Raj ne meri leaves pe paani fer diya

First thing first. Book the ticket, but Prasad (Narmeta) said he has US credit card :( but suggested to ask Prasad (Nayadu) for the same. and to ship the financial documents to Saama for Form-16. Prasad came and said no problem for making a ticket purchase of ticket using his credit card. He bought the ticket for me and didn't even ask for payment even though I was willing to pay him for that immediately.

Now comes the surprise package from Pune with my relocation bills which Victor was sending for more than week and more shocking was the cost of shipping. 185 bucks.. really a high amount, but blue dart charges high. I promptly paid that immediately after the call. Yeshwant told me that Sunil is throwing his party. He was unhappy that some stuff which he could buy in US, he refused owing to NOT HAVING MONEY.

Now Raj told me some changes about the cashier dashboard reports. One formula was incorrect rather not sure. There were lots of mistakes. Not logical but yes... like names of metrics were non-descriptive, objects not reused. and Non-volatile tables. In Teradata. Something that's rarely seen is non-volatile tables. Oh my god.. I was grilled like hell.. That each second of explaining thins was like an hour to me.. Well, I made changes as per asked, but got stuck at Credit Card Approval report. It reports has only one date column (good) but that's how we were NOT designing the prompts. (This dashboard is going to have 4 reports and it there are unique prompts per reports, user would be promoted 4 times to input same.. very user unfriendly. There is a workaround of this BTW) Here comes totally different Raj. He explains to me the whole logic about about two dates, how they have been connected etc very well. I reallied understood few thing which I had not understood before. And explained things to me very well. :) I'm really surprised. and finally, I found the reason behind non-volatile table too. Blame it to Moving Difference. and Raj is getting married on 5th Feb 2007. I have lost my leaves :( for the same week, I know.

I called up the Engineer to get the PCU fan problem fixed and repeatedly found his cell switched off. These guys are like that. Sent him a message asking for a call back.

Mama I'm coming home (Thanks Adi)

Well.. The first things I had to check was if my leaves on 3rd to 6th Nov was approved. I was not even knowing how would I know that, so I went on intranet to see if it is approved. Well, realized taht even if it is approved it would be costly to go. No check air fair :( So I deleted leave requests and I put new requests for next weekend. Time during Shubhangi's wedding (24th Jan), Jaidev's Wedding (4th Feb), Didi's birthday (4th Feb again), my own (9th Feb). So many thing in line. I have planned the travel too. One more thing. I'd also applied for leave for whole week starting from 3rd Sept 2007. (Govinda aala re!!!!!) Coming back to leave. I requested him taht I have applied for next weekend's leave and I have cancelled coming weekend's leave plan. Well, after 5 minues I got mail sayin g leave status changed. So now I know taht I get a mail when my leave is sanctioned.Now people in team got to know that I applied for leave to be taken alomost after a year. They were amused and laughing..... "You have planned for one year...." I believe you can apply for "week with family" leaves twice a year easily. Probably these guys don't know how I used to apply leaves when in Cybage. One day leave 2 day leave with 3 to 6 months notice... BTW. I don't have a credit card :(( Never liked the idea of "credit" and all these sites takes only credit card. Couldn't booko the tickets. I gotta catch someone to book it.

Lastly, I gotta find a Hardware Engineer. PC got some problem with fan. It stopes after 2 minuts so CPU tempture goes high and as soon as it reaches 75 PC reboots. Sounds funny, but I verified it. Vooo...... This is my roomies laptop. Good that he is on phone with some gal.... Ab bhagwan ne chaha to kal blog hoga.. I have seen some ads. Hope to get this problem fixed...

Headline (rumour) of the day
1. 60% employees of BPO have been laid off. Told straight to find a job in 30 days with 90 days salary as lumpsum payment.
2. Finanacial companies have stopped giving leans, credits to employees of IVYComptech.
3. 888 holdings (Company who owns 888.com) to merge with PartyGamin PLC (Parent company of IVYComptech) -----> This one affects me directly.. More chnages to the reports due to merger. More reports. Abe 888 ka ID 888 rakhna.
4. 32 nations of EU to back a law that would make gambling business more answerable to govts.
Quite good. They should be controlled to some slight extent. Player in USA, Server in Gibraltar, one of Top 100 company listed in London stock exchnage and 95% staff in India. Who the hell is contrlling the money transactions...

