Arranged marriages

I was chatting with a friend in the break room who is about to get married at the end of the year. His, like most Indian marriages is arranged and he is going back to India to get married at the end of the year. I was teasing him about his last few weeks of freedom.

We got to talking about how hard the first year of marriage is. I should know; mine was an arranged marriage as well. Marriage is hard enough when you have known the person for a long time. Imagine how hard it can be when you barely know the person. At first glance, many would arrive at the conclusion that arranged marriages never work. I don't know. I have had four friends who have separated in the past couple of years. Two had arranged marriages, the other two had fallen in love. A statistical wash!

I think marriage is really the art of compromise. I don't think two stubborn, headstrong folks can ever be in a happy union. Marriage succeeds when someone plays second fiddle. Somebody has to back off.

When luck is on your side

I have been following the Chicago White Sox fortunes in this season's baseball playoffs. And it seems to me that they are destined to win. They received some fortuitous calls in their favor in the first two rounds and last night lady luck smiled on them again when one of their batters was awarded first base when the umpire ruled he had been struck on his arm. Replays showed that he had fouled off and instead of a full count, the bases were loaded. Before you knew it, the next batter had hit a Grand Slam and the Sox were ahead. Fox sports - ever mindful of the ratings - wants a game seven, but I think this series will be over in five.

Update 10/28: The White Sox proved me wrong. They wrapped it up in four.

Ruby

And now there is ruby heralded as the next big thing in programming, even bigger than Java.

JSP, servlets etc..

Actually the last couple of days that I have spent boning up on JSP's and servlets have inspired me to work on a project and setup a website of my own. Hopefully I can get started pretty soon and have something up and linked to here. I have lots of ideas. Got to write them down so I don't forget.

Read somewhere that: " A great idea ain't worth nothing if you do nothing about it". All I can say is Amen!

Volunteering

Femme began volunteering last month and that inspired me to find my own gig. I volunteered back in '98 or so. Nothing came of it because the organization I was volunteering for disbanded a couple of months after I joined. This time, I wanted to do something long term. I searched Volunteer Match and found something I was interested in. We met for the first time last night. I am excited. I think volunteering for this organization will be a perfect opportunity to network and meet some successful entrepreneurs. Hopefully some of their success will rub off on me.

Language churn

Technology evolves at such a fast pace that it is hard to catch up. Over the years I had paid scant attention to presentation layer languages that are used to develop web applications. Lately they have become more powerful than ever witnessed by all those snazzy web sites with dynamic web content written using JSP, servlets, flash etc.

So I spent some time this week reading up and trying out some JSP code. In the process of digging up some online JSP resources, I read an article where Marc Andressen (ex poster boy for the world wide web of Netscape fame) says JSP is less richer and useful than PHP. Now I've got to add another language to the list that I need to acquaint myself with.

Peeved

I am peeved when I am speaking at a meeting and a colleague speaks over me. We are on the same team and I am sure she thinks she is supporting me by speaking up. I would appreciate it more if she waited until I finished!

Cruel

The Houston Astros loss to the Saint Louis Cardinals in the National League Championship Series last night was cruel. They were on the cusp of victory and had a firm grasp on a ticket to the World Series but were denied in heartbreaking fashion by the last man standing for the Cardinals. You could feel the air sucked out of the stadium when Pujols blasted the ball out of the ball park. It must have felt like a dagger through the heart for the Astros faithful.

I wonder if they can overcome last nights defeat. The mojo is on the Cardinals side for sure. The only thing Astros have going for them are their two top pitchers who are set to take the mound in the next two games. That and the fact that they need to win only one game of the remaining two to reach the World Series.

Disruptive teammates

At my previous job, a colleague in my group (I'll call him N~) was quite difficult to work with. He had a difficult time communicating and we had a tough time understanding him. It was not his accent - he spoke decent English - but rather the way he thought that put him at odds with the rest of the group. Often times it seemed to me and others that he argued over mundane matters. When he spoke at meetings, there was a feeling that the points he raised were obscure. It was fairly obvious that nobody paid much attention. Most people avoided N~ like a leech and often, he cut a lonely figure at company events and the cafeteria.

