Wow! Another year has gone by. Whatever happened to time? Doesn’t it always make us wonder.
But for me, I felt the year going by. The year 2009 had been a year of major changes. My life has taken a new path!
The year started a bit rocky for me. I was not seeing eye-to-eye with the owners of the company that I was working for. So the year started with me contemplating my future. It was clear that I was not going to have any future working there.
The good thing that came out of it was instead of looking for another job, me going into business for myself. I turned into a freelancer. While I was transitioning from being a monthly paid normal office worker to a uncertain and new territory of freelancing, my wife was expecting our son.
While all of this was going on, our son came into this world. That made us forget all our woes and enjoy his arrival. I think he truly brought in a new dimension to out lives. I stepped into the unchartered waters without much excitement or nervousness, initially. And I have to thank wifee for standing by me through all of that. She was brave to accept that I might have to go for sometime without a proper income or any income at all.
For me, things didn’t turn out that bad. First of all, a friend of mine came into my rescue by giving me a project. That kept me busy initially. And during the first month itself, I landed a gig with a LA web development company. And I am happy to say, 8 months and few projects later, I am still working for them. And we are exploring the possibilities of taking business to the next level.
Freelancing turned out to be better than I bargained for. Of course the initial couple of months, though I had an income, it wasn’t what I used to get in the job. That was mainly due to my erratic schedules and getting used to being my own boss slippages. But once I came to terms with my new life and the fact that no ones going to look over my shoulder to make me work, but it is the paycheck at the end of the month that will suffer, if I don’t out in solid work, I turned out pretty well.
Actually from about the third month of being a freelancer, I caught up with my salary and from the month after started to exceed it. That was the best thing and also took away my worries of financial stability. I have been earning much more than what I had earned in any job, for the past four months as a freelancer. The beauty of this is, if you have the capacity freelancing gives you the option to earn more. But if I was in a job, I would have had to wait for the annual reviews and all the other bullshit to get a raise. Even then, with the current economic condition,that was a far cry. With my last boss, it was definitely a non-starter.
And the other major thing is that we are going to be moving houses. We are moving to our own place and we are currently in the process of doing it up to our tastes and needs. And that gives me an opportunity to setup my ideal working environment. I have already designed the furniture and setup. Now it is just a matter of getting them done.
All in all, 2009 has been a good year. An year of changes, but looking back, it is an year that I am happy about. It has been an year of achievements. Looking forward to the house move and starting 2010 in a new house with a new lease of life!
We planned to move closer to the city when our daughter starts schooling, which is January 2010. We evaluated several plans and finally decided to move into our own home in Colombo 5. That house was given on rent, but we decided the benefits of living in the city will out weigh the rent income benefit.
We decided to do a few renovations and to give the house a bit of a face-lift before we moved there. We decided it would be easier to do the modifications before we moved so we don’t have to go through the hassle of living in a construction site.
We gave our tenant notice to leave but he overstayed by a month until he found a suitable home for himself. Then we started the renovations, with the initial plan of moving there by the beginning of December. And I was determined to put the project management best practices that I apply daily in my work to the construction and keep it within the plan and the budget.
The first thing that went off the window was the budget. When you start building, you cant always keep to the original budget. While some of the estimates given to us were way inaccurate, we also overspent on some things. It just happens that when you shop for stuff, you always end up seeing things that are far more expensive and you end up buying them.
For example, we are adding a new room to the house. First we weren’t sure if we were going to go ahead with this plan. Then our architect convinced us that it was a good plan. Building the walls of the room was the easiest thing. But getting finishes for it, was another story all together. Our bathroom is going to end up costing three times the initial estimate. Then again, we are going to build only once and we want to build it up to the standard we want.
Then came the time lines. As it turned out, the contractors estimates were etched in rubber. They kept stretching. First he would tell us that he’s finish something in three days. Then on the end of the second day he’s tell us that he needs another three days. Then at the middle of those second three days, he says he lost two days of work due to rain. Man, software is far more easy to manage.
To be fair by him, the weather didn’t exactly go our way either. We had some of the highest rainfalls to hit Colombo during this time. So he and his crew actually did lost a few days of work (about 20 man-days all in all so far).
The third issue was coordinating the different contractors. We were working with separate contractors for the masonry, carpentry, electrical wiring and aluminum excursions. As all of them were independent contractors, coordinating their schedules were a bit of a nightmare. Made me realize how better I am in committing and keeping my commitments to my clients as a freelancer.
