9 posts from July 2007

..despite the horrible horrible aches last night, I cycled into work again. I have deliverables today which I promised to finish last night but I still cycled in. Such is my motivation.
I need a pat on my back, I am very proud of myself.

...I cycled into work today after almost 2 years. And man, am I shattered. Luckily though I didn't have to stop mid way to catch a breathe but I showered later and despite the tea, I am soooooooo sleepy.
I know I will sleep well tonight.

...and I am not sure is entirely true. For example, I was just looking at matrices and their arithmetic, equations of planes and length of transversals and what not, and although things rang a bell but I looked at the maths and thought to myself - jeez! whereas I remember when I was studying A-level maths I was very good at maths - the plane, the sphere anythign! I sniggered at someone who didn't concur. How egotistical I was!
But today, karma has made me pay, for today I don't remember any of these things and I quite possibly would have troubles recalling them when asked.
So Karm improving activities such as making people feel better about what they know etc, to follow.

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,,2130793,00.html

A couple of events since this morning have reminded me of two entries I once made on the various blogs that I have had in the past.

The first one was about my russian flatmate and me arriving at the shower and havng at tiff, with her being mean to leave the tap on in the toilet leading to me not showering properly.

Well this morning, the same thing happened with my New Zealander flatmate and me turning up at the loo at the exact same point, when he said oh you were quicker, you should take a shower. And i said, No I will take long, you should go and in a very polite manner, I resorted back to my room calmly checking the news and having breakfast. Just a point in evidence that my new flatmates are nicer.

And the second, the other day I mocked the Polish Embassy for stating 'Visitng a Health Spa' as a reason for visiting Poland. Well, it turns out that they do have spas 130 metres underground - inside a SALT mine, which means the air is pure and fresh and hence the ideal location for a health spa.

This entry doesn't say much in itself but just reflects on then and now. Thank you for your interest.

I have been thinking very hard about getting involved in the whole climate change issue for a while now. Either getting involved in their development or the politics associated with it.

I find my job immensely unfulfilling. I feel that I am wasting my life away to save some Vodafone or Orange of the world to save a few pennies. I am sure the work I do has more to it than I see at the first glance but really, I can't see it.

I want to do something which would change lives around the world. Perhaps curb the poverty that I saw but never really looked. May be save the poorest of people in the poorest of countries who would be the first to drown in the sinking ship that our world has/is going to become.

Growing up in a country where you find a rickshaw wala only too happy to lug you from one place to another under the scorching heat of the afternoon sun to settlling in the west with its bright streets and rolling hills makes one's life a self conflicting dilemma.

On the one hand, western education, ideas open your eyes to the wickedness of the soceity you come from. On the other, you realise that had it not been for millions of people who suffered whilst your ancestors accumulated wealth, you wouldn't have had this education.

There is some truth in the fact that Human race, to a certain extent, has grown out of bounds. Even the goverments with overpopulous countries such as India realise that or else they wouldn't put stuff such as

"Nature has it's own way of controlling population. Everytime the human impact on a place grows out of bounds, nature curbs it with an earthquake, a volcano or tsunami".

in the national curriculum textbooks.

So in fact, even if a few poor people in India died it wouldn't matter, not to the government, not to anyone except perhaps their families, who again are poor and so they don't count.
And may be, the truth is that any research into climate change which are mostly sponsored by Shells and BPs of the world is just, well, sand in the eyes.

Perhaps the unspoken consencus between the goverments of India, China and US and other countries who refuse to sign the Kyoto is that they are only out there to save people who are rich or clever enough to survive the catastrophic consequences of climate change.

Which leaves me wondering if there would be any point in living a life of climatalogist at all. Wouldn't it just involve coming home each day having discovered that the extent of the damage was greater than we previously thought. Or perhaps never visiting those ryan air destinations. Or recycling with an obsession. all of which, don't come easily to anyone of our generation.

And if this is the case, perhaps making someone watch their grandchild being born over a phone would be the closest to job satisfaction I could get....

I just read an article in the Guardian this morning about Borders stocking Polish books, not only translations of popular English novels but actually Polish literature too.
I have read a few articles recently about rapid consumerism in the accession states. So it's refreshing to see that their sense of National Identity, culture and particularly literature has not been washed away with living in Britain and globalisation.

And then I started thinking about how a change in the English National Curriculum this morning proposes teaching Mandarin in school. To be honest, I think it's great that in a country where only 1 in 5 people can speak at least 1 or more foreign languages, that finally some initiative is being taken to expand the population's linguistic skills.

Considering that both the above initiatives are associated with two major trends affecting UK businesses these days, I found it strange that there is no such initiative for Indians living in the UK.

My statistics are probably not absolutely right here but they should be close enough. I think there are five times as many Indians living in the UK as Poles (something like 1m Indians live in the UK as opposed to 213,000 Poles) and yet you never see any Indian Literature Books in commericialised stores such as Borders or Waterstone's.

Discounting the fact that perhaps Indians don't read much outside of the textbooks relating to software engineering I wondered about Bollywood films in HMV, for example. The whole subcontinent is awash with the craze yet you only ever see very few of them.

Certainly I have never seen anyone trying to learn Hindi. You only get half arsed attempts at writing books for learning Hindi possibly because there has been no interest as one is bound to be within a kilometer at the worst from an Hindi speaking person.

Now in this case we could leave Poland aside, coz as a matter of fact it is in the European continent after all and like all other Europeans it probably has a stronger affinity towards its culture and language.

But then China and India were Colonies after all, you don't see the Chinese tattling French in the way Indians speak English.

So what exactly is it that drives the India-Pakistan war when we really we are ready to lose our culture, heritage, literature and whatever not to the rest of the world....

...I think I like the new Prime Minister, he might have had to get his teeth straightened and done voice training and he might still stutter when he announced his plans but personally I think he is good. He seems to have good intentions to begin with (I am new to politics you see), but I feel he would deliver.
In any case, I find it strangely calming to see that self-assertive Tony Blair go.
R.I.P

In the latest round of skills assessment, yours truly has realised that she had more work avoidance skills than she initially thought she did.

For example, just over the past couple of days, I have been assigned to do some programming - PROGRAMMING!! I shouted out with glee when I was assigned to do some programming last week but ever since my excitement has drowned in a emotional abyss, never to be found again.

So in the meanwhile, I resorted to forcing myself to work on this piece of code, which meant that I did some work - like editing the spelling mistakes in the comments.

And then grammar.

Then this entry.

Now whatever next...

At this rate, perhaps my code will be the most literate of all. Oh yes!