Creative Ponderings
Why do men's shirts have buttons on the right side and women's shirts, buttons on the left side?
The reasons are many-fold:- Because the designers couldn't figure out what the "wrong" side was, so they were forced to put the buttons on the only remaining side — the "left" side.
- Because the percent number of boys who are left-handed and wear shirts are greater than the percent number of girls who are right-handed and don't wear shirts.
- The designers figured that it wouldn't really matter, as once the shirts were buttoned up, they would all look the same — the buttons would be in the center.
- Girls had begun to complain as to how they couldn't button up their shirts and put on lipstick at the same time. So the designers decided to give them a break.
- The designer had the shirts aligned in the wrong direction — what was supposed to be on the left was on the right and vice versa.
- The tailor was mistakenly sitting on the wrong side of the sewing machine.
- The designers wanted to help out poor mothers a bit because they had begun to complain about how their son and daughter wore identical shirts and there was no easy way to say whose was whose.
- The designers wanted to introduce a new game in the coming Beijing Olympics — Who took the shortest time to button up the boy's buttons with girl's holes and the girl's buttons with boy's holes?
- And finally, designers have oh so totally lost their ability to think creatively, imaginatively and inventively.
Conclusion: A shirt is a shirt only if it has its buttons on the 'right' side.
If only I had known
I felt like a little schoolboy in love. I felt like I was in control of everything. I thought everybody obeyed my rules. It was rediscovery all over again.
I walked into a bus, change tightly clasped in my palm. In front of me was a partially blind man — dark black glasses hiding his eyes and a red-taped walking stick in his right armpit as he fumbled in his wallet for change. Everyone in the bus was looking at the blind man. One could sense the copious flow of pity in the atmosphere. The driver motioned the man to keep moving. He needn't have to pay. Some kind folks got up from the front row and offered their seats to this poor, blind man. All but one. One person — he was young and looked tremendously fit. He too wore dark glasses but his were stylish Ray Ban aviators. But he failed to get up even after acknowledging a poor old visually-impaired gentleman looking for a place to sit.
Anger surged within me. How could one be so selfish? I went up to this guy, my eyes glaring at his. "Who do you think you are!" I started. "Don't you know this seat is reserved for the handicapped?" My volume was beginning to increase. The whole bus was looking at us. "Get up now, and next time, try to be a little more courteous towards the helpless," I barked. I wanted to give him more of my dosage, but thought the better of myself and left it at that. I couldn't imagine someone being so impertinent and bad-mannered, especially towards an old handicapped gentleman.
If only I had known that this young man with the stylish-looking Ray Ban aviators couldn't hear me. He was not only deaf, but also dumb. If only I had known that he had just suffered a serious nervous breakdown the previous week, and had had his retinas detached from the back of his eyes. If only I had known his family was in ruins. He had no money to pay for his children's education. Those expensive glasses were gifted to him by the doctor who operated on his eyes for no cost. If only I had known his left side had been completely paralyzed by a major car accident two months ago. And his right atrium in his heart had a hole as big as a penny. It was a birth defect, the doctors informed him. Experts call him a miracle. Because only they knew that something as trivial as a sneeze could rupture his blood vessels and cause him a brain hemorrhage.
If only I had known his bleeding was internal.
If only …
Exercise Care Before, not After
A cellphone rings in her classroom, just as she was explaining the most important concept of her calculus lesson. She was outraged. "Don't you people ever understand that cellphones aren't allowed in the classroom?" she exploded. "What do you people think? School rules are a joke?" A few girls raised their eyebrows. "Next time I hear a cellphone ringing, be assured you won't see it again."
The phone keeps ringing … a monotonous, shrilly and dissonant melody.
"Now, who's cellphone is it?" she cried. "Turn it off at once, before I lose my temper!" Like she hadn't already.
From the serious looks on the faces of her students, a mixture of wild bemusement and apprehension, she realized it had been her own cellphone all along, purring along gently from the depths of her handbag.
