HR(Human Resources) demanded the Xion document by 17th December. My reply clearly stated that the Ancient Brotherhood would not be issuing the Xion document until the Ceremony of Xion in May and that the Ninja document should suffice till then. So, HR, in all its logic and reasoning prowess, extended the deadline for submitting the Xion document to 7th January. Must control... fist... of death...
Yes, I'm a huge fan of Dilbert
26 December 2010
18 December 2010
My pie of uncomfortable
I've accepted myself as an introvert. I am no longer ashamed to be the guy who doesn't talk so much. I can sit awkwardly alone at gatherings and be totally fine with it. But here's the problem: most people aren't comfortable with me being comfortably uncomfortable in social situations. They try to make me feel better. What they don't realize is that in their attempts to reach in and smother my core of uncomfortable, they peel away the outer crust of comfortable (which smells like freshly baked bread) and announce the ugly insides for everyone else to see and judge.
Now I seem totally ungrateful. So I'll say I don't despise these acts of magnanimity; I've done the same things myself. The thing is if someone is awkward and um... inthlahrung, you should just let him or her be comfortably awkward and most importantly, never ever EVER direct everyone's attention to said awkwardness.
Now I seem totally ungrateful. So I'll say I don't despise these acts of magnanimity; I've done the same things myself. The thing is if someone is awkward and um... inthlahrung, you should just let him or her be comfortably awkward and most importantly, never ever EVER direct everyone's attention to said awkwardness.
07 December 2010
Growing old or growing up?
This was supposed to be a comment on someone else's blog, on a post about about getting older. But it's one of those things that I'd probably want to read again in a few years. And I kind of like it when no one seems to read my posts anymore; I can write like no one's reading. It's a little against my principle of not redacting anything I've posted but that's a topic for another post. Anyway here it goes:
It's after-churchsies in a new city. I thought I was still young enough to hang with the college kids with the crazy hairdos. I wasn't. Then I assumed I belonged to the working professionals group with the tucked-in shirts. I didn't. I went home alone realizing I was growing older but not growing up as fast. (This reminds me of a joke about how growing old is mandatory but growing up is optional)
It's after-churchsies in a new city. I thought I was still young enough to hang with the college kids with the crazy hairdos. I wasn't. Then I assumed I belonged to the working professionals group with the tucked-in shirts. I didn't. I went home alone realizing I was growing older but not growing up as fast. (This reminds me of a joke about how growing old is mandatory but growing up is optional)
06 December 2010
It's all about the money...
I've come to realize how influenced I have become by money, or material possession. I think I've had this realization before but it must not have been a big enough a realization to actually be a part of my disillusionment, or maybe my disillusionment phase was too immature then.
It was about four months ago that I got my first salary. It's a decent sum - enough to spend on food, rent, transportation and the occasional expensive weekend and still have half of it left to put into savings. Then on one particular payday, I found that almost a third of my pay went to taxes because I had not provided my PAN number. I felt a sense of loss that I had never felt before. Never before as in this-kind-of-feeling-wise and not as-deep-as-this-wise. The next month, I half expected the same cut in pay (being the moron that I am, I still hadn't acquired a PAN card.) I opened my pay slip. I was getting my full salary! And a few days later, my application for travel reimbursement got approved and I was getting paid around half my salary extra! I felt the same thing I felt a month ago but on the opposite polarity. I was in a constant good mood and I was brimming with confidence.
It seemed silly that these emotions were brought on and altered by the amount of money I was receiving, but that was the fact. Then I remembered the first time I got my salary. I had attained a whole new perspective on how I spent my money. I was counting every rupee I spent, I avoided unnecessary expenses and I even made an excel sheet to document my spending, complete with average and total daily expenditure columns. Now I can start to understand a lot of things like why someone would bargain even for a minuscule amount, or why someone would never miss a horrible meal at the mess he paid for. I understood the tendency to save but it was only recently that I felt it myself (at a strong enough degree.)
The biggest point of this post, is how we are all so affected by the monetary value of things, like how my salary got me high and low, or how expensive things make us happy. I guess it has something to do with our egos. I'm not saying I wasn't happy as a child when I got a supercool winged ninja-like robot that transformed into three dino-bots, but that was a different kind of happy. This is a different kind of happy. I don't trust myself with it.
It was about four months ago that I got my first salary. It's a decent sum - enough to spend on food, rent, transportation and the occasional expensive weekend and still have half of it left to put into savings. Then on one particular payday, I found that almost a third of my pay went to taxes because I had not provided my PAN number. I felt a sense of loss that I had never felt before. Never before as in this-kind-of-feeling-wise and not as-deep-as-this-wise. The next month, I half expected the same cut in pay (being the moron that I am, I still hadn't acquired a PAN card.) I opened my pay slip. I was getting my full salary! And a few days later, my application for travel reimbursement got approved and I was getting paid around half my salary extra! I felt the same thing I felt a month ago but on the opposite polarity. I was in a constant good mood and I was brimming with confidence.
It seemed silly that these emotions were brought on and altered by the amount of money I was receiving, but that was the fact. Then I remembered the first time I got my salary. I had attained a whole new perspective on how I spent my money. I was counting every rupee I spent, I avoided unnecessary expenses and I even made an excel sheet to document my spending, complete with average and total daily expenditure columns. Now I can start to understand a lot of things like why someone would bargain even for a minuscule amount, or why someone would never miss a horrible meal at the mess he paid for. I understood the tendency to save but it was only recently that I felt it myself (at a strong enough degree.)
