Null Bit Me

This post by Ideasmith that linked to further posts by other women suddenly made me want to understand why did men want to marry virgins. Let me try to think like different males of different ages and lets see what I can come up with:

1. Damn, she’s done it before me I don’t want to marry her. I’ve lost the race. [This applies to a guy who's not done it yet and is extremely competitive]
2. Aw shucks… what if she starts comparing me to the other guys…. and I am not good enough [This applies to a guy with low self-esteem and would especially apply to a guy who's never done it]
3. What! She’s done it before. She’s got no morals. What if she does it with other men after marriage. I can’t marry her. [This applies a guy who doesn't understand the power of love]
4. If I meet one of her ex’s and he reminds me of their time together, I won’t be able to bear it. Wah! [This applies to insufferable romantics weak-hearted men some men]
5. She must have become “big” down there. I’ll never be able to fill her and satisfy her. [You need to grow up kiddo]
6. She loves to do it too much. What if she can never have enough? She’ll wear me out and still not be happy [Go out jogging every morning...]
7. She might have STD’s. Why take a risk? [The ever cautious idiot]
8. She might find me too small and make fun of me

Ok… that is all I could think of. Please don’t beat me up. I just needed a break from work and something to get me to blog… and sex is usually a good topic to get out all that rust All these came from all the discussions we had when we were in school and later.

Sometimes age is not enough to grow up.

Buy movie tickets standing in the queue… done that.

Buy movie tickets online.. done that.

Buy movie tickets on the telephone… done that.

Run to buy snacks during the interval… done that.

Order snacks for the interval online along with buying the ticket… nopes. But there is hope. Check this out. An awesome idea.
Order snacks on the telephone during the interval… nopes… perhaps never!

…no one, least of all a policeman, wants to die for the government of India.

[From Sagarika Ghose's blog on IBN Blogs]

Truth and nothing but the truth. I need to remember this at all times. The policeman never has to die for the country. The army, yes. The navy, yes. But the police, never.

Adding to Sushubh's rant about ICICI direct.com, this is what I get to see today:

It appears that Nandini's "creative writing juices" can have an adverse effect on me Some time back, Nandini had this bizarre idea to interact with her regular blog readers. Damn. Why can't I just be a passive blog reader, commenting nonsensically once in a while?

I have a theory too about this sudden excessive flow of these creative writing juices…. tax returns, as she's recently indicated. Reminds me of those days just before my exams when I would have these bizarre ideas like collating a list of movie names to play Dumb Charade with. That involved me looking at the movie page of the last few months of newspapers and noting down each movie name I could find! That would also be the time when I'd have this sudden urge to fix various non-working household appliances like the tape-recorder. Or when I'd start tracing the path of ants and destroying their homes, and in the process making holes in the walls!! No wonder when Nandini has to do her taxes… she gets this great idea to make her blog interactive

Anywayz… the way it stand now is that after I asked Nandini some questions (that she's answered), it's now my turn to answer some of her questions.

Nandini wants to know my "autistic" symptoms. Actually, I'd prefer to not be an adult at all rather than be autistic Looking back at the test questions and the definitions of "autistic", I think the following would perhaps be the most prominent symptoms:

1. love to be alone
2. not too many friends (by choice; with too more friends, item 1 gets affected)
3. love the unreal world that requires lots of imagination. (Harry Potter, Nethack)
4. very uncommon interests… gets a little difficult to form groups (So who's going to team up with me to kill all those ants?)
5. short attention span

Hmmm… maybe there are more. But I think this is enough. I might be autistic, but I wouldn't be too proud of it…

As an aside, check out Urville. Gilles Trehin, who is supposedly autistic, has been drawing an imaginary city named Urville since the last 23 years. He not only had drawn various places in Urville, but also has written about it's history, geography, cultures and economy! If I had to compare to him, I'm pretty certain I'm not autistic!

As I have said before, these guys at the helm of WordPress.com actually listen

They’ve introduced setting the primary language of WordPress.com blogs. YESSSSSSSSSS… remember, I am the guy who cried out here about not understanding non-English blogs and these blogs hampering my search for new interesting blogs from the “Latest Posts” section. Also I might have used the Feedback button for this too. So this is just superb, absolutely fantastic. I hope they soon start using the data to classify the blogs in a useful manner.

However, unfortunately the Language drop-down box isn’t working for me at this time. That is, there are no languages to choose from! I am hoping that this is a temporary glitch that they’ll correct soon.

Also, I think the Language option should perhaps been associated per author under “Authors & Users”. Just for a variety of reasons such as users writing on multiple blogs etc…. but then I won’t complain. I love what these people are doing

A heavyweight echoes my thoughts [And in case you don't read Joel and are into software, you really should].

If I had written about it, no one would have read and pondered about it. But when Joel does it, I am sure there will be thousands who would think about it.

I got lucky some months back when I started taking interviews for my team. That experience taught me a lot of things but one thing stands out the most. Because of my expertise or field of work, I tended to get quite a few resumes that usually had “Java” written on them. And this taught me:

a) I did not know any Java.
b) I did not understand Java.
c) People who knew Java and nothing else did not understand me at all! (God… this made asking them questions such a pain)
d) People who knew Java would usually not know anything else at all. They did not understand linked lists, pointers, data structures… nothing.
e) Given a problem, all Java people want to start writing Java code. They hated explaining the logic or the design behind the solution, because they could not.

