A Church, its Cemetery, its Flock ...

Dad used to take me, along with mom and my sis, to a Church in town every Sunday. He was brought up as a devout christian and wished the same for me. Once I reached adulthood, or was rather old enough to take a communion, he insisted that I attend a course in the same church to prepare myself for the communion. I attended this and received in whatever worthiness was expected the communion for my first time. He thereafter set me free to choose to attend or find faith in my own way as I saw fit and no longer bid me to accompany him, though he always wanted me by his side when he went to Church.

At the time of his passing, I attended the same Church. My paternal grandfather, among other late members of my family are buried in its cemetery. My opinion that this Church is broken, perhaps even beyond repair, is from previous conversations with Dad and specifically what I observed at this very occasion.

Holi and the Holy Week

It has been quite a long time since I've posted on my own Blog. Today being Easter, is probably a nice day to post. It is actually a mark of the beginning of resurrection. It is truly a wonderful day; on the basis of showing mankind that even after what might be perceived a fall or unfavorable conditions, there is triumph of the unabated soul through resurrection.

During this week, specifically this year a lot of festivals came up together on the day I remember as "Good Friday." At work there has been specific devotion to product quality improvement, new product planning, preparing our unit for stronger leadership and taking more roles on my part to see things through smoothly and strongly. This has taken a lot of positive effect, infused energy and enthusiasm to make our jobs as problem solvers more satisfactory.

We also played Holi on the day of Good Friday where I chose to be at office having taken leave on Maundy Thursday. I must say this is the first time during my 1 year 10 month stay in Bangalore that I chose to participate in Holi. Back in Pune, I used to be literally scared of the colors and the dyes, so much that I used to vanish before dawn only to be at work while the fun lasted. I understood that Holi (in its present cosmopolitan form against its true origin) is a sociable, fun-filled, friendly event. It might seem in converse to Good Friday which is spent in mourning for the suffering of Christ. I have no regrets on the choices made for the day.

At home, there has been the dawn of a calm after an unexpected turn of events over the last year which I had commented on my blog prior. There are those who have suddenly sought to contact me after a long while. Old friends have networked with me (including schoolmates, I had lost touch with.) There is also the rain that has showered this week, after (literally) sunny days where our usual afternoon walk (at office) seemed a bit more unpleasant than it usually was.

Some paid lighting visits over the month on trips to Bangalore and as a gesture of friendship I accommodated them at least long enough for them to refresh for their busy day in the city; arranged for transport to help them get back to the airport. There are those who chose to stay out of contact from me who have suddenly chosen to start communicating. Either way the effect has been more social contact. Across every week/weekend either I have visited (usually closer to my house) or someone has visited me (close to my house or at home.)

There have also been those who have solely communicated by phone (who believe the phone is an instrument that guarantees privacy over long distances; an urban myth I do not subscribe to). As I prefer to do any personal talking from home rather than while at office or on the move or outside; this has sometimes led me to sleep later than I've wanted to. I like e-mail as the high speed equivalent of written communication, which wastes less time and carries with it more clarity.

There have been those reading my blog frequent enough without commenting and expressing opinion. Either way it makes for readership of what I thought was a vain loss of expression. That is what makes this exercise of blogging fulfilling. Ultimately the scribes get to write History that lasts longer than the events. The blog if it survives on the Internet (for long enough), will do exactly the same thing that a "Minutes of a Meeting" do after the meeting. So perhaps there is readership and record.

On the whole, The Holy week was filled with peace and calm and as the entire period of Lent came to an end with a fulfilling joy in the mind; combined with mixed feelings at work (where we presently seek and await new Leadership), yet appreciate all the energetic things we've done till now.

We are also planning a farewell to someone at work who has chosen to spend time rather differently, indulge in self-exploration and understand the true fulfilling pursuits of self. We intend to club it with a team picnic and make it memorable to all of us as an outing we haven't had over 9 months. These details are being worked out and executed at a pace that is too fast to describe.

A Special Day at School

On the 24th, I had the opportunity and the privilege to be part of a great gathering at my school, Don Bosco Mat. Hr. Sec. School, Thanjavur. This was the celebration of the Silver Jubilee (25 years of the institution) from 1982-1983. It was nostalgic and more a family re-union than a celebration of an event.

Many former Rectors and Principals of this school made it to the function. I remember especially Rev. Fr. Joseph Fernandez, Rev. Fr. Paulraj Maniam, Rev. Fr. A T Thomas, Rev. Fr. Patrick Alphonse, Rev. Fr. Amalraj Thomas. It was sad that Rev. Fr. V. V. Abraham (who gave me my first opportunity to use a laptop) was unable to attend because of an illness which has kept him indisposed in Delhi.

