Nation First!!

Every job requires some sort of experience, learning or hands on experience, as there’s a thin line of differentiation between competency and ability. You may have ability to fly a aircraft, but the competency gives you much confidence of actually flying off the grounds. 

Only in Politics, you can find such exceptions where you free to choose any political wing and doesn't require prior experience; through I don’t buy this bite, but this is what eminent & prevalent now a days. We have many politicians into active  politics getting their Political trajectory from their father and grandfathers as ancestral assets; politics for them being a sort of Family run business. On the other hand we have many political leaders who started their career as mere party workers and slowly got  recognition and with time, emerged as national leaders primarily because of their competency and ability, management skills, coordination, planning & execution. 

In current political context of India we also have some emerging politicians who are mere rebellions of the society, puking and criticizing all-in-one and everyone under the sun. The irony was that such politicians got attention and sympathy of masses and were able to secure considerable amount of seats in assembly elections.  

But as experience does matter all the Air castles came crashing leaving behind unfulfilled promises, duped voters, & dissatisfied team members. One could see the inexperienced team failing on all the fronts of Governance and inability of management, coordination and execution were clearly visible in all their deeds. 

As a citizen of country I got worried when the party resigned on an issue, If I would have been in place I would have created a consensus across the board and would have derived a win-win situation but as stated earlier, experience and skills does matter a lot, indeed they were not able to converge the diverse interests to mutually satisfying outcomes. 

National Election being a broader horizon where the ruling party has to deal with lot of cross border issues including issues of nation interest; what if they elected to majority, but again put a resignation on the grounds of not getting support from other players as the inherent problem of ill-experience still persist. 

I think better proposition for them would have been, if they would have proved themselves on Governance, expectation and promise made during the election campaign, gather some experience instead of bad mouthing about everyone. 

What I understand politics in nutshell is "Getting people with different goals and interests to cooperate”, which means one has to always deal with people of diversified interests. So whenever you are there to vote think of all the issues of Governance, track Record, persistence, Family drama and Nation. After all “Nation First”

Trip to home town


It has been almost 9 months I visited my jamabhumi, karmabhumi so this weekend we planned to visit our home town on a quick note…; Evidently there exist some relationship which pushes me back to pavilion… kids were also excited of a small vacation but they didn’t wanted to end up landing in my hometown Ujjain for name sake; they till date didn’t understood the concept of power cuts and shortage of water. They wanted some thrill and action packed holiday instead.

They kept me suggesting many places to visit on this short weekend, were comparing the cities, amenities, recreation, outing and what not. It was tough for me to convince them but with a loose promise of some movies I lured them to board the evening train aka sham-wali-gadi….

A movie in theater appeared like a jackpot they were so damn excited; as a matter of fact Kids for that matter have never visited any of the booming multiplexes except that for one or two occasion when the school gave them a exposure to some mythological and patriotic movies to a nearby theatre. As I’m not a movie buff and it has been almost 15 years since I last saw a movie in theater and hence kids never got a chance to visit this theater for any of the pot boiler movies.

There School pals might been talking about and discussing stories of the movies they might have recently watched and I felt that my kids are really missing something here; answering to the situation I thought of visiting movie theatre. We use to watch movie on TV @ home but never visited theatre as watching movies @ home gives one an ease to control timings, moods and lot of variable parameters which could never happen in theater.

I also felt the span of three hours in a theater was sufficient enough to eat up the entire day as a matinee would crush the evening lights.. and so on so forth. But I surrendered my moods and thoughts to trash and started looking for theatres in the vicinity.

But in the recent past most of the theatres couldn’t survive the challenges from video piracy and cable war and were mostly closed out. The land bank was either surrendered to real estate developers and the vultures nested on many such monuments making it a archeological remains that boast of a “once upon a time” story…..small cities that once boast to have 10 movie theatre had now only 2 to 3 movie theatre functional with poor quality infrastructure. The condition is really working only and it appeared like a punishment to sit in the theatre for 3 long hours.

The movie appeared to be sluggish like the daily soap we watch on TV…. a skanky biography of a danseuse ... the Dirty Picture….and so the surroundings, people nearby enjoying the feverish moment & visual gyration … more a skin show and sarcastic adult comedy…. It was all Fxxxx… Correction sought Filmy.

