Happy Anniversary

I was quite surprised to see a mail from an old friend of mine, she was a my neighbor in Kuwait and lives in Egypt. It suddenly spun my memory back to the old times in Kuwait, yup the good old days. It also kind of reminded me of the fact that we haven't seen each other for over an year and also the fact that I had wasted one more year of my life, doing practically nothing. I see no meaning in my actions anymore, things aren't making any sense, I can no longer see the consequences of my actions. I do what I do that is all I know.

Life has been quite a mess since I left home about 1 year back on 18th September 2006 to join a company in the god forsaken IT industry. And I have done a lot of things in that period, well let me see if I can summarize them all into one post.

1. Finally got to see Chennai in full detail, the climate I love it here, I hate the rainy days, too much water logging.
   
   
2. Lived in PG, met some wonderful people there, Enjoyed life in a room shared by 3 people and vegetarian food in the evening.
   
   
3. Got one of the worst chest infection in my life and with nobody to care, I kind of handled myself through out the situation, of course parental support was there through phone. I remember the days I slept with my head on the table since I couldn't rest properly on my bed. I gotta mention Stryker who also helped me out in an extreme condition once by taking me to the doctor (Who still treats me now.)
   
   
4. Saw one of the worst kind of training in "The Academy" of Cognizant, it was a totalitarian government there. I will torture those assholes to death if I ever get them again in my hand.
   
   
5. Brought a Pair of Adidas Shoes with my 1st Salary and then brought myself a Playstation Portable with my 4th Salary, that was one of my biggest investments yet.
   
   
6. Met a person called J.K, who has become a good friend of mine and one of my room mates.
   
   
7. Learned to Drink Alcohol, Smoke Cigarettes and Grass (All thanks to J.K and Stryker.) As a look ahead for the next year may be I gotta try out drugs.
   
   
8. Went once to Home in this period of 1 year...Have I become detached from my family?
   
   
9. Got trained in .Net Technology and put into a .Net "Development" Project.
   
   
10. Moved out of PG and then moved along with friends into a rental house.
    
    
11. Got disgracefully thrown out of the very project I was put in due to the fact that I tried to follow the "Test Driven Development" Philosophy. Unfortunately people thought of "Getting Things Done" and I believed in "Getting Things Done, Right". I cried for the insulting methodologies used Software Development destroying the very fundamentals of Computer Science.
    
    
12. I met this wonderful person called Divs through Stryker, whom I had known through blogs only. She is the only girl to which I have introduced my PSP to.
    
    
13. Once thrown out of the project, I revamped my Assembler and gave a new look to my website. And put them out to be seen by the public. Unfortunately no one is noticing it :-P.
    
    
14. I was put into a new project with a UNIX background. Well at least my UNIX Skills won't be wasted to bits.
    
    
15. With the things happening in my new project caused a change in my attitude towards work, there is no ethics or respect for developers in this industry of Slaves. I might start an uprising and / or get killed in the process, but so long as I am a computer scientist at heart, I will not give up this fight. I despise the people who can't appreciate the beauty of the code and works in this industry.
    
    
16. Met some great people from my current project. People who appreciate the code, people who respect the Science in Computer Science.
    
    
17. Living on the edge with this attitude risks everything in this industry for a person. I have nothing to loose, in other words they have to fear me and not the other way. I feel no guilt to insult managers and use profanity when they act ignorant and try to convince things by lying.
    
    
18. I developed a Guestbook for my website using PHP and MySQL. With may not be a big achievement, but it was a nice technology to learn.
    
    
19. I decided to remove myself out of the equation from the life of normal people so that they can lead a normal life. I hope this lessens my impact on the normal people.
    
    
20. I sit here writing this blog entry on the day I am about to leave to my home after the completion of one year in Chennai.
    

Hmm...I ask myself what I have done? I have no answers...

Chicks, Crushes & Me

Let me start off with some basic definitions for my own reference as I am not used to such terminology.

