Galloping onwards … what lies ahead, who knows?

Life really is funny – or does that apply only to my life? :p Things happen at the oddest moments and for the strangest reasons. The latest? Well, I guess I should lay the groundwork for this one first – I came back to Sri Lanka at the beginning of 2002 and I knew when I came back that I would be joining my former employer (the employer I had before I left for the US) since I’d talked to them a couple of months before that about returning and they’d immediately said that they wanted me to rejoin them as an employee. Of course, I liked this particular company and the people there – I’d worked there for over two years before I left the first time and had fond memories of them. So I joined them when I did return to Sri Lanka.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a mistake in a way because some of the stuff they’d told me initially "might" happen, never did – such as a major multimedia software development project to develop educational games. Of course, to be fair by them, they never said that it was a concrete possibility and they did put me in administration because I asked them to. The problem was that I’d gotten used to administration in a US company and so had completely forgotten what it was like in Sri Lanka. To me, I’d just need to figure out what needs to be done and by when and by whom and tell the people and they should be able to carry out their assigned tasks independently … guess what? That’s not the way it goes here :p You do all of the above and then keep on checking on the people to whom the tasks were assigned since they tend to get "distracted" and forget all about deadlines. This has come to be a real pain for me since I can’t really work that way – I hate having to go prod people every half an hour to get some work done since that way I can’t concentrate on what *I* need to do.

And of course, there is also the politics to be dealt with … now there is politics in almost any organization you work for but here it really becomes a personality thing. I was talking to somebody about the Sri Lankan peace process recently and he said it is all about the people involved – that the whole process hangs on the likes, dislikes and egos of the people involved … not the major players but the implementers, the bureaucrats. It is the same anywhere – even at work. I’ve never believed in pandering to the egos of people just to get stuff done and I usually bend over backwards not to do it. I don’t chitchat for the sake of chitchatting (except perhaps with friends that I *do* like) and I don’t go brown-nosing either (at least I hope not …). While I’m not disliked, this leads to me being not being considered with extra fondness by the powers that be either. And so, when deadlines are not met, I get pulled up more often than somebody else who might be a lot more liked and of course, me being me, I would try to argue about the whole thing and that doesn’t go down too well either since I *have to be* wrong :p

Of course, I digress again – the point is that I’ve not been totally happy with the conditions at work but there were compensations too 🙂 And then they dumped proposal writing on me and as I’ve mentioned before, I just hate that because it is dry as dust writing – not the kind of stuff I really want to do (though I guess I’ll do it if I must …) but I got the job because my friend Robin had decided to leave. But he changed his mind at the last moment and decided not to leave and so I thought I wouldn’t have to worry so much about the proposals but it looks as if I might get them after all since they want Robin to concentrate more on other stuff … And then I get a call out of the blue from a company that I’d talked to about a year ago about employment.

They called me yesterday afternoon and wanted to meet me as soon as possible. So I suggested later on in the evening and they say fine. It’s one of the biggest software firms in Sri Lanka and they have this large campus a la Microsoft’s Redmond campus where all their employees work. The catch? It’s way out in the middle of nowhere since you can’t find enough land to build such a campus anywhere close to the city :p It took me like half an hour to get there – on the main road through all the smoke and dust (and I kept on thinking that this would have to be something I’d have to put up with everyday if I took this job) and then arrive at the campus which is in a very peaceful area and totally uncrowded since the buildings are spaced apart and so on. They spent about two hours explaining the software they develop (they have two major projects one for the stock markets and one for telecommunications) and then wanted me to talk a bit about stuff that I’d done and demonstrate DarkStep – an old shell replacement that I’d stopped developing over two years ago.

