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Please go to this new url to find my blog http://daviddehghan.blogspot.com/
Today my friend and mentor Suze gave me this book to read. She doesn't recommend that I leave Microsoft but just pointing out the skills that I have learnt at Microsoft are very helpful in running a nonprofit foundation.
I just read the first 3 chapters; I need to have my own copy of this book. So I am ordering it right away. I will write a review for it soon. So far it had been a pretty incredible story. The author had been at Microsoft 7 years before leaving to change the work. I can relate to that. ;-)
During the past 1.5 years that I have been working for Microsoft India Development Center I have had the opportunity to visit India and China a number of times. Each time I go there on a business trip I try to visit some schools over the weekends and interacted with students.
In January of 2006 on a flight from Singapore to India I came up with the idea for PlanetChild and I couldn't wait long enough for the plane to land so I could start implementing it. Since then I have spent a lot of time talking to people and refining the idea. Now it is finally at a stage that I can start to talk about it broadly.
What is PlanetChild? It is an international non profit organization aimed at improving teaching methods and practices in developing countries and at making them more effective. It is very much influenced by http://path.org/. PATH develops programs that have huge return on investment in the heath care sector. For example they have invented a new syringe that once used it can not be reused and therefore it effectively stops spread of diseases cased by multiple usage of vaccine syringes.
I put this organization together to find like minded people and collaborate with them to develop and implement targeted programs to help kids learn better and faster. If you are interested in helping in any way send me an email.
The first program of Planet Child is Development Through Drawing. I will write more about it soon.
If you want to write a blog about Planet Child please use the link below to include a random child drawing with your post:
<A href="http://www.planetchild.org"><IMG src="http://www.planetchild.org/RandomImage.ashx?Size=M" align=left></A>
This is a 3 part story on how I spent a night on the street in Seattle as an experiment to better understand the life of homeless people that I pass by every day:
Part 1: What it means to be homeless, a personal experience
Part 2: My notes from the night I was homeless
Part 3: What I learned from being homeless
Part 2: My notes from the night I was homeless
These are the notes that I wrote down on paper while I was sleeping on the park bench. I knew even before I started that the kind of problems that I would run into would be completely different than the ones that I originally thought of. In fact, that was the case; the issues that I was mostly worried about never materialized.
But fist my notes from that night:
[About 2:00AM]
I can't not find a cardboard box in the recycling bin outside of my house. The bin is usually full of boxes every single day that I pass by it, but not tonight of course. Well, I can live without it for now. I should just go the park and se what happens.
[About 2:10AM]
I am sitting on a bench in a small park by Seattle Pike Place market. (Here is a picture of it from above). There is no one around except the occasional taxi cabs that drive by. It was freezing cold a few hours a go but now that a misty fog has covered the air it is not very cold anymore. Still, I can see my breath in the air. I am sleeping under a rain shelter in the park. This is the only covered place in the park.
[About 3:00 AM]
A homeless guy came by circled around and is now sitting on the bench about 20 meters away from me. Maybe I should go talk to him...but I am just getting comfortable and I am too lazy to get out of the sleeping bag. OK, if he comes any closer I will just talk to him without having to get out of my sleeping bag.
[About 4:00AM]
No one else is around. So far it has been pretty uneventful.
I was thinking that I would be socializing with people. I had already made up my story: "I am a student from Canada traveling around in the US. I have just arrived in Seattle a couple of hours a go. I am going to find a job to finance the rest of my trip."
This should convince anyone that I have no cash on me. But I guess being homeless can be pretty lonely. No one really talks to you.
[About 5:00AM]
The constant sound of cars going by is very loud. I can't sleep with this much noise. The tiers make noise as they go over the steel joints of the elevated road, which is Highway 99, on the other side of the park. I can also hear the cargo trains going by. The rail road tracks are about 1 mile away. But I can still hear the screeching noise as the steel wheels grind over the steel rails. I can even hear this in my bedroom but because of the double sided window the sound is very much dampened.
[About 5:30AM]
The bench under my sleeping bed is very hard. I keep shifting around but every position is uncomfortable. I am actually not cold yet. I am wearing too many layers of clouding.
One homeless person just passed by me. He was talking to someone else. But my head was completely inside the sleeping bag so I could not really see them.
[About 6:00AM]
The vendors at the public market have started to show up. They are making more noise as they unload their boxes and drag them on the ground to their designated stall in the market. More noise. Man I can't sleep at all with all this noise.
I am actually cold now. It is getting windy and because I don't put any cardboard boxes around and on top of me the wind is getting into my sleeping bag. It was a rookie mistake to not look harder for card board boxes. It would have made a big difference.
[About 6:15]
Ok. I am just too cold and can't sleep with all this noise. Experiment is over. I am going home.
The sun has not come up yet. On the way back home I didn’t see anyone on the street
[About 6:30]
It is nice to be home. I never appriciate my warm bed this much.
Here are some of my key leanings from the past few years of working with wiki communities. I will write more about each of these points in the future posts.
- Use a license that maximizes content use. Give copyrights of the content back to the user.
- Promote your active users to roles of greater and greater responsibility. Make them administrators, content police, editors, spellcheckers etc.
- Create a space where all users can add value. Extract value form everyone: your readers, technical experts and language experts and the silent majority.
- Design for participation. Simple interface, easy to use.
- Don't enforce social norms with software .
- Help the community define and evolve rules of cooperation.
As I walking to our Microsoft Christmas party I passed by a homeless shelter that is in between my house and the Seattle Center where the Christmas party was being held at. I thought to myself I should come at stay at this shelter for one night to experience what it would mean to be homeless. Then I read the notices on the door saying that in order to stay there at night you have to register in them morning before 7:00AM. So sleeping on the street was my only option if I wanted to do this tonight.
It is a pretty cold night tonight, there is a light frost on the street which makes it a bit slippery but I am still determined to do this.
