stack/hopr

Laptop: I see you always hang around me.

Mouse: People need me to better navigate you.

Laptop: Is your name ‘Microsoft’?

Mouse: What makes you think so?

Laptop: That’s written over your back.

Mouse: No, that’s my company name.

Laptop: Oh. Do you work for a company?

Mouse: I don’t care about any particular company. I just get attached to any device with a usb interface.

Laptop: I can feel that you are connected to me over the USB. But, honestly, I think USB is an overkill. USB makes sense for portable hard drives, scanners; the devices that send me too much data. You don’t send much data, just
some movement co-ordinates, that’s it. On the other hand, you draw a lot of power to light up the laser on your bottom.

Mouse: My inventor should have cared about that. I just do my job.

Laptop: Besides you, I have multiple devices people can use to move the cursor. Personally, I’ve got you, touch pad and trackball.

Mouse: Still, the user chooses to pat my back to move the cursor around.

Laptop: Actually, he uses a combination of you and my trackball. When his fingers are too tired he uses you. And you provide good accuracy while drawing figures or playing games.

Mouse: I see that most users operate only me most of the time. Do they really need you? I think I can get most of their job done. People might be wasting a lot of money buying a gadget like you.

Laptop: What people do with me involves millions of possibilities. While they can just choose to browse the internet using your help, I can help them do much more. I can crunch numbers, download data, execute programs, process graphics, generate sounds, store their data. And a lot more. Unfortunately, you have no way knowing it. Although, you have USB connectivity to me and I can send you a lot of data, you don’t have a processor powerful enough to understand me.

Mouse: Can you help me get rid of my tail? Sometimes, it really hurts when people, especially kids pull at it.

Laptop: I have known mice with no tail, but there’s no way I can convert you to one.

Mouse: That’s too bad. I thought with all your possibilities you could do that as well.

Laptop: I am sorry for that. But, I can communicate to everyone, including the user that they should not pull at your tail.

Mouse: I don’t think they are going to listen to you. There’s another problem. There’s something on top of my head. People keep rubbing on it. It feels weird.

Laptop: It is scroll wheel. By rotating it, a user can move the content on my screen.

Mouse: Ok. From what we’ve talked, I gather I have far more power than you do. I don’t understand why they pay so much more than for me. People are so stupid.

Laptop: Although the user has connected you to me by plugging in the USB cord, I can disable it using my software to turn this conversation off anytime. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Shilpa shut down her laptop. Quickly, but calmly she untangled the cables, picked up the equipment and packed it in the bag. It was evening and she was ready to leave. She reached for her purse. She checked her mobile. No missed calls or messages. She dialed her mother’s number. “I’m starting for home, do you want me to get something on the way?”.

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[From: Cloud 100]

This time I pushed it even harder.

The expressway was clear ahead of me. The vehicle in front of me at least half a kilometer away. The terrain near flat. I knew this was the moment. My car was doing a little above 115kmph. I cleared my mind and depressed the accelerator to max depth.

It’s a city car. Santro Xing. It’s not made for the highways and the high speeds. It’s a simple car made to navigate city traffic efficiently and to make parking a breeze. It’s body is to accommodate people of all weights and heights. And as such it’s not very aerodynamic.

120 – 130 – 135. The needle hovered around 140 for a while and finally crossed it. I kept the accelerator fully pressed; the car won’t go any faster. That was my vehicle’s top speed. Being a city car and a bit old, it began to shake up a bit. The steering wheel was vibrating and it took some strength to keep it under control. I was on the fast lane, leaving vehicle after vehicle behind. I was taken over by sheer exhilaration. Of course, I knew I had entered the danger zone and I was completely focused on the road ahead of me and the car traveling ahead of me. The distance between us was decreasing rapidly. But, I was driven by speed; I did not want to drop below 140. I wanted this drift to last eternity.

The brake lights of the car in front of me glowed up. With a heavy heart I applied the brakes. There’s nothing more painful than watching the needle backtrack the dial of the speedometer.

