PIN REVERSAL

If you should ever be forced by a robber to withdraw money from an ATM machine, you can notify the police by entering your Pin # in reverse.

For example if your pin number is 1234 then you would put in 4321. The ATM recognizes that your pin number is backwards from the ATM card you placed in the machine.

The machine will still give you the money you requested, but unknown to the robber, the police will be immediately dispatched to help you.

This information was recently broad casted on TV and it states that it is seldom used because people don’t know it exists.

Note: I think this information needs to be confirmed, because snopes.com indicates that this is a false story that has been circulating the Internet since last year:

http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/pinalert.asp

Diwali, the festival of lights, is a major festival for us. Apart from all the lights, new clothes, great food, relatives, etc there is one other very important aspect of Diwali. Its about cleaning your place and getting rid of all the crap. I was just thinking about this and it occurred to me that this could be a good time to ask folks in the Agile community to get rid of all the crappy certificates that they have collected from those Scam Master training. Its time to set yourself free from the illusion of certification. What better time than Diwali to set them ablaze?

She’ll come back as fire, to burn all the liars,
And leave a blanket of ash on the ground.

With this, under the ASCI umbrella I would like to announce a series of 2 day free [almost free] workshops in India. I’m planning to call them UnCertification workshop. We won’t be giving you any certificate.

• Test Driven Design [TDD] - covering Unit testing, Refactoring and Simple Design - Object Orientation, Java and Eclipse IDE knowledge prerequisite.
• Agile Testing - focusing on various Test Automation strategies and tools that suit Agile projects
• Iteration Zero : How to setup a development environment for Agile teams, what tools are needed, how to manage configuration management, etc
• Release planning - Projection inception and planning techniques

All these would be hands on workshops. Which means, item 1-3 will require computers and item 4 will require lots of index cards and walls. If you are interested in attending any of these workshops, please drop me a note with your details and the city you would be interested in having one or more of these workshops conducted.

Thanks to Vikrant for creating the logo.