The contrast between a posh Christmas party and sleeping on the street will be memorable. I have seen absolute poverty in India and China before and I have been somewhat hardened by it. When I look at homeless people in Seattle I feel much less sympathetic because I compare them to homeless people in India and China who beside a rag around them have nothing. No shoes, no pants, no backpack, no sleeping bag, no jacket. They simply have nothing. They are very malnourished and skinny to the bones. It is very hard for me to see that level of poverty.
Poverty and suffering from it is very relative. I don’t doubt that homeless people in Seattle in Toronto are suffering. When they compare themselves to people that see everyday driving by in their car or going into their apartments they see the contrast with their life and it makes them feel poor. But what if you could take the same person to India where they would see that they are very rich indeed compared to the other homeless people around them. They would see that they are relatively well off. They would appreciate their shoes, pants, and not suffering from chronic hunger and malnutrition. Now, would that person feel less pain for being homeless after coming back to Seattle or Toronto? Would they feel blessed to have as much as they do?
Every winter in Toronto a few dozen homeless people freeze to death. I tend to believe that there are shelter beds that left empty every night meanwhile some homeless people refuse to use those beds because they can’t put up with the rules and regulations that they have to abide by. They rather be sleeping on the street and being free but cold instead of sleeping the shelter and being warm but having to put up with curfew time, light out time, no drinking and not doing drugs. So they end up sleeping on the street in winter nights when it gets to -30 degrees Celsius and they freeze to death by the sunrise.
At least homeless people in Seattle don’t have to worry about freezing to death at night. I wonder if they think about that problem.
I don’t think sleeping one night on the street with sweat pants and sleeping bags will give me the same experience as being homeless. But it is one step in the direction of me to putting myself in someone else’s shoes and viewing the world from their point of view.
As I was walking back from Christmas party to my house at around 1:30 AM I consciously thought about what I was wearing.
- My suite and tie, which I wear probably only once a year, = $200
- Shoes = 80$
- Camera that I took with me to Christmas party = $2000
- Money in my wallet (I almost never carry cash with me) = $0
- Multiple credit cards = priceless (well, that is a luxury that only a couple of percent of people in the world can afford)
As I am mentally preparing myself for the long night on the street this is what I am thinking of wearing and taking with me.
- Jeans and long johns and sweater = $100
- Cash = $20
- Driver License, in case I get hassled by the police
- Pen and paper, to write down blogs
- Sleeping bag
- Cardboard boxes out of the recycling bin, to put me sleeping bag over
As I was walking to my house I kept looking and thinking about where I could sleep. I can’t sleep in someone’s door step. I would probably get kicked out immediately or in the morning. I also don’t want to risk getting arrested for trespassing. There is a small park by my house where some homeless people and Mexican immigrants hang out. I probably can stay there without being bothered by police or homeowners.
My next problem is getting robbed. I discussed with Jana on where I should put my shoes as we were walking home. I don’t want to take them off and put them beside me because it might get stolen. But I also don’t want to put them in my sleeping bag and get it dirty. So I am going to take them off and put my feet and the sleeping bag over them. Cool, the first problem of being homeless, solved!
I really hope that I don’t robbed or arrested. Beside that I can’t think of any other problem that I would run into.
It is already 2:00AM and I am sure all the homeless people are already sleeping so all I need to do is to find an empty park bench and camp out. I am pretty determined to stay out until sunrise. I will write more after I come back.
There is extensive documentation on Mediawiki on how to shorten the urls from www.yoursite.com/index.php?title=testpage to www.yoursite.com/testpage. After a few hours of research I was able to do just that on my Windows Server 2003 and IIS. It is probably wise to follow the URL pattern of wikipedia exactly so that in future software updates of Mediawiki your site will not break your site accidentally. The more customization you do to your site the more likely is that the development team on Mediawiki will not be testing your specific settings and will not be taking your modifications in mind as they write new code. So it will be safer to mimic wikipedia url pattern: www.yoursite.com/wiki/articlename
I have put this text on MSWiki so that it can evolve: http://mswiki.com/wiki/Short_URLs_for_better_search_engine_ranking
Step by step guide
- URL Rewite
- Install URL rewite for IIS
- Download the zip file and unpack it somewhere on your server outside of wwwroot
- Give Network Service account write privileges to above directory.
- Configure the ISAPI ini file like below. Debug 1 will cause debug output to be written which will help you troubleshoot problems. Reload 5 means that the ini file will be reloaded at every 5 url redirection. This saves you from resrtting IIS every time you change this file.
Debug 1
Reload 5
#Browse LOT
RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*) /index.php?title=$1
- On the command prompt type iisreset +<enter>. Your re-director should be working now. Test it by navigating to www.yoursite/wiki/Main_Page.
- Mediawiki settings
- Modify MediaWiki localsettings.php to look like below. This will cause internal links on the page to also be shortened
$wgScriptPath = "";
$wgScript = "$wgScriptPath/index.php";
$wgRedirectScript = "$wgScriptPath/redirect.php";
$wgArticlePath = "/wiki/$1"
- 'Security Step' If everything is working now then revoke the write permission from Network Service where you saved your ISAPI filter. Then change the ISAPI ini to look like this
Debug 0
Reload 5000
#Browse LOT
RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*) /index.php?title=$1
- Some pages on your site will be cached by PHP or IIS and will still have the old style URLs. But eventually, with time or with editing of pages, the files in cache will be replaced.
- The old style URL will be present for non existing pages. I think this is a bug in MediaWiki software. Even wikipedia has this problem.
I have been experimenting with putting ads on my blog. So far it has been a very interesting learning experience. It forces you to think about the readers, click thought rate etc.
I need to finish reading this tonight: Million Dollar Experiment - Chitika Earnings Revealed Plus a Surprise
The interview on C-span.
Some interesting points that I can very much relate to based on my experiences with http://www.wsuswiki.com and http://www.mswiki.com
Contributors to Wikipedia:
- 3000 authors that contribute more that 100 edits a month.
- There are set of even more active users that make 1000s of edits a month which bar far, contribute the majority of the content on the site.
