I’m in the process of moving, so I’ll be hibernating for a few days, while I prepare to get roasted in the 115 degree sun of Phoenix, AZ.. but who cares, I love Arizona!
(via Boing Boing) An 8 year old Star Trek fan wrote his own version of the pledge of allegiance and decided to recite it in school. His principal, with a total lack of any sense of humor, decided to suspend him from school for the rest of the day. Here’s the pledge:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.
It is a funny story, but the reason I mention it here is that the pledge is undoubtedly the work of a genius. Read it again carefully and see how meaningful and broad-minded it is! I can’t imagine how an 8 year old could come up with this and really believe in it enough to recite it with his hand on his heart, while the adults could only see the blasphemy.
Yes, that’s right.. there is a saint for beers! While checking out some exotic varieties of beer at the huge Central Market in San Antonio, I chanced upon a local Texan beer called… Saint Arnold of course! It prefers to go by the old fashioned name ‘ale’ instead of beer, but it’s a wicked little thing if you can get past the initial taste shock. The neck of the bottle has a label that gives out a tasty bit of information about the patron saint (emphasis mine):
As Bishop of Metz, Saint Arnold spent his life warning of the dangers of drinking water and extolling the virtues of ale. During his funeral, his pallbearers stopped to slake their thirst, but regretfully there was just one mug of ale to share among them. Then a miracle came to pass…that one mug never ran dry, and all of the thirsty mourners in the entire gathering were satisfied.
That’s the kind of people I want at my funeral – people who can keep drinking from an endless pitcher! Since my curiosity about this wonderful patron saint was sufficiently aroused by now, I decided to find out more (again, emphasis mine):
Water was not necessarily safe to drink during the dark ages, especially around towns and villages. Nasty stuff. Arnold always had the well-being of his followers close at heart.
Beer, on the other hand, was quite safe. Arnold frequently pointed this out to his congregation. He is credited with having once said, “From man’s sweat and God’s love, beer came into the world.” It goes without saying that the people loved and revered Arnold.
Indeed. Saint Arnold was in fact, canonized by the Catholic church for that beer-mug miracle!
On an unrelated note, I’ll be moving back to Arizona from Texas in a few days. I’ll be working with a great GPS company and I’m excited about working on something that I’m really passionate about. San Antonio has been a great place, and I’ve had a great time going through this wonderful old city, but I’m terribly excited about going back to Tempe which is almost like home for me. Good ol’ Arizona! If you find me in a pub in Tempe (or if you ever meet me), the drinks are on me!
Joel Spolsky launches an unusually acerbic tirade against Microsoft for investing more in recruitment practices than in employee morale. (thanks Vivek!)
The best recruiting department in the world can’t make people want to work at a company that’s moribund, that can’t figure out how to ship a compelling upgrade to their flagship OS, or update their flagship database server more than once every five years, that has added tens of thousands of technical workers who aren’t adding any dollars to the bottom line, and that constantly annoys twenty year veterans by playing Furniture Police games over what office furniture they are and aren’t allowed to have. Summer interns at Fog Creek have better chairs, monitors, and computers than the most senior Microsoft programmers.
It is interesting fact that a company that consistently employs some of the brightest minds in Computer Science cannot come up with innovative ideas the way much smaller companies regularly do. I’m not a Microsoft hater and I can give credit where it is due but it is a fact that Microsoft typically comes up with a great implementation after someone else has shown the viability of an innovation. However, as soon as Microsoft captures a market, it stops significant development on the product, which lends credence to the idea that Microsoft is in the business of making money, not software.
There is a big difference between making a great product that is also a money-spinner, and making something of uncertain quality just to make some money off it. The former requires a passion for engineering and a good business sense while the latter simply requires a good business sense. The management may be good at the business of making money, but to come up with a great idea your engineers need to be motivated enough, and that will not happen just because your managers want to rake in more moolah. Engineers are driven by recognition and the satisfaction of seeing their ideas implemented properly, and Redmond is not a place where this might happen.
Consider this: Microsoft came up with IE4 which was a much better browser than the sluggish beast known as Netscape, but as soon as it captured the desktop browser market it decided to stop developing IE further. It took a renewed assault from Firefox to get them to drop their lunch pails and get to work on IE7. Could the Microsoft engineers have come up with a much better browser? Yes, but after gobbling up the market, a satiated Microsoft did not provide their engineers with an incentive to do so. It’s a shame that thousands of brilliant minds are wasted in a company that has no desire to use its humongous resources to truly develop the shape of computing.
There is a paper in the current issue of Physical Review Letters with my name attached to it! PRL’s peer-review process is a tough nut to crack, but thanks to my absolutely brilliant professor Dr. Ying-Cheng Lai, and my co-conspirator Satish Krishnamoorthy, we were able to get our wicked paper past them. One of the delights of getting this paper published has been getting an Erdös number of 4! (It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s a fun statistic.)