In an other province far far away
In an ever-increasing quest to tidy up my room, I have decided to take some drastic measures as of today. But first, you must hear the inspirational story behind it.
Some people like to draw, others just doodle. But if you ransacked their room, you'd come up with reams and reams of scrap paper full of stray drawings of the strangest things ever imagined in the annals of fantasy. So many drawings of various things, from animés to full-fledged motion pictures — so many that even they themselves would not know when and under what circumstances the sketch had been pencilled. This would provide you with a fantastic opportunity to engage in some first hand paper dating based on the amount of dust gathered or based on the shy hue of a yellow that is characteristic of old newspapers.
Me, I don't like to draw or doodle or poke fun at political characters by caricaturing their noses. That's probably because I have a lot of people around me who like to comment (often criticize) my work, and that's something I could do without. The only way, I guess, to avoid that is to go to the bathroom, do my funny pencil sketches, and flush it down the toilet as I walk out a tad lighter. No, that sounds like too much effort for nothing.
Instead, I've taken to solving math puzzles and proving complex theorems and equations. The best part about this is that common people take one quick glance at your stray papers and conveniently assume you're up to something way too sophisticated for them to even mention the word comprehend. The beauty of it is that the math doesn't really have to make sense or be mathematically sound. For all we care, it could just be an amalgamation of all the math symbols and variables you've seen in solid math textbooks the size of cricket bats. All that matters is that we have something that people can't look at and go "Oh, that looks nice" or "I don't think you should have done it that way" or "This would have been so much better if you'd have pressed your pencil a wee lighter" or things to that effect. If I don't find mathematics exciting enough, I move on to physics, or chemistry, or god forbid, literature. As we speak, I take a quick glance around me, and I find a rather carelessly lying sheet of lined paper with a rough sketch of an electrolytic apparatus to gold-plate an old, rusty, brass ring. The electrolyte in question is aqueous gold nitrate AuNO3 …
Just today, I came across an intriguing puzzle that I was sure I had solved previously. I was too unmotivated to solve it again and I started hunting for the scrap of paper that had the solution to it. I knew it had to be somewhere in my room; it couldn't have sprouted a pair of feet and walked out, could it? I mobilized a search party comprising of ten chubby fingers and a pair of watchful eyes to nail this scrap paper with the solution I'm looking for, but alas, I'm done for. The moons of Jupiter are not aligned to astronomical precision.
Thus, I have taken to organizing all my scrap notes. I hope to date each one of them, file them, and embalm them for future reference, lest they decay away. Hopefully I'll have everything arranged in an orderly fashion before I vacate my bedroom and move to Ontario this fall.
Tidying up your room is real simple. Either a) chuck out everything you got out the window or b) move to a different province.
I picked the latter option.
Biological Phenomena
This morning, I woke up, and sat wondering why I hadn't taken IB Biology. Was it because I'm more of a physicist and a chemist than I am a biologist? But no, I am more interested in biology than I am in physics and chemistry put together. I think it was quite an unthoughtful decision on my part to have not taken IB Biology; I would have done well. Too bad there wasn't a Sorting Hat back then to help you choose your science streams. To put down my agony, I did take Biology over summer school, and even though I got a mark that was one point shy of a 100%, I'm still not wholly content.
My interest in Biology has its roots as far back as Grade 8. Almost all of the natural sciences studied today can be categorized as Physics, Chemistry and Biology. For us, the split happened early in Grade 8, and given no choice, we were forced to study all three sciences. I still clearly remember him, my biology teacher, who taught us for two years straight: tall, laconic and highly pluralistic in his scientific outlook. It was he who sparked my interest in this wonderful field called Biology. In a subject as sophisticated as Biology, your teacher can either make or break your passion — it is all in his hands.
His name was A. M. Shariff, and he commanded respect even before he had fully requested it. I always used to wonder why he wasn't called P. M. Shariff, given he taught Biology to us in the afternoon.
