First day at Grameen Software

Sazzad and I joined Grameen Software today. After waiting for 3 hours, we were given two laptops to work with. This was a temporary solution. Tomorrow we are supposed to get two Intel 3.0 GHz hyper-thread PCs. Today, we mostly browsed websites for some RFCs. I was given the laptop of the C.T.O. which by the end of the day I messed. I don’t know what happened and how but suddenly I found that all the executable files are infected with virus and Trojans. Our lunches were provided free. We went to the very same place in 12th floor where our good old office was. There were same partitions and same cubicles. Actually, Grameen Software bought them from Eyeball Networks. We felt nice to be there, that place will remain in our memories for the rest of our lives. We have very nice memorable incidents there. However, after lunch Shakhawat came and we had a good chat. At 5:45 we came out of office, 15 minutes before end of office time. We went to a tea shop nearby and had tea with some snacks. After that we dispersed to three different directions. In a nutshell, the day was neither good nor bad. Hope we will enjoy working here.

New email address

Today, I got an official email address from my new company. I know it is not anything worth mentioning. My new address is like this ****@grameensoftware.com. I also had an official email address in my previous job. It too is not worth mentioning. The email address was like this ****@engr.eyeball.com. Now, I think, you have got a hint why I am writing this. There is a difference between the two email addresses. The one Eyeball gave me uses a sub-domain. All the members of Dhaka team used to get such email address whereas people in Vancouver got email addresses like this ****@eyeball.com. This fact is enough to summarize our position in Eyeball. They always treated us as their inferior subordinates, no matter how successful we were in our duties. They celebrated successes made by us in Vancouver by lavish parties but they never asked us even to have some snacks for the same purpose. We were always neglected slaves. They expected us to work day and night whenever it is needed, but back there they used to leave office at most after 6 pm. They used to enjoy three weekends once in a month and two weekends in other weeks. But here we were not sure whether we are going to get our only weekend on Friday until it is Friday morning. However, I should stop here lest this blog becomes a tirade. I am very happy to get rid of Eyeball now, I think I should not bring back the unpleasant memories and make myself unhappy any more.

A very funny news :D

I burst into laughter after reading the news. Click here to read it.

Aweful score in AWA

I got my AWA score of GRE yesterday. It is beyond my imagination. I got a mere score of 3.5. I thought that I would get at least 4.5. After finishing the AWA section, my impression was I have done fairly good. But it seems that ignoring advice of my friend Mehedi proved fatal. He asked me to practice this section very seriously but I thought I can get a good enough score in this section without practice. My TOEFL writing score led me to think in this way as I did not practice a bit for that too. However, my advice to other people is every section in GRE is hard, so no section should be looked down upon.

Chris's interview at VON

Chris Piche, C.E.O. of Eyeball Networks Inc., was interviewed by the VON Spring 2006 (A VoIP Trade Show) organizers. There he speaks of Any-Firewall Server as one of his two key products. I am very proud of being the only developer of that server. I designed and coded it from scratch. And considering the fact that I have to code the server in absence of any client program, I am particularly more satisfied with the server. Client program was being developed very late and when it communicated with my server, very few bugs were being found. Almost all the features were working fine. You can hear the podcast here.

Resigned from Eyeball

After one and a half years, I have resigned from Eyeball Networks. May be my release date will be the 15th instant. After sending my resignation email, I signed a job contract with Grameen Software. My joining date is the 1st March, 2006. They offered a very good compensation package with lots of facilities. Among them weekend on alternate Saturday fascinated me most. On those weeks, I can pass full two weekends with my wife.

I have lots and lots of memories in Eyeball. I know that if I begin to write them, I will become so emotional that I will not be able to finish the writing. So, I would rather want to recollect only the first few months of Eyeball now. After giving the final exam of level 4 term 2 in B.U.E.T., we began to come to office from the following day. The first few weeks were fun, we were dreaming of a surreal job. But things suddenly changed after that. Our C.T.O. came from Canada and we began to stay at office day and night right away. In our university life, we were used to write programs for Windows PCs mostly. But our first project was in an embedded system whose operating system was ucLinux. It was just like firing a machine gun without even knowing how to fire a single-shot rifle. Our experience in Linux was negligible. We first had to familiarize ourselves with Linux, then to cross compilation. Moreover, our software had requirements almost like a real-time software. At first, we thought it was unimaginable task. But our C.T.O. was very brave and prudent man. He kept on pushing. We all had our beds in office, days after days we did not go home. By this time Ramadan came, things became easier to work as there was less hassle for foods. After only one month, we released our first version, I should rather not call it alpha version. It was an achievement beyond imagination. Because only one month ago, we did not know what the hell a Makefile is but after one month we released a software which was capable of doing a video-chat. It was an enormous feat. Our confidence grew exponentially. Rest of the story is coming soon ...

Had no other option than refusing

It all started in one morning. I was working happily at my desk. In the previous evening, I got Indian Visa. It was the only positive thing in my passport after being gifted two visa refusals from Canadian High Commission. I was excited imagining a nice tour to India. But alas! I had not sufficient leave approved. I had only three days of leave but it was too scanty for a tour to India. I needed only three more. After my wedding in 2004, I had not taken a long leave to have a honeymoon. I always dreaded my leave application being refused by my office which is a leader in VOIP but very ruthlessly careless to its employees at Dhaka. However, I mustered all the courage I had, wrote a mail to my project manager to extend my leave. He was online at the moment I sent the mail. Suddenly, he logged out. I kept waiting for the reply. After long one hour, he came online. He knocked me in messenger. At the beginning he was pretending that everything is normal doing some enquiries about my assigned task but he could not continue too long. He burst into fury within a few minutes. He started to teach me what corporate behavior is. For, fifteen long minutes he kept on taking the class, humiliating me at his will.

I reached to the decision quickly. I deferred the decision for more than one year but at that moment I thought "Enough!" I could no longer carry on a job being completely unrecognized, humiliated and ignored. I already had done much sacrifice for this job. I did not go to the honeymoon, was not involved in the preparation of my wedding ceremony because I was staying at office day and night then, refused an excellent offer (better than my current offer by a good margin) from AKTEL in the peak pressure time just because I wanted be a part of Dhaka team to prove its worth, refused another offer from GP because I was promised after the completion of one year in the job my compensation package will be improved but I could no longer afford any more sacrifice for no cause. I clicked the compose button, attached my resume, sent the mail to one of my close friends at ReliSource.

ReliSource gave me a marvelous offer. It is really a nice company with an excellent caring management. The job was really a career job. But I could not accept their offer only for one reason: their office timing. I had to come home after 2230 if I had worked in ReliSource. That would create a huge gap with my wife as she is a working woman. I am really sad to refuse their offer last evening. I hope someday I can work in ReliSource just to experience how a caring management does the immense task of keeping all its employees happy. I am dying for such a management.

Blogger For Word

I am posting it from Blogger For Word. It seems like a good tool which facilitates bloggers to compose their posts in Microsoft Word at ease and then just click a button to publish it. I think I will use it regularly.