WIP ... an update

Work was a bit hectic last week, what with go-lives and all, but still got some more time to work on the pic, and here's the result :

and then got to work some more, and completed the hair...

I love doing the hair. Its easier, you can give the definition of the shape and fall with bold strokes and not care too much about the details. After all, a strand or two out of place does not do much to change the shape of a face... unlike the eyes of course. So I rubbed out the awry left eye that I had done last time, but havent corrected it yet ...

The pic is taken with a K-750i, the latest addition to the collection of my gizmo addict room-mate, its autofocus camera is simply wow. Beats the hell out of many digicams, let alone fixed focus cell-cams!

Any gyaan on how I can do this better ? please comment !

Unparalleled Institution of Fraud and Hogwash

Past couple of weeks has been to say the least, very eventful. Alumni from my famed institution were at the flash-point, bearing the brunt of a system that has struggled to overcome its tendency to nurture double-standards. Somebody from my immediate neighborhood became an instant celebrity after a windfall jackpot at KBC. I have been vicariously yet vividly involved in this flux. It makes sense to jot them down.

Gaurav’s stance has been a watershed of an event, where the innocuous looking blog-post has spread like a wildfire to expose the sham that AC is. This extreme reaction was but expected from a person who though has institutionalized public hog-washing and broken records in self-aggrandizing, is inherently an under-educated minnow with a deep sense of insecurity and deep fear for sane and matter-of-factly discussion on his spine-less institution. The brazen, obscene catch lines, without a grain of truth may have taken the marketing exercise to manic proportions, but he is scared ‘coz he also has heard the Bob Marley song. This synchronized machination of his cheap repertoire of fusillade that we have witnessed is the ramification of his deep underlying anxiety. This anxiety is the manifestation of a keen desire to ensure that the systemic plot of mass-fraud is not at all disturbed, coz once the cannonball is displaced, it might never stop rolling. Garnished by the idiotic awards and the meaningless qualifications, all conferred by organizations patronized by the mother-of-all-fraudsters institute of planning and management, and surrounded by a coterie of even-less educated professors whose collective intellectual output is as precious as shit, whose books and papers read like frivolous experimentation with management jargon, this guy has got away too long with his brazen blasphemy to the profession that is management. That the research regarding how this guy has fooled a lot of people for a lot of time is endemic on internet; I hope this result in a just consequence that this foolish nexus deserves.

PS: What was undeniably shocking was the behavior of the Chinese employer!!!
Disclaimer: We are not liable for the views expressed above. These are mere personal opinions, we suggest the readers to exrcise discern and do more research to realize the magnitude of the scam

Work in Progress

I made a promise on 43things about stuff I would like to do in life. Well, two of those are done now, completing a half marathon, and a trip to Goa. More about that in another post. One thing I did note down however, and did nothing about, was to Sketch Regularly. Doodling I did frequently (after all, I do have to sit through lengthy meetings), but all my sketching pencils were gathering dust in the drawer. That’s when I saw this photo of a friend which looked very pretty, and that helped me to at least start on my promise about sketching..

This is what it looks like right now:




















I am using a heavy, large grain paper borrowed from my room-mate; lots more suited to water color than sketching – it has a very rough texture, and would not allow much blending. More important to me was to get the shape right; there were not too many tonal values in the master copy, anyway. However, the alignment of the left eye has gone all awry, will try to set it right at my next sitting. The hair warranted a much darker black, but my 5b Faber Castell is not giving me the desired results on this paper either. Hope to post updates on the work pretty soon, till then any suggestions would be very welcome!

Boss for a Day

Sat, 24th Sep

Today, AJ, my team lead had taken a day off. Being the only other person in the team who was not a new joinee, I took over as the acting team lead for the day.

Being the boss has its advantages. You get to decide who does what. In effect, you decide to do nothing, and offload all your pending work to your underlings. I had been pretending to work on an assignment of documentation the whole week that AJ was there. Painting screenshots on user manuals isn’t what one would say “interesting work”, but having that on my worklist meant that it prevented AJ from handing me over any other “issues” that came up regularly. Hmm.., I thought, this work should get completed today !

Called over PM and asked him how he was loaded today. He was working on the specifications for a development that was high priority. What exactly is “high priority” ? Part of the fun in playing the boss is that you get to decide the priorities of everything. “Have you explained this report to the development team ? No ? Do that. Let them start working while you work on the written specs, no need build in linear dependencies. Documenting the specifications you can do later. That’s low priority. Now there’s this list of user manuals that need to be delivered positively by 4 p.m. today. You need to describe the processes in this list with appropriate screenshots. Start on this, and complete this by 3:00 so that I can review these before submitting..”

……..

Being the boss also has its drawbacks. All issues are routed to you. However, Saturday is normally a light day in office. Only one issue sprung up the whole day.

A mail routed through finance arrived after a number of forwards, saying some user in Baroda wanted :a new cenvatable condition type in import PO's to handle the new Govt levy - Additional Countervailing Duty". Whew . What a mouthful. I sometimes are amazed what sentences people can think up, given some leisure time.
Anyway, couldn't make head or tail out of that line. So, I sent back a mail to one of the guys in finance:
"Please provide the following details:
a) The rate of the duty
b) The cases/conditions where this applicable
c) What is the price basis of this duty
d) Will this be applicable in conjuction with Countervailing duty. (well, I had no idea about that, either, but I guess since he wanted "additional" duty there was some original duty in the first place ;) )
e) Whether the condition was to be made available in OBYC, if yes in what form; if no then what is the alternative to be followed. ( This was a technical term and absolutely irrelevant, but I knew that this would flummox the user and it would be quite some time before he would think up of an answer to that one :D )

We will look into this matter and make the suitable software modifications once this information is made available to us. "

The original mail was sent three days back before it reached me. I guess they would take a similar amount of time in getting back with the answer. By that time AJ would be back, he would know how to handle it ...

Ah, well ! getting to be a temporary boss is fun !

Guns and Roses

Intro

I have to tell you, there is nothing better than a life with a 9 to 5 job and a loving wife. You open your eyes in the morning see her cuddled up besides you and you can never resist the temptation to kiss her. And once you kiss her of course, you just have to move your hands around her. And once your morning activities are over you go to office and all and then work like a hog. Joke around with your colleagues. Call your boss names. And then return back home. Back into your wife's arms. I love it.

The dream i mean. Because I am neither married nor do I enjoy a 9 to 5 job. I work in a bank like many of my batch-mates. I work in the IT field like most others of my generation. And I work from 9 to 9. Sometime even later. Of course there are those beautiful girls in the office that i can look at when I am in the office. But the bitches, all have got themselves a husband or a boy friend. They never cared to wait for me. Not that I care too much either. But still it would be nice and all to have a girl friend. Or maybe a couple of girl fiends.

You might think I am a pervert who has nothing but sex on his mind. True. Only I don’t feel like a pervert. There's this girl who keeps giving me the looks like if I just go ahead and talk she will marry me right there. I am scared. As any other of my age, scared of commitments. Today I have got this proposal to make. Not to any girls silly. Agh!! No not even to boys. I am making a proposal for a change in the software system. Yaah so my life is boring. What can I do? Have started the work. But only just started.

Chapter 1