Radio - My Destiny

Sometimes you don’t have anything to do but to sit in the office and wonder what is it that you don’t have that could have made you happy, and suddenly you realize that it’s the songs that are missing.
After all you can’t simply go on listening to radio the whole day, cay you?
So battling all odds of the firewalls rules of restricting the community sites and music and illegal download sites I set out to find me some good songs so that will cheer me up on any day! Which songs would qualify for this job? Linkin Park, Eminem and the likes! Yeah, they would be perfect.
So I set out to find some sites where I could find them. About seventy percent of the time the firewall was successful and about 25 percent of the time I was a bit late (the files had been removed from the download sites, these things don’t liger for long you know!), but the small window of five percent was more than enough for me to get what I wanted.
At the end of the day I was able to find myself some six albums of Eminem and I’m yet to find some albums of “Linkin Park”.
But the irony is after all the effort yesterday I don’t have a pair of earphones/headphones today to enjoy the music I downloaded yesterday. So for now it’s back to square one listening to radio and the plain old “Radio City” and the good one “Radio Indigo”.

The Code Search and GAWK

The latest word on the wire is the release of yet another Google product (not to mention it searches) called Google Code Search.

Basically this a search engine specifically to search in the code snippets (full programs also for that matter). “Search public source code” goes the tagline. This may be of very great interest to the software industry as someone has said that 50 percent of the code we use today is the result “Ctrl+C” and “Ctrl+V” and then some modifications are done.

Anyway the code search will be definite boost for the open source community and the students alike. It will help students finish their project on time and allow the Open Source people to stop themselves from endlessly making copies of the same app.

Anyway today was a rather uneventful day. Spent the whole day downloading the material for Windows Exchange Server and IDE for Python (I’m a snake charmer now!).Seems that I am going to be an expert in the field of “GAWK”! I have the manual for GAWK and an implementation of GAWK for windows.

Someone should say something…

Everyday one can see the media shouting about one thing or the other; sometime it’s about
the latest scoop they have or it’s the new policy that has come out to protect the so called underprivileged and the underrepresented.

Never in my life have I seen any politician (his cast doesn’t matter) coming out against
these topics in open. All they do is sit back and let the Ass-holes (sorry for the expression) run the show.

Recently I started reading “Falling Over Backwards” by “Arun Shourie”. I must say that do
this day I was largely ignorant about the ways and means the “Mandal” commission had employed to reach the magical figure of 27.5% reservations and the way the Constitution was twisted by adding or removing (as the times required!) a single word, maybe a line or sometimes a whole section or paragraph. I had never known of the numerous cases wherein the courts had given a verdict so as to strike down a proposal or an action authorized by a Government (most of the times State Govt. and sometimes the Central Govt.) but the political parties joined together to change the law itself so that the new law was more
supportive to the previous decision.

The best part is that it didn’t stop there only. They (read Politicians) even went all out to
make sure that the law they passed to support the actions they had authorized before the law existed was put into such a place in constitution where it could not be touched or be commented upon by the Supreme Court.

The current scenario is such that a person who has more muscle power, more money and more
political power is enjoying the benefits of Reservation! Why? The question is completely useless if anyone knows what India stands for. Normally in a democratic country there as one law for all (few exceptions of religious issues like marriage and such) and everyone has to abide by that law. But in India the law changes by the minute as the politicians’ desire. When India gained independence the lawmakers did the terrible mistake of copying the constitution instead or framing a new constitution from scratch. India was a new country with its own set of problems to be addressed. As is with any patchwork the constitution had many loopholes waiting to be exploited by someone who knew how to work the system.

The very important thing the constitution makers forgot was the power to modify the constitution was entirely with the legislature. The same people who get elected and get to have a say in the assembly. They had made judiciary to see that that law that was made by the legislature was properly implemented. But the left a serious flaw there. The legislature got the whole and sole rights to the constitutional amendments and thus no one could stop it if it wanted to make any stand or belief a law.

