Call me Keshav

I was recently advised to use my actual name to Blog by someone whom i believe to be the first visitors to my blog. So I don't have any choice but to accept their advice.

Why did I try to use an alias?
One of the reasons is my first post. Its pretty embarrassing.
Also I value my privacy on the web.

Why am I using my actual name?
Been bored in Office. Wanted to do something daring or stupid!

Update:
I've stopped blogging here and moved to here and later here

A complaint can get you a job!

Failed to get through the interview? Was it because the interviewer was a complete nut job? Don't worry. You can still get the job. Just send an e-mail.

An Email complaining about the interview process actually got me a job offer in an IT company in Bangalore. (BTW this could apply only to IT offshore services companies)

Don't believe me. Read on.... (I will also attach the actual email sent, with the names changed, of course).

To cut a long story short. The series of events

Background:
I was called for an Interview to one of the many offshore software services company in Bangalore. The position was for a "Lead" .

So this was going to be a breeze. Wrong!

• Introduced to the interviewer, lets call him NJ.
• Interview starts, slowly I realise everything is going wrong. I'm asked not to shake my legs, all my answers are contradicted and some of them are laughed at.
• At the end, he makes me look like a joker. I'm astonished that my temper was in check. Hell I'm not a guy who sits quietly. I say a polite good-bye and leave.
• My roommate advices me not to waste time sending an email to the consultant. He says "Nothing would come out of it. This is an Indian company.....".
• But I send the email anyway, a very powerful and a professional email expressing my strong displeasure at the interviewer and azzz.
• But just before I send this big email where I spent an hour to compose, the power goes off in my house. Damn! Bangalore , Damn the politicians, Damn me for not saving a draft.
• Very soon the power comes back, and I log into my Gmail account. Thank God for Gmail!! There is an auto save feature, I love these guys man. So I finally sent that email on a weekday to my consultant.

Post Email. Everything changes...

• My consultant calls me within 1/2 hour of receiving the email. Gets all the details and promises to do something about it. Hmmm...i'm actually skeptical.
• He calls me back and says all hell has broken out in Azzz. My mail was the cause for that and it was forwarded to all the senior mangers in azzz. WOW! Just a mail?
• I go back to azz to start my interviews fresh. The recruiter from azzz meets me to apologize and thanks me for coming back. He loved the mail and tells the issue has been escalated all around.
• This is great. The company has actually taken my side. Was the mail that good?.
• So I go though another three rounds of Interview and they are still not sure if they need me. But they want me, from what they read in my email.
• Now they have offered me some decent things. But I cannot join a company like this and work with people where everything is about ego. Also I have an offer from ThoughtWorks!

I just wanted to prove something - Don't sit quietly, you can make things happen. All it may require is one single email.

click away

I've resigned 2 weeks back and during this 2 months notice period (Its like I'm almost on Bench) lot of activities were planned. One of that was to understand more about photography.

So who better to contact than my friend renith, an excellent photographer. He's all about capturing the beauty of the moment. This was at cauvery fishing camp.

A perfect moment

Business?

I like to capture moments when people are not actually posing for a photograph. A photo album is not about the perfect smiling faces, its about the beautiful moments, funny moments and amazing times.

Here are couple of his good works

In case you are wondering about the weird stand by the group above, it's a battle tank we were tyring to imitate. And that was my idea. The other teams tried - Car, Computer Network!!

Download YouTube videos

An interesting fact about downloading any YouTube video, insert the word "kiss" before the url and just after www. and then you would be directed to a location where you can download the video
so the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr9t9J5_kaI
becomes http://www.kissyoutube.com/watch?v=Xr9t9J5_kaI

However the video is saved as .flv extension and you will need a flv player to watch it.

The above video is of the Bangalore office of ThoughtWorks. And as mentioned earlier "No cubicles" its very different

Good Title. Paris Hilton?

This blog or posts generated interest very recently, and I believe brought my first readers here. How did this happen? Has it have to do anything with the title of the post or by the labels defined by you?

I created a title with the name of a company (ThoughtWorks) and inserted the same word as one of the labels of the post. What do you get? Immediate attention.