Chick - /'chik / - noun - informal terms for a (young) good looking woman quite often confused with the meaning "young bird especially of domestic fowl"

Crush - /'kr&sh / - noun - an intense but usually short-lived infatuation (usually with a chick) quite often confused with a "humiliating fragging" technique used in Unreal Tournament, as in Crushed To Death

Flirt - / flûrt / - verb - the art of talking to a chick without being in a crush (Note: may or may not lead to a crush)

Bird Watching - / bûrd wŏch-ing / - verb - A term usually confused with "Ornithology", but is more of spotting Chicks (as in above context)

Girl Friend - / gûrl frěnd / - noun - A girlfriend is a female partner in a non-marital romantic relationship, usually considered more than an ordinary friend, especially in a romantic sense but in reality is more of a liability and a money sucking machine, that is very difficult to please and to keep up with.

Now let me come back to the main title, back in the academy a few weeks back we has a session on life skills, which is basically a 2 day session on "Life" Skills its supposed to be fun. I wasnt interested in such events, but then I am being paid 460 - 470 Rupees per day for everyday in office, so not wanting to take a pay cut I went for the event.

Due to a play of luck the guy who came to take the 2 day session was not the "regular" conventional guy whom you would be expecting to take such a session and his methods were pretty renegaded and didn't want to stick to old conventional boring stuff like Powerpoint Presentations or long lectures, he was pretty much practical in his approach when it came to explaining concepts, with each concept being explained through examples rather than theoretical useless lectures like majority of the "Hi Touch 'Quality Time'" Sessions that we had at the beginning of the training.

Anyway it was half way through this session that we had a "Truth or Dare" game, obviously I got my chance no sooner the game started, and since I am not that good that doing "Dares" and I chose to tell the "Truth" and our trainer was ready with a question,

Trainer: Back in 11th standard who was the girl you liked, your crush ?

Me (in the head): Hmm...Tough one what do I say ? I never had any crush back then...

Me: I cant remember of anyone back then

Trainer: O.K no problems, lets go back to your school, college any one there, any crush in your life ?

Me: Hmm...Cant remember anyone !!!

Trainer: You gotta be kidding man!!! Thats impossible, its not possible for it to be like that, come on man, some teacher or your neighbours someone !!!

Me (still thinking hard, I mean real hard, then Pottu distracted me and reminded me of my previous mention of a crush...then I blurted out): Its my Pentuim 3 computer back home, but my first love was my 486 HP Vectra PC.

Trainer (Stunned): What ?!!!

Me: My PC, thats my love, I love my computer.

Trainer (about to go "Goo Goo Gaa Gaa"): How can you love a computer ? Its impossible every person has a crush, are you sure you dint miss out anyone, I mean there must have been some one you missed out.

Me: No I dont think so, My computer is the only thing that I loved dearly.

Trainer (with eyes about to pop out): I am going to get that person out of you, think hard there must be someone.

And that was the end of that session, but then it got me thinking, was there any crush that I missed out. And the recurring dreams of that girl, I thought I must have missed out a crush in my school / college life. I was thinking did I make a mistake somewhere in my life's timeline.

But it was not until I got into the projects I actually began to get into some more wider perspective of things. Well to be frank it was not because of the greater number of women that I began seeing every day, rather the influence of my colleague. This is where things were getting to be interesting, it started off with the fact that he had a girl friend and yes the relationship was a pretty strong one too.

It makes one wonder what is the necessity of "girl friend" in one's life. If we take the part of procreation away from the equation, I personally do not see a lot of necessity for this, of course a lot of you reading this might be protesting against this view. It seems that the art of bird watching chicks is in human blood and the thing is that this is pretty much independent from the fact that whether you have a girl friend or not.

For a moment this seemed to be very unfair since at a glance it looks like you are trying to keep your piece of cake as well as you are gonna eat it. But then I translated it to terms that I understand. Look at it this way, my favorite game is Metal Gear Solid, it runs on Playstation (PSone), also we got some mind blowing games like Gears of War running on XBox 360 which has a lot of eye candy and can grasp your attention. But any given day if there was a choice of Gears of War and Metal Gear Solid, my choice would be Metal Gear Solid no doubt, there are people who would go the other way also, but mine will always be Metal Gear Solid. I guess that is the main difference between Chicks and Girl Friends.

