Games I love to play on a rainy day

In my free time, when I've not planned on anything, I usually end up playing games on my PC (I never had a gaming console like PS2 or XBox. But the wide selection of PC games never made me miss them, though now I'm planning to save for the super cool Nintendo Wii :-) ). My entry into first-hand PC gaming was in 2002 when I got a laptop of my own. Before that, the only games I knew were solitaire and minesweeper that came (and still come) bundled with MS Windows. I started with Age of Empires on my laptop (I got the game CD because it was on sale. I was not aware that it was a cult classic by that time.) and have been a fan of this and a whole bunch of other PC games ever since. If I had to list down my favorites out of the dozen games I have, they'd be:

Adventure/Action: Sid Meier's Pirates, Thief 3: Deadly Shadows, Prince of Persia
Strategy: Railroad Tycoon 3, Age of Empires (Conquerors expansion pack)
Puzzle Solving/Adventure: The secret of the Monkey Island, Indiana Jones

Why do I rate them top in my list? Let me explain...

Thief 3: Deadly Shadows

When I first heard about this game, I had a feeling that this was one of those routine games that comes out with a promising name but ultimately disappoints. I had not heard of Thief 1 or 2. I am a fan of movies that belong to the heist and mystery genre. So it was a no-brainer that I was looking out for a game with similar plots. So, since I was having a lean period (read that as loads of spare time), I had nothing to lose and bought the game just because I liked the name. But when I tried to install it, the game would not run because my PC’s graphics card was not capable of supporting the game's graphics (Grrrr!!!). It cheesed me off and I tossed the game box onto my overloaded bookshelf-cum-JAA (junk accumulation area). It was another 3 months before I got a new graphics card (ATI Radeon 9500) and had it installed. One of the first things I did after installing the card was to install Thief. The whole reason for investing in a graphics card was to play this game. I had lost interest in the game after ignoring it for so long, but when I saw the opening tutorial I was hooked to the game.

As the play progressed, the settings, the environment, the layout and the stealth tactics got really cool. To top that, the game had an eerie aura to it. Gothic architecture in the city, the cobbled streets with menacing soldiers on the watch. And since you played a thief, you never ventured into daylight. So the night streets with shadows and dark spaces became more menacing and spooky at times. Garrett, the title character has this uncanny power to merge into the shadows but then again he's human too. You got to use your stealth capabilities to fight soldiers, zombies and other creatures of the dark. And there's this suspense that built up as you progressed in the game. Anything more would spoil the fun. Arguably, this is one of the best games I’ve ever played so far. If you are a fan of adventure and stealth games I strongly recommend this game for your collection.

My rating: ****/*****

Sid Meier's Pirates (Live the life!)

Another game I got bitten by after I saw the graphics. When I'm playing a game, my main focus is not only on the plot but also the graphics. I hate playing a game with a great plot but which has graphics that suck.

Pirates was one such game which fulfilled both my requirements. Well, almost. Though the plot was not as in-depth as I would've liked (hey! you can't have the cake and eat it too.) the graphics were really cool. Added to that, the battles with the swordfights and strategic plundering of towns, though similar in nature, give a great twist to the game. And the fun doubles when you hunt for treasures buried by other Pirate captains :-). The kind of map clues and leads you get in town taverns and through Governors' daughters, amazing!! I especially liked the way the hero ages as the game progresses. You really end up living the life of a goodhearted but wronged swashbuckler. And the other good thing about it is, the blood and gore normally associated with action/adventure games is thankfully missing.

If you ever wanted to play a game that should not strain you much but at the same time entertain you, this one is a must. You can select various options and keep playing for hours together and sometimes the game brings a smile on your face without you even knowing about it..

Probably, if I get more time on my hands (I've plenty of that on my hands these days), I'll write about the other games I like in my next blog.

