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My first experience with golf

On Friday (yesterday) I and a bunch of colleagues (all beginners) from my work place decided to take our first shot at golf, by testing our hitting (not sure if this is the right term) skills with a club at a close-by driving range. I quickly wrapped up my Fri'day-end activities (like filling in time sheets in hundred different applications for zillion different tasks) and reached the driving range. None of us had a "club", and our attire was totally formal... so we weren't really sure whether or not the driving range is going to allow us to hit a few balls. Fortunately, the package also included a golf club along with a basket of balls and most importantly they did not care about our formal attire. They had three different sizes of buckets.. small (50 balls), medium (75 balls) and large(100 balls). So I took a medium basket and a medium size club... for starters, I didn't know how to hold the club... instead of embarrassing myself in front of other pro's there, I quickly approached the person in-charge of collecting the balls from the ground, and asked him for some beginner tips. He was gracious enough to teach me some basics in less than five minutes. Thats it, I then started hitting some balls. It felt really amazing... some of my initial shots were very poor and embarrassing, but after hitting 10-15 balls in different directions, I was able to hit it straight and was on a role. I liked it very much for the first experience.

After hitting 50+ balls, one of my buddy mentioned his week full of frustration at work, kind of started going down. I guess Golf can also be a very good "frustration management" technique.

Ultimate Ajax resources

In 2000/01 when Java and J2EE were emerging technologies, Sun Microsystems had a collection of talks and tutorials from various technology evangelists working for Sun at that time. I felt that the talks (mp3 files) were a great resource at that time. I used to download the mp3 files, burn them into audio CD's and play them in my car when I commuted to and from work. One of the evangelists was Sang Shin. I did listen to his talks on J2EE, JSP's, Java Servlets, Webservices and SOAP. I still remember his talk on SOAP, Sang Shin took on Microsoft and other W3 partners for not involving Sun Microsystems in some of the decision making and finalizing SOAP specifications. I was really impressed with his knowledge at that time.

Now, when I was going through some sun blogs and got to www.javapassion.com where I found a treasure of AJAX resources by Sang Shin. Here you can not only see his passion for AJAX, but also find FREE on-line AJAX courses. The 18-week free AJAX Programming (with Passion!) Online Course is yet to start from October 15th. You can find videos, audio files, pdf's and download labs. For those who are planning to play with AJAX or looking for any assistance this website is a good start.

Thanks to Google and Yahoo...

Okay first, I welcome myself again to post items into this blog. I should thank both the giants "Google" and "Yahoo" for making this possible.

I have to really appreciate yahoo mail management s/w team, which let me retrieve my lost account and password. I am not sure how, but an year ago I lost (shamefully) my one of my yahoo account. As many of you do, I also have multiple yahoo accounts for different purposes and the one I used for blogger.com was suddenly closed (for what ever reason). I tried to log in many times but blogger.com did not allow me to login, and when I used the infamous "Forgot Password" feature, it sent an email to my closed yahoo account. So, I literally stopped trying to log into this website. One day, when I was reading some other blogs, I saw a note saying that we must now use Google account information to log into blogger.com... I was excited and thought I could login with my gmail account and tried... and I successfully did. But, unfortunately blogger.com allowed me to create a new blog but did not allow me to edit the old one. I was hell bent to get my account information and thought about all the ways to get my account information, and I re-tried logging into my yahoo account (the account that was closed), I got a message saying that the email account is invalid and showed me options to register as a new email account. I thought it was cool and registered the mail id. I then used the "Forgot Password" in blogger.com to send me the log in details of my vudathus blog account which they did... and hence big thanks to both Google and Yahoo.

Agile development...

The management in the company I work for decided to change the way we do development, they adopted "The Agile Developement" methodology, which is an eXtreme Programming derivative.

"Winner" by Jack Welch (Former GE CEO)

Anyone who missed Jack and Joe Scarborough's 1x1 on MSNBC last night... here is his advice for all the ambetious people in corporate america...

• First one... always over deliver. When your boss asks you to do something, he already has the answer or she already has the answer. And they just want you to confirm it.When you give them a broader perspective, something that makes them look smarter, think beyond where they have gone, you will have added real value, and you will be recognized out of the pack. And that's a big ingredient.
  
• The second one... Have positive attitude. The glass is always half-full. Don't be a moaner.
  
• And, finally, have lots of ambition, but don't wear it on your forehead.

The best advice Jack ever got.... was advice from his mother was to face reality. It seems she said, "Look kid this is the way it is. See it the way it is, not the way you wished it would be, facing that", which is 100% correct.

Who Moved My Cheese

Last weekend when I was wondering what to do while waiting for my wife to come and pick me up.. I found this interesting book which seemed very small and a quick read.. The book is "Who Moved My Cheese".. by this Ph.D guy Spencer Johnson. I have to admit that this is an amazing book. Grab a copy if you can and read it.