Learning is an Art

I have been thinking for a while to write about my experiences but was refraining from this for some reason or the other but today something happened that I can’t hold my anger against the shity policies of companies in India; I will illustrate three experiences of my life which forced me to believe that India is still way behind when it comes to serving customers and listening to there problems and promptly providing the solutions.

So I will start with my latest problem which I am facing with Tata Indicom broadband connection; I took a plan of RS 1300 6GB combo so it was all goody goody initially when I didn’t used much of my allotted usage of 6 GB free usage which I had; than this month I had to download some linux operating system from internet that started the nightmare experience it was 3.7 GB of download still less than my free usage and the very next morning I got a call that you have exceeded your credit limit of RS 1700 and you need to make a payment of 3100 I am still trying to figure out from where the hell that figure of RS 1700 came from; if I do a flat conversion of 6 GB of free usage with their rate 0.9/MB it leads out to some where around RS 5000 I was totally surprised with this and in next two days my line was barred; I didn’t had a option there I went to the office of tata indicom and made the payment of RS 3100 and it took them more than a day to restore my line.
I haven’t even realized that my lines are fully working I got another call next day asking me to make a payment of RS 1500 and since I was afraid that my line might get disconnected again which may cause another day of work getting lost so I made the payment immediately but I was even not able come out of two back to back payments I got another call from them today that I have exceeded my credit limit again and I need to make a payment of RS 2300 I was so badly pissed of I called the customer care and asked what the hell is going on and he had more shocking news for me sir your billed amount is RS 7000 and your unbilled usage is RS 11000 I was shocked WTF and than I asked him to check again than he started saying actually the correct unbilled usage will start reflecting in 48 hours that amount is not correct that was some respite for me.
I was told I can check my unbilled usage from tataindicom site but there another tragedy stuck me I had registered to that site already but never received the first time pin I told the same thing to customer support executive, he tried to reset password but it was in vein he kept getting that customer not registered and I kept getting you are already registered and you can not registered again.
He told me sir you will have to write a mail; now I have to write two mails the first one which I had already written for increasing my credit limit and another to fix my account on tataindicom.
I hope they will not f*** any more as I have already given up with them. I am planning to change ISP any suggestions are welcome.

I think this story has taken quite out of me I will write other two experiences some other day, keep watching this space for more bitter realities of customer support in India.

As always Google silently launched new version of its one of most popular application that is Orkut, I don’t exactly when it was made available as I noticed it couple of days back.
I thought to give it a try and realized that the features added are heavily inspired from Facebook, its quite apparent that Orkut was seem to be loosing to Facebook on many aspect so redoing the Orkut was always on the cards and they have done a fare job but still I haven’t found many people using the newer versions and you can not use newer features like commenting which is one of the most used features of Facebook unless other person is also on newer version.
Lets see what strategy is used by Google to move to people to newer version. One thing I liked and appreciate about changes done by Google is that you always have option to hop between versions very unlike Facebook which shifted me to lite version without my knowledge and only switched back after a month or so.

Yeah you heard me right today Atlassian JIRA 4.0 was officially released after doing many beta’s and release candidate…I was expecting that it will take people with a storm with opensocial gadget JQL and many other improvements yes it did took people with storm but for some other reasons and the reason was its licensing policy you can find details of same here and my favourite one is there reason of changing the licensing that’s really cool and pretty lame at the same time for reasons of increasing the licensing cost or changing it all together.

I really doubt the fact that any hundred people company will really like to pay $4000 JIRA and the biggest one is the Enterprise license now costs you double that is $8000 and the cherry one the cake is licensing is now based on number of active named users that means that if you have 100 users and you are now 101 ; you need to run behind Atlassian to upgrade your licenses.

I want to write more on this but may be some other lets wait and watch for reactions from other people; I will be back on this topic with more detailed analysis of pros and cons of same this was just an initial outburst.

Few days back first release candidate of JIRA 4.0 was announced that means JIRA has moved pretty closer to one of the greatest release in the history of JIRA releases; there was a mixed bag in JIRA 3.13 which people were speculating to be 4.0 at that time but Atlassian decided to mark it as 3.13 as they were planning something really big for the mega release 4.0.

Two features which look killer to me are Opensocial gadgets and JIRA query langauge; I was really wondering why Atlassian went ahead with implementing Opensocial while missing out few popular issues like ldap authentication which has been around for six years now but after pondering on thought of Opensocial  I realized that Atlassian has cooked up something really big which is not easily comprehensible in current scenario of issue trackers what I feel it has a potential to cause a paradigm shift in the way we look at issue trackers and way we use them I can smell something really big coming out of it.

I would loke to end with a not to all those who have AMC to start getting ready for a Opensocial. I am also eagerly waiting for this release to happen.

I was never a ardent fan of facebook I signed up just to see what its all about and I found it some what interesting so I started using it occasionally; but couple of days back I noticed something has terribly changed in facebook application; I was not able to relate if I had ever earlier used this application and on top of it you even don’t have an option to switch to older version which is pity.
I don’t know what has caused these people to change it but I am sure of one thing that I am not going to use it in future any more this is not the way you should force on people you want.

I have reading about this topic since 3-4 years now and feels like eternity or a life time. Every now and than this question gets raised and people come of with various answers like entrepreneurship is a mind set rather than anything else; some say they are born with entrepreneurial qualities in there DNA.
IMHO anyone can be an entrepreneur in his or her own way it just takes a determination, grit to survive in toughest of circumstances. a spirit to keep things moving when the whole world is against you, a never say dies attitude and the list goes on with such qualities or virtues but it all boils down to one thing that is entrepreneurs are like rebellions they don’t believe in traditional wisdom of life; they have already realized and got enlightened with what they want to do in life.

These were few thoughts in my mind may be I will elaborate more on some day but that day is not this day.
Cheers to all entrepreneurs out there keep the ship afloat, keep going and some one said sooner or later a person who wins is person who thinks he can win; nothing happens out of the box there are no free lunches. Go out and world awaits you to embrace with both hands.

Before starting on this I would like to than Atlassian team for starting personal licenses for users. I would say its really a big thing for me as it saves me a lot time going to atlassian site and downloading license after every one month.

So now what do I do with my personal Jira installation :

Tracking my own progress on things: My jira Installation has project name learning which I have components as shown below so the differnet sources of my learning has become components of my jira project learning and not forget the title of my Jira installation is Personal life Jira

Personal Jira Components

Similarly versions are quarters of year and I create few Jira issues for each components each quarter like say I have a traget of reading two books each quarter, write ten blog posts each quarter; Jira helps in setting my personal goals.

We all agree that putting down things on paper or in genral documenting it somehwere helps alot especially putting down what we want to do and what we are suppose to do. People might say Jira might be to big application for managing personal taks but in my humble opinion its not about tool its more about the intent.

Developing some plugins and customization for Jira: Being a developer at heart I was not able to refrain my self from trying my hands on Jira’s plugin development environment with so much help available its pretty easy to get started though maven may suck you at start but once set it works as bread and butter.

So Jira as whole as impacted my learning process; I would like to thank Atlassian for providing such a nice tool and great licensing options.

Disclaimer: I am not associated with Atlassian by any means.