From Bay Area to Bangalore - Month 2

First Vacation:

Went to native place beginning of Jan. Brave decision to take the little terror called Akash all by myself. After many many years I get to meet my entire family in one package. Not taking Akash would have been a terrible mistake. The kid kept everyone extremely amused while driving them crazy at the same time. Overall full time pass. Enjoyed the stay at native after 12 years without having to worry about schedules and deadlines (SIGH!) and the pressure of not being able to cover everyone. Also the thought that I have the option to revisit my people whenever I want, if I want it, is very reassuring even though I may not exercise it anymore than before. Return back with heavy but happy heart.


The brave move:
Made the brave move of moving into a rental place with nothing but floors, walls, cupboards and some lights in it. Senior R2Ier's gave a good dose of moral boosting to take such a rash unreasonable step :). We finish the customary milk boiling and sleeping for 2 days at the new home ritual.Whatever you forget, don't miss all-out and of course a bottle of drinking water. The villa community at first seems a little unfriendly. [Note to self: Don't stare directly at new people's faces if you cannot smile at them or atleast smile back when they smile at you. If you are so curious to look, do it when the other party looks the other way, PULLEEZE.] Managed to talk to 2-3 neighbors. Once you initiate the convo it takes at least 4-5 mosquitoes to bite each party before the convo ends with annoyed swatting sounds. Paid for house cleaning in bulk, in advance. Huge mistake. After 1 US-style managed, and 2 micro managed sessions I decide to finish things on my own.

Busy shopping for vital stuff with little help from Hubby and a lot of help from BIL. I find a lot of variety, better prices than US. Even customer service is not too bad. Delivery is like almost free. All goods are delivered together but installation happens in phases @ different times. School admissions done. Both parents being engineers and of course having the needed green goes a long way in securing admissions. It is important that you try for admissions during Nov-Dec time frame for the next school year.

Traffic is bad. No surprises there. But what is bad about it is the surprise part. There are days when you reach home in 1 hr and there are days when it takes 3 hours. Some idiot driver and his silly mistake in a one lane road can easily make you lose 2 hrs of time with your kids. Sometimes that idiot driver can be your own. Civic sense is bad. The other day a whole bunch of people rushed past my handicapped BIL to get into the lift while I stared in sheer dis-belief. Seeing my expression one of the cousins said pretty audibly "this is not America" and still people carried on with unchanged expressions. I swore to myself I will never become like that.

Second round of general Social Observations:

I observe that people are generally much less offended when you are a local and have all the time in the world and don't visit them Vs. you come from abroad in very less time,are sick all the time and then don't visit them. Common sense dictates the reverse but I come to realize common sense has committed suicide here long back. Attending some distant relatives function is more important than setting up our own house. It is OK not to spend time with kids as long as you get your chit chat time with some general visitors. There is a mandatory obligation to invite atleast a dozen people for a ritual(the necessity of which itself is questionable) that can be easily completed with 4. One cannot question this without being looked upon like an alien outcast.

Food still takes the cake. But then again there is too much of a good thing. It is showing up on my waist. Not too happy about the new found personal growth. Have to curb the urge to splurge.

End of the day, it is just a game of time and patience here. You have to wait out the settling down game. There are no shortcuts or fast tracks to it. You have to suffer through the little pains, few annoying people, the irritating circumstances and unnecessary botheration before you develop a thick skin and start enjoying what is good here. Also one needs to be highly adaptable to change for a while and expect the un-expected all the time. There are days when I dream of my life in SJ and wake up pretty sad that I am not there. I ask myself often, why did I have to throw away a well packaged, perfectly tuned life that was running like clock work and really what is it that I am getting in return. I don't have an answer to that question, at least not yet.

From Bay Area to Bangalore - Month 1

Pre-Move
Leaving the place I lived in for 12 years, almost a third of my life and almost the whole of my adult life. Mixed feelings, resentment for having to leave a well settled life, my dearest friends, the work which I never felt was 'work':at the same time hope for something new ,something different, a break from the monotony probably. Scurry of good bye parties from beloved ones doesn't make it any easier to say exactly that.

Post-move:
Landed in Blore. The way the parted brothers greeted each other was priceless. Usual vacation like welcome and environment.A week or 2 go by that way.

