Read the commencement address by Steve Jobs at the stanford university and kept thinking about what I loved and if I knew what I like? Well, am not sure if what I think I like is what I actually like. If I knew it, then I would probably have been one of Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs himself!
Keeping the question "Have I found what I love?" aside... I think there are more questions for me to answer to myself... hope asking myself these questions daily would help!

• What am I doing to realize what I like?
• Did yesterday take me any closer to my dream and will today do?
• Is this dream dependent on others too? Am I doing something to inspire them?

Apart from asking myself these questions... I hope the curve stays positive :)

Yesterday bunny asked if I had some "ultimate opinions in life", something that I keep thinking of [about my future?]... and before I could say anything much he asked me my opinion about 'management studies'. My answer, as most of you can guess was "management? forget it!"

We had a small discussion following it which was mostly about why good techies go to become bad managers, and today bunny found me a link that essentially summarizes our discussion.

We've come a long way since then, and that migration has sort of reversed recently, both because India has gotten better, and because the US has gotten worse.

But has anyone else noticed an equally disturbing trend lately? I see quite a few techies going to management schools (aka "B Schools").

The title to this post was taken from the same article. The complete article is available here.

Just back from a 10 day trip to Delhi!
These 10 days are definitely unforgettable for many reasons other than just visiting places in and around Delhi. For people interested, the photos are available at http://www.medhas.org/gallery/

Nothing much to say about me. Did my schooling at the Sainik School, Korukonda. Graduated from IIIT Hyderabad and am now working as a software engineer here in Hyderabad. I work at a place that respects my personal interests.

Disclaimer: All the opinions on this blog are my own and are not in anyway related, derived or based on those of my employer.

You can contact me at s.prasad [at] gmail [dot] com

I spent most of this weekend was at the IIIT's annual cultural and technical festival. With many of my classmates coming in from outside this city of Hyderabad, this was one of the most enjoyed weekend in the recent months. Played a lot of tennis, defeated hari and venky in table tennis and cooked chicken for sunday lunch!

I still remember the days when I was at college during Felicity...


After all those wonderful past experiences, this one - the felicity 2005 was a dissapointing one. What ever be the reason, there appeared to be less amount of interest and planning involved.

Its been quite a few weekends since I used a weekend productively...
Last thursday when I was thinking of making a LiveCD that can be used to demonstrate a product, I felt dissapointed that neither Knoppix nor Morphix meets my requirement. Slax was close, but still failed to meet my requirements. Now its my turn to think of a new architecture for LiveCDs - My (It should be Our - bunny and manish with me too) LiveCD will inherit hardware detection from Knoppix and the file-system will be based on one of the existing BSD-Union style filesystem. The modules in our LiveCD will be based on the packages and not directories... Minor modifications in either of the existing LiveCDs will probably do. We will try this over the week or during the next weekend.

Thats it for this week :)

A few months back, when watching the movie 'The day after tomorrow', I appreciated the creativity of the hollywood story writers... I thought, movie makers can go to any extent to make money. But now I change my mind - the nature can be more destructive than you imagine... it can give seemingly small waves enough power to overturn trains, break bridges and ruin the lives of a few million people. Its not easy to recover, but is not helping the victims recover one thing that we can do! Find channels in your organization to donate clothes, medicines and basic requirements and help the victims recover.

Finally, after three weekends of planning, cutting and stitching I managed finishing my first stuffed-toy, the TUX. Its now part of my workplace.

Unfortunate for me, very few people are ready to believe that I made this. Of course mom helped me by stitching all the complicated curves, but It's me who did the calculation of shape, did the cutting and even stitched the simple straight ones. Will soon make another one - a smaller one that would fit in my office drawer ;)

For those who want more surprises, bunny is planning for another new hobby - bonsai. I am ofcourse with bunny in this too.

btw... this TUX is our new mascot (for me and bunny, in our cubicle).
More images of my stuffed-tux available on the medhas.org gallery.

Thinking about my 'long term' goals brought me to a rather general topic - How ethical are corporate ethics? What is more important - personal ethics or corporate ethics? I personally have a big list of can-be-done and cannot-be-done rules, which I respect a lot and try my best to live complaint to them. Here are a few things.

• Should be loyal to the company - Ofcourse, we should be loyal to the company that we work for. Nothing happens without loyalty. I am loyal. I give my 100% when I work and would not, even in my dreams think of being disloyal to my company. This is part of my personal ethics too. With all this, I expect my company to be loyal too. It should take care of me, my needs and my environment.
  
• Notice before quitting the job - Will the company give a notice before asking me to leave the company for any reason? If my company is ready, then I am - afterall every agrement should be mutual.
  
• X years bond in return for the training - Is the training really worth that much? The cost of breaking the agrement should be reasonable. Its not the case in many companies :(
  
• Should not be on the rolls of another company - I do not agree with this point. How does it matter as long as I am loyal to my employer? Is it not sufficient if I keep both the works separate? Its my life and I am not a bonded labour.
• Intellectual property - many companies claim all publications by the employees to be theirs, irrespective if how relevant the publication is to the type of work the employee is assigned to. Do the employers expect the employees to be not creative? Does the employee not have the freedom to think in his off-work timings and publish his findings?

Please do post your comments. I would love to see what others feel in this aspect.

One thing... the rate at which I blog went down significantly, is it because there is nothing special that I came across or just that the initial 'JOSH' has come down?
May be, its neither of the two but I am busy with a lot of other things - Sorting out a few sensitive and important issues, schedules at my work and developing a new hobby of stuffed-toy making are a few of them.
Me and bunny started thinking seriously about making our workplace a much better and an enjoyable place to work. Both of us zeroed in on adding another member to our cubicle - the Tux, and this adding-tux-to-our-workplace thing kept me busy developing the new hobby of stuffed-toy making. With about half the work done, I would soon be posting photos of my workplace and my first stuffed-toy too :)

Keep visiting!