If everyone in this world has a special skill then mine should be an unerring ability to screw up. I've managed to make mistakes which are impossible to fix and impossible to duplicate. Truthfully I don't know how I do it, but it does. Something like : You can't make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious. Let me give you an example.

When you enter 'DDDD' into my old ericsson phone's addressbook it 
completely freezes. The really strange part is that to press 'D' 
it takes 4 keystrokes, it's not the easiest or the simplest to 
type. But somehow I managed to screw up there. 

Literally anything I touch fails , misbehaves or breaks. I used to be the nightmare for my managers when I was in Q&A. I combine a naive curiousity and a wanton destructive attitude to proactively screw up. My old webpage had an article on how engineers just love solving problems that if there are none available handy, they will go out of their way to create a few - just for kicks. I think I was very close to reality there.

The only good part is that these days I know it before I screw up. I might have a tinge of prescience or it might just be my allergy acting up. After all the good thing about being a pessimist is that you are never disappointed.

That was supposed to be the PREVIEW button .. aah !

posted at: 17:11 | path: /slashdot | permalink | Tags: public

Another birthday, Another year - and Time flys, doesn't it. I am now chronologically 23 , but I am still that sixteen year old short, weak kneed boy inside. Having completed an extraordinarily average 23 years of my life, I feel I've done fairly well in Chapter Zero of my life.

If I could have my way, I wouldn't have any more birthdays. The sickening sensation of having wasted YET another year doing nothing important is too much to bear. And back in your head someone is saying "this might be your last year on earth, use it wisely"... all the resolutions I haven't kept and the ones I've kept come back to haunt my sense of person.

I have no illusions of immortality, but the Eternal Now of the present has me in it's grasp.

posted at: 14:30 | path: /slashdot | permalink | Tags: public

With Revenge Of the Sith coming out soon, I was looking back at Star Wars. I saw Star Wars sometime during a weekend sometime in 1999 and I was very strongly affected by the story - and I'll tell you why in a while. The newest episodes have lost the basic something that the original had (Terminator is the only sequel I have liked as much as the original - Matrix was the biggest disappointment)

The Force : It was pure magic - nobody really explained it. That was what was so cool about the force. Midichlorians was a stupid mistake by Lucas. For me the most memorable quote about the force is this -

Luke: I don't... I don't believe it.
Yoda: That is why you fail.

The story essentially deals with the Greyness of the world - the two sides of Anniken Skywalker - The Jedi and Darth Vader. All good movies deal with a bad guy going good - but this one deals with the opposite and still manages to make it click. Memorable quote #2 -

Luke: He told me enough. He told me you killed him.
Darth Vader: No. I am your father.
Luke: No. That's not true. That's impossible.
Darth Vader: Search your feelings you know it to be true.
Luke: Nooooo. Nooooo. 

The inevitability of the Good vs Evil battle breaks down here - Paradoxes are what makes us think, everything else is in pretty much black and white. (think about an anti-slavery terrorist). The entire movie was about the struggle of Good against Evil - an inner turmoil that is fought out without light sabers or cool sound effects.

Penny Arcade was right when it put this down - Not Your Father's Trilogy. The later versions don't have the sarcasm, humor or conflict that the first one had.

posted at: 14:29 | path: /slashdot | permalink | Tags: public