Basket Case

Although we are already 2 months past the middle of the year, I decided to do a "mid year" review of my technical goals for this year to see how am I doing. Here we go: HAML, SAAS & Coffeescript : No progress :( SproutCore & BackBone.js : After a cursory look, I decided to explore Backbone.js for our upcoming project at Pothi.com. Still getting a feel of it. Learn Haskell : Deferred Git : Since Drupal moved to Git, it is hard to ignore it and I am beginning to get familiar with it. But given that we use trac, I don't think we will be leaving SVN anytime soon. Android : No progress SQL : Finally starting to dig into this. Not a very planned effort but in 6 months managed to understand few more nut and bolts of Mysql. Ran a few Explains finally :). Learnt to generate slow queries log and also managed to fix some obnoxious queries sitting in Ubercart. Beautiful Code : I realized that "finishing" beautiful code is not the right way to appr...

I never hoped he will ! In fact when I saw the forwarded mail in my inbox, I felt slightly irritated. What with all the commencement speeches being forwarded. I am sure at this rate and given the consumerist society we live in, we will be able to buy a collector's edition of these speeches very soon ! So I reluctantly opened it up and expected the now old formula speech of most-dramatic-events-of-my-life, the recent speech by Narayan Murthy at NYU being one very bad example (but people seem to be getting inspired by that also !!). As I have mentioned before on this blog, my disillusionment with such speeches started after I saw the video of Steve Jobs delivering his wonderfully written piece at Stanford. His presentation had no life, no soul and for me, no inspiration either. But to my pleasant surprise, Bill got this one right ! Looking back, Steve Jobs and Narayan Murthy sound like 2 narcissists now. And this when I had much less sympathies for Bill Gates than for Narayan Murthy ...

As you get ready to walk up and take stage, your hands get moist, your feet give out that strange sensation of standing on top of a 100 story building, suddenly you need to go to loo, your throat is dry, your heart is going to stop. The place is not even well lighted but you feel all the spotlight on your face, as words come out you cannot even remember to breath and then you take one deep breath and ... ... you either loose it or you flow. In my 14-15 odd years of public speaking, I have gone through this numerous times and I have been on both sides of the line. I have screwed it all up and I have taken the day. But what has not changed is the thrill, that rush of Adrenalin. Yes, like a drug addict, small doses don't satisfy the craving that much now and with the college life gone, even those small doses don't come my way any longer. I realized this a few days ago that I have hardly stood up to speak in the last 2 and a half years since leaving college and that realization ha...