- Wikipedia is ranked 40th on Alexa.
Who are the authors:
- Smart friendly people with targeted knowledge. He really emphasized the idea of being a social person and enjoying collaboration with other people to create new content.
- People who feel great for contributing to a great cause of documenting the human knowledge.
A good move by amazon. They have created a wiki page for each of the items in their catalog. Research has shown that anything mentioned by independent sources about an item will increase customer confidence in that item. Even if the comment is negative.
Items with user comments on Amazon simply sell more. Many people read negative comments about a product or a vendor and simply dismiss it because they don't relate to the author. So if you can get people to say something about your product, anything really, it will increase your sales.
Customer comments are one way, wiki is another. They are complimentary.
I have watched this video many times and it does not get any less shocking. It is a video of an American gunship in Afghanistan. The soldiers are looking at the infrared pictures of people running around or coming out of a mosque and then call out the coordinate of the individual people so that bombs can be dropped on thier head.
You can see people stumbling away from the fire blast generated by the bombs and trying to hide. Then the gunners drop more bombs on thier escape route.
It looks like sitting on top of an ant hill burning ants with a magnifying glass.
Here you can see for yourself:
1. a 7-minute video of an attack by an AC-130U Spectre gunship upon an Afghan village in October 2001. The video depicts U.S gunners firing directly upon people leaving the mosque, at : http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/AC130_Gunship.wmv
2. a 30-second video of a U.S. F-16 jet fighter attacking a group of persons in Fallujah in April 2004. The video was broadcast on October 5, 2004 by Britain’s Channel 4 News. At no point during the exchange between pilots and air controllers does anyone ask whether the Iraqis are posing a threat. http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/MassacreofCivilians.wmv
I was hanging out at the Amsterdam airport and suddenly I ran into Abhishek and 2 of his teammates. They way on their way to Redmond to participate in the customer advisory panel on RFID.
It was nice to hear that RFID project was moving along nicely.
I wonder when we get RFIDs at retail stores. Walmart scaled back on their implementation of mandating RFID tags on all the goods received by them largely because the suppliers were not ready for an overhaul of their inventory management system.
In the long run RFIDs will be everywhere but it might take a few more years.
Last time I bloged about the Shower in Narita airport a few people asked about the exact detail whereabouts. I will keep a list of these little oasis so you can break up your 20hr flight nicely.
- Tokyo - Narita: 5$ showers for 30 min. The place is incredibly clean and has lots of hot water. You can get in and out in about 30 min. You also can hang out in their lounge for a while and rest of comfortable couches.
- Amsterdam - I have heard there are showers here but have not personally found them. However there is nice quite lounge with big leather sofas close to the first aid station on the second floor. Highly recommended if the sound of snoring passengers doesn't bother you.
- Singapore - By far it is the best airport on earth. They have a movie theater and mini hotel and showers. If you have a semi long transit you can take a bus tour of the city. Since they don’t let you out of the bus you don’t need visa. If you are more ambitious you can arrange your flight to have 20 hr layover. Then go downtown and do some shopping and then to Santosa beach and relax and finally go clubbing and get back to the air port just in time for your flight. ;-) that is what I did once. Since you travel by subway the schedule is very predictable and you don’t risk missing your flight.
One the biggest drivers of user contribution to Wikipedia is clear mission statement they have. I have actually not read it and I am writing this blog in a airplane, but as a user and contributor to Wikipedia I have somehow got the message.
"Create a comprehensive and accurate free encyclopedia in 10 years."
Why Wikipedia has 10K+ active contributors?
Passionate contributors: They feel that they are participating in something that outlast their lives. When you add something there you are reasonable assured that it will outlive you. It is a way making history.
Large pool of authors: Everyone is a an expert. Everyone has something they are good at and want to pass that along. As individuals they may not be so smart but as a collective they are a genius.
Low barrier to entry to the author pool: The wiki collects and aggregates micro contribution for every users: In a successful and well maintained wiki you, as a contributor add what you can. You can forget about spelling grammar or style, if you have content and what to add it you can just dump it in. There will be others who clean it up and format it. If you are not an expert in a subject then you can contribute by simply formatting and editing. Just consuming the content is also a form of contribution. Page view statistics help authors focus their effort on a subset of content.
This is a great site to start with: http://www.frommers.com/destinations/beijing/
Together with the last time I was in Beijing I have seen most of the major sights like
Forbidden City
Summer palace
Tiananmen Square
Ming Tombs
Great Wall at Badaling
Lama Temple
Temple of Heaven
University of Beijing
Renmin University
So today I am going to go to the Zoo and do some Shopping at the end of day. Tomorrow I will go see Mao's mummified body in Tiananmen Square and the Great hall of the people.
I am boarding a train to Shanghai tomorrow night at 7:00. I will get to Shanghai the next day at 8:00AM.
One sad thing is that here in Beijing I can’t find any Windows Mobile smartphone. Nokia and Samsung are everywhere ;-(
I got a China mobile SIM card and unfortunately I see some ‘••••••’ on the home page of my phone. I also received some SMS messages from Chinese government to say that I should not go to the protests in Tiananmen square next week. But I couldn’t read them because I have English OS installed on my phone.
It is really interesting to see that SMS is an official method of government propaganda.
OK, Off to Tiananmen square. Maybe you can see me on TV. I will be guy directing the tanks to line up so I can fit them in my picture frame. ;-)
This months issue of The Economist has a special report on crud oil prices. I have been reading it veraciously in the past few hours in the plane to Tokyo.
Back in 1998 crude oil prices declined to near all time low of $10 per barrel. Since then the crude price has gone up steadily and in 2005 it has been sustained at $40+ level. IDC released a report just recently saying that this summer or in the near future it could easily reach $100 per barrel.
I believe oil price will have a profound impact on the global economy. I have tried to learn more about this subject and I will try to summarize my learning into an article soon.