A chick is like Gears of War might be having a lot to show off with new features and eye candy but your girl friend is like Metal Gear Solid, nothing else can give you the satisfaction of playing with it and you never get tired of it either. But there is one major point to note in this analogy, Video Games do not talk back!!! This is exactly where the Quantity of Bird watching and flirting with chicks matters. It is all a game of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Dr Jekyll is the part of you that contains your girl friend, the one you expose to her, the good one. We have the belief that a girl always needs the Dr Jekyll, I am not too sure about it, well frankly speaking I have no experience, so then you might be asking yourself why am I reading this entry by a guy who has to experience in this stuff at all. Well I say this, "You don't need to burn your hand to know fire is hot or Do you?" I leave the rest to the public to decide. From what I have seen we all try to be Dr. Jekyll and we all try so hard to do that, there are exceptions though, I am not saying that all relationships are like that but 90% are, where we all try to hide other side from the girl you love.

Now let me introduce you to Mr. Hide, now this guy is evil personified, the one that you make to stay away from your girl, the absolute bird watcher, the flirt, the dunk and the dope. Most of us try to hide this, but no one can hide it 100%, every girl knows that there is a Mr. Hide in all their relationships. I still wonder why people try to hide this and they do try real hard to do so too.

For a successful relationship the technique like in the correct balance of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, of course to what percent is still something that I don't know, I gotta find that out someday. But my belief is that both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide should be know to the girl and not one. At least that is what I would have done, because I feel that by hiding Mr. Hyde you got nothing to gain, someday Mr. Hide is going to over take Dr. Jekyll for that moment of time and you are gonna have lot of explaining to do.

Now let us bring me into the picture, I never had any big crushes or relationships in my life and never thought about it until this particular event took place during the training. Of course by not having any crushes or relationships, people mistake this as me not at all looking at girls. This is not true, I am not a saint, I am still a human being, that being said I don't bird watch them in the traditional sense of the term. Having thought about the fact that I never felt any crush doesn't mean that there was no crush on me, of course any one reading this if they feel had a crush on me please feel free to leave a comment, I like to keep a count of things :-D

But jokes apart , I am not that good at human relationships. For one it is pretty hard for me to accept new people into my life. It is not like I haven't tried it and I have failed miserably at it, yet I don't regret it though. I don't know if I am Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hide, however only one is existent for me I don't know who though. Many of my friends find it hard to be without company of friends, and they also find it easier to be a part of a group. It is the reverse for me, I find it easy to loose company and stay by myself. Ahh...the feel of loneliness I am so happy when I am lonely, I don't know why? And to add to this I find it very disturbing to take part in group activities, especially when I am not with my friends, the 2 days in the academy was real hard to pass by. But with friends like Duttan, Frantic, Jake, Shocky, Stryker...I am in a more comfortable situation. But even if one new individual is there in the group I feel uncomfortable once again.

May be because it was the way I was brought up, I spent most my time growing up with a 486 HP Vectra PC, when I should have been hanging out with my friends in a mall or going out to movies. Sometimes I regret that I never had done such things with my friends back when I was staying in Kuwait. May be I should try experimenting or may be I should try nothing...

A Game of Dice - Part II

Lazy Lazy me...Well a bit too lazy I must say, long time no post. Well after about 24hrs of no sleep I lost my sleep and thought I will complete this much awaited sequel (actually only awaited by me) on the Game of dice.

In the last post I mentioned something called the "Die Roll" some of my friends had a doubt regarding as to what exactly is Die Rolling all about, Die Rolling is nothing but an action that initiates a set of events, that eventually should lead to you goal in an ideal case.

Let us take the example of a simple Snakes and Ladders Game, here literally a Die Roll starts off your quest to reach from 1st square to last square and hence reach. Let me take another example say a game of Cards, the die roll here can be considered the act of shuffling the cards and then dealing them

In a more real life example consider the event of going to movies in a theater, the action that sets off the event might start from booking the tickets. But this is not the sole action that drives the whole event, but is one of the many actions that trigger the whole event. Let me list them out

1. Action - Booking the Tickets
   Event - Ends when the Ticket finally comes to your hand.
   
2. Action - Departure from Current Location
   Event - The events that occurs in between your source and destination (the theater)
   
3. Action - Validating the Ticket for Theater Entry
   Event - Getting to Watching the movie from Start to Finish

Of course I do not claim the above event to completely defined as there may be other sub actions and events, but the point was to make you understand on Die Rolls. I hope yo get it.

In my previous post I was just giving you the theory, with more practical examples may be you guys will understand the Game of Biased Dice...