My rating: ****/*****

My experience on working towards OCP in Oracle E-Business Suite 11i Supply Chain Management Consultant

[I had cleared the final paper of this exam in May 2007 with Procurement as the main path. Though I had an experience of almost 3 years working in Oracle Applications Manufacturing, it was not an easy exam for me to take. As most of you might know by now, the OCP exam for SCM Consultant has 3 papers. The details are given in the official site. The certification path also includes a mandatory classroom training apart from clearing 3 papers before finally getting there.]

Prep Time (Paper wise):
Paper I: 2 weeks (1 week rigorous). Familiarity level: 4 on a scale of 10
Paper II: 2-3 weeks. Familiarity level: 7 on a scale of 10
Paper III: 4-5 weeks. Familiarity level: 4 on a scale of 10
Overall: 8-10 weeks

What to refer: Oracle Inventory and Oracle Purchasing Student's Guides (11i), Oracle Inventory and Oracle Purchasing User's Guides (11i), Hands-on practise on Vision Demo Database 11i

When I decided to take this exam (March 2007), there was absolutely no information on the net available to work on with. Added to this was the $95 (Paper I), $195 (Paper II) and $195 (Paper III) fees which made things worse. I could not afford to flunk any of the papers. Otherwise, I'd end up paying twice for a re-take. Despite this, there was a strong reason for my decision to take the cert. exam so early (just as it went into production). At that point I had some free time on my hands and I wanted to make the best possible use of it before I got busy again.

The first and foremost hurdle I faced was the EBS 11i essentials (1Z0-200: 11i E-Business Suite Essentials for Implementers). Though I had worked on reports and forms in my own small way when I was a developer, I was not familiar with the Sys Admin, DBA and workflow concepts. The best material for this was the sys admin student's guide which I was able to borrow from one of my friends who let's say, had access to it.

The student's guide really proved to be of great help. A rigorous one-week two hour per day study schedule after office hours worked wonders. I am sure if I had not done this, there was every chance I'd have flunked. So the best place to start for this exam is the Student's Guide if available. The workflow and sys admin questions were essentially lifted straight out of this book. One sad thing about this though is that I'm where I was before after the exam with regard to the fundamentals. I would not be able to practically apply the stuff I learnt from the Student's Guide. My prep was purely from exam point of view.

One down, two to go.

The 2nd paper (1Z0-221: Oracle Inventory Management 11i Fundamentals) was more in my league as I had been working in the functional side. Here though the thought was that you can pass this exam directly using the official Student's Guide, I felt otherwise. One has to have a good knowledge about the basics of Oracle Inventory which includes hands on practice. This is what I realized while I was taking this exam. Mind you, I did not have the Student's Guide for Inventory which I got access to much after. My advice in this regard is, use the User's Guide as the starting point:

* Check the fundamentals of Inventory in the User's Guide (Chapter 2 - Setting up)
* Concept of Subinventories
* Concept of Locators* Concept of Lots and Serials (especially from point of view of Inv Transactions)
* Concept of Item Key Flexfield
* Organizations (Master and Child) and Org Parameters* Planning - Min-max - Reorder Point Planningand the rest of the stuff..

Also, if you have the student's guide, do use it but don't completely depend on it. It is a good indicator of the syllabus and what to cover, but not comprehensive.

The questions mostly are like mini case studies which make you think and sometimes you will need to use the sheet to jot down the problem summary. And yes, there can be more than one correct answer. Once you put it on paper, its really easy to visualize where the question is getting to.

For instance, a sample question would go like this:
A company XYZ wants to set up Oracle Inventory with the following requirements. The item part number should contain the information such as item type, item number, and item serial information. How would you help the company design the item key flexfield?

Also there are trick questions (that's what I like to call them) where a lot of unnecessary information is given when the first sentence in the question will be enough to select the right choice.

And of course, there are questions which you can answer based on elimination of wrong answers.

The best ways to prepare for this is work on an Oracle Applications Vision Demo Database and try different test cases, For example:

Create several items which are having different combinations of lot control, serial control and locator control. Do Inventory transactions on these items. The main transactions I would recommend are inter-org transfer and subinventory transfers.