Then I had an interview with their CEO and he seemed to want to get a feel as to what I wanted in life etc. and of course the financial stuff. I was then asked how soon I could join and when I said a month, they wanted to know if I could come in over the weekends and so on as soon as I get my letter of employment and later told me that the remuneration I wanted was agreeable to them and was asked if I wanted to come on board. I told them I needed some time since I really need to think things over as hasty decisions have never worked for me and they agreed to that. And here I sit thinking, why now? Why did it have to happen at this exact moment when I haven’t been successful at finding different employment for the last year (even with this particular company itself the first time I tried them)? Now that is the question … I feel as if this is a question being asked of me in some form and how I answer will decide the direction of my life – or maybe I’m just being fanciful :p

The interesting, irritating interview …

I attended the interview that I was talking about yesterday and found that there was almost nobody there that I did recognize – I still am not sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing :p Of course, that also dispelled my first paranoid theories that it might be some kind of a test/trap to see what I would do :p The guy who interviewed me turned out to be somebody that I didn’t remember but he seemed to remember me from the few visits that I’d paid to the old sister company’s offices. But I digress ..

The interview started off well enough but I realized that it wasn’t going to go well when the guy started asking me theoretical questions off a piece of paper :p Now, I respect people who are truly knowledgeable but when somebody thinks that they have the right to gauge how much you know based on some questions and answers that somebody else provided, I get irritated. Yes, I have a bit of a superiority complex – or something :p Anyway, I answered a few of the more general questions and then he started getting specific about syntax and exact methods to be used by specific objects/components. I immediately told him that I wouldn’t know the answers to any of that since I usually code with the help open and that since I work with several languages on any given day, I don’t bother to remember the specifics for any language.

What I didn’t tell him was the fact that I’ve also followed Holmes’ words in Conan Doyle’s "A Study in Scarlet" – "I consider that a man’s brain is originally like a little empty attic, you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it." I am not sure how long ago I’ve read those particular words (and no, I didn’t remember them verbatim just now, I looked it up in my copy of "The Complete Illustrated Sherlock Holmes" :p) and have followed them to a great extent – only thing is that I treat my mind more like a living room with interchangeable furniture :p When a new guest comes in for a longish stay, I put in furniture that suits him but for a casual visitor, I don’t deign to change the furniture at all :p

But I’ve rambled on again – the interviewer didn’t take too kindly to what I said and said how "everybody" codes in several languages and since .NET has multiple languages and they are all similar, I should be able to answer his question. Of course, what he didn’t take note of was the fact that I’ve worked mainly with only one .NET language – C# and that all the languages that I’d been working on recently (which I’d told him about earlier) were not .NET languages. So I told him plainly that if he wanted somebody who’d been spoonfed on the syntax and theory of .NET, he was wasting his time with me but if he wanted somebody who would do the job well and deliver on time, then I was the guy he was looking for. Of course, this being Sri Lanka and everybody being a little bit self-important (is that the case everywhere else? I’m not sure – I’ve found people willing to listen to reason a bit more in other places even when their ego has been bruised …), I don’t think he took that kindly (but I might be being unfair to him – I don’t read people correctly at times …) and I think his opinion of me would be either "bluffer" or "know-it-all-good-for-nothing" :p

There was more along the same vein – he told me that my methods would not work in a corporate environment, I told him that I’d already worked for a multinational with branches in over eight countries of the world and that they found me to be faster in coding on a new development environment after two months than consultants who’d be developing for the same environment for years – which incidentally is the truth .. that company hired me at a substantial salary increase from my then employer :p But this gets to be boring and repetitive since it was all in the same thread. I did tell him as I was leaving that I understood where he came from because he has to gauge my abilities based on what he knows and it is difficult to know whether I’m truly capable or not but I told him to ask some of my clients/former employers if he has any doubts. He gave me the usual bromide of "we’ll call you …" etc. But what do I think? I think I’ll never hear from them again :p

Who writes the script?

Have you ever wondered if your life is an elaborately scripted play or show like "The Truman Show"? I know I’ve talked about this possibility in different ways at different times but sometimes I just feel as if certain things have a pattern in the way they happen and that there are certain roads in life that you can take and almost be sure of their outcome. Yes, I’m being cryptic again :p But I’m just rambling again since "The Fountainhead" has been making me think a lot about how I act and react to the world and the people around me and that in turn made me look closely at the things which are not controlled by my actions – or at least not directly so.