So on the brink of the month of December, I am there at the site trying to supervise the work. But our chances of moving during the first week of December are pretty bleak. Now I would be happy if we can move within the month of December.
So the lessons learned:
- When building a house, either go with an open but realistic budget or be ready to not to have the dream home. The dream home, costs money, lots of it. I am somewhere in between. My theory was things that are hard to change/remodel, go with the stuff that your heart tells you to get. For things that can be changed without a fuss later, go with the stuff that suits your budget.
- Get professional advice on estimates. Our contractors are trades people, not engineers. So their estimates change, and they don’t feel bad about it. They are used to that. They don’t feel bad when they cant meet a deadline. On the other hand for me, as an IT contractor, that is one of the hardest things to do.
- Have some buffer. We lost our buffer time when we allowed our tenant to over-stay.
Finally, wish for loads of luck. So that you’d find the things fast. We scouted for days sometimes to get the things we wanted. Some examples were bathroom fittings,tiles and light fixtures. After weeks of scouting we still didn’t get the things we had in our minds. We settled for the next best things, at a higher cost than anticipated.
The trade unions of the country have decided to go ahead with a work to rule campaign demanding a salary hike. Their plan is to bring the country to a standstill and disrupt the whole economy. At a time when the world is going through an economic crisis and most people are clinging on to their jobs, these blokes are disrupting that as well, because they want a salary hike!
The private sector employees are not at all looking forward to a salary hike, simply because they are aware of the situations their companies are facing. They are just plain happy to just keep their jobs. But these blokes who either are plain stupid, to understand the economic situation, or are having vested interests, decide to hold the rest of the country to ransom.
I would just propose to fire all those who refuse to work and employ new employees or just to hand these over to the private sector who can run it. These idiots will learn a lesson then, like those idiots of the 83 July strike.
Ever since I started working from home, one of my biggest challenges had been being productive. When you are working from another room in the house, the opportunities for distractions have been far greater. Whether it is to satisfy an urge to get something to munch from the refridgerator, or to go play with the kids, or to get a quick update on match on TV, etc, the list can be endless.
Over the past few months I have found a few things that worked for me and I thought of sharing them. The motivation for sharing is partly because some of these tips I picked up from a variety of blogs on freelancing and work@home.
I had to adopt some strategies as some attributes that help successful freelancing do not come naturally for me. One of the worst being I used to be a champion on procastinating.
Practice some sort of GTD:
You don’t have to be a champion on GTD. But it helps to have some sort o a workflow that you follow. GTD proposes a great workflow and I use a slimmed down version of that.
One of my main challenges has been in finding the tools. I am yet to find my ideal tool. But between a notebook (the paper type, not a computer), my iPhone with a few free task applications, Google tasks, I make an attempt to record all the stuff that needs to get done.
I also a great fan of unfuddle for managing software projects. It provides a tool that is more geared toward software projects without the overkill or the complications of major project management tools, which is ideal for small projects with small teams and short timelines.
Find the times that work for you best:
All of us have times that we are more productive than the other times. These are the times when our energy levels are highest and our concentration is sharpest.
For me these times are the morning and the night. So I have planned my work day in such a way that I can make use of these times.
I schedule other activities such as meetings that requires me to go out and meet clients to those times that my energy I low. Having to go out and meet people is better option when you’re energy is low rather than trying to work on your own.
But I am not always able to dedicate these times for doing paid work. Go instance some mornings I have to drop and pick my daughter to school. An sometimes there are other errands or family matters that need to be done at those times. If that happens I shift my work hours to other time slots.
Stick to a schedule as much as possible:
One of the first things I tried to do when I started out was to get rid of all schedules. And that was the biggest mistake I made. Nothing hardly got done without crunching everything at deadlines.
Set targets:
This is something that helped me to get things done and also to keep my income in check. I target to do a cetain amount of work everyday. There is a monthly target and a weekly target and a daily target. Sometimes I may exceed the daily target but sometimes due to other tasks that I have to attend to, the weekly paid time target may go off target. I try todo my best to cover the weekly target. If I fail to meet my weekly targets, I know that it will result in a dent in my monthly income.
Time box:
This is something that has worked out for me really well and help me deal with procastinating and meeting targets as well. When I work I try to work in a chunk. Spend a chunk of time like 2 hours on a task. I reward myself with a small break after the specified time was spent on the task.