Work:
Then comes first day of work. There is a beautiful campus with a clubhouse and other facilities and then there is an ugly building opposite to it where the spill over employees are housed till the 2 new buildings are constructed sometime mid year. No brownie points for guessing which building I get to sit in. I get a very high traffic open cubicle, but on the other side is the full view of outside. I get to keep an eye on the driver from the third floor. He doesn't know it. I am the only member of my team here. All processes are similar to Cisco SJ except for one major difference. When some one says something takes 2 hours , they actually mean 2 days. Hmm few more days go by and I realize that's true everywhere, not only at work. Now only if someone can make my manager understand the IST jargon..specially since I am on Indian payroll it should make all the sense *wink* *wink*.

Observations on life in general:
I feel life is in full color here with a lot of dimensions to it. The roads, the functions(in lieu of parties), shopping scene, the movie experience, everything is so alive. Every day is new and comes with different surprises, some time shocks but it still new :). Currently put up at in-laws, quite far from work. Commute each way takes couple of hours. I leave around 8:00 Am and am back around the same time PM. Sometimes I miss that monotony back 'home'. I miss being able to getup and grudgingly doing my treadmill. I miss making my own tea. I miss having my oatmeal with dry fruits while I browse through my mails. On the other hand, I love the filter coffee being handed to me as soon as get up in the morning. I love the fact that I don't HAVE to drive, and better still I don't ever have to listen KLOK 1170AM again. The radio scene is so awesome boss, what can I say, too many choices.

There are innumerable shopping choices. Getting to each choice takes a good chunk of time and dependence on someone(mostly driver). Sometimes I have to depend more on the driver than I depend on Hubby. Everything looks awesome when you buy it. It may or may not stay that way depending on your luck. How much you pay or where you shopped has no relevance.

Saved the best for the last , the food.THE food. THE FOOD. YUMMY! Everything is Yummy, food at home,food in functions, food in multicuisine hotels, food in international hotels, food on the street side, food in low end veg darshinis, all food is mind numbingly delicious with one exception, my cafeteria food. People really have to work hard to come up with that kind of tastelessness. I have started locking up my lunch along with my other precious belongings after eating only once at my cafeteria.

Lack of privacy is an issue. Maybe it is just the environment I am in. Generally life so far here has been a mix of some good days and some bad days, which is the case with life anyways. Looking forward for better days ahead like always.

More later..

Lesson 1: How to use the mouse and get past the lock

The mouse connects to a USB port on the side if it is a wired mouse. Sometimes a mouse can also be wireless. If you have a laptop the rectangle pad like area with 2 equal sized buttons on the bottom also serves as the mouse. Let us start learning with the regular 2 button wired USB mouse.

The demo graphics of mouse: Left button , right button.

First be comfortable with the mouse. It is a mouse not a bomb. Hold it and move around the screen till comfortable. Now take up a particular task like say move the mouse in precision around a large image.

Once comfortable , learn how to use the left mouse button. This is the most important click action to learn if you have to use the mouse effectively. Move the mouse to places where the cursor changes and try clicking on it to see what happens. Ok! First know what a cursor is . The small image that moves around when you move the mouse is a cursor.

There are 2 buttons on a mouse ,one on left and the other on right. The left button is the most heavily used button. Most of the select and open actions are done using this button .

Mouse single click and double click concept: The mouse button can be clicked just once or can be clicked twice in rapid motion. If you take a pregnant pause between 2 clicks they qualify as 2 single clicks and not a double click. Single click usually selects an item while double click opens it.

Mouse right click. The button on the right is used to do some secondary tasks .We will go to the details in a later class.

About computer security and unlocking the computer: You must have seen a box with some mumbo-jumbo in the center of the screen . When someone types a password into the screen it suddenly takes you into a screen that you want to see in the first place. That is called locking a computer. You lock a computer to avoid others from looking into all that private information you have put into it. A password is special secret word (can be a combination of letters and numbers and more) you type in to let you into the computer. Do not share the password with anyone who is not allowed to look into your computer.

Typing password, removing caps lock, getting in through enter or mouse click:

Type the password wherever it says password. If there is no word password anywhere but just a box with a button near it , type your password into it and press the button. Now you can use your newly learnt mouse moving and clicking skill to click the button after typing the password , or you can press the button in the keyboard with the word “Enter” on it. Both of these actions take you into the computer.

Tip of the day: Don’t click while you move and don’t move while you click.

Assignment:

1>Unlock the computer with your password.

