Muranpaadu: November 2004

Saturday, November 27, 2004

Unbiased Shopping

Thanks giving day in US is celebrated during the last Thursday of November. 'Turkey dinner' on that day is a tradition they follow here.The shopping/sale on the day after Thanks giving day is the talk of the town. For the past few days’ people were sharing the past shopping experience during Thanks giving day. That made me inquisitive. The free ads said that the sale would start from early morning 6:00.oh a tough invite. So, got up by 8:00.Decided on the things to buy the previous night itself. Reached Best Buy (Electronics goods shop) by 8:45.Parking was a predicament. With eagle’s eye we found a place. Then entered into Best Buy. As expected the shop was jam-packed. Lot of Desi families! The first item we gazed was Digicam.After half-an hour analysis we found the prices are unchanged. So just wandered through out the shop and brought a Disc man. Then went into the billing queue. I was positioned in rear end of the shop. The queue had lot of hairpin bends. The queue was arranged in such a way that you tour the whole shop. (Business technique). The queue moved in tortoise pace. Suddenly a service guy came and announced that “he’ll take the people in queue to the counter instantaneously and it’ll take just few minutes to get out of the shop”. My eyelids lit up. Then he also said that for that to happen “you need to enroll yourself for Verizon wireless service for 3 months”. Few people volunteered. I was stumped. Yet another lesson from the business gurus. After some one and half-an hour wait finished the billing. In the mean time that service guy came up with three such offers and got customers. Then went to circuit city (yet another electronics shop). Not that much crowd there. Brought a digicam and few more stuffs here. It was really a very good shopping experience until I checked my bank balance. When I checked my bank balance I found I spent almost my one-month savings! Oh God forgive me, I was a bit more liberal today. I wish I would be a conservative for few months.

posted at 11:01 AM by Cipher Permalink

Friday, November 26, 2004

Hats off to Vikatan

Owning a Vikatan Deepavali Malar was a pride at home, back in India. Being an admirer of Vikatan, I find irresistible to own one. Couple of weeks ago, I was trying to get Vikatan Deepavali malar through online. But the booking policy demanded DD to be sent to Vikatan Chennai office. Sending a DD from US for $12 was laborious. I was displeased. When I surfed Vikatan this week I was astounded, they made the payment policy through credit cards. Customers cherish. Acute business mind. These kinds of things explain that Vikatan is still in sync with the customers’ mindset.
I wish they will make the subscription of the weeklies too through online soon.
One more good customer trait that I liked this week, from an Indian Organization was from Times of India. They have a division called Remit2India, for transferring money from foreign countries to India. Previously money can be sent either as a DD or to a Bank account. I felt sending money through DD was a bit dicey, because we need to withdraw the full amount in one transaction. Now they have one more option – ATM card. They have tie up with UTI, India and if you send money to Remit2India, they’ll send an ATM card for that amount, so that you can withdraw amount in smaller chunks.
Kudos to you guys. Great work.

posted at 7:15 PM by Cipher Permalink

Thursday, November 25, 2004

Lessons Learnt

Our Project rolled into production last week. As a custom we had lessons learnt session. We conferred our drawbacks. Most of the folks barbed the reason for the hitches encountered were because of improper planning. I differ with this on certain aspects. The avowal I keep in my favor is, not all things can be planned. If that needs to happen then lot of time needs to be devoted for planning. Remember this is an impromptu world. So spending more time is not feasible. And moreover we need experts in planning. Since the technology is on the rise daily, we can't have experts on all things. So instead of planning everything we can be prepared for whatever thing that comes in the way. Brainstorming and thinking ahead sessions should help us to a great extent. Do understand that early hatch gets us in a mess. So always remember when u review keep the time that it has taken. And give the remarks based on the timeline that is taken to complete a work.

As far as I am concerned my lessons learnt, as a developer will be

Spend more time in scope finalizing and development analysis
Spend less time in development. (This doesn't mean that u should do a hurry burry work)
Spend more time in unit testing. (Simulate all possible test cases)
Spend more time in integration testing (manage the dependencies properly, test regressively on environments)

And last but not least please understand - To err is human

Apart from this I learnt a lot on etiquettes.

If you have more things to add I hail your suggestions. You can give your comments. You don’t need to be a member in blogger to post a comment. You can post your comments as - post anonymously. If possible sign at the bottom of your comment. I assure that the comments will be imbibed.

