Tales from ye older crypt

Editors Note: Every once in a while in an attempt to convince himself of the accuracy of his long term memory , the author will bring up some charming whimsical and yet insightful tale from his youth. Some artistic license, as  always is to be expected but the thematic accuracy  has been largely preserved. The names of various individuals have not been altered in any way since the author has no interest in  protecting anyone. However in some cases initials have been you used. You know who you are !!

Ye Firste Tale : She’s got the LOOK

 

Chapter 1  Prelude to a crisis

It was a dark time in Indore. Storm clouds were gathering in the distance. The armies of evil were amassing from the west and from the east the forces of darkness were conspiring . The north was not sure why they should have been singled out by the compass and the south was telling anyone who would listen , that in reality the magnetic south pole was the geographic north and so the compass actually favoured them…     The ring wraiths were  in full force and ominous sounds could be heard every night. The screams of the damned would chill men’s souls  and children would shiver in nameless dread. YUP the semester was coming to an end and exams would be upon us.

In these trying times we meet two intrepid practitioners of the dark arts of  computer science S.J, and  A.S, , who in their youthful exuberance are on a trip of fun and frolic to a godforsaken place called Mandu. I having a prior commitment to sleep could not make it ( Also a somewhat lengthy conversation I had with an Old Monk the night before might have played a part )

The trip itself was fairly uneventful, or so I am told ( there was a near death traffic incident but this was India where rather than keeping  to the left or keeping  to the right more esoteric rules like keeping to the shade  applied, so no real worries ). The other event was that some idiot managed to lose the keys to their Kinetic

 

and while this could have been  a problem thankfully the scooter was not locked and a local mechanic opened up the thing and hot wired it. Now of course you cant be doing that in front of a bunch of geeks and so next thing you know A.S and S.J were explaining to the mechanic about how from the moment they had been born their fondest dream was to learn how to start a Kinetic without having to worry about silly things like the ignition key. After much negotiation the dude spilled all,  and our intrepid duo was armed with *yes its true* knowledge

 

Chapter 2 :  *Bat eyelash ask for help, sit back and watch*

 

It was a dark time in Indore . Oh we’ve covered that already. Cool, So anyhow a few days later …

It was a lovely day , the birds were chirping the flowers blooming and er also some construction noise in the background and dust everywhere and well you get the idea.

I was walking into college a little late ( the monk had raised some very powerful ideas regarding Ice Vs Water and the subversive nature of lime cordial ) and in fact it was fair to say that all the lectures for the day were over so in many ways I was quite late.

As I entered the charming driveway that was my college

 

I could not help but notice a certain amount of aaah labour and commotion around a kinetic Honda parked in the driveway.

We now meet the another character in the soap opera that was my college ; Ms. Sancheti or Priyanka to her friends or anyone who did not want to look like an absolute ass calling her Sancheti.( as an aside and I’m just saying , I am typing this is Windows live writer and when I typed in priyanka the automatic spell checker suggested piranha:-). Not sure what to make of that . Priyanka had many a stellar quality including an almost superhuman ability to lose her scooter keys, and also she could turn a number of er people( with penises)  into er shall we say less than fully coherent human beings and convince them it was in their absolute best interest to help her by just sort of looking and sometimes  talking . I can only illustrate this by saying that when she announced to a bunch of  guys that she had lost her keys to the kinetic; one of the ideas seriously being considered was that she should sit on the kinetic and about 6 or 7 guys would take turns carrying her and the scooter about 10 odd km home. Thankfully better sense prevailed and the next idea was the everyone should spend about  24 hrs combing over the entire college using the grid method to locate her keys. There was some talk of offering a reward to the finder as well. Showing a rare combination of vision grit and loud voices our heroic duo calmly announced that they in fact could hotwire a Kinetic so would the idiots please leave. The fact that they had no tools did not deter them cause as one of them would recall later in telling the tale , “after all, all  Priyanka has to mention is that she needed tools and then we could sit back and watch who would win the race , the idiots running home to get them or the dudes racing to the shop to buy them” .

