Mmmbop

Sensory overload. Sounds are louder and more distinct. Lights are brighter. Things feel more tangible. Sweets taste sweeter.

This is where I get off.

...and then climb back on and continue from where I left off. Personal challenge to continue this line of investigation even when the investigatory incentives have worn off.

Much better, but only by a little. Running around in the sun does one's constitution a world of good. It's so beautiful today that I think I'll head to the park instead of stewing at home?

No no, IPL changes to be made. Park can come later.

And the stream of consciousness continues. Trippy trippy trap.

IPL ditched, park idled in, lake walked by. And most of the day is still left to enjoy. Been a great Sunday thus far. People must be thanked, activities and recipes must be repeated, and further fun must be had.

Over and out.

Last night

All these ideas floating around. They all seemed brilliant at the time, but are nowhere to be found now.

No sounds or voices, but the suggestions came over in a thick waterfall anyway. Not much food was eaten.

Oblivion. Thought it was Moon with a soap opera thrown in, but turned out to be The Matrix as well. And then seemed to swerve into a time loop of sorts. Really need to watch the movie again while in a less... profoundly analytical frame of mind. Maybe on Monday?

The train is at Knightsbridge now, and I need to get off at King's Cross. The attempt is to make it to the game successfully and then NOT run around with arms flailing wildly. And hopefully not forget and leave important stuff behind.

Everyone in the tube seems to be eyeing my backpack. I'm suddenly glad I didn't leave the wallet in it. Any minute now somebody could grab it and run. I'm hyper aware of the avenues of possibility around this event, and fully prepared to indulge in fisticuffs with the potential perpetrator.

Like the Peep Show title song, exactly! I'm not good but I'm not well, 'cause I'm in hell. Not entirely sure those are the words, but it'll have to do. But the key line is "paranoia paranoia, everybody's out to GET me!".

I'm actually literally amazed I've managed to ramble on this long with very few spelling mistakes. I could credit the reasonably OK predictive keyboard on the Nexus 4, but screw that. It refuses to predict profanity, even when the words are added into the dictionary. That's messed up, and another unfortunate example of Google overstretching in imposing their values on their users.

However, I, for one, welcome our smartphone overlords and don't particularly care for the underperforming, underpowered and one dimensional dumbphones of yore. Progress is a good thing, even when it isn't.

Kurt Vonnegut was right

Tralfamadorians are real. I am one now. The doppelganger watches from a safe distance the miracles on the revived bodies.

Only one difference. They can see all points in time at once. I can do the same, but have no credible way of communicating across to you chaps that my extortionate pricing may not cause the ever seeked elusive retail footfall and heavy walletted poseurs. Buy outside of that you're actually quite nice.

Early in the morning.

Just to continue

It never ends. Just comes and goes. But then all the stories come true and bounded rationality is violated.

It would be almost interesting to put these up on tumblr but enough.

How can I unify identity while still maintaining the decentralisation aspect of many identity providers?

Everyone always seems to have strong opinions on everything. I feel quite envious of such thorough convictions held about an entirely new field. Either genius or successful self deluders. Same reasoning as the .. .

Will sleep help? Don't want to, can't let go just yet. Tripolata. Lots of food, but tandoori chicken was missing. Would've gobbled that up by the bucketful.

Football is OK, NBA is OK. But playing is definitely better than simply reading and commenting.

Some people just sit and eat. They can be watched with interest too, because they may magically turn into zombies. Then we have to place plants that spit seeds out to kill the psychotic attacking flower army.

It's all good.

Posting this from the blogger app on android.

One is not entirely of sound mind. But one is of fun mind.

Repeal everything. All is well. You may say that I'm a dreamer. So... Wonderful and naïve.

Great weather today. Great for the indian good that was gorged on. Sleepy now, but still attempting to document all this.

Actually not sleepy. Somehow everything is more.. Everything stands out more. Smell, hearing, pain, sight. All existence is magnified.

Seems late, but so much to do, so little time. The woods are lovely dark and deep.

Hagrid never had these problems

Why is is that I'm so absolutely indecisive when it comes to facial hair?

The only serious attempt I've made has been to "wear" a goatee for a few months. All other experiments with beards and moustaches have been cut short for various reasons.

For the most part these reasons are borne out of a general "fear of the unknown" -- save for aging, my appearance has remained pretty much static for most of my life. Right at the beginning of adolescence, there was a brief period of a year or so when I was "rockin' a 'stash", as the kids call it these days. (Do they..?) But after I discovered the wonders of a good razor, it was wiped out.