Happy Thanks Giving Day.

posted at 9:46 AM by Cipher Permalink

Sunday, November 21, 2004

THE BOOKSTORE

Alderwood village is a shopping mall near by my place (Edmonds). An ingenious mall based on an archetypal American village in mind. I spent some precious moments in a bookstore there – Borders. Shelf full of “Da Vinci code”(this seasons bestseller) greeted me. The whole store smelled books. The books are smartly categorized. I’ll just take you through the flair they have. They have wall mounted PC’s for customers to find the books they are looking for. The search algorithm they have is first-rate. It pointed the place where the book has been placed and more importantly the book was there in the right place. I have no idea whether any Indian brain is behind the software! If the book you are looking for, is not there then u can order it for print and they pledge you will get it in 7 days. The music section was astounding. They have a barcode reader and a player. If you scan through a DVD/mp3, it lists the songs the DVD/mp3 has and you can listen to the songs you wish. The speakers are suitably spaced on the top. And the final thing I liked most is the music band by two people on the ground floor (these people call it as first floor). I don’t know the name of the instruments they played. One is like Harmonium and the other looked almost like guitar. They played it with great caliber. The effort they put to make the customer buy a book is startling. They almost make you buy things for their effort. Indian shops have a very good lesson here. Gandhi correctly said - customer is the owner of your business, years ago. Only Indian bookstore that strikes me which equals this is - The Landmark. Even they need to use technology more. This is not Caricature. Its true we need to learn a lot on how to do a business. I feel sorry that the treatment the customer in India gets is appalling. This is the truth, though hard to accept.

posted at 8:21 PM by Cipher Permalink

Saturday, November 20, 2004

Readability Statistics

I fortuitously found a good article on Effective written communication. The tips were simple and apt. It has been forwarded to friends circle .To improve the readability of a doc MS word helps us with a Readability statistics. This option is available in MS word->Tools->options->Spelling and grammar->show readability statistics (check box). It shows some figures after finishing the checking for spelling and grammar. Two stats related to readability are displayed. One is Flesch readability score and the other is Flesch-Kincaid grade rank. Both these stats are a result of a formula, which they have. Let’s hope this works. After going through the help I found out that a doc with few words per sentence and fewer syllable per word would give us a good readability. The other is a grade rank based on American grades (schools). The readability of this article is 63.3.The draft version of this article had a score of 53.7. MS recommends 60 – 70 is good. A great improvement .The detail of the formula is given in MS office help. If you are an ardent lover of writing skills here is a book that‘s worth owning – Eats, shoots and leaves by Lynne Truss.

posted at 9:11 AM by Cipher Permalink

Saturday, November 13, 2004

Old is gold

After a longtime I spent three hours of beatitude in watching a movie - Kathalikka Nerramillai.A comedy movie that filled up the box-office in 1960’s.The story is based on Love. TO satisfy his ladylove's father one of our hero (Ashok) shows himself as a son of rich man. His close friend (Vasu) helps him by acting as a rich man (chidambram). They get caught when vasu's father accidentally meets Ashok's original father. Then it gets resolved to a happy end. The screenplay was impeccable. For e.g. at one instance vasu's father recognizes his car in the hands of Chidambarm.Chidambarm says that he has brought it recently. Then when vasu calls up his father he says that he has sold it for a good price. (If I am confusing pls watch the movie). I wonder if Tamil film industry could give such a wonderful film 40 years back. Why not now? Of course there are many good films. But a film without violence is rare, very rare. This film has no violence. No one even raise their hands in anger. The comedy part of Nagesh is pleasant. The songs and lyrics are stupendous. Not even a single scene sounded bad to me. I don't think most of the movies of recent times will be this much good after 10 years from now. The current and future directors can consider this movie as a definition for entertainment movie. Thanks to Indiahuthouse from where I rented this DVD. Still lot more movies in rental queue to watch!

posted at 8:48 PM by Cipher Permalink

Friday, November 12, 2004

Will this be True ?

