If my mobile could also double up as an air conditioner remote, I wouldn’t have to sit at my laptop to write this down. Come to think of it, I wish my mobile would also double up as a TV remote, a DVD player remote, a car radio remote and also serve as the remote controller for multiple devices.

I remember a time when I wasn’t able to watch TV for a while at my house in Bangalore because the remote control wasn’t working properly. I later realized that it was due to a loose connection in the batteries, but until then, all the repeated beatings that poor remote took could’ve been saved had the WishMobile been invented.

I am too lazy and technically incompetent to work on coming up with this device. Plus I have a huge educational loan that hangs on my head like Damocles’ sword. But if someone chances upon this idea to come up with an integrated device that can serve multiple purposes as described above, you have my eternal admiration and respect.

However, considering I am strongly gravitating towards the minimalist lifestyle thanks to my being congenitally parsimonious, I don’t even know if I will have enough remotes around me in the first place to warrant getting a WishMobile!

But now, after some significant introspection, I realize that the suggestions and steps I put forth weren’t really implementable. Hence, I’ve come up with another brilliant alternative idea that might be a little easier to implement.

Anyone who doesn’t drive / ride their vehicle properly, and has been caught and fined on more than N occasions (N : to be defined) should be tattooed on their forehead with something that will cause them to be the butt of ridicule for everyone concerned.

Maybe something like ‘traffic offender‘, or ‘I can’t able to drive‘ (works best for techies, some from my company included), ‘I can haz ambulance??‘ might just do the trick. It has to be just above the eyebrows, so that even emo-cuts (punk rocker style) cannot hide the tattoos. Further suggestions for witty stuff to be tattooed are welcome. Please to comment.

I like this solution better, no capital punishment involved. Amnesty International cannot issue a fatwa against me. At the same time, politicians and cops can still make a lot of side money by siphoning off funds to be allocated to the various tattoo artists who’d be involved in putting forehead tattoos.

I propose that someone draft a proposal so that we can submit it to our honourable Governor, who is bombed ad nauseum with stupid petitions anyway. One more will not really make a big difference.

In turn, on receiving that link and having seen it, I was labelled a woman for forwarding links that contained pictures of cats, and this has subsequently cemented my reputation in various other aspects including that of being a chick-flick God and so on. The point of the extreme absurdity and the horrendous language that those pictures contained that made one laugh at it was totally missed by those otherwise observant people.

Now that we’ve eliminated the irrelevant back-history out of the way, I wanted to speak about LOL code and the potential impact it could have on our tech industry.

Most IT firms in our country keep a close watch on the development of technology all over the world, in order to have a jump start on their competitors when the technology hits the market newly. Building expertise in the same is financially viable for said companies in order to bid for projects involving these nascent technologies, and to establish themselves as leaders in this area.

I believe that companies that face the prospect of laying off employees who were previously employed in capital markets projects should instead focus their attention towards having them learn and prefect working in LOL code. LOL code is the way to go for the future, and here is why:

• It is new ‘technology’, and everyone likes new stuff.
• Most techies are already experts in Tech Speak. LOL speak and consequently, LOL code employs the same deviation from the normal standards of coding as do Tech Speak and LOL speak from the conventional ways of english grammar and syntax. Learning curve will not be very steep. Basically, techies will take to LOL Speak and LOL Code like fish to water.
• Companies have an excuse to retain employees it might have previously fired, and thus seem more humane in their dealings, while actually making them work towards the time when the next big wave will hit the tech industry.
• Being in its incubating phase, the potential for developers to make modifications to LOL code and customize it to make it compile and run on virtually all platforms is immense.
• It is amazingly funny, and all those who appreciate its attempt at humour would have a good time coding, thereby improving developer morale.
• How can you NOT code in a language that says – ‘CAN HAS STDIO?’ for file inclusion, ‘KTHXBYE’ to indicate return and ‘AWSUM THX’ to indicate that a condition check returns true? 

If someone who is in a position to implement this absolutely genius level idea chances upon this post, please do take it up on yourself to bring about the attack of the gramatically incorrect developers. Who knows, with the kind of expertise we already possess, the world might be our playground!

KTHXBYE.

I’ve decided to name that channel…….wait for it…….pH1!!

I confess to cheaply conforming to LOL speak in my post ‘Hai World’. Additionally, some of the tech offices of the more chilled-out kind in the US use this lingo in official communication or while checking in code into the version control repository. LOL Dogs and LOL Code are further spin-offs of this phenomenon.

I would encourage all those willing, able and enthusiastic enough to use LOL speak in their lingo, so long as they don’t mess with regular english spelling and only tamper with the grammatical aspects of the language.

Moving on, Tech Speak is a relatively lesser known malaise plaguing the Indian IT industry. Instances of Tech Speak have effects on virtually every IT office within the country, but incidents of its break out have been brushed under the carpet and despite awareness of its presence, no remedial actions have been taken to stem its growth or to quell it once and for all.

