The Mute Oracle

It’s impossible not to compare the Motorola Droid with Apple’s iPhone. Verizon hyped the Droid as the iPhone killer. After spending a week using the Droid while at home, on the road and at work, it is clear to me that the Droid is not the iPhone killer. But, leaving it at that is selling the Droid short. The iPhone is not the Droid killer either. The iPhone’s OS is far more polished, and has tremendous brand charisma. The iPhone’s usability is vastly superior to the Droid’s. So is it’s hardware design. However, these are the only claims to superiority that the iPhone has over the Droid.

So what stood out about the Droid? Read my full review here.

I was in California this past weekend, and ended up taking quite a few photographs. One of the side-effects of obsessive photography is that you tend to become a perfectionist. Of the hundreds of photos you end up taking, only a few appeal to you. Presented below are four photographs I took at the Malibu beach pier. You may click on them to head over to where they are stored on Flickr to get better resolution images.

Fisherman on Pier 1

This fisherman stood motionless for a long period of time. At first I thought he was asleep, but the basket of fish at his feet suggested he was patiently waiting for the next catch.

Fisherman on Pier 2

The man with the straw hat caught a sting ray. He took the hook out of it and gently dropped it back into the sea. When asked, he stated that the fish was too small. And added shaking his head – that the law is the law.

Fisherman on Pier 3

Along the left side of the pier, there was an array of fishing rods. All of it belonged to the man in this photograph. The fish didn’t stand a chance against him, he said with mock grandoise.

Waitress and Boy

On the opposite deck from where I sit, I spy a pretty waitress dressed like the 50s. She could easily pass for Penelope Cruz. She sets the table, and calls the awaiting customers downstairs. As she walks down, a boy runs up the stairs past her.

“I am in love with too many women to be with just one,” I quote, as I fight the unpleasant feeling in my gut that could either be good scotch sitting bad, or proverbial butterflies which accompany the accompaniment of beautiful women such as the one accompanying me. For a man who loathes the idea of uncontrollable emotions, I seem to be caught in the throes of a wild passion. My nostrils are flared, I do not feel the chill of the October wind, and as I glimpse a reflection of myself in the glass window behind her, I can’t deny that I look strangely pale.

Damn! She sees right through my bullshit. This doesn’t bode well. I do not wish to bed her – that is below me. I wish to dazzle her. She considers me with a wry smile, pours a glass of wine for herself, and drinks it slowly till it’s empty. She leaves the glass dangling between her fingers, toying with it. “Are you in love with me?” she asks. Of course I am. I love every woman who shows an interest in me.

“Maybe I am.” I leave it at that – a dignified that.

We’ve been here for almost three hours. The waiter wears a scowl. We are the only people sitting on the sidewalk tables outside the restaurant, and he had to bring us our booze in the cold. This guy doesn’t deserve her, I think he thinks. I feel strangely emboldened by the idea that he could be jealous of me. I sip my poison, light up my cigarette, take a deep drag and let out a long, fading streak of smoke.

“I don’t want to waste my time on damaged goods,” she says coldly, disapproving of my habit. I take another drag to make a point. I hold it in, savoring the slight burning in my lungs, the nicotine absorbing into my blood, and her mock-disgusted look. “Then don’t,” I say, letting out another long exhalation of smoke. Her mock-disgust turns to a look of shock.

Scorned. She gets up, drops a forty on the table and walks away. I leave my forty and walk the other way. The waiter picks up the money, pockets his tip and smiles to himself, smug in his correct assessment of how the evening would turn out.

She was too easy for me. I’d lost interest. I finish my cigarette, pull up the collar of my misogynistic narcissism, and walked into the light rain that came out of nowhere. The dark, cold, shower of denial swallows me.

Yesterday, a few of us gathered at a friend’s place to take photos of DC from his rooftop. We had a short barbecue before clouds and heavy winds put a stop to it – chairs flew, wine spilled, and a well cooked steak fell 13 floors to the street below. Just before the rain, after clearing whatever was left of our barbecue from the roof, I managed to get some pictures of ominous clouds. I took them using a borrowed 10-12mm Fish-eye lens. The wide-angle lens, and cloud-diffused sunlight produced better results than I expected.

The real fun came later, at night, in the rain. While everyone photographed the city spread out all around us, I decided to photograph them, and the rooftop. Most of them feature the city lights of DC in the background – glittering and out of focus. The rain, the point lights and the general great feeling of being in great company produced some interesting photographs.

He could spend hours, even days composing the perfect sentence, he said. And it showed. He handed me the result of all the time he spent staring at his screen, stroking his keys, coaxing ideas, stringing words, to form cohesive and delightfully playful sentences. It amounted to a single page. As I took it from his printer and put on my glasses to read, he told me that I should keep an open mind. He told me that it was a novel.

I asked him when the rest of it would be done. He smiled, carefully weighed his reply, and said – you don’t understand, this is just it. It’s a whole novel in a single page. I read the page. It was a stunning, haunting, flawless work of literature. He did not let me keep it. He said it was a work in progress.

This was a few months ago. Since then Georgie had managed to reduce his single page book into a half page novel. He called me when it was done. He was quite proud of his accomplishment. He said that he would mail it to me. Sadly, before he did, Georgie’s house caught fire. The PC that had the only copy was destroyed. Georgie now has amnesia.