It’s no secret that I’ve been looking for other employment for a while now. I’ve had some disagreement with my boss in the past and felt that he didn’t really want me there (I mean in the company) and that he’d eventually get around to asking me to leave and so I wanted to leave before that happened. However, I seemed to have no success at all at landing a new job – I’d go for interviews, they’d sound very interested, call me back and say "We are extremely interested and will get back to you" and then hear nothing from them at all. As Goldfinger in Fleming’s book says "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, thrice is enemy action" :p Of course, I don’t really think it’s enemy action but I’m left wondering what to think when it happens so frequently.

Of course the latest was different – somebody who’d interviewed me and said they were very interested, calls me out of the blue just when I was beginning to think that maybe I should settle in at my current place of work because things had kind of worked out between my boss and myself and so many others had already left that I was beginning to feel sort of guilty in leaving myself since it would be like rats leaving a sinking ship – and I didn’t want to be a rat :p Anyway, they call me after almost a year and say that they are interested and whether I am and that gets me started on leaving all over again (and I totally decided to be a rat – yes, I’m fickle so sue me :p), I went for another interview and they simply wanted me to do a Brainbench test and let me even choose the test. I chose the .NET Framework test since it was apparent that that was what they wanted most <g> and it really didn’t matter to me much as to what test I took – I don’t do too well on programming tests since my style is different to what people expect – I haven’t been taught any of these languages and so don’t know the "theory" behind them :p

I did the test and it turns out that it is almost totally theory and nothing about actual coding. I realized how little I knew of .NET framework theory but since I don’t really need most of that stuff to code a good .NET application (which I’d already done several times already), I wasn’t really worried about it but I knew I wouldn’t even hear back from them – and I haven’t so far and I don’t think I will either (that brings up a whole new rant about courtesy but I’ll let that go for now) 🙂 But then I apply for another job on Sunday and I get an e-mail confirmation on Monday and a call yesterday asking me to come for an interview today …

The catch? The company is a sister/child company of my company :p I hadn’t known it at the point when I applied since the company name on the advertisement was different but when I got the e-mail response, I saw the domain name and it was the old domain for the company and I was curious as to what was happening – whether somebody working for that company was using their company e-mail address while working for a different company or if they were changing names since that particular company had been having financial problems for a while now. So I asked around yesterday (before I received the call from them) and learnt that this was some sort of a venture under a different name by the sibling/child company of the company I currently work for. I didn’t get the exact details but it turns out that this is indeed an organization affiliated to the organization that I work for and that they are/were in financial difficulties … Then I get the phone call asking me to come for an interview … and what did I do? I accepted :p

It was mostly to see what was going to happen since I’m kind of going with the flow on this one. I’m also curious as to whether anybody at the other company noted where I worked and they are waiting to see the look of surprise on my face when I go for the interview since I know quite a few people in the new company – if the top management is the same as it was when under the old name (yes, I know, not mentioning names makes this whole thing totally confusing :p) If so, they are the one’s who are going to be surprised since I already know who they are :p Or maybe, I’m being totally paranoid and they are totally unaware of what’s happening and just called me in for an interview … Anyway, I guess I’ll find out what next when I go for the interview today – so more details tomorrow …

Welcome back, Kotter :p

He’s alive!! Yep, I finally come out of hibernation/hiding 🙂 One of my favourite quotes from Stephen King is something to the effect that time is a pony – that it sometimes trots, sometimes canters and sometimes gallop … These days, the pony seems to be galloping full tilt as far as I’m concerned since I just don’t seem to even notice the passage of time. I thought it was maybe a couple of weeks since I’d last written here and while it is essentially so, it seems to me that I’d effectively stopped updating on a daily basis much earlier than that. I’d thought that I had nothing to write about (at least that’s the justification I used to give myself whenever I happened to think about it ..) but when I decided that I was going to start updating this page regularly, I suddenly had stuff flowing through my mind without any conscious volition and I had enough for not one entry but maybe two or three :p

