Amit's Diary
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I got a pair of Bang & Olufsen A8 headphones from my parents. Details here and here.
Still thinking about them, and no cons so far. I am now listening to classical music in a whole different way. When I listen to a CD on my Discman in background silence, I can really hear every last, minute detail.
In other news, I'm going on holiday to Italy for a week this Thursday. Still based in Leeds, working on Choose and Book for the NHS. Yesterday, most of my Bath uni chums met up in London for a great time, we had dinner in Brick Lane. Today saw the maiden opening of a new hall for my Navnat community.
I'm working in Leeds on a project for the NHS, and have gotten into the ultra-healthy lunch phenomenon because of the Pret a Manger here. I thought to talk about the experiences I've had.
Every time I walk into a Pret, the ambience feels healthy. Everything seems to have a large intimate, comfortable, teddy bear feel to it. Things that can be heard and seen include Miso Soup is so healthy it's unreal or We think you'll like it so much that if you don't you can have it free are striking. The people are excessively friendly, and unlike the majority of shop assistants in England, are not blase teenagers, their eyes speak volumes about how much they like their work. Families with kids can be found at Pret, encouraging them to eat healthy, which can only be good given our health problems. The place is jammed full, both for eat-in and takeaways every time I've been there. On Thursday, I forgot to pickup a doughnut, went back, and the lovely girl gave me 2 doughnuts (healthy ones! ;)). I thought to do some research and pulled out the following information from pretamanger.com.
- The two founders created a single store on the basis that the food they wanted was nowhere.
- There are no franchises. Damn! I would love to buy into the Pret concept. Similarly, no investment opportunities!
- They recruit happy people from many backgrounds who like food - specifically!
- They also pay their staff as much as they can afford, not as much as they can get away with
Pret is the Google of the food industry. It's as simple as that. I felt it was so refreshing that there is a business out there where the founders provide a really great service and shareholders, growth or returns are simply not on the agenda. These people genuinely seem to love food, and love selling it. A good profit will naturally follow. We live in an age when the public can talk with their own two feet by choosing where to spend lunch money. The most intelligent businesses fill the gap that we all wish for, and prosper based simply on their ideals. I love Pret, it's not very expensive, and my lunch in the past week has been so healthy that my skin's glowing and I feel almost 100%. Occasionally eating like a lardarse is okay (fryups come to mind!), but it's a false temptation. Go Pret a Manger - you guys rock!
In terms of petty critique, this is what I would say about the Pret layout and in-store concepts:
- The amount of time people spend selecting their sandwiches can be accelerated in various ways, which I won't bore you with here. The result will be less pushing around as everyone wants to look at the fridge shelves.
- An optional payment system online using credit cards would save the hassle of messing with credit cards and change. A solid loyalty scheme would be great too. Providing PayAsYouGo Pret sounds cheap, but it's actually useful!
- It's clearly a place for social networking - so a dating service might go down quite nicely, given the crowd ;)
- The concept should be extended into a proper, distinct offering for dinner.
- I thought I'd never say this - but the place does have a non-mainstream ponciness about it, which prevents many people from dabbling into what could be perceived as a food bar that is reserved for socialites or the pretentious types. It would be so much better, if perception was toughened up.
So only one thing remains - do they have a job at HQ for clued up IT people like me? Here's to hoping.
In other news, I'm a few weeks away from introducing My Quotations at quotationsbook.com. You will not only be able to save your favourite famous quotes, but write and share your own.
It's been a while, no?! Many things have passed, but I continue to work on a few main things, like quotationsbook. I have a new project in my day job, but details can't be written here, so I'll talk about quotationsbook instead! Since my web host is now incapable of taking the load, I bought a dedicated server this morning, which has a permanent, unlimited 512Kbps dedicated connection to the internet backbone. Let me know if any of you need high capacity hosting at scorching speed! I can control everything about the server, including hardware reboots. The scary part is that I now have to migrate each site one by one to the nameserver of my new dedicated server, so not as simple as a shared web host. Blinder.
I met Dr. Clark and Sally of LitEncyc.com at their home in Angel last week. I am pleased to announce a partnership between our sites. Specifically, we will share content between our sites using private RSS feeds. This is virgin territory but will benefit us both. I am excited by this development, the single most significant thing since QuotationsBook.com launched. I will have extracts of LitEncyc biographies on my site, and LitEncyc will have quotation extracts from my site. LitEncyc has many academic volunteers, and amongst the most thorough content and meta-data about writers on the web. Robert and Sally are also pleasant people!
Birke put her photos up on FlickR. She takes great photos, and there's some of when she came to London. Also, Gaz looks like he's getting Hesam into the great sights, sounds and smells of England!
Continue Reading on this post for an account on the evolution of QuotationsBook.
Continue reading Hello again!
This blog is a chronicle to record where my mind has been, in case I forget and need to revisit certain memories. Hence the times between updates (a month for example) are completely arbitary, usually based on my level of adventurous activity. Translation - sorry for not updating! The attacks in London were a day of chaos for me. I had to drive to Paddington to pick up my brother and some others, and the streets were crawling with confusion. My condolences to those that lost loved ones. The best we can do is to not let anything affect us, since one of the goals of terrorism is to change our behaviour.