It is raining Orkut

It was around 4 in morning and I got up due to some noice. I saw my roomie Sunil closing his shelf. Later he told me he had got up to shut the windows. Read forward. Well I just slept back. Now at 8 O'Clock I realize that is chilling cold even though door and windows were shut. I just looked outside, sky was covered by grey clouds. It was a very nice scene specially seeing the whole city from you window. I live at not one of the costliest but the costliest place in Hyderabad. I like the place with slight extra premium price to stay. It was raining whole day. Could not even go out to get the bike washed. In evening went out and had 5 somasas and 2 Cup of tea at New Jubilee Hotel, the frindly neighborhood tea shop :-). Chao!!!!

I met my many friends or school. Probably for the first time after a break of 11 years. Cool.. Orkut rocks....

I hate innocent people

Hey kinda surprising, isn’t it? But this is about the all people who send me invite for sites. Let it be big or small. Generally I have subscription to all type of site that interests me. Still I get mailers from my few friends to register for some sites. I really get irrigated by this. Only Reason, most of them are new so could be in email harvesting. I hate spams. I hate my innocent friend who sent me a flowered to win Nokia phone keeping some spammers/email id harvester in CC. I have not able to counter spam in last 3 years. I had very jolly 4 years of usage. I didn't get even single Spam. I use service of GMX.net as my primary email. I send my personal mails from this id only, if at all. Now I get around 30 spams a day :((. So just ad advice, if you like a service take some effort to send a personal mail, drop an offline or scrap. Don't use ready-made mailer of websites. Do you know that these sites would keep 1 PX image in image to find the authenticity of the address and sell it? Just to tell you Spam is the biggest cost to ISP. Let us see the offline model first. If someone wants to send you unwanted postcards like "40 din mein takdeer badal gayi." My home in Bombay still gets such mails. The spammers have to spend money for that. But in case of online model it is your ISP who pays to mail server-hosting ISP when you open such a Spam. Totally opposite of offline model. Also, now spammers have become damn smart. They would scan Internet for PC with less security (Blame it on evil empire of Bill Gates called Windows, the most widespread but most useless OS) to use as relay for Spam. This way they can even hid the origin of Spam. So just an advice (1) Don't put anyone's mail id in any web page (2) Don't forward a mail for winning something. Those are just Spam. Remember the "Bill Gates is sharing his fortune" that was the biggest running online scam. It originated some 6 years back I still get mail of people expecting money for forwarding money. BTW, the reason I use Gmx.net as my primary email, because it is world's only ad-free POP-3 supported mail service provider.

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Peter..............

About to finished the report that Peter explained to me. And now Peter pings me about some correction in some report. God knows what does he want!! He changes his requirement every now and then. Chatted with me to do something that he could have had done by just dragging some object (intentionally) hidden from reports. These OLTP guys are really big problem. How much time it takes to write a report on OLTP system. May be 10 minutes. The same would take 1-2 days or may be even more. If not possible then go for Freeform SQLs. Man. how he is chatting with me. I do not know the answers, so ask Ritesh. He was busy with Adi due to last day of week. He asks to ignore him. Well I just did that. 5 minutes later phone rang. That was Mayank asking about the same. Peter wanted a confirmation about the possibility of the same. I was witless, due to not having any information about the table used in the report. He was asking to make that report as he has seen in OLTP system, which we don't see. So can't comment on it. So finally the report guru Sachit comes. HE was the one who made the report about which Peter was fretting. I gave up. Sachit asked me ask Peter to chat with Sachit. Well Peter was still insisting that I should let Sachit know all that. I told his he was the person who created the report so it is better to ask him. Well 1 minute after that Peter said, "When you were not the person having created the report, why were you answering the question?" Bouncer... no beamer....