The Shankaracharya of Kanchi - Jayendra Saraswati was arrested on Thursday. That too on a Deepavali day .The pontiff was arrested in connection with a murder. Reports so far say that he is involved in a phone conversation with the henchman. Still hearing has not been started in a full fledged way. No proper motive has been listed in any of web pages I have read so far. What would be the motto? Money, Pride or Position .Nothing strikes me to be a valid reason. The post that he holds is known for its high Ethics. I never dreamt of such an incident. Implausible. He volunteered himself to mediate between the Hindus and Muslims on more than one occasion. And at one more occasion - against religious conversion he went to some parts of Tamilnadu.I don't think those were his job. He was also known for his good relationship with politicians. Whether he has been laid the trap there? Killer instinct is never possible for a person of his position. If proved guilty then it’s a shame for all Hindus. If not it'll be termed as a political drama. One thing is for sure - all the Media's will have a good time for four days, making this their Headlines. Then as usual everything will get vanished. Did this incident prove that everyone is equal before law? I don't think so.Bcos we could see lot of criminals are still politicians. Will he be so innocent to plan a murder with evidence? Let’s wait for the plot to unfold.

posted at 2:51 PM by Cipher Permalink

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Vicarious Deepavali

A kind of Thalai Deepavali for me. No no Edmonds is not my In-law's place. Just to delineate that I am away from my home for this Deepavali.Every year I used to be at my grandpa's place - Papparapatti - A village near Dharmapuri District (This place being the spot where the sandal wood bandit Veerappan was shot dead, will be in the history of TamilNadu police). I remember only two occasions in which I was not there during Deepavali.Once during my school days because of some reason (not able to recollect).That's long back. And couple of years back because of my semester exams. It’s hard to accept changes rather habits like this. But no other go. Being the first grand child I was given a freedom on everything during Deepavali.A little more sleeping time, more number of sweets, my favorite channel/movie and I will be the one firing the costliest crackers !!!OOps the list grows. This is ordeal. I’m missing all those things and doing an analysis here.Oh Is there anybody to pity me ?In my grandpa's house there will be a ample space in front .No one dares to question me for firing crackers. But here we need to get prior permission to fire crackers that too on specific place only. LAW is not Fair.So I am going to enjoy this Deepavali vicariously. Happy Deepavali to all people back home.

posted at 4:54 PM by Cipher Permalink

Sunday, November 07, 2004

Experiencing coffee

Having a cup of tea/coffee with frenz in a corner shop is part of every bachelor’s entertainment. The experience has been very sweet for me also. Usually after returning from college we used to have in a shop near by the Bus Stand. And there'll always be a quarrel for paying the bill! Each and everyone would pick up the changes whatever we had and we would settle it. On weekends mostly on the way to a temple we used to have a standard coffee shop to drop by and spend some time. Even this continued for some months after college days. Now after almost a year after those days, my experience is not similar. Being in Edmonds no coffee shop is as flexible as in Erode(No dialogues such as annae naallu tea)! Here the coffee shop is a place to bring your pulse to a normal state. Dim lights, mild music to smoothen your feelings and hi-fi interiors. Even in home here the coffee experience is different. Sitting in the chair in the sit-out and watching vehicles pass by ,remembering the past coffee experience and having some unanswered questions in mind - will those days be back ?

posted at 5:56 PM by Cipher Permalink

Saturday, November 06, 2004

Hard-to-accept

After having a rubberneck on my thoughts in a typical Friday evening. I tried to get the climax of Tamil films that left a tough feeling in my mind. You could say Anti-climax Most films end on a joy note - the love will succeed after two and half hours of struggle. I looked for movies that didn't have love as its main part. Actually I looked for films without love but could not remember many! The movie struck my mind quite often is "Anjali". A film about a mentally challenge female kid. That role was played by shamili. The performance was exemplary. Might be because of her gene. The film was made with exquisite techinque. The credit goes to the director - ManiRatnam.I don't know how many would have the confidence to make a film based on this subject. Though every aspect of film is applaud able the climax made me sit still, shed tears. The movie was going smoothly as if everything will end in a fine way. But never thought the director had the gut feeling to have an Anti-climax.The film touches the hesistation people have in accepting a kid of that nature. When everyone in the family and the rest of the people around started to love her, she passes away...Whether this scene was made diligently to put a hard-end or is this the way it happens? At times in life the second question suits. They call this "THE END”, rightly.
I would like to have the comments and any such film that falls in the above category.

posted at 8:33 AM by Cipher Permalink