31 August 2009

# for number; and an Angel.


murphys_law_posterHow many times have you done something with your best BESTESTEST of intentions and it went totally off the mark because you failed to account for the strength of Murphy? Well, not many times for me, but now yes. 

The problem is that when it happens, it backfires/bounces back with such a force that it shatters you top-to-bottom, completely as if you will never be able to recover from it. It causes physical pain to your heart! :(

Well, it doesn’t come without some positive sides. For starters, you at least know that you TRIED and I think that matters. Another thing is, you get another instance of “Been there, done that”.

So, the above happened to me and I am just simply shattered/devastated.  As they say, the play has to go on.

……………………………..EOD. 

I had to be at the railway station (still am) in the morning. I am an extreme optimistic person who trusts every single soul, who believes in the good of people. Not many people have disappointed me. People are by default good.

But there are some people who have made me feel that I underestimated them.

So was the lady at the counter. She was simply an angel. Perhaps because I am in a bad shape, I perceived her to be extra good? I don’t think so. She was indeed a very sweet nice amazing person. There are many such people.

Fun: Kamalhasan is teaching someone “Hindi Kavitha” - “Jawani… diwani… … blah blah blah Satyam Shivam Sundaram” in my iPod. (What better thing can I look for in this tight corner of life  ;) ).

Signing off, Sands.

PS: Have you noticed that it is not so easy to type with cold fingers?

29 August 2009

(First) Names with “L” and “Y”


Tell me, how many names do have the alphabet “L” in? Quite some I would say. But if one has about 7 friends here in Germany, (all girls, with whom he could openly speak more or less anything) and if 6 of them have “L” in their names, I would consider that a bit of coincidence.

And he recently met a long lost friend, refreshed the friendship – and surprise, she has two Ls in her name! :)

Now, the alphabet “Y” should be even rare. But 3 of the 7 girls have it in their names. Am I analysing too much? May be a sleep could do me good. :)

Signing off, Sands.

PS: The “he” in the story is yours truly himself.

PPS: Only two male friends; none have any “ell”. ;)

21 August 2009

I : Not funny! :(


I and My SixpackWhy am I not able to write any humorous posts in English? I think, my Malayalam posts are funny enough, with a pinch of good humour. I am not a funny person as such, but I am not very boring either. I might blabber/repeat, but not very boring.

Perhaps I should try to write funny posts here. I might want to start with translating “I and my sixpack” (I still read and enjoy the humorist in me) or “Physics, dog and me” or “Gult-girls and gold-game”  from my other blog. Let me think seriously… (err.. funnily).

If I don’t try, who knows what a great loss it would be for English literature! ;)

Signing off, Sands.

PS: Beware!! Fun coming soon … in the pipeline.

18 August 2009

Python and Parenting


I spoke with her some time ago… after a long time… She told me about her plan to leave her child with her/his parents and go back to UK. A 5 month old child.. poor thing to be away from own parents, I’d say.

Two days ago I had a conversation with Anair – about things varying from nano-technology to gossiping. One topic we talked about was parenting. People are not unaware of the importance of it, but they just don’t seem to put things into practice. children

Well, no one is perfect; no one can plan everything; parenting is no thing to experiment. But two normal decent intelligent parents would/should be able to help each other, in bringing up the child(ren) well. Help each other when the other one takes wrong measures etc.

Of course, I don’t want to be a parenting freak; I would not be. But I think it is very important to think about it. Remember? - “Failing to plan X is planning to fail X”.

I have a friend who had to stay away from his parents all through his childhood and unfortunately but predictably, it didn’t turn out really well.

At the same time I have a friend who had a stay-home dad and he has turned out to be mostly fine. :) [Cannot lie any further mate ;) ]

I had mentioned here a long time (18 months) ago about my stay-home-dad interests. Of course, if I participate in bringing a life to this world, wouldn’t I want to be participating in helping it grow just fine?   EVW_146C

Bed time stories (i have a huge collection of them in my mind); not being able to answer those “why” questions (look at this BBC article); teaching small little things (my old post) : would childhood (courtesy: RG) and parenthood be complete without these?