Just in one day the misunderstanding was cleared…

7 days and 30 Days. 3D Reports (I love myself)

Marketing and Sales are the most ideate guys that you come across in your professional life. Jinx broken with some doubts. Peter had given some reports to be complete ASAP about the user trends. I could say that the main report was very tough. There are total 4 reports. Size keep on decreasing but the difficulty level remains the same. The biggest report was almost completed by Raj. Really very good work. I was given that report in my down time but my approach was incorrect due to set of attributes picking date from different table and it was must to be taken from different tables s that’s how the WH was evolved. Well. I was trying to explain to Ritesh about the second report. They wanted approval % and $ of various card payment methods. Flat report was already present. Btu they wanted the average of same to be compared with last 7 days and last 30 days. After having understood this problem, I explained it to him rotating my finger less in case of 7 days and longer in case of 30 days, as if we were seeing reports. He found it very funny and wanted me to do it again... :)) Well Sriram came to help me out and told me that I can achieve it by "Apply Simple"ing the whole metric. Total bouncer. So He sat with me. Got the SQL. Edited it. And told me to the fine level what to be made "apply simple" [FYI, Apply Simple is the way to use database supported function directly in MicroStrategy. Highly highly NOT recommended by MicroStrategy Inc] Yup. By 4:30 I achieved it. I felt so great. By 5:30 it was tested and found to be correct. Now comes the pick on the day.

I started looking into 3rd report. This has very cryptic column name. I asked Sriram if he knew anything about it. He told me about the entire column he could explain, but he insisted to ask requester of report to verify. Well I pinged Peter on yahoo chat for it. When I told him I could not get 2nd column, rest column were depended upon it directly or indirectly, he just asked my ext. Voila, here is Peter calling you on phone. This thing that I could not get was Monthly Projection and they had written monthly estimates. He explained to me how is that calculated. I could not get it and I could not listen to him well due to my neighbor chatting too much. He is a complete chatter bug. He I just asked him to explain again. Well, He explained it to me all over again. I covered my other ear to hear him properly. (I don't know but this strange thing of not able to talk well happens whenever there is an overseas call, inbound or outbound). Contrary to the feedback I had got about him, I would him excellent.

Sriram and Peter were hero of day for me. Sp. Sriram for making things Simple.

Zero of the Day. Sify Braodband. This blog was supposed to come yesterday but hey someone stole his wire and I was connectionless. Such thing happens in India. My broadband operator in Mumbai had accepted doing such thing.

It is (was) a beautiful day

"Up by 8:00 sharp. Disconnect the Internet. Go back to sleep" funda of a holiday :-). Hey today is Eid so it is off from office. So finally I managed to raise my butt from mattress. Straight to computer. Logged on to net. Checked my shares.. and looked for someone to chat. I and Akhilesh had a good voice chat on yahoo and skype [You can skype me on "a s h i s h 9 2" remove the space] He is just gone to US on H1-B so kinda new to city, just as I'm new to Hyderabad. He told me his plans, good and bad things about US. Not it is time to log off. We chatted till 3:00 AM his time. I let him go when his wife came. So finally had food by 4:30 PM. Again browsing and updating my To-do list of Google Docs [http://docs.google.com]. Use it heavily. I can easily keep my thought/task/docs and access them from anywhere. So now comes the most sucking experience of the day. Dominos. My roomie and I had gone to Pizza Hut. This time I thought to go to Dominos. It was a real bad experience. Hey....
1. You don't wipe clean the table when customer has gone. Most of the table had left over lying just there. Very very disappointing.
2. We took a table, which was clean. Not to forget, it had the food lying there. I had to request the counter for the same.
3. Ordered Farmhouse medium, 2 Coke, 2 Chili Bread (similar names) within 350 bucks. I had to request the guy fro glasses three time. and by the time it reached out table we had finished the food. :((
4. There is no fork and knife provided to cut the pizza. Though it hardly matters but that would help a bit.
5. WTF pizza come packed when I'm dining in?????????????? It is a big puzzle for me.

Anyways, I found a garage that provides service of bike wash. My babe had not taken a bath for so many days. Too bad.