Bubblies on the house! *Cheers*
Tags: research
ABC’s Dancing with the Stars is the latest British import on American television and while I haven’t seen the original, I doubt it if could be worse than ABC’s version. The show, if you missed the plugs during the NBA finals, is a ballroom/latin dance competition that pairs a celebrity with a professional dancer. A great idea that could have created mesmerizing television, for who would not succumb to the glamour of stars combined with the grace and seductiveness of the Rumba or the movement of the Cha-Cha! Unfortunately the show looks and feels cheap, and employs a style of judging that combines Simon-style acerbity with a scoring that makes no sense to the viewers.
I wouldn’t mind all that if the dancing was interesting enough to hold my attention, but after watching an episode in its entirety I had a baffling realization – every latin dance was performed to incongruous english pop music! Not only did the music lack the rhythm and percussion that characterizes latino music, most of them were totally devoid of any beats at all! It almost appears as if ABC is convinced that the general populace can only appreciate music if it is in english! A pity that the viewers who are unaware of latin dancing will end up thinking that it’s an insipid dance form. What’s Cha-Cha without the cha-cha-cha!
Tags: dance, television, abc
Found on Sambhar Mafia‘s Flickr photostream – a mallu wedding invitation that’s wacky as hell! (Caution: huge images)
Tags: humor, wedding, kerala, india
Surya and Vulturo have book-tagged me, so in the greater interest of the common good I’ll have to reveal the sordid details of what goes on between me and my books.
Total number of books I own: Why buy when you can borrow or steal! I am an impulse buyer of books and while I usually haunt bookstores for the ambiance and the coffeeshops, I usually end up with atleast one cheap book every time I visit a bookstore. The attrition rate is equally alarming since due to my splendid memory. After the latest round of moving, I managed to haul in two boxes of books plus a bundle of them spread around the backseat of my car, so let me throw in a rough estimate of around 150.
Last book I bought:That would be The Bartender’s Guide which is an incredibly useful quick-reference book for a plethora of cocktails. The latest fiction I bought was The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold which is a disturbing and ultimately touching account of a 14-year-old girl Susie who is raped and murdered. It is a first person account of Susie in heaven who watches her family and friends struggle with the horror of the tragedy long after she was gone, so that she can find peace herself. What I like about the book, apart from her unique perspective, is her description of heaven where everyone sees it uniquely as a world that was familiar and comfortable to them when they were alive.
Last book I read:The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel. It’s the first book in her Earth’s Children series which tracks the adventures of a Cro-Magnon heroine Ayla who is raised by a Neanderthal clan. Part Harlequin romance and part Indiana Jones, it’s a good read but not great literature.
My unfinished book:Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. I bought it after reading rave reviews, but I could never get past the first few chapters because it was so… boring! I might pick it up again once I have nothing else to read.
Books that mean a lot to me:
I am using ‘booktag’ as a technorati tag so that it is easy to find book-tagged blogs. Use the tag if you like the idea. I have to pass on the book-tag virus to someone else, so here’s my list: JD, Kim, Suresh, Sanaja, Michael H.. Feel free to booktag yourself and I’ll add you to the list.
There are those of us who prepare to go to buffets by skipping dinner the night before, only to find out that the food might be unlimited, but you have only one stomach to fill it in. (My friend Anoop’s advice: Remember, it’s your own body) Then there are those who attack buffets with all the planning that goes into a military ambush. At the Le Village Buffet at Vegas, I was shown the ropes by my experienced friends who first surveyed the entire faux village, and then proceeded to attack it in sections, with plenty of rest between attacks. People around us came, ate and left, but we remained there for four hours (which included a long restroom break) after which we were satisfied that we had received the maximum bang for our moolah.
When contests mention that they will accept unlimited entries with ‘no purchase necessary’, it becomes necessary to test those limits too, as this bunch of Caltech students did a long time back. They printed a million copies of the contest coupon and ‘ended up winning a Datsun, 300 five-dollar gift certificates, and $3000 in cash‘ and also caused the unlimited entry option to disappear from almost all future contests in the United States.
The most interesting class of buffet-busters is the make-me-famous type of weirdos like this guy who decided to make use of the unlimited SMSes from Airtel to enter the Guinness Book as the person who drove away his few friends by sending them 1,82,689 SMSes in a month (that’s ~6000 a day) and promising to break that record himself.
“I used to be very angry earlier. But then I started supporting him so that he can register his name in the Guinness Book of World Records”, said Pushkar Pandey, Deepak’s friend.
Now that’s an SMS every fifteen seconds! I sure hope he was spreading the love among all his friends, and not just this guy.
Tags: humor
The wisdom of ancient sages, spoken through modern gurus and presented as the Tao of Programming.. From the book of maintenance:
A manager asked a programmer how long it would take him to finish the program on which he was working. “It will be finished tomorrow,” the programmer promptly replied.
“I think you are being unrealistic,” said the manager, “Truthfully, how long will it take?”
The programmer thought for a moment. “I have some features that I wish to add. This will take at least two weeks,” he finally said.
“Even that is too much to expect,” insisted the manager, “I will be satisfied if you simply tell me when the program is complete.”
The programmer agreed to this.
Several years later, the manager retired. On the way to his retirement luncheon, he discovered the programmer asleep at his terminal. He had been programming all night.
He who understands Tao shall transcend the desire to label his software 1.0 and keep it forever in beta as the great master Google does.
Tags: programming, humor, philosophy
