Indian Work Culture ?

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I keep getting this mail as a forward, and it’s contents reflect my views too. Have a look at the mail.

Mail sent by Narayan Murthy to all Infosys staff:

It’s half past 8 in the office but the lights are still on…
PCs still running, coffee machines still buzzing…
And who’s at work? Most of them ??? Take a closer look…

All or most specimens are ??
Something male species of the human race…

Look closer… again all or most of them are bachelors…

And why are they sitting late? Working hard? No way!!!
Any guesses???
Let’s ask one of them…
Here’s what he says… “What’s there 2 do after going home…Here we get to surf, AC, phone, food, coffee that is why I am working late…Importantly no bossssssss!!!!!!!!!!!”

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Dilli Chale!

Yup, that’s right! I will leaving for Delhi tomorrow night who’s going to get married to attend my teammate’s wedding on Sunday. So why am I leaving so early? Sight seeing 😀 \:D/ ! Will be reaching Delhi tomorrow night(taking a flight, scheduled for departure at 20:30), we have an elaborate “schedule” all planned out. Lets see how it goes!

Will keep twittering about it, follow me and you’ll know more!

Update: I was sent a text file containing the “elaborate schedule” I was speaking about, here it goes:

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The Geek Quiz – How Geeky Are You?

Are you a geek? Do you consider yourself to be ‘Lord of the Geeks’? Well then why not take a simple quiz and find out? [xubz] had tweeted about this and lo! This is my result: Not bad eh?66% Geek

Some other results:

So does that make me, the err, “geekiest”? Nope! I’m beaten by unitechy, who scores a whopping 75%! 😮

Way to go girl!

An oh,if you _do_ take take quiz,  please drop by a comment to say how much you score 🙂

BSNL EVDO To Be Available in Chennai only in Outer Peripheral Areas

BSNL Chennai’s website may claim that EVDO connections are avaible, but the reality is that they’re offering connections only in outer peripheral areas. Sad as it may be but the news is true. I’d paid a visit to the Greames Road exchange in Chennai to apply for a EVDO connection. Initially I was thrilled to see the EVDO device infront of me, all my excitement died when I was informed that there’s no CDMA tower in Triplicane, nor there is one in city. I was told that at the moment, BSNL is focussing on EVDO connections(in Chennai, atleast) only in areas where standard wired connectivity is not possible – areas like Perungudy, OMR, Velachery etc.
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Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 Impressions

Ever since I’d seen a preview Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 at GSMArena, I’ve been floored by that awesome device. The good folks at WMExperts have managed to get a unit of Xperia X1, and take it for a spin. Lets see what they have to say about the X1. WMExperts also had a chat with Martin Winlet, the Director of Global Marketing for Sony Ericsson and he also answered some questions people had put to him. Here are some excerpts from their article

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Change your Yahoo IM Status to What You Are Currently Listening to

While on IM, one of the most common question everyone asks is – How do you show what song you’re listening to? Well it’s a no-brainer really, quite a few plugins exist which allow to do so, but most of them are buggy, don’t work with one version or the other, or just don’t work at all!

Well after doing a bit of research, I found an ideal plugin for Winamp – Yahoo Messenger 9/8/7 Now Playing v4.3, which works for Yahoo Messenger versions 7, 8 and even the beta version 9. You can grab it from here.
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For those using Windows Media Player, there’s a Messenger Data Plugin v1.1 which you can download from here

For those using Pidgin for all your IM needs, fear not, the MusicTracker plugin will send the now playing satuts to all of your Pidgin accounts. Even better, MusicTracker supports Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes and Foobar2000! Grab the MusicTracker plugin from here.

So what’re you waiting for? Go grab those plugins and let people know, what you’re listening to!

Duke Nukem 3D and other games For Nokia N800

Back in 1997, when I was in 7th standard, and an adolescent, I was a huge fan of Duke Nukem 3D – for its AWESOME graphics, the attitude, and of course the sex and the violence 😛 . Back in those days, I used to play it on my old computer – an Intel Pentium 100MHz, with 16MB RAM, an 8X Creative CDROM drive and a Creative SoundBlaster 16 soundcard and had a blast with its 320.x240 “high-res” graphics!
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Coming to the post, while on twitter, somehow the topic of Duke Nukem came, and Vimal George pointed me to the The Internet Tablet Talk forums, where a member has actually ported Duke Nukem 3D to the Nokia N800/N810 Internet Tablet. You can find the complete instructions over at the forums. It’s just amazing as to how far technology has progressed that allows you to play what we used to play on a bulky desktop onto a sleek handheld!

