Another year passed by. A new year has started. Nothing is special except that another fresh day has started and the earth has completed one more revolution around the sun. But still the grouping of days into weeks, months, years, decades, milleniums ... mean something significant to most of us.
At a personal front, a few significant things have happened for me in 2005.
- My marriage in February
- Obtaining the PMP certification in September
- Travelling abroad for the first time, to Australia for a paper presentation at the IEEE conference in November.
- Guiding a project in ontology based inferences
- Incorporated new sessions like Usability, Essence of Problem Solving, Ontology etc... as part of our courses
- Starting to 'Blog'
- Learnt so many new concepts, dwelled upon some and mastered a few.
- Travelled to Chandigarh, Chennai, Melur, Mumbai, Mysore, Shimla, Suttur and Tanjore within the country, and to Bangkok and Melbourne outside the country.
- Declining an offer to go to Grenada (part of west indies) as an IT expert (sponsored by the government of India) for designing solutions for the hurricane hit country.
- Shifting my house to a location that is 30 kms far off from my office and approximately takes 120-150 minutes of travel, owing to the interests of the family.
- My friend and colleague getting himself a transfer.
- Tried to come with a proper open source license for our software system, but still nothing has been decided
- Started to guide a group of people on generating useful inferences, using the concepts of event coorelation, as they requested me for some innovative project work, but later disappeared without notice.
- Our software localized in Punjabi, and successfully included in the package of Punjabi tools slated for release by the Prime Minister. Unfortunately the launch was postponed twice, and still yet to be released.
Though the last few points look like reflecting the negative aspects, I believe that everything happens for the good. I would like to dwell upon a few of my decisions in the rest of the paragraphs.
Declining the offer to go to grenada was one of the toughest decision for me in the last year. It was made within a short time. At one end, it is a job that will give me a sense of pride, apart from money. At the other end, the project that I was involved for nearly the past two years, seemed to be at a stage of bearing fruit; and I did not want to quit that and go. We have been in the mission of building ICT applications usable by rural people, and we have done a lot of field work too, apart from our technological activities, and I have been in the forefront of these activities right from the day, the project was started. I wanted to experiment, explore and learn further, and ofcourse reach the logical end of our work, before I jump to another. That made me to decline the offer.
On the positive side, the decision to appear for the PMP examination, decision to submit a paper for IEEE conference, decision to guide projects were some major decisions that has paid dividends. Thus 2005 in short was an year of opportunities/challenges, changes, and learning for me.For the reader, here's my philosphical note. There's no place for 'if ... then' in any history. Overall the year was eventful and satisfying.
