[overheard from the next cubicle]
A : dude, what is this? Is this really an 8GB thumb drive? It’s so small..
B : Yup ..
A : How much did you pay?
B : 350…
A : ohh .. where?
B : FlipKart ..
A : Ohh, a flash drive?
B : FlipKart.com
A : ahhh …
Wondering what would have gone through B’s mind … sigh!
I’m quite sure that most of us has been in this situation and that you will concur with what i say here.
Picture this, your’re in conversation with another person. Let’s say a business partner, a colleague or a friend. At the end of the conversation both parties agree that they need to have a follow up conversation of what they were discussing. So, very politely, the other person, offers you the freedom of fixing a follow up meeting.
You’re free to choose the date and time of your convenience. Well that’s what the other person said, right? That being said, the rest of the conversation goes something like this.
“Ok, so how about Thurday 10AM”.
“Hmm.. Well i won’t be able to make it to office by 10. Let’s keep it at 11AM. Then again, if you can’t Thursday 10AM should be fine.”
Arrg! I don’t understand. They wanted us to schedule a meeting at our convenience and now we have to change it according to their convenience?
Am i missing something here? You tell me…
Many of us might have been in a situation where there is nothing much to do in office and you are practically jobless at the job. The most creative ones of us will spend that time learning, researching and innovating. But what about the lazy bunch. They don’t want to do all that. They just want to spent the free time that they have doing nothing but un-productive work.
But what if you’re totally in a fix? What if you just don’t know what to do with the time that you have and you’re just as confused as a blind man at a strip club?
Here is the Top 10 things that you can do to waste time at office, in the order leading up to the least productive activity, in what so ever manner to the company or to you -
Now is the time to open Google or Wikipedia and type in something that you wanted to search for a long time and just couldn’t get the time to do it. It could be the photos of Barbara Mori or the latest flick of Jenna Jameson. Just do it. Read about the gossips about celebs that you wanted to know all the time. Once you are at that page, there will be some other link that will capture your attention, click on that. Sure it will be something that you might be interested in. Else why would it catch your attention. Question nothing .. follow your instincts…
Ever since YouTube has come into existence, there has been no shortage of interesting videos. Search for F1 Crashes, Football, the latest episode of your favorite tv program, watch America’s Funniest Videos. What was the new song from Shakira? Find that on YouTube. Take a look at the related video links it will sure lead you to more interesting videos.
Read blogs, check the blog roll of that blog, follow the links, read more and more. Don’t know what topic to read on checkout Technorati and search for the top blogs under your favorite category.
Once your think you have read enough and has been inspired enough, why don’t you start a blog for your self. Well that’s exactly how yours truly started his first blog. At least it kills the time.
Follow people on twitter, re-tweet and tweet anything to everything that comes on your mind. Follow conversations on twitter. Who knows you might even win free tickets for a movie. People whose real work is to update twitter, read this as Google Buzz and skip to 6
Tons of sites out there that offer free flash based games. Play them find out which of those are worth the time spent (like that matters). Send them to your friends. Playing such kind of games is one of the best ways to spent time. You really never know how time flew by.
Stay connected. When you are not using the office phone for official work, call up your friends. Sure there would be someone who is interested in talking to you. They say at work you need to grow you network. So call up that fellow who joined with you 2 years back and you couldn’t keep in touch. The advantage of this being, when the boss’ looking you are busy on the phone. If he asks tell him you were explaining something very technical to a co-worker.
P.S. You would be required to find like minded people for this.
Just chill out at the cafeteria. Sip coffee, chat, enjoy the snacks, just spent time. There is nothing more rewarding than spending quality time with your friends. Get to know couple of them. Who knows they could turn out to be real jack asses. Then stop hanging out with them, find new ones and just chill at the cafeteria. The advantage of this being, the cafeteria owner might start giving you ‘frequent customer’ reductions.
Orkut, Ibibo, Facebook, MySpace, IndyaRocks etc. etc.