The most difficult part was Inventory Planning. Apart from the Min-max, I had not worked on other planning methods which involved MRP. Some of these methodologies are direct formulas which you might have to memorize.

I allocated my time like this:
* one-week for familiarizing with the concepts mentioned earlier.
* 5 days for working on a Vision instance for doing different transactions. Out of this, I dedicated one-full day (3 hours) checking out the different flags in the Items form and creating several items with different inventory controls. The 2nd day for transactions and transaction managers (plus profile options), and Inventory controls, the third for Inventory integration with other modules, esp., WIP, Order Entry and Purchasing, and the fourth for reports and different Inventory forms. The fifth day I just went through the entire stuff which I had covered in the previous 4 days.

Also while doing this, I made sure that I referred the window help for each form which contained some good and useful information.

I skipped some of the Inventory Planning chapters as I had not worked on planning and kanban (it was purely a no-brainer that I skipped these topics because I knew I would not be able to cram this relatively new stuff in such a short time).

I expected that the 2nd exam would be similar to 1st one in terms of the type of questions that would come. What I mean to say is, I was expecting that the questions would be directly lifted of the Student's Guide. And this worried me; as I didn't get access to the Student's Guide, though I tried hard.

When I took the exam, it was an eye-opener and then some. I could see that whatever I had studied would not be directly useful but had to be applied. I had to work on each question as a case study and apply the concepts from what I had learnt. I was glad when it was over and was glad that I had practised the stuff on the Demo database. But it gave me a good idea as to what to expect for the 3rd test, provided the 3rd one would be based on similar lines.

Other colleagues of mine who had written Paper II mentioned that they got questions from Warehouse Management System also. I am not sure about this because I did not get any questions on WMS.

Two down, one to go.

The IIIrd paper (1Z0-222: Oracle Purchasing 11i Fundamentals) was again no cakewalk. I was only familiar with creation of a PO and receiving against a PO in an existing setup with a basic information of the PO workflow. I took 4 weeks preparing for this paper. At one point, in desperation I even searched in google for any OCP site. The only site I came up with was the OAUG blog which didn't contain much info on the Purchasing paper (this will be the first site you hit when you search for OCP in Google).

I started with the User's guide again. I tried to correlate the syllabus from the OCP site with the User's Guide. Once done, I tried to get info from my friends familiar with Purchasing. I got different approaches but I got back to the one that was the hardest and the most painful: Working on the demo Vision database. And again referring to the Window Help. I felt that this worked best for me.

Purchasing fundamentals mainly consists of Purchasing, Requisitioning and Receiving. There are other sub-modules iProcurement, iSupplier and Sourcing. Its a good idea to have an overview of these topics before starting. Again a good starting point is the User's Guide.

The first week I got to familiarize myself with the Purchasing fundamentals. The next was the setups, esp., the documents and approval hierarchy setups.

Questions on document types and approval hierarchy are one of the most straightforward ones you get in the paper.

The other part which was a bit new to me was the Purchasing interfacing with other modules which mainly consisted of Payables.

After completion of these, I went for the Approved Supplier Lists (ASL). The sourcing part of the Purchasing was really confusing. In this regard, one profile option that's important is the PO: Automatic Document sourcing.

The exam also contained questions on iProc and Oracle Sourcing which are a part of the Procurement suite of products in Oracle Applications.

And then, it was all grind and no play. Work on the Vision demo database. Create POs, BPAs, requisitions, releases and other documents.

On the day of the exam, I was glad that the questions set in the 3rd exam were similar to the way they were set in 2nd. Based on the concepts, I was able to get some sense out of questions. One thing worth mentioning (again) is, when I was reading the questions, I simultaneously jotted down the problem points and the steps on a piece of paper to analyze the questions. It made things easier and saved me time. For the questions for which I was not sure of the answers, I revisited them after I had answered the questions I knew. For all the papers, I was left with about a little more than 1o mins for revision.