The Oil and Gas index is the best performing index funds this year. I bought some about a month ago near its 52 weeks high. It is somewhat risky but I am pretty confident that we have not yet seen the worst of high oil prices. Any disruption in the oil supply from Iraq or Saudi Arabia will likely be followed by a sharp increase in the oil price. Since the oil production is already at its highest level it can’t absorb any anomaly in either production or consumption. I am still not sure how long I want to hold on to this index fund; I am thinking at least until end of summer.
Wow. What a fantastic way to stat my vacation. After 11 hours on flight I got to Narita Airport. I was walking around exploring the airport and amazingly enough I ran across a small sign saying “Showers 30min --> $5”
I gotta try this; It will be just like the capsule hotel that I went to in 2002 in Tokyo.
.... 20 min later….
Ohhh. It was amazing. Aaaaah so nice and relaxing. Here is how the shower looked like. Towel, shampoo was provided for fee. And even a super clean freek like me everthing was so clean that I felt completely relaxed.
This alone is enough of motivation for me to always fly though Tokyo to go to India.
This morning before I left Seattle I stopped by Costco to buy a 1GB memory card and at Borders to buy a travel book for Shanghai and Hong Kong. I got to the airport with an hour to spare. That is unusuall for me as I have missed plenty of flights in the past; I guess I have learned my lesson.
I am going to be in flights and airport for the next 2 days. So I might as well stop counting hours.
I have not gone anywhere special on vacation for a long time so I finally decided to stop by China for a personal trip before I head out to India to meet my team at Microsoft India Development center.
I am flying from Seattle to Tokyo to Hong Kong to Beijing. Then will take a train From Beijing to Shanghai and then fly back to Hong Kong. From there I will go to Mumbi and finally to Hyderabad. I have been to Beijing before but not to Hong Kong and Shanghai.
I am going to write more travel logs in my personal blog.
I listen to NPR religiously but sometimes I miss the shows that really like to listen to: Democracy Now, Alternative Radio, This American Life, etc.
I spent hours today looking for "TiVO for radio" to record shows for offline listening. Eventually I found exactly what I was looking for:
http://radiotime.com
But since I am incredibly cheap when it comes to buying software, I kept looking for a free version of the same thing. Eventually I found a good alternative: http://www.publicradiofan.com which is a really cool service. It is a database 100s of radio stations and radio shows and it can tell you who is playing your favorite show and it gives you a link to its streaming content.
I may give in and pay the $39 yearly fee for the RadioTime. Their site UI was pretty simple to use and offline recording sound irresistible.
Other interesting links I came a cross:
At lunch I went to get tickets for his lecture. Unfortunately it was already sold out at 9:00AM. Apparently there where people lined up before the university book store opened. I was sad that I didn't get it but I was happy to find out that there was that much demand for him. People in Seattle are generally pretty educated and muti-national.
Well, next time I will get up early!
WSUS is one of the first Microsoft products that has
a wiki site. The wiki site has been growing rapidly since beta 2 of WSUS; It is getting about 2000 hits a day at the moments.
I looked around at several wiki engines and wiki farms before settling on editme.com as the host for this wiki. My key requirement was a WYSIWYG editor and back in October only Editme had a decent wiki engine and simple to use editor. I really like JotSpot.com user interface but sine they are not yet out of Beta and require users to pay a fee to view the content I couldn't use them.
I have been relatively happy with editme. The editor has several bugs but in general it is stable.
Fortunately so far we have not had to deal with wiki spam and vandalism. Hopefully it will stay that way even with more publicity for the product and wiki.
I am very please to announce that the release candidate for WSUS formerly known as SUS 2.0 and WUS is finally out the door. I worked on this product for the past 2 years and I am very happy seeing customers using it.
It will help IT administrators keep their networked fully patched with windows and office updates. And hopefully ease their pain of patch management and give them a few more hours a week to do other stuff.
How do you obtain the WSUS RC, associated documentation, and tools?
Go to WSUS site,
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/updateservices/evaluation/trial.mspx
After 5 years of being immersed in software distribution problem space I have just move on to a new challenge of working for India Development Center.
I will be based in Redmond and will coordinate the efforts of my team in Hyderabad, India with the rest of the Windows team here in Redmond. It is really hard to leave my old team. We have been through a lot together and accomplished great things. I have been incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with such a smart, dedicated and customer focused team. I joined Windows Update team in February of 2000 a week before Windows 2000 launched. Back then we had very little infrastructure and processes to keep the site up-to-date and running. Along the way we developed an infrastructure that over 100 million customers use to keep their PCs up-to-date and secure. I have always felt great about the reach that my work has. Hardly anyone that I talk to has not used or is not currently depending on Windows Update and Auto Update to keep thier PC secure. We also developed a great solution for the corporate administrators to keep the machines in their network patched. That product, SUS, has been adopted by more than 200,000 customers; we have received great feedback about its simplicity to use and its robustness.
In the past five years I worked on five major product releases:
Windows update corporate site (no loner exists)
Windows Update site (V4) and Windows Update Catalog site (V4)
Windows Update site (V5)
Software Update Services
Windows Update Services
Another accomplishment that I feel great about is when I convinced the powers to be that setting up a Wiki site would be a great complement for our product. It has been great seeing the
http://wus.editme.com flourish with activity.
I will be traveling to India often and that would be a great opportunity for me to take some amazing pictures and work with university students on some special projects.
I am looking forward to the upcoming years .....
This is one of the best documentary movies that I have ever seen. It is about the story of how US influenced/sponsored a coup to overthrow the democratically elected president of Venezuela. I saw this movie on TV in Canada and I have been trying to find it on DVD or on the net to show it to others. This is definitely a must see documentary.
Movie description: "On April 12, 2002, the world awoke to the news that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez had been removed from office and replaced by a new interim government. Documentarians Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain, in Venezuela making a film about the left-leaning democratic president, suddenly found themselves in the heart of a coup and captured those frightening moments and days in which a nation's political future hung in the balance. see
http://www.chavezthefilm.com
And there is a semi automatic tool that visually segments the commercials for you and allows you to skip them with one click:
SmartSkip
I read in the news paper that TV networks just paid a few billion dollars to NFL for the rights to broadcast NFL games on their network. One of the reasons why they are willing to pay exorbitant money for broadcasting these games is that no one watches them with TiVo to skip the commercials. To the fans watching a game that is not live is less appealing than watching it commercial free. So they put up with the commercials to have a sense community and belonging with the other fans that are watching the game at the same time as them.
