Courtesy this site.

Tags: comic, computer.

Tags: comics, smbc.

I was having some problems recently with my Nokia headset, so I went to their service shop to deposit it for fixing. They handed me a job sheet, on which particulars of my repair were printed. On the reverse of this was a long list of Terms and Conditions. I was reading them lying on the sofa under the fan, cooling off after returning home. It was a string of the usual unfriendly, intimidating talk you usually find on any Terms and Conditions, but when I came to clause 10, I stopped for a while. This is what was written:

10. RT (Ramdev Telecom, the service shop) is not liable for any delays, non-performance, failure or non delivery of the products due to contingencies arising from any force majeure such as acts of God, storm, earthquake, accident, strikes, lockout, industrial dispute, labour trouble, transportation embargo, imminence or the existence of any state emergency, war, civil-commotion, riot, in ability to obtain any material refusal of license, approval imposition of sanctions or any measure taken by government which renders it impossible or impractical for RT to perform, supply service or deliver the product to the customer.

What act of God, I ask, might be directly inflicted to hinder the repair of my Nokia headset? What the fuck are they talking about? And then I try to imagine the storm and earthquake bit, and the war,…

1Life.

Tags: nokia, service, clause

You humankind, you put too much weight on success. It’s not your fault entirely, that’s how you’re wired. You need to eat, live, have a shelter and make a few babies. And if possible, degrees, a phone, a car, a vacation… of course you need to believe in success and set much store by it. Worship it. Not that you shouldn’t, but you have found one of the wrong ways to approach it. I think so.

You know what I think the problem is?  I think you take success as a certificate that you worked hard. That’s not a problem, but sometimes, you know, it isn’t so. There are sometimes dirty little hidden stories behind success. These are not much of a bother, though. What is, is another connotation that is intermingled with this notion. That bit does bother me.

And it is that failure is often taken as a certificate that you didn’t work hard.

That’s wrong.

I really don’t want to be talking that cliché, believe me. I have something else to say.

What I think is that in any particular pursuit or effort, success as I would like to think of it, or failure for that matter, is accomplished a little distance before the end of the effort, or the announcement of the result, or whatever is usually taken as verdict as to whether one has succeeded or failed. It is accomplished while you’re still on the job, and you’re knee deep in the middle of it, or just clutching your way out of it and seeing light at the end of the tunnel. That’s when it happens. You either succeed or you fail. And yes, you feel it. You know it. But you humankind, you pathetic flock, you push that feeling away, feeling that it’s not important. What’s important is that certificate at the end, issued — and this is funniest — by someone else, someone who had no hand in that effort, someone who didn’t get in there and get their hands dirty and doesn’t really know what they’re talking about, someone who entered the scene only conveniently late in the proceedings, and on a high chair of some sort from which they do all their surveying. Now, let’s not be unfair, not always is this other person like this, but it doesn’t matter what they are like.

What matters is when in the middle of your job you suddenly get that good feeling that yes, you’ve been doing something worthwhile, and you can do it, and you have worked your pants off for it. And you’ve succeeded then. Even if you don’t win the competition or whatever. And if in the middle of it the job seems too easy, and you aren’t so serious, or you are, but your plan failed to materialize the way you would’ve wanted, you have failed right there, even if you get the first prize.

The pity is that it doesn’t seem to work this way for you, humans. You don’t like it this way. You always feel the need to appoint an external factor to decide the verdict (this part always makes me feel a little tickling at the base of my stomach), and maybe that’s not so bad or you’d have problems of all sorts, but hey, keep that guy for administrative purposes. You just put too much weight on what he says. Success and failure of the kind I talked about can’t be decided by him. He’s just not in the equation.

Anyway, that’s your way and it can’t be changed. You’ve all just settled down this way and no one ever really thought of changing this and even if someone did it’d be an alien concept and wouldn’t shake down too well. But when you don’t succeed, you start thinking along these lines, don’t you, that perhaps the effort should have had a greater say in the matter than the ultimate verdict? Perhaps success or failure is decided a little earlier? Internally? And then you vocalize these things, in your different words, sitting down in front of your neighbour over a cup of coffee and telling her how your son didn’t get the scholarship doesn’t mean he didn’t work hard. And while you’re telling her of all the ways your son worked hard, you start to wonder whether the words that are coming out of your lips are starting to sound like excuses, maybe?...

And the more weight you give to success, the less, obviously, is the chance of succeeding. It follows logically, see, when you invert that sentence. So you see, the more you worship success, the greater will be the number of failures. And you, humankind, will be forced to glorify failure every once in a while and in small conversations, put in a little word here and there about the effort.

