My take on life

I had a very weird dream tonight. I saw that I was a space traveller and we came in contact with aliens who could live in 17 dimensions. These aliens did not try to kill us off, but they made us humans well aware of the inadequacies of living in "just" 3 dimensions. These guys looked similar to humans, but I do not remember what other things they could see that we could not.

I arranged my closet and I found out that I have more shirts than t-shirts. Luckily, I have only one pair of pants and 6 pairs of jeans, so I am not handing back my geek badge anytime soon

This is a recommendation for my fellow geeks who enjoy sci-fi series. You should check out Sliders. The premise of the story is that a college genius invents a machine that gives him the ability to travel between dimensions. There are infinite number of worlds and there are an infinite number of story-lines to go with it. With his friend Wade Wells and Professor Arturo, Quinn (the college genius) decide to take a spin round the universe and due to some accidents, they are not able to get back to their home.

We see universes where alternate outcomes to world changing events have happened and things are different from what they are "back home". The pilot episode deals with the possibility where communist ideology has won the cold war.

One of the episodes that I enjoyed was "Eggheads". This is a world where intellect is prized and nerds are heroes. You have billboard of Einstein modeling for Gap in khakis, and a sports guide written by Stephen Hawking. The best part of this episode were the "bad guys", who threatened using Latin phrases!

I am still on Season 2 (netflix disk 1). Go check it out.

I have been thinking that sometimes personalities of the speaker affects the way I perceive his ideas. i.e. if the speaker has a pleasant personality, and presents his ideas with a calm demur, I will be more agreeable with his point of view and I will take in his evidence with an open mind. However, if the speaker is unpleasant or if he is not calm and confident while presenting his ideas, I sometimes dismiss his ideas and evidence as unworthy of my attention.

I think I might have found a workaround for this issue. Whenever I find myself strongly agreeing or strongly disagreeing with someone's ideas, I would do a "vice-versa" on the speaker's personality and see if I still agree with the evidence. What this means is, if I find myself strongly agreeing with someone, I will imagine him presenting his facts and ideas at the top of his voice or in a very shaky voice. Similarly, if I find myself strongly disagreeing with someone's ideas, I will imagine him talking in a calm manner and in a strong voice.

The idea here is to try and subtract out the effect of personalities when listening to new theories and ideas.

I attended the Hackers and Founders meetup yesterday. It was a high energy meetup and I liked it. When I walked in, I was already 2 hours late but there were still quite a few people around. I walked in, took a name tag and tried to "merge in". Merging was easy - the folks were friendly and did not mind if you joined the discussion.

Some observations

• I did not have a good answer for "what are you working on right now" . This made me realize that from a technology perspective, I have not worked on anything interesting for some time now. I have tinkered with a few things in the past 6 months (man!), but have not really done a deep dive on any of them.
• There was a focus on programming language in the group. I am not sure if the choice of a programming language is really a big deal when creating a webapp. Rails, PHP, Python, Perl, Java - all have a good web framework. One of the arguments was that it would be difficult to organize PHP code in a coherent manner. In my opinion, that is a matter of discipline instead of language.
• I did not find people thinking of totally different ideas. Or maybe, the folks were not telling those ideas . The ideas floated around ads, community, social networking, websites etc.
• I am not a unique case when it comes to the case of creating a startup. A few folks there had a regular job and were planning on side projects.

OMFG!! Is that a Romulan Warbird decloaking in front of us. OMFG!! They are hailing us.

Actually, no. It is just me posting to my blog. I had a busy month and hence my website and my blog took a backseat.

So what all have I been up to -

• Facebook is the new Orkut. I find myself logging into FB every day now.
• Yahoo!'s iphone app is great.
• Finally got myself a postpaid AT&T connection, with their data plan. In my opinion, it is easier to get a phone connection in India than it is in USA.
• The iphone + google maps app + at&t data plan make a great way to explore new places. My wife and me used it when exploring places in San Francisco.
  
• I am now cycling to work! After some research, I bought myself a Schwinn Frontier bike and I am pretty happy with it. The only problem that I see in this bike is its hard seat, but from what I heard, this is not a bad thing. This review pretty much sums up my opinion about the bike as well.
• Oh yes - Star Trek!! I saw this movie and I was impressed. In fact, I was so impressed that I clapped when the movie ended (oddly, very few people clapped)
• GIT. That has been a new addition to my programming arsenal. Git is really nice and I am loving it. I have to deep dive into the git branches, but even the basic stuff from git have made source control easy.
• Oh yes - I checked out Songbird music player. If you are already using Amarok, don't bother with Songbird. Amarok is way ahead of it. If, on the other hand, iTunes is the only player you know, then give Songbird a spin. It is much nicer than iTunes.