Toasty meeting today...

Had a Toastmasters meeting today here in office. Must say it turned out to be pretty good inspite of the fact that there were just about 10 of us and that we were meeting up after a long time that too on a odd day (unlike the regular weekly day we usually meet). Yea, we have membership troubles you see! The theme for the meeting was, "New Beginning" and it indeed seemed like we were starting all over :) We ran through the regular agenda which involved the Sergeant-at-arms opening up the meeting, followed by the President's address to the meeting and thro to the TT, speeches and evaluations.

Being the table-topics master today, I had prepared for giving out a few topics of interest like innovation at the workplace, Breakthrough ideas: myth or reality, Travelling: Planned or unplanned, and a few others. It always amazes me the amount of creative ways in which people can come up with ideas to speak on any topic, and my club is very clever in that! It was good fun and lots of ideas were shared.

Even after more than five years of being a Toastmaster, I have found that there is always so much to learn and know about...and it helps when the members are so talented!

Servicing a Product

I was chatting up with a friend when the talk drifted to (as it is know in sprightly parlance) The great debate! The topic was whether working in a service company is better or working in a product company is. A service company offers services which can be in terms of maintaining equipment, software, providing IT solutions or some sort of end-to-end product maintenance and support. A product company on the other hand creates products based on customer requirements (sometimes even otherwise), has significant investments in R&D and does a lot of core engineering work. Ultimately, there is a brand that the product creates and which the company identifies itself with.

Now both of us have had some experience in working in a service company and a product company. While the scale and complexity of work is clearly different in both (service companies normally having more focus around client interactions and support, and product based companies more around product engineering and R&D), clearly there is a lot more than meets the eye.

Talking about growth and opportunities itself within any of these, both product and service industries have plenty of examples. From a more technical perspective, working in a product company is technically more challenging and requires some sort of specialization. You cannot expect to lead and manage teams though, in a product company, in a span of just a few years because usually the product itself has a long and winding history, and because the processes are quite strong and it requires putting in many years of work and experience in various domains to have a grip over the work involved.

Whereas in a service oriented company, the focus is always around handling a client and issues and getting involved in more 'variety' of work, even if you are not an expert in any of them. You can expect to lead teams and manage them more quickly, since it involves more of people skills and you do have the opportunity to serve in various roles. It might not be cutting edge work but there is a focus on maintenance of products and seeing that all the parts of the client's system executes flawlessly.

There are so many more factors differentiating the two industries, in terms of which of the two earns more money, which of the two sustains longer, how do both compare in terms of working conditions, where do the two gel and how do they operate.

Which industry are you suitable for is a question one needs to ask. What kind of work excites you more? Is it engineering a product or managing a client? Is it variety of work or complexity of work?

Ultimately, you need to answer, what will you be happy doing?!

But I am neither an expert on the subject nor a celebrity :) so I will leave it here. Do add your thoughts to it.

I am 'listening' a Book !

I was not a great fan of audio books and always thought people who listened to them were either the ones who were completely unread, or that they were too busy doing other important things in life (and I wondered what exactly!) and had no time on hand to sit with a book to, duh, read them. Because it takes me long to commute to office and back, and though I have lots of reading material with me always, sometimes it gets a lil boring. So I thought of checking out on audio books anyway (ewww...). While browsing, I came across the website Librivox. Here there were tons of audio books all in the public domain and available for download. It was real eye-opener to find so many classics which were just lying there! Gee, it was like I had found some treasure trove :) I went ahead and downloaded the "Sign of Four" (Arthur Conan Doyle) which I thought would be easy listening. A sample chapter from the book confirmed it. There are other websites too where you can get public domain books. Here is another.

For the next one month, I listened up chapter upon chapter of the book. To be frank, it was a real treat to the mind and ears too! The lady reading the book had a wonderful voice and I could see the story unfolding in front of my eyes as I listened to it. I could see Sherlock sitting in his chair and Watson by the side as they solved another great mystery! It was fun! From then on my take on audio books has changed. Though I personally do prefer reading from a real book whenever possible, because I like to get a feel of the book, read it word by word and also have the convenience of flipping back to read up some craftily written piece, you might enjoy listening to an audio version of the book too. I would probably reserve it to light literature and not serious literary work. And anyway, there are not as many audio books either.

In the meantime, I have just downloaded 'The Man who would be King' and 'Siddhartha'! Happy reading...er..listening!

Protect your mob

A close friend of mine lost something very personal...a mobile! Not only did it have lots of personal messages and contacts, it also contained pics, music and other important documents which you would download on a smartphone.

Losing a mobile phone is a traumatic experience because it is something that you carry around with you all the time. It almost becomes a part of your daily life and living without it even for a few hours makes you feel incomplete! I know you should try not to let any device/gadget take control of you so much, but heck, it does have an effect! Imagining someone going thro' my stuff makes me cringe.

There are a few precautions you can take though. On Samsung phones (I own one, so this is what I know about it, and I am sure other phones too might have similar features), there is something called a mobile tracker. It helps you to manage your phone remotely by letting you add in lock codes, erase your data and lot of other features. Check this out to find out more.

My Sam is a lil older and I don't have that option, though I do have an option of enabling an automatic message being sent to a pre-defined number in case someone removes the SIM from my mob and inserts another. That way I can track my phone.

Another option on Android phones (in case your device does not natively support remotely managing it) is to install an app to do the job. Android Lost is one such option.

Again, I haven't tried it yet because it works only on Android 2.2 and above. Mine is a 2.1. I know...I should upgrade...sigh.

The power to sync..!

Today I realized the importance of sync. The story goes like this. At work I use both a desktop computer and a laptop. And the time has come to get my laptop completely re-imaged (read formatted) with a new OS. I have loads of data in both though all my mails get downloaded through Outlook only on my desktop. But all the other things are pretty much scattered on both. I will be simply copying  all the stuff I need from my desktop to the laptop or vice-versa with a not-so-brainy idea of a pendrive. But what about my browser data?!



I am a Google fan and I use Google's Chrome browser with loads of Google extensions, apps and plenty of bookmarks. Plus I have my Kindle and my Android powered phone integrated to it too. The prospect of losing all the things that I use on my browser really got me checking up on syncing up my browser data onto the cloud. And guess what, Google Chrome provides just what I wanted with its "sync" support. From the wrench menu, I sync up my browser with whatever I want to sync (including passwords, extensions, apps, bookmarks etc etc) and when I sign into Chrome on any other device, I can get all the stuff there. Just like that! Now that's cool :)



So when I get back my laptop re-imaged, I will have to just download Chrome once again, login to my Google account, and lo and behold, I will be back in action with all the stuff I used before!

Getting Agile!

I was reading a lot of Scrum and Agile frameworks stuff over the net and checked out a few online tutorials too. Just felt a need to know it because everyone seems to be talking about it lately! Found some really good introductions on the subject.

Basically, Scrum is derived from the way in which rugby players huddle together to get at the ball when they playoff. On similar lines, Scrum is a lean process, high energy, iterative framework for Agile project development. It cuts a lot of flab in an otherwise traditional SDLC like the waterfall model where all the requirements have to be elicited right from the beginning. Though, there is another model, the iterative variety (I forget the name!), but I guess it still does not have as lean a structure.

Will try to enroll for a Scrum master course sometime to understand this better!

Setting up my first blog

So I finally decided to become a blogger. It feels like I have just embraced some cult phenomena that I was far away from!

Checking out the settings and all the bells and whistles I can incorporate in my blog...!