Monthly Archive for September, 2009

My New Love

Published on September 21, 2009 in Anu. View Comments

Ohh how I am falling in love with my bike :) . I love riding my CBZ Xtreme even though the traffic in Bangalore is the worst ever imaginable.

I had never been a bike enthusiast. I always dreamed of a car. For some reason Merc has always been my favourite. Perhaps it has something to do with the my having spent an year in Germany when I was a kid. But what really etched the car in my mind was an open top, sports look, blue Merc that zoomed across me in Delhi. It is the same type of Merc that I now desire and hope to own one day. I have seen Carrera, Porshe, BMW’s but none have matched the beauty of that Merc.

Bikes were never in my scheme of things.

Yet, when I moved to Bangalore, I needed a bike to commute from my home to office and back. Having no idea of bikes, I asked my brothers for advice. My younger brother, Ambuj instantly suggested CBZ. He went on about the features of the bike that I did not understand. And Shashank bhaiyya also recommended the same bike, though since he himself has that bike, his advice will obviously be biased. But these are two people whose suggestions I cannot ignore when it comes to the domain of bikes.

So I went the Hero Honda showroom the same day and got the CBZ Xtreme booked. It was delivered to me within two working days.

Then came the greater concern. I had not driven a bike before !! Well, till my engineering days I was happy with my scooty. Then the next 4 years at IIT Kharagpur saw me riding a bicycle. Meanwhile I had car driving lessons and got the DL after passing the driving test. So I knew how the gears and clutch play together, but even then it had been quite some time having driven the Hyundai Santro. And the 4 day training I received from my brother was on a Discover 125cc bike where the gears were all down, unlike the CBZ’s one down rest up system.

Nervously excited, I drove the bike to work the next day. I must not have stalled by bike more than a dozen times in those first 5 kms :P . Its actually a credible performance considering the fact that the traffic was moving in the first gear all the time.

Now 3 months have zipped by and I have become quite adept at driving. Having completed almost 2000 kms, which includes one ride of 90kms, and yet another of 50 kms on the State and National highways respectively. Gaining in confidence, we have now started planning even longer stretch of trips to Nandi Hills, Shiv Samundaram, Mysore and beyond. Yay, the ultimate aim is to make a trip to Goa on bikes, subject to permissions though :( .

Popularity: 8% [?]

A Black Day At FICO

Published on September 19, 2009 in Work. View Comments

:) . Why do people always misunderstand black as synonymous to evil or unfavourable. It is much more than just that. I feel that apart from being a classy colour, it symbolises desire. Agreed it is associated with the dark scheming intentions.None the less, you can’t get smarter than being Men in Black.

Eh, what does black have to do with FICO you might be wondering. And for the uninformed, FICO stands for Fair Isaac Corporation, the company where I am currently employed.

It all started when Shafiq called upon the youth at FICO to revive those happy old days when fun activities were a daily thing. In those fun days of a time long gone by, people used to assemble at the cafeteria or the pantry and spend time chatting away or playing antakshari, dumb-charades, etc. But just as all good things come to an end, so did those days have to when the recession set in. Work became more demanding with the reduction in the number of employees, and people gave up on all the fun.

As Nishchal put it, if you were to ask an employee of FICO what he likes the most about his company, he wouldn’t reply the atmosphere, the mingling of people, the fun of going on treks together. He would perhaps blurt out something like work culture etc, which he hardly believes in. Concerned by this, Shafiq urged us to once again start the Fun Committee which used to oversee all this activities until 2 years ago, but with the added constraint that we have almost negligible budget at our disposal.

Almost a dozen of us attended the first meeting. We formed a committee, identified a leader to represent our group and got down to business right from the first day itself. The daunting task of getting all the lazy coders to be involved in extra fun activities was the motivating factor driving each one of us. But we also knew that change would not be easy to bring in. People are not accustomed to having dumb-charades every Friday evening now.  And if we were to ask them to come one fine evening, hardly anyone would turn up. We had to gradually build up the excitement and get everyone involved.

What could be the simplest thing that we could ask people to do – this was the problem we were faced with. After some brainstorming rejection of a few ideas, we settled at a Dress Day. Yay! 300 employees all dressed up into a theme would be a good way to show your support for the new team of people who are trying to revive the fun culture at work place.

After further discussion, we settled at the concept of FICO in Black. Almost everyone has a pair of black clothes, so it should be a simple enough task to wear them on a particular day. But the girls in our team were not too happy with the choice of colour. They felt it was too gloomy. So we switched to Denims and Blacks theme, which was agreeable to all the members. As an added incentive, we declared that we would go around the works place clicking photos of team and put them up in the notice board and also publish them in our monthly newsletter.

Posters were put up and emails circulated to let everyone know of our intent. But honestly speaking, I was a bit skeptical about the success. I wasn’t expecting more than 50% people to wear the black dress, least of them all the managers.

To my surprise, no sooner did I enter the building, I saw people in black dress everywhere. I couldn’t help but smile. It felt strange and good to see everyone turnout in black dresses. Even the managers were wearing them! In fact, almost 80% of the people were in black. It was just amazing.

Our team went around crazily clicking away photos and making everyone smile. People at FICO are not just a bunch of lazy coders I realized it then.

This was just meant to be a kickoff thing, signaling our intent that we are here to change the way we work. We are here to make people smile again, to have teams interact with each other, to have teams compete each other in what would be our FICO Olympics. On our behalf the intent is very much there, and by conforming to the Denim and Blacks theme, people have shown their support today. It provides an ideal launching pad for us. Only our time, work commitments and imagination can limit the fun we have in our work place now.

By the way, our group is called the Exuberance Team, and I am a member of the Cultural and the Literary Sub-Committee. Yay! Looking forward to lots of earlier-dreaded-but-now-fun Mondays.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Project Euler : Multiplicative Palindrome Number

Published on September 3, 2009 in Problems. View Comments

I am currently stuck at the problem of finding the largest palindrome number formed by the multiplication of two 3 digit numbers. I am not able to think of any solution other than the brute force method.

I have been googling around a bit in between work to find some theory for this. One that I found says this:

If you have a number say abc, and if it satisfies the following inequality

a^2 + b^2 + c^2 < 10

then the product of the two numbers abc and cba will be a palindrome. For example,

221 x 122 = 26962

But this way we cannot find the largest palindromic product.

I need to look more.

Popularity: 5% [?]