Examples of Tech Speak are too many to be exhaustively listed here, but some of the gems that one can come up with are as follows:

‘I can’t able to access the central server.‘
‘He is bad at communication. He can’t able to speak properly.‘ (Reason stated for turning down a person’s candidature during an interview.)
Our country national anthem are voted by UNESCO as best. I am having proud tears of joy.

Tech speak is prevailent in all IT offices, and is something that can be remedied among the nicer guys who ail from it by correcting them nicely and guiding them appropriately. The sad part of this is that there are enough bozos and clowns around who think no end of themselves and their ‘communication skills’, who are hit by this in an even worse fashion, and are therefore past the point of salvaging.

I am highly certain that ‘fraandship‘, popularized by Orkut, is also something that originated from Tech Speak.

The first step towards addressing this is to become self-aware of its presence and acknowledging it. One way is to embrace Tech Speak much like LOL Speak has been adopted. Now, if you feel that LOL Speak is cool and Tech Speak isn’t, you’re a prudish one-dimensional wannabe. When we make Tech Speak cool enough, more people will notice it, and those that are not lazy enough will try to remedy it.

Additional measures to keep Tech Speak in check can be put into place. I had come up with this idea of creating a simple software, appropriately named ‘Tech Speak, given to firangs who work with us Indians, for them to understand the nuances of our language.

This software will act similar to Babelfish and have two fields:

• What the techie says:
• What the techie means :

Filling up the first one and pressing enter will give out the corresponding string in coherent English, thereby eliminating all possible communcation gaps.

Lastly, I recently overheard someone singing a Kylie Minogue song in Tech Speak:
‘I just can’t able to get you out of my head….’

What can I say, Tech Speak rocks!

I was initially puzzled at this, but I suddenly realized that everyone was now switching over to daylight saving time, and Pacific Standard Time (PST) had now become Pacific Daylight Saving Time (PDT). The entire nation had moved ahead by an hour, and I was inadvertently caught in the middle of it all, not having experienced this previously in 25 years of my existence.

The repercussions of this change were soon to follow. In my last two weeks there, I had to wake up an hour earlier, and given how late I used to sleep, it was quite a task. But there were enough and more relevant motivating factors that prompted me to do so, without much trouble.

However, when I got back home, it dawned upon me that I had lost an hour of my life forever. I did not see 01:00 to 01:59 in the wee hours of 9th March 2008 for no fault of mine. I want that hour of my life back.

The only way this can be accomplished is by being in some place that is already running on DST and then being present there when they switch back to their regular time. However, if, due to circumstances, I am unable to travel to any place and be present when the switch back takes place, I’d like it if someone were to sponsor my trip.

I did gain an extra day by crossing the International Date Line onward to the US, but lost it again when coming back home. This meant that I had two days of my life which had the date 9th February 2008, and no day which had the date 24th March 2008, but since the total number of days evens out, I am not complaining.

Maybe I can go ahead and start an NGO, inspired significantly by Aadisht, called – ‘I want my hour back‘, which will ensure that whoever has been a victim by losing time due to the DST switch over gets to be regain it during the switch back.

This problem would, I realize, be compounded further when the person has experienced N DST switch overs, and less switch backs, but those complications can be remedied on a case by case basis.

The theme song for this NGO, if anyone would bother to compose it, can be sung to the tune of ‘Life is a Lemon’ by Meatloaf. If anyone wants to implement this idea, go ahead, please, knock yourselves out.

For those still blinking at the ostensible spelling error – it is plugging my blog. If you don’t know what plug is, kindly refer urban dictionary.

After having engaged in significant drum beating via facebook on its status message, on orkut by finally enabling my updates to be visible for junta and courtesy of twitter and the usual gtalk status message build up, which has resulted in quite a few junta visiting this site, I was having a discussion with SKimpy about other innovative and unconventional ways to blug one’s plog, and we came up with the auto-rickshaw idea.

It would be quite awesome to get some bumper stickers printed, with the blog URL and have it pasted on the backs of auto-rickshaws, so that footage can be provided in the weirdest and coolest way possible. I have seen autos with stuff like ‘Hai! Want to Friendship me?’ and ‘Love leads to death’ and other such nonsense.

I am not sure how much auto drivers would charge for such advertising, but before I go ahead and print stickers, I sure would like to find out. If you have a plog that needs blugging and want me to help by getting stickers printed, drop me a line, and I’ll see what I can do after I’ve done the background research work.

Any further ideas apart from the conventional ones to engage in shameless publicity are most welcome as well. Please don’t tell me I need to write well to make this happen, I’ve been trying for ages to do so and I have now finally abandoned that approach, in a ‘grapes are sour’ type situation.

