Video Games

A sort of pre-requisite for being in the technology world is that one should be addicted to video games. I just don't get it though. Why would one want to spend tons of time (urm and money) jumping over hurdles, killing alien bosses just to save the Princess...I think its fun playing Wario Moves on the Wii, but playing Final Fantasy for 75 hours sounds crazy!

Let me try and list my issues with playing video games.
1. Time : I tried playing Zelda. I did put in a few hours. After that, I just got irritated. Sure I am not the most patient person in the world, but why "waste" all this time to learn a few jumps, how to swing your sword and how to correctly press A and B together to shoot.

• I do understand that at least the gamer is using his brain and is not ideally sitting around and watching TV. But, if I want to use my brain, I will go work either on my own projects or on my day-job project. Either of them will be beneficial and no one can argue the useful-ness of using your time to "work".
• Of course the gamer could just be playing a game because he's taking a break and wants to get away from work. Fair enough: so why would you want to get deeply involved in something that will take 50 hours to finish! How is that a 30-minute break? Like I have seen, its really never 20-30 minutes, its about reaching the Save Point and then getting addicted to finishing the damn boss!

2. Money: I am sure people are aware that even if its not a ton ( and yeah right coz the XBox is sooo cheap) of money, you do spend $$ on various different gaming consoles and the games itself.
After Halo1, I want to see how they did Halo2, and oooo Halo3 is out....I played Zelda5 years ago and now they are releasing it for the Wii, I have got to buy it!
Common, you guys have heard this before. I rather spend money on cool sci-fi books or music( maybe ) or something cool!

3. Addiction: People spend hours upon hours just playing and playing and playing! They want to get to the next level, and specially for MMPOG, people get crazily addicted to it. Being this addicted to anything can't be healthy!

Ahh maybe its just me and my short attention span, but hey, we are talking about developers and software engineers too who are probably really impatient, and yet spend hours on their gaming console. Sometimes, I do like playing with my friends and having fun with the graphics and the remotes and the controllers. But, I wish I could get really excited about standing in line for hours for the next big game. I would love to use the Wii remote as a LightSabre just for the ooo factor, and that would last for exactly 20 minutes!

I Hate Documentation

According to dictionary.com, Documentation is defined as : Computers. manuals, listings, diagrams, and other hard- or soft-copy written and graphic materials that describe the use, operation, maintenance, or design of software or hardware. Alas, If only this was the true "definition" of documentation.......

In my company, I inherited a project - lets call it FBB for FooBarBaz. My work is fun ( yes even at a megacorp, work can be fun!). It gets tedious and boring and interesting and I spend long hours @ work, but I am not complaining about that ( at least right now)! What I would like to talk about is documentation on FBB. Documents are required for maintenance of a project, right. So when I come on board, and am expected to 1. start developing 2. fix bugs 3. and support the Support Team AND there is just no docs to make my life simple, I get frustrated. I volunteer to start documentation in order to help me, the next person, the system administrator, and the Support Team. Wonderful: I know exactly what another Software Developer wants to see in a document, and since I am so smart, this shouldn't be a problem. Right?

Nope.....In order for me to write up a document which is actually useful, I have to speak to the people who were involved in FBB since day 1. -> Problems!! Either they are busy, or in another country, or simply not available. So a Software Engineer with very less background in FBB and the system gets stuck with writing all sorts of document, only 'coz she wanted to make life easy!

This is not just one "How does FBB work" document, There are Operations documents ( futile for me to write them up on so many levels ), Delivery Stuff, blah blah blah. I waste my time in doing "work" that really should be done by someone else. And of course, this is a ASAP requirement, BUT I need to focus on content as well as the darn formatting.

Don't get me wrong - I think we need documents in order to plan, develop and maintain a system. But the problem here is that either we don't have enough docs or we have way tooooo many with so much redundant information, that people just get turned off by documents and documentation. Vicious circle...

log4j

It's not like I am new to this logging API. I am familiar with Appenders, Loggers, Layouts. I have used in a basic manner so when there is a need to dynamically ( on-the-fly) change logging settings.
The logging level is the easiest property to change. I am messing around with how to change the retention period ( maxBackupIndex ) and the MaxFileSize. I don't think it should be that hard - get an instance of the Appender using the logger. OR change the DOM tree - ewow, I don't wanna do that. If I had an external file, I could use ConfigureAndWatch, but I really want this to happen via a GUI Button.
Ideas, anyone?

Lotus Notes

One of my concerns at work is that I have to use Windoze on my development laptop. Of course, since my corporate laptop has MS stuff pre-installed and I don't have admin rights, dual booting into Linux is hardly an option. My thoughts of getting away from the MS environment was to bring in my personal laptop from home ( runs SuSe ). Since I work with Java, Eclipse, SQL and these are all readily available for Linux, it would solve my irritation. The only reason I would hang onto the corporate laptop is coz it runs Lotus Notes ( useful for emails, meeting notifications, calendar, travel request, etc.....) which was very legacy, closed source and only available for Windows.

But check this out: Free Lotus Notes !!! . Hopefully I can play around with my personal laptop and get Notes installed on it. I am excited! I have been waiting to develop on my *nix environment.

SITA it is

After a few weeks of interviewing, I chose to join SITA . I started last Wednesday and been busy getting introduced to lots of people. My team is really cool and I work with very smart people. I know I am gonna learn a ton from this group of engineers.
So the interview process started out with me being pretty nervous. This was the first time that I was officially interviewing with employers. I mean I know my stuff, but I don't really know how to sell my skills and sounding smart all the time :) But man, this was such fun. I didn't dread it one bit ( except for the driving ) after I started meeting the people, and seeing how exciting it is to talk about different technologies in different settings solving different problems. I got in touch with lots of cool companies, cool smart dudes who gave me a chance to present myself even though my "number of years of work experience" was less than theirs. I am glad that I gave myself plenty of time to look for a job that suits me.
At SITA, 4-5 people interviewed, all the way from my team members to the resident Java Guru to the Director of Software Products. I really like how in a megacorp, I am a somebody. Coming from Choices where I had the power of God to do anything, I wanted a job which gave me good amount of responsibility but also protected me from all the political BS. I also wanted to be in a place where I meant something, and where my views/opinions/thoughts matter. At SITA, I really feel that even the higher ups ( HCE : Highly Compensated Employee ) care about the developers and we aren't just code monkeys. I like that about SITA which is a mega corp but not really!
I am excited about working here ( other than traveling to the office ) and I hope this place keeps me motivated.