Joel is against using OOP as a teaching aid too. And I agree. There is just too much C code in this world to be able to escape from it (some can, but not all). And learning OOP and languages that facilitate this kind of programming (such as C++, Java etc.) will make you very frustrated when you have to look at C code. And when you code in C, you will never be able to figure out compilation errors, because there’s a lot of things that is an error in C, but not in C++. I’ve seen people gazing at C code unable to debug or figure out compilation problems because all they’ve learnt is C++ in college!

I was among the lucky ones who was not taught C++/Java as his first programming language. My teachers stuck to C and functional programming. Not that I appreciated it then or understood it properly. And I regret it now. I’m still better off than a lot of people though.

Not everyone is paranoid about their privacy Tim Hibbard lets people track his whereabouts… and I just hope parents don’t find out about this. I’d hate to have parents spying on their kids all the time! What will happen to bunking school and going off to the movies!!

This also reminds me of the clock the Weasleys have that Molly Weaseley refers to so often.

Blogging isn’t for everyone. I know all these blog software producers etc. make it seem like it is. I’ve been trying to blog for a long long time. But I used to blog for a few days and then give up. This is the absolute first time when I’ve crossed more than 80 posts at the same place!! Two reason why I guess… one: I like WordPress for some reason. Clean interface, open source.. i don’t know exactly what, but I like it. And two: I’m anonymous and I’ve got a username/domainname that I finally like.

If by any chance you’re reading this because you saw the title of the post and were immensely happy that I was going to stop blogging,…. well that’s not it As the McDonald’s ad here in India goes like… I’m lovin’ it. But it is true that I don’t have anything useful to say. I blog just because I feel like it. And I read blogs because I enjoy reading up on other people too… different counties, different cultures, different problems and different thoughts. But it does waste spend a lot of my time And everytime someone stumbles here and reads a post, he/she might be doing the same.

This post was triggered by one of the best exit posts that i’ve read recently. It made me feel a little guilty.

I did a micro-analysis of digg once, soon after I had started using digg, where I likened it to a manual version of Google News. Dan Cameron has a post where he cites some reasons why he thinks the digg model may breakdown soon. He might be right. But his solution does not seem to be workable. What he proposes seems to be very similar to what StumbleUpon already does. And that won’t help. digg will need something else to keep being useful and help get news from all the world over to their front page.

Also, I’m not sure how much digg is helping in “ranking” news. Because I’ve stopped ranking or “digging”. I like the looks of a news (I read the news only when I see it on DiggTray) and I go have a look. And I forget to “digg”, usually because I’ve closed the tab or I’ve moved on to the actual webpage. digg really needs to do something to help me “digg”, while me reading the article. One way I can think of is to use frames where I see a digg bar on the top frame and the actual website on the lower frame. I like the news on the lower frame. I “digg” it on the top frame. This happens to be a very old way, and with newer crazy stuff like AJAX being available nowadays, maybe there will be something better. But I really think digg needs to help me “digg” in a simpler manner.

I write crap.

I post crap.

But experience has led me to believe that almost everything has a market.

And so if my crap gets “reproduced”, I’d like to be recognized for it.
So what would I do if someone “reproduced” something I wrote without linking to me? I’d be hurt and I’d post about it. I might not be able to do much. I might have the time and energy to follow it up, but I’d definetely want more people to be aware of this sort of thing.

Just read this on Kiruba’s blog. And I thought I’d help Suyog’s cause.

Workaholiks, an ad firm in Bangalore, India, used a picture from Suyog’s blog and are being a pain in the ass by refusing to recognize this fact.

Here is Suyog’s initial post about this. And here is his reply to a Workaholiks mail. It’s still not over.

Ok. Rant post ahead.

The Internet has penetrated all of the world.

Ok, maybe not. I sometime do look out of my window and see poor people crapping on the sidewalks, because they got no place to go.
But the Internet is definetely accessible to all the people who actually make decisions or are part of it. And some vellas like me who just keep tabs on these decision-making people and observe them, whilst getting obese

All decision making people except maybe the Vatican? Does the Pope use the Internet? Dunno

Anyways, no more happy smilies in a rant post

I seriously wish someone would do something about so many languages on the Internet.

I keep checking out referred links that seem gibberish to me. And I read comments that seem gibberish to me. And it wastes a lot of my time because I never know beforehand what language is a particular website in!

For example, I like to browse through the “Latest Posts” on my WordPress.com dashboard soemtimes, discovering new blogs. But about 70% of the times I reach blogs that are not written in English! Maybe that’s because I share this timezone with the Chinese and the Russians etc. and all of us tend to blog during normal waking hours? I’ve sent this as a Feedback on WordPress.com, but I’m sure they’ve been busy with other more important stuff
But whatever it is, I really wish I’d be warned by some bubble help before I click on links that it would lead me to a non-English blog i.e. a blog that is not in one of my understood languages.
That IS a cool idea, isn’t it? Now since I can’t think how to develop this feature, I’ll just link it to LazyWeb, I think

So, after I’ve denounced immedi.at, I read Chris Pirillo lauding it

I expect him to know more, but I still don’t agree to him.

I checked out Odeo today after reading that they had a new update.

Yes, that is the message that I get when I try to change my username on Odeo

Check out the screenshot below:

I love it when I can find glitches

Why? How can I continue when maintaining this blog means depleting my IQ (like I had any to start off with!!). How can I when it also means contracting a “problem solving deficit disorder”?

Damn the guy who invented blogging and email.

Oh… I didn’t mention what I was talking about, did I? How forgetful of me…

Damn… why couldn’t you be a little more intelligent and guess what I was talking about?! Now I’ll have to copy and paste you the bloody link….

Umm… link. Link …. what link are we talking about? ……

…….

Ahhhhh…. just remembered…. it was this:

10% of US net users ‘addicted, needing therapy’

Happy now?