Ayaz

Absolutely. I learned touch typing on my own during my O'Levels years when I bumped into a DOS-based touch typing tutor. It changed the way I looked at computers.

Sadly, yes. Out of the 400 people that work where I work, less than 30 know how to touch type. It deeply saddens me.

Definitely. Using a computer becomes easy when you can type fast without looking.

I use both shift keys. Left shift key when the other key I need to press is on the right side of the keyboard, and so on. I also use both of my thumbs to press the spacebar.

_The Book of Laughter and Forgetting_ by _Milan Kundera_.

I am taking a break from reading business/self-help/startup related books to read fiction. Milan Kundera is one of my favourite authors.

Although, ICU and emergency wards at most if not all hospitals are kept cooler than other places in part to slow the rate of growth of bacteria, viruses and other similar organisms that can spread infections.

Pictures taken from the point rain began look so ghostly and chilling they give me goosebumps. Beautiful journey, beautifully narrated.

No application I've ever tried has worked for me in the sense that I felt it an indispensable part of my life. In almost all instances, after a few days, I always kept forgetting to use the application. Plus, the overhead of using applications seemed to appear significant overtime.

I am now successfully down to a good fountain pen and a clear notebook. It is also part of my strategy to break my device-addiction, which is bordering on insanity. Where I used to take in my laptop to meetings and use mind maps and others for taking down notes and ideas discussed, I only simply carry my notebook -- my pen is usually in my shirt's front pocket.

I have rediscovered the love for handwriting, which I had all through my childhood and teenage years. I had a beautiful cursive handwriting and could write fast, which I gave up when I joined university in favour of a more mechanical style, and soon thereafter, gave up on writing completely. I have started writing in cursive again, and it makes for my ability to take down notes very fast in a handwriting that looks good.

The only real grievance I have is when I want my notes to be available to others. In those cases, I do wonder if it wouldn't have been better to have typed them down in the first place (I'm a fast typist). But, it is a small price I'm happily willing to pay.

That is an interesting observation. For me, closely observing would translate to nagging individuals several times a day about what they are doing as well as how they are doing something.

The end goal of standups, the way I understand it, is to figure out what people in your team are doing and what they are stuck at in order to:

* align people towards individual goals in the sprint that require collaboration; * remove impediments that are beyond the control of team members and that may cause delays; * improve task and load distribution, so that some members aren't overburdened while others are slacking off (if you run a short sprint and give team member autonomy to work, tasks that require collaboration from several team members can tend to become bottlenecks, as I have experienced).

I suppose you could well call it micro-managing if these standups were used to manage individuals instead of the process. In my view however, standups help you gather data to manage and improve the process, so as to make things favourable for the team.

iOS devices sold in UAE don't have iMessage and FaceTime support. I can't remember whether I was able to use iMessage the last time I was there with an iPhone I purchased elsewhere.

Is it really micro-managing? Isn't it the point of standups in Scrum, to find out what an individual in a team has been working on and what issues they are facing in order to make more efficient use of their time and skills as well as to clear impediments in their way? The end goal is to improve the team's performance.

If I was telling them what to do, what results to expect _and_ how to do it, then I would be micro-managing.

I understand what you mean. However, if you personally have to ask every individual every day 1) what they did, 2) what they will do next, 3) and what impediments they have, and you can't get them to do it without your having to ask (in my experience, they'd do it for a few days, slow down, and then stop again), the more efficient way seems to me is to automate it.

Of course, in my case, I didn't wake up on the first day and put this in place. I spent a few months trying to get people to send in their standups every day, but realised that I can't possibly do it everyday with an expanding team and it didn't make for the best use of my time. Because filling in your standup is a quick part (quick because it shouldn't take you longer than five to ten minutes to fill it up) of the process that needs to be followed, the most efficient alternative was to create a bot to remind those who can't remember to do. Plus, the number one reason I got from people who failed to do it was that they simply forgot.

This is very cool! We use HipChat (migrating to Slack soon) and Assembla (which has a standup module). We have coded a bot which checks who has not added their standup in Assembla and reminds them on HipChat.

Standups, when done with discipline, bring in a lot of insight and prove helpful for everybody in the team. I use Assembla at work which offers a standup module, which asks the three customary questions. My problem is getting my team to regularly fill those up. I have personally reminded them several times. I have created an automated bot which checks who hasn't added a standup for the day and reminds them on HipChat. Despite that, people just don't do it with regularity. I should think this is a common enough problem that most teams/organisations face. I'm interested in what they use to tackle it.