Why the long silence?

I've been tumble-blogging over at churchofchai.tumblr.com, and that was actually more fun and less work for a bit. I'll be back here in a little while tho' i think.

An Incredible Story

Be sure to read this story to the end...it's well worth the read and to forward to all those who you feel deserve the thought.....

AN INCREDIBLE STORY

 
In 1986, Peter Davies was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University .

On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air.  The elephant seemed distressed, so Peter approached it very carefully.

He got down on one knee, inspected the elephants foot, and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it.  As carefully and as gently as he could, Peter worked the wood out with his knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot.  The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments.  Peter stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled.  Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away.  Peter never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.

Twenty years later, Peter was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenaged son.  As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Peter and his son Cameron were standing.  The large bull elephant stared at Peter, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.

Remembering the encounter in 1986, Peter could not help wondering if this was the same elephant.  Peter summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing, and made his way into the enclosure.  He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder.  The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Peter legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.

Probably wasn't the same elephant.

This is for all of my friends who send me those BS heart-warming stories.

Ok, now that I've managed to piss everyone off .. yeah, it's fake and I just had to do it!! :) Now I'm ready to be stoned for my sins :)

Indians "Deeply Love" Bush

With the signing of the US-India nuclear deal just days away, it is time to demolish all those Gandhi statues disfiguring Indian streets and squares and to adopt a new idol.

Given the Indian population the title is more appropriate for other reasons

Obama and McCain are negative, but the devil's in the details

I'm pissed that Obama's going negative.

The "media" has recently been given to saying that Obama runs 77% negative ads vs. McCain's 56%. Given that the last few emails I've received from the Obama campaign have been pretty damn idiotic (using Karl Rove as an information source?!) I tended to agree that Obama's been having dinner with Cheney and Co.

Turns out the truth is far more interesting:
Op Ad: Obama More Negative Than McCain?

The really annoying thing here is that it took me 30 minutes of research to figure out whether there's anything real to the 77% number. This US politics thing really is a PITA!!

Ay-rab's are takin over Mayricuh

I'm not sure if that should come first or this:

MD5's and OSX

Sucks that I have to keep looking this one up, so here's the one-liner:

$ md5 file-name | grep md5sum

If the checksum is returned in the next line, things are good. Otherwise not so much.

Constructive sentences

Le Shrub proved that there's no reason to be able to construct a coherent sentence to get the job of ruling the morons free world US.

But Sarah Palin takes the cake. She's able to construct sentences, but it's sentences that are made by the construction company which decided that you can use caulk and duct-tape and nails and a compressor and a few rebars and zipties and a heat gun and a nail-screwer-thingie and a battery operated whizziewhig to build a sky-scraper. It's exactly like building with a diablo or lego set, but just a bit more sturdy.

It's impressive that she remembered words from talks (Abraham Lincoln?!) and managed to string them together in grammatically correct sentences. Too bad they still make no sense.

wiki-fication

The last 2 corporate (or pseudo-corporate) gigs that I did were SORELY in need of a common documentation interface, and my solution was the wiki. The first involved a slightly uphill battle. Come to think of it I shouln't even call it a battle. It was more like an unexpected upheaval. It started off with SharePoint, and my implementation of MediaWiki turned out to be more popular. The second used Trac. The success of that project is still being weighed. I think it's a failure because I did not do the legwork necessary to make people aware of the benefits and also did not structure it correctly.

I wish I had had the series of lectures from http://ikiw.org/21days before I started, but I completely concur with the suggestions. In any case, every corporate wiki implementer should go through these videos:

world changing

i'm curious, in the confused and exhausted state that i'm in, what few points i would consider to be necessary to change the world. here's a brief list that i'll be evaluating under more lucid conditions:

* legalize drugs
* legalize sex-work
* remove merit from education (i.e. don't delineate based on test performance)
* make all education free - at all levels
* require all education curricula to include farming
* require a foreign language (and that should exclude english in relevant locations)
* make all education wiki-based - so students can write their own textbooks
* put all political and public information online (wikileaks, sunlight foundation)
* make all religions pay tax (i.e. no tax benefits for contributions to religious charities)

that's my list of 9. i wish there was a 10th.

hope

the ilugc [indian linux user's group, chennai] have been having perl programming sessions at the workplace. they've been progressively declining in terms of attendence, and progressively evolving in terms of the quality of presentation and focus of the attendees.

today i spent a lot of time describing my visions and aspirations - basically the ashok jhunjhunwala vision - to the attendees. trying to instill the vision and leadership that they need to contribute to society here. i was hoping to not have wasted my breath.

today one of the attendees at the end of the class said he was very glad to hear my insights because he had never thought about his programming career as having opportunities for the local population. he had only thought about programming for programming's sake. this person works for jhunjhunwala's company.

i'm thrilled that he gave me this feedback.
and sad that jhunjhunwala has not instilled the vision into his own employees.

but i have hope (outside of the usual gymkhana club stupidity, which i feel is going to crop up regularly until i leave india).