Sad about MJ's :-(

My favorites of his are:

• Billie Jean
• Smooth Criminal
• Bad
• Beat It
• They Don't Care About Us
• Black or White

(pretty much in that order)

Though 'Billie Jean' is my most favorite, it makes me sad when I listen to it too many times... all the crazies he had to deal with even back then.

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Recently watched movies: (in the past few months, most recent first)

• Up (awesome)
• Hancock (piece of shit)
• The Hudsucker Proxy (enjoyed)
• 3:10 to Yuma (enjoyed)
• Vitus (i loved it. awesome.)
• Primer (wow + whoa)
• Rat Race (very few funny bits)
• The Truman Show (yup, watched it so late. enjoyed.)
• The Darjeeling Limited (enjoyed it)
• Dogma (seeing it again. of course i liked it)
• Tropic Thunder (enjoyed it)

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I bought a Kindle DX. I love it. It is amazing.

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Currently Reading:

• The Annotated Turning
• GEB
• ANSI Common Lisp [pg]

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I am now doing an "hour of learning" every day, where I spend 15 minutes each on 4 different subjects. This reduces my senseless browsing around that leaves me fatigued. I am finding that I am spending more than the 15 minutes and in more than 4 different subjects, as I am getting too engrossed. This activity feels awesome. I am keeping detailed log but I don't plan to publish them for privacy reasons. The subjects I touched in my today's session were : lighttpd, boto.py, pg' ansi cl, emacs, linux, python, analysis of genes and genomes. I ended up spending way more than an hour ;)

Changed the title to something more appropriate.

It used to be "Just Curious..." which was kinda huh?, kinda blah, kinda meh and kinda blah again. "a primate on a blue planet" is more in line with my current perspective, which no doubt will soon change.

This is not to be particularly taken as an attempt to brag about my opposable thumbs. I just use them to hit the space bar.

I cleared more than half of the storage space that I am renting. It was quite a workout, hauling stuff, sorting them and donating as much as possible. Then, after picking up pizza and some immediately needed groceries, I stopped by my friend Prakash's house to pick up something. It was quite late. Still he force fed me. He had his mom and wife on his team. I was out numbered. I am sure I could have convinced the baby to be on my side but he was fast asleep, not caring about the noise of our lousy jokes and unmusical laughter. Chapati + garbanzo beans curry combination was delicious, but it didn't take long for my eyes to start rolling into their sockets on being over stuffed. That was taken as a cue to serve more. I am a fat penguin today.

There is something about showing love through food. It works.

I slowly hobbled back to my car more than an hour later. Only then did I remember that I had parked on the fire lane, with blinkers on, as I expected to be back well within three minutes.

org-mode marathon

Few days ago, I learned emacs org-mode for almost 10 hours straight. It was FUN. It felt like org-mode was loaded into my brain Matrix-style. I saw couple of videos, read through the manual and tried out my made-up examples. I read the manual cover-to-cover, metaphorically of course. If you are a more of a literal kind of person, I mean that I read the manual first-link to last-link. I skipped only the sections that described features that I thought I'll never use.

org-mode is beautiful. I had a lot of omfg moments. I believe it is going to have a significant positive impact on how I get and keep my ducks in a row. I won't go into the details here, but I'll just say why org-mode is better than all the other organize-your-stuff / project planning softwares out there: It is notes-centric rather than task-centric. Learn more if that makes you curious. Some people have learned Emacs just to be able to use org-mode, I hear!

I've become a fan of marathon learning sessions. There was a time when I prided my multi-tasking skills. I was just fooling myself. Interrupted time makes for pretty low quality time. I'd like to try this Quality Recluse Time type of effort on few other things I want to grok. 'Lisp Macros' is what comes to mind first. I've put off learning Lisp Macros for long enough, I suppose. I kind of know it but I want to learn it well. I mean, *really* learn it well. Ironically, that is how I've put it off for this long - I should just start.

Notes : Technology & Courage

I reread 'Technology and Courage' [pdf] last Thursday, making effective use of the time waiting to go to my weekly motorcycle meet. I took notes this time. By the way, I had an awesome time at the meet, at Pike Place Brewery. The Kilt Lifters did live up to their name.

