My Thoughts !

Due to our CIO's visit, the declared pooja holiday was postponed from Wednesday to Friday. That gave us a long weekend! Dinesh was driving force and finally Ravi and me landed at Thirssur along with him to Shine's home. We were there for 2 days: Friday and Saturday. We went to the 'Punnagai Mannan' falls - Athirampalli and two other falls near by also. We also went to Guruvayur temple, a place where all the elephants of the temple were kept and then to a dam nearby. 2 days were jam packed. The best thing was the food at Shine's house. Right from breakfast to dinner, it was NV and poor Dinesh, he struggled a lot :-) Few photos here ...

Every good movie will have a "what if" one liner knot in the story.

Consider the following "What if"s:
What if one day, an alien spacecraft covers the sky of every human city? - Independence day
What if one day you wake up and find all your life is just a dream and reality is something different - The Matrix
What if a freedom fighter starts killing people who demand bribe? - Indian
What if a adopted kid wants to meet her real parents? - Kannathil Mutthamittaal

Then the knot would be developed into a nice screenplay. Here is where the characters will be defined and the whole flow of the movie would be decided. If the knot is the skeleton, this is the flesh of the movie

The final thing is the picturization. Here the length of the scenes, dialogs, camera angle, stunning stunts, technologies, etc will come into picture. This is the dress on the flesh. For a given screenplay, this gives a good out fit and its mainly determined by the budget. More the budget, richer the dress is.

Coming back Gajini, it had a wonderful knot like that - What if a person with short memory loss wants to take revenge on people who killed his wife? But looking at the screenplay, a lot of loopholes. What is the necessity of the Police Inspector's role? Nayandhara's character is not properly defined. How come the hero collects the phone number and other details of the villain? And more importantly, why is he tattooing it when he can simply write it down on a paper? Things like these make the screenplay very weak.

Picturization. Should say in many places it was really good. Esp the climax fight where hero fights with the twins. The technology is perfectly utilized(The worst thing is the twin is introduced in the movie only to use the technology! He has no other role than that) Whats not good about picturization is violence. It is too much. From the starting scenes, were blood dripping from the water tap, to the climax, where the villain kills a gal and removes her dresses. Esp the place where Asin gets killed.

The only thing I liked in the movie is Asin and Surya. The scenes where she comes are really entertaining. In fact I thought if the one liner of this movie had been: "What if a middle class gal claims to love a millionaire, and he really falls in love with her", the movie will be real entertainer.

Final thought is that if Murugadass booked Vijay Gandh for this movie, it would have been a block buster as their previous combination - 'Ramana'

To give a one liner about a movie, I can say that: An ugly shaped body on a strong skeleton wearing a good looking dress, which is torn in few places!

Two days back, I was sitting at my desk and was busy working. Heard a 'Hi' and turned back. A guy was standing. Very familiar face but I couldn't identify who he is. He smiled and said 'Remember me?'. I couldn't. Then he said 'remember CSC? Manikandan, Laxmanan, Sabareesh?'. Oh Yeah! I got it. He was a student of mine, when I was teaching C & C++ CSC. It was long back - my 2nd year of UG. Laxmanan, who came to my desk, was studying 1st year BE then. After 7 years we meet! Now he has 3 years of experience and joined here in Verizon few days back. 3 years and this is his 4th company. He couldn't believe that I was sticking with the same company for all 3 years. It was good to see him back and was talking to him.

I was reminded of those good old days in CSC. The golden evenings. Esp. the rainy days. Mostly no students will be coming to the computer center if it rains. We, staffs, would order tea & hot snacks from the JM bakery and have a round table conference, teasing each other in turns. Apart from CSC, I even worked as a pager operator also. Cell phones were just then introduced and rates were too high. Rs 8/- per minute for incoming and around Rs 20/- for outgoing!!! Pager was very popular as its pretty cheap. People would call us, the operators, and give the message. We have to get the message and type it, check it manually and then send it. Our efficiency is measured by parameters like the number of seconds we talk in the phone, the number of spelling mistakes we make, how soon we send the message and get ready for the next, etc. Somehow I hated that job and luckily my boss at CSC was asking me to join back.. I thought for a while and then joined back. Result: I got a hike :-) The pay with hike put together won't even fetch me a booze in a decent bar now. But it was a very big amount for me in those days.

Now the staff and the student are the same company with same experience - most probably he might get a better pay than me. Other guys who was there in CSC - Mani & Sabreesh have now 5 years experience and getting more than twice of what I get here.

