Saturday, November 27, 2004

Eating Out & Lunch-time bets

One of my friends here and I went to eat out this afternoon. Today was one of those days made just for driving around, cruising on the highway flanked on both sides by farms. It reminded me of the vacations I spent in my native village. We went to a restaurant about 13 kilometres from here, and returned with full stomachs; 1 Mutton Briyani, Naan, Kalimirch murgi(blackpepper chicken) and 1 Chicken briyani! We were so stuffed we did not want to leave that seat. Later we went for some shopping, just some basic stuff like soap, bodyspray, topical cream, oil etc. This guy was one of the most indecisive. You won't find many such managers around. He took an hour deciding to buy a file and came back emptyhanded. "Should I do this? or that? Ok, I will do this", later he changes his mind to do That.

Some of the good stuff were made as bets over a lunch, like 'around the world in 80 days', the webcam, etc. Now this, the largest digital panoramic picture, a gigapixel picture, by some engineers in The Netherlands. We had such discussions even in Dilbert College back home. The verdict of the majority would be always 'Why this unnecessary work?' or 'it is impossible', unless it was a project week and some come up with some good ideas. Some guys do come up with useful things, like this English to Tamil converter this guy called 'Kuchi' made or the nifty hydraulic robot my seniors made, or the battery powered car my cousin made when she just joined medical college.

The Dutch team used already available technologies, although it had to upgrade them to be able to handle the high-resolution image.

These guys, in the Netherlands, had to 'upgrade' many of their stuff. Leaves them with even more cool stuff, huh? Now, they are going to 'upgrade' even further!

Following the success of this project, and with promises of help from others, the TNO team is considering creating a full 360-degree panoramic view of another Dutch city, with even higher resolution.

Maybe it is a European thing, doing things unnecessary and making all people crave for it. This guy thinks Indian engineers are content with writing code and not so much for innovation.

1 comment:

Lumbergh-in-training said...

I am not sure about that buck-passing man... He does most of the work for his group. He just can't make up his mind