Several teachers, including beloved Mr. Sekar, Mr. Albert, Mr. Souvuriraj, Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Kumar were able to attend the function. Mr. Paulraj, Mr. Gabriel, Mr. Balasubramaniam, Ms. Jacintha, Mrs.Hazell were all part of the events and continue to be involved in the everyday activities of the Institution.

I had the privilege to share a few words about my experiences at school, which was taken in good light by all the former rector principals who had arrived for the solemn gathering. We shared more experiences on our personal life, exchanged business cards and "re-connected" the family. I shall never know how the skills and values imbibed in me through the days at school can ever be repaid for.

Of the past pupils several from the batch of 2004 had made it. The earliest batch who managed to make it had one participant, Dr. Leo Joseph who practices in Thanjavur who also shared his experiences of the earliest days of the institution. Sadly a few residents of Thanjavur Dr.Manoj Xavier and Dr.Anand Mohan were indisposed and unable to attend the function. Most of my batch-mates (1997 pass-out) had the information too late and were unable to plan the trip due to dearth of tickets as the Music festival in Thiruvaiyar has already begun.

The day started with an early and long mass. The function had several performances from both the Primary and the High school. The function took until 1345hrs and was followed by a luncheon buffet in which all the past pupils, and parents of the past pupils partook with the members of the Salesian family.

I had the opportunity to mingle with some of my juniors (past pupils) and get to know them better. This was indeed a most wonderful and nostalgic event. The institution merely did not give us academic opportunity. All the teachers, brothers, Fathers and the non-teaching staff of the institution instilled in us skills to become better people with better values and respect. It was nice to see Ms.Lourde Marie being honoured for her service to the institution as the caretaker maid for the Primary school. I remember her getting me to eat when I was in preparatory school (then called Dominic Savio, in honour of a boy saint chared by Don Bosco.)

The values to treat individuals as equals, to respect everyone's opinion and to put morality above all else are priceless. This is what the institution had instilled in everyone. They had done this with a paradigm of education named "The Preventive System" whereby students are not "punished" for their wrongs, but rather guided in a way they would avoid mistakes and correct themselves had they committed one.

Today, Newspapers talk of the "Education Ministry's" order to prevent "punishment" in schools that cause potential injury. Most schools are ill-placed to really understand and implement this law.

The Preventive System does more than that, it instills self-discipline in the "Individual." In the words of my first Principal in school Fr. Berkman, this Family was, is and will continue to be a place for creating "Persons" (who by definition are people to whom one can relate with, not beings or individuals in isolation) with high regard for morality and social values.

We, the students of this school will always remain Students of Don Bosco Mat.Hr.Sec. School, Dear School of our Hearts!!

A Week less ordinary

This week was more fun at work than I'd anticipated. We have finally laid the benchmarks and lines to take one of the products I've been involved with out to the market, engaged a few customers and are already working on revisions. To add to the thrill, there's one more product also in the field where I was involved in redoing an algorithm.

Beyond this, I have been trying to squeeze the best performance out of a CMOS sensor for improved realistic images. It looks like I might have hit some of the physical boundaries of CMOS sensor technology beyond which only smart post-processing could help. I am also set for a trip for my School's Silver Jubilee; set for 23, 24, 25 January. I am hoping to be present from 24 January to keep my presence at work maximal (this being one of my new year resolutions.)

Noisy Neighbourhood

This Saturday introduced me to a big change in the neighborhood. The building next-door is going in for reconstruction (preceded by demolition of the existing edifice.) The owner has involved a team of noisy people (who chatter louder than the work they do and become a nuisance day and night) to complete the demolition. I have been facing a sudden change in ambient noise level and dust level. They have yet to construct a partition between the houses that would at least serve as a barrier for the dust.

To add to the adventure, there was another group of people taking down nature's edifice, the tallest tree in the neighborhood. It was heavy and it was taken down in heavy intermediate modules. One of them knocked off part of a barbed wire fence on my house's compound wall while being "safely" taken down. The enormity of the tree and the way it was taken down gave quite a few people a good scare of what could happen if nature came crashing down. This made me more worried than the man made edifice generating noise and dust plumes for now on another side of the house. The task took almost after sundown to complete. Recapitulating, a branch from this tree had damaged a window in my house during a storm.

