We are the champions

It was in the 1992 world cup when I first saw cricket matches with any interest. Incidently, that was also Sachin's first appearance in a world cup for India. I was told we won it in 1983. When Pakistan won it in 1992, I thanked god that atleast we already had one to show for ourselves.

For 19 years, I couldn't understand what it feels to win the cup. Heck, I didn't even know if it feels anything. For 19 years, this other guy didn't know that feeling either. We abused him while feeling sorry for him when we got destroyed on a faithful eden garden pitch, and then when we came tantalizingly close but got brutally drubbed by a certain genius in yellow.

A dream of a billion cannot be fulfilled by one, it has to be fulfilled by eleven. This is the time when the individual brilliance of the 90s is complemented with the leadership and teamwork of 2011. This is a new India, and it can take on the world on its own. I salute the stars who have given us this belief. I salute you Sachin, I salute you Dhoni. I salute the Indian Cricket Team.

Yes, and now I know that there is a feeling when you win the cup. And I am happy that now he knows it too.
(Photo courtesy: cbc.ca)

Daring or Non Obedient?

I wrote this (and the upcoming next) post while flying from Bangalore to Jaipur few days back.

Unka kaam hai bolna aur hamara kaam hai nahi sunna.

A fellow passenger doesn't switch off his cellphone during take off even after being specifically told by the flight attendent. On the other side, a small kid is sitting on an open tray table. His father(?) initially tries to get him to wear the seat belt, but when the kid doesn't agree, he gets busy with attending a phone call while his kid is sitting in a very unsafe position. All this during takeoff.

I wonder the paragliders and the sky divers in western countries would drive their cars without wearing a seat belt, even if their is no law regarding the same.

Being daring to get thrilled is one thing, unnecessary risk taking for sake of non-obedience is another. I am afraid a lot of Indians I know fall in the latter category.

Why Mafia Wars is more addictive than Farmville.

I used to be a Farmville player, and after wasting quite a lot of my life precious hours on it (which could have so much more well spent with family/my startup and this blog), I was finally able to kick off this habit. However, in doing so, I got into another addiction and that too by Zynga -Mafia Wars. After wasting another set of precious hours, I now see how Mafia Wars has become the new addiction, and a more difficult one to cure.

Here are my reasons why I think Mafia Wars is a bigger addiction than Farmville.

• Leveling up becomes pretty difficult after level 25. The max level player I saw in farmville was level 60 or so, and that was a paying player. On the other hand, I have completed more than 300 levels in mafia wars and I still can level up 4 times in a day.
• The real gameplay is really just planting crops and harvesting. All other activities (such as harvesting trees and animals) yield zero/little experience and little money. The motivation is to get more and more different type of items, and most of these items have nothing more than decorative value. On the other hand, all the mafia wars activities yield exp/money/items, and items have attack/defense value useful for fights.
• Maybe it was Zynga's brilliant move to monetize, but fuel limitation seriously hinders gameplay. That's Zynga's way of saying, this game is free only till level 25. No such apparent limitation in mafia wars.
• You can setup Farmville to play only once every 24/48/72 hours (by planting appropiate crops), but you can't do the same for mafia wars. That's where mafia wars is dangerously addictive. Farmville addiction can be cured by slowing down the game and ultimately leaving it, mafia wars addiction is much more difficult to cure.
• Farmville is slow to load. It took me almost 5 mins just to load the game everyday, and that was the primary reason why I stopped playing the game Just couldn't wait any longer.

Zygna has addressed some of these issues in recent times (after I stopped playing Farmville), such as useful buildings, one click harvesting, mystery gifts and giving out free fuel. But limited farmland and limited fuel capacity is still a major deterent.

So if mafia wars is so addictive, why is Farmville is no 1 game of the internet?
Here's why. The first time user to mafia wars will see all black screen with guns n illegal stuff, and all he needs to do is click "Do Job" again n again to gain exp. On the other hand, First time user to Farmville will see colorful plants on green soil and he has options to plant different crops. No prizes for guessing which one most users will like more.

You start liking Farmville immediately and slowly get bored of it. On the other hand, it takes you 10-20 level ups to start getting a hang of mafia wars (and getting used to it's graphics), and it starts getting addictive after you level up 50 times.

I invented the slow bouncer

Long long time ago, I used to play a cricket game on my computer. It was a DOS game and was called Allan Border's Cricket.

Most of these cricket games were heavily tilted towards batsmen. There were limited options with the ball, and most of the time any player, like a typical indian, would simply put the game on auto-player mode while bowling and then play when it came to batting. 