Image source: blogs.independent.co.uk

Vision

Visionary are those who can envision the future! Most of us are inspired by numerable told untold stories of visionaries; which been inspiring and motivating us during different walks of life. Many of the visionaries have left behind a legacy, which is more enduring and timeless.

Inspiration and insight to look ahead in future proved helpful to the organizational assets on 5th June-2012 when the day came challenging and it’s only because of the vision and farsightedness; the decision taken in year 2005 helped us in avoiding a major setback. The eventful day was sufficient enough to force us to close some portion of the business deliverables.

June -2005 when we were working on an deliverable having huge open content no one thought that huge traffic and search engines will hit the pages, but anticipating the future requirement and traffic pattern, the decision maker decided to deliver it through a flat file structure instead of the conventional database structure. Though this decision was challenged by colleagues and stakeholders but the decision maker was firm to execute the project through a new approach.

Things fallen in line as per expectation, huge internet traffic started flocking those pages and decision appeared as a vision and the decision maker as visionary.

On that eventful day some portion of the database which uses to be the base for executing the deliverable got dropped accidentally, over and above this portion of database carried a lot of interconnectivity within itself and other applications and structures as well. As it was the root element, many functionality were anticipated to malfunction. But to our surprise everything was working normal and no one could felt any denial of services.

Later team learnt that though the crucial portion of database was dropped but it use to serve like a centre warehouse to publish information to different architectures and other dependencies were only subscribers. Everything connected to it was depended on it but was nicely crafted to have manipulated redundancy of information and files.

Today we thank the decision maker for being firm on his decision because of which the organization have avoided a major downtime in deliverables.

Moral learned being “Our Futures is decided by the today’s decisions.”

Image source: strategicdiscipline.positioningsystems.com

Joyous moment

Since almost a year or so It has been a daily affair for me to answer challenges on networks, infrastructure and application level, being a very dynamic environment the landscape changes very fast; at time faster than blink of eye. Every day comes with a different set of opportunities and challenges. I enjoy those challenges but at times I really get pissed off as practically I’m alone to understand the criticality and seriousness of challenges, there is support team with me but to me they are toddlers.

Time came calling again and challenged the deliverables, this time it was on 19th May 2012. Organization has a commitment to create certain reports and to deliver them to our subscribed members on specific dates; this time also we honored our commitments and report was created as per the planned schedule

Delivery of mail through our mailing mechanism used to be flawless and this time also all the mails vacated the Queue in a fraction of time. To ensure and track the delivery and delivery time we have few of our email in the subscriber list, and on almost all of the occasions the mails used to hit our inboxes in fraction of time.

But this time till 19th May the reports didn’t hit our mail boxes and become a major cause of concern. We were of an opinion that as the mails were having attachments they might have got blocked or marked as spam. Though we were working on an alternate way of delivering the report in which the mail messages were plugged with URL of the report instead of carrying the attachment, the reports were to be downloaded utilizing the URL shared in the mailer.

This mechanism was tested for few of non critical report, but was yet to be tested and validated for other set of critical reports which were having a small shelf life.

Wait and watch was not the solution, we quickly decided to work on the alternate mechanism on a war footing basis and successfully created the mechanism within a few hours of time frame. The report delivered through this arrangement banged our mail boxes within 2 hours of execution and gave us a reason to smile.

This quick response was generated by a new kid on the block which made me feel proud, his efforts was equally supported and complimented by the senior group members in the delivery team. The commitment of the kid also makes me feel that he will definitely create records in terms of project execution and commitments.

Happy to have team members who are willing to answer the challenges 24X7





Crazymakers..

Have you ever been in a situation when somebody is trying his level best and directs you to pursue things which you are not interested in, a sales person following you closely, trying to pursue you as your well wisher and finally selling the product?

You might have not recognized it; But you have just dealt with a Pushy Personality.

To give brief about these personalities don’t believe in democracy, they don’t seek any barrier, trespass everyone’s territory and insist others to see things their way. Dealing with pushy people is really a pain in the neck, especially if the person is your friend, relative or close associate. One can get rid of sales professionals by avoiding them but one is helpless if this is a daily affair....there is no escape in those cases.