The exercise paid off and I got certified with a decent score (I had never aimed for 100%).
Three down!!
Whew!!
Here, I should really appreciate the folks at Oracle. They had aimed to test the candidate's knowledge of fundamentals and they did succeed to a great extent.

Stargazing - Lunar Eclipse 28th August 2007

Once in a blue moon, (no pun intended) the amateur astronomer in me surfaces out into the open. So this time when that happened, by sheer luck, I had a chance to watch the Lunar Eclipse (that occurred on 28th August 2007) standing right in my frontyard!! On the left is one of the shots I could take with my pretty outdated digicam (with a ridiculously low zoom). Its actually the same camera with which I got the pic of the Golden Gate (the genesis of this blog), but in this case it simply gave up on me (and consequently exposed my very limited photography skills).

And without any optical aids such as binoculars, telescope or any other useful sky gazing kits, I could not capture the "red moon" :-( .

But I was lucky to get to view it with the naked eye without the clouds playing spoilsport (and at 2:10 am, even the light pollution was less!!).

Also, I found these great photos on the net if you want to really see the entire event: http://www.umatrix.net/lunar/ . Enjoy!!

While we are on this topic, you can also check this useful site for Positional Astronomy I came across a very long time back (it involves a wee bit of Math).

Chances are...

[ This is a random article I had written for my office magazine a long time back (of course, it never got published!! :-) ). I am posting it here so that I can save this work. Most of my friends who saw this article liked it, some said I should never take up writing for a living. Anyways, I'm publishing this so that I can clean up my hard drive. If anyone does chance to come upon this, enjoy (or disregard). ]

“I’ll take my chances.” How many times have you come across people say that in course of a conversation?

It is calculated, that the chances of winning a jackpot in the UK National Lottery is 1 in 13,983,816, that is, 1 chance in almost 14 million! Yet, you do find people thronging to the lottery centers trying their luck to make a quick fortune where the odds of winning are miniscule. Taking a chance is not new to mankind. I guess the first game of survival the evolving human ever played would have had to do with was to take chances, yes, a lot of chances. For instance, the chances of survival were extremely low when trying to hunt for food in the wilderness but so were the chances of surviving if he did not hunt. In short, he didn’t have a choice but to venture out.

In this world of uncertainities, there are still some people who love to take that one chance that will give them the thrill of a lifetime. And while taking these chances, many have made a fortune and many have lost. But had not those chances been taken, maybe this world would have been a less interesting place to live in. It is said that many inventions that changed this world happened by chance! Yes, so, the odds of winning the jackpot might be 1 in 14 million but who knows, the first chance you take and you win, your life’s changed. Forever, and how! A renowned astronomer and physicist once stated, “God does not play dice.” But then probably, we lesser mortals can.

Rarely does one gets to do something he or she always desired when given a chance. The question then is, Why not? It is better to have tried at least once and failed than never to have tried at all. Success or Failure should not be a criterion to decide, much unlike in those action movies, where the ramrod straight General states in a typical clipped accent, “Failure, gentlemen, is not an option.” Success and failure should just be the byproducts of the chances that are offered to you. You might win some and you might lose many but do go out and make the most of it while the opportunity knocks.

Why am I talking about all this? Well, I always loved writing but the writer’s block used to hit me even before I used to type “Foreword”. I got this chance to show off and this one time I just didn’t want to let go. So I skipped “Foreword” and went forward. What the heck! Let the creative juices flow! You as a reader may criticize it, laugh at the attempt, pan it, toss it into fire, but at least I have made a start. As the byline of an upstart company ad used to state, “Just do it”, just did it. So the next time, you get to do something you really felt good about, go ahead, take the plunge. Make your world a bit more interesting. So, while you people figure out what you would love to do, I will go ahead and buy that lottery ticket. Chances are…