Monday, May 21, 2007

Insane Ramblings...

Just came across this piece of poetry that circulated among our Jundk group (people in the slideshow up above at the top of the page) with each one contributing. Just started off as a harmless reply to fun mail...and boy, did it snowball into a poetic free-for-all! We rock! 'Twas fun! And I thought I should post it here. Vikas even put it up on the NDTV poetry site :D


Insane Ramblings
- Jundk


Unknown:
In the confines of cubicles by artificial light,
Sipping coffee from the machines day and night.
Speaking on phones , in meetings we sit.
Staring the monitor, the keyboard(s) we hit.
Far away from loved ones whom for days we do not meet.
Remembering them, working, on our seat.
This is life for us,
Working away from homes and loved ones in places afar.
What a life, techies we are.


Prashanth, Software Engineer echoes his heart:
What you say is true, my friend
Sitting on the revolving chair, the misery never seems to end
But there are the plus points too, you bet
Which include free phone, email and Internet
But when the month reaches its last day
And the bank accounts are credited with your pay
One's joy knows no bound
Because ultimately, its money that makes the world go round.


A Friend, Vidya asks
Did you just write that??


Prashanth replies:
Yes, I did write that now
But even I wonder how
Coz with so much work to do
The insides of my head feels like a zoo
To tell you, for writing things like this
For a brief while, I can afford to give the work a miss


Suprada an MS Student from Arizona State Univ adds:
And there are us student too
With deadlines to meet and profs to greet
Day or nite means nothing to us
Slog all the time..Thats our curse


We speak to the comp, our best pal
And Everybody thinks we're slightly off
All we want are no deadlines
And then its Partytime!


A frustrated sleep deprived Vybhav,
Onsite support bemoans;
And then there are blokes like me,
That wake up in the hours of wee.....

Just to receive some stupid phone call.....
Only wishing it was some cool gal

But there alas, goes the system crash .....
Here it is, the same old trash .......

There are phone calls from everywhere , left , right and centre ...
Away then from your TL , you want to canter ...

Sorry life it is of a software engineer
Away from everything you want to meander.


Suprada continues in a blaze:
For some its day, for the others, nite
But similar is our plight
This misery we share...
Of the comp and its stupid software
Ah how nice it would be, to sit and chill
As once we all did!
Gone are those days...
All's left is my mind in a daze!


Vikas Pitches in shyly:
Are you guys good or what !!
Thought would try my hand too, in that
Be it Student Be it Engineer
All of us have the same veneer
Of taking on the world and making a Difference
Of deciphering this thing called Life and making some sense
To write such stuff and give ur work a miss is no crime
Hey, know what? I can also rhyme :)


Another Novice Sathwick says "NOW EAT THIS":
And then there are other folk,
Who sit all day looking ard for work,
And when it comes there is hardly any,
Surf and chat, happily,
Plan for the weekend,
And thus week ends
By painting the town RED... !!


The Grateful Prash:
Thanks for collating the poems Charlie
Tis really wonderful to see
All you people writing ode upon better ode
Which is really better than looking at ____ing software code
And for all you students
There is no reason to get tense
Coz JundK is always there
In times of joy, to share
And in times of strife, to care
That is what makes each one of you, a friend rare!


Vidya says ruefully:
Well, well, well,
All this hullabaloo rings a bell
I was a Software Engineer
Only to move from the pan to the fire!
I fear
Now that I'm here
I'm no longer free,
The best of my life is now behind me
:-(


And Rashmi has a valid Point:
I feel sorry for all u'r plights
Being a S/W engineer's wife is my plight

S/W Engineer's work is never ending
And their wives frustrations beginning.

Only the four walls of my house is my sight
Which is making me lose my insight
Atleast You guys get a better bait.
Hope to see a "coming home early" side of my mate..

Monday, May 14, 2007

Cool Firefox extensions

Cool Firefox Extensions:

For all those who are Firefox fans, here are some cool, funky extensions.
There are guaranteed to make heads turn towards your monitor (even if you are not having a page with Pamela Anderson photos all over it!)
Beware, these may not be the best in terms of memory utilization and all the geeky stuff. So if you are one who cringes at the task manager turning Matrix-like green, then this might not be your cup of tea. But they are kinda fun to have.

Tab Effect -
One of my favorites. But a resource hog. It makes a cool 3D transition when changing tabs. Its like a whole cube moving around to the next tab. It does take a second to do it, considerably slower than the normal tab shifting. But its fun.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4258

Firesomething -
A timepass funny add-on. It has a cache of different names and changes your browser name (on the top left of the browser screen) from Firefox to random names - I have had names ranging from ThunderElephant to SuperPorcupine to FireUnicorn..it guarantees you some humor whenever you notice the names. But you might need to do some fix for it to work on Firefox 2.0
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/31


Dictionary Tooltip -
A pretty useful add-on. When on a webpage, double click on any word and see its meaning in the accompanying slide-out window. No more opening dictionary.com and keying in a word to find out its meaning. Gives you dictionary, thesaurus, synonyms and antonyms as well!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1171

Galleropa -
Again an useful tool rather than a cosmetic one. You can load your frequently used webpage links into galleries and use it as the default page when Firefox loads up. If there are a host of sites you log into each morning regularly, save them in the gallery and make it your Firefox default. So you have easy access to the links to each of this pages. And get to it without much navigation.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3374

VideoDownloader -
Use this download any video file from youtube, google videos, metacafe, etc. This saves the file as a flv file which then needs an FLV player to playback the clips.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2390

Other cool tools

ATNotes -
A very, simple Post-It notes software. You can configure colors, sizes, etc. You can even send each note to a different computer connected on the network.
Looks like I am not able to find the link to it. Google and find out yourselves.

Process Explorer -
Its an advanced version og your Windows task manager with lot more advanced features. One use I used to put it to is to find where the downloaded youtube/metacafe files are being stored by IE. And fine details of unknown processes that somehow appear.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Security/ProcessExplorer.mspx

BGInfo -
It gives information about you hostname, MAC Id, ip address, free space, memory used and available and can be displayed on the desktop. It gives an easy snapshot of the system at any given time (not real time though. You need to update/restart it every time you need to exact current information). But good, all the same.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/BgInfo.mspx