Since then the only sort of facial hair I've allowed has been the occasional overgrowth of stubble due to (usually) laziness, (less usually) convenience, or (not applicable any more) religious reasons.

The other times I had to abort any experiments, has been due to "human error". I'd be on the path to an interesting new appearance, when the razor blade would go astray and lop off a crucial piece of carpeting. Initially, the attempted method of dealing with this was to balance out the mistake, but that -- without exception -- always led to merely doubling the error. This would force me to stop fixing errors and just wipe the slate clean. Eventually I gave up drawing on the slate altogether.

During the goatee period, I also realised that maintaining a consistent appearance is just as hard as remaining clean-shaven. This further levelled the playing field, as the amount of effort wasn't a deciding factor any more.

I wonder when I will come around to giving the whole facial hair thing another shot. I suppose the best time is now, unencumbered by professional requirements. Will I, won't I?

Deliberations on giving interviews

Giving interviews is hard.

I used to think interviews are a breeze, but this was before realising that "being yourself" in an interview is not an optimal strategy. Till date I'd been fortunate -- for the most part, my interviews had been conducted by somewhat like-minded people. In such situations, being "true" to oneself works quite well.

However, the trick is in sizing up precisely what the interviewer is looking for, in asking the questions that he is. The response then needs to be tailored to match the interviewer's expectations -- not the role's. and not the organisations, even though they should ideally be aligned.

In the case of a question looking for a factual answer, while the core of the response can stick to the facts, the language it is couched in can make a big difference (firm? conciliatory? with gusto? with a sense of distaste?). This also applies to the length and approach of the answer (curt? concise? rambling? detailed?).

Of course, the most correct, internally consistent, and confidently stated responses won't do you any good if the initial read on the interviewer is completely off-base. If your approach to validate a hypothesis is Bayesian when the interviewer is a fanatical frequentist, it may not matter at all that you were entirely right. Back in the day, expounding the virtues of JSP in an interview where the interviewer was an ardent PHP fan didn't work too well.

If you aren't applying to roles that are clearly out of your league (claiming knowledge of a tool or technology that you've only read about, or only dabbled in), then the associated interview should be a piece of cake. But humans being what they are, and ridiculously susceptible to biases, the best strategy for an interview is always to get a read on the interviewer(s) and manipulate said biases in your favour. If you're unable to do this -- ceteris paribus -- the chances of making it through the interview are entirely 50-50, which is really quite low.

Broken thoughts

1. "[O]ur modern notions of wealth, money and currency are built on a type of social proof pyramid."
2. Depending on good behaviour from participants doesn't scale well.
3. Labels are stupid. It is perfectly fine to hold opinions that span a political spectrum, as long as they are orthogonal and don't contradict each other in weirdly hypocritical ways.
4. How do you deal with a situation where a job has low desirability, great demand, but very low pay because it just doesn't provide more value just about minimum wage? This appears to be a problem with the "caring for the elderly" sector, and will only continue to worsen as the average age of the developed world keeps increasing. More importantly, who deals with this situation?
5. Don't tell me to "hate the game, not the player". I am well capable of hating both equally strongly, TYVM.

Some day, maybe I will be able to string together a more cogent and developed position on some of these, but till then, this will have to do.

How programming lets me know I'm getting older

You're hammering away at a particularly hairy bit of code (or any other problem). You know exactly what you want it to do, but are just struggling to translate it into the right language. After hours of wrangling with convoluted logic and endless cycles of edit-build-debug-rinse-repeat, you throw your hands in the air, give up and walk away.

And then suddenly, while cooking dinner, or watching a movie, or in the shower thinking of what manner of pasta to snarf down for lunch, or simply just on the can focussing on your business -- it hits you. A brilliant solution to the hair-puller-outer, so elegant and so bloody simple you wonder how you never thought of it in the first place.

You scribble a quick note in your head (or Evernote, or a notepad, or whatever) and suddenly nothing else will do except firing up vim and set things straight right away. You do it.

The final turn on the safe -- maybe something audibly goes "click" in your head -- and it's done. You step back and marvel in the beauty of it. You can feel the mystery briefcase glow on your face, a la Pulp Fiction. All is right in the world again. You are the master of all you survey - there is no mystery you cannot solve, no stream you cannot ford.

