How to kill time?

In the afternoon today, I was thinking about putting up a post to express my indignation and desperation of how horrible weekends in Bangalore are.
Some how as the hours passed by I found a means of killing time. A stab of a movie killed it for 2:30 hours. At the end of it time was up again, this time in arms, to take its revenge on me - that is to bore to death. Here I express my gratitude to water problem that accompanies me, where ever I might go whether it is Bangalore or Chennai. I sought refuge in it to negotiate time. Yes, I meant the water problem by "it". To tidy myself I badly needed a bucket of water and in whole of my house I didn't have a drop of it. I spent nearly an hour to get a bucket of water and another half an hour waiting for the water to get warm. I am not conventional enough to put the water on the gas stove nor am I modern enough to use a geyser for the purpose.However, I am clumsy enough to use a 1KWH immersion rod to heat the water up. I have to own it up now that I entirely miscalculated the time duration. Bad equation: 15 minutes for half a bucket of water so 30 minutes for a full to heat up.Immersion rods are really quick than I anticipated and as I realised later, half an hour is too long for a bucket full of water to get warm.The water was boiling hot before this enlightenment dawned on me and I did not have another drop to cool it down. So, waiting was mine. Clock ticked away 15 minutes, I let another 900 seconds pass by and telephone call helped me with another half an hour.A Bangalore's hour was good enough for a bucket full to cool down. If this were Chennai the water would be cool enough to bath only the next day. This is one upside of the downside. Downside because, first of all, I should never have had the need to warm up water in Chennai.
That's how it was, run out of water, spend an hour to get bucket full as it were a desert, heat it up carelessly past the admissible Celsius then wait for the water to cool down. Perhaps, Louis Pasteur arrived at the procedure of pasteurization - the process of boiling milk and then rapidly cooling it down to kill bacteria- in a similar fashion. Whoever said Genius is a product of naivety should add a clause to the definition - Genius is a clumsy consequence of lethargy and carelessness. Wasn't penicillin an accident? Wasn't rubber being flung into sulphur another? How would you describe Newton lazing under a tree when an apple blew his wits out? And what do you have to say about devising a way of killing time with a bucket full of water?

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Moron and Oxymoron

"An enterprise often contains a variety of applications that operate independently but must work together in a unified manner".This is the oxymoron under discussion.
"Applications that operate independently" but " must work together in a unified manner". Doesn't it sound like searching for shadows on a moonless night? Doesn't it seem like chasing mirages in an endless desert? Then what am I trying to prove here? Trying to prove nothing - that's another oxymoron.Huh! One is enough to spoil a life time. I can not accommodate a second.
The opening sentence is what EAI means. For the benefit of my blessed readers - blessed, if you do not know about EAI - I take the infinite pain of expanding the acronym EAI- ENTERPRISE APPLICATION INTEGRATION. That is in brief about my job. As a fresher, who knew nothing about IT industry I took the oath of integrating applications for a lifetime - possibly - you never know.

In short, according to me, here are the seven simple and defining principles of the oxymoron, EAI.
1. Build your enterprise anyway you like, in as many applications as you wish.
2. Your enterprise becomes huge and untenable. If it does not, make sure you make it.
3. Find innocent "somebody" outside your organization.
4. Repeat step 3 till you find "somebody" because you do not find intelligent goats easily.
5. Once you find that somebody, sit on his head and force him to wire the applications together.
6. Scream TTM(Time To Maket) and ROI( Return on Investment).
7. Repeat step 6 for ever, at regular intervals.

In the meantime major IT players, in the name of solving integration problems, form consortiums and arrive at industry standards. In the name of no-vendor-lock-in products, these companies release proprietary tools. The business houses to meet the ever rising bar of customer satisfaction ( that is our satisfaction, don't we ask why is this bank's website so slow or why is loan approval a week long manual process?)buy different off-the-shelf products from various vendors to reduce Time To Market. The disparate products from various, obviously and not surprisingly, do not agree with each other. And, the integration problems go to next level where the then( future dated ) big players, again, sit together to arrive at latest agreeable standards and go on to build different products on it. Thats how IT evolves.

Evolution IT has gone through in the past 40 years:
1. First, data and operations were put together. (procedure oriented languages - C)
2. Then data was separated from operations for the sake of data security . ( OOPS- JAVA, C++)
3. Next adapters were built for operations to access the data residing elsewhere. (EAI - whole lot of middlewares)
4. Then operations were combined to form services so that similar data operations could be done at a time( SOA).
5. Next the services(combination of operations) and data are colocated so that only way of accessing the data is through those services. ( Master Data Management - Websphere WCC/MDM )

Don't you see a full circle in this evolution, from operations and data together to services and data together? I do. I say all this irrespective of the fact there are huge monies involved in such projects, and I am very much an IT consultant who makes a living out of solving integration problems. Money wasn't the topic under discussion, at least it was not today.
Okay, do you find a moron(meaning: idiot,mental retard - otherwise no vulgarity intended) in the entire story? I promise there is more than one. I found out the Oxymoron you find out a Moron, at least one.

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