QuotationsBook is progressing, and it now has an RSS feed and mailing list.
I spent a week road-tripping around South-West England. We covered so much and it was great, we got lost in sand dunes (at Braunton Burrows) and climbed to the top of Cheddar Gorge. Pearl and Brian took all these great pictures. I've become a fan of doing the easier Su Doku puzzles published at the back of The Times. Work is slow, so distractions are welcome!
Team America - when watched under alcoholic influence, the most hilarious film ever made. I watched it in Putney at a friend's place last night! I'm on holiday all next week, road trip around England! Yes! Again! with friends Pearl and Brian Pirie.
After a lot of time spent dawdling around, I've launched www.quotationsbook.com. I hope to improve it a lot over the next few weeks, including adding over 70,000 fortunes! Please go visit and enjoy!
I had a fantastic weekend break around Bath. Five of us (Bruno from work, his girlfriend Ara, Leah the incomparable, and lovely Lucy) rammed into the car and drove over to near Bath on a fresh Saturday morning. We first put luggage in our nights accomodation, a luxury farm house B&B with our own kitchenette. It had roof windows, sofas, and was very cosy. 6 people ended up sleeping comfortably inside that night, more on that later! We went on to Bath, I met with friends at a pub, and did all the walking about and sightseeing. After a few drinks and a walk around Victoria Park, we joined Malcolm to dig into grocery shopping for cooking together. It was more organised than I imagined, thanks to Ara's decision making before we got in. Leah still bought things at the end, and at the last minute! We got back to the farmhouse (6 in the car), which is a little ride outside Bath, nestled inside a valley, but with adjacent hills either side. The sounds in my car were many and varied but Grease did feature. At home, we had an awesome time cooking and watching Eurovision. Many of our heads lost many millions of brain cells by accidentaly smacking on the very low roof beams! We kept a tally of how many bangs we each had, Leah was undisputed champion with about eight solid whacks! The hardest single hit must have been poor Lucy, because the beam thundered really loud when her head smacked it. Later, after much conversation, Malcolm decided to sleep over because Leah (bless her!) slept on the floor. Lucy (who's Norwegian) enjoyed the Norway entry muchly, although I fancied the Romanian one for a few reasons. We sang songs with my guitar and mellowed to bed.
In the morning and I rang up a totally loud song to wake Leah and Bruno! We must've woken the room downstairs. The morning was crystal blue, but this was to change during the day, when it rained like crazy. There was farm animals outside, and we played with them for a bit! We had a full English breakfast, packed up, and rammed into the car again to drop off Malcolm and say goodbye to him in Bath. While passing Bath Abbey, I stopped so we could pick up a map for the day's driving. We drove to Dyrham Park but it was expensive to get in, so, seeing the opportunity to test my Land Rover, I bushwhacked across a field and we drove to the end, peeping though the fence to see a group of red deer. We were then back to the road, this time heading for Castle Combe, said to be the prettiest village in England. It certainly was. The Manor House Hotel was wonderful, like a scene from some fairy tale kingdom. After a drink and food in an old pub, we visited two more old towns, Lacock and Avebury. At the Stone Circles in Avebury, we stopped inside the Red Lion for quite some time and had a huge dinner. As soon as we walked out to see the Stone Circles in the evening it rained (surprise!). And in the rain, we met a Celtic Druid, who said they learn from the scriptures of Hindu Brahmins. He was being filmed for a BBC documentary about the solstice coming up, and we were told we might be on TV soon enough, since we were asking so many questions. We all chased the sheep at these ruins (sorry sheep!) and got back in for the road trip home. Leah bought me a chocolate at a service station. I had a fabulous weekend, new friends, it was full of wholesome life and food. Hope this happens more often. I can imagine this being even more awesome if it didn't always rain on our green and pleasant land!
Click here for our pictures (thanks to Bruno for most of them)
Recently I've been thinking a lot about love, the kind that lasts for a long time. I pictured myself having met someone, and then unable to really listen, I make the great mistake of losing her through my own will. I wrote this as mental preparation that such a thing should not happen.
People say “good things come to those that wait”. But I walked straight out of the door, I didn't wait. I found you, I wanted to know much more about you. But I left, into the ether, like a lost soul. I didn't even know you. Today, I think of you, the highlight of my day. I think of a great love that could have been. I think of love lost, about the ages of time that wanted to bloom under another sky. It was never meant for me. I haven't the charm to say if the moment is now lost. Magic must be left as magical as it was found. I want to keep knowing what I’ve learned, keep feeling how I feel, and be tearful sometimes, when you're inside but somewhere distant.
