Wordplay

Trees of fruits bearing life hanging over the river of death. Waiting for their fall!

Resume Hat tip - Peter Norvig

Job hunting while sucky, tacky etc can be fun as well. Consider this piece from Peter Norvig's (Research Director, Google) resume / bio / self description bit. I consider this ingenious, a great moment to turn the conversation to places.

File it under other information / achievements or just below professional summary. Of course the nay sayers may say only Peter Norvig can do this. I think its crazy style brilliance.

Fun from the world

As I spend more days waiting for someone's final decision to finally hire me, I continue to enjoy the small world around me. For proof -

Text under the fold is an email I got for a job posting -

Hi

Warm Greetings. We have an excellent opening with one of our client for the Position "French resource".
Please find the details below:
Location: Bangalore
Shifts Any one of the below options
1) Rotational shift (Preferable) every 3-4 months
2) Early morning shift starting 8 am
3) Regular day shit-9 am thru 6 pm .... (so on)

Regular day shit - That's one typo I would never forget / condone. Mighty LOLs occured.

University of Iowa's Internation writing programs mentions this -

"His short tories ....."

Short tories ? I understand but short tories. Please explain.

Linguistic Overtures - 29 Sep 2010

Self sufficient words in a sentence (could not think around it much)

Organism in orgasm ...

(Take "in" out from the organism)

Linguistic Overtures - 20 Sep 2010

Not at least literally or in terms of language but this is the kind of the firsts for me.

Japan's two cities are infact anagrams of each other -

1. Tokyo (the capital)
2. Kyoto (the environment protocol)

Are there any other examples or does this make Japan unique?

Linguistic Overtures

Noun and a verb as anagrams - proof - see the two end-letter reversal in the word

Noun - Categories

Verb - Categorise

PS - Works in one version of grammar only

Linguistic Overtures

This one is titled "Musically yours". Well, self explanatory-anagrammatic five letter words presented below -

Till its done well "Notes" and "Tones" are great. If not, all I saw was a "Stone".

Its like this cryptic world view of words.

Rediscovering Saala, Sasur, Devar

Sometimes it is very adventurous to trace origins of common-place words -

1. Saala - Brother in law - Shyaalah (Sanskrit)
2. Devar - Husband's brother - Dhevarah (Sanskrit)
3. Sasur - Father in law - Shwasurah (Sanskrit)

Such fun !!

The Bombing of Dresden - Kurt Vonnegut's words

"On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden -- possibly the world's most beautiful city. But not me. "

Notice the day - Feb 14 (St. Valentine eh!!)

Notice the number - 250, 000 and 24 hours (Oh my god)

Notice the last three words - "But not me" and I am thankful for the above.

Seen somewhere

A message on a t-shirt

Cogito cargo sum

(Rene Descartes seen committing suicide)

Colour me a few months of life

The colour of life, lived in the

the colour of lies;

the colour of imagination, lost in the

the colour of effervescence;

the colour of the gaze, seen through the

the colour of a veil;

The colour of the eyes in

the colour of the mind;

Reproduction - Used books

Found inscribed in a used book, that I brought some time back from the bylanes of Calcutta -

"To Partha,

Always remember

Love,

Papa"

!!Oh the irony!!

Reproduction - Panwari

Panwari - Shop around the corner selling betel nuts and other uniquely Indian digestives.

Heard from one -

"Saab, choona lagate lagate 15 saal ho gaye" and then after some time

"mera matlab, paan main".

He goes on to justify that indeed it was necessary for clarifying the context as his duty.

Such gems I say.

Reproduction - Shakespeare as a mathematician

Q - Prove that Shakespeare was a mathematician? (let 2 minutes pass to overcome the surprise)

A - He solved the equation a^2 - 4b^2 = 0

Q - Please prove?

A - To be or not to be

Disclosure

-Again quoting with permission. "Not" to be read as negation and "be" loses an e.

Linguistic overtures

Discretion provides Directions (only the SC moves)

Note - Long time since some word has really made some meaning while juggling. Well this one came while reading this.

Rant - Chrome

Having recently switched to Chrome (100 %) I find its handling of RSS Feeds to be poor. Let me illustrate -

So I install this extension for auto subscribing to RSS feeds (Link). This page says "okay I am now subscribing to the feed that I wanted". However even after checking the box above, it automagically forgets that "yes I had indeed asked you to remember that I want to subscribe to all feeds via Google Reader ONLY".