I find it easy to communicate with most folks, but I found my former colleague to be an exception. We sat in opposite cubicles and the few conversations we had were uncomfortable at best. N~'s thoughts were so disruptive that even a simple conversation about the weather turned into an excruciating exchange. But when it came to technical issues, I thought he had some cogent and powerful ideas that the team would benefit from.

I bring this up because I subscribe to the view that a team always benefits from people who think differently from the crowd and therefore challenge the conventional view. Every team I think benefits from a contrarian view that challenges status quo.

That is easier said than done, because groups tend to form around people who think alike and behave the same. N~ thought differently and was excluded from the group. And the group just did not take his views seriously.

Cut to my current job and I have a similar situation. I~ has a PhD and is a solid engineer. She is thorough and good at what she does. But her views are often disruptive. She won't toe the party line without questioning its merits and highlighting some of its weaknesses. When she speaks, most people turn a deaf ear. To my boss' credit, he gives her a fair and patient hearing.

Again I~ is the contrarian in the group. Her approach to doing Quality Assurance (QA) is vastly different from the rest of the folks on the team. She tests software by using it in ways our customers in the field would. Traditional QA seldom ventures into that area.

I~ works for my team. She is a tough resource to manage and a huge time sink. But I think it would be a big mistake to discount the work she does just because she is difficult to get along with.

Picasa review

A friend replaced his windows desktop with a Mac G5. He showed me the photo editing software iPhoto on it and I was mightily impressed. It is a cool photo editor, rich with features and extremely easy to use. Unfortunately Apple makes iPhoto only for Mac's. People have been clamouring for a Windows edition, but so far Apple hasn't budged.

Another friend recommended Picasa as the closest thing to iPhoto on Windows. You can download it from Google. I played with it this weekend and the first thing I noticed was that it eats up a lot of memory. You'd be well advised to have a half gig of RAM if not more. My old desktop that I rarely use has 256 MB RAM and it took at least 40-50 seconds to startup.

Picasa is much better than the software that comes with digital cameras. On startup it immediately scans your system and locates all image files including movies. You can turn that option off and run scans manually.

The timeline feature is nifty and neatly arranges photographs in a chronological order. It was amazing to see how many pictures I have compiled over the past four years.

The slideshow option is cool and you can play music while it loops through a bunch of photographs. By default, the slideshow displays low resolution images. If you choose high resolution images, it will consume more system resources and slow down your system further. By default, the images are full screen and I could not find a way to change the display settings. I would have liked the option to adjust the size of the photograph being displayed. I did find a workaround where I accidentally hit Ctrl-Alt-Del. I cancelled out of it and returned to the screen. Instead of full screen images, the pictures were 1/3rd the size and centered. It made for much better viewing.


I prefer the slideshow in iPhoto which has a movie style format, where photographs slide in and out and the software manages to zoom in on the main subject matter of the photograph.

I tried making a movie of a trip to India which contained about 150 photographs. The movie was in AVI format. For some reason, I was unable to run it. I suspect it was because my system was heavily loaded.

All in all, Picasa is a decent alternative to iPhoto on Windows. Of course I'd jump if Apple were to release iPhoto on Windows in the future.

Taking pictures in Bangalore

A German friend is visiting Bangalore on business. Here's a snippet of our conversation on IM:

Me: Have you been taking pictures?

He: I am taking lots of pictures; mostly of dogs!

That last line made me laugh out loud!

Crash

Watched "Crash" this weekend. Great movie! It was a toss up between "Talk to her" and "Crash". Both came highly recommended by friends. But the store didn't have any copies of "Talk to her" left. I am glad they did not; a friend who watched it was underwhelmed.

Great art forces you to question your beliefs. It leaves you a little less certain, confused, even a little less sure of yourself. Life is easy when you can make a choice between good and evil and black and white. The differences are stark, the choices are clear and the decisions uncomplicated. Life is rarely that easy. There are more shades of grey than black and white.

And that is what I liked about Crash; it made me question my beliefs. I won't be surprised if it gets an Oscar nomination. A thumping two thumbs up!