So what’s been happening? I’ve been busy with a lot of stuff and I won’t bore people to tears by reiterating all of the work and coding related stuff since I’ve already made an entry on my development blog about all that 🙂 Let me just take a moment to say that I do hate project proposals – I love writing but I can’t seem to think of project proposals as writing … they are just too dry for my taste. It’s a good thing that I intend to cut and paste from old proposals for most of the work I need to do :p
In fact, things have been so busy that I haven’t had the time to really do the stuff I enjoy – except for coding (and reading) of course 🙂 I bought around ten DVD’s on one of my DVD buying sprees week before last and how many have I watched so far? One! And this is I who manage to watch at least three or four movies a day when I’m not busy that we’re talking about. Ah well … I guess I’ll eventually watch all of them since most of them seemed pretty good and these aren’t movies that I had watched before and wanted to add to my collection but rather ones that I hadn’t seen before – some I’d heard about or seen the trailers and some I hadn’t heard of at all 🙂

While no movie watching is going on, I do seem to be reading at a rate. The book I’m currently reading is Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead" – the characters and the story has just got me spellbound and I’m usually unable to put the book down even to go to sleep. I’ve stayed up till 1:00am on weekends (that’s very unusual for me since I usually am in bed promptly by 10:00pm give or take an hour) because I wanted to know more. It’s probably going to be a long ramble if I were to launch into a discussion about the book though and so I think I will save that for my next entry and stop for now and give my fingers a rest :p

This and that

This week has turned out to be fairly hectic and I suddenly find myself unable to write here even though I had quite a few thoughts swirling around in my head that needed to be written down. Of course, none of those will go into this post since each one of them were a long entry in their own right and this was simply to be an update of the events of the last few days in a few simple paragraphs (or so I hope :p) I’ve been coding again and that keeps me busy and at the same time, my workload at work has started to pick up too. I was hoping that my boss would ignore me and find somebody else to groom as his aide now that Robin is leaving but it looks as if I’m destined to get at least some of that work – even though I have a feeling that he’ll get somebody else to be his aide since I just don’t fit the profile and have too stiff a back to do much butt-kissing :p

In the mean time, a couple of my friends who used to work for the company that I work for now are down from Canada and so we had a sort of informal get together of old friends from the company and those who still work here who knew them. There were only like six or seven of us but it was a nice evening since we got to catch up and to talk about all the stuff that had happened in the past. While we might be glamorizing how much fun it used to be – it still was nice to go back down memory lane and remember all the people that we used to know and all the crazy stuff that we used to do. One outcome of the meeting was a suggestion that we should set up a site where all the people who worked for the company (as well as those who currently work there) could keep in touch. I volunteered to do that and yesterday morning got on the job as soon as I got to work. A couple of hours later, I had what is called The YA*TV Bunch (sorry, no link since the site is only for employees :p) and people started signing up almost immediately.

Robin was one of the first members to sign up since he works with me and sits right next to me. Now Robin and I come from the old BBS days in Sri Lanka when we used to have all these guys on a single electronic bulletin board system insulting each other, pretending to be girls, starting flame-wars and what not. We even used to have multiple logins so that we could start a fight with somebody and then both support them and oppose them :p Robin seemed to go right back into that mode since he started making posts right, left and centre and stirring things up 🙂 I think by the end of the day we had around 11 articles on the board and all had been made by Robin (or by somebody else on whose behalf Robin made the posts :p) or myself. Hopefully, that gets the others involved too but you never know – some people just don’t like to put anything down in righting where other people known to them might see it :p

I completed "The Way of the Pilgrim" yesterday evening and while the book as a whole made me think a lot, the ending seemed to be a bit too rushed and somewhat incomplete. And it was kind of irritating (though certainly true-to-life) to have all of humanity joining together against the aliens through most of the book and then find them all reverting old patterns of being at each other’s throats in the last chapter when the aliens are ready to withdraw – I would hope that they’d have learnt something from all that they went through but us being human, I’d guess that probably wouldn’t happen. The story does end with a bit of a question as to whether we lie to ourselves about who we are or whether it’s the aliens who will not face the truth about themselves. This does tie in with an earlier post where I mentioned how people don’t seem to realize who they are or what they want and I might want to go into that in more detail at another time but for the moment, I think I’ve written enough 🙂