This also helps me meet my targets without getting burned out. This also helpse pace out my day.
Be flexible:
The greatest of plans go off th track. So the key is being flexible and having th ability to adopt the changes and disruptions. I still get irritate when my work plan gets disrupted. But I am trying my best efforts to be flexible. One of the advantages of freelancing is it gives greater freedom to become flexible.
These techniques and this work flow has helped me keep my productivity at a higher level. This also helped me to keep my income in check. One of the great worries of freelancing is the fluctuating income. While getting work is the primary fact in meeting this, once you land work, getting things done will ensure that you deliver on the work that you have taken up.
This post is made from a hospital bed from Asiri Surgical Hospital. Written with a IV fluid attached to my right hand, I will keep this short and sweet.
I ended up in a ‘luxury’ room out of no choice, as all the low priced rooms were full, and thanks to my wife’s insurance policy which covers me as well.
It is a great room with a cable channels on a LCD TV. They have a DVD player and there is a DVD collection as well. The other features in the room are state of the art as well.
The best thing I like about this place is the free WIFI. Helped me be in touch throughout my stay and now it is even helping me blog on my laptop. I wish all hospitals in Sri Lanka could be as well equipped as this one! It would make hospital stays memorable.
Sri Lanka Telecom has started to block web sites. I think the idea would have been to block out pornography related web sites as there was a new law which was passed in paliament which banned pornography from computers and mobile devices. But in the process SLT has blocked out access to all the domains I own.
I have a couple of domains of my own and another few I manage on behalf of my clients which are mapped to Google Apps for email hosting. These domains have sub domains mapped to enable web access. And now none of these domains can be accessed through their domain names. Luckily for me, as these are google hosted applications, there were alternate URL’s through which they can be accessed.
SLT’s official position has been that SLT IP range has been blocked out from google. This is a bit hard to believe since there are a lot of non google sites that are non accessible as well.
Whatever they were trying to do, SLT should hve done this move more carefully. If they block out a clients email acces in this manner the losses could mount to collossal amounts. In this day and age, cutting off access is the worst kind of outage that can happen to a business.
Damn it was heart breaking. All that looking forward, watching matches at the expense dog my productive work hours, and the anticipation down the drain. Our guys did not comeout at the most crucial match.
Congradulations to Paks for their fantastic performance. I wish your team were playing for Us!
Posted with LifeCast
Watching cricket after quite a long time. I was not following this tournament until that last crucial match between Sri Lanka and New Zealand. I wouldn’t have watched it either if it wasn’t for my friend Chandi. But that ignited my interest in this tournament.
So here I am watching the final. The early wickets of Lankan team made me realize why I was not so keen on watching cricket. It is great to watch cricket when our team is going great guns. But not so great when they are not doing so great. As a spectator you feel very powerless as all you can do is to watch and keep your faith in your team. That is maybe the great thing about team sports. And particularly cricket. You cannot really place bets based on odds. On any given day any team can be on top. And that is particularly true for teams like Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
I am going to keep watching. Hopefully I can watch through to the end, even if we win or lose. But it will be very heart breaking to see another team win.
Damn, Mahela also got out! I think now we are really in a bad spot!
I am not a hacker. It is not something that appeals to me. I do not think I have got the patience or the motivation to keep hacking on something. I dont attempt to hack anything unless it is the last resource. And usually, I attempt to hack if the price for the original is way beyond my budget or if it is not available in its original form in Sri Lanka. Usually when you are trying to work with limited resources you are forced to hack out a few things. In the past few months I had to resort to hacking as I decided to work my hacking skills rather than spending money. And both these times I was hacking to use Apple tools.
The first instance was when I created a Hackintosh using my old desktop computer. I wanted to try out my hand at iPhone apps and was disspointed to learn that you can develop iPhone apps only on a Mac. Therefore I went on to create a hackintosh. But since then, I have been too busy with other projects and never got around to developing that iPhone app.
This time around it was the iPhone. There are iPhone that are being sold in Sri Lanka but they are rather expensive. Actually I have a price range that I am comfortable paying for a phone. But the price for an iPhone in Sri Lanka is way above that price range. Therefore I resorted to buy a used iPhone from eBay through my SIL in UK. The phone I bought came with a Turbo SIM but unfortunately it had been upgraded to the latest iPhone OS version 2.2.1 with a baseband of 2.30, which made the turbo SIM useless. This basically made the iPhone to become an iPod which was not something I was ready to accept.
