As I write this note I have a small, yet serious problem with my Apple PowerBook G4. I have been using this for more than a year now and it has been serving me really well. But of late its keypad has started to behave very strange and very often I end up striking the keys really hard to echo on to the screen. This problem is not permanent though! It requires some really hard work on my part to key in certain characters esp. “u.” So everytime you see a word in this article which has a “u” in it, understand that I managed to put it in using the classic “CTRL + C” & “CTRL + V” method. It is indeed quite annoying to have a problem like this. For those of you who had sent me several E-mails over the last few days and still didn’t hear from me, kindly know that I am finding it slightly difficult to draft a mail to you because of this keypad problem. This morning I went to the Apple Service center in Bangalore, only to find them not working on a Saturday (Foolish me to think that Saturdays are off days only for me). I wouldn’t be able to fix up an appointment with the service center until next Tuesday, for Monday is a National holiday. I sincerly hope I can resolve this issue as early as possible.
I feel very serene today. This is a long weekend and I intend to take some good rest. I have not been keeping up well over the last one week and more importantly I was engaged in an all important assignment: the first roll out of Sun Java System Access Manager in India. I have been preparing for this for a couple of weeks and I am personally satisfied with the job I did last week. At the same time, I must also confess that this wasn’t really the best of training programs that I delivered. During the five days training program, I witnessed a couple of CPUs and monitors “blowing up’ right in front of me. The labs of this course were quite sensitive (in the sense that it worked fine only a specific version of the Solaris 10 Operating system and that we had lot of issues using certain browsers while testing the Policy Agents in the SJS Access Manager) and I found it a little difficult to manage 17 participants who sat through this course. There were moments in this training program, wherein I felt I lost control of the situation and I really hate to find myself in such situations. Nonethless, I managed to convey all that I wanted to convey to a bunch of people who travelled from various parts of this country to participate in this training program. In the next couple of days time, I would analyse the situation and probably find out different methods of improving upon the quality of the delivery. Well, life is all about accepting the mistake and eliminating them. Probably, such lab intensive course should slightly have lesser strength. Now that I have realized the situation I should able to give some valuable inputs to my Management. That would be helpful to decide upon several factors while scheduling the JES training programs. Having said all this, as usual I enjoyed every bit of my time that I spent with this people. What makes me moving is this exposure to various human beings with varying nature. For me, such an exposure is something that I rate much above the exposure to any technology.. It has been a pleasant experience to know several people and learn some good lessons from them and I am certain it shall continue to be so. Everyone would have a few things to share. And probably whatever they share would have great significance in the long run. All that is required an openmindedness to listen keenly to what others have to say.In this context my Master used to say,”Even a dead clock is correct twice a day.” So it was fun to be with another bunch of people, a proof of which you would find below:
I must express my gratitude to Edward and Gary (Sun Education Team, Australia) to provide some timely help in order to ensure that all the lab files for this course were in place and also to Manikandan to have spent some time, very patiently, on the phone throwing some light on various issues that generally pop up when we install policy agents on Web Server.
Last two weeks have been really really tough, esp after having some serious problems with my throat and chest. One of those nights I was finding it difficult t o speak and ended up spending a few minutes gargling some hot water with salt (traditional method of getting over throat problem). Another incident that is worthy of attention is a narrow escape from an accident yesterday morning. I was walking, very peacefully, towards the venue of the training and I was doing so on the footpath (obviously). And suddenly I saw a tempo traveller jumping on to the footpath from the road and the driver losing complete control over the same. I have a gut feeling that the driver dozed off in between. If it was a few meters behind, then I am sure it would have run over me. This prompted me to brood over various mysteries of life for which this is not the best time to discuss.
I don’t seem to have anything more to write for the time being. I look forward to my LVC on ZFS next week. But before that, I need some good rest. So if you have reached this far reading through the entire note, please remember that every “u” you came across in this article was produced as a result of two key strokes and not one.