Spam and more spam...

There was an entire debate running around in student community at the ISB about spam. Not the food variety (devara devara, would go some in the veggie population) but the Monty Python inspired email kind. The debate started off as a few random mails to the general mailing list, and then turning into a series of accusations and counter-accusations involving alleged spammers^[1] The core of the issue remained - what constitutes spam?

No, I'm not going to go into that. But I definitely shall provide a dispassionate perspective on why those accusations (the counter ones as well) are a bunch of bollocks. Not by any logical dissertation. Nay, I just think that anyone with a low threshold of spam-tolerance has:

(a) never been an engineer
(b) never lived in a boys hostel, where people chase each other from one end to the other of a corridor shouting "abey M****C***!!"
(c) never worked in companies where some 'valid points' raised at meetings are more inane than the most boring spam. Spam then become preferable in these cases, temporarily being raised to the status of a miniature bestseller.
(d) never owned an email account before

The last point is worth noting. I mean, we are in a day and age when most web-based email providers invest heavily in finding spam and filtering it out for you. Representative of the things that they manage to hide from us are messages like "Grow a massive package in your pants today" and "Any of these elegant women's watches will be a great gift to your fair one, mother, or girlfriend!"^[2] After all this, how could it be possible that people are still sensitive to spam?

Needless to say, an underground sense of humour also developed. There were the custodians of morality and all things good - proclaiming what was spam and declaiming all those who did. In the face of such damning authority, what power does the common man have? Well, the same kind that Laxman gave us every morning in the newspaper, and challenging the spam-guard came a one-liner sent to the entire student list: "This is not spam". Funny.

Overall, it's all about tolerance. Live and let spam. And that is what points (a), (b) and (c) would have reinforced and reaffirmed. I have great respect for a specific category of people: engineers, who have lived away from mummy-and-daddy, eating food that cows would not touch, and living with a bunch of half-crazed other guy engineers. That sort of situation tends to inculcate a lot of patience, spirituality, and a ton of horniness. I half-believe that tech companies take HR interviews only to try and figure out whether you are a potential spam-fundamentalist before they hire you (they wouldn't want to destroy the work culture of email-forwarding, would they?)


Sigh. The song says it all: Oh, when will they ever learn, oh, when will they ever learn...



[1] Yours truly was counted in for sending "too many emails regarding the theatre club". Whatta load of crap...

[2] If you're wondering how I know all this, then it's because I regularly go through my spam. No, no, not for finding any non-spam messages that were inadvertantly marked as spam (a Type-I error I think). I do it to understand the sheer creativity of the human race. My spam folder is a representative sample (yes, I've been doing too much statistics) of number of out-of-work third rate novelists being put to better (and probably more profitable) use, who would otherwise have churned up works like "One Night at the call centre". Reaffirms my faith. To quote my Eco prof - "Cathartic".

Nahiii....!!!!

My laptop hard disk crashed. It's gone!! Now how will I while away my time at home... Sigh!


PS: It was a good laptop. Served me well. RIP my friend... you shall be remembered.

On a random day of movie watching...

Yes, I watched it. Yes, I know... I don't usually watch these types of movies, but I really wanted to see what they could do with 3 chipmunks and some serious animation.

Verdict? It's cute. Nice timepass, especially if you are watching it with your girlfriend. Dave is bugging - he obviously doesn't know how to act or get variations in his expressions and tone (his constant expression being that of exasperation). Fortunately, not too much of him going around in the movie. If you concentrate on the 'lil-'uns then you should be just fine...




And then I went and watched Men In Black - II. Oh yeah, I had one crazy movie day yesterday. MIB-II isn't half as bad as it was made out to be. Tommy Lee Jones is amazing. Will Smith... is Will Smith. Rosario Dawson looks very cute in the movie, but that lasted only till I went through IMDb. Plot analysis: nah... I'm just kidding. You're not meant to watch this as a serious movie, analyzing the sub-twists and the loopholes. This movie (like a lot of others in its genre) is meant purely for style. It's about aliens, a dog that talks, and an interplanetary war for god's sake - do you really want to know more than that. To truly appreciate this movie, you have to keep your brain on standby. Preferably watch it the first thing in the morning, when slightly groggy.


Take a Sunday off, and watch these two in the morning. Follow it up with Mystery Men (ooh.. god level chaat), The Fifth Element, and The Devil Wears Prada in the afternoon. End it with a sobering The Lord of War in the evening. Now you know what I have been up to all these days. And this is just one day...

