Wednesday Jun 04, 2008
There is never a dull moment in IEC. The energy, the enthusiasm, the team spirit and passion for work, shows in various forms. Recently couple of exciting things happened and thought it would be a crime if I did not write about it.
IEC Volunteer Core Team
IEC Volunteer Team chosen winners of the "Best In Show" contest from Sun's CSR team. A few words about the "Volunteer Core" team in IEC. This is a team of Sun, India, employees, who take it upon themselves to build, keep alive and activate the spirit of volunteerism among Sun employees in India. This team is highly motivated, passionate and has successfully kept the spirit of giving alive in Sun, India. To avoid the risk of leaving out the most deserving people, I will refrain from naming the individual members of this team. FY08 WWVW, like all past years, saw remarkable participation from Sun, India, thanks to the tireless effort of this team.
Rightly so, this team was recently picked winners of the "Best in Show" World Wide Volunteer Week contest, not only for their dedication and activities, but also for the great work they did on show casing Sun, India's work. What this means is a grant for a volunteer activity through a qualified NGO, to the tune of USD 10K.
Great job, guys!
IEC Quality Forum
IEC Quality Forum is a team of enthusiasts from different product teams in IEC, predominantly in quality function. A key person instrumental in not only forming the group, but also providing the leadership that was required to keep the passion alive and the group active, is Raju Pallath. The quality forum was formed two years ago, (by Raju) and continues to sizzle third year in the running (am already counting FY09, folks!).
This group has evangelized the significance of quality as a function in software engineering and has created a pride among the quality teams in IEC. They did not stop at that. Through the various "bug-a-ton"s for our software products they have created a sense of ownership for engineers (and managers) in IEC, of our products. These bug-a-tons have seen tremendous response from across IEC, irrespective of whether participants were in that product team or not.
Today, the quality forum ended their activities for FY08 with a three day "Quality Fest".
What a show it was!
They ran tools demos (I heard about 150 or more people visited the demo stalls), got an external speaker from Ariba Technologies, to talk about SCRUM, facilitated a panel discussion on "Time to Market vs Quality" 
and of course, concluded the event acknowledging the contributors.
Selvi, the quality forum lead for FY08, announced the lead and co-lead for FY09 - John Morrisson, Lead and Anitha Gopi, co-lead. At this juncture, I would like to thank and congratulate Selvi for her great leadership to this group in FY08, and all the other members of the forum for their passion and energy.
It really feels great to see a group thrive and add value to the eco system that we are part of. Keep it up guys!
More on more things, later.
Ciao,
KNR
Friday May 02, 2008
I have always found myself wanting when it came to using the cool features of blogging, to make my blog not only readable but also approachable. Be it about very basic things about including pictures in my blog, or about adding additional features to make it convenient for the reader, I have always felt that as a bottle neck. That is also one of the reasons I have blogged very infrequently.
However, I have not felt shortage of things I want to write about, share with the community out there, on wide variety of topics including Sun, IEC, personal observations, views, musings etc.
This was a dilemma I had to break.
Today, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Vasanth Vaidyanathan of IPG and trouble him to let me in on the secrets. It was really educative and I think and hope that I have picked up some tricks that will not only be useful for me while blogging but also make me share more.
Thanks Vasanth!
KNR
Saturday Nov 05, 2005
Read an interesting poem at the end of an essay by Prapanchan, a Tamil writer in a recent issue of Kumudam. Prapanchan mentions in the essay that the poem belonged to one Raja Sundarrajan and that he was narrating it as he remembered it, probably not exactly as written by Sundarrajan. And I am here, attempting to translate the essence of it.
Would be interesting to see how much of the original thought can be retained.
Chinese Whispers!
Don't mock at me from the zenith of success
We certainly left together from the start line
Midway, I trailed a butterfly for a while
Prapanchan goes on to say, "Following a butterfly is the way of children, while the way of adults is to follow the line for bread".
What butterfly do you want to follow today?
Friday Nov 04, 2005
Once a week, Kimberley and I talk, mostly about work, but many times about anything and everything - New England Weather, pot holes in Bangalore roads, jabs needed for a first time visitor to India, Horses and, of course, New England Weather.
Did I mention New England Weather?
In a conversation a few weeks ago, Kimberley asked me if I blogged. I said, "yes". Though I was syntactically correct, I left the call thinking, "Do I really blog?". Because in the last twelve months I have blogged only twice, not including this one. When Kimberley repeated the question in our next call, I said to myself, "Alright, you better start blogging again!", so here I am.
One of the things that I have not had the time to really ponder over is my hesitation to blogging. I wanted to understand what really was the mental block. It was not like I do not like to write. In fact, that is one thing I love to do, be it typing an email, putting together a business memo or even writing a fiction (though in Tamil). Then, what was it?
Though the answer's not in 'black and white', I could think of some faint reasons:
* Being an ISTJ (MB Type), I think I was not too comfortable blogging without understanding the mechanics of blogging, the back end behind blogging, the culture of blogging and the need for doing so - which led me to do some reading about blogging, on Wikipedia.
* Fear of exposing myself: Somehow, blogging, to me has a connotation of talking about one self only, which I was not sure was a polite thing to do in a public forum (not a difficult barrier to overcome, I suppose).
* Fear of being seen as opinionated, irrespective of how much I truly could be!
* Fear of saying inappropriate things and making a fool of myself in public.
* and reservations that I cannot put my finger on.
But, in the end I figured that none of the above came close to the joy of writing and *sharing*, so here I am.
Thanks Kimberley, am hoping to be seen around these circles more.
Thursday Jun 16, 2005
Couple of days ago, one of the cool dudes of Bangalore, a fashion guru, was detained in Dubai airport for carrying 2 grams of 'grass'. While the news itslef may not be a surprise in these days, some of the reactions to the event, are truly disturbing. For example, his wife is quoted as saying, among other things, "Every one smokes pot in their life, some time. [so this is not a big deal]". His close friends have said that they would like to see him out early. No one seems to be really concerned about the morality or the lack there of, of the situation. Is anyone concerned about the ill reputation this incident has brought to the country?
I have nothing personal against any of these folks, but am wondering what kind of a society we are in, if such activities are taken this lightly.
I have grown up learning that Virtue comes before everything else. I have grown up reading stories about kings and queens who sacrificed everything to uphold their virtue. This is a land of great people. And it pains when I see that, on this same land, we have celebs who act as if getting caught for carrying narcotics was not a big deal.
Am I the only one who has lost it, I wonder!
Hope our children grow up to be wiser than us!
KNR
Thursday Dec 16, 2004
Finally, I seem to have gotten over the inertia and here I am.
Every time I started typing something with the hope of blogging, I have been procrastinating, in the past.
Anyway, finally, found time too, now that I am winding up my activities and meetings in Menlo Park after a 10 day visit, for our planning meetings. It does feel good to be able to spend 15 minutes at a stretch on doing something! :-), without having heads pop in through the office door.
It has been a productive visit, I would say, to MPK, having been able to meet some key people and arrive at conclusions on some key initiatives, as a management team.
It is amazing to see the growth of OP/N1 RPE globally, in the last many years and the influence OP/N1 RPE is creating across SMI, not to mention the reputation we carry as a truly global team!
Go team! Or to make Binu notice, "Way to go team!".
