It's been a fairly lousy month on the whole, barring work (which is going on decently enough except for attending pointless meetings). No admits yet - 6 rejects and waiting on 2. Sucks! It isn't even politically correct these days to ask someone for coffee. Or I just don't know how to. Either way - L!
Have a nice weekend, mortals.
Current reading
1. The Kenneth Anderson Omnibus - Volume 1 - Kenneth Anderson
2. Phantoms in the Brain - V.S. Ramachandran & Sandra Blakslee
3. What do you care what other people think ? - Further adventures of a curious character - Richard.P.Fenyman
4. The Collected short stories - Roald Dahl
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Untitled
Despite what anyone says, I know it is going to unfold just the way I predict. I am sure - I have seen it before. Too many times for my own good.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Statistically speaking ...
... I have had more success with asking women out when compared to applying for a Master's degree.
Damn!!!
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Maybe...
... I should just screw all the noble aspirations and desire to learn and make a difference - to probably make things a little better. I should just become one of the many billions whose only aim is to make tons and tons of money for themselves. Become materialistic, suck up, ditch the morals, fake it.
Eagles fly high, but weasels don't get sucked into propellers.
SOD IT!
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Of protocols and standards...
Have you ever spared a thought for why, despite your using shitty Internet Explorer or the popular Mozilla Firefox or the uber-elite Safari or the wannabe-cool Chrome, this post that you are reading looks pretty much the same? Of course, if you are the techie like me, you would have put the title of this post and the last question together and figured out the answer. If you have the answer please feel free to skip the next paragraph and read on. The others, hang on a little...
Ok, so the deal is this - standards and standardized protocols. What it simply means is that it is a pre-determined and agreed steps of communicating and interpreting. If some bit of software, or hardware for that matter, says that it supports a protocol or a standard it means that if you were to use another similar program or hardware from a different vendor that claimed to support the same protocol or standard, the results you would see would be similar. The advantage is, quite simply, that your life is a little bit simpler. I want my readers to see this blog with a gray background and I know that despite what you are using to see this, you are going to be seeing a gray background. Why? Because this page has been generated by HTML and CSS (in addition to others) which are standardized. To put it in perspective - if you went to a restaurant and asked for a glass of water, you would be served a clear potable liquid that consisted of H20 (mostly). Everyone understands what water is!!! That is the beauty - all you need to understand is something that is publicly available and if you do understand that then it means that you will be able to communicate clearly and lucidly to anyone who understands that. Simple!
At this point you might be asking yourself what is this guy trying to get at, in this beer induced state? All I am trying to say is that webpages and cellphones and other assorted technology is not the only thing that ought to be standardized. Personal interactions could be standardized as well. My biggest gripe is that there is no clear cut way to express that you like a certain member of the opposite sex without running the risk of embarrassing yourself in some manner or the other. Ask a number too soon and you are labeled horny, desperate or a host of other disparaging titles. Keep waiting and some total dumb-idiot will come and sweep her away. And the worst part is, he will be the kind who can string three words into a sentence, or will be some arcane philosopher idiot who walks with his head so far up his rear-side that he cannot see where he is walking.
In short, there has to be some accepted method where it is perfectly normal for a guy(girl) to ask a girl(guy) he(she) has met not so long ago for a number or express interest. In case, she(he) is already taken, there is some respectable way to say that as well. Both parties walk away with their pride and self-respect intact. No loose or horny labels. Personally, I think there will be a lot less trouble or violence that way.
And, yeah, screw all the excitement and mystery that you might probably not get. If I want mystery or excitement, I'll go read Doyle or watch a Tarantino flick.
Ok, so the deal is this - standards and standardized protocols. What it simply means is that it is a pre-determined and agreed steps of communicating and interpreting. If some bit of software, or hardware for that matter, says that it supports a protocol or a standard it means that if you were to use another similar program or hardware from a different vendor that claimed to support the same protocol or standard, the results you would see would be similar. The advantage is, quite simply, that your life is a little bit simpler. I want my readers to see this blog with a gray background and I know that despite what you are using to see this, you are going to be seeing a gray background. Why? Because this page has been generated by HTML and CSS (in addition to others) which are standardized. To put it in perspective - if you went to a restaurant and asked for a glass of water, you would be served a clear potable liquid that consisted of H20 (mostly). Everyone understands what water is!!! That is the beauty - all you need to understand is something that is publicly available and if you do understand that then it means that you will be able to communicate clearly and lucidly to anyone who understands that. Simple!
At this point you might be asking yourself what is this guy trying to get at, in this beer induced state? All I am trying to say is that webpages and cellphones and other assorted technology is not the only thing that ought to be standardized. Personal interactions could be standardized as well. My biggest gripe is that there is no clear cut way to express that you like a certain member of the opposite sex without running the risk of embarrassing yourself in some manner or the other. Ask a number too soon and you are labeled horny, desperate or a host of other disparaging titles. Keep waiting and some total dumb-idiot will come and sweep her away. And the worst part is, he will be the kind who can string three words into a sentence, or will be some arcane philosopher idiot who walks with his head so far up his rear-side that he cannot see where he is walking.
In short, there has to be some accepted method where it is perfectly normal for a guy(girl) to ask a girl(guy) he(she) has met not so long ago for a number or express interest. In case, she(he) is already taken, there is some respectable way to say that as well. Both parties walk away with their pride and self-respect intact. No loose or horny labels. Personally, I think there will be a lot less trouble or violence that way.