Now this Mr. Shariff requires some preliminary introduction. Once, Mr. Shariff inspired me to dream of becoming a soil specialist — in Grade 9, I spent four full months investigating the organic conversion of desert soil into rich, fertile soil fit for agriculture. He taught us about soil texture, quality, moisture management, and all sorts of random things. At the end of my shallow investigation, I realized that all the poor soil needed was a bit of humus, some elbow room, and time.
The only thing I clearly remember of him, and will probably never forget for my lifetime, is his laugh. His laugh was very characteristic: hysterical and yet derisive in an inexplicable way. He would laugh for the most unusual things. Once, he was talking about a little boy who lost his limbs in a car accident, and for some reason, he found this incident to be utterly jocular. He started laughing, and I, taking the cue, my mischievousness an integral part of me, armed by my almost unshakable desire to disrupt the class and re-route all attention to me, would laugh along with him, but in a slightly louder pitch, like a hyena that had swallowed too much ice-cream. I would steadily kick my timbre up a notch, and would continue to laugh long after Mr. Shariff had gotten bored and ceased laughing. The whole class of thirty or so students—who had hitherto been snoozing during Mr. Shariff's monotonous lecture on the organization of species, i.e. taxonomy in this highly convoluted and materialistic world, or on the symbiotic relationship between a peanut plant's root nodules and some insignificant bacteria—would immediately raise their heads from their desk like a zoo rhinoceros who had been tickled by a notorious kid in the belly area, and would also again take the cue, this time from me. My friends would do just about anything to disrupt the class; consequently, the whole class would suddenly burst out laughing as if the funniest joke in the world had just been said, and the laugh would ensue for a delectable good two minutes. Mr. Shariff would not have the slightest idea as to why we were laughing (some even crying due to the excessiveness involved in the act), or the slightest suspicion that we were laughing only to kill class time. In a sense, I was a true leader: I could harangue the classroom with my cackling laughter and make the whole class follow in heated pursuit.
What was truly amazing about Mr. Shariff was his ability to teach biology without actually teaching it. I've heard many accounts from my fellow classmates about Mr. Axel Krause, our resident IB Biology teacher. The accounts had to be definitely good, so good that there were students making postcards for him at the end of the year. But Shariff had a knack for teaching biology. I don't think he has ever heard of anything even as remote as a biology joke, a pun or an analogy that would help us understand and remember facts. His tactic to make us learn was quite simple. He'd make his lectures so boring and so insipid that you would have no other option than to just pick up the textbook and start reading it over and over again throughout the class so as to avoid hearing his lecture or to avoid dropping to the floor in your miserable sleepiness. Of course, once the textbook had been read, you pretty much knew all that you needed to know.
I was one of the few students who always looked forward to please Mr. Shariff at every opportunity. Each time he would pose a question to the class, I would be the first one to put up my hand, regardless of whether the question was easy or tough, regardless of whether my hand was tall or short, regardless of whether I knew the answer or not, and regardless of whether the answer was only a word long or an entire lecture into itself. My hand would reach high up into the air, even higher than smart little Hermione could have possibly imagined to put up in Lockhart's class. Such was my enthusiasm in his class.
