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?