"Add to Percentage" metric added in brain

So here come the ghost of Cashier Dashboard report. Armed with not matching different table heterogeneous for date, 24 metrics.. This gave me cold shiver when I started it. Now having to complete the percentage, it was a tricky part. I added so many derived metrics. Made the report OLAP. Shouldn't be doing that. Keep it Standard Stupid. I played with "Add to ...." is added in my brain.

HR guys .. teri mahima apar hai

I have got so much fed up of job call (Bhagwal kare aise din hamesha rahe), that I made my resume on Jobsahead and Monster confidential. I used to take calls and welcome any mail to forward it across to friends for jobs. But stopped it. But the guys (gals) at Ness, to whom I had replied, ages back realized that I had sent CV????? This opening happened to be at Hyderabad. As usual .. Never said No to anyone in life, spoke to her and she told me that my resume on Jobsahead is search-able. Now I know why I was getting mails (read spam) and sooooooooooooooo many questions were asked by Geeta, the lady who called. My O my...... One thing I can tell you she was so used to searching people for MicroStrategy that she virtually took my mini technical interview. Hey..Ankit she was asking about you man. Tune aisa kya kar diya yaar.... And just 10 minutes past the end of 30 minute interview, another guy from Ness called and asked for the same, in-spite of telling that I had been through this. BTW, No response from Sify about the issues raised... This is what they call ISO certification... :

Sify really really sucks

Sify Broadband definitely sucks. It sucks big time. They're such a cheat. Now they have deducted one more day for having crossed 150 MB a day download limit. Now I was forced to see how come the limit is getting crossed so often in spite of taking utmost care. So I checked the log again. Viola! I download 1435.45 MB between 00:09 to 08:10. So much!!!!!! A speed of 178 MB an hour can be achieved in day dreams. No doubt I get speed of what they promise, but over billing of downloads is too much. They can do a mistake by may be 20% margin. But 300% to 400% error is not accidental. It is intentional. And logged another complaint with them. Their customer care is good for thing. happened to meet a guy who had very little understanding of English. For something which took me 3 minutes last time, it took me 20 minutes to tell him. The customer care executive was someone named Prabhu.

Sify Screw up

Just got up to disconnect the Internet as premium download rate starts from 8:00 AM. But hey... Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind just needs 2 minutes to complete the download. So I decide to disconnect after the movie is completed. After the download I checked the usage. Oh my god. 107 MB between 8:10 to 8:50. That's impossible. A phenomenal speed of 3.75 MB a minute. Now I know why I lost 6 days of Internet usage. (Sify decreases your usage be one day for every 25 MB downloaded above 150 MB daily download limit.) Good way of making money Sify. Fudge the downloads and charge the customers. If you use Sify then do keep a tab on what they show as usage on "My Account". Just logged complaint with them. #4212247. There is no doubt that Sify Broadband gives what it promise. I get speed of 25K for 256kbps plans which is acceptable. I used Beam CableSystem when I was staying at Company's Guest House and I used to get same speed for 512 kbps plan. Let us see what action they take for over billing.

MicroStrategy Free Form SQLs simplified

I got up so late today. It was 10:05. I’m supposed to be in office by 10:00. I straight jumped into shower, got dressed, had Idlies in breakfast and reached office by 11:15. There is reason for being extra late. ;-) Working on the report of Game-bookers KPI, I gave some final touches to the SQL. I really enjoyed making final touches, because I made changes to Free Form SQL reports myself alone. I had to depend upon some one knowing the SQL well to do the same. I removed one complete join that was a great achievement. The joy was only short lived. I had to redo that join due to one separate WHERE clause. I spoke to Adi about my planned leaves in November and I didn’t get any positive reply. Ritesh also told me about the rules that I must follow while creating free form SQL report in MicroStrategy, as no other guy would be bale to make or create any schema change till I’m done. I hope I would be able to keep it, because after today’s tweaking the SQL my confidence level is increased very much. I printed the Rent receipt to be sent to Saama Technologies, my ex-employer, and got sign of landlord, Mr. Neeraj Jamwal, too. ;) I took the help of a site for the same. Here is the link. http://www.vakilno1.com/forms/delhirentcontrol/form_b.htm