God forbid if the work place witnesses pushy personalities that too in senior capacity or a management representative. This scenario will suck all energy right out of your soul; believe it or not these types of people exist and can affect you in ways you never thought possible.

I recently experienced a pushy personality, initially I thought that the person wants to impress me though his stature and knowledge but soon I realized that his stature was legislative and has not emerged democratically or as a referent power, it was stature only without authority and zero knowledge.

During further course of interaction I learnt that this is indeed a pushy factor and a crazymaker as well and needed a careful handling. Pushy elements takes control of situation quickly and make one feel lesser than desirable spreading all negative vibes in the surrounding. Crazymaker on the other side adds to wastage of time and energy and intentionally or unintentionally, knowingly or unknowingly, sabotage the efforts.

Sensing that I planned of appearing as a strong tree, pulling strength and calmness from the earth and allowing everything else to overflow. But the patience really got tested and I couldn’t remain calm in perpetual course of discussions. I reacted; instead of responding assertively.

But as we all are human; and to do mistake is purely human, I learnt a lesson out of this to be remain assertive and adopt an avoidance strategy.

This strategy worked superbly.. to most of the pushy advances I could hold by writing “We will consider this”, “Thank you that was really insightful ideas” etc… But I’m equally sure that he will sooner or later understand my strategy and come up with new ways of pushing things and crazy ideas….

I need to be one step ahead of his thought process and also device new action plan apart from avoidance strategy.

Dot to exploit

Till recent past we use to boast on our online registration process; though it’s not much unique but surely posses some additional features and follow common practice adopted globally for online registration. A verification email was send to the account provided during the registration process for validating the existence of the email address.

The process was fool proof and no bugs has been reported since the day it was deployed, but one day we observed that some 100 odd registration happening from a single domain i.e. @gmail.com the email addresses appeared to be fake but has qualified all the registration verification process. Prima-facie we couldn’t understand what went wrong and which loose ends exists in the system which someone had tried to exploit.

When I was sharing this issue with one my colleague; he told me that his account with GMAIL earlier had received mail which were not meant for him and he later learnt that placement of dot(.) for Gmail account is immaterial as far as location of dot(.) is concerned. I could not simply believe to my ears and to validate this I tried to create new account with the same username of myself by adding dot(.) at various locations, but to a surprise it always prompted for choosing a different user name stating the username already exists.

It took few seconds for us to identify the loophole exploiting which registration process was validated using practically different email accounts based on dot(.) location, but virtually same email account. For Gmail accounts firstnamelastname@gmail.com and firstname.lastname@gmail.com or for the matter of fact dot(.) at any place is immaterial and mail written to firstnamelastname are delivered to the closest match firstnamelastname and while delivering the email, Gmail ignores dot(.) location.

The conclusion was that for Gmail accounts dot(.) at any place is of no meaning but for most of the websites and email accounts they are different based on the character patterns.

Quickly we created a fix for this wherein the dot(.) Character needs to be ignored for checking existence of email especially if the account holder is of Gmail. This was a lesson learned for us and I’m sure that most of the website may not be aware of this logical bug for the email accounts. So if you are having any validation process based on distinct email accounts create a check for the dot(.) especially for accounts on Gmail.

The nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or language to be shaped and exploited.”

Image source: techpin.com
















IDIOSYNCRASY

World is full of Idiots… 

You find them everywhere….  

Even I’m surrounded by Idiots…!! 

They are tough challenges of life.… 

We should always appreciate Idiots…. 

Because in the first place God made Idiots…!!

Idiotism is tough to handle, because you can’t guess their intelligence…

If there would have been no idiots, no one would have acknowledged wisdom… 

Do not underestimate idiots; there is no other better recognition then an Idiot’s acknowledgement….!!

IDIOT stands for 
I – Intelligence: Idiot encourages you to use you all intelligence.

D – Determination: Idiot challenges the determination.

I – Ingenious: Nothing can be idiot proof because idiots are ingenious.

O – Optimistic: Idiots survives on highest level of optimism. 

T – Treasure: Idiots are real treasure as even death can’t cure them.
  
My needs are few and simple. Food, clothing, shelter but with No Idiots

Image source: colourbox.com