From octal to nonal

         Tipping Point

2008------^-----2009

What I'm thinking:

• Osama versus Obama! Just sounds cool
  
• Colbert Report/The Daily Show is imba!
• Naabos techonology can one day help identify corpses!
• Life really isn't so serious
• Somebody said 2008+1!! Ya dude, so is 2000+9 and 1988+21.
• Sixth semester is a drag. Especially if you're cooped up in a tiny dark room, with 60 others who refuse to mass bunk.
• Sixth semester is a drag. Especially if you have a retarded teacher who thinks ignorant students taking seminars is the ultimate path to education. 

It ain't rocket science

A 200 foot line of people stand behind one another, chatting away. The mass of people fills the entire corridor in the building. They move slowly and people in the front disperse away occasionally carrying with them a white piece of paper with a bunch of lines and two numbers. More fellows line up from the behind and some slip in between people by claim of friendship or knowing-ship, while fellows behind curse quietly - "It's not fair!"

This isn't Tirupati, folks. It's not Black Friday either. It's the college fee line in NITK.

Why a couple of women need to write the amount of fees (a one way function with a domain of about 6) on a cheap disposable form pushing wait times on the queue to over 1.5 hrs beats my fantasies. Perhaps they want to force us to pay 135 bucks for the cheap disposable T shirt. Perhaps they want to torture us. Perhaps it's part of the stimulus package to create new jobs (Hah, Americans! Learn from that!) Perhaps it's because they're too dumb to realise we can do that ourselves. It ain't rocket science. 

Whatever it is, it's extremely annoying. What's even worse is they want to process to 3000 students this way, at a rate of 30 students per hour in 4 days time. Do the math. Impossible.

How to do media

• Talk sensationally, even if it's groundless!
• Rumor monger! Who cares about facts?
• Be a drama queen. "Oh my God, he said THAT!"
• Discount other media for rumor mongering. 
• Edit out areas of information and pick out phrases so that they really mean something else. Eg: "He screwed her dishwashers door" -> "He screwed her". Ooh, don't the  journalists just get turned on by that?
• Be pretty.

Dark Blight

When I first watched the Dark Knight, I kind of agreed that it was a good movie. Better than most of the Juno/21/most of the crap that's been coming out off late. But when Dark Knight hit #1 in IMDB, over Godfather, I couldn't believe. Surely, the movie isn't THAT good.
Ofcourse it isn't. I guess people of this time have been afflicted with stupidity syndrome. It's true. If you think about it, there has been no major technological/scientific breakthrough the last decade. Not as many as the 30s or the 60s or before. Our generation is a big bunch of dumbees.
Anyway, back to Dark Knight. What do people think that made it so amazing? The story?
Here's what pisses me off now that I go back and think about it.

How many ever chances the DK gets to kill the Joker, he doesn't. Instead he allows the joker to kill others. Wow DK. Amazing sense of justice you have. Save a life to kill others. Amazing. Best not to get your hands dirty eh?

Batman falls off the building some 20 times from 20 floors. And literally walks away. Two face, a minor pain in the butt btw, falls 2 floors and dies!! What the hell. Poor two face. And whatever happens to the Joker at the end of the story?

DKs voice...That is the biggest joke ever. It's utterly ridiculous.

Cell phone sonar? Have you lost your mind? I'm sure the story writers are a bunch of morons with no education. These are the kind of people who make hacker movies in which hackers press a button to hack a giant ultra secure military database. Fools.

Just because an actor dies doesn't mean you have to watch the movie and praise it to be best the world has ever seen. Oh wait. This reminds me of the Rajkumar situation. Oh wait. It can develop into a business strategy. Kill off an actor after the movie and be sure your movie grand success.

Okay, got to agree the Joker was good. He was way more interesting than Batman. They should have named the movie Joker. Morons.

Oh and the thing about the two boats. A big murderer actually THROWS out the switch. That's plain stupid. The Milgram Experiment(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) proves that chances are people blow each other up.

Anyway, it was a good movie. But it's plain insulting to life as we know it to call it the best movie ever.

Fags

Stupid annoying government officials who think they run the world, only they don't realise that their sphere of influence doesn't even extend to the cockroaches at his place.

Stupid annoying government officials who somehow find ways to justify the shit they do

Stupid annoying government officials who are underpaid and overpissed and therefore exert their failure in lives on us

Stupid annoying government officials who think that they have big *****

Stupid annoying government officials who actually think Yahoo! is a monopolisitic oganisation promoting cannibalism

Stupid annoying government officials who think attendance is the prime factor in indicating intelligence

The Noobs' Guide to Getting Decent(er) Autos

It's a pain to get screwed by auto drivers. I mean you never know when a mad one hits you or when the meter shows 100 when it should show 60! Here are some tips that give you a better chance at getting a sane auto driver.