But with the help of excellent technical resources available on the Internet I managed to hack the phone; jailbreak it and also unlock it using software. It is currently running the latest iPhone OS with a baseband (modem software) version which is one version older than the latest. This shows the the power of the Internet. A complete non Apple Nerd, can basically jailbreak an iPhone on his own by Googling!
Oh and I found Bing (the latest search engine by MS) to be better in giving relevant results for search terms than Google. More on that later.
If anyone wants to know the exact steps on hacking the iPhone, let me know. I will write a post with what I did exactly. The simple reason for me not listing them here is because none of them are my original discoveries. I was just following instructions available on various discussion groups, blogs and forums. It should not be an issue for any one to find this information and at the same time they tend to slightly differ based on the phone model and the current software version you are running.
Today is a significant day for Sri Lanka. Our gallant security foces have defeated the terrosirt forces that had plagues this country for over 25 years and finally united all parts of the country. We will no longer have a civial war in our land. At most it will be a sporadic gurilla war. But that should be a walk in the park for our forces.
The western world has had a different take on what is going on here. They referred to the terrorists as equals to the legitimate army of our country. But these same terrorists were a banned terrorist organization in their countries. When the US forces killed hundreds of civilians in Afganisthan in air attacks they were termed mistakes that they will TRY to avoid in the future and wer justified saying they were being used as human shields by Taliban. But when the terrorists were keeping civilians as a human shields in Sri Lanka, our army was asked to cease fighting. They gave credibility to news reports orgonTed by the terrorists and acted upon them while ignoring official statements from our government. All in all they actwd quite funny as if they did not want the terrorists to be defeated. When the western world led by the USA is fighting a war on terror in places like Iraq and Afganisthan because of the threat of terrorism to their countries and were not considering negotiations even as an option, they were telling us to not to fight the terrorists. It is as if there are good terrorists and bad terrorists. Maybe there are terrorists that are useful to them and those who are fighting them. But a terrorist is a terrorist.
Maybe it is because they do not want any other nation in the world to win a war on terror because they, with all their guns and fire power had not been able to win their war! Maybe that is the reason.
would the the same people who were preaching us on how to deal with our internal terrorist issue listen to the same advice when it was given to them when they were waging war in Iraq and Afganisthan or when Israel was waging war in the Gaza strip? As the saying goes “those who preach without following what they preach are similar to the sinners who preach”. Dear preachers, hands off Sri Lank. Let us savour our victory over terrorism.
Powercuts have been a common occurance the past few days. Everynight ther seems to be a powercut of at least half an hour. And to add pain to the misery there was a full day powercut yesterday. Not only did it make getting through the day extremely uncomfortable with the prevailing heat and humidity, it alo made me miss my work.
Since excuses such as those are not acceptable to people in the USA, I ended up working till 4 AM. And now I am trying to get through today like a zombie. I can tell you this, neither my kids nor my wife are impressed. No who said life was all rosy?
I recently upgraded my VS2008 to Service Pack 1 which was a combined update to .NET Framework 3.5 also to SP1. I did update to try my hand in ASP.NET MVC architecture.
I am working on a couple of projects that are using ASP.NET AJAX these days. And after doing this update I started noticing strange issues in pages using AJAX extenders.
First I noticed that the pages containing the AJAX extensions were throwing strange errors. They were usually in the form of “Cannot set value True for property enabled”. This caught me quite by surprise and made me review the HTML over and over.
Once I was sure that there was nothing wrong in the way that the properties were set, and these were pages that were working perfectly, I realized something would have happened after applying the service pack. But I could not find a lot of useful information directly documenting this issue. Most of the issues were reported on the user controls behaving in a similar manner.
After quite a bit of Googling and putting 2 and 2 together I managed to solve it by applying ANOTHER hotfix. This is where I found most of the info from: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/Workaround.aspx?FeedbackID=361826
This is the hotfix that solved it for me: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB967535
Hope this helps someone out there to avoid the mess I was in which resulted in a few hours worth of work just before a major deadline!
I can vividly remember my teens and my twenties. I’m glad that I lived up the years, experienced life to the full. Now that I am turning 33 today, life is taking a different path.
