apartment internet speed

Last Result:
Download Speed: 499 kbps (62.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 481 kbps (60.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Wed Jan 12 2011 07:45:50 GMT+0530 (IST)
from http://www.bandwidthplace.com/

And according to http://testinternetspeed.org/ I'm getting .46Mb down, which sounds pretty plausible.

My apartment has five balconies

Yesterday was awesome. My apartment here in India has five balconies, and there were cloves. Smoked a clove cigarette on a balcony in India, check. Had awesome conversations with fellow TWUers, check. Ate pizza in India, check. Had a study party, check. Got an epic series of bugbites which are interfering with my ability to type, check. Awake again at 6am when I don't want to be, check.

Training Day 2

Term: "geeks on a parachute" A few geeks who drop in and make win happen. (Usually a preparatory team to impress the client with a fast result so that the company may be thought of favorably in the future.

It's crucial to make good informal connections with clients so that you will be able to move past your differing technical opinions with good will- whereas if the technical argument is your only interaction, neither of you will feel connected to the other, or very happy about them.

"Get a Linkedin and connect with everyone in this room."

Here, we listen to a recounting of a cocksure young consultant's first two projects and the mistakes that we should avoid repeating. Lesson: don't interrupt clients when they're talking.

Complexities of engagement with the client:

- there is usually internal conflict in the client company.

- understand the politics behind the scenes.

- consultants have influence, not power. The goal is to have a lot of influence.

Book: Flawless Consulting (There are two books by this title on Amazon and I don't know which one he meant.)

In general, there are only 3 reasons that anyone hires a consulting company:

1. Genuine desire for outside expertise (they give you power)
2. Political (infighting)
3. Dirty work (firing people. similar to political.) <- in general TW avoids this strongly

Here, we hear the story of how TW ended up with a certain large contract, and the mess that we had to deal with when it finally arrived at our door. It is long and complicated.

Next, we hear a story about negotiation at the highest levels about toxic individuals and project style.

"Nothing in large organizations happens very quickly."

"Most of the toughest problems we face are non-technical."

Next, we hear a story about a mobile app and the political situation which surrounded its creation and who could access its database.

Skills: trainable vs. non-trainable (can only gain through experience) 

Strategy- building influence through excellence. And then using the influence to affect goals.

We went over the TW categorization system for accounts, in brief. It'll make more sense when we're actually working on a project.

We discuss stereotypes about Indian culture using the example of a shopkeeper who keeps a customer waiting rather than telling him that the item he wants to buy is not in the shop. We must tell the customer "no" and "can't" when those things are true. No beating around the bush. A lot of times, what the client is asking for isn't what they want. Keep asking "why". If you have doubts in a client meeting i.e. something seems impossible or undesirable, TELL your fellow coworkers + leader. Never agree with someone just because they are above you. Also, when telling the client no, offer options and alternative courses of action.

We watch a video about TW and a satisfied TW customer. The satisfied customer still has complaints, and we analyze those. Quote: "choose to understand the craft."

Consultant vs. contractor: respected expert vs. body shop. TW avoids being used as a body shop unless we're doing it as a way to build the client's respect for us so we can have a good consulting contract.

We hear a funny story which warns us against accidental unprofessionalism, and also against lax security permissions on your computer.

What is a risk log? We went over it at a very high level. "A risk log helps to quantify risk." 

We did an exercise "how to put on my shoe" which taught us about how people can (willfully or through ignorance) misinterpret instructions. This uses what I like to call the duty of creative disobedience for the purposes of education- i.e. exploit every loophole in order to show how a thing can be improved.

We did a session called Roles on a Project, which was pretty interesting and elucidated many acronyms. 

We did an exercise involving making paper hats and submitting them to a trainer posing as a client for evaluation... the client valued different things and we got to figure out what they were by question-answer. 

Session on how to give good feedback: art critic exercise. There was much hilarity. Renaud's picture was the best. "I think you should make it more clear that this man is vomiting." and "Is that blood???"

thekua.com/atwork  is an excellent blog for consulting skills

Sumeet recommends books:

What did you say? By Gerald Weinberg 

Crucial communications by Tom Peters

Sumeet recommends a lecture by Randy Pausch called The Last Lecture. It's about "achieving your dreams" and that sets off my fluff-o-meter but the clip he showed of it was pretty excellent.  

Written feedback is often unspecific and has adjective overload. But this is ok or at least not that bad as long as you give good verbal feedback.

Constructive feedback as the number of incidents increase: first talk about content, then about pattern, then about relationship.

History of TW assignment.

How did TWU get its current name? See the long below quote. 