• Do NOT even bother going near auto drivers who are just standing around in the 'auto stand'. Especially when the auto stand isn't fast moving. This means the fellow is a lazy a-hole and he will screw you, ask you for ridiculous amounts of money, start fights over 10 rupees and what not.
• Do NOT get into autos who have big speakers. These auto drivers need high income to support their speakers and frankly you shouldn't care unless you like listening to blasting "Allele thuntu kanna sundari" or some other recent kannada super hit song.
• Do NOT get into autos or even negotiate if the auto driver asks for extra money in broad daylight. Just say no, don't even bother negotiating. You may win now, but you will get screwed later.
• Do get into autos who are roaming the streets looking for people. These are the hard workers and will give you a fairer price.
• When naming the place, don't name some landmark close to where you want. If you do, state clearly so. Otherwise you might find yourself stranded 400 meters from where you want to be. 
• State clearly the route you want him to take. Otherwise, prepare for a city tour. Don't bother asking him about the route, he'll take whatever he wants. 
• If the guy seems friendly, and you will need some bargaining power(late nights), try to have a chat with the dude. Comment about the rash drivers or the annoying police or the muslims! Whatever will get you connected with the driver. It'll shave off 10 or 20 bucks off the double/triple/one and half. 
• If the meter is flying, either you didn't follow the above principles, or you're just plain unlucky. You can get out of the auto, or continue to get screwed. You should try the former. The general rule is more than 30% extra on the actual price is getting fucked. Most meters have about 15% extra 'mileage'. 
• And do not annoy the auto driver unless you want an ugly crazed fight in the middle of the road.

When it comes to living off nothing

NITKians have it boiled down to an art. Deferring eating yet ingesting randomly, we are alive! 

Airtel sucks

So my Airtel validity ended uneventfully. BOOM! Out of nowhere. At 2 in the morning I realize I can't send messages. And someone couldn't wake me up in the morning for work. Because calls were barred.

So I proceed with my usual journey to the shop with the Airtel Recharge(A humble Chemists store 100 metres from my place).

Me: Airtel recharge kodi. 1 year validity beku, college plan. 

Chemist dude: Ah, ondu nimisha.

My Cellphone: ERecharge not successful

Me: WTF! @!$#@!! 

After a long time trying, Airtel tells chemist dude to tell me to tell airtel to get the 565 thing ENABLED. Whatever the hell that means. 

So I do, only I am told there is no SUCH THING. As I suspected. Also I am told the 565 thing SHOULD work. 

It doesn't. 

So I call Airtel again. They tell me to call after 1 hr because askdjska!! Yes, he said actually something like "askdjska". 3 times. I pretended to understand. 

I call them up after 1 hr. The thing gets disconnected. Just like that. Your call is important...Please hold the li..beeeeeep beeeeeep beeeeeep. WTF

Next the Chemist guy calls up. They tell him to call after 9:30! That's like 3 hrs away. Chemist dude reassures me he will.

So I call up Airtel again later anyway. Airtel tells me to try 566 next! But that changes my plan. To a pathetic 50p per call, 10p per SMS! WTF! My current plan is 25p per call, free SMS!! Why do I have to change plans?? 

This sucks. They keep changing their pathetic plans hoping that people will get caught in some sadass plan paying more than they should just because they have to tell their friend they're walking down the stairs or reassure that he will be there on time or some such. It's sad. Phone companies suck. 

Update: So I went to a proper Airtel shop. After 3 days of fiddling around and little help from a good friend of mine, I got them to do a 777 recharge and it's all fine now! Phew. Morons. 

Stairway to Heaven

Superbug

Have a head ache? No problem! Just take a pill! 

Slight cold? Take the arbitrary cold tablet.

This is the birth of the super bug. It hides and breeds. Antibodies swarm around it and they are powerless. Antibiotics stream and attack it fiercely. Not a scrape on it. It floats around undeterred. Multiplies unquestioned. Destroys its host. But as far as it's concerned, it got there with help and it's just surviving. Like homo erectus  killed the lions that attacked their camp, and monkeys scratch and bite you if you try to steal their young ones.

Patient walks into a clinic with a simple incurable common cold. Doctor pushes antibiotic to convince patient he's done something. Naive patient unwittingly takes in and feels better', a.k.a. , Placebo effect. Virii get exposure to weak antibiotics and eventually develop immunity. Grows stronger. 