And, yeah, screw all the excitement and mystery that you might probably not get. If I want mystery or excitement, I'll go read Doyle or watch a Tarantino flick.
Friday, August 21, 2009
And in the meantime...
...while I contemplate on the nature of the universe, solve hard computing problems, vegetate, procrastinate and generally exert myself in cooking up reasonably plausible reasons for not writing anything remotely sensible, check this out from my not-so-long-ago trip to Singapore and Cambodia.
I am sorry....I meant this...
PS: Yes...I know this is called flickr-whoring, but what the hell...!!!
Edit: I am actually just sitting and staring at a screen that is just scrolling. Woohooo...ain't that fun!
I am sorry....I meant this...
PS: Yes...I know this is called flickr-whoring, but what the hell...!!!
Edit: I am actually just sitting and staring at a screen that is just scrolling. Woohooo...ain't that fun!
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Would you...?
This is a story from a time long gone. A time when I wasn't bothered by the possible effects a recession could have on me - I guess I couldn't have spelt recession. Neither was I worried about how long an ISR took to execute. Tim was yet to invent the Internet as we know it or it probably was still command-line. I used to happily hum Mere Sapanon Ki Rani instead of the usual Creeping Death or Master of Puppets that keeps playing on inside my head today. I was four-ish back then, I think.
At the age of four, I had this crazy idea that I could convince people to belive in whatever I wanted them to. It was probably the earliest (and maybe, the only) signs that my folks had that I would probably become a consultant with an MBA. Thankfully, today, I am not. Atleast...not yet.
There was this phase (which lasted quite a while) where I wanted everything to be either strawberry flavored or colored. I still maintain that back then Kwality's strawberry ice-cream tasted different from what strawberry ice-cream does today. I have memories of eating half-raw strawberries from bushes that grew in my uncle's garden in Ooty. So much so, that I colored all the mountains in my 'scenery' pink and spent a lot of time trying to convince my teacher that it wasn't unheard of - in fact, I gave a very reasonable explanation. Someone had taken loads of pink paint and gone to the very top and tipped the container over. The result was what I had drawn. She was a little impressed.
We had a grapefruit tree in the school playground and after months of resisting temptation, one fine day during lunch I went and tried to examine what these big things were. Needless to say, thirty seconds later I was holding the fruit, completely detached from the tree in my hands. And then, the enormity of the situation sunk in - punishment and a note in the diary. Not the one to give up so easily, I hailed a classmated and asked him to hold the fruit up so that it was in contact with the spot where it hung from previously - if not, I warned him, that it would start rotting. I promised to return with a tube of glue so that we could stick the grapefruit back and then no one would ever know. I ran back to class and sat down - the epitome of innocence. It wasn't till much later that a teacher saw the poor chap holding the fruit to the tree looking very silly. Oh, and yes, there was a note in the diary that day.
The one thing that kept confounding me in school and sometime even now is that question - " Would you do this at your home?". If I were scribbling on the walls of my class with crayons and I answered no, then the automatic response was a lecture about how school was like a second home and ya-da ya-da. If I said yes, then the cold reply was, "Well...this is not your house!" How is a four-year old supposed to handle a question like that without having to resort to crying (which is what most of the girls in my class did)?
So would you...?
At the age of four, I had this crazy idea that I could convince people to belive in whatever I wanted them to. It was probably the earliest (and maybe, the only) signs that my folks had that I would probably become a consultant with an MBA. Thankfully, today, I am not. Atleast...not yet.
There was this phase (which lasted quite a while) where I wanted everything to be either strawberry flavored or colored. I still maintain that back then Kwality's strawberry ice-cream tasted different from what strawberry ice-cream does today. I have memories of eating half-raw strawberries from bushes that grew in my uncle's garden in Ooty. So much so, that I colored all the mountains in my 'scenery' pink and spent a lot of time trying to convince my teacher that it wasn't unheard of - in fact, I gave a very reasonable explanation. Someone had taken loads of pink paint and gone to the very top and tipped the container over. The result was what I had drawn. She was a little impressed.
We had a grapefruit tree in the school playground and after months of resisting temptation, one fine day during lunch I went and tried to examine what these big things were. Needless to say, thirty seconds later I was holding the fruit, completely detached from the tree in my hands. And then, the enormity of the situation sunk in - punishment and a note in the diary. Not the one to give up so easily, I hailed a classmated and asked him to hold the fruit up so that it was in contact with the spot where it hung from previously - if not, I warned him, that it would start rotting. I promised to return with a tube of glue so that we could stick the grapefruit back and then no one would ever know. I ran back to class and sat down - the epitome of innocence. It wasn't till much later that a teacher saw the poor chap holding the fruit to the tree looking very silly. Oh, and yes, there was a note in the diary that day.
The one thing that kept confounding me in school and sometime even now is that question - " Would you do this at your home?". If I were scribbling on the walls of my class with crayons and I answered no, then the automatic response was a lecture about how school was like a second home and ya-da ya-da. If I said yes, then the cold reply was, "Well...this is not your house!" How is a four-year old supposed to handle a question like that without having to resort to crying (which is what most of the girls in my class did)?
So would you...?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)