The noise change did have an impact on my sleep. I was so annoyed by the "new" noise that I decided to try and sleep off earlier, which actually didn't work straight forward. It took much longer than that. I used to live in a flat off one of Pune's most noisy highways. At that time nothing in the morning 8:00am rush could take me off my bed as I was so used to it. But a change in the noise levels when I moved to a new silent neighborhood in Pune made me extremely sensitive to noise. I have begun to understand that our brain tunes itself on the basis of ambient noise available near our habitat and our workplace to help filter out the excess and remove any stress related to that. This process is however not instantaneous and takes a bit of time (something like subconscious learning.) Until that is done, I will be extremely aware of this new level of noise in the neighborhood.

A Nice Day at the Office

The whole of Wednesday, reckoning the new year was quite nice at office. We had a nice session where my mentor did give me some useful ideas to improve things I was working on and review some of my skills. I really liked the time spent as it was most useful.

For the next part, I was most interested in an open-house where the management shared information on the last quarterly performance of the company both in numbers as well as inside. While many were asked to come up with their questions, I noticed that everyone was looking at the possibility of pointing out at issues that had not yet been taken up. The speaker had made sure that these issues will not be the point of (an endless) discussion in the most polite and acceptable fashion.

Everyone seemed intent to find fault with "decision making" or "policies" that had not been taken up. The trouble was no one (who was criticizing middle management as a blocker) was pro-actively fighting it out by getting things done by convincing the necessary people. As it was someone else's job function, they were hoping that it should have been done by those responsible and were unwilling to try it out themselves. I find that the environment does allow people to do things themselves at every level.

As each system is held back by some sort of inertia, the response time is a drastic factor in deciding whether a pro-active approach of changing things is really worth the while. It is unfortunate that people switch jobs hoping that another system with different inertial properties will help them. If one can't get something from the present outfit/establishment they are working/interacting with, they should at best sharpen their skills. These sharpened skillsets can help them change the system itself rather than require them to switch. This holds good unless there is something drastically wrong or factually impossible. Such cases are rare and occur when a system is at its end.

The grass is always greener on the other side. Many leave finding good pastures, but the one thing they might definitely find is a temporary change in compensation. For that switch; it would seem a reasonable thing. Better administration and management do not necessarily mean that they are superlative, they would still have their fallbacks. I find great opportunity in making something grow better, and the more latitude of growth it has, greater the offer.

I do agree that any system that disallows change is doomed to self-destruct. The environment constantly changes dictating everything that is part of it to react and change suitably. Nothing within the environment can reverse these tides of change. Changing the environment would require many systems or a large number of systems that are part of it to affect the environment in such a way (drawing similar analogy.)

Well Begun

Of course, after spending quite some time on Friday over the logical approach of a puzzle we were trying to crack, a bit of retrospect and lateral thinking brought us to a solution. It does have side effects, but was consistent and stable with respect to the problem we were trying to solve.
That made a good start to the weekend in general. Friday night was spent watching Television. The whole of Saturday did not turn out to be much too different.

I did watch a good movie, "Bug" which is on quite a difficult subject. The movie was given a "Horror-Movie" tag, while it really is more of a drama with a message that is slightly horrific. It deals with group psychosis, a strange thing that is usually not witnessed with such dramatic outlet as shown in the film. Ashley Judd has again proved herself in the movie in her role.

Further, I am working to find out what is really lacking for an opensource developer while creating embedded application development platforms (the entire Operating System underneath including a kernel, bootloader with the core utilities for a system.) There seems to be a considerable gap being addressed by very few projects like "emdebian" and "openembedded." It would be a good time to give these projects some competition.

A Good Christmas!

This Christmas, I chose to have a full holiday from Saturday all the way till Tuesday making it a really long weekend. Mom and Dad visited as planned, and we had a good time together. Bangalore, it seems wasn't as cold as Thanjavur at least for these days as a tropical cyclonic formation had rained cats and dogs there making it much colder. The temperature though with lesser humidity did make me feel quite cold.

Christmas was warm and we had food from a good friend. We all watched more than a fair share of Television as moving around Bangalore wasn't really the in-thing to do. On Christmas day we went over to St.Mark's for the service. It was unusually crowded and we were lucky to get seats in the second row to the left. I did enjoy the service, though earlier I was quite lazy to actually leave for church having coded for my pet-project till late night on christmas eve..