I find this as a matter of responsibility even though it might be laughed at as “wuss”-ness.

So where does python fit in here? It is funny though. A couple of weeks ago, I bought at Python programming book for kids. I didn’t read all of it. I did take some material from it and taught my students – 6th semester computer science students learning from kids’ programming book? :) 

It was not just for kids, any newbie could learn from it, although recommended for 8-14 year olds. I had wanted to write a review for it, then was too lazy.

In a world where people even think about including python in parenting (a bit too much right?), it is sad to see that parents would leave children away. Of course, I know that they are not doing it very happily.

Their circumstances are not the best. Still I feel sad…. feel sad for the small little girl. And that little girl happens to be my niece.

Signing off, Sands.

PS: I have confusions about the timing of the post.  Never mind.

PPS: I should perhaps take a small break from blogging? 10 days?

14 August 2009

Next Thursday Next


Today’s post might look/sound a bit artificial… because of some not so great mood of mine, but my blogging is regular. Isn’t it? Long-story-short-version is that I was an asshole for some few days and it peaked and backfired. Now I learned (am learning) a lesson and will be less of an asshole in future.  

As a child, I had been lucky enough to have heard a few stories told by my dad (rare event). If he were a writer, he would have turned out to be a fantasy/fiction fellow. Because, in his stories, there would be cats hailing taxies driven by rabbits and stuff like that. He being inherently a funny person, his on-the-fly-made stories used to be funny too.

{1AE1D2DD-70B6-461D-95F1-910178FA3815}Img100The Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde should be in the same genre. Pretty amazing stuff. I read two books of the series and really liked them. The rest are in the pipeline. But now in a small break (sigh).

The protagonist is a lady – which in itself is nice. The narration is in first person – again, I mostly like that (remember “To Kill a Mocking Bird”?). And the story is unbelievable, yet amazing. Imaginable, yet incredibly rare kind of imagination.

{0C297488-3AF2-41FF-8DC3-4DDFBC820AC7}Img100The heroine goes into the world inside books and interacts with the characters in there. The characters come out to the real world and interact with people here. There is time travel, singularities and all such fantastic stuff.

And the topping – it IS funny. But it assumes the reader to be aware of lot of stuff. I cannot recollect the details now, but I remember reading a small conversation from the book and then laughing out loud. Then I realised that no one would even understand the joke if he/she hasn’t read some other book.

So you see? you need to have some general-literary-knowledge to thoroughly enjoy it. (Not that it is non-enjoyable otherwise). And I don’t claim that I have loads of it. I might have missed out some nice stuff owing to my ignorance. :(

I would recommend it to the ones who’d like to read some good books.

BTW, After writing here about reading/improving German, I didn’t really put efforts in that direction. Now, I am heading to the city to buy one book – “Das Parfum” – suggested by a couple of expatriates in Munich.

Signing off, Sands.

Additional:

A small thing which I forgot about the books is that, the author wrote his first book at the age of 40. So… I still can hope. :) (I remember about an author who had his first novel at the age of 54. Coincidence – even that was told by my dad!)

6 August 2009

Geek Partner

This is just an impulsive post. But definitely about some idea which I’ve been pampering for quite some time. And about being too frequent here: this happens to be MY blog and I decide things around here.

Let me claim that I would be counted as a geek. Or at least I am on the geeky side of the spectrum. A geek of CS/Math… and among those, I think I even have a good enough range of general reading as well.

I have received emails/links which say why a geek would be a good partner for you . That was just fun stuff… OTOH, they were not completely senseless.

I have always put thoughts into being a great partner myself. I kind of realise now that, yes, geeks definitely would make very good partners (of course they aren’t perfect).

Well, why would geeks make better partners? The simplest reason is that we think about finest details – closely. And we work to get those finest details finereligiously.

The major drawbacks are:

  1. We happen to mess it up (royally) when it comes to expressing/reading feelings, emotions and stuff like that. We are not used to doing so.
  2. We offer advice – tons of it. And guess what? We HATE being advised.