Those were the years that you could eat anything you want, play as much and party all night long and still make it to classes or work the next morning. Had no care for cholesterol or BMI or blood sugar! We played cricket, almost every day and cycled a few kilometers daily.
Now when I cannot play badminton for an hour at a stretch and when you do, the next day you feel as if a truck has run you over! Now the concerns are on losing weight and getting the waist line to a respectable figure, to a figure that you can tell a shop assistant without feeling shy! Typical life story of a Sri Lankan professional male?
But I am not lamenting in any way about how my life turned out to be. I am glad and proud of it in fact. True, I may be a little over weight and a few muscles that needs shedding, which I am working on by the way, but what i have, I truly cherish!
So on this birthday I like to thank all those people and circumstances that I am grateful about!
Thaththa – It’s been a while since you bid adieu. But you have been the biggest influence in my life, my mentor and my role model! Need I say more? Except, I miss you and there isn’t a single day gone by without me wishing that you were around!
Amma – Thank you for putting up with me for all this time. For bringing us up in one piece. You have been the strength of our lives! All relations tell me that I was a brat and now I know what it must have been like, because I have two of my own!
Lush – You are the best a wife can get! I thank my destiny every day for bringing us together. You love me and support me unconditionally and that is all a man can ask for. And you put up with all my sillinesses. I love you and promise to love you till my last breath!
Dinara and Dineth – You are the apple of my eyes. Thank you for bringing a joy into our lives which we did not know that existed before. You two are a handful (and more), but the joy of seeing you two blossom is the greatest joy in the world and brings a new dimension to our lives!
Malli – Thank you for being my brother, friend and advisor. Above all thanks for putting up with me. You give all you have and never expect anything in return. You have always been there for me and I truly value our friendship.
Siri/Diana – Thanks for trusting your daughter with me and also accepting me for what I am. You give me the space and the freedom to lead my life but yet silently support me. You’re the best in-laws anyone can ask for!
Rukshan – I had a brother and then I found another! You are a brother to me and there is no in-law part in it!
All my friends – You know who you are! Far too many to name individually. I treasure every memory with you all and though we don’t get to meet as often as we used to, I know our friendships will stand the test of time and distances. The great thing about the friendships that I have with you all is we can always pick up where things were left off! I have learned from all of you and all of you have been there whenever I needed you all! Remember the good times mates!
Relations – Thank you for being my relations! I do not regret anyone one of you being my relation. Some of us we meet only occasionally and some more often, but what ever the time and distances between us, our relationships will remain!
I have also to thank my past colleagues and bosses who shared the fun times with me, and from those of whom I learned quite a bit. Thank you for sharing those moments with me.
It is a great time to be alive. And a lot is going on in my life right now. So a few years from now, it should be interesting to see how my decisions have played out.
I have taken the plunge. And this post comes one month late. Since the start of April 2009, I am a full time freelancer and an entrepreneur. I made the decision and moved ahead with it. Severed all my strings with the cubicle nation and started in the environments of home sweet home. I felt the fear, but did it anyways (that phrase sounds strangely familiar)
And I have been feeling better than I felt for a long time. I felt peacefulness that i had not felt for a long time. All the stress I had boiling inside me just vanished. I had to drag myself to work some times during the past few months and all that pressure evaporated.
Now I work the hours that I am comfortable (honestly I work far more hours, but I do it joyously), I spend quite a bit more time with my family (my daughter is thrilled that both her parents are at home), cut down time spent in commute, am doing projects that I want to do, learning new technologies every day and actually enjoying the work the that I am doing.
And there is no chance of this work getting bored as the projects that you do as a freelancer tend to be more short term and you are constantly working on new projects. This is a major departure from my last gig, where I was maintaining and developing an old system built on deprecated technology.
The transition had its own set of complications. I was moving from a salaried position to becoming a freelancer which meant that my income was going to vary from being the fixed income to a variable income. This was a major decision to make as I have fixed expenses due to debts apart from day to today expenses. But I had this major confidence that I would be able to earn the minimum that was needed to sustain our family and the first month has been successful in that regard.
Secondly, I was looking at the upside more. As a salaried employee my income was more or less FIXED. But as a freelancer and an entrepreneur the upside is unlimited! I read somewhere that a risk assessment should concentrate more on the potential upside and not the potential downside! And if you see your cup as half full, you know what I mean.