So my idea is for some software on your digital video recorder to cut out all the commercials in the live stream and replace them with segments of a movie or another pre-recorded show. © ;-) With this you can even watch 2 football games at the same time since a 3hr football came has less than 1.5 hours of actual content.
Human brain is fairly apt at following a movie along even if it is segmented into 3 min chunks. The software will take care of recognizing commercial interruptions and do the hard work of playing the pausing the movie. Perhaps it could even re-play the last 15 seconds of the movie so that you remember where it was left off.
I am sitting in Edmonton airport and thought about this idea. Thanks to the free internet provided by Bell Canada and Air Canada.
I have done a fair amount of research into the outsourcing industry of India and China. So far I have found the claims of massive amount of IT job migration to India and China to be completely unfounded. In reality the number of jobs moving out are extremely small at this point. According to Forester research 3.3 million jobs will move out of US by 2015. That is an insignificant amount considering the total job turn over rate in US. See "
Ten Myths about Jobs and Outsourcing" for more details.
The outsourcing business in China is very small. There are hardly any big companies there that employ 10K+ people. Major fortune 500 companies have a presence in China but the number of employees that the have there is a fraction of percentage of their global employee numbers.
In India on the other had the outsourcing business is more mature. They are called BPO or Back Office Processing. There are a lot of call centers and credit card processing offices that employ 5000+ people. But even in India there is little offshore development of new products. Wipro and Infosys are the 2 major Indian companies that both do outsourcing and new product development.
One the second day of being in Hyderabad I found out that a group of Microsoft employees have sponsored a local public high school and go there weekly to work with the students. The school is in a poor neighborhood of the city and being a public school, it is lacks some basic infrastructure. Many of the students are pulled out of school by the time they reach grade 10, or even earlier for girls, to work and contribute to their family's income. I wanted to visit place for myself and talk and play with the kids. If I come back I will definitely join this groups and will help out these kids anyway I can.
So on Saturday, Aug 29th, I met up with Gayatri to head out to the school. She had also brought her brother along. Gayatri works at Wipro and her brother has just finished chemical engineering and is looking for a job. They both live with their parents.
We arrived at school at about 11:00 AM. In India schools, some companies and government offices are open for part of Saturday. But fortunately Microsoft and other tech companies close their shops on Saturdays. Just before we arrived at the school the head mistress of the school had left so we could not check in with her. However one of the teachers at school greeted us and accompanied us to the 7th grade class of English medium. Over the course of the day I found out that the schools here have 3 separate language tracks or as they call it medium: English, Urdu, Telugu. Once the students choose one of these tracks then their entire course work is thought to them in that language. However since some of the subject instructors are not fluent in the language of the of that track they end up speaking in Hindi or Telugu with the kids. So the students understanding of English was very limited.
In general their class sizes were very small. Some classes had as few as 10-12 students and some as much as 30.
The schools building itself was quite good. The classes were of adequate size with very tall ceiling. However the rest of the infrastructure of the schools pretty much sucked. The school yard was made of dirt and was full of rocks and construction material. The water fountain was incredibly dirty and the water it dispensed was very likely untreated. The kids had built up immunity to drinking that water but if I had drank it I would have died of a painful death. I was told that the bathrooms were incredibly disgusting so I did not even attempt to go there.
The school super intendments lived in the school itself in a couple of rooms off the school yard. As we passed by I could see some of the women cooking food inside their room.
So we went in seventh grade class. The kids already knew Gayatri and she introduced her brother and I. Once Gayatri kicked out all the extra students that had followed us in the class we were left with fourteen students: one girl and thirteen boys.
We really didn't have an agenda so I just started describing how I got from Seattle to Hyderabad. I wasn't sure of how much they could understand so I looked around to try to find a map to show them my flight path. There was a small map pinned near the ceiling about 10ft off the floor. It was probably there for years without ever being used. So with the help of the kids I took the map down and use it to show them where I live, where my parent live and how I got to Hyderabad.
At this point I realized that the kids had no idea what was the difference between a country and a continent. I asked them to name a few other countries in Asia beside India and they responded by listing the name of continents. When I told them that that wasn't the right answer then they gave me the list of ocean names. Well, at least they are good at memorizing, I thought to myself. I played a couple of games with them to hopefully teach them the difference between a continent and a country and some more things about geography.
After an hour the bell rang and lunchtime hour started. Some kids had brought their own lunch, some had no food, and some were going out of the school to buy food. The only girl in the class offered some of her food to us. I thanked her and politely refused. She had very little food and I was worried about getting sick.
After lunch we went up to the 10th grade class. The class had about 30 students but most of them were absent because of a religious holiday. The kids in the 10th grade were much more disciplined. Every time I asked them a question they would stand up say "Sir", respond, and then sit down. And they were very shy but once we got to know each other they ask more and more questions about where I came from, if I was married, etc.
They pointed out that one of the boys in the class had a girlfriend in the class just below us. And they kept teasing the poor boy. I asked them what it would happen if her parents would find out. They laughed and said "Beatings!".
We talked for another hour and then I offered to take their class picture and then send it to them. I took a few pictures of them and then went to the seventh grade class and took some pictures of them as well. As we're leaving a whole bunch of kids congregated around us and wanted their pictures taken as well. So I took a few group shots of them.
Here are all their pictures. I will print them and send it to them by mail.
As we left the school I thought to myself that I had a pretty incredible experience. My experience of going to India would not have been complete without this.
I went to see some apartment buildings yesterday. From distance it looked that they apartments building were fully completed but I we got closer I realized that it was still being constructed. But I went there anyway.