Of rants and reasoning …

Yesterdays non-rant about people saying something and doing something else seems to have touched a few nerves since I received several responses to that in one form or another :p But it actually was that – a non-rant. I wasn’t going to let other people’s actions upset my equilibrium and I was simply stating something that was going through my mind at that particular time – so no reason for anybody to be alarmed, offended, irritated etc :p

However, reading Gordon R. Dickson’s "Way of the Pilgrim" later on during the evening, a paragraph from the book struck me as being relevant to this particular situation. In this particular situation, the earth has been conquered by aliens and the protagonist is trying to understand the alien mindset. In the process, he says that aliens and humans see each other as distorted reflections of themselves in a mirror. He goes on to explain that what he meant was that the aliens and humans can’t really understand each other since they think in totally different ways and yet, they can’t help trying to equate the other’s actions with the way they’d do something and so come up with a distorted picture of themselves to explain the actions of the other. I’m not sure that I explained that properly here but anyway, it made sense to me and what is more, I realized that this holds true even in human-human interactions.

We don’t really understand what drives other people and so we attribute certain things to them in order to understand their actions – only thing is, that is probably a distorted picture of that person since we can never be certain of correctly identifying what drives the other person. For example, there is the case of something that happened at my grandfather’s funeral – this incidentally, is one of the reasons I hate going for any family gathering :p I had bought a new cellular phone recently and by Sri Lankan standards it’s pretty expensive since it’s a Sony Ericsson P800 and it’s one of the latest in the market. My Dad had commented on this to one of my uncles and while my parents berated me for spending so much on the phone, I wouldn’t be surprised that when they spoke to my uncle about it if they hadn’t said it with a touch of pride – hinting that I could *afford* to spend so much money on a new phone … and of course, they would have mentioned the price of the phone.

Anyway, my uncle comes up to me later and asks me if I had my phone with me and I thought that he simply wanted to take a call and told him that I was out of range since I was. He says never mind and takes me over to his son-in-law and a few others and introduces me to them. Then he casually says that my father had told him that I bought a new phone and asks me if he can see it and then says that he doesn’t know much about this stuff and passes the phone on to his son-in-law. Naturally, the price of the phone gets discussed at this point too. I thought at that point that my uncle was simply trying to impress his son-in-law and his relatives with the fact that his nephew had such a good phone (or could afford one) – they do that kind of thing here in Sri Lanka :p But when I told my parents about the incident later, they said that it wasn’t so at all – that my uncle had simply doubted the price that my Dad had quoted (which was the price that I actually paid) and wanted to make sure that my Dad wasn’t lying by getting his son-in-law and the others to verify the price because my uncle trusted his son-in-law more than anybody else (my parents’ opinion, not mine).

My point here is that I thought of my uncle’s actions in one way and my parents looked at it a different way – each one of us basing our opinion of a person (my uncle in this instance) on how we’d interacted with him, how we thought of him and our own ways of looking at things. I really have no idea who is right about the real motives of my uncle – maybe none of us are. But I’d still prefer to think of my uncle the way I’d thought of him since to me that’s a less negative picture – there is this Disney TV movie which I forget where the central character says something along the lines of "if you look for the good in people you will find it" and I’d like to believe that. Maybe I wear rose-tinted glasses but heck, it’s better than looking at everybody and wondering what they might do to you … though sometimes it’s hard not to do that too :p

Of death and Dickson …

They have a saying here in Sri Lanka that death comes in threes and the funny things is that I was thinking about this last week when the husband of my mother’s cousin passed away just two days after my grandfather passed away. And guess what? The third death in the family has appeared as well – this time it’s a relative/contemporary of my Dad’s and my parents have gone to the funeral. Since I never knew the last two people, I didn’t go to either funeral but it does make me think as to whether there just might be some truth in all these old sayings – such as "death comes in threes" …