A couple of weeks back, while bitching about the trials and travails of being a Project Manager, my boss told me that he had been the happiest when all he had to do was code. He also winked and stated that I should enjoy my happy coding days while it lasts, because soon I will be given more responsibilities.

Sadly, I hate everything about my job that doesn’t revolve around me sitting alone in my office and working in my IDE without a care in the world. I have deadlines, and instructions. Beyond that, I am left on my own. And I love that. The moment I have to make a presentation, or write a piece of documentation, or oversee a junior programmer, I feel a strange suffocating sensation inside my chest.

One of my good friends at work told me – “the more you stay here, the more they pay. And the more they pay, the more they expect you to do.” He has a point. With great power comes great responsibilities. But is it worth it?

Consider the case of Bill (can I get more generic with anonymizing my co-workers?) – he is 42, a Senior Computer Scientist at my company. He is an ivy leaguer, has worked for Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, and currently is in charge of the Advanced Technology Group at my company. He hasn’t programmed a line of code in the past 3 years. Yours truly works as a programmer at the ATG division. His greatest achievement in life – having worked on the Windows port of Mosaic v1.0.

He was as old as I am now when he worked on Mosaic. (My rant about not having done anything with my life will be discussed in another post.) But he is now stuck in a high paying job that he doesn’t enjoy very much.

The moral of the story – that a programmer is happiest when he is on the front-lines cooking the code noodle, slaying bugs with his sharp debugger, deciphering obscure function calls in legacy systems, and updating and often replacing said obscure passages with beautiful refactored haikus that on occasions give the system a significant performance boost (and an incredible sense of achievement to it’s writer). And after toiling in his sandbox, writing lyrics that only a few others will ever see (damn you source control!), he commits everything to the repository and leans back on his chair. A happy coder.

I will never give up my IDE for spreadsheets. A debugger is mightier than a spellchecker.

There is a new girl at work. How painfully obvious a reason is that for posting after such a long time? Oh well, now that I’ve gotten your attention, might as well carry on. She is not technically ‘new’. She joined a month back. But out of the crop of new-comers at work, she is definitely the most interesting – fresh out of college, major in philosophy, interested in literature and classical music. How perfect is that? The librarian chics are always the perfect kind. It’s not all that rosy a picture though. She makes her intelligence very obvious, aggressive even. This might be a good way to get your bosses to notice you. But the cocky ambitious kind don’t make for a good peer. Her reply to my “Hey, how’s the job treating you”, was a patronizing smile and a curt “great.” Bitch!

But she is cute. No denying that. And this humble blogger is mildly smitten. I wouldn’t be writing about her if I wasn’t.

The other day, I decided to act on my smitten-ness, and asked her if she’d like to grab lunch. Yes dear readers, your narrator grew a pair of balls. She said an “er… where are we going?”. I said an “I don’t know, maybe that japanese place everyone keeps talking about.” A pause. A “yes, okay.”

We met outside the building. She had brought along a couple of co-workers from her part of the building. It was awkward, I had come prepared for a different game. I was not mentally prepared to engage 3 people in conversations. I hate lunches with more than 2 co-workers. The lunch went well enough. The conversation steered through hockey, Iran, late night comedy shows, and finally landed on literature; specifically Rushdie. As some of you may know, I lay my Rushdie down quite tight. This niggah’s got some moves with that niggah’s lines biatch!

She was engaged. I could tell. She wasn’t paying much attention to the other two dimwits at the table. Once past the initial “I know more than you do” crap, we ended up having a decent conversation after all. The cloudy noon gave way to heavy rain. The dimwits had their umbrellas. I had mine. She did not have one. As we waited outside the restaurant for the rain to clear, the dimwits shifted uncomfortably. One of them finally said, “it’s getting late. I gotta get back to work.” The two left. My umbrella was too small to share.

“Why don’t you take the umbrella,” I said with a faux chivalrous voice, “I will feel terrible if I walk under one and you walk in the rain.” We both laughed. “No, seriously, there is no way I am going to walk under the umbrella if you don’t have one,” I asserted. She obliged and took it from my hand. I followed her in the rain, getting drenched to the bone. We reached our building. She gave me back my umbrella and said, “Thanks.”

Though she did not say it – and she doesn’t quite have to say it anyway, what with me being so full of myself ‘n all – I knew that I had struck quite the impression on her. You see, I am part of a dying breed – portly gentlemen with impeccable tastes, balls of steel, and chivalry to rival a certain misguided man from La Mancha. “I enjoyed the lunch very much, we should do this again sometime,” she said. “Yes we should. Bye,” I did not linger. Niggah please, I am far too smooth for that.

Another video from the Memorial Day weekend. This one was shot at Charlie’s place. He is getting shipped off to Iraq for his second tour of duty. A big chunk of my family from around New Jersey showed up for this barbeque. The evening began with light rain. But soon the rain vanished, and the sun came out. Everything looked very colorful.

Note: Vimeo doesn’t allow HD video embedding. But you can view the video in HD if you click this.

I spent the Memorial Day weekend with my cousins in NYC. The video above was taken at the apartment where we stayed on Saturday. Thanks to my cousin, I now have a place to crash when I visit the Big Apple. And it’s smack dead in the middle of the city too.