We passed the gate and security guards and then looked for the leasing office. The signs pointed at one of the building. But when I went to that building I could not find it. So I just kept going up the stairs to the top of the building to take some pictures of the neighborhood. On the 9th or 10th floor I saw a construction worker in the stair way. (See his picture) He tried to talk to me in Hindi but I could not understand what he was saying. He was probably saying that there are no offices on the top or that I should not go to the top. And he kept doing this hand gesture that I did not know about. He had his right arm held up vertically and would twist his wrist on the Y axis. (Just like the hand gesture for saying so-so but done vertically).
Later on I asked a friend, Karan, and learned that the hand gesture means NO.
I find seeing
free roaming cows on the street very amusing. Most of them are not owned by anyone and are free to graze on the side of the road. Sometime they decide to cross the road or just walk alog the street. They are not afraid of cars and even when you hank your horn at them they move about very slowly. One time I saw a huge caw with long horns slowly walk into the lake to cool off and eat some of the grass around the water's edge. I asked my driver Aleem, to stop and I went out to take pictures of it. I slowly walked up and took a lot of pictures. With one eye I was looking at the camera with the other I was watching another caw a meter away from me. I was afraid that I migth get spooked and charge me. But he just stood there as I walked around and took pictures. You can also see lots of dogs and some chiken on the streets.
In general food is very cheap here. Lunch at MS is 35Rs or $0.6. At a really good restaurant a meal would be about 200Rs or $4.
I have not had any problem with spiciness of the food here. But even people from North of India find the southern food too spicy.
I have seen people eat a lot of food but in general people are very thin. I don't think I have seen anyone over 250lb as supposed to Seattle which I see at least 5+ a day.
I love the food here. I keep reminding myself not to eat too much but at each meal after sampling all the plates I end up being totally stuffed.
So far I have been to "10 Downing Street", "Dublin", and "Bottles and Chimneys". They are medium size bars with very small dance floor. The music varies from pop to house to rock. At Dublin they have live music every night. The live music consists of 2 Korean or Thai girls and a piano player. They are very good at singing the popular American and European songs and sometimes even Hindi.
The male to female ratio sucks unfortunately. To overcome this problem some bars only let in couples so you have to have a date to get in. Well, this is even worse than the original problem. Oh, well.
Twice in the past week I have seen reporters from local news paper or TV stations at these bars. They are interested in reporting on what hip people do in Hyderabad. So apparently it is pretty easy to get yourself onto the local news paper.
Hyderabad is very conservative city compared to Mumbi and Bangalore. Only 5 years ago the city was completely dry. All the current bars have sprouted up in the past couple of years. So it is slowly getting better.
Drinks are very very expensive. They cost anywhere between 150 to 500 Rs. or about $3-$10 US. That is insanely expensive for local people and this pretty much cuts out any students or non professional people from ever frequenting these places.
The community of people that go out to bars is pretty small. So you see many familiar faces.
Nearly all the high tech companies in Hyderabad are located in one small neighborhood north east of the city. There is tons residential housing being constructed around this neighborhood to house the IT professional workers.
Some of the apartments are just amazing: marble everything, summing pools, basketball, tennis, squash and badminton courts, party room/club house facilities. Etc. etc.
Another advantage of these large apartment complexes are that they provide a buffer for water and electricity for when the city’s water or electricity gets temporarily shut off.
The infrastructure of the city can’t cope with the huge economical boon and general over population and therefore rolling blackouts are common.
I took some pictures of one of these apartment complexes near the new Microsoft building.
Story 1:
The inaugural flight of India’s first ingenuous air craft just happened a couple of days a go in Bangalore.
BANGALORE: India's first home grown multi-role transport aircraft soared into the sky here on Sunday, boosting the spirits of hundreds of scientists and engineers associated with the Rs.1.58-billion project.
"It's a historic moment and a proud achievement for India. This is not the time to look back at how long it took and what it cost but to cherish its success. This is a flight into the future. We should be proud and hail it as a success story," Sibal said.
Story 2:
One of the chief ministers (equivalent to a US governor or Canadian premiere) of India resigned her post and was sent to jail. I don’t know too much detail of the case but the charges seem to be very politically motivated. Apparently she was arrested 10 years a go in a political protest. But she was not prosecuted until now when someone went and dug up that old case and reactivated it.
Hubli, August 25: At the end of her daylong train odyssey, former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Uma Bharti, against whom a non-bailable warrant was issued in a case of rioting ten years ago, surrendered on Wednesday before a local court, which sent her to 14 days' judicial custody after she did not seek bail.
She did not seek bail, which she had made clear she would not do soon after her arrival at the Hubli station to a tumultuous welcome from the BJP and the VHP cadres carrying the party's saffron flag and the tricolour.
By my standards I should be taking 1000+ pictures a day here in Hyderabad. But I have only taken 300-400 pictures after 4 days.
The first reason is that I don’t have enough time to go to places and get to know people and take pictures of them in their daily life. I don’t want just shoot people from distance with a long telephoto lens. I rather capture people in dignifying way and have a story to go with the pictures to put it in proper context. And that take time and leg work which I don’t have right now.
The other reason is that I am too focused in trying to find out what it would mean to live here and what the standard of living of people like me is. I have spent most of my time at Microsoft office talking to people. Inside the building is no different that our buildings back in Redmond. However the view out of building is pretty amazing. I will take some pictures of that today.
Here are some interesting local news headlines from the past few days.
Story 1:
A new festival is coming up and as part of this festival it is customary to dip a statue of Ganesha in the river.
Local environmental activist are upset that the government had ceded to the worshipers and gave a temporary permit to the organizers to do this ceremony in the local river. Originally the government had designated only a small section of the river for this event but that proved not enough space for thousands of worshipers that are planning to come to Hyderabad to perform this ceremony.
The status are about 1 meters tall and cost a few 100 Rs. They are made of clay and when they are placed in the river they melt. This will pretty bad for the environments and will put a lot of trash and plastic in the river.
