Worth of an MBA

courtesy http://www.mbaonline.com


Created by: MBAOnline.com

Random Ranch - That. Not this.

I would like to thank my unofficial partners and traffic sponsors "Random Ranch" - The largest country bar in Barrie's, Ontario.

For the record, I have no affiliation with this place, nor am I trying to 'hijack' any web-traffic intended for them. I have had this blog for about 5 years now, and till very recently (okay not THAT recently - about 2 years ago) I had no idea of the existence of such a place in remote Ontario. I only discovered it when the blog promotion/traffic monitoring bug bit me and I noticed the entries sitting above mine in Google searches. I also found an inordinate number of visitors visiting this blog from Ontario.

The place seems to have shut down of late, but hey, considering the significant amount that has come my way courtesy this bar, I feel that a formal mention is the honourable thing to do (besides, I love bars).

So here's to Random Ranch. That. Not this. Or Why not? This too!

Respect the infrastructure teams

For some background on what is coming up, I work on project which involves various (often unrelated) teams plugging their components (pun unintended) into a central framework thereby resulting in one of the largest data access portals in my company. For over 4 years I have hammered away, doing my own stuff, worrying only about my own code and pretty much expecting the "framework" to do everything else seamlessly.

In such a scheme of things, the team tasked with maintaining and enhancing the framework are the bad guys - applying controls, managing approvals, adding/removing jars, and generally messing around with honest middle-class developers like me. Any issue outside of my code is always their problem - missing functionality, poor performance, lack of flexibility and what have you. Their design choices are poor, they use reflection with impunity, and are generally an ugly lot.

So for a little hobby project of mine, I decided to set-up something from scratch. A Java web-based web project, with the fairly standard jsp-Struts-Spring-Ibatis stack. As I mentioned before, I had never done this before but figured it must be easy enough.After all, the great and wise Mr. Hannibal has said - "What one man can do, another man can do." (-from "The Edge")

Bad call!  As you would have guessed by now, it wasn't long before I was drowning in jars and configs and a confetti of components that refused to get glued together. Let's start with the project structure. I had a general idea of my class hierarchies, but how to layout the structure, where goes the source and where the
binaries. Well, simplistic problem that got solved by copy pasting a sample Struts project.

And the jars!! Ah the jars! Sometimes they are missing, sometimes there are too many of them, sometimes they work only with certain version of other jars (which in turn are incompatible with other jars still), sometime they work only if you colour them red in Ecplise...But as before, my perseverance and awesomeness prevailed and everything (a dummy action class and jsp) started compiling.

I swear I am wiling to work for free for any company whose aim it is to rid the internet of outdated technology tutorials. There should be law against them. You read an authoritative sounding "how to..." article ,try to do it, fail, try again since you are convinced that you are the idiot, and then in some obscure comment on the tenth Google page or in some deeply buried change log (I had never read a single change log till about 2 months ago) find that it has been deprecated or drastically modified.

And I hadn't even written any REAL code yet !

Lesson learnt - When it comes to code, never believe you can do something till you have done it at least twice before. And respect the people who are doing it today.

All infrastructure teams I work with - I still hate a lot about what and how you do many thing, but accept this post as a token of my gratitude for doing the dirty work for a lot of us :)

EDIT: I just came across this excellent article by Ryan Tomayko which neatly sums up my frustrations with setting up a Java web stack.

Taking a break

Somehow I have never quite understood this concept of coming back to work rejuvenated from a holiday. I have always heard and read of people who took a break and are now "raring to go". This doesn't seem to work for me.

Not that I don't like my work. I really really enjoy what I do, and I tend to think of my work as "problem solving" than (merely?) programming (I wish they had designations like that - Senior problem solver etc.). I never have Monday morning blues (unless I am hungover) and a challenging day at work is actually more enjoyable than a duh day.

But every time I take a long(-ish) holiday, I find myself totally detached from what I was doing before I left. I find that I have no memory of what was happening and have to go back almost to the beginning, familiarize myself my own work (re-reading your ownn code sucks BTW) and re-motivate myself to get into the problem solving groove. I want to kick-start from day one, I'm not tired, but there is always this massive inertia.

Likely it is due to my working style. I tend to over-focus and binge-code rather than pace out my work. I'm fairly obsessive about whatever I am doing and some of that intensity takes time to return after a break. But I guess no programmer has ever been guilty of working without a looming deadline so I don't know how valid this argument is.

Just one of those thing I am feeling strongly after a week long break.

