A not quite obvious co-incidence is the fact of my involvement with niche projects and startups. The strange beginnings is where I tend to find my footsteps quite often. Be it diprs, ckjob, cons... anything ..Comprehension of things at a birds eye has never been a big problem however the mind is heavily taxed when it starts looking into the minute details. Years back when i moved out from my place for the first time crossing the state borders to a different place about 1500 kms away all alone, it looked quite similar to the place I see today. 56 acres of barren land on the lonely Hounsur road could be big for my small eye to see it as a whole. You heard it right it was barren. Little did I know it would be dpirs!...
Dimming lights of the halogen lamps scattered in a random pattern, freshly burnt bricks lying around, the dozers still trying to make the road a bit more plain.. men and women of the worker class working late nights, to make the building. TOCET, another engginering college in the making! .. At the start remember! .. am there again ;)
This time not alone but with my team, an experienced old man, like my dad, two budding engineers, one being close enough to address me dad!.. heheh being dad at 23 with a daughter of 21 is fun. This day I sometimes I sit and wonder what forms of love can be!.. amazing huh!
There’s always a technology change and the change happens so rapidly, people like me are just spell bound with the pace. For me its relatively hard to accept such a change for I am limited by my myopic vision of its acceptance and usability. I rely on facts that are an outcome of experimentation. This technology we would be implementing seemed exciting. Words words words, words are they.. Possibly trying to change the way the education systems work!. No computers, no thin clients, A hundred terminals, supported by 4 IBM servers, centrally managed. Virtualizing the entire computing environment was quite a task! See the diagram below!
I have been a little more molded by the words of people around me, and at some point i think i have evolved in my thinking. My perception on business, technology everything has changed .. but from my evolved way of thinking I was to learn one of my greatest lessons.
Things will happen and the process will evolve with time. It will stabilize. "It will happen, dont worrie about it", had become my way. As i write this I am reminded of a time, when there was no night nor a day, 3 years flat went into building a framework which worked fine on the networks in the college yet rarely any one knew about it.. Perhaps you got to work and make it happen. It doesnt otherwise! may be...
There were no plans, nor an architecture nor a paper nor did I know what had to be done except for my faint understanding of virtualization and windows 2003 networks, and of course a goal of building a network of a hundred machines managed and administered centrally, consolidated, all clients could connect to the internet, maximum downtime of 5 minutes.
For some of us who are engineers, we would probably start with a pen and paper try out sketches, and make it work on paper before we try it real. Sometimes you dont have the advantage to make people understand why of things! You dont have time, you work and make them work your way, even if they like you lesser than they did! Hehe.
Time starts at 3 PM, No plans yet, no one knows whats about to happen. Ho-jayega hurray! .. I have started believing this theory lately :). We look around, for a piece of paper and a pencil, the brown paper that forms the package cover for the IBM Server serves the purpose. Ravi, Vibha and amforked are on trying to figure out why this way and why not that. We missed the sunset but the plans were ready.
"Can we make it?" someone asked i dont remember who did. Its a dirty area to work. We have our own doubts and questions in a given environment, rarely do we have the balls that we want. "This is the beginning of something. We build it. People are going to work on it. We have the advantage of making the rules here. I see 300 students working on the framework we build." And there we go...
The grand old man of the project, the Godfather, as i call him, was responsible for the Infrastructure. He had done his job perfectly well since the past 2 days working quite hard on it. And this night was our turn... Crashes, blue screens, jumbled wires, "Windows booting up for the first time", keying in the dcpromo with excitement... and finally "Log on to tocet.local domain" .. 4 servers, 16 virtualized clients, configured for dhcp and dns failover, with basic applications for the users ... 7 am and its up. You could log on to the network from anywhere in the campus and start working. Shutdown your terminal, go to the other building and resume your work again from where you left!!! However the internet aint still working..
Its got to be up and live for the AICTE would be inspecting it at 10AM. First of its kind in India. No mess.... There comes a team at 10:30AM, speaking to the Godfather, who explains everything and passes on to me for comments on Virtualization. One guy.. "can i browse the internet?" And all say "Yes lets test that"... Am cold, am stuck, the confidence vanishes like i never knew what it was...Point-Click Firefox -> http://www.google.com.
.....
-----
STUCK
-----
.....
"Page not found" .. hehehehehe .. certainly most unexpected The Google flashed on the browser and ..... Everything seemed perfect. Had we done it? Perhaps...
That was a day ... a moment. 6 months ago.. we were all at the beginning, now we are in the middle, caught with some issues. Issues popped from poor assessment of technology .. Probably, just starting is not enough, building it and letting it float and running beside it nurturing it makes sense... I dont have an idea if we can ever go back in time and build it better... of course we started it.