But I used to try bowling a lot (mainly because I was a better bowler as a kid than a batsmen). I saw that whatever I tried, it was really difficult to take wickets.

Then I noticed that these computer players would always leave the bouncers alone (it was the era of test cricket). So I would drop most balls short. Then I tried reducing the pace. I reduced and ... what I see ... the batsmen got BOWLED by the slow short pitch delivery (hehehahaha).

To some it might be discovering a bug in the game. To others it is innovation, out-thinking the computer (is that an oxymoron) and its physics laws by bowling out the batsmen with a slow bouncer.

I invented the slow bouncer.

20 years, 200 runs

Dear Sachin,
I know I have been a crabby guy. For 20 years, all I have done is to complain.  Sachin, why didn't you stay till the end and got those 17 runs? Why did you got out early when we needed to chase 360 runs for the world cup? Why do records like highest test score and highest test average belong to someone else? Why don't you play like your earlier days.

And I know you don't like that. All these 20 years you have been trying to keep me happy. Here, keep this Sharjah cup I got for you from Australia. Here are records for highest no of runs and centuries in both one days and tests. Here is the overseas win you wanted so badly. Here is me hitting Akhtar out of the park. And Shane Warne. And Olonga. And McGrath. And Walsh and Ambrose. And Akram and Waqar. Dude, I am trying hard for the world cup. Just wait.

I was 11 when I started watching cricket. You were 18. I don't even remember how quickly you became the synonym of cricket for me and for everyone else in India. I couldn't even realize that cricket is a team sport, not an individual one. Yes I liked Azhar, Jadeja, then I liked Ganguly, Dravid and then Sehwag, Dhoni. But truly speaking, I switched on the TV to watch you, and switched it off the moment you got out. When my mood is so much governed by how you play, I am bound to get crabby when you get out.

But from today I'll stop complaining. Today you wiped out which was probably our biggest shame, and coverted it to our proudest moment that's gonna stay for a long time. You were the one who stopped Anwar from getting a double hundred that day years back, and today you finally put an end to that pinching that every Indian Cricket Fan has been feeling in their hearts for past 13 years.

Congratulations on getting a double hundred Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, and Thank You very much.
(Photo courtesy: R@VITH)

Sanjay Goel resides on goelsanjay.com

Its been quite some time since I registered domain http://www.goelsanjay.com. And even though moving blogger to your custom domain is only a 10 mins job, I have been lazy enough to not spare those 10 mins.
Anyways, here is my first post on the new domain. All the existing posts gets redirected automatically and the rss feed works too.
Great.

One small poll. Which domain is better?

• goelsanjay.com or 
• sanjaygoel.name

I have registered both. Please mark your preference in the comments.

The next step would be to actually write a post, something I haven't done in 3 months. Its high time to do so, expect a post soon.

Why interviews are so tough?

I often hear this - The interview was as if the company wanted me to build a spaceship, and now all the work I am doing is nowhere better than data entry.
Why do companies take such tough interviews during hiring and reject so many candidates when quite a lot of them are qualified to do the work they offer? Being on the other side of the table for quite sometime now, here is my point to view.

The World is full of boring/routine work - Vikas said that in his post Good Work Bad Work, and I couldn't agree more. Call it 80-20 rule, 90-10 or 99-1, challenging work is hard to come by.

Smart people take challenge in doing the boring work in a smart way - Regular people will do manual testing of their code, Smart ones would write automated testing code, Smart and experienced would know when to do manual testing and when to automate. Companies want smart people because they save their own time and teach the world to do boring stuff in a faster way.

Only smart people can solve difficult problems - So you have been doing all this boring work in your project. The project is deployed now. Suddenly the system has started failing consistently. Who is going to dig into the issue and solve it? The IT industry is different from most traditional industries in one fundamental way. Here, there are problems which average people cannot solve in their lifetimes but a smart one can solve in 10 mins. Smart people are troubleshooters. Companies need troubleshooters.

Apart from these, I believe that there is also another important reason related to human psychology. If the interview weren't tough, the candidate would feel it was too easy to enter the organization. During my job career, I took the toughness of the interview as an indication of what kind of peers I would have, and how good the company is in general. And the companies where I got in too easy were never the best places for me to work.

Some tips for a tough interview:
- Open ended questions are asked to judge your thinking. So Think, Think and Think out of the box. If you give a non-stupid answer that the interviewer has never heard before, thats a big bonus. Giving multiple solutions is also a good idea.
- Be prepared to write code on paper. Writing code really means psuedo code, don't worry about the syntax.
- Every interviewer has his own way of judging candidates, so don't panic. I used to ask only 2 questions to a candidate and never expected to get full and complete answer.