• The Quiz
  
  It was around the time I lost getting into HP and this were going against me. I had lost almost all the technical quizzes that I participated in. Lost my quizzing partner. Almost become a lone wanderer. I was literally thrown out of a coding competition because I didnt have a partner, yet there no rule saying the minimum team size was 2 and to put salt on my wounds the 2nd round was to debug a 2 pass relocating SIC assembler. I was pulling my hair out (you must be wondering why??? check this out)
  
  Nearly 4 to 5 Quiz competitions in a row was lost, I didnt even make it through the written and then one fine Saturday my friend calls me to go to technopark for some Quiz competition I thought why waste time at home and said "OK", to my surprise I was the odd one out both my friends had quizzing partners, this wasn't the 1st time this happened to me, so I said I will take it on myself and ensured with the authorities that I wont be thrown out and got into a seat. Then this well dressed gentleman comes to me and asks me if I am alone I said yes and he joins me, most of the quiz was G.K and I am not that good at it and but my technical knowledge was good enough, combined we answered enough questions to make it to the on stage rounds.
  
  This is where things went out of control, one my friend was with a professional quizzer so they were leading the scorboard, but to my surprise my partner was good with current affairs and entertainment industry. While I was doing my bit on the technical, scientific and historical areas. There were some unfair decisions against me like for the question.
  
  Who is the inventor of WinZip?
  
  I answered Nico Mark, but the quiz master said it was Phil Katz, we had an argument over it was PKZip and not WinZip not a single person supported us. Sad but true...
  
  But this was the 1st time I realized that if I played with the knowledge of where to bet if I rolled a weighted Die I can take advantage of situations. I am still exploring the various things around here.
  
  
• The Magazine Incident
  
  This happened after the quiz, I got a one year free subscription to PC Quest.
  
  The simple action of Subscription i.e. Posting the letter with my delivery address caused great pain.
  
  Even though my friend and I posted for the same subscription, he used to get regular deliveries at his door step. I had to send 3 emails to the subscription manager to get my copy delivered by the end of month.
  
  This is an excellent example of how Die Rolls on the same event by different persons can have drastically different outcomes.
  
  
• M-CET UT Tourney
  
  Mohandas College of Engineering and Technology, A college where I have a lot of bad memories and 1 good memory.
  
  M-CET used to conduct a UT Tourney every year and my friends (Shocky, Stryker and Duttan) and Myself used to participate for the glory of UT Championship.
  
  The 1st one was during my 1st year in Engineering College. It was Stryker, Duttan and Myself in the Tourney. I won the prelims and was placed 2nd in the 2nd round. Meanwhile Duttan also got himself placed in a parallel ladder, unfortunately he got kicked out in the 1st round it self, it was sad. In the finals we had 6 opponents and the local game hero a guy named Rubin called the game to be run at 75% actual game speed this was disadvantageous to both of us and it was a not a standard procedure as well. But we played along as we had no choice. I was leading the score board until the last 3 minutes , where I lost my lead from +6 to -3. I was placed 3rd and I got no prize for that performance.
  
  The 2nd one happened in the 2nd year of my Engineering, this was the most horrible of all, I was kicked out in the prelims due to a faulty mouse and heavy lag. Of course I demanded justice and as usual no one cared. But Duttan made it to the top of the ladder, I still remember the match the had in Liandri where he obliterated the entire population. But as usual the local hero boy Rubin with his custom settings won the finals, but Duttan managed to cling on to the 2nd position. This also around time when I lost around 89 Consecutive matches in UT against all opponents. IT kind of drained all morale from me.
  
  The 3rd Tourney happened in my final year. My last chance to bring down Rubin. My mind was blank. I had lost so many matches by now I lost my count. After so many days of practice Why has it got to be me...? What makes things worse is my friends Duttan and Stryker also got themselves MX-510 and MX-518 Gaming Grade Optical Mouse respectively. Technically speaking I had no chance to win against them in a 1-on-1 competition. There were 4 of us who entered the competition. We made it through the prelims and in the second round after a couple of restarts in the round, Shocky and I made minced meat of our opponents, with Shocky leading the score board, I made sure Rubin never scored enough to make it to the top 2 and finally we got through the finals. The taste of long awaited victory was sweet, but soon after the dice rolled against me.
  