Like their illustrious forebears before them A.S and S.J were clearly masters of their domain. Oh what a heroic sight it was to watch them wrestle with screwdrivers, pliers and other paraphernalia  as they were clearly trying to teach the kinetic who was boss. I remember feeling at that time, WOW so this is what the Wright brothers must have felt like then.

So at any rate this then dear reader was the sight in front of me when I entered college. It was good and it was fine and I was just shooting the breeze when S.J took a  break from his back breaking labour to discuss strategy regarding the final assault that he and A.S were planning to make sure the forces of righteousness would prevail. There were a number of technical details ( who was responsible for arranging the soda and ice later etc ) that I wont trouble you with but in about 7 min ,we had a working plan in place. Events moved briskly after this , and shortly after a particularly tricky washer bolt combination had been nullified by a fine backhanded top spin screwdriver-in-the-wrench-for-leverage move the paneling succumbed and…. Houston we have access to the electrical subsystem.

Now that the specialized knowledge was about to be employed everyone stepped back, tension was running high as A.S carefully started caressing the wires , red, blue or black was the question in everyone’s mind. I meanwhile was idly twisting the handlebars of the kinetic and noticed something very, very interesting viz. it was locked. I was super impressed, not only did these guys know how to hotwire the system but they were going to break the lock without any damage to the vehicle ( the no-damage clause was something Priyanka was very clear about )

SO I walked over to S.J and congratulated him on how he had figured out on breaking the steering lock while preserving the spirit of the no damage clause. “What do you mean break the lock ?” he said. Well I responded if you don't break the lock and just hotwire the damn thing all she can do is drive around in  circles no?

“OH hmm yes quite so circles hmm ha-ha hmm” he said. And then he gave me a look. To the day I die I will not forget that look.  It turns out no one had though of this little detail. I could not help it,  this was in  fact when ROTFLMAO became real for me. Ah Friend of my youth  companion through thick and thin , brother in arms through 12 semesters of end terms , person with whom I have driven a Luna together, I feel for you . I weep bitter tears now when I think of how all your hopes were dashed and the pain you must have suffered. Then again WTF were you thinking not thinking it through huh?. Meanwhile A.S had finally made a decision re which wire to attack first but alas the news had to broken to him too. Oh yes got to see the look again. More ROTFLAMO, this time: keeping time to the beat of “We Will We Will Rock you”

Priyanka came over to enquire( and point out that on the third roll on the floor I had missed a beat ) and I took this opportunity to congratulate her on now having the ability to drive around in circles. Lets just say there was a look but it was slightly different  from S.J and A.S’s looks .  At this point some more of our friends were included in this little episode from Amar Chitra Katha  and don’t you know it half of them went about giving looks and the other half were taking ROTFLMAO to new levels er depths er spins well something.

Well that was it , I don't quite remember how it all got sorted out eventually everyone concluded that the entertainment section was over for the evening and went home and what of me dear reader why I had a date with the Old Monk of course

 

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT FROM THIS PARABLE : Not much

 

Some time the future ye Seconde Tale : Probabilistic methods theory and practice as applied to Mrs. Tokekars DCM Paper aka A.S wins we all loose

Hodge Podge and the search for mathematical competence

Sir William ( middle name unknown—to me  ) Hodge was born in 1903 Edinburgh Scotland. At the age of 33 he was appointed to a chair at Cambridge, which he held till 1970. He was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1938 and awarded the society’s prestigious Royal Medal in 1957. In 1959 , a gracious sovereign bestowed upon him a knighthood, but I mean at that point they were practically giving them away.

As a young boy nothing much is known about Hodge , although there are strong rumours that he conceived of the bread sandwich ( the bread goes in the middle and on the outsides you see ) but care must be taken in accepting this rumour as it was started by me. Here. ( my deepest felicitations dear reader you are now watching history being made, well remade anyway and who is to say the second time wont be better ) . Indeed there are great many similarities between Hodge and me and whilst an exhaustive comparative analysis is left as a exercise to the reader I would like to point these salient points;

Hodge and I, both on our own figured out:

1. Breathing
2. Running
3. Long Division

But here alas significant difference arise; whilst I turned my gift at long division into a fine understanding of sophisticated  concepts such as percentages , surds , and mental multiplication by 2 , William Hodge would go on to spend much of his life pretty much proving nothing and leaving behind at best a conjecture. ( for some reason this has been called the Hodge conjecture , what are the odds huh ).  There is also some substantiated chatter about how he “was one of the leading figures in developing the relationship between  geometry,analysis and topology” but its not that useful when trying to order a latte , and having a crazy dog running around your legs , while you try and figure out how many calories the second shot of vanilla syrup really has( long division to the rescue again) .