For more such games, do check out the N800 blog and Arnim’s Ports for Nokia

Cheers

The Idiotic Hotel Cashier

Generally I always carry a fair amount of cash with me, coz I’m a bit paranoid as to what might happen if I’m stranded without cash. The set of incidents which happened just now will now ensure that I will always carry cash with me.

I’d been to Hotel Balaji Woodlands for dinner – I don’t go there often, but have been there enough number of times to know that they *do* accept Debit cards. Now it so happened that I didn’t have enough cash with me – I had only Rs 30. Wondering whether I should goto the hotel or not, I just decided to go there. I ordered Naan and Kaaju paneer(or, kaaju curry as that was what given to me, the paneer – well they decided to eat it themselves 8-| ) . I asked for the bill – it came upto Rs. 50. Fair enough I went to the cashier and gave him my debit card to charge it to that. The next set of events left me dumbfounded. Here’s the conversation

Me: (hands over bill and ATM card)

Hotel Guy(HG): (Shakes his head)

Me: What?

HG: Rs 50.. not enough

Me: I don’t have cash. Either you accept that or you give me this meal for free

HG: (puts my ATM card into the drawer)

Me: (Getting pissed) Hello, give me my ATM card back

Waiter: You go get cash, then I’ll give card

Me: Hello? How do you expect me to withdraw cash WITHOUT my ATM card? :-w

HG: We don’t accept debit cards for small amount

Me: (Me with voice raised, and bit of temper) What kinda stupid Hotel do you run? The one which says We accept debit card, but then reject it for “small amounts”? Give my debit card back.

(Now it begins to look like a scene – there are few foreigners in the hotel, and he obviously doesn’t want the incident to be heard to all)

Finally, he gives my ATM card and asks me to pay for the dinner tomorrow. I say fine

So here’s 50 paise to the hotel guy. I hope that amount is “big enough” to be charged to a debit card.

Also posted on Fifty Paise

Appraisals, Appraisals

Past couple of weeks have been sort of “important” for most people in 3i. Reason being: appraisal time. It’s that time of the year, where you are judged and rated for your performances. It’s a 3-tier appraisal, the immediate appraiser being the project manager, then the group head, and finally the HR. Appraisal mean everything for most – whether you get promoted/demoted, whether you get a salary hike or not.

In case you guys are wondering why I’ve mentioned in the first line “for most people”, well it’s because, me being a Trainee, an appraisal for me holds no weightage, monetory wise. The monetory increase will come, once I’m confirmed, ie, at the end of my training period, which will happen in July. Well my appraisal meeting with my manager went very well, he was pretty happy with my performance, and amongst the things he’d said was “I can assign you some work, and not be bothered on following it up with you as I know you will complete it”. That’s given me an immense boot to my confidence, and it’s made me feel good. And to top, my overall rating is a 3.9/5, which is pretty good. So the next thing to watch out for would be my confirmation, which should happen in July. Will keep you guys updated.

Cheers

How-to: Change the themes and icons of Sony Ericsson P1i

The p1i by default comes with a rather drab theme, and the default ones are no good either. So, to spice up the phone’s look a bit, you can always download new themes(my current one is the PSP original theme from Themebin). While changing the theme is a no-brainer – just download (or beam) the theme(.utz) file to your memory card(or phone memory), use file manager to browse to the location where the theme is saved, click on it and just apply! The new theme – including wallpapers, sound schemes will all be applied. Most themes also come with icon replacements, which replace the original icons with new ones. To check if your theme has icon replacements, Just check if there’s a folder called “resource”, present in the skin archive. IF it’s there then your theme comes with an Icon pack.

For that we’ll have to do a bit of tweaking. No, don’t worry, it won’t cause you P1i to go berserk. First, connect your p1i to the computer via the USB cable(Bluetooth won’t do) in file transfer mode. Once the memory card is detected,  browse to it. Just copy the “resource” folder from the theme folder over to your memory card. When asked to replace or overwrite, just say yes.

This is how my P1i looks, with the PSP original theme.

P1i Main Menu          P1i Standby Screen

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