Makes me wonder if popular keywords have to be used to get readers to find this blog. So whats next? words like "Microsoft", "Google", "Nasdaq", "Money"?

or why not use really popular names like maybe "paris hilton" or "paris hilton married".

I need to add a counter for this blog to understand the traffic numbers. www.google.com

Surprise! We found you.

Well Hello World!!

Until yesterday I was assuming that I was always talking to myself in this blog. Who would believe that out of the millions of blogs, there would be some traffic here (even if it was one or two people).

All I had to do was create a post with the word "ThoughtWorks" and add it into the tags and I was found out. This is not my real name, it was an alias when i started this experiment (blogging) in Feb.

I called my contact at ThoughtWorks 2 days after creating the new post to chat about other matters and I was asked about this blog, my blog ID etc. I was completely surprised (shocked) that it was found and traced to me. Apparently they read the posts and put 2 and 2 together.

All I could say was "WOW! That was fast and very impressive".

Even though it was flattering that someone has finally read these posts, it was actually very embarrassing, the earlier posts were plain stupid!. This would be the most embarrassing moment for me at ThoughtWorks (But technically I have not yet joined them).

I was even advised to use my actual name when I blog. I'm not sure. What say?

Offer@ ThoughtWorks. Finally!

Finally! I recently proved to myself (again) that i do have at least a dormant Brain. After nearly 3 months of uncertainty, confusion and whatever, my job search has finally yielded something. I now have a very decent offer from ThoughtWorks.

But its very frustrating trying to convince people its a great place to work, maybe next to even Google. How many companies put their employee profiles on their Corporate website?

Here are couple of good links about the company

Roy's social experiment
http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/RoysSocialExperiment.html
First Month at ThoughtWorks
http://ca.rroll.net/2007/03/19/first-month-at-thoughtworks/
Rotation
http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/Rotation.html
Thought blogs
http://blogs.thoughtworks.com/

The place has a very unique work culture and the interview process was very interesting and actually fun. I had to go though 6 hours of discussions (6 rounds) and 2 written tests. The most surprising element was there were absolutely no cubicles, just long tables and flat monitors on these tables. People have been working like this in Thoughtworks.

This is what i felt and i told these guys in the interview when i was asked - Why do you want to change to Thoughtworks?

When I started my job search 2 months back, I was searching for something and I
didn't really know what.. (maybe old passions?). But then I came to Thoughtworks and started my
interviews, it slowly dawned on me that this was exactly the kind of place
where I fit!.

The whole IT industry is going in one way and Thoughtworks tries to do something exactly opposite. I like that!!

one red paperclip

one red paperclip

why am i up and searching for my Blog?

The stupidity continues.....

So I was up creating this blog (check the previous one) and I lose sleep over this....


So being the IT pro, and also supposedly I’m an expert on Google. I do a Search for my blog, and type in some keywords (blog name?) and click 'Search'...Bingo!!! 1 sec there's nothing. Now I try with more keywords (author, post name, anything) still zilch.

Okay now I have an idea, open the Google blog search window and find the blog. And..... Nothing. So now i'm stuck, I open the FAQs and read about searching or listing my blog, I go back make all the right settings for my blog to be visible to the masses (meanwhile hope keeps fading) and still no blog found!!!!

Now i'm really frustrated, I start cursing all the blogs and the bloggers, i'm tired and sleepy it was 2:15AM...all I want is to see my GOD DAMN stupid blog on the Google search results and ive spent like an hour trying to get famous through my blog..hahha..and nobody can even find it!!.

My ego gets a good beating, i'm an IT techie and for the love of god can't search&find my blog in Google. Am I that stupid?

So after a restless sleep, i'm here at the office trying the search again..... I SHALL PREVAIL!! and since I was bored and frustrated, i'm posting this...hoping hoping for the fame that I deserve (damn I should make this post visible to the millions)

Why am I up and blogging?