2>Move the mouse to one of the icons(images with some text on the bottom) on the desktop screen.

3>Double-click to open it.

4> Whatever opens press the X button on the top right corner to close it.

5>Repeat steps 1-4 till you are not afraid of the mouse and it’s workings anymore.

Computer Lessons for the senior citizens.

We have an old adage from where I come. It goes " if you couldn't bend the seedling, bending the tree is out of question". This adage manifested itself in front of me more than once as I was trying to teach my double-graduate soft skills challenged mom the basic use of computers. The mistake we do is we 'assume' they have to know some basic stuff. It blows yours mind at the way they struggle with some things which are allegedly simple like say keyboard and mouse use.

I am starting this blog as an ongoing journal of the small baby steps to take to achieve complete computer literacy for the generation that missed out on the wonderful world of computers and internet.

Pre-requirements are:

1>The course assumes you right-handed. My mom is, so ..
2>Ability to read and understand instructions in English.
3> Ofcourse access to a computer with an external mouse.

The power of UI

User Interface ..the first thing that comes to one's mind is ...'yeah this is what you do to let the user interact with the product'. But do we really realize how much power lies in small module we call UI?

The UI can take a product from 'yuck ..this thing is driving me crazy. I may have to take a training class to use this' to 'Wow! this is awesome..yeah the product does not have all the features of it's competitor but wow man!, just look at their screens'. Tell me why IPOD is not just another MP3 player with a great UI. IPhone = mediocre phone service+great UI driven features= must have for everyone. Cisco introduced Telepresence sometime back. I was wondering , isn't this a really hyped version of video conferencing which existed since so many years. So what is the big deal? Great ,no gorgeous UI.

Yes the product and it's features are important , but how many of us are ready buy something that looks like something that just crawled from under a rock. Companies spend millions of dollars on logos and styling for the company name. The same product, be it a beauty soap or network management software is re-released into the market with "new packaging". Hey! the product is the same ,so why bother about the packaging? Bcoz, that my friends is the power of UI. The power to make things look better that it actually is. The power to send positive signals into the brain of the user even when is doing something not so entertaining. The power to awe and captivate . And the power to do all this using something as boring as software coding is the power of UI.

The journey of Web 2.0 and me (so far)

It all started one day, when one of my cousins persuaded me to join Orkut, a social networking site which lets you connect to friends -(long lost or otherwise). So I register myself ,browse through some profiles (many just out of curiosity rather than with the intention of making contact) and happily go back to my regular life for the day. It dawns to me the next day from various scraps that this is a open world ,where every one can see what anyone is doing.

Having been on the web for the past 10 years, I have seen the web go through several phases . I have always felt in sync with the changing ways of the web. But this time I was a little startled, felt a little out-of-sync with the current generation(I am not too old BTW). So I began wondering ,kind of trying to figure out the psyche behind this phenomenon. I had to ,coz if I don't understand it ,how will I ever be able to develop something using it which is why I started investigating it in the first place.

So I do some research and register with a whole bunch of Web 2.0 sites like facebook, flickr, youtube..you name it. These were my musings after a whole lot of time wasting on the web at company cost.

-We had a lot of emphasis on privacy, guarding our data and broadcasting information to only a small target audience most of whom we knew well . W2O has no concept of privacy, forget guarding data and if the target audience is not world wide, it not called broad casting anymore. I guess the term 'world wide web' makes more sense now than ever :).

-The second observation was about blogs themselves. So why do people blog? What drives us to spend time (sometimes several hours) on conveying our opinions and thoughts to a whole bunch of strangers without a face . We are a generation who struggle to make time for our parents, our children and try to keep in contact with closest of friends squeezing chit-chat into 1.25 hr lunches meetings. I am still not able to get it but hey, here I am blogging about it .

-My third and hopefully last thought is who is going to pay for all this. I mean , is this model strong enough to generate enough revenue to keep it going. Will those tweens , teens and young adults who make up most of the W2O audience have time for this stuff when they become busy, earning, responsible(Ahem!) adults. Even if they had the time ,will the interest hold. Targeted advertising and all that blah sounds good on paper but we have already seen it fall through once.

But despite all my reservations I still feel a tiny revolution coming through. A revolution of empowerment. Empowerment through knowledge sharing . We can leverage the technology to make us better consumers, better moms and dads, better friends and over all better human beings.