PMP Certified!

The thought of doing my PMP certification crossed my mind for the first time almost a year and half back. But then I was never decisively working on this. Eventually lot of things around me gave me the inspiration to take up this certification. In the month of October 2011 i made the payment, but i took the exam date only in December first week.

Yesterday December 15th was My Exam, which by God's grace was quite easy as compared to some of the mocks that I taken earlierand cleared without much fuss. My preparation included:

Head First PMP
PMBOK 4th Edition
Rita PMP
then various mocks which included O'riely's , Rita's etc.
And ofcourse Rajesh Nair notes (spreadsheet) came in very handy. The last two weeks before my exam i was only referring to these notes and the questions after the chapters in RITA's book.

Overall a good part of the questions were short not having multiple paragraphs which in itself was a soothing factor Psychologically. But there were lots of questions with two very close options . I finished my 200 questions in about 3 hours and 15 mins and then spent about 40 mins of the remaining time reviewing the 40 odd questions i had marked for review.

Deja Vu

After a long time tried my hands at pencil skethches, Indu as well joined in.. sharing the same..

Nokia E63

Nokia E63, I bought this phone almost 14 months back and to be honest it’s been quite a phone and I have found lot of its features useul. Its my first business phone and I found it quite useful. Though at times I used to see some issues like screen hanging, slow performance etc and off late automatic restart. Initially I used to think this to be a bug in my own piece and owing to time constraints I didn’t visit Nokia care.

Today the situation has become worse, my phone has hanged completely. The phone switches on but it does not respond to any keypad functions. Now when I conducted an extensive search on the internet I found that all these problems that I was facing are a known bug in E63 L and had been known to Nokia since long. I am completely stumped I am surprised how come a corporate like Nokia not solve this issue in its phone.. or may be it has already solved via some patch which I am yet to find.. will search more.

Update's

Considering that i didn't post for long there are lotsssssssss... of updates.. Will try to be more regular on this blog so that could post the happenings then and there .. because as u can see it becomes really difficult to put them across in one go.. but anyways sparing a few almost all of the udpates have been a pleasant one..work wise its being a bit challenging, learning but yet pleasant time.

On personal note took couple of days off form office went to mumbai ( that was abt 2 weeks back)had some real nice time with my nephew and niece [miss them after coming to chennai :-(] , made a quick visit to kerala as well as my aunt took ill.. Apart frm that there there is somethings more to add hopefully should be able to post more about the same in coming weeks :-D

Just for the records

Well, as i said this one's just for the records :-) Finally I am going to buy new phone tomorrow.. and bid farewell to my old (really old) communicator which now has lots and lots of issues.
The bad thing about me is that I am bit too careless as far as gadgets are concerned, and hence mobile has stayed safe in my hands for more than two years :-( . I hope i could set the record straight with this new one.
And as one could guess my knowledge abt these gadgets as well is not so great.. hence though i have few shortlist but still i don't know which is the one that I might go for.

P.S.: The update is that i bought an Nokia E63

Traveogue: Elliot's Beach

After spending my last weekend in Kerala, this time I decided to explore chennai. Subsequent to a awesome chicken curry that we (me and my room mate) prepared we went to the Beasant Nagar Beach also called as the Elliot's Beach. This is supposed to be among the more cleaner beaches of chennai. 

From Porur we got an A/C bus ( one of the few in chennai) quite a comfortable journey to Saidapet with just two stops in between. I wish there were more such buses in chennai. From Saidapet it took us another 20 odd mins to reach Beasant Nagar beach. To my surprise as my friends had told me it was quiet a clean beach. Since we were not carrying any spare clothes we didn't actually venture into the sea, rather enjoyed the cool breeze from the shore. Considering that it was a weekend the place was quite crowded.  

To my surprise lots of well known brand’s retail outlets are there  around Elliot’s beach. Infact I managed to have my first vada pav in 4 months from a small shop out here, though it didn’t match the taste of a typical Mumbaiya vada pav, but then considering the fact that I was having this vada pav in one of the most conservative cities of southern India gave me immense pleasure. 

Out an out it was a nice weekend cooked a delicious meal and visited a nice place, hopefully the subsequent weekends would as well be equally good. By the way the next weekend we are supposed to go to ECR road, for a Go-karting competition .. J

Life @chennai

Its been precisely a month since I ventured out of my home once again to a new place altogether to start things from scratch. Further retrospection tells me that in the last 10 years I have been to quite a few places like Jabalpur, Kottayam, Palakkad, Mumbai, Pune, Dubai, Singapore and now in Chennai and have stayed at these places for a period varying from 6 months to 4 years. Guess that’s some achievement of sorts ;-) .