It's not speculation anymore. It's a fact of life. Really. Google it if you don't believe me. Eventually, we are going to have serious problems. When fevers can kill and colds incapacitate. Think about it. Some day, patients who are actually ill won't get treatment.

Getting to the top

So, I was thinking about people and how smart they can be and how each person decides his own destiny and all that sort of related gibberish. Everyone does this some time or the other.

I was thinking, hmm, everyone is born with some inner latent ability/talent. Some persons are just smart, and some are just dumb, but most are in between! This is obviously demonstrated by a normal curve! Let's call this the inner ability everybody has the Latent Factor(L). 

Also, not only does it matter that a person has a high L, it also matters how much effort they put into their lives. Let's call this the Effort Factor(E). As a sweeping generalization(a logical fallacy I agree), we'll assume that this variable also has normal distribution. 

So from these two variables, a person's Quality Product(Q), or how good a person is in general at something is given by

Q = E x L

Now, L is generally a constant, but E isn't.   An overall distribution for a population would would like this...(spare the inaccuracies, please)

But the thing is, the top percent on the L graph don't have to be top 10% in the E graph. Or just put, someone with an L of 0.5, the worldwide average, can easily have as much Q as someone with a high L(say,1), simply because of the fact that most people have a Q of around 1/2!!  Of course, now the question becomes, how hard is it to get a high E, to sufficiently bump up your Quality Product to super-average levels? Just work hard I guess! 

4 reasons why Facebook sucks

1) Every time I do ANYTHING, I'm interrupted by the page, which takes frikkin' forever to load, that tells me to send some shitty invite to all my friends.
2) Because of the above, I get about 20 invitations to totally arbitrary things from sending 'drinks' and 'gifts' and other quizzes about movies totally unheard of!
3) Again, because of the above two, the supposedly most important part of social whatevering - the messaging, done by a unique tool called The Wall in Facebook, comes at the end of a 10,000,000 pixel long page. That's roughly about 'Oh shit, I'm closing this window' long.
4) It's just like windows - allow some blasted noobs to write 'apps' for you, 'Face' a big load of annoying bugs and totally unusable interfaces.

Drawing the fine line

It's totally pathetic when we're talking about something and the result is "In such a case, do this. In the other case, do this... and so on and so forth". This is like drawing not just a fine line, but a plethora of such fine lines, making Clarity into a cobweb of confusion. I wish there was some sort of elegant formula which you could apply to every problem/situation and make them simple. To illustrate,

"How much alcohol one can drink (legal point of view)"
A solution such as "If not near mad beach, upto high level 4, else upto high level 8. If not near parents, high level 9,else upto level 2..."

This is mundane and ridiculous. It's like those math formulas, where you say f(x)=blah, at point 1, blahmore, at point 2 and so on and so forth. How lame.

In so many cases, the true answer is so complex and boring that one wouldn't even be least interested. In the mind,"Who the hell cares? Give me something simple and easy". And at a certain level, it begins to sink into one's tiny head that if the answer for something is too complicated for the actual use, then screw it! It's far better not even bother with the answer!
S0, you start wondering about a concept or an ideology of thinking that'll allow you to have simple answers for all your questions. That way, everything will start being worth the time! Wow, methinks I've found an amazing path in life. So I start thinking about it. Hmm. What the , this is too complicated. Get out! But then, this answer is worth finding...but I'm too lazy. So I'll just screw this question and make the answer "Screw every blarmed other thing and don't even bother!"

Peace

Morals or Friends?

After an inexcusable hiatus, I'm back blogging. Happy New Year!

A lot of times, one is faced with choosing whether to support a friend or screw it and choose the right moral path. And it can be a horrible fork in the road to face. But thinking about it, I came to realize that my values were only mine. But people are with everyone. Unless such a value isn't so important, I'd take the friend path. Sometimes friends and values are on the same side, no problems.

Today, I might choose the 'right path', and piss off a friend. But later tomorrow, no value is going to stand up for me. I'll have only my values...pretty lonely if you ask me.

But morality is really important. Noam Chomsky says,

... if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right
(or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not
rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards
they apply to others -- more stringent ones, in fact -- plainly cannot
be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or
of right and wrong, good and evil.

That means one who doesn't have certain standards are just not trustworthy. I'm not saying abandon all ethical values. Then even your friends won't believe you!

Now the other angle is when is it right to lie or steal? What moral level gives us such rights? That's such a situational thing with so many factors in play that a definite answer is really tough. Everyone loves the Robin Hood concept, maybe breaking a few rules is good there. Robin Hood chose friends.

If one chooses morality, they better have the integrity to stand up for them. We're not all Brutus'.