Thirdly, I wanted to always try my hand at starting a business. I have attempted this as a side project a few times, but the conflict of interests and work commitments kept me giving such a project the true effort needed in one. Being a freelancer is in a way, you doing your own business. And it gives me the opportunity to build a company around the services that I offer, do it in a more expanded manner that goes beyond a
single person. So I am finally giving wings to my dreams!
Hopefully, this will enable me to blog more often, do things that I truly enjoy doing, work the hours that I want, spend more time with my family, reduce my carbon footprint (no daily commute for me), exercise more, create more value and earn far more than I DID!
This is a very quick note to record the birth of our baby boy on the 15th of March. He was born early in the morning and by the looks of it seems like he is a pretty active kid.
Both Lushi and the kid are doing great. Lushi has not had a full nights sleep since he was born as he keeps waking up throughout the night and needs to be fed.
Dinara, our elder daughter has instantly taken up the ‘malli’ under her wings. She talks to malli all the time standing beside his cot. Whenever someone comes to see him it is her who takes them into the crib wanting to show malli. I think she is a little bit upset that malli doesn’t come to play with her and wants malli to grow up fast!
With double the responsibilities, honestly I haven’t discharged them as well as I would have liked. The changes on my professional life are keeping me pretty busy and I seem to be preoccupied.
But the changes are going to be good in a way that at least for a month I get to work from home starting April and that gives our little family a chance to be together most of the time.
With the arrival of this baby I had a pretty strange feeling of completeness. It is not as if I had been missing something and now that it was fulfilled. I was never feeling as if I was missing something. But this is completely new feeling that came in, not to fill a gap or a void, but a new one all together.
I think the work is just beginning. Now the task on us is to nurture them to become good citizens in this world, to educate them and to keep them safe!
I am getting the vibes that things are not in my favour. I have seen the things that happened and can spot a trend. I have seen how people were recruited and then shown the door once they were milked.
If you were looking to fill up short term positions with specific outcomes, then it would be really great of they were told that up front. That would have helped the persons concerned to make an informed decision. It would have set the expectations straight.
But when you get people in, promising them long term employment, and then getting your immediate pains solved through them, and then showing them the door is a pretty bad way of running a company. It should have opened my eyes then, but then I kept telling my self, “no it wont happen to me”. But now, it is happening to me.
When I took up this job I knew that the risks were higher. They were offering me an employment contract enforceable in the US. That meant I would have little or no legal protection in Sri Lanka. I also knew that since the company was not established in Sri Lanka, I had to shoulder a large responsibility of setting it up and stabilizing it. These were challenges I knowingly undertook.
I am a trusting person by nature. I don’t set out with a suspicion. So I believed i the rosy picture that my boss painted. What I did not count for was all the games and the politics that I would have had to put up with.
The first few months were great. I set up the operations, recruited the people, set up the infrastructure and did this all by my self. I went and paid the bills, ran the errands and had the work done. I never got any negative feedback regarding the work that I did. Then my probation period was over. I asked to be confirmed in my job. He said that he woudl issue a letter.
When I took up the job, I agreed to a lower salary than what I was asking for during the probation period. I was made to understand that my expected salary will be paid upon my confirmation. So I asked for the salary increment.
Then the flood gates got opened. I was told of a long list of areas that I needed to improve on. I took them positively. Then started the witch hunting. None of the good work I did were not appreciated. But even the smallest mistakes were taken to town! I kept putting up, all the times that I was being hunted.
Now it has come to the stage where I can hardly take it any longer. I know I am still not shown the door as there are still a few things the rest of them cannot handle. And I can see the pressure being put on others to learn those things from me. They are being pushed to learn the things that I am doing as part of my daily tasks. That’s fine. When a company is trying to make a person redundant, they need the remaining employees to pick up his work. I am asked to document all the work that I am doing, so another can do it in my absence (if I was sick, etc – yup that’s what they told me).
And the hunting for my head continued. I was held responsible for everything that went wrong. The funniest was then I was blamed for mistakes done by a person who was not even reporting to me. The respective manager was left scott free and I was the one blamed.
Enough was enough. I tendered my resignation. I was not ready to be made a scape goat. And I wanted to work, when there is professional freedom to perform out duties. So come end of March, I will be blissfully jobless.
Read my post on Giving GTD a Try at my other blog more dedicated to personal development.