  The semi finals consisted of only 4 of us, Duttan vs Me and Stryker vs Shocky. I felt this was the most unfair battle. Duttan was going against me with MX-510 and I was holding a low grade optical mouse that Wheels every now and then. But by now I had learned how to turn the die roll in my favour. In a battle arena the enemy with Superior weapon always wins, and no it is not a statement against Duttan NO. He played like a warrior, one must have no feelings for an opponent in a battle field, we should be professionals in a battle field, that is exactly what he did. Of course I had to change my strategy this is where my Die rolls got into my favor. My usual game play being play fair with opponents and attack them. My game play mode changed from Aggressive to Defensive and starved my opponent. I didnt give my opponent any chance to improvise on weapons or shield and waited like a preying vulture on my opponent to make the 1st mistake. Such a game play is considered to be highly unethical, but in a battlefield with an enemy I cannot directly face I was left with no choice, I was literally holding holding up my mouse in air so that my view wont get disrupted by a mouse wheelie. I won with 3 lead, both kills made in the match by me was due to mistakes on Duttan's side. Sorry Duttan about this measure I took to defeat you.
  
  Next in line came Stryker, but I was armed with MX-510 now from Duttan, but this time to defeat Stryker I needed an arena without Sniper Rifles, he was too good with it. He offered me the choice of arena, I said "Zeto", he said lets toss. I won, "Zeto" it is. Again game play was similar to that of Duttan, starve the opponent and eventually I won the match. I brought my MX-518 with money I got from that.
  
  This is a typical example of How some people play with a Biased Die that favours their actions and while other the Die's Bias goes against them. As in Styker's and my case the Die rolls never fully favored us. But Duttan's Die rolls favored him under all conditions allowing him to reach the semi and finals of all the 3 contests. Of course I am not saying that it was dumb luck that got him through, but under similar conditions die rolls favored him.
  
  
• The Online Shopping Incident
  
  After getting a job, I decided to go for a QcK Steel Mouse pad. I did an online order from The Respawn for a good deal of Rs 750 per pad (one for me and one for Stryker). Since my Die Rolls are biased I asked Stryker to post the Cheque to them. But some people are lazy and got other important things to do in their life, so he eventually never posted the letter.
  
  This wasn't problem, the problem is that I posted the letter. The very action that initiated the event. The order never arrived in the specified time of 1 week. After a couple of weeks I sent over a letter to Respawn asking the status of my order. Three things came as a part of their response.
  
  
  1. The order was not delivered, because the person never exists in the Address (you must be thinking I gave the wrong address??? well explain the fact that I was getting my telephone bills on time) and the ordered was returned to New Delhi.
     
     
  2. My cheque for Rs 1500 bounced :-O, holy shit I got 10K+ in my account and my cheque bounced, they were going to take legal action against me...
     
     
  3. Rs 1500 was debited from my bank account, yup lost the money too...
  
  What to do was my first question? After a bit of negotiation and a copy of my bank statement they were convinced that the error was on their side and also agreed to ship it again without any extra cost. This time I gave them an address that they could not miss, my office.
  

Of course these are just glimpses of where the die rolls affect mundane tasks where others seems to just pass through. This point of view also gave my opinions a realistic point of view rather than an optimistic point of view. Most optimists would call this being pessimistic.

This brings us to a very big question what exactly is optimism? If you look at it from a broad perspective of from the biased die roll perspective, optimistic view points arise due to biased die rolls where certain outcomes are less likely than others. But for me who is on the other side of the spectrum where these less likely outcomes are more likely, I have to consider all possible outcomes before a die roll.

In simple sentence I can say that an optimist is a person who has never seen the occurance of a Tail in the toss of a coin. And is so much convinced by that fact that he / she beings to believe that there is no such a thing as a Tail to a coin. If a tail occurs in their toss , they say that is bad luck. Now if a person like me were to toss a coin and get a more likely outcome of tails and not heads and I tell this to them, they would consider me as a pessimist.

This is true with any optimist, ask them the possibility of a worst case scenario, they would say why worry it never occurs so there is nothing to worry. But for a person like me deep rooted in fundamentals of computer science worst case analysis forms the back bone of some of fundamental fields like Algorithms.

Cribbing is another thing that accompanies these optimists and they do it pretty well especially when the die rolls against them, but they still wont accept the fact that the die has rolled against them. I still consider myself as a realist considering both sides of coin before going into a decision making scenario.

This kind of brings a conclusion of my topic, A game of Dice.