That is your punishment.

1Life.

Tags: success, failure.

At the heart of everything is that

I don't know exactly what, or why I bother to speak

And I feel no urge to change the topic now

You will never know who I was, nor do I want that fact to spread

When you lift this out of the dark mouth of this dreamy abyss,

Shake loose the dirt of centuries over the plaque

And hold it to the amazing sunlight I have already forgotten

I shall not rise again through my writing

For I wish not to be disturbed

But a veritable treasure this will be, I am sure,

A relic, of historic value, but the personal little strains that

I write this for, now,

Will be suppressed and forgotten

That is how you are

A myopic generation, refusing to see what's right in front of you

because it's right in front of you

And no one ever taught you how to see such things.

Fine, I shall remain a relic, and though I quiver at the thought of being hung for the public display,

I shall be long gone by then, that is my only consolation.

Come find me out, after a thousand years, pull me out of this cave

And do with me whatever you wish to,

I don't care, for this will not be me any more when you pluck it

I am taking the train tonight.

1Life.

Tags: relic, random.

Day 628

L Day 628, man.

N So we stuck through, did we?

L No, N. that doesn’t imply we stuck through. But it looks like — touch wood — we’re having fair weather.

N Well, happiness is what matters. When the sun shines, you kind of strangely forget about what it’s like when it doesn’t. And it’s not good when it doesn’t. So we don’t want that.

L Right. N?

N Yeah?

L We been out of touch.

N Why?

L Dunno, maybe because I didn’t need you, maybe never did? It’s easier saying those things now, you know.

N You mean you are happier?

L Strangely, N, I’m not sure. It’s like TV. Everything’s TV. Nothing matters too much.

N That’s bad, I guess.

L Yeah, but I ain’t feeling any urgency or any direct discomfort because of it. It’s just a sense that this shouldn’t be right that makes me worry about it. Not too much, though.

N It’s time you got another.

L You think so?

N I think so.

L N, you told me to not give up hope.

N L, we both know that doesn’t matter any more. We turned out fools. And we didn’t really have it in our hands.

L That’s why, N, I’m not feeling motivated to go into all this again, where you are always at risk of turning out stupid, and paying a lot in damages. It’s just that I invest so much… And besides,…

N Besides?

L Besides, I don’t feel an urgency like that. If a situation comes by, I’ll judge it and decide.

N But who’ll turn off the TV meanwhile?

L I guess college will.

N Man, college. That sounds so… so new.

L Yeah. Me. In college. Time slips by, man, irreversibly. Not all of that is good.

N You, the eternal moaner.

L I see reason.

N I see reason to not talk about it now.

L Right, me too. You know, it’s a hard job keeping up with all your friends.

N Count the good ones.

L Can’t. Not here. Bad idea, N.

N Some you will shed.

L Funny, isn’t it, how at one time I wouldn’t be convinced that I’d ever get over it?

N You’ll do the same thing if it happens again.

L Dragon-shit, man. Don’t you wish it.

N I think you’ll be careful.

L Will be, but I don’t know how effective that will be. You don’t get to know how you’ll turn out in a situation till you are in that situation.

N It’s a museum into yourself, isn’t it?

L Not quite as glamorous as all that.

N Hmm.

L How ’bout we put up the graphs?

N Who’ll know what they are?

L They don’t have to. It’s my blog, I do what I like.

N Okay.

L In alphabetical order.

N That’s the way they are, anyway.

L/N.

A12090605 / 140515.

Tags: none

When I used to be in class VIII or so, we had Visual Basic in our Computer Practical syllabus. I eventually took a strong liking to it and even brought home monster-size books on VB. During this time, I created a number of applications on VB. The best of them, a fully customizable multi-step calculator, was lost in a disk crash. However, today I opened an old backup CD to look for WinRAR Archiver and stumbled upon a few such applications I had stored away on the CD. It was all very nostalgic.

The first is a puzzle game I had created, the type where you have to move tiles around a grid to form a picture, only I used numbers, so that there are many formations you can try to make. This is the link to that application:

The second is the first version of the calculator. The history behind it is that we already had a calculator on our syllabus, a really stupid one whose code we simply had to copy from our textbook. It could do just the four primary functions, and without a great deal of accuracy (it used only a few decimal points). I improved upon it a little, and brought out my version, which you can download here:

Then I worked a hell lot more on it, and produced something that no man has ever set his mortal eyes on, but, as I said, it’s lost now.

I remember I cried the night it happened.