Life as I find it

I seem to be on a learning swing. Just back from the Group Relations Conference in Bangalore, and as I headed to my email, I saw that Cisco certification has a possibility for a review to be written. So I headed over to their site to take a look. No surprise so far.

What I found there was a relatively newish site with an eye for quality. This I admire. Further exploration led me to the learning center where the first article to cath my eye was one about soft-skills in IT managers. NOW, this is what I appreciate in an educational institution whether online or physical.

Just the last week, on an induction programme for young IT professionals in a leading organization in Mumbai, we had talked about how important it is to forget the competition orientation of education and learn to collaborate and achieve practical functionality.

The unfortunate fact of life is that people want to know what you know, and your own claim of competence is not an adequate measure in their eyes. So unless you are a mighty famous professional, it is important to have an idea of where your skills lie, build on them and get them officially acknowledged to certain standards to make them more visible and credible to those employers who have no clue of where your talents lie.

We had spoken of different ways to accredit and improve on this competence. In my opinion as both a consultant and an active webmaster, it is important to not just keep learning and updating our knowledge, but also to be able to apply it in a practical and functional way. One way of doing this is to step out of your comfort zone and take a risk to test your knowledge and get a stamp of acknowledgment.

The sorrow of much education today is that it doesn’t account for the human factor, which is what actually makes things work. To find a site that talks about soft skills while encouraging the certifications in various subjects makes me happy to be.

The online world is a good place to unfurl wings and chase development and growth in our chosen careers. This site is a useful tool for those.

The certifications themselves are well thought out and useful. In a world of competence, it is getting increasingly important to have skills verified and attested, which is exactly what this site helps you accomplish. Rather than duplicate the contents of that site to tell you everything about it, I invite you to actually experience it and perhaps you may want to share how you found it here.

Friends I know look for jobs, look for the one thing they are really good at. For me, its different. I’m good at so many things that it becomes difficult to stick to one, because the temptation of another grows too strong.

For years, I’ve balance adventure, websites and training - three careers. Now, I wish to immerse myself more fully into human processes work. Not just training, but research, study, EXPERIENCING the knowledge rather than learning it.

To some extent, its working. On another level, I’m frustrated, as its a fine balance between income and expenditure that all people must manage, to be comfortable.

I feel like a gladiator in an arena of learning.

I found this letter posted on an Orkut community. I feel that it is important, and I wished to share it here. I don’t have any link for the original credit, but if anyone points it out to me, I will be happy to credit it as the source.

LETTER REMOVED.

NCERT text books can now be found online

I came across this site and thought it was a must have for here. How many times have I wished that I had access to old books I studied from…… as said before, I’m information hungry. I like to have references to everything I have studied handy to refer back to.

Now, on a professional level, I need them too, to design training programmes for children. Thanks to this link, it is now possible. I really wasn’t looking forward to collecting physical copies of those books - they take up major space - remember school days? Now multiply it with all those years…….

Anyway, that train of thought is now redundant. We can refer to these whenever we like. I can imagine kids not having any excuses of lost books for not doing homework…..

Enjoy!

I had been longing to get rid of my Windows OS and begin using Linux. However, as there always is, there was a catch to the story. I have horrendous amounts of data on my machine. Stuff that I couldn’t afford to lose. Easy. I backed it up.

But the problem was that the data was a daily thing. I use my desktop to run my business, a couple of websites, learn coding and stuff…….. there was an incredible amount of data piling up every day. Even with regular back ups, restoring was going to be a pain. Not to mention what would happen if the all too likely destruction of my hard drive happened, and I was unable to use my computer until I could fix it.

I’d been surfing around for a long time, trying to find ways in which Linux would “become easier”. The only thing I succeeded in discovering was that it was one of those things where you needed to fall into the water to learn to swim. Not funny!

Then, I happened to come across the website for Ubuntu. From descriptions by online friends, it was very good. Not to mention the community itself on the forums, where queries were very helpfully dealt with. Plenty of Indians there too. I decided to give it a shot, and to my surprise, not only were there options to download the OS, but a very considerate and generous offer to ship it free of cost to people with slow connections, who couldn’t download the massive iso file.

To make a long story short, I downloaded the thing, backed everything up, crossed my fingers and went for a dual boot according to the detailed instructions on the site. To my surprise, the CD seemed to read my mind. Everything happened exactly as the instructions said, and before I knew it, I had a smooth as silk dual boot with my Windows. No loss of data at all - I never used that back up.

What’s more, my PC is running like a rocket. The Ubuntu simply went ahead and recognised my network settings and everything else it found, and I was simply using it. I took to this new experience like a fish takes to water. Yeah I’m raving.

Meanwhile, I got myself a nice new laptop with a Vista, and well….. I fail to see what’s advanced about Vista. Surely the more developed a software gets, the more compact and faster it is? Apparently Microsoft doesn’t agree. The “place holder” OS is hogging 15GB out of my 80GB hard disk on the laptop, and still doesn’t manage to look snappy. 15GB!!!! Its way slower out of the box than my rarely maintained XP even then and I dare not compare it against the Ubuntu unless there’s an option for reverse gear. The Ubuntu just picked up that 1GB RAM and turned it into speed - like its supposed to.

After spending all that money for software, turns out that the best thing in life is indeed free. All software for it is free. It updates or installs automatically if you want a new software for something. I’ll keep my Vista for a bit, since I’ve paid for it, but the minute I get serious about working on it (I like working on the desktop), the first thing that will happen is a format of the hard drive.

For all those reading my post and wondering about their ancient, slow computer, pirated Windows, legal Windows, anything…… don’t take my word - just go for it and see for yourself! If there is stuff you need Windows for, go for a dual boot, or just save yourself the space otherwise. Believe me, I acclimatized within a day and have to simply do a search or ask for what I don’t know.

Life will never be the same again.