I’m reading Gordon R. Dickson’s "Way of the Pilgrim" at the moment. I feel as if Gordon R. Dickson really understands me from the way he writes about his protagonists – some of the things he comments on are so uncannily similar to the way I am or the way I think. I’ve noticed this with several of Dickson’s later novels including the later books of the Childe cycle. I’d probably try to contact Dickson himself since I wonder if he just writes his characters this way or if he actually thought this way but unfortunately, he passed away several years ago. It still is strange though – the way his protagonist looks at the world, the way he seems so separated from the rest of humanity and even some of his philosophies and actions just seem to strike a chord within me. Ah well .. maybe I’ve just been reading too much Dickson lately :p

Speaking of people and their actions, I’m tempted to launch into a rant about why people say something and do something else or berate you for doing something and then go ahead and do the same thing themselves with not a word or hint of apology but I guess that’s just another example of the irrationality of people. So I will save my breath and go do something constructive … like code :p

Of floods and feelings …

We’ve been having heavy rains here in Sri Lanka recently and while Sri Lanka does not have snow, earthquakes, typhoon, cyclones, tidal waves or volcanoes, we do have one problem – floods. Certain areas in Sri Lanka are currently under heavy flooding and I hear that hundreds of thousands of people are left homeless. Pictures of houses totally covered by water, cats sitting on roofttops with water all around them, TV antennas sticking out of fast flowing water and buses stopped at the edge of water with no means of going forward are common sites on TV. My heart cries out for all the people affected by the floods and their families. I hope the rains stop soon and that these people are able to go back to their homes and that no more lives are lost due to the floods. But then again, we’ll probably go back to no rain and will have a whole new set of problems when the power cuts start …

The "Gilmore Girls" have always been a favourite topic of mine here :p If you’ve been following this blog, you’d remember my ranting about Rory and her relationship with Dean, how while claiming to love Dean, she also seems to be leading Jess on and hiding things from Dean. Yesterday’s episode of the "Gilmore Girls" actually showed me a new perspective on Rory’s actions and while I still don’t approve of her actions (to me, a relationship is about commitment – total and absolute. If you have a problem with the commitment, then you tell the other person and then you decide what to do next – a combined decision, not an arbitrary act by an individual …) I was able to understand why she did what she did and that insight has also helped me with the way I look at the world. In yesterday’s episode, Rory suddenly goes to New York to see Jess (he’s been sent away from Star’s Hollow where Rory lives … long story …) and on her return her mother tells her that she must face the facts – that she’s falling for Jess.

Rory vehemently denies this. She says that she loves Dean, that she is happy with Dean that she doesn’t want to hurt Dean and that she has no idea why she did what she did. I then realized that she can’t see the truth herself – that wittingly or unwittingly, she’s lying to herself. The thing is, that this is true of so many of us – we lie to ourselves when certain matters are concerned. We might say that we are totally not that kind of person about a certain way of behaviour and yet behave just the way that we said we didn’t like and yet deny to ourselves that we were doing it. This is something that I’ve never understood about other people – how they could do that and still think that they are being honest with themselves. But now I begin to ask myself whether I’m that way too? Maybe I do something which is totally against my *stated* principles and yet am justifying why I do that too by lying to myself? I hope not because I don’t like that type of behaviour in others and I’d think that other people feel the same way … All I can do is try to be true to myself and hope that I don’t fall into the same trap that Rory has fallen into …

Miscellanea

I was planning to do some work on the Blog code today but a friend of mine asked me to take a look at an HTML page she’d done since the page wasn’t working properly, and I got sidetracked. She was using a lot of layers and one layer was not aligning properly. Now a simple word of warning, if the following sounds condescending or patronizing, I can only say that it wasn’t meant to be – I hate people being oh-so-high-and-mighty-just-because-they-know-something-that-others-don’t and try not to be that way myself but sometimes I get the feeling that I come across as if I am what I hate most. Well, anyway, this was not meant to sound like that :p The problem she had (and the situation itself) was an interesting one and so I thought of writing about it. She had over 20 DIV layers each nested within the other and when she gave me the source code to look at, I didn’t realize this was the case. I however, am unable to take a look at code and then simply decide what was wrong – I always need to putter around a bit with the code before I get a "feel" for it. So I began reformatting the source so that the tags would be indented and so I would be able to figure out if there were any non-terminated tags. The end result? I ended up removing all the DIV tag nestings :p I realized my error only after about an hour of work and then had to go back and work from the original code but actually figured out the problem – it was indeed in the DIV tag nesting and the indenting did help – it’s just that I’d never seen like 20 levels of nested DIV tags 🙂