A very happy new year to everyone!

Role of a trader

Full Disclosure - I am a programmer for a hedge fund.

In all societies in the past, a person's income was directly linked to his/her role in society. Agricultural societies rewarded farmers, warlike societies rewarded soldiers and democratic societies rewarded statesmen. This is not to say that the system was fair or that everyone got what they deserved, but there was a general connection between the craft that was the primary source of a society's prosperity and the status of the practitioners of that craft.

Traders and investment bankers are among the highly paid professionals of our times.And yet somehow I am unable to understand the role they play in our world. As in I understand the role, but not its significance to our lives. What would happen in no trading was done for a week?

The role of a professional trader emerged as a side effect of development of excellent means of transportation. With farmers and craftsmen able to ship their goods far and wide, it became impossible for them to personally be present at the site where theie wares were being traded. Thus emerged the trader-someone who would charge some money in exchange for buying/selling on your behalf. And it is in strictly this role that the function of the trader is critical. Such trading has to be done in order for assets to circulate in society. Here actual assets get introduced into the economy  via the trading function. The trader is essentially as assistant for those creating real assets and value.

Now consider the role of the stock market trader as we see it today. This trader does not generate any assets in the system. By merely playing off one asset against another (No one really knows the reason for volatility, but the likeliest reason is trading itself. Imaging that!!! The phenomenon that the trader claims skill in riding is in fact 'created' by his riding!), he generates a notional wealth which in no way reflects the real world's prosperity. If the stock market climbs a thousand point in a day, it does not mean thhat an equivalent amount of assets have somehow been injected into the economy on that day, or that people are living proportionately better lives. Nor do the actual asset creators benefit from this movement, apart from claims of massive market capitalization, which is merely a poor metric of a company's performance. No one benefits, apart from the trader, who without having given anything to the society, has now cornered a good bit of its money.

Trading-for-the-sake-trading is institutionalized gambling. It is cartel which allows power to shift from those who produce to those who merely piggyback. The trader in an assistant's role can never be too big to fail. The role is very important, but one that doesn't necessarily drives our lives.

This brings me to the concept of bank. But that is a discussion for some other day.

Kislay Verma goes live!!!

Balls to perfection. And Screw the previous post.

The music is here!!! It can be accessed at Reverbnation, Facebook and Myspace. You can also check it out in the whats-its-name on the top-right of this screen.

After many, many hours of tinkering with different softwares, recording and re-recording vocals, being betrayed by sound gurus, and in general trying to perfect the sound as I detailed in the previous post, I finally lost patience and decided to go to the world with home demo recordings. Not that I dont care about the quality any longer but all those hours didn't seem to be improving the mix and I was beginning to get more and more confused about the right tone. So I figured the best way to do this would be to go to the audience and use the feedback. Crowdsource the critical listening, so to speak.

The first 2 songs out are Drift Away and An ode to good times. Drift Away especially has been received very well by the few people who have heard it till now. Rank 20 among Indian singer-songwriters on Reverbnation's charts is not bad for starters (Though admittedly  the category is sparsely  populated).

I must thank Sidhharth, Kalpana and Tarun for listening to some very bad preliminary versions of recordings and giving invaluable feedback.

Next stop is finding some gigs in Hyderabad. If you have any ideas/contacts, please let me know. The beer will  be on me if I land the act.

So if you haven't heard the music yet (What are you waiting for??? The whats-its-name is right there on the right!!), get to it!!! Every bit of feedback is highly appreciated. If you like it, don't forget to share it with a friend. Or ten friends.

Kislay Express is rolling out. Welcome aboard :)

Listen. Share. Support.

Cometh the music

Throughout 2009 and 2010, I was a part of a band called The Turning Brain. We jammed intermittently and though we did manage to end runner-ups in a Battle of Bands competition sponsored by Extreme Sports bar(Hyderabad), the show never really went anywhere and as mentioned in an earlier post, we have now officially disbanded. Playing with Mohtashim Khan, Nishanth Pais, Aabhaas Khanna, Jonas David, Anirudh Voleti and Mohit Lalwani has been my great pleasure and much of what I now know about playing music I learnt with them. Best of luck boys!!! Fates willing, it is not over yet :)

I have been turning my thoughts into lyrics and sharing them on this blog for almost two year now. Almost always, the lyrics have been backed by some melody (however rudimentary). A few of these melodies, were attempted as full-fledged songs by the Turning Brain, but like I said, nothing solid came out of it. Now with the band gone, I finally decided to bite the bullet and record a few of these songs myself. The arrangements would have to be simpler (I can only play the guitar) and the vocals would be ordinary at best, but as Khan bhai would say, my solo career would have taken off!

