smorgasbord

This week started with a complaint by RN that her performance review was due and she was very scared that she would be getting a very bad rating. You see there is no data being maintained here to track performance of any employee and every thing is impression based. How do you counter that? AKB who was supposed to run the show on ground floor was highly incompetent fellow who didn't have the guts to ruffle feathers. Well, I had always wanted to know about how the PMS happened over here and I used this opportunity to raise this issue. I had expected bad news but what i got was a complete howler. No one, it seems and I repeat no one has ever bothered to even think on those terms. Well, if I was so keen on getting processes here, why not throw my hand and do my bit? And so I volunteered. It is still a work under progress, so more on that later. Suffice it to say that the moment news spread that I was going to do it for my team, I got buried under an avalanche of advise and indignant protests of how things had been in complete shambles before. RN got an email from Boss after my talk with Arin which was very surprising. Good for her. She deserves the hike.
On the work front, I realized that the mpp was a tough nut to crack. It is easy to create one. It is very difficult to update it. You see if the project plan were fixed, there won't be any issues. But at our workplace, things happen, work items get added, prev fixed bugs re-appear in a new avatar. And so it is almost impossible to track the activities of team members. Anyways, I have decided to do this on a weekly basis, to save some time for me.
I had been trying to fix an issue of total loss amount not matching the rake when only the bots were playing. Ideally the amount they lose should get added as rake for the house. But there was always a gap. The first thing I fixed was the rounding issue of rake. The code was using deprecated version of Big decimal rounding macros. Replaced them with proper enum. The rake became proper but still loss amount was miles off the rake figure. Went through a sheet of over 1400 hands and found the issue to be missing entries for bots doing leave during a hand. Fixed that issue. Still the loss amount didn't match the rake figure. Went through a history of 2600 hands and found that because of my change, the bots who were doing sitouts were also being added to the grs table. So at least I have found the problem and so it will be fixed. But I had spent quiet some time in going through the excel data and was wondering if there could be a better way to crunch numbers. Vijay came to my rescue and used the pivot table to simplify calculations. I had seen pivot table in action before but had never found a practical need for it. If you have never used a pivot table before, learn to do so. It will save you a lot of time :-)
On Friday we were all talking about the food that we have and when I mentioned that we have non veg food once in 2 weeks, the audience was left dumbfounded. You see, Goans eat a lot of non veg especially fish and the concept of having only vegetables was something uniquely alien to them. Jai ho!!!!!! Now I understand the rationale behind the movement of promoting vegetarian food habits.