Wooot!

My company is now ISO 9001:2000 certified!

The Importance Of Marketing

Both the ISO auditors are keen on, and very knowledgeable about, Indian food. Being foodies ourselves, we were joking with them about the best biriyani in the world being made in Bangalore - even after taking into account Delhi, Karachi and Hyderabad. (Let the flame cookout wars begin!)

Anyway - come lunch time, and we decided to drive down to a South-Indian restaurant in Serangoon Road. Anyone who has been to Serangoon Road knows how the aromas of each restaurant on the street loudly proclaim the goodies obtainable inside. We stood outside the restaurant we had chosen, waiting for admittance behind a crowd of people, when we spied a place that billed itself as a Hyderabadi Biriyani house, and walked over.

While all the places around it were buzzing and overflowing with the lunch crowd, this place was empty.

Empty! In Singapore! This is a place where a hawker can viably sell food at 2 AM, on a Thursday morning, in Tampines, in the rain! We were stunned, but since Peter had eaten there before and vouched for the food, we went in and sat down anyway.

The service was predictably good - we were the only customers there after all. The food arrived on time and there was a rude plenty of it. It even tasted fantastic - probably the best Hyderabadi biriyani I've had outside Hyderabad, and definitely better than a good many I've had inside. A thoroughly good time was had by all, and several people in the group were publicly discussing what they were going to order again when they came back!

We were puzzled how an Indian restaurant, in the middle of Little India, with excellent food and decor, could be empty during the lunch crowd when people were queuing up outside the neighbours. Puzzled enough to accost the head waiter and ask him when he brought us the post-prandial tea.

His response stunned us - the owners didn't want to invest in marketing!

Imagine that - you invest in infrastructure, rent a place in the right location, serve a darn fine lunch, impress customers enough to want to come back to you, but don't invest in marketing! One wonders if the owner might have become more 'profitable' by closing down the place, firing the chefs, and selling away his equipment!

That's an interesting lesson for a geek like me - that success in selling something is at least as dependent on marketing as it is on getting the product done right...products don't actually sell themselves all the time!

ISO 9001:2000

My company is being audited today for ISO 9001 compliance.

It's definitely an exacting process to get ready for the first audit. We have reams and reams of documents and the Management Representative (MR) has been exercising the laser printer for the last three days running.

I gave a presentation about the company - for a change, the presentation was quite interactive, with the auditors asking genuine and intelligent questions, so that was refreshing.

I hope I'll have update the presentation soon...to include the ISO certification!

Early Morning Traffic

The Singapore MRT is one of my favourite ways to travel. Day after day, I take the East-West (Green) line from either Tampines or Simei to our office close to the Redhill station. About 42-45 minutes worth of rail time...costs about a buck-thirty. In spite of the lemming-like crowds, one manages reasonably well...

While one sees the smooth running of trains every 2-5 minutes day-in and day-out as an example of well-oiled machinery, it's when things go spectacularly wrong that one is really impressed.

Sometime last week, I decided to walk to Tampines, rather than Simei, and catch the train from there. When I got there, however, there was more-than-the-usual crowd standing at the entrance to the station, gazing steadfastly at some writing. Every so often, a small section of the crowd would mumble, break away, and dodder down the road, while the rest of the lemmings moved in for a closer look at the writing on the wall.

Not willing to be the only ignoramus on the block, I dutifully donned my lemming-suit and joined in. A terse Singlish message along the lines of "Sorry for the inconvenient, MRT closed, Please follow signs to take the bus to Tanah Merah" greeted me when it was my turn at the edge of the cliff. I must confess that the mumbling and doddering came naturally after that.

After following the crowd (no visible signs anywhere, really) I found myself waiting for a spot in one of the special buses commandeered for this occasion. Orderly crowds, forsooth! I found all the experience of dealing with buses in India useful as I had to elbow my way into the bus for a place. We eventually reached Tanah Merah and were shepherded into a train which took us the rest of the way. There was no charge for the emergency bus service.

Once we were all definitely on our way, I got a chance to look around. Everyone was very annoyed by the delay, but the older folks were more stoic about it. The younger lemmings were texting away on their phones even more furiously than usual. Very uncharacterstically, I found my self in tension for a potential twenty minute delay!

It transpires that over 6,50,000 people were 'inconvenient'ed that morning - by as much as half an hour!

I don't know what impresses me more: the fact that the MRT system simply took an unexpected emergency of such a scale in stride and did a fine job by any account; or the fact that a 30 minute traffic delay, which is so commonplace in Bangalore, could cause such consternation to the Singaporean populace; or the fact that it caused me to actually be concerned about arriving half an hour late!

Had I chosen to walk to Simei as I do usually, I would've been able to walk over to Tanah Merah and save myself 10 minutes! Now that would've been an impressive achievement!

Visual Studio 2008

OK...geek time again :)

I just got my hands on the new Visual Studio 2008! Fantastic! The DVD was waiting for me in the office - the MSDN subscription fulfillment guys don't let the grass grow under their feet!

I've decided to install it because I've watched the whole VS 2005 version from the sidelines - my dev environment is (very satisfactorily) still at VS 2003. I've now officially skipped a FULL version of a Microsoft product - and I'm afraid that it's likely that such a trend is going to continue :) I've still not, for example, installed Vista or Microsoft Office 2007.

However, with WCF and WF released - both frameworks that my friends back at Microsoft have worked on, and thought that I really ought to try them out and see how they fit into my scheme of things.

The install went off smoothly - and I got MSDN installed as well. Next came Expression and the whole ASP.NET AJAX paraphernalia. Also downloaded the Facebook VS 2K5 template for good measure...

Now off to play in my free time with all these new toys!

Let's see how this goes - will write about my experiences as they are sure to be unique!

Hello from Singapore

So I'm in the "fine" city :)

They even call themselves that in the free tourist guide - warning you of the various fines and punishments for transgressions big and small - and painstakingly pointing out that chewing gum is no long a capital offence here..

Got here flying Indian Airlines. Even after many times in the air, I still enjoy take-offs and landings. This time was unique though - an aborted takeoff!

It all started innocently enough - an on-time departure, no time spent on the apron. We were taxiing onto the runway when, two rows behind me, this guy starts wailing "I'm bleeding! Let me off!". Frantic attempts by the flight attendants and helpful comments by other passengers made it look like a scene out of Asterix and The Silver Star...

I'm always amazed by the efficiency at Changi - it's the only place where I spend less than 10 minutes at immigration and *still* get beaten to the carousel by my luggage!

I've also been highly impressed with the tightly controlled economy, where services are efficient and cheap! This time, however, I was shocked to find taxi fares up (by 35%, natch), apartment rental prices up (in some places by over 100%), house purchase prices up, food prices up, and general morale down...and I was only here 6 months ago! What's the world coming to when a tightly controlled economy can't keep its people happy!

Still - not all is bad here..the weather is still hot and humid, the traffic is still crazy, the trains still crowded - nothing out of the ordinary in the second-most densely populated country in the world.

Enough kvetching...I'm off to work...