I clocked out at 12:30am last night and I felt “guilty” about it. Why? I left the office at about 7:15pm today and I felt “guilty” about it. Why? I worked about 70 hours this week and I’m planning to work Saturday and Sunday. Why? If anything, the events of the week have made it clear to me that they don’t get it and I shouldn’t be working this hard. So… why? ...
The traffic here is out of control, and, with the introduction of the 1 lakh car (which I think is fantastic, btw) it’s bound to get a lot worse, at least in the near term. For a while I thought a big part of the problem was the lack of traffic signals at most intersections and a complete lack of order on the road. The heterogeneous traffic mixed with the all out war mentality creates an extremely hostile environment. ...
On Thursday, Amazon announced SimpleDB, “a web service for running queries on structured data in real time.” As many others have noted this more or less completes the cloud computing stack that Amazon has been steadily building, ever since they launched the Simple Storage Service (S3), early last year. Where their earlier releases (S3, Elastic Compute Cloud [EC2], Flexible Payments, Mechanical Turk) commoditized much of the infrastructure required for building scalable applications, SimpleDB (SDB) and the earlier Simple Queue Service (SQS) are bringing cutting edge technologies and design patterns to the masses. First they made it cheap and easy to have a cluster; now they’ve made it cheap and easy to use a cluster! Amazing. ...
Ever have a moment where you suddenly stop and ask yourself: how did I get here, to this exact moment in time? For me it’s almost an out of body experience where I look [down] at myself in a particular instant and I try to work backwards to the events that led up to it. It seems to be happening a lot, of late, and it always comes back to the same question. Two weeks ago, I was sitting in the domestic terminal at the Bombay airport, reading a book of no consequence and listening to my iPod while waiting for my flight to Pune when I suddenly looked up and thought to myself, “what the fuck am I doing here? How the hell did I get here?” ...
My boss asked me a question recently, which really got me thinking: would it make any difference if I [my boss] wore slacks and a shirt every day? That is, do outward appearances at the office really matter that much? Could dressing a little better mean being taken more seriously? It took me a really long time to answer the question, because to me it doesn’t affect how I judge a person’s performance, and it was difficult for me to look at the question objectively and realize that not everyone thinks the way I do. Everyone has their own criteria for judging performance or value. Which got me thinking about meritocracies and why they don’t work in business. ...
As far as film adaptations go, I thought it was pretty excellent. It pretty much played out exactly as I pictured it when I read it in January. Of course, the movie had already been out for some time when I read it so I knew who was playing the various characters but I pictured Robert Langdon to be an older, bearded version of Tom Hanks, not the young, long-haired version in the movie. A little more like Indiana Jones than Nic Cage in National Treasure, I suppose. ...
11:31:48 PM chuan: funny 11:32:02 PM chuan: eating thai curry and watching tokyo drift in india
I woke up this morning and there it was. Now I know why I kept thinking something was falling on my head last night! It wasn’t just my imagination…