There are a many that you can just select from and be active on. Pick one at a time. Build a network of 200 people. That should be your aim. Try and build that network as soon as possible and then move on to the next networking site. Build again. As i said before there is nothing more rewarding than networking with people. Once your are done with almost all the networking sites available, why don’t you write a post in your blog telling your readers why a particular networking site is better than the other.
You don’t have the habit of snoring, then sleeping is the best activity to do. This requires minimal effort. The flip side being that if your boss catches you in the act its really hard to explain. So think about something very clever before you decide to doze off. Beware there might be other jobless people around that might take this opportunity to take a pic or video of yours and post it on their twitter / blog / social-networking sites etc. After all you are not the only one jobless.
Totally meant for wasting time. It really doesn’t matter if you have work or even a job. These games on Facebook are build for only one purpose – waste time while in no way being productive. You can be glued on to it for hours, without really making any sense of things. Compared to conventional games these games are never ending. Once you have build something on Farmville or your Mafia rating is high enough you can gift items to other people on the network. Its an all in one total time waster package rolled into one.
Straight from the IBM site, this is the definition of DataPower -
IBM® WebSphere® DataPower® SOA Appliances are purpose-built, easy-to-deploy network devices that simplify, help secure, and accelerate your XML and Web services deployments while extending your SOA infrastructure.
Lets stop with that and talk a little bit about SOA, the current architecture and how DataPower fits in.
The middleware infrastructure of an enterprise need to support XML and Web Services, since its emergence and popularity. This meant that the ESB or enterprise service bus had to support the emerging technology. This was proving to be an problem because of -
[1]DataPower SOA appliances address these three challenges with the creation of specialized, purpose-built, consumable SOA appliances that redefine the boundaries of middleware. As the “hardware ESB,” DataPower SOA appliances are an increasingly important part of the IBM ESB family.
As mentioned earlier DataPower is an appliance. So why exactly do we need an appliance what can it do?. Lets looks a typical infrastructure – (this is not how it is but helps to explain the situation 
)
Lets just say that PERL made me a crazy programmer. Then came Python, it made me an insane one. In my previous job, it was all PERL, PERL and PERL. But this current job has made me pick up Python.
Python was picked up because the STAF/STAX automation work required scripts and Python was the candidate. So one fine day i found myself writing this -
#!/usr/bin/python
print "Hello world"
instead of this -
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Hello World";
Then i actually looked back and thought, what was the first real purpose for which i wrote a PERL script – telnetting. Even today i find that telnetting to workstations to retrieve stats, is one thing that i do a zillions times day. The usual telnet script with PERL/Python has to be used along with the Expect module. That guarantees that the session time-outs and failure scenarios are properly taken care of.
But there is one place where you can just avoid Expect module all together. Its when you use the script within the same network and you are 70% sure that the pain-in-the-butt scenario rarely happens. So here it is a minimal telnet script that i have made in both PERL and Python.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Telnet;
$host = "192.168.1.100";
$port = "2300";
$uid = "jerry";
$pwd = "password";
open $inputLog, ">in.log";
$box = new Net::Telnet();
$box->open( Host => $host,
Port => $port,
);
$iLog = $box->input_log($inputLog);
$flag = $box->login( Name => $uid,
Password => $pwd,
);
$box->print("show log");
$box->waitfor('/# $/i');
$box->close;
exit
#!/usr/bin/python
import os, telnetlib
HOST = "192.168.1.100"
PORT = "2300"
user = "jerry"
password = "password"
f = open(sLog, "in.log")
tn = telnetlib.Telnet(HOST, PORT)
tn.read_until("login: ")
tn.write(uid + "\n")
tn.read_until("Password: ")
tn.write(pwd + "\n")
tn.read_until("]#")
tn.write("show log\n")
f.write(tn.read_until("]#"))
f.close()
tn.write("exit\n")
tn.read_until("#")
tn.close()
Happy scripting. 