At any rate without further ado I present one version of the Hodge conjecture:

Every Harmonic differential form ( of a certain type ) on a non singular projective algebraic variety is a rational combination of co homology classes of algebraic cycles.

OK then, clear as mud I take it ( if you actually understood this please mail me immediately, I have much to say to you ). When faced with understanding new concepts  the mind often reverts to what it knows , as a tool to understand the new ( witness Rudy Giuliani’s use of 9\11 as a  way to discuss , climate change ). So of course on encountering the Hodge conjecture , I at once used long division , albeit in an somewhat ah unorthodox way, I decided to eliminate\divide all the long words I did not understand leaving me with….

Every form of a certain type is a rational combination of cycles.

Notice  how much easier this is and (wait for it )even better this is no longer a conjecture it  is in fact obviously and plainly false ( see Gisele Caroline Nonnenmacher Bündchen’s   form and

let me know if you are thinking about cycles rationally or otherwise ) ( this technique is called reductio ad absurdum AKA wait till I reduce your statement to something plainly absurd you stupid idiot!!!)

Jolly good what !! as the bad British writers would say. What does all this have to do with anything you might say at this point ( or even earlier in fact) Well nothing really but I am so friggin pissed that all through my life I have had incredibly I mean really incredibly bad math professors\teachers. I used to love math once, and whilst I will never get so bright that Hodge will ever make sense to me , it still pisses me of when I think of how badly those idiots taught me calculus , statistics, probability ( aka poker to some people ) and a bunch of other awesome stuff( yes awesome is in the eyes of the beholder ).

Anyway this year 2010 , I have decided to start relearning math on my own , I have some specific areas I do want to look at , long term I really want to understand Andrew Wiles work re Taniyama-Shimura . This would be Fermat's last theorem for the rest of you .I am pretty confident of getting this done by 2020. Its good to have goals in life ( other goals include winning lottery tickets ,and building 6 pack abs but I mean I only have till 2020 so…)

Stairway to Heaven

So I am at the gym today running up a sweat on the treadmill( thank you thank you , you at the back kindly stop choking on your laughter )with my personal trainer at my side, wisely nodding and saying “good job” regularly ( so regularly in fact that I am getting a little suspicious about how good I really am doing ). Anywhoo we start talking about she gets compensated, and it turns out, she gets paid per client and here’s the kicker while the club will send the odd client her way , she’s pretty much responsible for getting new clients. Rev share is roughly 50-50.

If a trainer is not generating enough revenue well then …..Quite so. Its not really that diff than any sales\commission based job , BUT it struck me that this job this per hour commission job is really on the fast track to nowhere in terms of making more money. ( please note this is not a post about money cant buy you happiness, and how job satisfaction is about .77 times as important as orgasms etc etc ). This is just a non profound realization that you can end up in a job thinking things are really really great but for whatever reason , THIS IS IT, you will never ever make any real wage increases from now on. My trainer is in a really tough spot, lets say she get super fantastic at her job like twice as good, well I sure as hell am not paying her double. Also while I have no proof of this, rumour is she sleeps bathes eats and works out on her own to make sure her trainer look is maintained. For the vapid and  irresponsible reader, this means there is an absolute upper limit on the number of clients she can scale to.

So bigger picture , are you in such a spot? Do you care. Until recently I used to basically dev and yup like it or not I was like her. Say I wrote code twice as good ( whatever that means ) well no one was going to pay me even 10% more for that . And in fact the amount of money I was making well that was it , anymore and the employer starts thinking fondly of outsourcing and hiring fresh grads from college.

