Ravi’s Blog

About 45 days back, i posted about a contractor who was unreachable after taking some advance money from me. It took a bit of introspection for me and hesitation to post something negative like that. Eventually, i felt that as a contractor he is different from an employee and he deserve get reviewed online. I caught some flack for blogging about this contractor - private as well as public. I suppose most people were either indifferent or appreciated the warning. So couple of days back someone posted a comment to my blog about a wayne deviney who stole goods from them and got arrested, I was surprised. I went to news.yahoo.com to search for wayne deviney and i found this. The photo is the wayne deviney that i signed contract with. So now i feel that i should have blogged about wayne earlier and not have hesitated as much.
oh as an aside, google news did not find this article, just yahoo news. Oh, i also saved it on my web, so the article can be cached.

Here’s a great post from dave shen. I can tell you more about it, but read it for yourself and enjoy

My last post, got me thinking about how the world changed and how one can find out a lot about a person by just searching for that person’s name.
Specifically, the thought that employers are looking online for more info on candidates made me think of “employee reviews” sort of like restaurant reviews. Of course, I am not talking about posting someone’s annual review here. I believe an Employer-Employee relationship is something that is almost like a marriage :). It’s a deep bond where both sides sign on with a trust that they will engage in this business activity together. An employee (especially the one who take stock options) make a deep commitment to the company’s well being and employers offer to help improve employees life rather than just simply giving money for work done. Given that, i donot think it’s fair to share reviews, assessments about co-workers and employees with the rest of the world. Confidentiality is implied and critical.

However, if i hired a contractor ( a company or person) and that contracting entity did not deliver, then they are fair game for a online review in my opinion.

Here is my experience with one such contractor.

His name is Wayne Deviney. At the time of this incident he used to live in san ramon. He had prior experience as a CTO at Go Interactive LLC, Director at Scene One, Engineering role at Incenta and a long stint at Microsoft, among other roles. He responded to my advertisement on craigslist for a contract opportunity to code a IE toolbar. He was prompt and clear with his communication, and vouched that he’s also doing a contract for Hotjobs (Yahoo). He said that he’d be a better bet for doing something like this because of his long tenure at microsoft and his expertise. In fact, his contention was that he can build this very quickly (2 weeks). So we agreed upon a sum, and contract terms. He came over from san ramon to palo alto on a sunday to sign the contract and pick up the check.
Of course, as you expect, this is when my troubles began. He sent over some xml that i need to prepare for the toolbar to behave as i want it. I asked him some questions on it. He kept on saying that i’ll get something to you by end of day and missing. Then he started blaming his ISP, saying that he’s been prompt and sending me emails but i haven’t been getting them.
Suddenly he stopped responding to my emails, then my phone calls, then my voicemails. He definitely cashed in that check though. I talked to my lawyer and sent a notice to him that i fired him and he needs to return my money. Of course he hasn’t yet.
So, if you want to hire Wayne Deviney - Go Ahead. But If he tells you that his isp has ben acting up and his gmail has been acting up, you know what’s coming next.

may be i should have a link roll or something to point people to what i read. While i think about that, i still have a good blog post for you folks to check out

Given the rise of blogging, does owning a blog do good to your career or the opposite? The conventional wisdom is that it improves your career prospects. Here’s an argument from chyetanya that folks hiring should not take a potential employee’s blog too seriously. I tend to agree with the line of thought he has. Unless you have a work focused blog and what you wrote on your blog matters to your ability to perform the job, it shouldn’t matter.

Today amazon.com is taking a beating in the stock market. The stock is down 22% similar to yahoo, however, their report seems much worse than that of yahoo!. Only the revenue year over year grew, but rest of the numbers were down and down significantly (20%-50%). Market cap for amazon.com fell as low as 11B dollars.

Is this an opportunity to buy? Yahoo has been up 10% in the last week after that horrendous drop. Will amazon do the same? I doubt it. Yahoo has a book value of 6$/share. Apart from this book value they have stake in yahoo! japan and alibaba.com (china). We can put an intrinsic value of the stock at 12-13$. So we would have been paying 13$ for yahoo’s US business. Sounds cheap doesn’t it? So, i can see some justification in a lot of value guys picking up yahoo!.

Looking at amazon, the book value is 0.777 per share!! I would imagine they’d have higher book value because they own warehouses and trucks that go around taking pictures. I am going to stay away from this stock.

In the last year i have visited india 3 times and going back there again in early august. My needs to send US dollars to india (for my expenses and family expenses) increased a great deal compared to before. India is getting more expensive and i noticed that i was sending decent sums of money to india.

What took me a few transactions to notice is the extra charges credit cards charge and how various banks give a conversion rate that’s much much lower than what’s quoted on yahoo! finance. There is a huge difference in rate citibank offers to what’s quoted as a exchange rate in the market (almost off by 1 rupee!).

Since then i looked at different ways to send money. Overall, I love money2india.com and i have been using them consistently. It is a service offered by ICICI bank. They can send money to any bank in india, or deliver it by Demand Draft. You can wire money or transfer by ACH. You can send to various types of accounts (NRE , NRO, local etc)!

To top it all off, i have found they had the best rates and they are transparent. The conversion rate is still a tiered structure - you get a better rate if you send more money - but even along all the tiers, the rates are much better than citibank.

Overall, great service, easy to use and sends money quickly!!!