A good friend called and wished me and parents. Many relatives got in touch to wish us all a merry Christmas. Mom had brought two cakes made by a friend and that was really nice. I also had a longish phone conversation with my niece, and also wished my Sis and family. They had braved the Delhi cold for the watch-night service which ended shortly after midnight.

Today, Mom and Dad left for home, which due to bad roads and construction work on the way, took almost 10 hours. They left about 7:20am and reached about 5:15pm which was almost the same time they had taken on their trip to Bangalore. The only other person celebrating Christmas at office (people from Goa having returned to their homes) was Natarajan, D-Link's new Marketing head. My Boss was excited about a movie named "Welcome" and was encouraging us all to watch it.

Indeed, it was truly a merry Christmas! I loved it. It helps me prepare myself for my new-year resolutions which would hold quite strong this 2008, as my ever increasing commitment to new-year resolutions is at an all-time high.

A Weekend that wasn't so gloomy

This weekend, I have been following up with everything that I've been doing over the week in my spare time. I decided to do some real coding and come up with something creative that I could probably deploy even at work. The result is something quite nice where I've pieced together the initial ingredients for what should become a useful toolbox for embedded system/user-space applications. Part of my drive was to create a usable replacement for busybox which almost stands out as the single swiss-army-knife that embedded linux deployments use.

At this stage I haven't started a project page and involved more people, but through the next week that should be possible.

I was also tweaking the iwp3945 drivers as I had quite some trouble getting my custom kernel working on my laptop with wireless access enabled. Pairing with the AP wasn't ever happening. While all this was on, I needed to move a heavy table near my desktops and pulled a muscle and probably tore a ligament in my back. I took some rest finally and feeling much better am just trying to cruise on with the code after reading some interesting articles on anthropology.

It seems that the product I've been working on at office would finally hit the road after one last weekend of stress testing. I haven't heard someone screaming for help which means there is a stable set of system software that should be able to take it without surprises.

On Saturday, I met up with a friend after quite a while having some time to have a long conversation with both of us not too busy. I did experience the horrific traffic on MG Road in Bangalore in an Auto (Driving my Car was out of the question.) This being a Saturday, it was probably amplified thanks to the inching work on the Bangalore metro project.

Saturday Lazed out

This Saturday wasn't too different from the many I've spent in the past weeks. I did very little "useful" work. I was watching some movies, playing games, randomly reading kuro5hin, slashdot. I had skipped plans of visiting foss.in on the last day out of partial disinterest. It is bad, I should've gone for a friend's talk at least, but heck what I never made to within 9 km of IISc Bangalore. My chauffer's not in town and with my direction senses I wouldn't take the right diversions (to a straightforward route.) I simply didn't get down to doing it and instead cocooned myself at home.

I was hoping to write an arm related code commentary that went out of the window thanks to movie watching. Then I did some PC maintenance and updated it for vulnerabilities. That should be the only useful thing that went on the whole day. I just lived on chocolates. No noodles, nothing else. (Bad Idea, this too.) Hopefully Sunday would be better as it has been from last week with more personal productivity.

A Debugging Day

Today, the early part of the day was spent in the unbiased understanding that out of five of us in our team three were attending a training session. That left me and another teammate in opposite cubicles sitting and feeling more lonely than anything else.

Through the day, I scanned through more CVs and Resumes, shortlisting a few after some careful thought. We also had a trip planned that had to be rescheduled to a prior date necessitating immediate action to book to/fro tickets for 4 (including myself.) My reporting head did a really dedicated job at getting this done.

I went through the next phase of debugging everything in a strange audio driver for one of the products I am working on. I found that "readprofile" gave very low granularity and actually only gave a slight hint on what we should be looking for. It did give some positive results, but we have something that always ends up in a cascade failure. I now need to work my brain on the actual cascade failure to really get the indeterminate problem sorted out.

Finally, the day ended with more than an hour discussing our moving to a new facility, improving some processes and the last item of the agenda scratched out as we ran out of time. Phew! I got back to debugging with another geek and we did build some ground after which we chatted and wasted at least half an hour before I got to exit from office.

Come home, and I had noodles for dinner as that would be the quickest thing to prepare at this time. That done, I didn't have much else to do than to type out into my blog. Ultimately only the debugging thing stays fresh in my mind though I'd actually list today as a very productive one.

Another Saturday!

I usually don't have a "plan" for Saturday. I let it go the way my moods go. This time I decided I'd watch "The Devil Wears Prada." A nice movie indeed. I also got to watch "Zodiac" which was quite another average Hollywood movie. It seemed that that "Zodiac" was more about FBI incompetence than about a serial killer being hunted down by a civilian who just got interested from his boring day job.

