Free time? - Random thoughts #2

For the last few weeks, I have been hearing news about the layoffs and other awful effects of global recession. Some of my friends, including my wife, have expressed their fears of getting laid off. If I am not sounding harsh, I feel all this fear is just because we are not prepared, really! We are habituated to this lifestyle with comforts and fat salaries, and started taking them for granted. I feel that most of the times, most of our time is spent, most inefficiently, by most of us.

I know few exemplary friends whose learning curve is always in growing direction. I often wonder what makes them so consistent in doing that. To my horror and disbelief, one of these exemplaries has expressed a fear of getting extinguished with the current learning speed. With his consistency and religious regularity, if he says like that, where am I? A difficult question to ask myself. Instead of passing time with social networking sites like orkut, twitter and gossiping on gtalk, the same time can be used for more constructive things. If we are prepared for the worst and ready with necessary weapons in our arsenal, I think, even the ugliest possible situation in life becomes manageable. All this is an outcome of reading Seth Godin's post.

If we have free time, we should feel blissed and make best out of it!

Programming blues - Random thoughts #1

Being a computational researcher, most of our time is spent in writing programs. When we do a thing repeatedly or for a long time, our thought process and henceforth the ideas get moulded in that language. Here are some such random things!

1. When I see people, there are different kinds of smiles. If smile is considered as base class, cunning_smile, deceiving_smile, healthy_smile, encouraging_smile, lifeless_smile etc. are the derived classes. When I think like this, I am involuntarily giving a gentle_smile.

2. When I want to get up early in the morning, I put my alarm into an infinite for loop, with 10 minutes as snoozing time. Of course, the loop will be ultimately broken by my wife. How it's broken depends on many factors, though ;-)

3. Whenever (most of the times) I don't feel like going for jogging, I comment that activity for the day.

4. When I am preoccupied with too many things, I tend to forget certain things. I blame this on insufficient memory, and give a segmentation fault. There can be unexpected response due to uncleared cache etc.

5. Most often, I take too long to boot up in the morning.

6. Few things like washing clothes, arranging house etc. are simply declared in the program, but never defined or executed!

7. Improper allocation of resources (like time, money etc.) will lead to the decreased efficiency of the program (life)!

Now, this is being terminated due to insufficient time!