As I see the birds fly back home, the thoughts of the lab we built once fade away.. theres a guilt creeping in me, which ain’t just about starting but ...
Dimming lights of the halogen lamps scattered in a random pattern, freshly burnt bricks lying around, the dozers still trying to make the road a bit more plain.. men and women of the worker class working late nights, to make the building. TOCET, another engginering college in the making! .. At the start remember! .. am there again ;)
This time not alone but with my team, an experienced old man, like my dad, two budding engineers, one being close enough to address me dad!.. heheh being dad at 23 with a daughter of 21 is fun. This day I sometimes I sit and wonder what forms of love can be!.. amazing huh!
There’s always a technology change and the change happens so rapidly, people like me are just spell bound with the pace. For me its relatively hard to accept such a change for I am limited by my myopic vision of its acceptance and usability. I rely on facts that are an outcome of experimentation. This technology we would be implementing seemed exciting. Words words words, words are they.. Possibly trying to change the way the education systems work!. No computers, no thin clients, A hundred terminals, supported by 4 IBM servers, centrally managed. Virtualizing the entire computing environment was quite a task! See the diagram below!
I have been a little more molded by the words of people around me, and at some point i think i have evolved in my thinking. My perception on business, technology everything has changed .. but from my evolved way of thinking I was to learn one of my greatest lessons.
Things will happen and the process will evolve with time. It will stabilize. "It will happen, dont worrie about it", had become my way. As i write this I am reminded of a time, when there was no night nor a day, 3 years flat went into building a framework which worked fine on the networks in the college yet rarely any one knew about it.. Perhaps you got to work and make it happen. It doesnt otherwise! may be...
There were no plans, nor an architecture nor a paper nor did I know what had to be done except for my faint understanding of virtualization and windows 2003 networks, and of course a goal of building a network of a hundred machines managed and administered centrally, consolidated, all clients could connect to the internet, maximum downtime of 5 minutes.
For some of us who are engineers, we would probably start with a pen and paper try out sketches, and make it work on paper before we try it real. Sometimes you dont have the advantage to make people understand why of things! You dont have time, you work and make them work your way, even if they like you lesser than they did! Hehe.
Time starts at 3 PM, No plans yet, no one knows whats about to happen. Ho-jayega hurray! .. I have started believing this theory lately :). We look around, for a piece of paper and a pencil, the brown paper that forms the package cover for the IBM Server serves the purpose. Ravi, Vibha and amforked are on trying to figure out why this way and why not that. We missed the sunset but the plans were ready.
"Can we make it?" someone asked i dont remember who did. Its a dirty area to work. We have our own doubts and questions in a given environment, rarely do we have the balls that we want. "This is the beginning of something. We build it. People are going to work on it. We have the advantage of making the rules here. I see 300 students working on the framework we build." And there we go...
The grand old man of the project, the Godfather, as i call him, was responsible for the Infrastructure. He had done his job perfectly well since the past 2 days working quite hard on it. And this night was our turn... Crashes, blue screens, jumbled wires, "Windows booting up for the first time", keying in the dcpromo with excitement... and finally "Log on to tocet.local domain" .. 4 servers, 16 virtualized clients, configured for dhcp and dns failover, with basic applications for the users ... 7 am and its up. You could log on to the network from anywhere in the campus and start working. Shutdown your terminal, go to the other building and resume your work again from where you left!!! However the internet aint still working..
Its got to be up and live for the AICTE would be inspecting it at 10AM. First of its kind in India. No mess.... There comes a team at 10:30AM, speaking to the Godfather, who explains everything and passes on to me for comments on Virtualization. One guy.. "can i browse the internet?" And all say "Yes lets test that"... Am cold, am stuck, the confidence vanishes like i never knew what it was...Point-Click Firefox -> http://www.google.com.
.....
-----
STUCK
-----
.....
"Page not found" .. hehehehehe .. certainly most unexpected The Google flashed on the browser and ..... Everything seemed perfect. Had we done it? Perhaps...
That was a day ... a moment. 6 months ago.. we were all at the beginning, now we are in the middle, caught with some issues. Issues popped from poor assessment of technology .. Probably, just starting is not enough, building it and letting it float and running beside it nurturing it makes sense... I dont have an idea if we can ever go back in time and build it better... of course we started it.
As I see the birds fly back home, the thoughts of the lab we built once fade away.. theres a guilt creeping in me, which ain’t just about starting but ...
1 comments:
Nothing is ever perfect.. and it does not have to be.
If it were... there would be nothing called as love... or beauty.
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