My Mind

2011 was a dud. The year showed so much potential but apart from getting one thing off my chest, it was pretty much eventless. A month into 2012, it seems like things are about to change. Here’s a quick list of what’s happening(or not)..
Twitter.

I went off twitter for a week. I was bored and tired of my timeline. Reading ‘The catcher in the rye’ made me realise how much I dislike phonies. My twitter timeline is full of phonies. Fake outrage & intellectualism, snobbery, stupid attention-whory humor, trolling – is what my timeline is full of these days. Need to get rid of these blogger turned twitter celebrities.

Love.

Last week I was told that I had once said that I’d never fall in love. That was such a stupid thing to say.

Work.

I got an unexpected promotion recently. This new three word shiny designation makes me slightly uncomfortable. Anyway, these titles and peanuts mean little.. what matters is the work. If you love your work, if it makes you feel like owning up, if you get to learn & grow, what more do you need.

Life.

How do you come to terms with the fact that dreams you’ve invested in so much can never come true. A new dream, a new hope?

Programming.

I’ve been playing with python, virtualenv, django, gunicorn, celery, nginx since last few days. It makes me feel good. I’ve also been working on HTML5 video, which leaves me frustrated at times. This reminds me of a point made in Code Complete,

how you spend your programming days will depend on where you are on the technology wave

Kaylee.

I like Kaylee Frye from Firefly for her chipper, bubbly, never say die, cheerful attitude. I wish I had a friend like her. I wish everybody gets a friend like her.

Agneepath.

Until recently I hadn’t watched a movie on the day of its release. Agneepath is an average movie. I watched it for the music. I’ve been a big fan of Ajay-Atul’s Natrang. The music was good. I loved `gun gun guna` and `deva shree ganesha`. Picturisation of `shah ka rutba` was disappointing; as my compatriot said, “it looked like Comedy Circus”. The only moment I felt connected was during the brother-sister reunion, thanks to the lovely `abhi mujh mein nahi`. I don’t even want to mention that chickengunya song, I like the Marathi version though.

Meditations.

Whenever I feel depressed or sad or frustrated or angry, I think of Meditations. I read a page or two if I have my copy of it nearby. It helps me look at things from a stoic’s perspective.

There are couple of other interesting things happening.. but until they are executed successfully, no one gets to know about them.

Whenever I work on something interesting, I get too involved and lose track of time. A notifier which notifies every `x` minutes would help me to (a)Take regular breaks, (b)Focus on the main task whenever I’ve digressed. The script below satisfies this need on my Ubuntu machine.

I was walking towards the bus stop after having my cup of coffee when I read a revolutionary-type, man-must-take-risks tweet on my mobile. I liked this tweet; it changed my mood; the sober me was suddenly super excited and chipper.

I had to cross the busy main road to get to the bus stop. So I put my mobile back into my pocket and was waiting for an opportunity to cross. A car, lorry and few bikes were approaching. Crossing at that moment looked tough. The usually cautious me was now all excited, thanks to the mood changing tweet; I decided to cross the road anyway.

I was midway when I realized that I had misjudged; crossing was impossible at the speed the car was approaching. Every time I find myself wrong, I go into a shock, curse myself and feel bad. The thought that the car would run over me was secondary to the outrage for misjudging. Instead of moving out of the way, I stood there perplexed for a second. And then there was the sudden realization that I was going to die if I stood there doing nothing.

With all the happy-happy things I had planned for next few days, dying wasn’t what I wanted. I turned and jumped to move out of the way but it was too late. The lorry hit me; the front wheel ran over my gut; rear wheel over my legs. I died on the spot. As I was moving out of my body, I remembered Yoda’s words..

Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.

Every new website(startup?!) that I come across these days(which requires me to register to use the website) has a “Sign in with Facebook” apart from the site’s own login system. I hate it when these are the only two login options available. And, I refuse to use such sites.

It’s a PITA to remember password for each and every website we use and so, people with brains came up with an open standard protocol called OpenID. Google, Yahoo!  are famous among the many OpenID providers. If you disregard the technicalities, ‘Sign in with Facebook’ is similar to OpenID in terms of the end-user experience.

Apart from “it’s not a open standard” rant, my problem with ‘Sign in with Facebook’ is that it wants to share my private information with third party websites.

When all I want is to login to use your website, why do I need to share my friends list & other information, give you permission to access and post data? I don’t want to share my information with your stupid website. I am apprehensive about what you might do with this data. And, I don’t like it. I, just, want, to, login! Can you please provide more options?

I like “login with Google“. It’s simple and minimal, it’s OpenID and it does not share my private data with others. It serves the problem of remembering too many passwords for too many sites.

I love how Stackoverflow handles their login. It provide me with multiple options to login and is neat and elegant. I hope these new and upcoming startups learn from them.