Whats up with Hatim!

I have to register for IELTS in order to apply for admission in a Masters Programme in Europe. I am targetting Sweden, Finland, Norway and Germany. I may also look into Netherlands and Switzeland but so far Sweden is my top choice. Belgium is also another choice but I haven't really explored it so far. I submitted the required fee (around 146$) to the Standard Chartered Bank F-7 Markaz (Jinnah Super) branch. I got the form but screwed it up while filling. Tomorrow I am hoping to fill up a new form and submit it to the British Council for a December 1st test date. I am still not sure how It will work out for submitting the test results to Sweden (I suspect that IELTS reults are not sent to Institute, like TOEFL, but they are confirmed by the Institutes them selves)

 Update : I have gotten the date of 15th Dec 2007 for my IELTS test. I could have gotten Dec 1st, but I hand submitted my documents a bit late.

Leaving Iphonica and Joining Zeropoint.it

In Mid Feb 2007, when I decided to leave my first job to join Iphonica, I was very excited. Iphonica seemed to be a small but enterprising company with open source based telecom software roots. Although I was not happy about location of Iphonica, which was considerably a down from the fancy Evacuee Trust Complex in downtown district of Islamabad. It was closer from my home and pay was bit comparable. The most important thing was that I was to work with Open Source technologies.

After working in Iphonica for  seven months I realized two things, first I left my job at JinTech too early. Perhaps If I was patient enough and open minded enough to embrace proprietary technologies I would have probably ended with a better one year experience, instead of fragmented 7 1/2 months and 3 1/2 months at two places

Second, that it is very hard to find a job in Pakistan where people act professionally. This I say with great regret that very few companies in Pakistan, which are lead by Pakistani's are capable enough to have good work ethics (there are very few places which are truly professional, Jintech being one of them in my opinion). Though the work seemed interesting on paper for me, the fact was that alot of my time and efforts were being wasted . I learnt a few things here and there in Iphonica, worked with networking software and did some java coding, but I could have done alot more.

Iphonica's inherent "Pakistani" practices of time management had so much effect on me that I had to leave Summer of Code unfinished(on top of which the other fact that time was already short for SoC). Overall I was disappointed with my self and was reevaluating my career choices. One fine evening I got an email for an interview at Zeropoint.it. I had heard this name before as back in Jan 2007 when they were looking for some Slashdot reading Linux Gurus (I don't claim to be one, but would love the idea of working in company of people like these). I went for the job interview.

From the job interview it was obvious how methodological were people at Zeropoint. I gave Java test from which I cam to realize that I still need to learn a few things from core Java. One thing which struck me very positively was that my blog was a consideration in the selection process.  

I switched jobs on 1st of Oct 2007. The new job is probably the best so far. I get to have free lunch, but its home cooked. There is a pool table in the lobby for free time. I get to work on a dual-LCD ubuntu, and last but not least there is a big conference room with a huge blackboard. Lets see how much I can gain from this job (my hopes are high).

As for Iphonica, I heard that thye have got a new Technical manager, hpoefully they will succeed in achieving what ever they aim to. I will sure miss all the fun times I had at this place.

(put picture of my station on to it)