Story 2:
A local woman had committed suicide when she found out that her husband had cancer. She was a believer in the tradition that a woman should not live long enough to see her husband die. The woman is survived by her son and her husband.
Story 3:
So far in the 2004 Olympics in Athens India has one 1 silver medal. It was a shotgun shooting event. The medalist was quickly hoisted back home for celebrations and was received by many dignitaries at the airport.
It is intriguing that India has only won 1 medal so far but china has won 50+ medals. I would guess that there is not much support from government and businesses for developing athletes. I am sure there are or could be many talented athletes here if there was some infrastructure to support them.
The day before yesterday I was sitting the in the hotel restaurant having breakfast and two men were working our side cleaning the window right in front of my table. It was about 10:00 AM and starting to become hot outside. One of the 2 men was about 25 and the other about 40. They were painstakingly removing the wood warmish of the window so they could repaint it later. It was a tedious manual job that I had done myself a few years a go. With a little sand paper you have to get it all the crevasses and then blow the dust off and repeat. It is not a hard job just tedious. Anyway, as I was sitting there waiting for my food we looked at each other several times and I smiled and nodded my head. I was getting increasingly more uncomfortable just sitting there knowing that the food that I was about to eat was a couple days worth of their salary. I felt pretty ashamed and thought about doing something nice for them. Buying food was probably inappropriate. First of all, they were working and second, it would have been somewhat pretentious. But a cold drink was probably OK. So I decided to ask the waiter to bring them some fruit juice.
All of this took about 5-10 minutes. I was pretty uncomfortable sitting there reading my news paper and waiting for food.
A waiter came by my table and saw that I was looking at the two men outside cleaning the windows in front of me. Before I had a chance to ask him he went by the window and gestured to the two men to get lost and then he came by my table. I asked him if it would appropriate to buy those guys some drinks. He didn’t quite understood what I was asking. So I asked if he could take 2 glasses of juice to those guys and tell them in Hindi that I had just done that exact work on my house back at home in US. The waiter then said “certainly, sir. I will take them in the back and give the juice to them.” He then went to talk to the manager waiting at the door to probably ask for permission to do this. I saw him getting 2 glasses of juice but I never saw the 2 men drinking it. A couple of minutes later I saw the 2 guys come by the window to collect their tools and then they walked off.
Hmm, I thought. I hope I did not get them trouble. Probably they were just told to get lost for a while and then come back later when there were no guests around.
Local affluent Indians here can easily separate themselves from this extreme socio-economical disparity. I am sure over time it will be able to do that or at least be less uncomfortable. The way this dilemma has been explained to me is that by the fact of me being here the life of these folks are already better and they very much benefit from the wealth that gets tricked down to their level.
In retrospect I probably should not have bought those guys a drink. It is not a big deal; I am sure I will make bigger blunders. One mistake that avoided was taking pictures of Muslim women in Berka at Char Minar the day before. I did know that I would not have been OK but I was reminded of it by a local student I had befriended.
A few hours after I arrived at my hotel I was ready to go and explore Hyderabad. I have rental car which is a Honda Civic and it came with a driver named Nayeem. I asked Nayeem to take me to Char Minar in the old part the city and we started driving. Even though I was sitting in the back seat I still had at least 10 heart attacks in a the 30 minute ride. After only 5 minutes of driving I had already realized that I could never ever driver here.
I need to capture the driving experience with some pictures but for now I will describe in in words. Basically if your nose is 10cm ahead of the next car, bike or pedestrian then you have the right of way. Pedestrians walk on both side of the street and are go with or against the traffic direction. And occasionally you see them standing in the middle of the street between the lanes. Bikes, and motorcycles drive on either side of you and weir in and out of your way with seemingly random pattern. Only about 10% of them wear helmet. To this mix we should add the autorickashs (the yellow 3 wheel taxi cabs). Everybody honks their horn at each other to announce their intention. I am turning left, watch out I am behind you, move out of my way, go faster/slower, etc, etc.
After about 10 minutes of driving I realized that a car was nearly an inch a way from our car. The driver looked at me then smiled and then reached out of his window and grabbed the door handle to open the door of back seat of my car. He opened the door slightly and shut it closed, smiled at me and my driver, and drove off. All this happened as we where driving at about 30 km/hr. It took me a few more second to realize what happened. I was just shocked.
I has asked the driver to take me to Char minar, which is a historical structure with 4 pliers in the middle of the old city. But after this intense driving experience I just wanted to end the driving as soon as I could. So when the driver pointed out a museum on the way there and offered to stop by for a while I took it and got out of the car on terra ferma.
I was still alive but a few pounds lighter.
I landed in Hyderabad at 7:40 AM. I was pleasantly surprised that my luggage showed up on the conveyer belt. Before leaving the baggage claim area I was mentally preparing myself to be swarmed by cab drivers. I spotted a guys with a plack with my name on it I introduced myslelf and he guided me to the band new BMW that the hotel had sent out to pick me up. Taj Krishna, the hotel that I am stay at is about 20 min a way from the city. We were on the main road/high way the entire time and since it was early in the morning on Saturday the streets were not that busy.
Upon my arrival I was greeted by the hotel staff and taken directly to my room which had an amazing view. That is what I call service. ;-)
I am sitting in my hotel room. In the background I can hear a constant harmony of at minimum 20 different car horns going off at the same time.
The hotel and service is amazing. It is definitely the best I have ever had. The hotel sent a brand new BMW and a driver to pick me up from the airport. While in the car the driver gave a menu of CDs that I wished to listen too! I still can't wipe this grin off my face.
Right now my own car and driver are waiting outside. I feel like I have to go and use the service or send the guy home. I am not sure what the etiquette of having a driver is. Hopefully the driver is not going to go home at 5:00 because I am not going to be able to drive the car myself. I can't handle driving on left hand side, not knowing the city and the busy roads around here.
I will write more about how I got here later on tonight. For now I am going to go down and eat some amazing Indian food and then go see Char Minar.