Today my beloved BIL is moving to a house on his own. We all used to live in one big house and it was a lot of fun! I was getting used to living in a large family. And our daughter Dinara adores him.
But he has a very important exam coming up and the environment at the house was not one that was very productive for him to study. He just came back after spending 6 years on his own in Latvia and I think he prefers a not so crowded place to effectively study. And also a place that will save a lot of time he spends commuting from Wattala.
So he is moving to his own place in Colombo. We are going to miss him quite a bit. I am going to miss having him around to discuss the latest gadgets and software. Though he is trained to be a doctor he is pretty much a geek as well.
I think the person who would miss him most will be Dinara. Since he is one of her favourite persons, she will miss having him coming home in the evenings.
The whole process of him moving on his own kind of triggered a hidden streak in me also to move on our own. This was something that me and my wife discussed sometime back, but ended up putting it off with the expected arrival of the new baby in March. We didn’t want to leave the support net provided by her parents in looking after the kid, and specially with the new arrival we would need more help.
Anyway, we thought it would be good for Dinara to be with her grand-parents during the time we are at work rather than leaving her at some day care or with a care taker. She would never get the attention or the love she is currently getting from her grand parents and from Rupa, our ever faithful domestic!
But at some point we would have to consider moving on our own. Probably when Dinara starts schooling. But until such time, we would stick to the serviced apartment at my in laws!
Contrary to the official stance of the government recession is having great impact on Sri Lanka. One of the most obvious signs are the drying up of the job market. Take any weekend news paper and check the employment sections and you can see this for yourself.
A few more pointers, notice how many times properties and vehicles for sale ads are being repeated, and the going rate. Property prices are being slashed quite significantly. And how long rental properties have been vacant without new occupants. These are tell tale signs of cash drying up from the hands of the consumers.
And the stuff that usually do not hit the news stands. How many companies did away with their annual bonuses in December. How many did away or curtail the spending on Christmas and new year parties, calendars and diaries they were printing?
So what does it tell the average salary earning professionals? Hold on to your job like its dear life? Damn, I am praying for a speedy recovery from the recession.
Have you experienced getting a print job stuck? Thus preventing you from printing subsequently. You try cancelling the print jobs, but it gets stuck on the cancelling state. Well, it has happened to me several times on Vista, specially when papers get jammed in the printer.
What I had resorted to do in the past was to shut down the printer and restarting the computer. But sometimes, you simply cannot do that because you may be in the middle of some other task, or simply it’s such an annoyance.
So today when I faced this situation, I checked to see if there is a way to clear the printer queue, when it is stuck at cancelling the print job. TypeNet Stop Spooleron the command prompt. This will stop the printer spooler service. Then go an cancel the print jobs by going into Start, Control Panel, Hardware and Sound, Printers, select the printer and select “Cancel All Documents”. You can also access the printer queue by clicking on the Printer con on the Windows Task Bar. This time around you will find that the print job disappears when you cancel.
Then type Net Start Spooler to start the service again. Voila, now you should be able to continue with your printing.
We are experiencing an interesting time these days. Our little girl is starting to speak English and has come to a stage where she is picking up everything that is being said around her. She also seems to understand the meaning of what has been said. Accordingly, she has also learned to express her desires and needs in English.
It is amazing to see how fast children pick up what is going around them. They do all of this naturally without any concept of learning. When you grow, you tend to think about the concept of learning more and more. In your younger days learning comes to you naturally.
I remember when I was doing my Ordinary Level exams, I had a major dileama on the concept of learning. When my parents were telling me to study, I had no idea what studying was. I just kept reading my notes, sometimes without much of an effect.
Anyway, now I am enticed and thrilled at the opportunity to watch my daughter learn to speak. It is amazing to watch a child learn and grow!
Something I noticed. There are quite a few Chinese and Japansese blog posts which have been posted using moBlog. To be honest, I never tested moBlog in any other language other than with default English. But I guess if you cahnge your Windows Mobile’s language to any other language, you can use moBlog to post to your blog in that language! Brilliant! One minor defect though. Your moBlog user interface will still be in English!
The mobile platform war seems to be heating up. So far, the dominant player was Symbian. But there are quite a few challengers to Symbians dominance. MS’s Windows Mobile is now a force to be reckon with. They are getting quite a good market share on the higher end smartphone segment.
Google is trying to grab their share of the pie with Open Handset Alliance and Android. There is LiMo, which is challenging Google and the established rest of established players as well. Then there is Apple with its phenomenal iPhone.