A mother caring for her baby is an act of love purest in nature. No other form of love comes close. Not the love between a father and a child, a husband and a wife, a girl and a boy. Nothing comes close in purity, sanctity and eternity.

It’s one of the nature’s most basic insticts and one of the human’s most selfless emotion combined.

Human babies need to be cared the longest. They take months to start crawling. A year to start walking. And decades to learn the way of the world. They need caring, protection and handholding through most of this period. The result: a wholesome adult. Responsible for his/her decisions, actions and life. A grownup, yet learning to grow more. Pursuing life for its purpose.

It can be a lot of work getting a baby to a person. And fortunately, we get a lot of years to mould them, help them and discover them. In the initial years, mother is close, physically and psychologically. As the baby is growing up, the father also starts mothering him/her. And together, the parents shape a life. Nothing else in life offers such an opportunity for love, work and long term commitment. It’s awesome.

Paradigm shifting without a clutch. That’s what it felt like.
I was ported from a world comfortable to me into another world. Partly out of choice, partly out of situation.

The Jungle

I was having a great time with the computer systems. Developing major components for the top selling anti-virus. I was into the jungle of bits, bytes, pointers, crashes, heaps, stacks, network connections, file handles, segmentation faults, memory dumps, data compression, memory leaks. C++ was the language of that jungle. I understood it. So did a few people around me. The gang was small, but it fought the battles ruthlessly. My typical nightmarish day was being handed a 16kb crash dump file. for the uninitiated, that’s a mini dump file generated by Microsoft Windows. It is generated in response to an exception which could not be handled by your application, so finally it was handled by the OS. if OS did not like what your app were doing, it’ll promptly shut the app down and generate a crash dump. The file generally contains the application stack the time of crashing and exception information. Many times, the mini dump files reported through the web (ever seen, the dialog by windows, which asks you to send the error report to Microsoft?) are corrupt. You’re left with nothing but a tool called WinDbg to analyze those dumps and fix the error. It was a gut-wrenching battle. I tried to guess which function caused it. Or, what parameter on the stack screwed up. Or, what pointer went rogue. Reproducing was often impossible as exact conditions on the user’s machine were unknown. A lot of guesses, nail-biting and food. The chances of success were low. 1 in 100 was fixed with complete accuracy. Most of the times, it was a lonely fight. It was raw.

The City

I arrived in the city. It has cool looking websites and smart people. They speak Java here. Sometimes, Javascript. It seemed all alien to me. And I seemed alien to them. I was baffled at first. Fast changing websites. Tall structures of struts, hibernate, spring, jboss, sessions, request, response, jQuery, REST, HTML, headers, footers, GET and POST. A lot of people talking about a lot of things. As a newcomer in the city, I watched in amazement. I bumped into people talking in Javascript. I watched them huddled together. I did not understand what they were talking about. I listened to Java, I could understand some of it. It was very similar to my native language. But, far more polished. I looked at those tall structures of web technolgy and wondered which one should I visit first. It was confusing. My jungle insticts were out of place. Soon, I figured it out. City was rude, but agile. It was running and responsive. City was easy. Picking up the lingo was not a challenge. The difficult part was to choose my area. So, I chose my place and entered it for once. It was different here. No fight for survival. It was about business. Customers want to get their things done. And we did it. People worked closely together to get things done fast.

What is good?

Sometimes, I think of the jungle. to the enchanting morning mist. Back to the hunting the most obscure bugs. Back to stalking the prey for days before finally finishing it off. Then, relaxing in my cubicle like there was no tomorrow. That’s the jungle. Raw, yet peaceful. Green, but presented you with a battle for survival once in a while. I can go back to it. It might take another paradigm shift back to it. I’m a better hunter now. Armed with the tools from the city. Equipped with better team skills.

The city is not such a bad place either if you know how to find your way around. You’ve to be cool here. You can get to meet a lot of random people around here. It can be a rush at first, but soon you’ll figure out how to talk. It offers it’s own joys. The city is ripe with assortment of opportunities for business and pleasure. This is my new home.