Allocation getting extended

I just heard the news that our customer wants my allocation in the current project extended till end of June. Which means that I have been able to keep them happy with my work. That's wonderful because I have been able to maintain a quite comfortable work life as well.
I usually come to office around 7.30 and leave around 4.30. So I have enough time after work for myself. I do all the customer interactions in my project and manage my own work and time.
The perception over here was that you have to work extra hours to produce good work and keep the customer happy; I have proven that it's wrong.
Keeping the customer happy is all about doing what you do right and be crisp and honoust in your communications.
My architect, Nalin, once said "Even 14 year old's can do the coding, what makes the difference is managing a good relationship with the customer". I took the advise..

Light of life

Finally a picture I feel happy about capturing...

My hard created template is gone!

Some time back, I created my own profile for my blog using tables instead of DIVs that are commonly used. I thought that gave my blog a uniqueness.

But today, when I altered the display picture url and saved the template, blogger decided to completely remove some of the elements... So I was forced to change the template to a default one.

Update: Managed to recover the old one :)

What makes us happy?

My brother, on last Saturday, flew to Qatar to work for the Qatar commercial bank. He plans to settle down there with his family. I don’t quite understand the rational behind his decision. He was quite well established here and had every thing he needed to lead a decent life here. He had a house, car, spare money and a beloved family, yet he wanted more. And for that he took the risk of never seeing some of the immediate relatives ever again.

Would I have done that? I think not, but I’m not married with kids like he is. Even then, I’m more likely to be happy with a place to stay, a comfortable ride and some money to spare. And wouldn’t have sacrificed the company of my loved ones in order to earn some extra.

I’m not rich at all. In fact I could really make use of some more money. Yet I’m not struggling for it. That alone is enough for me. So what makes us strive to earn more and more than enjoying from what we already have? I could understand the need if I couldn’t afford a shelter, a decent car and little more money to spare. But if I have that much, I would kick out the shoes and rejoice that.

Settling down

I came back to Sri Lanka on 2nd January. After traveling for 48+ hours I was exhausted. I stayed in Kandy on Wednesday and came back to Colombo on Thursday morning. Spent some quite time till Sunday afternoon and returned to work on Monday.

The whole office was filled with new faces. Some of the people I knew three months back had left the company. And many are scattered around in other building facilities.

Settling down wasn’t as smooth as I expected. Our FTP site has destroyed some of my files. I didn’t get a desktop machine as soon as I expected. And setting up a source repository that could be shared with the customer seems to take more time than I expected. Anyways we had received good comments about my engagement from the customer - so that’s enough motivation to iron out the odds of Sri Lankan work life.