Xmas trip to Florida

I have been away from blogging for a while, so thought I would restart this new year.

I was off from work for almost 3 weeks during December. I stayed home most of the time, except for a nice vacation to Florida with friends and family. It was great to get away from the cold winter in Ottawa.

We got a great deal from Syracuse to Orlando for the week of the 24th. We drove to Syracuse from Ottawa and parked our car at the covered parking garage at the airport. Just when we were ready to get our boarding passes, we were notified that our flight to Chicago was delayed and we would miss the connection from Chicago to Orlando. We reached Chicago around 10:30 PM and checked into a hotel closeby. On the 25th, we took a flight from Chicago to Atlanta to Orlando. We finally reached Orlando at 1 PM, almost 13 hours late than our scheduled arrival.

The temperature in Orlando was ~18C, which was markedly different from Ottawa (-25C with windchill). We met our friends in Orlando and headed out to Fort Lauderdale to meet my dad's uncle,aunt and cousins. We reached Fort Lauderdale around 7 PM and had dinner at our uncle's house. The dinner was awesome, with special south indian specialty items that I hadn't tasted in ages.

The next day, we headed to Key West. The drive to Key West was beautiful, especially the 7 mile stretch. By the time we reached Key West, it was 6 PM. We went to the visitor center and booked a room at Holiday Inn. Keys is an expensive place to stay during the Xmas/New Year break. A basic hotel room costs ~250 USD. The rates at the visitor center were much better than through internet booking.

We spent the evening at Duval Street in Key West. I enjoyed a nice drink at Sloppy Joes, the famous bar where Ernest Hemmingway spent time writing.

Social networking-Good or Bad

I have been drawn into the various social networking sites these days as most of my friends, colleagues are there. It does seem cool to get in touch with friends after close to 10 years of no contact.

It also helps me maintain my contacts, as opposed to looking through phone books and calling folks once in a while to be in touch. LinkedIn sounds like a good networking site to connect with work colleagues and keep upto date on trends in the technology sector. I did connect with many of my classmates from school and university through facebook, LinkedIn etc.

The only drawback is, i have stopped calling some of my friends I used to call at least on their birthdays. With facebook, I just find it very easy to post a "Happy Birthday" note:-).

In facebook, I see people post hourly updates of what they are doing. People are so used to posting all that they are doing, its almost like their life is an open book. I have seen surprise parties ruined because of posts in facebook by other friends. This is still ok. The difficulties arise when work colleagues/managers are a part of your facebook friends list. A lot of unnecessary personal information is available, which may not be good in this time of recession. Decisions about layoff can also be influenced based on personal information.

It's best to think carefully before posting any personal information on public websites.

What do I really want

After spending a decade in the telecom sector, and having seen couple of recessions, I seem to wonder if this is what I should be doing for the rest of my life.

I have been contemplating going back to law school. 3 long years of school followed by a series of exams to get bar certified is not helping make an easy decision. Probably the best way to see if I am really interested is to take one course.

I have also been thinking about consulting or teaching telecom as well as project management basics to small and medium scale companies. With the experience and PMP certification, I think it is a viable option.

I still am trying to find answers for the question "What is it that I really want"........ I know I can achieve what I want, given the vision and focus. But to determine what one wants is the toughest thing. A vision that is truly aligned with our inner self, body, mind, emotions is a true vision that one should strive for and will achieve.

I am interested in working with people, and making a difference in people's lives. Hence i had given some serious thought to law school. I know with a law degree, I can help many people go through legal issues.

Still don't know if thats what i truly want.....Will ponder over this some more

PMP certification--is it worth pursuing?

I am a certified PMP, passed the exam in Oct2006. There was a lot of hype about PMP at that time. I thought it will be a good to add onto my resume. I did a course conducted by the PMI Ottawa valley chapter. It was an exam preparation course, that ran for 9 weeks. After attending the course, I had to prepare for atleast 6 weeks religiously. I had to read through the book thoroughly atleast twice. I hadn't done this kind of preparation even for my Engineering final exams. The exam was also quite tough, with all four hours barely enough to complete the test. I was just happy to see the pass grade at the end of the exam.

After getting PMP certified, i felt good that I had achieved something. However, the next process was to maintain the PDUs. I found that it is a time consuming and expensive affair. All courses/seminars offered by PMI institute were atleast 80$ for 3 to 4 PDUs and I needed ~60 PDUs to maintain PMP certification.

I realised that I could give seminars and collect PDUs. I did one seminar in a university in India. I am hoping that will count for a few PDUs. I do have a fair bit to collect before end of next year. I did see that pmstudy.com is offering cheaper ways to collect PDUs. Their online courses are a lot cheaper than courses conducted by PMI.

All in all, I think the PMP certificate is good to have on the resume to help find a job. In the tech sector, it doesnt matter if one is a certified PMP or not. Government project management jobs do require PMP certification.

My First Blog

I have always wondered how nice it would be to start a blog, but never sat down to actually doing it. Finally, after many years of inertia, I decided to start blogging.

My quest to find out more about web 2.0 finally brought me to blogs. Blogging seems like a lot of fun.

I want to start blogging on varied areas like telecom, finances, travel, rental business, small business opportunities, cooking, healthy living.