Daily Blogs!

At work, we are (apparently) trying to cut down on paper use. One rather good suggestion that has been implemented successfully since a few years now is the use of reusable envelopes for inter-departmental mail. These are yellow coloured A4 sized envelopes with a 3×6 grid of labels that can be filled in with details such as the sender, recipient, location and department. New users are expected to scratch out the last label, so that only one is unscratched (and not blank) at any given time. The system works.

“Cross out previous address. Use repeatedly until all spaces are utilized.“

What’s really fun is to follow the trail that your envelope has taken before it came to you…

Take this last one I have here: It had ping-ponged about ten times between some random guy in one of our offices and the Finance and Administration (F&A) department. Seems like someone has been sending in a lot of bogus claims that are time and again getting rejected!

Or there was this other one, which always goes from office A to office B. I wonder how does it return back to office A from office B. Does it have legs? Or wings? Or maybe it boomerangs back to the original sender. It is not completely outside the realm of belief that higher powers may be at play - such as magic straight out of the Ministry of Magic’s office in the Harry Potter series, where letters fly themselves!

I once also had the pleasure of receiving a used envelope that I had already used twice. Fun to see it come back to me time and again. Almost like a pet.

And there’s this friend of mine, whose girlfriend, also a friend and in the same company as the two of us, is in a different office half-way across the city. So there’s a packet that goes everyday inside of these very envelopes from one of them to the other. It’s filled with chocolates and, I’m told, lots of love. This is such a regular occurance, that the office boy now comes asking if there’s a packet to be sent across!

A particularly evil idea that comes to my mind is hijacking these goodie packets - people often use the evenlopes to send across birthday gifts, chocolates and other yummy stuff such as rasgullas and poha. Unless properly packaged, this is the last journey for the envelope - the sugary syrup and the turmeric flavoured oil make them rather unusable!

I’m going to suggest this topic for those sadist English professors who loath to innovate topics for the standard sixth-seventh-eighth grade essays: An Autobiograhy of the Inter-Departmental Mail Envelope.

I’d like to take pride in the thought that I belong to the information age. With all the good things there are, there is, however, one really painful side effect – Information Hoarding.

In the simplest terms: I don’t feel like deleting anything, ever. Of course, GMail and the ever dropping prices per GB of hard disk space don’t help. And the worse part of all this – the digital hoarding follows me to the offline world as well – and it doesn’t port very well there, given the lack of real-estate-space and all the junk that accumulates.

The logic is simple: There’s no reason to really delete or destroy stuff, unless it is really sensitive, and even then, there’s encryption. Moreover, you never know when you might need something tomorrow, in some way that you didn’t account for today. Then you’d thank yourself because you didn’t destroy it yesterday.

The biggest bane is of course, finding what you have when you need it. Leaving aside the really unique things for which I don’t have any alternatives, I often find it easier to grab a new download rather than search for that needle of information in my now close to over three terabyte of hay-stack. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve tried every search solution that exists today, and frankly nothing really helps me, and I’m not that disorganized.

Certainly, sometimes this information hoarding does make for some really nice surprise nostalgia. I once found some really silly skit I co-authored when in my fifth grade. Unfortunately, I lost the climax to it. Then there was the very first attempt at philosophy – and boy, how crazy was I! Greetings, lovey-dovey letters, emails arguing about the pros and cons of a Intel Pentium 133 MHz versus a Intel Pentium 166 MHz with MMX, my first free email provider registration, a first-grade math notebook, marksheets from my pre-KG and a doctor’s prescription for cough medicine from 1989!

All of this makes me feel a bit sad – why wasn’t I born a few decades later? That way, I’d be able to record every ephemeral second, in every sense that I felt it when it happened. And then being able to get back to it instantly. Yes, all you nit-pickers may point out the obvious problems with that. But for now, I’d like to stay in my bubble and imagine only the positive aspects of such a detailed recording.

Another real issue that plagues me currently: security of this stored information. Not in the sense that someone might steal it, or worse, use it against me in some way – I’m not all that important, yet, for someone to warrant spending all that effort – but in the sense that storage today isn’t entire reliable. The venerable Winchester drive, or the HDD as we all know it today, isn’t meant to last for ages. CDs / DVDs and now the HD-DVDs and the Blue-Rays last only for a decade or two in the real world. So there’s some sort of a false sense of security that we all have, that the information we’ve stored digitally is really secure and retrievable tomorrow. And I’ve not even started enumerating the issues with formats and compatibilities. Not that the offline world is any better suited, but still.

It has been over a year – one year, five months and four days, to be precise – since I’ve last posted here. And I’m feeling terribly guilty and sad about that. But hey, realizing that here’s a problem is half way to solving it. So, this blog is now officially being resurrected. And the non-functioning links have all been fixed. So everything is waxed and shiny – but expect more design and functional soon!

So what’s been up with me all this while: Well, I’ve finished almost twenty months at my first job as a Software Engineer at Atos Origin India Pvt. Ltd. And, more importantly, I’ve finally made it to the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIMC).

But, like the title of this post, it is yet to sink in…
Maybe sink in completely, if you want me to add that.

So, I will join IIMC in Kolkata on June 17th for the two year residential Post Graduate Diploma in Computer-aided Management (PGDCM), which is equivalent of a conventional Management in Business Administration (MBA) degree offered worldwide.

In short, it has been a wonderfully tense but generally enjoyable experience so far – CAT, the CAT result and calls, the GD/PI preparation that followed, the actual GD/PIs, the whole OBC fiasco, the final results and conversions! Whew!

I’m absolutely looking forward to all the fun and frolic, and of course, the insanely rigorous academic programme that the folks at IIMC have chalked out for us fuchhas!

“Like a hungry dinosaur stuck in a snow bank, Microsoft is in starvation mode, eating itself rather than using its energy to look for new food. It knows there’s no more easy new food options available. Microsoft is dying.“