Edit: Urban dictionary defines blugging as bad blogging. An unfortunate coincidence, I’d say.

I’m still unsure of how to go work on this “about me” section, though what I do know is that I like writing more than I ever thought I could and also because it makes me happy.

End of Update

When I had initially thought of putting this post up, I was brimming with ideas and with all sorts of content that this post could house, and I was dreading the prospect of not being able to stick to a self-imposed word limit that I want to adhere to. New blog, new rules you see.

However, the problem I am facing is diametrically opposite, for I have drawn a complete blank. The issue at hand is one that is more fundamental than your average writer’s block. The usual about me description would sound like what I would say to people who asked me to tell them about myself, and the ‘tell me about yourself’ type queries are those that one faces in interviews of the boring kind.

Being in the same job for four years, I think my interviewee skills are currently as sharp as the business acumen skills of whoever decided to make Lehman Brothers a leading contender in the subprime loan sector.

I don’t want to sound like I am being interviewed. However, when you glance through this blog perfunctorily, it is going to sound like a monologue that will bore you to death. Read all the content here at your own risk.

The only way anyone can get to know a person is by spending extended time with them, and you will get to know all the irrelevant details about me that I’ve chosen to share by checking out the various posts I have.

Most of my posts are what the average guy on the street would think of and pen down, with a few things here and there that might pique your interest. Humour is an important aspect of my life in general and I try to focus on that, although that effort is usually in vain.

Check out the various links on top (home | blog | music | links | about) and see what works for you.

For all its worth it, I am awesome. And I’m quite modest about it, as the sub-title of the site would suggest.So are you, albeit to a smaller extent, for having landed up here, intentionally or otherwise. Enjoy!

This officially earmarks the longest voluntary relationship I have ever had in my life. Either party could’ve broken up at will, but both of us have weathered many storms together and have stuck on, for some reasons best known only to the both of us, while most other reasons for aforesaid situation remain significantly inexplicable.

This NaN is going to focus on the memories I have had of September 1st over the past five years, and for sure, it has been quite interesting in more ways than I could have previously imagined.

For the first ever time in my life, I fell asleep in something akin to a class, because the person who was giving us the corporate presentation could as well have been spraying valium through an atomizer four inches away from my nostrils. In addition to my acute somnolence, I had also been, as I had mentioned previously, unwell, and the medicine that I’d been prescribed had given me a light tremor in my right hand, and for one of the first ever times in my life, I was scared as hell about whether I’d ever benormal again.

The doctor’s reassurance about it being a reaction to some expectorant tablet did nothing to remedy the situation, and it was only after I got better and I was able to write properly did I heave a huge sigh of relief.

I had been to the office a fortnight prior to my joining date, on 18th August to hunt for accommodation that was close to where I had to work. Seeing the amount of dirt, dust, traffic and the accompanying madness and mayhem was too much of a shock for me, given that Mysore was diametrically opposite insofar as the state of affairs on the roads were concerned.

Three days after the entire rigmarole began, I had called my Mum up and told her that I wanted to quit and open a grocery store in Mysore, or teach in my college and I’ve had constantly recurring thoughts of quitting work ever since, but the idea has been mulled over so much that its now relegated to that part of me that tends to over-romanticize trivial situations and circumstances.

Its been four years, and, as is quite evident, I still haven’t quit.

Music, which was such an important part of my life, had also been relegated to oblivion.

In the last week of August 2005, I contracted bronchopneumonia, and as a consequence spent the first anniversary of my starting life as a working professional in bed with a fever of 104 F, getting more pale and gaunt by the minute, but sleeping like a baby and feeling happy about not having to work during that time.

Not the best of times, but not the worst of times either.

On the morning of September 1st, I saw two mails – one of them said I had my august salary credited to my account, and another one congratulated me for two years of work in my company. I said Meh to both, as I had said to some other formerly important stuff at the very start of the trip and continued to work, without those two mails bothering me much until a few days ago when I took a lazy stroll down memory lane.

In retrospect, that second trip changed my life for the better in more ways than I’d have imagined it would.

Nevertheless, this was quite a tame and incredibly lazy time for me, and this anniversary passed on without much ado either.

Even if I end up going home after work and just crashing after watching some arbit stuff on TV, I know that I’ll have had fun simlpy because I’ve reached a stage where I don’t give a damn about too many things, and am in a controlled free-fall mode.

It just seemed like a good idea at that time.

(The above statement has been used by many people throughout history, including those that committed the defenestrations of Prague that led to the 30-years war, those that used brandy in thermometers before switching to mercury, by Indira Gandhi during the 1975 emergency, by Abhinav Bindra’s dad after he narrated the incident of young AB shooting the balloon off the maid’s head and so on and so forth).

It is certainly not as cool as owning a domain name, and if emailed at that address, I promise to reply. Just for kicks.