I thought I had gotten around that by picking up jobs on the side contracts , outsourcing them myself , etc etc but the reality is I am again rapidly coming up against a wall in terms of revenue that I can make. Scaling will now have to involve hiring more developers and worse either finding business or hiring someone to do that , which is really like saying I am completely changing my job and again this is not a call to arms or some such crap never forget laziness is the second most powerful force in the world ( stupidity is first in case you were wondering )

I think it really helps from time to time , to do a gut check ; Can I convince someone to pay me a lot more money to roughly do what I do now albeit a lot better( I stress money here because in our current system I  really believe it is the purest estimation of perceived worth) . If the answer is no well either figure out how to do something else OR if the money does not matter then great but at least you know.

Old School !!!

Was at the pro club( for those out of town this is like one of the best gyms ever ,I think definitely the largest one in the country ) the other day listening to some tunes on my phone and ordering a coffee at the coffee shop.

Some pixie haired, barely legal, girl rings me up and then remembers what she learnt at orientation viz, be friendly and chat with the customers. “What’re you listening to”? , she manages to trill in a sing-a-long voice while smiling at the same time ( I tried this later at home and managed to scare the dogs). Um Led Zeppelin I mumble back. The girl clearly has no idea what I am talking about. This is a tense moment in her young life, faced with the absolute knowledge that hour(s) of training will not help now , she resorts to the safety play…”Oh Old School nice”, and of course I wittily retort “nope just means I went to school a long time ago”. We both laugh although once can detect a certain strain in my hahahaha. And then as I leave it strikes me , “old school” is not code for “cool” or “the way things ought to be” etc, its actually just effin code for OLD. AS IN makers of fast cars , aftershave, cologne, sexy leather jackets, cigarettes, and alcohol no longer think you are a key demo. AAARRGGGH.

And then I start thinking about other such insidious phrases that sound great but really mean “This is LIFE…. bend over”

For example “Work Life Balance”, what a charming phrase bringing to mind a well rounded life, the aggressive go-getter at work taking time to listen to a piano concert recital perhaps , or the passionate yet ethical worker who also whips up a souffle in the evening for a quaint old school ( see what I did there ) dinner with the kids. Wunderbar Wunderbar…

There is however a small catch. When a company ( specifically the recruiter or hr person or your boss ) talks about work life balance…… they are not talking about the same person !

Its genius and despicable wrapped up in the cloak of fiduciary responsibility. Added bonus it shows they care ..

Oh well the coffee was kinda nice though and if I try really hard someday I will have no work and no life …. balance is very hard

Back to Seattle

(Editors note: Some parts of this episode are made up . Some are true. And some are just mean. Artistic license has been interpreted to mean “Because I can “. See if you can spot which is which )

Sometime ago we flew from San Diego to head back to Seattle. By itself this should have been a fairly uneventful trip , nothing to write about etc, etc but clearly I did not count on the the fiendish ingenuity of the TSA, the airlines involved and of course the cabin crew

To start with , at San Diego I realized things would be a little different when we had to walk on the tarmac to the plane. At first I could not quite understand what was expected of us , I mean there we were in the wide open spaces with a couple of toy display aircraft that were clearly models to amuse the children I mean they would never actually…. ,

“Please walk this way in a single file ladies and gentleman , yes Sir those planes can indeed fly, yes Ma’am with the passengers in the plane, No Sir the pilots will also be flying with you , Sir for the final time you may not double or nothing on your life insurance”

Thus with a certain sense of adventure and trepidation we entered the plane to see this ……

Now please note this looks really good in terms of the leather so think more like refugee camp reject furniture and you will begin to get the idea

Anyhow we managed to get to LAX ( I should point for the roller coaster ride aficionados, that you aint seen nothing till one of these babies goes through what the pilot called “minor turbulence” but I am referring to as anti-peristalsis on steroids. )

LAX , entry point to the City of angels, LAX gateway to the fabled land of dreams, nightmares and porn, LAX where Hollywood celebrities and you have a remote chance of oxygen carbon-dioxide exchange, LAX where um if you are on a commuter flight from San Diego you have to walk a mile across the tarmac in a mad rush to catch a connecting flight only to be told by a helpful TSA agent that you are in the wrong terminal , at this point the agent will turn over his shoulder to share the joke with his co –worker ”really Ernesto these people want to go to terminal 4 not 2 hahahahah estos idiotas estúpidos”.