Otherwise I didn't do much about eating except some noodles for lunch and chips'n chocolates for dinner. Well, that's the standard. I didn't get out of the house except to return the movies I'd got. That was that.

The rest of the day was trying out configurations on my new phone which was amusing for perhaps an hour. At least three cups of double espressos to keep me going (whew!) My plan (for some time) has been to hack on an opensource project on Saturdays and Sundays. The truth is I do have the time, I just don't get myself to do it. It seems its about time, I did that on Sunday and stop wasting time on movies (being the movie buff I am.)

Strangely there were absolutely no phone calls to me (except from the service provider about some new features for free costing $$$.) It was in that manner quite peaceful. I did not take the time out to call anyone either. I sometimes think I'm building a cocoon around me, but that isn't entirely factual.

The Carrot and the Stick

Before a "Grand Inauguration" of a new facility, at least my teammates were expecting their performance Bonus. Processing for the same and scoring was already done and the figures had already been presented on paper to the team. But like all efficient organizations and with the assistance of an absolutely insensitive clod of a reporting head (who ain't bothered coz he's got no financial deficit right now) this wasn't credited.

That meant a lot of people were unhappy. I had a bitter taste too after having detailed all the necessary information, nothing was working out.

I am probably very impatient in many ways. This of course helps me in more ways than it can harm me as I get things done on the double.

I am not very happy either at the end. I might end up not visiting the Grand Inauguration even if I could, just for saving a few bucks on transport (fuel) and spending some quality time playing around with the linux kernel.

There were other precipitating factors like the inability to recruit new people because the company's offer of salary is too disagreeable to anyone whom we select. Market correction of the salary is a long way down the line. I am sure more people will quit before they realize. The point is the management think they have the Carrot and the Stick. It looks to me like the Stick is with the people who actually create it. If you don't invest you get nothing out of people or bricks. The Truth being, today's world does call people "Human Resources" and are more interested in "Capital Assets" and "Human Resources" like other resources are a liability.

(Yeah these are the words of a disgruntled employee in part.) That doesn't change what's what at the end. You give everything you have when you want to get more than what you have; that's the personal loyalty sense of today. Otherwise it has a negative effect that you stop giving everything you can give, that makes you dull. You'd rather switch and do more rather than stay back unhappy and do less. That seems to be a valid argument to me.

The unfortunate part is, no matter where you go, you're still a brick. There are those who are Dogs in the manger (managers) who'd rather never give up for a horse.
There's just the watermark of what you get that gets adjusted. When you reach it, you get unhappy all over again and switch. So where do you stop this all? One way, is to start on your own with your dreams and put yourself and everything you have at risk to get much more than what anyone else can offer. The other way is to learn to change the place you're already in to think differently. The former being easier (although too risky), the latter being much more difficult (although it looks less risky.)

Fighting Murphy's Law

Today was, in retrospect, a fine day indeed. Quite a few things I'd planned at work had started to go wrong. I had to go and reverse a decision, thanks to a new input on a microprocessor I was working on. Then there was buggy software that almost went along with a product to the field.

The strange thing is, we managed to stop all of this just at the eleventh hour. While I would say this ain't good management, it is strange that (at least) some of these things showed up before we got products on the field. I was running around quite a bit all through morning understanding before everyone else did, what was at stake. Everyone thought I had a panic reaction and finally after addressing the situation, people were quite happy about the way I'd rushed through it.

Afternoon was much more relaxed. I was supposed to meet somebody or rather the other way around by evening. Unfortunately the person was attending TI's Developer Conference and I chose to leave a little earlier than my published 1830hrs.

There has also been speculation on the dates on which my Company is actually shifting location of operations. That's adding one more uncertain variable specifically a disproportional increase in commutation cost and time. The sooner it comes, the sooner I would be forced to consider addressing it as a risk that I'd rather not take. Perhaps, this got me a bit worried in the morning, but nothing actually got to me to snap my cool.

The one thing I could learn today was, "So long as you react quick enough you can prevent things from going wrong later." Although masked by urgency, addressing problems quickly can potentially prevent a catastrophe. The other rule was of course to take responsibility for what you've done earlier. That makes it easier no matter how everyone reacts.

A Personal Blog at Last!

After quite a bit of thinking, I thought it would be nice to jot down everyday thoughts that crept in my mind. I already have another blog that I haven't been updating in a while. This would have lighter writing and be more a personal window.