Of course the framers could not have simply taken away the right to modify the constitution but what they could have done was that every amendment that was going to materialize had to be authorized by the judiciary. But alas! They didn’t do it and nobody after them required it (except for the general public).

And we thought we were living in a free country. Where is the freedom? The basic question that
remains to be answered is that the politics today has become hereditary. The father dies and the son takes over. In case there is no son then some of the kith and kin will take over. Take congress for example, Rahul Gandhi may be very good leader and it may happen that over the course of time he actually does some good to nation. But that doesn’t change the fact that he didn’t have to go through all the hardships his father or the founder of Congress went
through. The dynasty system was thought to have been abolished in India with the
fall of “Moughal” empire. During the colonial rule the governing officials did not come out of a single dynasty. But after the British left after partitioning India, we have relapsed back into the old system which we loved so much. The plain old Dynasty system!

The Printer and the Problems

One more day has passed today and I’m sitting here in the borrowed cubicle on a borrowed PC and listening to radio on MY CELLPHONE. The day was almost eventless except for 3 pages of printout where the printer started to act up and demand special paper.

I don’t know if this was the fault of “Adobe Acrobat Reader®” or the Printer Driver or “HP LaserJet 8100 series PCL6” but the document I was trying to print got stuck and would not get printed.

The printer demanded that special size paper be inserted from the manual loading tray to start the printing. Thankfully a few key strokes later (actually buttons on the printer console) I managed to force the printer to print on the A4 (standard) sheets.

After I got the printout I’m still wondering why that printer was shouting for paper of different size when the job could be done on the paper already present in the tray.

Today I have to go to my supervisor to try and get myself a PC, and I just hope that they give me a new PC with at least minimalist configuration (P4 2.4 GHz+ with at least 512 RAM). Actually I would love to have a PC with 1 G or RAM and Dual Core Processors (HT will also do fine ;)).

So much for the Office part! I actually forgot that I have a three day weekend (remember Gandhi) and most probably Wednesday will also be a Holiday (yippee!). Why? Because some fools in Karnataka have called for a “Bandh” and thus no public transport (yeah Baby!), that means almost all the companies will be down on their knees while they wait for the Bandh to finish.

But alas, in lieu of the Wednesday off I’ll have to come to work on Saturday! Sucks man! There are times when a man is tired (Psychologically, if not physically or mentally), Saturday makes a person feel tired and makes him want to sleep and do things he normally doesn’t do. It’s a natural response to the Week gone by, when a guy sits down and contemplates what he did in the week and tries to find out better ways to pass time and Better excuses for all the misdeeds ;).

Will be back on Tuesday

Allocations – no comments!

This comes in the wake of fresh allocations…
Not a surprise there, again as it turns out the people are not happy with the way they have been handled. Unlike me who is perfectly happy with what I got I know of some people who deserved a lot better and got so less.

Sometimes the world is not so gracious; I know of a time when I was not happy with the stuff I was allocated to, that was about a month back, but back then I didn’t have any say and I could not blame the people who allocated me to the department. But when I consider the present time I sure do feel that the staffing and allocation department should have been more thoughtful while allocating the Human Resources.

There have been a few exceptions to this (including myself ;)). But that can’t make people overlook the fact that they need to revise the allocation scheme. Once they have examined people for more than one month and had their people monitoring and trying to gauge the potential of the people to be allocated to various groups, they should have tried using the feedback from the supervisors and the results from the test.

Looking back on my allocation I feel that in the beginning I was not entirely happy with what I got allocated but once I got to the root of the job I was supposed to do I felt that this could be the ultimate redemption for me.

More on the allocations and their fallouts tomorrow.

8 to 8

Well something left unsaid contribute to the world in unsaid ways…. And more often than not the contributions result in more chaos than there originally was.

I’m not saying that the converse also holds, when you say something you should not have said the tension builds up not inside you but in somebody else and that my friend can sure lead to an increase in the entropy of the system on the whole!

This my friends is a place where each weekday I’ll put in what I learnt from that day and what I should have done. Although I must say that I can’t disclose any info regarding my whereabouts or what do I do but almost everybody with some mind should be able to guess.. 