Make sure it doesn't scare off immigration/border protection officers! We got into trouble when it was called "Global Boot Camp" because immigration officers thought that ThoughtWorks was sending people off to India to train with some sort of para-military organization. http://twuname.ideascale.com/ (check out the comments for more info)
The original name of the program was "Global Boot Camp", something most people felt was good and described how new hires from college would be trained once they joined TW. "Global Boot Camp" was also catchy; we could use it when talking to our customers, and even they started asking if we could run boot camps for them.
Unfortunately, this name doesn't work so well when it comes to crossing borders. Everyone involved had to be instructed to use "technical training course" when going through immigration at airports and border crossings, so we wouldn't cause any alarm. Apparently, that still didn't matter, because a ThoughtWorker unrelated to the GBC was stopped at an airport and asked "what is this 'Global Boot Camp' thing all about?"
In the search of a new name that still sounded catchy but had less of a militant edge, we through around a few names for the next round of training. Some of those that were rejected included the following:
"ThoughtLearning" (according to our brand guidelines, we can't break up ThoughtWorks)
"Global Thought Learning"
"Technical Training Course"
"ThoughtWorks Center of Excellence"
"Neville Singham's School for the Gifted" (Gary Larson fans united around this one)
"[ThoughtWorks.edu]" (couldn't get the domain)
So, we ended up with "ThoughtWorks University." We're not trying to be smart-alecky nor are we full of ourselves. We just needed to find a name we could use consistently to throw to the recruits, regional invitation letters, t-shirts and the corporate website.
We want something that rolls of the tongue and is easy to understand. If you want a better name, please suggest one soon.
https://confluence.wazokazi.com/display/GBC/About+the+Name

OpenSpace on Arduino, soldering, and makerbots (possibly with practical demonstrations)

What is (bring mine)

• soldering
  - flux
  - lead-free or notlead free
  
• an Arduino
  Show it off. Microcontroller. It has its own dev language.
• a makerbot? (I only wish that I had one of these)
  - prints plastic, can make shapes that modern manufacturing can only do in many steps
  - prototyping
  - ideally self-replicating
• hackerspaces
  - there's one in pretty much every city, and usually several
  - PS1 in Chicago
  - Janga in Bangalore http://www.jaaga.in/bangalore-hackerspace

What would you do with one?

• Everyone say an idea

And then we will discuss... I expect it to be over relatively quickly (especially considering that not that many people are signed up for it...)

defeating jet lag

I slept during the normal hours of the night! Woke up to my alarm at 7:30 feeling triumphant but groggy. Now we're at the Orchid, eating breakfast... and it turns out that when I take both my wake-me-up pill and the weekly malaria pill at the same time- even if I take them both with food like they're supposed to be- the feeling it creates is to say the least interesting. I wonder how well I can learn while under the influence of pills which reportedly give mild psychoactive side effects.

The ill appears to have vanished for me and several other TWUers, which is excellent. I hope it stays away!

Service culture

The nice man in the uniform at the buffet ladles your soup for you, and the nice man in the uniform by the coffee pours that for you, and asks you how much milk you want, and if you add sugar he uses your spoon to mix it in for you. And there's full waiter used-plate-pick-up service during/after the buffet meal. I thought that the point of a buffet was that it was self-serve, lol.

Anyway, just another culture difference

My first post to the main forum!

Was totally inspired by Rrodrigo's courage in going first. I mean, I just sent an email to the entire company (or at least the ones who don't filter out the townhall mailing list) ...that's like 1800 people and includes people whose books I've bought and read. It's exciting.

I was replying to a thread about diversity in hiring, i.e. quotas vs. goals, with a side of how to get the pool of interviewees to be more diverse.

On a related note to diversity recruiting, I also am currently at TWU (dev, Chicago office) and I am interested in the small and diminishing presence of women in IT and what can be done to redirect the trends towards a ratio which more closely resembles parity.

My favorite document on the topic is a (longish) howto by Val Henson about how to avoid driving female Linux users out of groups, and how to find more and retain them. I believe that his points are very generalizable to the IT industry as a whole. http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/

When it comes to interviewee's backgrounds in computer science, I too am one of those who came to the field from an unexpected direction. I was in the Humanities department during my undergraduate career, and programming didn't gain me anything in my particular academic or social circles. I think that, as a solution, "lowering the bar" is worse than the problem because it gives fuel to the cultural theory that women in IT are not as skilled as their male counterparts.

I believe that mentoring of female students by women in the IT industry gives good result percentage per time invested on the part of the mentor. Mentoring needs to start with students before they enter college, where they have already begun to choose their specialties. In fact, I think that late middle school (7th and 8th grades) may be the ideal start time for introducing the specific field and attributes of our field to students.

Random notes

Future TWUers: the 24-hour cafe in G-block named Java is a sit-down place but you can get take-out. Take-out is an extra 7Rs. A box of white rice is 35R - jut under $1USD.

Bug bites are a perpetual and severe annoyance.

One of the door greeting guys at the Royal Orchid has an amazingly excellent hat, and shook everyone's hand as they came in the door. :)

Cultural differences regarding complementing clothing continue to confuse me. 

ponderings on professionalism

What are traits of professionalism? Here's a short list of my current learnings.

• staying late if the situation requires it
• having a passion for your job
• making sure things get done properly
• everything that falls under customer commitment- not just for the hours or the money but because you're proud of what you do
• showing up on time
• if they ask for something and you think it's not the best thing to do, tell them no, no matter what. You could do it and just pocket the money, but don't.