How can one ever forget the day when we walked, behind Mr. Shariff's supervision, into the coveted room known as the Biology Laboratory? The biology laboratory at our school was one of the most intriguing places in the whole school — it was large and spacious, bright and airy, and the sight of the gruesome specimens placed on the window sill was tolerable, if not vomit-inducing. He showed us how to use the microscope, and soon after, he materialized a toothpick out of nowhere and started scratching the inner side of his cheek. He informed us, much to our relief, that he was going to observe his cheek cells under the powerful and impressive microscope he now had in his command. When he had prepared the sample, he asked each one of us to form a line and take turns to observe the specimen. Without a moment's hesitation, there were shouts of disgust emanating from every corner of the room. I was the bravest, if not the most imprudent, and one look through the eye piece told me Mr. Shariff's inner cheeks were made of neatly cemented brick …
Mr. Shariff is most well known for his language. His language was unimaginably formal. He would say things like "please refrain from speaking during your presence here in this classroom" when others would have simply said "Oh, just shutup." He was always polite, and he treated those who got zero out of twenty on a quiz the same way as he treated me with a twenty out of twenty. In Grade 9 when we were supposed to learn about human reproduction, he quite modestly informed us that we knew more about reproduction than he had ever hoped to teach. And for some bizarre reason, he would find simple and tasteless topics like cell division (mitosis & meiosis) more exciting than anything else, perhaps with the exception of the day when he spoke about the reproductive organs of a flower: he became so shy that the lesson had to be cancelled.
But, no, don't get me wrong here. Mr. Shariff was an amazing man. He had his head firmly placed on his shoulders, and nothing, mark me, nothing, could have made him give up biology and say, become a scuba diver or something. He always insisted on discipline and enforced it more strictly than they did in military school. And when he walked, his head was held high, a duster with some stray chalks in one hand, and a seemingly new copy of Organization of Life: A Concise Textbook for Grade 9 in the other. When he walked into our class, he would expect pin drop silence, and would see to it that all his pupils were standing in a single file in their respective rows. Only when he was thoroughly satisfied would he give us the sign, and we would all pronounce in disorganized unison: "Good Afternoon Sir." And only after all these legal formalities were we allowed to sit down. The black board would have been scrupulously tidied up by me beforehand, because I was afraid all the chalk dust might get into his lungs and choke him, resulting in our supervisor assigning us a new biology teacher. A new biology teacher was the only idea I totally feared and despised with all my heart and soul, and I would have done just about anything to save me from that unspeakable punishment, even cry.
I once dreamed of becoming an entomologist. That was both my childhood vocation as well as childhood obsession. Some tiny little fortunate insects, whose only ambition in life is to mate, soon after which they die; some baby ants, who burrow their way into the damp soil seeking a new home; the lethargic sloths, who have absolutely no notion of time; from the most primitive to the most complex — all these wonderful creatures that we classify as insects excite me for reasons I fail to understand even today. I still remember the day when a pregnant queen-ant decided to invade the privacy of my balcony and make my glamorous flower pot her new home. Her pregnancy resulted in an enormous family within just a matter of weeks. I then wanted to venture out into the world of bees, regular bees or bumble bees, I didn't care. Those crazy bees, totally unconcerned about stinging me or inflicting any sort of pain on me, and oblivious to the plastic mesh in my possession. Insects are fun. But I can't become an entomologist anymore. I lack sufficient zeal. The world of insects has become as ridiculous to me as a swarm of bees knocking on the door of a wrong hive, waiting to be let in.
Insects know no bounds. A mild breeze to us is a catastrophic twister to them.
Straight from the Desk
My Desk at Work
The possibilities of just being equipped with a camera and a digital image processor are simply endless — and the above image perfectly exemplifies the statement. The digital image processor I use is called ImageMagick and is freely available from http://www.imagemagick.org/
In a dire attempt to add some colour to this website and liven it up a shade, I have decided to go with some pictures and images like the one above. Sadly though, this one had to be B&W. Sometimes there's the exception of those nastily colourful "new" buttons that show up like full moons every now and then — watch out for them. What to say, I'm not a great fan of colours, as you could have guessed.
Someone remarked recently that this webpage of mine looks strikingly similar to a notebook. Well, of course! It is a notebook in case you haven't noticed! That was my intention in the first place when I commenced structuring the CSS from scratch. This way, I won't be placed too far from my dear notebooks, and can therefore save myself from any mental trauma that may arise due to a Severe Acute Absence-Of-Books Syndrome. All my books, save a fat calculus textbook reserved for casual bedtime reading, have been packed up for the summer, and I dream of a day …
I have a dream, that one day, I will be provided with the strength and fortitude of character, to open my books, and peruse them carefully, and not have to lend them to crazy gizmos, such as my closet locker.