PS: The Lord of War... oooh.. still kickass. Saw it with Bra at Abesh's place and it rocked. Saw it again with Bra after a few hours, at Abesh's place, and it still rocked. Now in Denmark after a whole day of random movie-watching, and it still rocked. It seems to be pretty rare DVD-wise so you could watch "The life of a bullet" on YouTube. Might convince you to find the whole movie.


*Images thanks to DvdVcdPlaza and Movie-List.com/Blog

The 1-session Guide to Sarcastic Finesse : a practical methodology

Good going brainiac! Of course, there is nothing easier to learn and apply than sarcasm, is there?








PS: You could go ahead and read the title and the main content line again. Do leave a comment if get it eventually...

PPS: Strangely ironical that this might actually achieve what's promised

Compiling!

The ultimate programmer excuse: compiling. So true, so very true. It's tremendous how many times I have given that as an excuse to take a snooze after a heavy lunch. It's probably the most reliable way to shirk after sutta and coffee. And since I don't do much of those two, I do a lot of builds/re-compiles :)

Discovering the British...

Of late, I have made some accidental discoveries. Mostly related to the British. And though I was surprised in the beginning, it did make a bit of sense later on.

My first discovery was with popular fiction. Science fiction and fantasy to be precise. There are a surprising number of good British authors out there that no one really hears about. Everybody knows about Sidney Sheldon and John Grisham, but who really has read Jonathan Stroud or Philip Pullman? It's difficult to compare them really, but the point of the matter is that The Lord of the Rings was written by a Brit.

Then came, rather slowly, the appreciation for some British actors. Paul Bettany is one. Have seen him in a few movies (Wimbledon.. simple story, interesting setting.. tennis.. who would have thought..), noticed him, and gave a pause to try and register him before the protagonist rushed on the screen and occupied the whole of it. But it wasn't until I saw "A Knight's Tale" that I actually took the effort to find out his name and more about him. And this is what I found on IMDb:

Writer/director Brian Helgeland wrote the role of Chaucer in A Knight's Tale (2001) specifically for Paul. He "refused" to do the movie without him. The production companies did not think Bettany was known well enough, Helgeland thought that if he backed down on his choice of Bettany, he would have to back down on everything else.

Made absolute sense to me. The movie is nonsense. A whole lot of fun with Queen's "we will rock you" in medieval England, but nonsense nonetheless. And in the middle of all this, the one character that stood out quite memorably was that of Chaucer.

I wonder how is it that the Sidney Sheldon is better known than Tolkien. Is the American PR machine unbeatable? Or are they shrewder - with fame a welcome side effect of writing for the common man? Dunno. I enormously appreciate the British comic style and their television comedies. I guess I have to extend the recognition to movie actors and books as well.

Damn, I'm getting old..

"Everything that has a beginning has an end."

The Matrix Revolutions*

And the "end" in this case is just the beginning of a sequence of such ends. The sad part is that the only reason it is not 100% true is because I don't own a car. Maybe when Tata's 1-lakh car finally hits the market, I can officially retire to an old age home**.



*Sounds like a really cool start to a blog post only when you have "Clubbed to Death (Rob D)" streaming in through your headphones - which is what is happening right now.

** And now it's Colin Hay's "Overkill"

Denmark winters...

... here have finally paid off - sipping chilled Coke while roaming around is now feasible. Though this might sound like a trivial reason to rejoice (especially with larger reasons like Christmas looming around the corner), but in order to truly appreciate this you should try the same thing in the sweltering Bangalore summer*.

The basic assumption here being that Coke must be served chilled. It tastes crap any other way. Gulping down half a litre of coke in a minute just so that you can drink it cold is just as useless. Coke is meant to be contemplated, in the same way that wine connoisseurs go about their wine, and is a great accompaniment for long walks with no purpose. This combination, however, is practically impossible in Bangalore. You can contemplate with your large glass of Coke in an air-conditioned environment with a lot of ice at hand, or you can walk aimless and Coke-less all you want around IndiraNagar's 80ft road. Together... umm, difficult.

The winter here solves one problem. Staying outside longer just makes your drink colder! Can you possibly find anything cooler (pun intended) than that? Of course, roaming around for too long will just give you frostbite or some such winter-related phenomenon. And there is only so much that a Southie can adapt. Still... item 1 out of 2 - check!!



* Ok, ok... so Bangalore does not have a sweltering summer so to speak, but if it's so bad in Bangalore then imagine Delhi and Chennai. Also, I just realized that roaming around in Bangalore at the height of the summer season will never be an enjoyable experience - with or without the chilled Coke.