my rating, which is something undocumented at ILP, or elsewhere…. Or as scheduled on every friday, when I wait for ultimatix to open up and it does, only to say your session has expired. Feel nostalgic then, I mean, remember in ILP if we wanted to check our mail, we had to open up eenadu.net. Oh! and how is Mr. Lalitha Prasad. Do convey my regards to him. I have yet to get his Address. Tried to forward mails to him, but Lotus notes… ah… Lotus notes.

So sure Prita. Do send in the forms, and all that. Its been great hearing from you. A bright sliver of sunshine during dreadful monotony. You can figure out my address from this mail. My PL’s is: PL’s Name: Manish Pinge PL’s ID: Manish Pinge/DEL/TCS

Cheers,

Ramesh Ananthakrishnan

P.S.: Have you ever wondered what a cheesy email client Lotus Notes is. I mean I always thought of you as Preetha Thomas. It’s right now destroyed another fond memory and made you Preetha Rajiv.

P.P.S: What is your email id btw. Doing reverse DNS lookups on Lotus Notes is certainlly not my idea of fun and games

P.P.P.S: Do you require young idealistic faculty, to inspire your students into the vision and mission of Kohli. I can recommend a few people.

P.P.P.P.S: I just figured out that the only thing worse than Lotus Notes is perhaps the food outside the Karyavattom hostel

August 11th, 2004 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 2 Comments

the damnable thing

is that i forwarded mail to myself of a reply i wrote to my batch co-ordinator about life in tcs. the thing hasn’t reached my gmail inbox. great. but why does vindication make me feel like shit. niyant called up and was talking about how skydiving is a great pursuit and he wished he could do it, if he could only do it in america. heck! for half the cost, I would push him off from someplace real high. Of course. No parachute. And then he was meandering about quantum computation. It seems I am the only guy not doing my ms now. That’s ok. No great hurry. I am too busy exploring now. There’s treasure everywhere….

August 7th, 2004 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 2 Comments

F(r)iends from Hell

What is it with all these Hell movies going on nowadays. Van Helsig, HellBoy, Go to Hell, how to give hell, born to raise hell, where to stash hell at night so that the cleaning staff don’t get it….

I am thinking of writing a spoofy screenplay called….

oh! just read on….

collaborative efforts anyone. just add it to the comment and I will make these changes and keep republishing better drafts of F(r)iends from Hell….

[Dark Screen]

Friends. Friends. Lend me your ears. Hey you Sam. Yes you with the red collar, give me your pitchfork.

[Ouch! Argh!-shrieks]

Yes. You friends from hell. Quiet now.

Listen ye and listen all. In this glorious year of the new millenium I have decided to start a brand new society that will finally finally finally provide us respite from these years of being tortured, beaten, murdered, killed and sewn up by sanctimonious so and so’s from the church to the trade press, I present to you, a society that is designed to forever protect you.

[Buzz in the crowd]

Yes. Protect you from the harsh uncivilized brutes from all over, who keep opening up wormholes in space to our world, come thrashing us, and do unspeakable things to us. An institution that will forever protect you from the most fiendish creature possible. Man

[frightened crowd]

An institution that will protect your rights as a living creature, to the pursuit of happiness, values, and morals. I present to you…

[ A large flag of the United States covers the screen]

No you idiot, those are our allies.

I present to you.

F(r)iends of Hell!

[A large blue cloth randomly dotted with gold specks comes into view]

[Titles]

F(r)iends of Hell

August 7th, 2004 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 1 Comments