You are also not me.

Maybe I am slowly gathering up enough work experience, or maybe I'm just getting older and my mind is atrophying, but while the initial frustration and subsequent elation are still very firmly in place, the "eureka!" appears to be happening a lot less these days. Instead, what I find works most of the time is just plugging away at the issue, continuously breaking it down into smaller bits, and gradually piecing the solution together from these little digested chunks.

"Solution epiphanies" strike about two or three times out of ten, down from 6-7 out of ten from back in the day [when we wrote our code with styluses on papyrus and prayed to Ra to compile it into machine code via heliography]. The adrenaline and oxytocin rush is still phenomenal, but I find myself needing them less and less, since I can be more objective about the side effects and just more productive overall.

I still end up getting celebratorily hammered over the next weekend though.

His Noodly Appendage is acknowledged

This is awesome. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster can rejoice - Pastafarianism has officially been recognised as a religion.

Sample these two screenshots of my thwarted attempts to read about certain subject matter. Focus on the "Target group" heading.

Eminent wootage.

Why I like Windows 7

It's just... nice.

Stuff amidst fluff

Caught up once in a bout of arbit enthu, I added a bunch of "business"-related feeds to my Google Reader subscriptions. Roughly a month after that, I into a routine of diligently reading the webcomics, the occasional update by an XLer or two, items shared by my Google Reader buddies and promptly "Mark As Read"-ing everything else.

Earlier today though, a post titled "Are You Programmed to Fail" from a blog called "Sales Machine" (I know, I know...) caught my eye. This is one of those hardcore "everything you do is a sales pitch" blogs, so one has to click through to the actual website to read the post, which usually annoys me enough that I avoid doing so, barring one or two intriguing Freakonomics posts. But then again, I really did want to If I Was Programmed to Fail.

Wonder of wonders, amidst the most patently ridiculous premise, was actually something interesting!

Everybody has a set of arbitrary rules defining the meaning of events in their life. Most people don’t set these rules consciously; instead, they just “grow” into them based on their temperament and upbringing. Because of this, many people have rules that tend to make them miserable.

I’ve known people who, in order to consider themselves really happy, must be on a wonderful vacation, win the lottery, fall in love, eats some rare delicacy, or some other unusual or even once-in-a-lifetime event.

In almost every case, these same people can find virtually any excuse to be miserable. If they miss a stop light, they get upset. If they can’t get a jelly donut in the morning, they’re upset. If they can’t watch their favorite TV show, it ruins their day, etc., etc., etc. They have an endless list of tiny things that steal away their happiness.

People who have those rules about life, are programmed to be miserable, because they’ll encounter dozens of things each day that irritate them, and very few events that will make them happy. And being unhappy or irritated most of the day is the ULTIMATE expression of failure in life.

[...]

The solution, of course, is to get off your emotional duff and start doing the hard work of changing your rules. Because here’s the exciting thing: if you switch the two sets around, you’re re-programming yourself to be happy, and therefore to win.

Want to be successful? Here’s how:

• Decide to have rules that make it easy to be happy. Let little things that happen every day be cause for celebration. Find every excuse possible to take a little pleasure out of life.
• Decide to have rules that make it difficult to be miserable. Save your misery for truly awful things, like the death of a close relative, financial disaster, or a major, debilitating illness.

Well played, sir. But. B-U-T but! Seeing as I have no other way of paying for the "content I consume", I urge you, dear readers, to trundle on over to the Sales Machine blog to see what the real point of that post is.

Linky to consume and pay for.

There goes the day

One Hundred Interesting Wikipedia Articles:

• First 50
• Next 50

As the disclaimer over that blog says: I will not be held responsible for the many MANY hours of lost productivity resulting from the exploratory clicking around that will inevitably ensue as a result of following above links.

Ancient history (sort of) repeats itself

THEN: Xenophon with Cyrus

While a young man, Xenophon participated in the expedition led by Cyrus the Younger against his older brother, the emperor Artaxerxes II of Persia, in 401 BC.

NOW: Xenophon against Cyrus

Senator Nick Xenophon launched a scathing attack on Scientology, citing letters from former followers alleging extensive criminal activity. Scientology spokesman Cyrus Brooks said the senator's attack had been an abuse of parliamentary proceedings.

One expects the battles to be no less bloody, though.

Combining theory with practice indeed!