Anyways this wasn’t supposed to be a self boosting blog. So coming to the point now I am put up at one of the oldest metro’s of southern India. The last time I came to Chennai was about 14 years back and that was just for couple of days. Since then I have never had any ecstatic feelings about this place, unfortunately then the memories that I took back home was that of long queues of vessels in front of the pump waiting for water to come, petty fights over water and the extremely crowded buses. Infact I used to feel pity for people who used to work in Chennai. Well what can I say what goes around comes around. So here I am in a altogether new place where everything we eat starts with some form of rice and coconut. People speak different languages like Tamil, Tamil and Tamil ;-). The best part are the autowalla’s, their’s nothing called a meter that the auto guys out here make use of. But I must say the auto drivers out here enjoy tremendous unity they are all united as far as stating a fare is concerned, you ask for a 2 km distance and they would add two zeros to that and state a bill of Rs.200 ( a bit exaggerated u see). But believe me this month I have dared to take an auto ( not the share auto) only once and that was the first trip that I took out here.

Having said all these not so good things I would say that my preconceived notions made me expect more bad things in Chennai than I actually did. Things in Chennai are certainly changing but there is a lot too be done on the infrastructure side. Though they have developed an IT park but this place is an panchayat which means although the government gains in terms of taxes and employment but then there is much that they can do, but since supposedly the budget of panchayats are not good enough to undertake major infrastructure projects. So many places along the way I see water clogging which seems to be a very big problem in this vicinity. Public transport is pretty decent infact its much much better than a city like Bangalore, but mostly its crowded.

So out and out I have got very mixed feelings for this city with a bit of an inclination towards the negative side. I believe there are some basic things which the government can do in here which would improve the life of the local people immensely. Well the worst test for me would be during the summers and the rainy season, so keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for the best

A Nice ( But tiring ..) Weekend

This was one of the my most entertaining weekends , infact i would say , that my last two weekends have been really cool.....
The weekend of April 14th i went to Shangrilla water park on the outskirts of Thane , it was supposed to be more of an family get- together , as some of my cousins from abroad as well had come down to India ...Thanks to one of my uncles who took the pains to orgranise such an gathering... beleive me with such an big family with so many relatives ..its never an easy task to get everybody under a single roof owing to different reasons .... ;-)
Uhh .. anyways it was an funfilled day ..... the best part was the "Rain Dance "...Belive me there was a time when i was utterly shy to shake my legs , but then i don't know what happened that day ...i was in full flow , i was pulling across everybody to the dance floor , and i was actually astonished at see my dancing skills ;-))
This weekend was no different , where by we went to Diamond Water park , this is about 7 KMs from Lohegaon airport . To be honest this visit was never there on the very first hand ..Thanks to the extent of uncertainity that we have in our lives , it happened ;-) Even out here the best part was the rain dance .... all drenched in rain, dancing to some rocking music !
Woww.... i can't beleive i had two back to back outings that to some water park ..
But now i can actually feel the hangover over or i would say the body pain :-( its simply unbearable .... hmm proabably will need a day or two to come over it .....

Cricket and Java All the way !

This weekend after a gap of more than 2 years i would get a chance to play the game whichevery Indian cherishes , yeah ,come 11th March and i would be part of an intra project cricket tournament .Its been more than 2 years since i last played cricket :).
After getting dinged at my bskool attempts , this is an nice change.
Though this week was pretty cool at the office , on personal grounds its been busy , i had been busy with contacting my college friends out here in Pune for an get together, now that as well is there this Sunday .So immeadietly after my cricket match i would be going acrossfor this meet.Though i am usually very excited abt such meets , but this is one of those which makes me feel a bit wary . And that's because all the guys out there will be speaking in pakkamalayalam , and though i am an keralite myself but i don't speak that good a malayalam.But yes i want to use this for the benefit of our Alumni projects , specially for the scholarship one !
Now this is what i call a busy weekend :)
As for this week it has been a very entralling one professionally , though there wasn't much work in myproject , but personally i did quite a bit of R&D .For someone who had not done codingfor any lanaguage other than microsfot technologies ,it was a nice experience to develop a utility in Java.Still a long way to go though ...

As for on the MBA Front , i have ordered the Manhattan SC guide , hoping to improve my SC Verbal half of GMAT , which screwed up my score in my first attempt !