Dig Cam Perspectives Out!
Yes! I finally got the collage up without ado. Super! Thanks to Picasa for creating the collage.
The collage consists of 86 random pictures taken with my Casio Exilm
camera. Basically, I went through the hundreds of pictures in my
~/dig_cam folder and nit-picked every single photo I liked on
first viewing. The pictures I like the most (in that order) are:
- A gaping Graeme (gG)
- A Graeme showing off a marker bought from the UBC bookstore
- A Brittney and an Annie — hands on each other's shoulders
- The gravel
- My home television — photo looks really cool when seen separately
- An oblivious Asia
- A light bulb in a cardboard box — Physics Group 4
- Director of Photography (not really a photo, but who cares)
- The Big 3 (Mr. Klassen, Mrs. Birsan and Mr. Krause)
- The Big 4 (not visible — Graeme, Manny, Tony and Luke)
If you want to do yourself a favour, visit the page with Firefox or any other Gecko-based browser such as MozNGW, Camino, K-Meleon (awesome replacement for Firefox), Epiphany, Galeon, DocZilla, and the likes.
Five points for those who can make the longest list of tags to index the collage. I may want to put it up on Fickr, for instance.
Brandishing my nose
Dear All,
Yes, I have not written anything for a long time. Yes, my garrulousness has escaped me. Yes, I have successfully graduated from high school without bruises. Yes, I am free now. Yes, I have been hearing rumours through the grapevine:
"Whatsup with Rajesh? Haven't seen him in a while..."
"Shhh, I believe he's gone back to India for good."
"Oh my, what a drain on Canada's human resources!"
No, no, I am here, well and fine, my arms and legs all intact, thank you. Save your presumptuousness for a later day, you temerarious little concluders.
If I have been foolish enough to expect my summer vacation to be work-free, it would all be my fault, and my fault only. The start of summer could not have been as busy as the good ol' days of April and May 2005, but justifiably busy all the same. I am now doing an intern with Novare Res Media Inc., a three-year old web development company, employed as their PHP programmer plus database architect. At times, I take the liberty to be their official suggestion maker also. Our head office (snicker) is a sprawling yet cozy studio-style, two-storey apartment, fully furnished with kitchenette and balcony, situated on the intersection between 6th and Granville. The balcony deserves special recognition as it is a calm and quiet place where one can enjoy an amazingly breathtaking vista of the Vancouver skyline. Besides, we're on the fifth floor, so that gives us an altitudinal bonus.
The job is all nice and dandy, but the deadlines are as tight as a sumo wrestler's underwear. I have air conditioning in my cabin to keep me cool over the next two months. I spend three hours on transit everyday, staring out the windows, watching people sleep, or reading translated works of Gabrielle Roy. But reading on transit makes me nauseous, so instead I settle to observe little Korean girls whispering amongst themselves in a dialect I fail to understand, and all of a sudden, without due caution, they burst out in a gale of laughter which only makes me want to look elsewhere. The scenery isn't breathtaking either. Every time I'm in a good mood for some visual food, I find myself in a tunnel at Columbia or Granville. If anybody has any useful suggestions as to how I could productively spend my commute from Gateway to Granville without breaking the law, I'm all ears.
I now sit once again in front of an NEC monitor, appreciating the current state of affairs, and how speedily and splendidly the last couple of months have flown. I don't like the monitor anymore, maybe because I've been spoilt by the Philips flat-screen monitor I have been offered at work. First, the IB exams. The monitor at home gives me a splitting headache after just three hours. Then, the easy, but at the same time, difficult provincial examinations. The new monitor at work works well with my new lenses equipped with anti-glare protection. And soon after that graduation ceremonies and all the religious gala that follow. If I were asked to buy something for myself, it would be a lovely 17" plasma monitor. Finally, we got back our IB grades early this month; didn't do exceptionally well, but I'll still live. I turned eighteen soon after that, and boy, wasn't that unexciting. I have set my eyes on that plasma monitor.