My friend Robin, who’s probably my closest friend in real-life, is leaving the company for a different company. He joined about a year after I’d been with the current company (the first time I was with them) and stayed on when I left to go to the US and now he’s leaving. Since I hardly go out after work and don’t socialize much, he and I basically associate only at work. Wonder what’ll happen when he leaves? Of course, he and I are pretty similar in that we’ll both pick up a friendship after years but wouldn’t try to maintain the ties of friendship while we are in different places. So we’ll probably drop out of touch unless of course, he happens to be online from his next place of work :p Robin leaving is going to put me in an awkward situation in a way – it is possible that quite a bit of his work is going to come my way and I might not like doing that. I’m tempted to find a different job quickly so that I can leave at the same time as him (not that I’m not looking now mind you – but currently it’s kind of a laid back search … :p) but then again, I don’t know … I guess it’s best to wait and see in this case …

I’ve been playing "Rise of Nations" the last couple of days and if you are a "Civilization" and "Command and Conquer" fan, you’ll probably love the game since it seems to be a cross between the two :p In fact, I’ve only played the game only twice so far – once last night and once today but I’m hooked! The game play is interesting, fast and keeps you moving all over the place – and I’ve only played the tutorials so far :p In a way, the game seems to be what Microsoft tried to do with "Age of Mythologies" (incidentally, this is a Microsoft game too but developed by Big Huge Games whereas AoM was developed by Ensemble Studios) but I feel that this succeeds where AoM failed. I didn’t like the feel of AoM what with the full 3D engine and the kind of blocky looking graphics. While not 3D, "Rise of Nations" looks better and plays better – at least in my opinion. I’ll have to get in to a couple of actual games before I can tell for sure but considering that I started the first tutorial last night around 8 o’clock and didn’t even realize it was 10 o’clock till I started losing <g>, it seems to me as if I’ve found a new addiction :p

Taps, turnings and philosophies

There’s this tap in our kitchen sink that my Mom insists that I broke. How? By closing the tap too tightly. The problem is that I don’t *consciously* close close the tap too hard – I do it with what *I* consider to be normal force but it turns out that this is too much force for other people since my Mom says that she can’t open the tap without some effort. So what’s the point of writing all that? It’s just that thinking about it made me realize that our interactions with other human beings is also like my situation with the tap – you apply too much pressure, the interaction/relationship fails and if you don’t apply enough pressure then like the tap dripping, the interaction too remains somewhat incomplete. Granted, that’s not the best of analogies to come up with but it did have some sense in it – at least to me 🙂

The problem with interacting with other people for me is the same problem that I have with the tap – that I never am too sure how much force (or in the case of people, how much affection/enthusiasm/friendliness etc.) to put into it. I usually go all out since that’s the way I am but I begin to see that maybe that’s the wrong approach – just as it was with the tap. Maybe putting all of your emotions into an interaction is not the best way to go. I don’t know. I guess maybe I’ve listened to all those talks of "if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well", "put your heart and soul into what you do" etc. too much :p It’s just that so much emotion seems to confuse or simply drive away most people. Or am I just making excuses for simply not knowing how to deal with people? I don’t know – the tap (or in this instance other people) might be able to tell but to me it seems as if I’m doing what is normal – normal for me that is.

On the other hand, I’ve started consciously not putting so much pressure on the tap in the kitchen. I am very careful about how firmly I close it and I do begin to see that the water does indeed stop flowing even if I don’t turn the tap firmly. So maybe I’ll have to try doing the same thing with people? Be not so all out as soon as I meet them? I don’t know … that seems wrong to me somehow. It seems to me that while that approach would be fine with taps, maybe that’s not the best way to go with people? But then again, what do I know? :p