So tell me, is this how one manages the studies of one's faculties?

Such is life

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner gave me a good couple of hours, when I read Freakonomics. "Exploring the hidden side of everything" was (to me, at least) a novel concept, which was why I also gobbled up The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford.

These days, though, when the advantage of information (and data!) asymmetry is being gradually eroded by the likes of the Big G, 'counter-intuitive' pronouncements require a phenomenal amount of legwork, and nobody can get away with being contrarian just for the sake it, thanks to the meddling bloggers.

Hence, after Levitt and Dubner get called out again and again, and continue to not "take responsibility for their failed attempt to be cleverly contrarian", I was reminded of a Seth Godin conclusion from about a month back:

You don't have to like the coming era of hyper-measurement, but that doesn't mean it's not here.

Such is life.

Tech fundoo

"Tech fundoo" is term first made known to me by Krishnamurti (G, not J). It appears to me to be the Indian form of a hacker, as defined in its 'original' form.

I have always felt that I was tech fundoo, and sometimes attempted to back it up with a few blog posts. But most tech fundoo I have felt was, curiously, NOT when twiddling with hardware/software innards or some arcane Linux-y fundaes. These two occasions, by some weird coincidence, involved the use of the Character Map in Windows XP.

The first time was when ant poop had eaten into my laptop's keyboard circuitry, rendering some keys useless. As Murphy would have it, one of these alphabets had a double occurrence in my Windows password.

Living in a relatively boondocky area in Chennai then, rendered me completely unable to get a USB keyboard, so some other ingenuity had to be thought of. Which is when I used a cybercafe computer to look up the Alt code for the missing alphabet of my password, and used this to peacefully log in to Windows. Such technological satisfaction. Such tech fundoo-ness. Ah!

The second time was the previous night, whilst waiting to board a Jet Airways flight from Bombay to Bangalore. (Aside: This was via Jet Airways Konnect, but Travelocity losers never informed me of this in any manner throughout the booking process, or in the e-ticket. And I would rather go hungry than pony up Rs.100+ for a sandwich that wouldn't be enough for Kate Moss.) The waiting area at the boarding gates of the domestic terminal at Bombay Airport has 4 Internet kiosks. Two of them are your standard kiosk fare - LCD screen, hobbled laptop keyboard with touchpad. The other two are touch-screen LCDs, one of which was switched off. The other one was running, and logged in to WinXP, but had no keyboard, and no apps running! This explained why people would wander near this terminal, scratch heads for a few minutes, and walk away. So the question now was: how were we to check up on cricket analysis/bulletins?

Easy. Fire up the Character Map, click-select 'cricket' letter by letter, open up IE, focus on search box, Page > Paste (This took a couple of minutes to figure out - IE8 is frickin' counter-intuitive!), Go. Bam, reading Cricinfo!

Happier still this made me, when after we were done, the stream of people to this kiosk increased. As did the subsequent head-scratching and walking away. We did end up slightly miffed that we'd forgotten to erase the browsing history, so an enterprising kid fired up the browser and used the History to get to CricInfo.

Occam's Razor takes a while to slit one's throat though - I realised much too late that happy online-ness could have been attained via the free airport wi-fi on my trusty Nokia N82.

Still. I am tech fundoo.

On mistakes

Today's so-called 'avant-garde' crowd over-rates making mistakes. The precise load of horse-manure that captures this kind of thinking is spewed by Alyson Hannigan as Lily in How I Met Your Mother:

OK, yes it's a mistake. I know it's a mistake, but there are certain things in life where you know it's a mistake but you don't really know it's a mistake because the only way to really know it's a mistake is to make the mistake and look back and say 'yep, that was a mistake.' So really, the bigger mistake would be to not make the mistake, because then you'd go your whole life not knowing if something is a mistake or not. And dammit, I've made no mistakes! I've done all of this; my life, my relationship, my career, mistake-free. Does any of this make sense to you?

What a steaming load of tripe. Some things are just wrong, religious or philosophical eloquence notwithstanding.