In preparation for visiting India and Microsoft India Development Center I talked to a number of people at Microsoft that had worked in India or had worked for MS outside of US. A friend gave me this sage advice based on her experiences of working abroad in Italy. She started to have a much better time when she stopped having any expectations. For example when she went to the bank she didn't expect the bank to be open, or if it was open to have any money or to be able to get any cash out of the bank at all. When anything went her way she was just pleasantly surprised. It is a bad example but it demonstrates the point of not setting yourself up for disappointments.
So despite all the troubles with the plain ticket I am actually having fun. I am not expecting that I would fly today or my baggage to fly with me in case I end up going or to get to Hyderabad anytime before Sunday. But I hope to be pleasantly surprised. ;-)
I wanted to make the best out of being stranded in Portland. So I decided to take the MAX light rail to the Japanese and Rose gardens.
For the past 4+ years in Seattle I have been hearing at nauseas about various solutions for Seattle's transportation problem. The 2 competing options are a Light Rail system and Monorail. Development of both projects already have been started but the proponents for each are trying to kill the other project through legislation, legal challenges, and recall votes. I have heard on NPR numerous times how efficient Portland's light rail system is.Not that I have experinced it myslef I can say that in fact it was everything that I expected it to be and more. It takes you from the airport directly to downtown and to major parts of the city. And it is pretty cheap too. I got a day pass for 3$.
I took the train to the Japanese garden. It was a very peaceful place. I spent a couple of hours there and at the rose garden. Here are some pictures from a day in Portland. After that I went back to the hotel picked up my loggage and went back to the airport.
I honestly don’t know when I am going to get there anymore. I just called AMEX travel agents to confirm the flight information with them and they said that the flight from Singapore to Hyderabad was not operating anymore. And that my reservation was never confirmed. Good thing that I called or I would have been stranded in Singapore for days.
At this point I will take any option that gets me to Hyderabad.
UPDATE: After a few hours of phone calls eventually I got new itinerary. Portland to Frankfort to Mumbi to Hyderabad. I will get to Hyderabad on Saturday morning.
Well, I had a bumpy start. My original flight was from Seattle, to Portland, to Tokyo, to Singapore, to Hyderabad. But I had a little unexpected adventure. My flight to Portland was canceled and I barely got into an earlier flight but then I was randomly picked for an extended security check which delayed me long enough so that I missed my connection to Tokyo. After a couple of hours of phone calls with MS travell agents and NorthWest reps I finally found a way to get to Hyderabad 2 days later than my original plan. I will have to stay over a night in Portland and then another night in Singature.
Hopefully this would be the end of the advanture but there is a chance that I might get stranded in Singapure. The travel agents could not actually buy a ticket from Singapore to Hyderabad. I just have a reservation. I hope they don't cancell the reservation because there were no other flights out of Singapure.
I received this news a couple of days a go: During the Canadian Solar Tour one of the 6 participating cars had a head on collision with a mini van and the driver of the solar car, Andrew Frow, died as a result.
The news is specially disturbing because this could have happened to myself and any of my friends that drove our solar car team for University of Western Ontario. I keep thinking about a time in Sunrayce 96 when as we were driving over Mississippi bridge part of the steering mechanism of our solar car broke. From the chase vehicle behind the solar car we could see some red thing sticking out of the wheel fairing. We debated for a few second as what it was and when we realized that it was part of the steering mechanics we were all horrified. The bridge was very long and narrow and there was no place to stop. We just hoped that nothing would have happened. It never occurred to us that our driver, Greg, could have been easily killed as a result of such a small mechanical failure.
We gingerly got to the other side of the bridge and we pulled off immediately and started working on the car to fix the problem. It took us about 4 hours to find a machine shop in a small town near by where we machined a new piece out of aluminum and brought it back and jammed it in place and continued driving. That day we won an award for being most resourceful team at Sunrayce.
I remember another time when I was driving the car in 2 way highways around London, Ontario. The car wighed only about 700lb and it would get sucked in toward the median and in the opposite lane every time a huge semi would pass us in the opposite lane.
Being part of the solar car team was an incredible experience. I am so thankful that nothing tragic ever happened to any of us or any other solar car teams. And I hope this accicent would not kill the solar car projects at any of the universities.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1092367217850_16/
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/LondonFreePress/News/2004/08/13/580142.html
Wow. I am shocked as how expensive Internet access is in India. Unlimited DSL (128kbps) is about $150 a month.
http://vsnl.ddsl.net/ourproducts/dsl_tariffs.asp ,
http://www.calcutta.bsnl.co.in/tariff/dias_tariff.shtml. Dial up access is less expensive but it is limited usually by both hours and total data transferred.
7000Rs ($150) a month is a very good salary for an average person. I wonder how the local population could afford such service.
Cell phones prices are more reasonable. They seem to be around $10 a month. One funny thing is that the application for getting a phone requires your picture, proof of address and a few other forms.
I attended Liceo Scentifico G.B. Vico in Cologno Monzese in a suburb of Milano, Italia.
Since I could not find any of my classmates from my high school in Italy I came up with a clever plan to have them find me.
Google generally gives blogs a very favorable ranking therefore blog entries always end up near the top of search results for a person's name. So it would be just matter of time before my friends would type their own name in Google and will stumble upon my blog.
So if you are one of the persons on these lists or know any of them please contact me ;-)
Sezione A:
Alessandro Alessandrini, Alex Alessandrini
Antonio Antonini
Romina Barella
Fabio Bernini
Alessandra Bosio
? Bruno
Cristina Colaizi
? Crisci
Behnam Dehghan
Julanda Deni
Fabiano
Giammarco Fagnoni ? Gianmarco Fanioni
Luca Favretti
Luca Lugani
Claudia Garilli
?Manghi
Alessandro Marchesetti, Alex Marchesetti
? Mascaro
Thomas Motti
Melissa Verri
Marcello Vita
Nicola Vitale
Sesione B:
Manuela Brambilla
I professoi:
Candeloro
Bartoli
Michele Brichetti
Michele D'Alonzo