So armed with the knowledge that we are the wrong terminal, and that our only hope of getting to the right terminal rests on the whims of Juan the bus driver who is currently off somewhere studying “Learn English in 30 days ,45 if you are a dummy”, I did what any reasonable Indian would. I pulled out my iPhone and checked my email.

Finally the bus arriveth. The TSA guard lets us through telling us sternly to walk in a single file into the bus. Somewhere behind us we hear a man phone his friend Jack. Soon three TSA guards wrestle him to the floor and helpfully tie his head to his ankles. We thank the fates above that we did not call Jack and say hi to him, and board the bus.

Gingerly I sit down and here’s where things get interesting\ridiculous. The bus is merrily driving across the tarmac and planes are landing and taking off and taxi-ing all around us. Now I know the incredibly well-oiled machine that is the ATC at LAX ( vive la TLA ) is taking care of all this but I am still wondering if this is an appropriate moment to have an anxiety attack when I see this little gem

This is by far the funniest sign I have seen in a really, really long time. I start laughing uproariously, when a sudden cold thought strikes my heart! what if Juan has only got to chapter 3 in his book ( The use of ‘a’ , ‘an’ and ‘the’ , controversies and nuances thereof ) . My blood turns to ice and my vision reaches a Zen-satori level of clarity. My world turns into a Kill Bill movie ( this time with a nekkid Uma Thurman) and in glorious Eastman Kodak colour I watch with a certain anticipation as the bus rushes towards the landing aircraft. In a split second I evaluate the possibility of flying through the window of the bus and cart-wheeling into the cockpit of the aircraft where I will distract the pilot with the story of “nihilism as a rap song” thus giving the other passengers in the bus the desperate few seconds they need to bash Juan on the head and stop the bus.

I review the plan, it seems flawless, but as bitter experience with longhorn( vista to the hoi polloi) has shown , one cannot plan for everything (or in the case of Vista sometimes one cannot plan for anything ). I take my first deep breath prior to the commencement of my strategy but a slight misstep causes the breath to go wrong and I find myself writhing on the floor battling a cough—aah despair, death, doom, and destruction.

JOY JOY Juan got to chapter 5 after all ( “what to wear when driving a bus that might be required to stop for aircraft” )

So he stops !!!!!

<Editors note : Juan was terribly embarrassed when passengers pointed out that in fact he has dressed most inappropriately for above occurrence )

Anyway back to reality, the bus driver idiot drops us of somewhere in the middle of what looks like Mordor in gray.

As as aside if you have not read and obsessed over “The Lord of the rings” this would be:

1. a good time to start OR
2. Kill yourself

After much huffing and puffing we find an artfully concealed flight of stairs and ascend upwards. We enter a terminal and our co-passengers erupt into joyous celebration. This must be what the D-day parade looked like. Hark!! in the distance I see a fair maiden sink to her knees to kiss the hallowed grounds of Terminal 3 but wait!! nope only a lost contact lens. Whilst we feel blessed at this near spiritual experience we are also reminded of course that Surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat( what is that you say , GODS ABOVE what are they teaching you plebeians these days ( translation:In the midst of the fountain of delight there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers) )<Editors Note: With ref to the delightful bit of Latin prose ( Surgit ….), due to certain complicated legal issues we are not able to comment on the cries of “stole it from Wodehouse did you” . We deeply regret the inconvenience >

A TSA guard , casually just sayin, asks us which airline are we on. Alaska we reply in one voice, reassured in the knowledge that we know the answer. Ah ha ,says the women who in certain angles undoubtedly resembles Helen of Troy although the effect is most believable in the dark , when you are asleep, in that case folks you will need to be at Terminal 4 , this of course is terminal 3. Repeat co-worker skit( get this Shevonne these folks are flying a Alaska and are in terminal 3 hahahaha stupid idiots )

NEXT TIME : In which we learn that it is possible to miss a flight , the long trip to terminal 4 ( scenic route ) and strange story of the passenger that would not snore and yet be really , really annoying