I have tried my hand at home demo kind of recordings before, but doing the entire shebang alone turned to be a brutal and humbling experience. I have already spent at least 5 days and all I have are just about passable recordings of four songs. The recording, processing, arranging and mixing is tedious business. Also it is beginning to look like I am frequency deaf (technical term-totally different from tone deaf) since some audiophile gurus have told me that I am catching a very narrow band of frequencies and I can’t help but make my blank face at them (“Sounds good only!!”).

So I decided to check out what other people recording solo are doing and was amazed not merely by the numbers but also by the quality of some of the stuff out there (like this, this, and this). I am now convinced that even with the extremely limited gear that I am using, much better sound can be produced than I have currently.

There is nothing more precious in this world to me than my music and I want it to be perfect so that everyone can listen to it just as it sounds in my head. So it is back to the drawing board for me as I try to reach a semblance of quality with the recorded stuff before I can share with others.

It is coming. Await the onset of Awesomeness :)

Lyrics - Fly Away

A long time ago, I blogged about "The Turning Brain"'s first performance and the first song I wrote. The band is now defunct with Aabhaas (drums) moving to Delhi and Dodo (bass) moving to Bangalore. However, sometime ago I realized that it was the only song missing from this blog and that I had lost the lyrics!!! So, after much digging and data mining, I found them. Here we go, for posterity - the song is called Fly Away (Fast blues riff in E and a mind blasting bridge constructed by the then drummer Mohit and Dodo)

Break my heart and set me free
Let me fall inside of me
I can see through all your lies
All the lows and all the highs

You can look but you can't find me
You can try but you wont deny me
You can hold but you cannot tie me
I'll fly way

All my days that I gave to you
Deep inside you were never true
Thinking about it hurts my mind
Were you trying to lose, or trying to find

You can look but you can't find me
You can try but you wont deny me
You can hold but you cannot tie me
I'll fly way

Its all much clearer now
I can see what's your will
You want me to be the butcher
And you want me to be the kill
Well I've got news for you honey
I not a bird in a cage
I'm the burning fire of anger
I am the fist of rage

You can look but you can't find me
You can try but you wont deny me
You can hold but you cannot tie me
I'll fly way

Defending or explaining

This hit me today for absolutely no reason. It hit me so hard that I was compelled to sit down quietly and think about it for a while (in the middle of a shitty day at work). It isn't even a big deal but the way it sort of came together in words in my head was amazing.

I use the word 'defend' here in the context of, e.g., Someone says - "Why didn't you come to the party yesterday?" and I say "well, I..." to which the reply is "It's okay. You don't have to defend yourself".

When we defend ourselves we are actually convincing ourselves that whatever we are saying is correct in essence. We want to believe that though we are sugarcoating the facts, the facts themselves remain. In other words, there is some element of guilt involved. And it always shows.

Explaining is when we want to convince other person. We are convinced that we are on the right through and through but somehow the listener has misunderstood. Our attitude towards the whole thing is vastly different.

I understand that the distinction is so fine as to be mostly moot, but like I said, it's not about the idea but about the pristine clarity with which it exploded in my head - Kind of like the first time I actually UNDERSTOOD conditional probability (which was sadly not until the final year of my college education).

Lyrics - An ode to good times

After a number of brooding, introspective tunes, I've finally come around to writing something more in-the-moment. Yay!!! Even I can write a happy song :)



Everyday, as I prepare, to face the world another day.
I take my time, and do the rounds, and laugh again at yesterday.

I note them down, the jokes and frowns, until they start to come around;
into that rhyme, called good old times, that I can carry everywhere.

Not for friends, they turn away.
Not for love it dies.
For the moments that remain, let's sing
An ode to good times.

When I get stuck, in life or work, and every road is a dead end,
When all around me, chips are down, and all the lips have drooping ends.

I sing my song, and nod along, and tap my feet too just in case
and try to think, like everything, for all of us, this too shall pass.

To the "Do you remember when"s
To the time that flies
When we laughed, till we cried, let's sing
An ode to good times.

Everyday, as you prepare, to face the world another day
Arms open wide, take in your stride, anything that comes your way.

Think of when you worked, from dawn to dusk, but in the end, it was all worth.
Or of the hour, over the bar, of which you recall nothing much...

Good times