These notes were a result of liberal paraphrasing... So read the original for accuracy.

• It is all about courage. We almost never look at it like that.
• Do warm up projects. IMPORTANT
  
• Identify your failures of courage. This is difficult as it comes well disguised.
• "I am too busy with a more important task"
• "No one will be interested in my work"
• "Can't show. It is not quite done yet"
• "I have to analyze this further"
• "Let us be just reasonable here"
• Long vacation / Sabbatical is great for good work because:
  • Change of location
  • Rest
  • Lack of distractions
• Harness pride.
• Anglo-Saxon names for things stick, more than Roman names <==
  
• If you use parenthesis in writing, either you are too lazy or your thoughts are still muddled.
• Blogging is good. Ivan called it "display file". It gives you an informal start, which is important.
• Have courage to abandon unsuccessful projects.
• We have a finite reserve of courage. Use it well.
• He has more tricks to bolster courage.Device some of your own.
  

"If god is for us, who can be against us?"

Answer : You

This is what I came up with, when I once again heard the often quoted verse. Religion turns people into sheep, if they aren't one to begin with.

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I liked this comment that someone made about Ayoreo-Totobiegosode Indians, an uncontacted tribe in South America:

I wonder if they sit out there all alone without the necessary technology to move beyond their little village, and they all believe that they must be the only tribe in the Universe, because if they weren't, then surely someone would have contacted them by now.

They've been listening for jungle drums for decades without hearing anything, and sending out smoke signals that can be seen from miles away. If there was anyone else out there they would have seen them, and what reasons could they possibly have for not initiating contact?

Sometimes one of them happens to spot an airplane passing by, but he is instantly considered a nutjob, and the event is explained by claiming it must have been a big bird, or Venus.

Neatly explains Fermi paradox, I suppose :-)

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I learned today that if you are a citizen of India, you don't need to get a visa to visit these 31 countries:

Andorra, Bermuda, Comoros, Cook Islands, Cuba, Ecuador, Fiji, Galapagos Islands, Guam, Haiti, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Kiribati, Leichtenstein, Macau, Maldives, Mauritius, Micronesia, Nauru, Nepal, Palau, Palestine, Pitcairn Island, Saint Helena, Saint Kitts Nevis, Saint Vincent Grenadines, Srilanka, Samoa, Seychelles, Tuvalu, Vanuatu

[Source : VisaHQ]

If you are a citizen of a first world country, many more countries will let you in without a visa. It would be ideal to be a Canadian - as people will be friendlier to you than, say, if you are an American.

My .emacs File

Here is my .emacs file, ready for public consumption. I've cleaned it up.

http://github.com/ki/my-dot-emacs/tree/master/dot-emacs.txt

http://github.com/ki is where I plan to host my public code.

OLPC As eBook Reader

OLPC was choking up on large pdf files. I installed xpdf and it is working perfectly now.

yum install gv
yum install xpdf

I like xpdf a lot now... It is so minimal and blazing fast! I installed it on my dev laptop too.

Also, I installed emacs on my OLPC.

[credit]

emacs and stuff

I am sick with cold. It is probably flu, as the whole body hurts. I am in bed and don't feel like doing anything else. So I thought I'll type up a blog post.

I will try to keep this post to be about what I did and what I am doing, while avoiding what I plan to do. By now most of you are pissed about my grandiose plans that I blog about and don't follow up on.

One on the most productive things that I did was to learn the text-editor-slash-operating-system emacs. I was using vim to edit files in my remote webserver instances. I promise you that emacs kicks ass. Seriously. It is a joy to use it. I has so much fun tinkering with my .emacs file. Of course I've barely scratched the surface but it gives my such a happy feeling when I get a boring task done in a blink with keyboard macros.