I'm tired and its late in the night. The lights were off and I was hoping to
dream about the/a beautiful girl. Kash's (me)thoughts - beautiful
gal-> attract girl -> need money-> need lots more-> increase
money ->more salary->better career----------------- blank blank blank!!!!
can't sleep can't sleep!!.

Disclaimar: Dear who ever da one reading this. Please note that what follows is a very big post which takes a lot of time to read and even more to type!!. If you hate reading this then you can skip to the ending (CNTRL+END). I have an interesting idea there, have a look. But if you can get the time to read through this, you'll have some good laughs.


So i'm up and hey since i'm a cool "IT guy" from Bangalore and I now have broadband man!!. So i create this BLOG!!!! Cool Dude here man...most of the guys in my team don't even know whats a BLOG.But again just realized i'm doing this after nearly 200 million folks discovered and blogged. Sad? What makes me special?? i'll say this...

There can be only One.
Let be me!!

(copy+paste from Highlander)

Maybe its this IT city of bangalore that causes these thoughts, I WANT TO CHANGE MY DAMN JOB... this keeps screaming in my head for the last 3 months!!!!!!!. JUst reaalized again tonight that everything that i want and need and whatever is tied to this "JOB"!!!!.

So this is Bangalore and any idiot can change a job in like f*** micro second. So why haven't I? Ans)What job and why? The eternal question, what am I good at????????

Well i'm doing the same thing that the rest of the young minds are doing in Bangalore. So whats special?

"But the difference between you and me?- I make this look good"

(copy+paste from MIB)

I'm trying for the zillionth time to understand what i'm best at...believe me i was the best at a time back (consider a straight shift of 72 hours..loved every minute of it), but my interests keep changing... i want to do something great(my own company and ideas?)....maybe related to people.. I believe i'm perfect with customers

HAH U SAY!! what a loser? Stop being a cry baby and fight for survival like the rest of US u say

---------------

First Thing!! This is my BLog..so the rule 1.Freedom to blog (crap)!!

Second thing!! This gives a start to my third thing (BTW Why do I like anything with 3 three things, three points or three steps..oh well)

Third thing!! I don't want to survive!! I can't survive like this!! I can't do a job that i'm bored with, when i can think about a whole bunch of things to do. I want to do something that I love about!!!

Idea 1: Play video games and get paid for it..haha... Over time i'll be bored with it
Best Idea: start my own small part time business

Okay Okay enough bullshit...i'm sure I have lost 80% of my readers by this time.

hmmmm....readers??...HAHA Man thats the funniest thing i've written in this post. What readers? I just created a new blog out of like a billion blogs and this is my first blog and considering my exceptional skills.. i think i may have readers in like 10 years??.

So the best reader, critic,anonymus or whatever is going to be me for a long while. Now i feel like 'Tom Hanks' in that movie where he talks to the basketball (what was the movie name??? being the IT guy i can search google..but being me i'm just too lazzy to do it)

Oh Cool Quote i wanted to say related to too many dogs and IT guys in Bangalore. This actually sounds funnier in Telugu.

Throw a stone in Bangalore (any random direction) and you hit a dog, if it
missesYou hit a Software Guy!!

So back to losing 80% readership. I'm sure i've lost 100% now or the guys still reading this post have too much spare time or are so frustrated like me, they go read junk like this. OR I may be so good that they love my writing skills and creativity. (I can hope right?).

Now i'm really tired. Its 1:30AM and tomorrow is friday night...ahh fridays is "Sit at home and booze" night. Man my life sucks!!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ok!! This is tough man. I'm a like sends personal email with 2 words and here i 've written all this bullshit. So please someone read this damn thing..criticize, appreciate, love, adore me in your comments, you can even leave a comment with just white spaces.

Would I like that? Yes!! Why? I like to be popular!!.. Man this sucks.. tomorrow i swear to work on my resume and start applying to companies by next week.

Idea!! I was about to spellcheck, but a better way to keep the readership (yeah..thats u)interested, you can be the editor and count all my gramatical and spelling mistakes and leave a count in the comments. (Let me know if this was a really stupid idea..i'm kind of proud about this funny idea)

p.s - can i spellcheck from here through any particular link?