Yahoo’s earning report came in yesterday and the stock is down to $25.12 right now (12:00pm PST). Ouch. Even though i quit yahoo in march, a substantial portion of my networth is still in yahoo shares. 22% cut in yahoo shares hurts pretty badly.

The reality is that the numbers weren’t all that bad. The earnings met expectations at 0.11$/share and the revenues were slightly lower than consensus (1.123 B vs 1.14B). The short fall in revenue is 17 million dollars. That shortfall in revenue triggered a loss of ~10B in market capitalization for yahoo. I suppose that loss of 10B in market cap had more to do with the announcement about delays in the Panama project. Even here the delays announced were not really bad. It’s not like windows vista which got delayed by years. All they said was that this product is in QA and it will take atmost another quarter.

While there can be ton of speculation on whether or not this sell off is justified, the conclusion that can be drawn is that investors are not comfortable with yahoo’s growth propects and ability to deliver on the story as promised.

What does this mean for yahoo!? I believe this stock drop is going to force yahoo to find partners. The extensive partnership with ebay is perhaps on everyone’s mind and ebay might be a strong partner. I wonder who is a better partner ebay, microsoft or aol?

UPDATE: No, I don’t believe this represents a buying opportunity. I would wait until something concrete emerges. For example, a merger/acquisition/partership or release of panama and panama becoming a killer product or even some other killer product.

I guess it’s not a surprise to hear that Hyderabad has changed in the last decade or so. As is the common case with a economically vibrant city, hyderabad attracted a lot of folks from surrounding areas and the population grew tremendously. New people bring their own culture, and hyderabad changed.

Hyderabad used to be a unique city in india in a lot of ways. Back in the 80s/90s,

It’s part of andhra pradesh, but people from andhra were intimidated to visit hyderabad. The indimidation factor ? Language problem

I guess i can keep listing some of these things, but there was a character to the city. It was not a hustly bustly north indian city, nor it was culturally inward focused south indian town/city. Hyderabadi hindi was different, hyderabadi attitude was different. In short, Hyderabad and hyderabadis, were unique.

Today, the city is centered at Panjagutta, somajiguda, Khairatabad (prasads + ntr garden), begumpet, ameerpet areas. Abids is not crowded. Roads near LB stadium, basheerbagh are relatively free of traffic compared to panjagutta chowrasta. We could drive through sultan bazaar, find parking, get our shopping done with literally no crowds on a weekday evening. We had much harder time parking in hyderabad central. Hindi is accepted these days, but the language of choice is telugu. Very few hindi movies play and even those don’t play for very long. I doubt, if we’ll see sholay run for 365 continuous days in the present day hyderabad or even deewar playing for 100 days.

This hyderabad, feels a lot like a big vijayawada. May be more open and welcoming to all cultures and languages, but it feels like a distinctly telugu city trying to become a metro, than a historical hindu/muslim city that is a cultural bridge.

I guess these changes are good and economic boom is great. I am just being a bit nostalgic. The hyderabadi unique character is now missing in hyderabad.

I made it to india safe and tired friday night local time. The weather was quite unusual for hyderabad in late may. The temperature was right around 30 celcius ( and it was somewht humid. I learnt that it had just rained the day before and the temperatures cooled down from a day high scorching 43 celcius (110F) to a day high of 33 celcius(86F) in about 48 hours. Wow! lucky me As much as i hate the humidity, i really appreciate the lower temperatures. Years in bayarea’s perfect weather spoiled me and i find that the days still feel hot at these temperatures.

Yesterday (sunday), i went to begumpet to meet my interior decorator. Ofcourse, things run by “Indian Stretchable Time” here and i forgot to bring my keys to the apartment, so we had about 30 mins to kill. We jumped into a Coffee day (starbucks equivalent) and sat down to order some coffee. The clouds have been threatening since saturday, but it hasn’t rained till then. Suddenly, it started pouring and i mean pouring. This is the first monsoon rain i experienced in fifteen years, and i really wanted to jump in the rain. In few minutes the streets were filling up with water, motorcyclists were stopping on the sides and taking shelter in near by stores. The rain didn’t let up for 15 mins and we had to walk out to get to our car. Needless to mention, we got completely wet before we got to our car.

What was very pleasantly surprising was how warm the water was. It was like taking a shower with lukewarm water and I slowed down to enjoy the rain. I really remembered al the fun times in rain we had as kids. Getting wet in these rains and playing outside in them were some of the best memories of childhood I love these monsoons. I missed these rains for so long now, and i am glad to be back in them. I guess, i haven’t experienced the downside of monsoons yet - the flooded streets, potholes in roads etc. But i am going to enjoy the rains while they are here.

I stopped reading news in the newspaper about 7-8 years ago and the only reason i pay for the merc is the ads. Specifically, I am one of those people who pay for the SJ mercury news to find out what’s on sale at frys. It’s not that i feel like i am the gadget guy, but my week invariably includes multiple visits to Frys. I am quite sure i am not unusual in the valley.
I wished for the longest time that the news paper ads were available online and now they are! Kudos to SJ mercury news for doing this. Here is the Frys Ad. Mouse over a section of the ad and the relavant subsection pops up in a small sub window!! This rocks!!

I dare say, this is perhaps the most useful web2.0 innovation i have seen in the last 3 months or may be google calendar. It may not be the sexiest, technically most challenging, but definitely very cool and very useful! Now, why would I buy SJ merc? Do they care about me buying SJ merc as long as advertisers continue to pay for the ads?