For example, I am on-call this week at my day job. I got called in the middle of the night to rerun a set of programs. I had to write dumb code like this:

For list of jobs:
somepgm25
somepgm33
somepgm04
somepgm11

Create:
JOB SOMEPGM25
RUN OCT 9 2008
ENDJOB

JOB SOMEPGM33
RUN OCT 9 2008
AFTER somepgm25
ENDJOB

JOB SOMEPGM04
RUN OCT 9 2008
AFTER somepgm33
ENDJOB

JOB SOMEPGM11
RUN OCT 9 2008
AFTER somepgm04
ENDJOB

But I had to do this crap work more than 30 programs.

Here is the macro that I recorded:

M-d ;; kill-word
JOB ;; self-insert-command * 3
SPC ;; self-insert-command
S-C-y
M-B
M-U
RET ;; newline
2*SPC ;; self-insert-command
RUN ;; self-insert-command * 3
SPC ;; self-insert-command
OCT ;; self-insert-command * 3
SPC ;; self-insert-command
9 ;; self-insert-command
SPC ;; self-insert-command
2008 ;; self-insert-command * 4
RET ;; newline
TAB ;; indent-for-tab-command
AFE ;; self-insert-command * 3
DEL ;; delete-backward-char
TER ;; self-insert-command * 3
SPC ;; self-insert-command
S-C-y
M-Y
RET ;; newline
ENDJOB ;; self-insert-command * 6
RET ;; newline

It probably looks complex if you have never used emacs, but it is ridiculously simple. It is just a matter of starting the recording process and doing what you would do anyway.

So, my point is: though it is in no way earth shattering, it came in handy in the middle of the night and it made a guy smile who would have been cursing otherwise.

My thought is that you can make most of the dull tasks interesting. I am specifically saying "most" for a reason. You are out of luck if you have a micromanaging mofo for a manager.

I am typing this post in emacs of course! What did you think?

Not only this, I love how I can ssh to my instance on AWS and run emacs there. Coding is fun again. Especially because I am discovering emacs tricks everyday. I feel like how I felt when I discovered MSExcel macros when I first started working.

I was going to write about how I -- climbed the Seattle Columbia tower, ran a half-marathon across the 520 floating bridge, flew in a hot air balloon, flew a glider myself, revamped IWS with what I am learning from "Don't Make Me Think", enjoyed reading 'The Day Of The Jackal' etc but I'll blog about them later. I've rambled too much today. Also I'll blog about how Stevey is awesome.

The Amusement Ride Ahead

I love to build things. But I hate certain annoying characteristics of the real world. If I were to sculpt a cool looking statue of Venus, a one second lapse in concentration can end up ruining days of work. Attempts at correcting lopsided breasts of Venus result in smaller ones on each iteration.

It is sad that most of the programming methods used in corporations are as inflexible as sculpting.

I am lucky in my current job that I am a team-of-one for the tools I have to code. I interact with many but code in isolation. Freedom to do your work your way is the best perk, I suppose. For instance, no one forces me to code in Java.

Corporate inflexibility is brought in using seemingly benevolent requirements such as "coding standards", "detailed design documents" and "best practices".

Apart from such procedural inflexibilities, there are, of course, other issues. People.

"Happy Coding" can scale to bigger programming teams too. But it requires the absence of control freaks, credit leeches, fragile egos, passive aggressive types and various other corporate scum. Obviously, bigger the coding team, more likely is the presence of these well-poisoners.

I perhaps used up all my luck. My co-workers are all great... even the "worst" ones are harmless. However, losing my current job is now imminent. I've defied fate in the past. I came here for a three month consulting gig and have lasted five years - still as a consultant! Pretty much unheard of, everyone says. Powers-that-be liked my work and kept me. But the mega-corp itself was recently sold for half a dozen billions to another mega-corp. A firm tug on the carpet is expected at any moment now.

What are the odds of landing another job with ideal working conditions and relaxed co-workers? Yes, you guessed it right in one try!

Financial independence is the best way to insulate yourself from having to deal with douche bags. With this in mind, I've saved up rather aggressively and haven't signed up for the modern day indentured servitude called the 30 year mortgage. But the real 'fuck you' money would be from success of the startup.

I don't want to work with teams sculpting programs. I don't want to work with teams doing high school reenactments. So I have to make my startup succeed. I am working on it.

[Credit : Title from 'Just For Fun']