Life is really weird!

Yes, Finally Gajini is released! Heard that the opening is so grand and its already booked housefull for few days! The initial comments from the movie-goers are also good. I was so longing to go for the movie on the first day, but didn't get tickets. Somehow one guy booked the whole balcony on sat morning show and it was exclusive for Verizon and CTS makkal. I got a chance to get the ticket, but then I had other important work to do at that time and so decided not to go. I gathered a group for Sunday, but alas no tickets - even in Mayajaal, its booked. May be I'll plan during a weekday sometime next week. I'm not going to miss this film by any chance. Its not for the hype, not for the screenplay, its not for the songs, its not for Suriya and its not for Nayandara. Its all for the cutie Asin!

Again :-( I'm still not sure whats wrong, but my PC is not booting up. I guess the trouble could be with the SMPS as the SMPS fan itself is not working. This weekend, I've to get it ready somehow. I tried contacting Sify to suspend my account till it gets ready. The guy at the call center asked me to mail me. What the heck? I'm calling them because I'm not able to bring up my PC and they are asking me to mail! I went to a browsing center and sent a mail. Then I get a reply that the product can't be suspended. Well. Get lost. Somehow I got Sree's laptop connected and started working. Its all fine now. But all my bookmarks and data is in my PC. I've to get it ready soon!

Last friday I attended the first BEA User Group's meeting. The presentations were about Diablo (Code name for Weblogic Server 9) and Service Oriented Architecture. I was quite surprised that many people didn't know about Eclipse. When the guy who was presenting asked how many of you know about WTP, I was surprised that only 3 hands were raised(It was me, Chaitu and Dinesh). How can that happen? Does everyone else is using MyEclipse or WSAD? It cant be. I guess people who use Eclipse, still use the plain text editor in it to edit JSP, CSS, HTML, etc and use an ant script to deploy. Only 3 among the 300 were using appropriate editors!!! Why the Indian techies has gone so bad? I soon got an answer. One guy had a printout in his hand and was asking me, 'is this the right conference na?' I looked at the printout it said 'Win a mobile phone'. Looks like there is a mobile phone to be given out to one lucky person and he came only looking for the chance of being lucky. I could see few others came for the good food (to be honest the hot dosa with chicken curry was very tasty) So I decided that the real techies stayed back at office/home and were busy coding while the vetti guys who have less/no work and guys looking for free mobile & food came for the meeting. (of course there were 3 exceptions and you know who ;-))

Soon after that I was going thru the blogs which I've read for few weeks. Look here and here for interesting entries about Cedric & budding Indian techies (look for the comments). hmmmmm. Hey fellas, welcome to the club. You got lot of company in the industry.

- iPod Nano, the cute little thing I already fell in love with.
- Blog Search - an Google has created a new search. As like other Google products, its cool. I tried searching for my real name, but lots of Prakash and I cudn’t find mine :-( I recently formatted my C: drive and reinstalled everything. I lost all my blog list and this search is a useful one to find my blogs. To make things simpler, I wrote Google blog search engine extension for Firefox, and hey its working smart
- I finally somehow installed a 512 MB RAM in my system in addition to the existing 128 MB. Installed Windows XP, Google Desktop Search & Konfabulator

When we were going to the Sivasamuthram falls last week, we stopped at some place for lunch. I took my camera into the hotel, but didn't get any nice objects to shoot. Guys were asking me 'Why did u bring ur camera then' Desperately I was looking for something to take a picture and all I saw was this grade filled with bottles. I hesitated to waste a shot in my film camera. Ravi lended me his digi cam and so here is the shot. It came pretty well than I expected :-)

Wondering what the heck it is? Its a building set kind of toy that Ravi bought for his brother's kid. It has metal sticks and magnetic balls. If you have enough of those sticks and balls, you can build any structure, you can image. I was pretty much bored one day and didn't know what to do and was playing with that. Thought how about a photo of it. I arranged it on a sheet and then clicked with my K2. The result is good, with a few tinkering with picasa.

I told here that I've got a good offer. I thought I'll get a decent hike here because I've done a good work. Based on that belief and few other factors, I declined that offer. Its almost confirmed that here I wont get any hike this time. All my efforts towards shipping the product, my decisions on the design, 80 hour weeks, training for other members, personal sacrifices for this project, what more? Now all that for nothing. I've 'promises' for next appraisal, but should I wait till then? May be a good interesting work will make me stay. Nothing is decided as of now. But for the fact, I literally got pissed off because of this process.