I am going to invent a new language. Every sentence in this language will be composed of a sequence of numbers, and each number — or word — will be a cultural reference, a reference to a quotation, event, activity or just about anything that took place in the history of our world at some point in space and time. Each sentence in this language will carry an immense amount of information within a few, short, simple words.

Eventually, advances in technology will make knowledge ubiquitous, thereby condensing sentences into something as simple as a representation of a sequence of vectors in space-time.

I call this language “Pointerse”.

Today, I will firmly stick to the latter stance, that a little rain never hurt anybody. After all, rain is nothing but water falling from the sky. Look at the bright side — in a few years’ time, it will be falling space-junk (like forgotten satellites) that you need to worry about. If you’re lucky, it will take a good snap of you from up above, that your friends will tag you with on Facebook once it irrevocably damages your face. And yes, I will let this sentence be, leaving it on an ambiguous note.

Do you realize that water falling from the sky is no big deal? If you are reading this and are not named Garfield, you are almost certainly not a cat. That probably means you take a shower everyday (with water), wash your clothes (with water) et cetera. So what’s there to complain about? Live with it. Get wet. Enjoy it!

In fact, maybe — just maybe — you could even use the weather to your advantage. The next time you need a shower, just wait till it starts pouring and take a walk out in the open instead!

Now this rain phenomenon starts looking interesting…let’s see if we can take its usefulness a step further. Why wash your clothes at all? When you walk out in the rain, just make sure you’re wearing your dirty laundry. Another problem solved.

What, did I hear someone say “detergent”? Stop whining — there’s enough chlorine in the atmosphere to poke holes in the ozone layer over the Arctic — that’s certainly enough to bleach your fabric. That’s close enough, you know.

And hey, now you have a good reason to argue for climate-change as well. This just keeps getting better and better. I’m sick and tired of watching doomsday movies about the Earth’s climate going berserk, where some divorced scientist dude figures things out but gets laughed at in the beginning only to be redeemed later, and everyone turns to him to fix the world, which can only be done by building a series of ladders from the Earth to the Moon through an asteroid belt, and a banal happy conclusion is thrust upon us whereby some unimportant sidekick character dies, the scientist dude gets reunited with his ex-wife, and the kids continue to exist and do and say annoying things ever after — but hey, you can’t have completely happy endings, you know?

This brings us to movies — another thing everyone seems to like to complain about. “That movie really sucked!!” Boo hoo. I for one, have found a great use for Hollywood’s bad movies, much like one can use dung as manure and stop complaining about it.

The general idea is this: you find a mediocre movie to watch online — you will find several of these for free — and then you watch some of it based on a formula: ten minutes from the beginning, and then two minute clips, skipping ahead fifteen minutes at a time until you reach the end. The ending is not important. All in all, you would have watched about twenty-minutes of this movie, and gotten an idea of the names of the characters, the plot (which is generally as obvious within the first ten minutes as a billboard studded with neon lights on 8th Avenue) and how the movie is likely to end. That brings us to the main event: reading the popular user-reviews on IMDb, which will now make sense since you know the plot and can identify the characters.

Now, it is important to choose the movie carefully. For instance, avoid the kind of movies where everything takes place in the dark; that’s just plain boring. Also, don’t select movies that have little dialog; those are bound to be based on some Pulitzer-prize-winning novel or the other, and you will always find people who rave about what is unarguably a perfectly bad movie. In fact, the best movie candidates are the ones which have both male and female characters in it (distinctly so), not one of them mumbles too much and looks ugly at the same time, and the movie has an IMDb rating between 5.0 and 6.0.

So there you have it — a perfectly wonderful forty-five minutes extracted out of a mediocre movie on some rainy day. Ah…I love this weather.

You were like the sunshine
For all that could see
With your gentle, kind heart
And witty repartee.

What choice crept upon us,
And took us oceans away?
Adding to that distance,
An inch every day?

What choice crept upon us,
That neither could see,
That made a hole in this heart
And left a memory?

You’ve gone your own way,
And there’s so much I miss;
That girl in the kitchen
That gave me a kiss.

So close to my heart,
Yet a stranger to my soul,
I will always love you,
My sweet little girl.

***

Opportunity knocked on my door the other day. I opened the door, not because I wanted to welcome her in, but because I was curious to see what she looked like.

***

Opportunity knocked on my door the other day. I lured her in, knocked her out with a baseball bat and confined her in my dungeons. Serves her right for walking into a stranger’s apartment like that.

***

Opportunity knocked on my door the other day. I was pretty excited and welcomed her in, but all she wanted was a glass of water. Bummer.

***

Opportunity knocked on my door the other day. I told her I’d had enough of personifications and slammed Mr. Door in her face.

***

Opportunity knocked on my door the other day. Yeah, right.

I now have a new blog called technoYak. Does that name sound vaguely familiar…?

For a long time now, I have wanted to maintain a separate blog for all things technical, especially the ideas I work with professionally, such as software and system design. This was motivated by a slight unease whenever I wanted to post an interesting idea to this blog — but couldn’t because I figured it wouldn’t make sense to the lowest common denominator of the audience. A new blog with a much more narrow focus seemed to be the right answer. That and a pinch of “seriousness”.

So why haven’t I done this before? To tell you the truth, I’ve been stuck in this vicious circle of inaction. Here’s how the thought-process works:

1. I just had this great idea! I think I should blog it.
2. Oooh! You know what, it would be great if I could have a nice serious blog about these ideas that I can talk about with authority, instead of mixing it up with all this random stuff that is unrelated.
3. Yeah, and it would be even cooler if I could do this on my own blogging platform (the one I’ve been meaning to release version 0.1 of for the last three years). Let’s do that first!
4. There’s this whole bunch of features I want to put into this code. It would be nice to have some kind of note-taking software to keep track of all of this stuff. Let me check if there’s awesome new software in the Gentoo repository for note-taking.
5. Nope, I guess not. I wish I could use something like OneNote on GNU/Linux…or perhaps I should invest in a really large whiteboard for my apartment? Will I find that online at Amazon.com?
6. [*] Maybe that’s not what I need. Maybe — just maybe — what I really need is a new laptop to do all this new cool stuff. *drool* Yes, that’s it…if I had a new laptop, all of these annoyances would go away.
7. Sigh. Let’s put this discussion on hold while I take care of all this work stuff. *several weeks pass*
8. I just had this great idea! I think I should blog it.

* If you’re struggling to find the logical leap to Step 6, I’m afraid I can’t help you there.

At the end of the day I put down my sword
And take off my armor without a single word
Head on my pillow I dream a silent sleep
But in the heart of my heart, I lie down and weep.

I weep, for all of the demons that died
Killed for the malice that I could not abide;
And for those that lived to darken this place
The ones that got away — the ones I couldn’t face.

I ponder, silent, at the mistakes I’ve wrought
The lessons I’ve learned, and the lessons I’ve not;
I prepare for battle that approaches with dawn
For in just a few hours this night will be gone.

They ask why I fight, not stay here and sleep -
“Oh, what do you so sow, and how do you reap?“
But a soldier must fight, no matter the cost
To win every battle, knowing the war is lost.

A Hint of Spring

I guess I should be thankful for the 24-hour-open Subway store down Denny Mountain.