The biggest point of this post, is how we are all so affected by the monetary value of things, like how my salary got me high and low, or how expensive things make us happy. I guess it has something to do with our egos. I'm not saying I wasn't happy as a child when I got a supercool winged ninja-like robot that transformed into three dino-bots, but that was a different kind of happy. This is a different kind of happy. I don't trust myself with it.
24 November 2010
About time...
When I heard about Ronald Mallett and his time-travel quest, the one thing that intrigued me most was the possibilty of sending information back into time. Once it becomes possible to send even the tiniest speck of recordable particle or wave back into the past, time would come to a standstill at that very moment and at that very point in space. Laying down standards for communication, results of years of research could be sent back, effectively completing the research within zero or even negative units of time. Hence, at the very instance it becomes possible to receive information from the future, we would instantly have the technology to build infinitely better "time machines" as the exponential growth of our knowledge becomes a permanent vertical slope on the time scale, reaching upto infinity. There would no longer be any time barrier between any two points in time from that moment on, thereby effectively putting time to a standstill.
Today I thought about how we already have thousands of years' worth of knowledge available to us. It then occurred to me that we already have working time machines, only not as apocalyptic as Ronald Mallet's. Instead of an infinite amount of knowledge from the future, we have relatively limited and sometimes distorted information from the past. Thus, you are Pythagoras in ancient Greece with a time machine that sometimes corrupts its data and works only upto the present time. You are al-Shahrastani in medieval Persia with the same partially functional time machine. You are anyone anywhere in the past with this same time machine. Put it to good use.
Today I thought about how we already have thousands of years' worth of knowledge available to us. It then occurred to me that we already have working time machines, only not as apocalyptic as Ronald Mallet's. Instead of an infinite amount of knowledge from the future, we have relatively limited and sometimes distorted information from the past. Thus, you are Pythagoras in ancient Greece with a time machine that sometimes corrupts its data and works only upto the present time. You are al-Shahrastani in medieval Persia with the same partially functional time machine. You are anyone anywhere in the past with this same time machine. Put it to good use.
23 November 2010
Think moments
Some things have always intrigued me. They catch me unaware and lead me into think moments - while walking down a street, while waiting for the bus, riding in a bus, during an information theory lecture, in the middle of a book or a movie or anything at all - the tired science versus religion thing; then on a higher level, consciousness; and then ultimately, existence itself.
Let's start with consciousness. I've always believed in evolution (I also believe in God. How I manage this will be covered in another section.) I believe there is no exact instance at which "life" started. I believe life evolved as interactions between various particles started increasing in complexity, finally forming entities that acted as living objects (to cut things short.) Evolution teaches that these objects evolved to become what we are today. The question is, when did we start being conscious? Have the aforementioned interactions become so complex that a living object now possesses an idea of being. When I think of myself as an individual, I find it hard to see how my thoughts, my motives and will, my very act of being conscious and thinking of myself as an individual with unique thoughts and motives and will are all end results of neurons and enzymes. I can accept this is evolution when I see people interacting with each other. But when I myself am here to have these thoughts, it is difficult to accept that my own consciousness is just a bunch of biology. (That was lousy communication; I didn't even convince myself when I re-read it.)
Moving on to existence, sometimes I think about how if everything that exists never existed at all. Not just our planet or our galaxy, but everything - the universe, parallel or multiple universes, matter, energy, time, space, the other six dimensions, any other dimension or anything else suggested in any attempt to explain existence. Not even an entity to bring all these into being. If you believe in the Big Bang, think of how if it had never happened and how if time never existed to come to a point where it happened. If the thought doesn't do something to you, you're probably not visualizing it right. "Wouldn't that be wonderful?" is what I would think if I felt suicidal.
It's late. Time to sleep.
Let's start with consciousness. I've always believed in evolution (I also believe in God. How I manage this will be covered in another section.) I believe there is no exact instance at which "life" started. I believe life evolved as interactions between various particles started increasing in complexity, finally forming entities that acted as living objects (to cut things short.) Evolution teaches that these objects evolved to become what we are today. The question is, when did we start being conscious? Have the aforementioned interactions become so complex that a living object now possesses an idea of being. When I think of myself as an individual, I find it hard to see how my thoughts, my motives and will, my very act of being conscious and thinking of myself as an individual with unique thoughts and motives and will are all end results of neurons and enzymes. I can accept this is evolution when I see people interacting with each other. But when I myself am here to have these thoughts, it is difficult to accept that my own consciousness is just a bunch of biology. (That was lousy communication; I didn't even convince myself when I re-read it.)
Moving on to existence, sometimes I think about how if everything that exists never existed at all. Not just our planet or our galaxy, but everything - the universe, parallel or multiple universes, matter, energy, time, space, the other six dimensions, any other dimension or anything else suggested in any attempt to explain existence. Not even an entity to bring all these into being. If you believe in the Big Bang, think of how if it had never happened and how if time never existed to come to a point where it happened. If the thought doesn't do something to you, you're probably not visualizing it right. "Wouldn't that be wonderful?" is what I would think if I felt suicidal.
It's late. Time to sleep.
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