Today, I am telecommuting, which, trust me, is ridiculously fun. You can engage in all sorts of things that one cannot, or does not, usually engage in an office environment: play games, sing nursery rhymes to yourself, go to sleep mid-way, just to name a few.
Our home seems surprisingly peaceful and serene today. Clad in velvety black slacks and lightening white shorts, I have but the slightest idea as to what I am to do. I can only hear the gentle hum of a chainsaw trying to prune a tree. Don't these people understand how bad an idea it is to prune trees in the summer? Where are your gardening books, my fellow green-thumbed gardeners?
So what's on my agenda for the day? Nothing too occupying, but at the same time, not a day to laze off either.
8:00 Wake up
8:30 Get up
8:35 Brush + Shower
9:30 Breakfast
10:00 FTP novareres stuff
11:30 Shopping with mum at Superstore
12:30 Make a blog post
1:30 Lunch
3:30 Explore MagpieRSS and RubyOnRails
4:30 Get started on next short story (after having been consumed by the likes
of J.D. Salinger and Edgar Allan Poe, I
have resolved to write at least one
short story every two years for my own
reading pleasure)
5:00 Tea with biscuits
7:00 Go down to the gymnasium and do something that makes you sweat
profusely
8:00 Start working on the profile management module
9:30 Dinner
10:30 Sleep
I have an uncanny ability to deviate from my schedule. Let's see if I can't do that today.
So, what's been pulling my strings lately?
- PHP: I've been doing crazy amounts of PHP programming this week. That's mostly because of the kind of work my job entails. A day doesn't pass by without me looking at some ingenious PHP library that can do everything from rinse your dishes to soak your socks.
- Granville Street: More on this in a future blog post. It will suffice to say that Granville St. is more active and vibrant than even Orchard St. in Singapore in the twilight hours of 5 PM. The walk across the Granville St. Bridge is fun and so is the underpass that runs underneath it.
- Adobe Illustrator: I somehow managed to lay my hands on Adobe Illustrator CS. The installation didn't have the tutorials that were supposed to come with it, and now I'm going to have to learn it myself.
- Google Earth: I'm not sure if this neat app should be receiving the hype it presently is. I mean, it's a cool app and everything, but not terribly useful for the Common Man. Besides, the resolution drops dramatically every time you zoom in. Coolness factor is high, but utility factor is close to nil, if not negative.
- Text-Twist: This Yahoo! game is quite interesting if you're seeking to improve your spelling aptitude. Just recently, I got bored of figuring out the six-letter word, so I wrote a nifty script that does the guessing, thereby permitting me to advance to the next level.
- Bubble Trouble: I've been playing this Miniclip game for quite some time now, but can never seem to get past level 17. It's like that level in Prince of Persia where you have get past Jafar with a lose tile impeding your way. If you manage to get past level 17, don't hesitate to boast about it in front of me.
- Picasa 2: I've been trying to somehow make that Dig Cam Perspectives page look complete, but can never get myself to do it. Just last week, a brilliant idea struck me while playing Frisbee. A collage! Yes, that's what I'll do, I'll make a collage using Picasa! Picasa does a fine job of making scatter collages no matter how many pictures you have in your album.
My colleague Ken asked me if I could display any math/physics formulas using pure HTML. He wanted to be able to select each variable in the formula with his mouse and so images, I was quick to note, were unfit for this purpose. I came up with this:
<em>e ≠ mc<sup>2</sup></em>
e ≠ mc2
Of course, nothing beats the home-grown solution of one pint of LaTeX DFS, a pinch of PNG graphics and a dash of PHP to create a magical potion called Latex2PNG.
\$\$ e \neq mc^2 \$\$, which results in
$$e \neq mc^2$1.2$
