lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

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Taken from Kevin Sites in hotzone

  "I feel like we lost the best years of our lives," he says. "We
  weren't able to have any fun, and now today in Iran, what can we do?
  We just want to play our music. I mean, Madonna says time goes so
  slowly. But here in Iran time goes so fast... We're running out of
  time."

  "Why are you running out of time?" I ask.

  "Because we're getting old," he says.

The last two lines capture the essence of what I feel when I see a group of college students in a pub, trying to console one their friends who has had a broken relationship.

Yesterday night I was surfing through the idiotbox to see if there were any good cartoons playing when I came across the series Recess playing on Disney channel (or it might have been Nickeledon).

In the part that I saw,one of tha characters, Vince (an athlete) had come to realize that his brother whom he had always thought to be a cool , was actually a geek. Vince was devastated by this discovery and was sharing his anguish with his friends. He thought it was only a matter of time till genetics kicked in and he too would transform into a geek.

I am not sure how old the serial was, my rough estimate is 4-5 years old. It made me realize how at one time geek was a derogatory term. However being a geek is an fashionable thing now. People whose only claim-to-geekdom is that they have a Moveable Type blog (updated hourly) proudly proclaim to be a geek.

Just take those old records off the shelf
I'll sit and listen to 'em by myself
Today's music aln 't got the same soul
I like that old time rock 'n' roll
Don't try to take me to a disco
You'll never even get me out on the
In ten minutes I'll be late for the door
I like that old time rock'n' roll
                    ----- Old Time Rock & Roll - Bob Seger 

I too like the old definition of geeks - the ones that write php/perl/pyhton one liners, who know the language specs (or at least the urls where the specs live), or those who know arcane geometrical and calculus formulas and so on. Someone who know their subject deeply. In my opinion, blogging and podcasting(and other web 2.0 shiny objects) are so shallow subjects that even thought you may know the nuances of them well, I will not consider you to be a geek. But that is just my opinion.

Thanks to Sachac for pointing out this list of questions to review your year.

What did I learn this year?

Let me see. On the technical side I learnt quite a lot.

• a bit of Perl
• quite a lot of MySQL
• new things in PHP, especially related to web services and graphs
• lots of new stuff related to high availability and failover
• lots of new stuff in troubleshooting

On the non technical side, I did not learn much

• I finally read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
• I started taking steps to manage my time well. I am following the Getting Things Done forums and mailing lists, picking up great tips from them but have yet to read THE BOOK. It was this year that I learnt about emacs-planner for managing tasks
• I read a few management type books, they are not that bad

The lessons of life that I learnt this year

• I am much better than I think I am
• Family support and good friends are the most important assets that someone can have
• Don't try to get stereotyped
• An idea does not have to be big, it has to change the world
• It is a good idea to write and publish about every new thing that I learn.

What did I accomplish this year?

Quite a lot, if I can say that myself

• Got selected to be a part of Yahoo! Bangalore
• Moved from Delhi to Bangalore and established a household here
• One of the interns I mentored got selected to become a regular employee
• Got published in webzines
• Kickstarted the PHPC Gazette, which is still in its infancy but I am sure something good will come out of it
• Wrote articles on my website that proved useful to a bunch of people
• Spoke on Y! webservice at Freedel
• Got a good year end appraisal
• Discovered Terry Pratchett

Which accomplishments am I proudest of?

• Getting selected to be a part of Yahoo! bangalore
• Kickstarting the PHPC Gazette

Knowing what I know now, what would I have done differently in the past year?

Let me see.

• Written more articles
• Written more code for my favourite free software
• Read more Terry Pratchett

What will be my greatest lasting memories of this year?

• Getting selected into Yahoo!. Absolutely something that I will always remember.
• Moving to Bangalore from Delhi

In what ways did I contribute?

Not in as many ways as I would have liked to, just in small ways

• Helped my previous colleague in taking over from where I left off
• Started the PHPC Gazette
• Submitted one patch for AMO. I should have done more
• Answered a bunch of questions on php-general, linux-delhi and some other mailing lists and IRC channels.
• Supported my brother and sister for this year

What were my biggest challenges or obstacles?

• Not enough time management
• I am not punctual
• I am not caring about my health, even though I am aware that it might give me trouble later in life

What obstacles did I overcome?

• Reduced the time I spend in the office from 16 hours to 9 hours, though this change took place only in December
• Established a household in a new city

How am I different now than I was at the start of the year?

• I am more confident than I was when the year started
• I am more willing to voice my disagreements, both in person and over email
• I have stopped saying RTFM to questions now
• I am fatter
• I know how to better manage my time now (but this is still a ongoing struggle )

What am I most grateful for?

• The support of my family
• My job

What else do I want to reflect on?

I should have contributed more to Free Software projects than I do now, and by contributing I mean more in terms of code. I need to figure out a way to fit exercise in my schedule and lose weight.

Originally posted posted Thu, 13 Nov 2003

I came across an interesting essay, Consumer Angst, today. It mirrors very well what I feel about products that try to ride on advertising instead of innovation. Take Microsoft, also known as the evil empire, and Linux. Everyone (well almost everyone) agrees that Linux is more scalable and robust than Microsoft < insert your Windows version > . Yet, there is this amorphous resentment, this inclination to trust a glossy advertisement more than an impartial report by your IT department. Well, my bile seems to be spreading all around and getting out of hand, so I will return back to the essay.

The reason I like the essay is that instead of ranting (like me), he fleshes out the issue very well. Here is an excerpt from the essay

Here are some examples of the minor lies that are included n advertising to support the big lie:
"New!" - How can something be simultaneously new  and absolutely essential to survival? Or, given the thesis that new is better, the advertiser should honestly list the ways that the old new product failed us, thus setting the stage for inevitable disenchantment with the new new product.

"It costs more, but it is worth it." By implication, things that cost more are worth more, and by negation, things that have no price also have no value. This is an appeal to reject the entire natural world out of hand.

Before I got myself the rajshekhar.net domain, I used to have a blog at journlaspace.com. I have stopped posting to it completely (I use the JS account to read the blog of siome of the people ), but there are still a few good entries in it. Over the next few days, I will bring them into this blog. This suddent spurt in posts should not be seen as a burst of creativity

Geek Pick-Up Lines: Part 3 - Also collected from part 1 and part 2

• No matter how I sort things, you'll always be first.
• You put the SPARC in my workstation.
• By looking at you I can tell you're 36-25-36, which by the way are all perfect squares.
• My 'up-time' is better than BSD.

Some good parts from a speech by John Gilmore

• I want a guarantee -- with physics and mathematics, not with laws -- that we can give ourselves things like real privacy of personal communications. Encryption strong enough that even the NSA can't break it.
• We also want real privacy of personal records. Our computers are extensions of our minds. We should build them so that a thought written in the computer is as private as that thought held in our minds.