There in lies my problem. For quite sometime I have been convinced that mobiles are the future. I mean even if you just compare the numbers, there are far too many mobiles than computers. And apparently around 14 mobiles are sold in the world every minute. That means its growing.
The carriers also are now concentrating more on revenue from data and hence are promoting applications that will entice users to use more and more mobile applications. So if you are into software and are looking for new ideas, then mobiles are the way to go.
Most of the mobile platforms that are in use today are either proprietary or are Symbian based. Which makes my .NETCF skills more of a niche. Therefore I kind of figured that if I ever seriously consider developing a mobile application that has mass market appeal, I need to master Symbian (as of now). But with the emergence of all these new mobile platforms, is it the way to go?
What I would really like to see is MS making their WM platform open source, and then it becoming the defacto standard. That will push my .NETCF skills from being niche to mainstream. But that seems very unlikely, specially it is highly unlikely that they will make their OS open-source and secondly, even if they did….
But one thing is certain. I need to brush up my Java skills! Be it Android, Symbian or Limo, the common thing they share is the ability to write programs for them using Java! Man how I wish it was C# instead!
Had a peaceful weekend. This was one of the weekends recently where I spent the least amount of time in front of my Laptop. I spent quite a lot of time with Dinara, playing with her, talking with her (she in her own language and me in my language), watched some TV and read papers. This weekend being the 4th of July weekend also helped a great deal as my headoffice in US was closed for business and everyone over there was enjoying their holidays. It was also the last weekend without Lushi’s parents. They are returning to the country from their European vacation early tomorrow morning. As I write this post they must be on a flight back home.
Talking about them being away, everyone seems to be missing them a lot more than anyone expected. They are also missing home and specially our little baby. They are so used tobeing around her, and she is more used to being with them than with us. She also has been missing them quite a bit. There were instances where she kept walking all around the house, looking in every nook and corner, calling out for them. I guess she’ll be one of the happiest people to see her grandparents back at home.
So with everyone returning to work tomorrow, after a vacation in US, and a peaceful weekend over here I have a feeling this coming week is going to be pretty hectic for me. I have two new recruits starting off tomorrow. So from tomorrow onwards I will have two direct reports to manage. Since I am the person who recruited them as well, I am directly responsible for their performance. I am quite confident about them. Just need to wait and see how fast they are going to pick up the work.
So with new recruits starting off at office my work from home days will come to a standstill as now I will have to be at work, setting a good example for them. Eventually I hope to get all the people to work from home sometime, with the rising fuel costs, I think that will be one of the best ways to be productive and to cut down the costs as well. The good news is my boss is all for telecommuting. So as long as my two new employees are still being productive from home, I will have no problem to allow them to work from their homes. I am in the process of setting up the necessary infrastructure to allow people to work from home. Once the VPN is setup, everyone can log into the VPN, download the source codes, access the required systems and securely work from virtually anywhere from the world.
So let me take that task to my weekly task list: ‘Complete the setting up of the VPN’.
Today a bus crashed in to the side of my car. It was no fault of mine. I followed all the traffic rules to the dot and then a bus comes along, unable to brake because it is overladed and travelling at a speed it cannot bear, brakes, brakes, but still keeps coming and BANG!
I was watching the bus coming towards the leftside of my car but I was helpless. I was hoping the bus would stop any minute, inches away from the car, but it didnt. It came and BANG!
Then came the war. People on the bus were trying to prove that it was my fault, which got my blood also heated up. Then the conductor of the bus was trying to teach me how to drive. That took the lid off my anger. Eventaully the driver came to me, obviously realizing that it was his fault and that he was in trouble if this ever went to a court of law, started to plead! A two sided attack on me. On one side total aggression and on the other they were playing the pity game.
But I got the Police to come, told them that I didnt want to press charges but only wanted them to advise the bus conductor on how to behave, gave him a piece of my mind and got my insurance to come and asses my damage!
I would have defintely wanted to go to courts, not to claim the damage, it was negligible, but to teach those b******s a lesson. But the driver seemed innocent and with his pleadings, my heart also melted a bit. So hopefully I will be able to get some of the existing scratches also painted with the insurance money 
I was expecting glass shattering and major upheavals, but my car being the german tank that it is was just scraped with two minor dents on a door! Man both I and all the by standers
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