Random thoughts on growing older

(as paraphrased from arbit website - note to creator: don't sue me, pretty please)

• Is it just me, or are 80% of the faces in the "people you may know" feature on Facebook, people that I do know, but I deliberately choose not to be friends with?
• You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you've made up your mind that you just aren't doing anything productive for the rest of the day.
• Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realise you're wrong.
• I don't understand the purpose of the line, "I don't need to drink to have fun." Great, no one does. But why start a fire with flint and sticks when they've invented the lighter?
• Have you ever been walking down the street and realised that you're going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you're crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.
• I totally take back all those times I didn't want to nap when I was younger.
• The letters T and G are very close to each other on a keyboard. This recently became all too apparent to me and consequently I will never be ending a work email with the phrase "Regards" again.
• Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn't work? You take the cartridge out, blow in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There were no internet or message boards or FAQ's. We just figured it out. Today's kids are soft.
• There is a great need for sarcasm font.
• Sometimes, I'll watch a movie that I watched when I was younger and suddenly realise I had no idea what the fuck was going on when I first saw it.
• I think everyone has a movie that they love so much, it actually becomes stressful to watch it with other people. I'll end up wasting 90 minutes shiftily glancing around to confirm that everyone's definitely watching and laughing at the right parts.
• I would rather try to carry 10 plastic grocery bags in each hand than take 2 trips to bring my groceries in.
• I think part of a best friend's job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.
• The only time I look forward to a red light is when I'm trying to finish a text.
• Was learning cursive really necessary?
• LOL has gone from meaning, "laugh out loud" to "I have nothing else to say".
• I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.
• Whenever someone says "I'm not book smart, but I'm street smart", all I hear is "I'm not real smart, but I'm imaginary smart".
• How many times is it appropriate to say "What?" before you just nod and smile because you still didn't hear what they said?
• I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars teams up to prevent a dick from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers!
• While driving yesterday I saw a banana peel in the road and instinctively swerved to avoid it... thanks Mario Kart.
• Every time I have to spell a word over the phone using 'as in' examples, I will undoubtedly draw a blank and sound like a complete idiot. Today I had to spell my boss's last name to an client and said "Yes that's G as in...(10 second lapse)... ummm... Goonies".
• Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.
• I find it hard to believe there are actually people who get in the shower first and THEN turn on the water.
• Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.
• I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars teams up to prevent a dick from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers!
• I can't remember the last time I wasn't at least kind of tired.
• Bad decisions make good stories.
• Whenever I'm Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public I feel like a kid on Christmas morning who just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don't mind if I do!
• Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don't want to have to restart my collection.
• As a driver I hate pedestrians and as a pedestrian I hate drivers, but no matter what the mode of transportation, I always hate cyclists.
• There's no worse feeling than that millisecond you're sure you are going to die after leaning your chair back a little too far.
• I'm always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to.
• "Do not machine wash or tumble dry" means I will never wash this ever.
• I hate being the one with the remote in a room full of people watching TV. There's so much pressure. 'I love this show, but will they judge me if I keep it on? I bet everyone is wishing we weren't watching this. It's only a matter of time before they all get up and leave the room. Will we still be friends after this?'
• I hate when I just miss a call by the last ring (Hello? Hello? Darnit!), but when I immediately call back, it rings nine times and goes to voicemail. What'd you do after I didn't answer? Drop the phone and run away?
• I hate leaving my house confident and looking good and then not seeing anyone of importance the entire day. What a waste.
• When I meet a new girl, I'm terrified of mentioning something she hasn't already told me but that I have learned from some light internet stalking.
• I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it's on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.
• Sometimes I'll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.
• I keep some people's phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.
• Even under ideal conditions people have trouble locating their car keys in a pocket, finding their cell phone, and Pinning the Tail on the Donkey - but I'd bet my ass everyone can find and push the Snooze button from 3 feet away, in about 1.7 seconds, eyes closed, first time every time...
• I wonder if cops ever get pissed off at the fact that everyone they drive behind obeys the speed limit.
• I think the freezer deserves a light as well.
• More often than not, when someone is telling me a story all I can think about is that I can't wait for them to finish so that I can tell my own story that's not only better, but also more directly involves me.
• The other night I ordered takeaway. When I looked in the bag, I saw they had included four sets of plastic cutlery. In other words, someone at the restaurant packed my order, took a second to think about it, and then estimated that there must be at least four people eating to require such a large amount of food. Too bad I was eating by myself. There's nothing like being made to feel like a fat bastard before dinner.

Say it isn't so!

Is IIT-M going the way of IIPM? Or was this deliberate? One can never know. Found in the Super Manager event page for Shaastra 09, the rules & regulations read thusly:

I suppose if a manager is 'doing their undergraduate', then they REALLY must a super manager..