Now this screen says "You are not subscribed to this feed yet". I would swear that I indeed did that before (in the screen above).

Or maybe I am using a wrong extension.

Synonyms

Permanently useless <> Dead

Customer Service

While the week long "siesta" continues unabated, I have become used to having everything "eatable" from Hotel Saravana Bhavan. I don't claim that they are the best in customer service.

Like each organization has its own bad ass versions of "I-don't-cares", in the same vein they also have the omniscient waiters who know what the customer is going to ask of. Incidentally while I was en-route finishing one cup of sambar, wondering of the potential combinations of the three chutneys, in front me, that might be used to finish the remaining pongal.

There comes this waiter doing his rounds and sees my plate and quietly brings a refill of sambar. I did not even ask for it (eventually paid him a generous tip as well, he deserved it).

This is the same HSB where one has to wait indefinitely for his glass of water.

What's the difference ?

What is the difference between

Denial

Apathy / Indifference

Oblivious

Feign

I am really confused here reading about anosognosia (Errol Morris in NYT), a beautiful line comes by -

"Patients that are amnesic don’t know they are amnesic. " (From here)

Reproduction - Raavan

Don't be mislead by the title, its just words / quotes reproduced from around my gang with permission of course.

My respect for Original "Raavan" has increased after watching the movie.... at least he was straight to the point and he did his job well.... - A review of Raavan from a friend

Original Raavan that took me a couple of seconds to figure out :)

Misspell and coochie cooing

I guess there is a tremendous market out there for doing a spell check on images.

What an image this one (tsk tsk, oh the spell check fed generation)

Why not ?

I decided to die but then retracted on that because "there are just too many books left unexplored, just too many films not seen that would not be given a fair chance, if I decide to pack my bags". And so I remained.

Deliverance request

With due respect to my friend, reposting his thoughts that echo the current status now -

Super accurate (especially agree on the school point)

I can't keep cheating myself telling that the next company I join is going to be good...

I guess once you get married it'll serve as the perfect distraction for the shit we are going to do all day long.

Chinna vayasula veetla thara tharanu schoolukku kootitu povanga (till 1st std i think) (translated as remember the way little kids are dragged onto their school while they wail in the background)

Same feeling now except that no one can force us, because we have supposedly grown up (mba lan pannirukkom) (after all we have done MBA etc)...

I guess the force will come again after marriage - parents replaced by wife...

Geeky request

I thought you had a context switch and then some other thing kept your attention in a deadlock state and I was thinking when to send a hardware interrupt.

Office feel - 04 May

Obviously - do read the GameWorld trilogy by Samit Basu which was my only escape from the dreary, overloaded office work. Sad but it has to end.

For today - Zilch motivation to go to work / Dreading to return on 05 May

Aaaaaaaaaaarghh !!

Linguistic Overtures

Redundancy

Utter <> Mutter

Heard today

A birthday wish -
"Let your tribe increase"

Roomie -
"Shifting with a hindu batchmate. I mean the college and not the religion"

Love the way people use words.

Inside a high quality veg restaurant

Eating in a around-the-corner, trying-to-keep-the-cash-store-ringing; Here is a place where you, assuming that this place cannot burn a hole in your pocket, can sit and eat, mumbling silently about the "okay okay" quality of food. However here is also a place that "your two downs", monetarily, also come to eat. They come, they eat, their eyes breathe aspiration and also a sense of impending dip of green. While I ordered a mini meal for myself, at measly Rs. 25, which is not much for a post graduate who came out into the world when the latter was going down. Literally!
Next to me, came and sat a group of four. Two mothers, one instinctively elder in a protective way, one probably her junior-in-command and their two school going daughters. As the waiter sold them the mini meal, obviously casting a corner-eye to my plate, they decided to order 4 suchlikes. They did not ask for the price and looked at the price list which boasted of the same dishes in Tamizh and in English with an extra "h". In nanoseconds, the elder one calculated, that's a big note for lunch and her eyes sank and took a look at her purse carefully placed inside her blouse.
Then the waiter arrived with the four meals neatly compartmentalised into - a biriyani, sambar rice, curd rice, single roti, kurma, beans and a sweet.

Mall Recall

Trudging down an escalator, heard the following from a 4 year child -
"Mom the ad on the escalator has changed to this new one."

Such recall, I wonder. Actually the ad is an interstitial, coming down an escalator, visitors can see this ad over their head. We live in exciting times.