Boyles Law of Public Transportation

From where i come from, its not a great experience using the inter city public shuttle service. Was a bit a squeeze on the bus yesterday. Everyone who didn't have their face violently pressed against the windows or the armrests were wrestling furiously not to fall out the doors. All thanks to Boyle's Law about pressure being inversely related to volume. And that was at constant temperature. Well, its almost May and this might easily be the most unfashionably hot part of the country. And I spent nearly the whole journey -a nightmare three hour ride through dusty, humid roads- standing up. True to physics, pressure and volume - they didn't seem to let up.

Before it left though I waited to see if I could get a seat; otherwise I was going to hire a taxi, and charge the company however much it took. I found a seat, and it was all going well, but the driver decided he could squeeze a few more stinky passengers on board, and kept making stops. Then a crone got on. And then another one and another one. For several minutes I ignored them all, hoping that they would go away or that someone else would see them and do the gentlemanly thing. Darned women. Kept staring at me with that pitiful expression. So in the end I gave one my seat, albeit with utmost resentment and bad grace.

Had we not been jammed in like cooped chicken I would have fallen flat on my face several times, for the driver was the usual idiot, hurtling around bends as if he only had five minutes to live. After ten minutes of this I was sweating like a pig in a sauna, and soon I was aching all over. At times I only had one foot touching the floor. A poor sick child dropped a toy and I bent down to pick it up. The driver just then decided to play Carmageddon, as everyone was flung to one side, and for several moments my head was trapped. My neck was twisted like an owl's and the side of my face was squashed into the stomach of the surly peasant next to me, a stinking oaf in a vest.

It was most unpleasant.

Point of the Post - Use company perks. Thats what they are for.

Loving Ogres, Wood-Elves and Sabre Warriors

This is a take on an article in the Daedalus Project a few weeks ago about people who fell in love because they met in "massively multiplayer online role playing games. (MMORPG)"

A year and a half ago I was an avid player of these games, Final Fantasy XI (FFXI) and Everquest(EQ). They were fun games, but there weren't very many female players. And people estimate that half of the female players you did see were actually male players pretending to be female. Yuck!

But based on the Daedalus's endorsement I thought that maybe I should give this another one a try. I needed to find a game with a better male to female ratio (Yes, two b school years do that to you). So I tried The Sims Online. Sims supposedly has the best male to female ratio of all massively multiplayer online games, but hardly anyone plays it. I can see why. It's pretty pointless. There's nothing to do. In Fantasy or EQ you would join a team of other players and kill monsters. Only with good teamwork was it possible to kill them efficiently. Plot lines follow every other Hollywood Fantasy movie. Young apprentice befriends older mentor(another player). Work together to kill monsters(other players). The more you kill, the stronger you get, more skills you learn. (For the initiated, along the lines of Diablo, only more complex and more fun). And so, unlike the real world where you work and work and nothing happens, in this your work is quite shockingly, rewarded.

However in Sims all you do is stuff like take the dog for a walk, call your wife good names, make lunch, watch tv, eat dinner, go to the bathroom, take a shower, sleep. That was easily the only virtual world ever invented that is more boring than real life.

But this virtual world does have a better male to female ratio than the real world. And the girls (atleast i think they were) are easier to talk to. Every time I did log on, my virtual roommate, Ktrina79 starts chatting with me. Ktrina was a schoolteacher from Montreal and the pics she sent made me wanna go back to school. Was fun for a while, but there was no way i could go on with the tedium. For all I know "she's" really some fifty year old gay guy.

Although it may not fit the stereotype, we gamers are not immune to love. There's bound to be some flirting going on when you have a few thousand people playing an MMORPG together. The games are filled with scenarios that shed light on player personalities. Those seem like pretty good odds for the ladies.

We thus stand on the cusp of a new generation where parents telling their children about the circumstances of how they met will not revolve around college parties, chance encounters at a coffee shop or business conferences. Instead, they will tell their children how they met each other while battling gnolls in subterranean caverns or slaying the undead in forgotten crypts while pretending to be warriors or clerics.

Point of the post - I'm bored. Lots of work i dont wanna do.

One True God

I'll never get why we are supposed to love these conferences that are called for ever so often. I love discussing in abstract , doodling incoherently as they discuss outcomes that will definitely have no far reaching changes. However, I do not like meetings where my attendance is required and my input is not appreciated or desired. That's how my day has been for the last two days.

I've been working my ass off on a project that will not actually kick off until after I should have moved out of here. Further, most of the other members of the team are the gods in the office. Only the opinions of the gods are truly considered. Of course, I should mention that the opinions of the gods pretty much reflect the opinion of the facilitator so there's not even value added by the gods. Not so conducive to additional input from the non-gods if I don't say so myself.

Now, this doesn't mean that the input of the non-gods is not sought. In fact, I've been called on and asked why I have no input.

There are atleast two reasons that I can attribute to that. a) I have no input because I wasn't told what to prepare for and b) Nobody told me that I'd need to prepare for it at all. On two occasions when I did have input, such thoughts (which more or less seemed related) were casually thrown aside when the gods didn't appear to readily jump behind me.

So today, after 6 hours of meeting and 6 pages of my designs of synchronised battle axes, I have come to realize that the entire meeting was just set up for the facilitator to mentally masturbate. But then I guess its part of being God. What could be more fun than calling an endless two day long meeting to listen to yourself talk, accept feedback that supports your initial opinion, and requires the non-gods to write down every single pondering thought you might have?

Off to a second session. It's enough to make me eat my drawings (on insipid paper - yes, i've tasted). Seriously, I could be chewing nails and be more productive than having to sit though any more of this.

This dance aint so great

Third Post. Think I've been bitten by the indite bug, mostly because I don't have anything positive to say.

I went to a wedding this last weekend, and had the unfortunate experience of being surrounded by mostly couples and these two single guys I went to school with. So, when the slow songs played - and there seemed to be a lot of them - I found myself sitting at the table alone. It was really, really uncomfortable.

I wasn't sure what to do with myself, so every time the tempo slowed, I excused myself to the bathroom to stare at walls. As humans I have decided that we complicate moments. Hardly anything happens without the mind spinning it up into an elaborate production. It’s the elaboration that makes life more difficult than it needs to be. Come to think of it, I spent a lot of time in the bathroom at this wedding. The other wedding guests must think I have an overactive bladder or a serious coke problem.

I can't remember ever feeling so fucking awkward in my life.

Maybe as a really young teenager. But not as an adult.

I may hire a date for the next wedding I have to attend.

Typing that actually made me sad.

Leave me alone, I'm busy

I'm SO busy that I decided to see if I could still get to blogger rather than actually do anything productive. Update on my life: sinus infection, sunburns, stock issues, dinner out, staying in room, freaking out over stock issues, sinus infection, television, internet that is just too slow and sleep.

I finally found some shows I like to watch on Thursday nights. That one with that one guy...I can't think of his name, but it's called 30Rock. I was cracking up. Watch it next Thursday if you can.

Second post in two days.... I've outdone myself

Where is the nearest bridge?

I officially hate myself.



Don't you hate it when it feels like you've had a string of disappointments and you foolishly decide to rely on someone who is well known for being unreliable to be the one who will bring you out of the dumps? And then that person - lovely and wonderful and amazing as they are - is, as people tend to be, a human being, who has their own ups and downs to contend with (at an amplified dosage, no less).

Well, i don't know about you, but i hate it.

I'm trying hard to focus on the positive, which isn't easy, because for bunches of other reasons i've had a predominantly tough few days of late. The resources seem low.