I don’t deny that these problems are of gravity. But hey, that’s mainly all about it and how it is. The rest is fine I guess – we usually tend to be understanding, caring. (perhaps too much of caring *evilgrin*)

Geeks ARE well informed about stuff. And anytime we mess up (human you know?), we try to improve on it. We are the ones who love to be efficient and better, the ones who are ready to put efforts to get things working (well).

A partnership is no different. A lot of hard work has to go there if things are to work fine.

You could say that it is like writing a device driver (or an OS itself) – you don’t get it working fine first. There are general principles – but you need to fine tune it if you are to achieve good results. There is going to be enough bugs in your plate, you work on it and debug them. Yes, we do it.

learning curveBeing the guys who learn Vi and Emacs (sometimes, just for the heck of it), No one would ever doubt our love to have things simple and smooth and efficient; No one would ever doubt our patience and tenacity. If you ever do, look at the learning curves of these things.

Trust me on this: the thoughts and efforts being put to each and every thing, every single person should hunt for a geek – as his/her SO.

It is funny the way and the time I reached this topic. Today, I witnessed (just now and it triggered the post) a big geek discussion about (geek) partnerships.

And the timing: Especially, presently, being in love, I have been putting thoughts to “how not to be a messy lover”. I did get loads of food for thought.

Life IS good.. (GREAT)… isn’t it?

Signing off, Sands.

UPDATE: After someone’s query, opening up the post for comments. I don’t know what I’d have to hear/read … after writing stuff like Vi/Emacs is simple! :) (Not to mention the other stuff)

5 August 2009

Expensive, Hard and Fun.

Three hundred Indian Rupees – that’s what I spent for getting the Indian version of drivers’ licence. (Well, I had it cheap, some others would have spent more)

I have spent about 700 Euros till date – for the same, but the German version of it. I should account for another 700 Euros – at least. bangalore

If you do that math, you can see that it is already more than 100 times expensive. Wow!

Now, is it worth that much of money? I guess yes. Back home, we don’t have any rules per se. Many a time, it IS the will-power of the drivers which decides – who gets the road first. Keep away from accidents, do whatever you want to do – this is all what we do. If others want to be safe, let them keep away from me. yetanother (Can you not see it in the first picture?)

The rule of ‘drive on the left of the road’ has changed to ‘drive on what  is left on the road’. (courtesy: someone) [Look at the picture on the left: Is there any space ‘left’ on the road?]

I would call it “aggressive driving”. I was glad to be one of those who always managed to be the first one to get the road. I had never gone against the rules which existed there. I have almost always obeyed the signals, one-way-traffic, etc. I was just FAST and RASH.

[one might want to read : Rude Drivers Reduce Traffic Jams ]confused

In Germany: One has to follow the rules – very strictly. And there are gazillions of them (sample on the right side). Each and every single one of them are quite logical and very sensible. The problems I face are mainly:

  • My teacher is a typical Bavarian person with strong accent.  (hard to understand him)
  • I have driven a LOT in India and the whole system is in the wrong side. (loads to unlearn)
  • I have chosen to do everything in German - (despite of the possibility to do it in English)
  • I am in a city where traffic is definitely more than the average – even for German standards

:) Stau?? :)It is a big Paradigm Shift – as far as I see. A total change in philosophy of driving. I have to unlearn a lot of stuff. And German words do bamboozle me at times.  (The final picture shows the result of following the traffic rules)

Altogether – loads of FUN. :) Challenge is fun. Isn’t it?

One should go and live abroad (at least for sometime) – far from his own culture and get into the foreign culture. Then he would discover himself better. He might have frictions with the people, there would be things he would find stupid in them, and they in him. But at the end of day, it will pay off.

People from his culture may not like him for the change. But he himself would be content about himself, would be able to accept different things, would be open to things; would definitely mess things up – but, much less than others. :)

Signing off, Sands.

PS: Don’t you think, given the amount of chaos on Indian roads, we have very few accidents?

PPS: I forgot the links from I copied the pictures! Not able to link to them. Oops!