I mustn't forget these visions. I may grow older, but my dreams must not grow old. One day, I will ask myself about an opportunity I lost and what I long to believe. There you'll be, a mermaid in my sleep. I'll die with your smile in the back of my throat, and I will regret my world. But in the midst of regret, your voice will seep through; you will come and place your arm on mine, and tell me that I have known the anguish of loss. My eyes will not shed tears, and I will hold my head up high, innocent as on that first day when you melted into this gorgeous world.
I tend not to involve myself much with politics. I'm an avid reader of the left and right, but after hours, I often feel that this huge mass of debate is created by man, quasi-true and not pure, satisying, and without material substance for a timeless good.
Everyone seems to say politics is very important. In my case, I'll do whatever I have to do, and forego thinking and getting worked up about politics because there are too many greater pursuits out there than a petty attachment to someone's manifesto which will always remain one person's godsend and another's downfall. Politics at a national level is a man made problem, inherently unsolvable, and really not worth wondering too much about. If my country goes extremist, then I feel I might have a say for some greater good, but otherwise, it's a simple choice between a set of clowns with nice suits who converse very well. If one of these clowns can save me a few hundred pounds in taxes, that's great, if they don't, then that's fine too, I would have spent it anyway on music, travel or entertaining myself and others!
Sometimes, a voter is faced with the decision to abstain from voting. I don't believe it's right to abstain, but I also believe that a layman's understanding is usually fine to vote to a moderate level of confidence. Above all the hype surrounding the British General Election, there's people who don't care less. I'd rather go on holiday!
Yeah, my shoutbox has been down for a while because it's host has measles. It should be up soon! I had a great time in Nottingham for a few days on training.
Octavio Paz, Speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1990 - Source
"At the close of this century we have discovered that we are part of a vast system (or network of systems) ranging from plants and animals to cells, molecules, atoms and stars. We are a link in "the great chain of being", as the philosophers of antiquity used to call the universe. One of man's oldest gestures, repeated daily from the beginning of time, is to look up and marvel at the starry sky. This act of contemplation frequently ends in a feeling of fraternal identification with the universe. In the countryside one night, years ago, as I contemplated the stars in the cloudless sky, I heard the metallic sound of the elytra of a cricket. There was a strange correspondence between the reverberation of the firmament at night and the music of the tiny insect. I wrote these lines:
The sky's big.
Up there, worlds scatter.
Persistent,
unfazed by so much night,
a cricket: brace and bit.
Stars, hills, clouds, trees, birds, crickets, men: each has its world, each is a world, and yet all of these worlds correspond. We can only defend life if we experience a revival of this feeling of solidarity with nature. It is not impossible: fraternity is a word that belongs to the traditions of Liberalism and Socialism, of science and religion.
I raise my glass - another ancient gesture of fraternity - and drink to the health, happiness and prosperity of Your Majesties and to the great, noble and peace-loving people of Sweden."
Also read
- Pablo Neruda, Literature - 1971, Banquet Speech
- John F. Nash, Economics - 1994, Autobiography. Subject of the film A Beautiful Mind
- Mother Teresa, Peace - 1979, Presentation.
- Rabindranath Tagore, Literature - 1913, Account.
- Martin Luther King, Peace - 1964, Acceptance.
- Jean-Paul Sartre - Literature, 1964. Refused his Nobel prize. He disassociated from any institutions to form bridges between cultures.
- And finally, an open mistake in awarding the Nobel Peace Prize, He that changed the world and influenced countless people.
MIT is working on natural language to code visualisation. The example used is Pacman, where the highest level definition of a program is sketched through some banter with a natural language agent. I remember chatting with Riian Van Schoor a while ago, who's created an MSN Instant Messenger interface to book tickets and search for flights, an agent in this sense is an interface. More so, if such a tool could be used to question and assess information for requirements, it would pseudo-code the main bits, leaving just finer details to nail down.
And life's not all work (far from it!) but I'll hold some info! I expanded my DVD collection with my masterpiece favourite The Big Blue, and also bought Thelma & Louise and The Usual Suspects. I have this mad idea about doing a short black and white film with just hand silheouettes, i.e. all the fingers and the wrist as an actor and writing a short script and filming the shadows on a white background. The trial movie will be Cashier at a supermarket checkout where one hand does the cashier and the other is the buyer. The other night, I realised how real the movement of our fingers/wrists/palms can be. Their shadows look like the faces of cartoon characters on a wall.
I grew up with a Hindu background with time in an Italian missionary school, in magical Kenya! My first 12 years were in Kenya, and many familiar things seem unworthy of being written down, but they still make me look into my own memories in Nairobi, Mombasa and the rest of Kenya. I met old relatives, friends and felt many memories that put me inside my past. This was the first visit to Kenya in several years.
Wedding
In Mombasa, I stayed at my grandad’s old, large house in town which is now painted lilac all over. In Nairobi, the jaan stayed at Nairobi Gymkhana, all flossy and busy with the ceremonial buzz. I remembered some Swahili again from the first day I landed in Nairobi, stayed a few hours with dad at our home, we had bhajias, I bought a shirt and took a local flight to Mombasa. It flooded back, the forced African styles of easy vocal clarity, unassuming, simple and direct. My uncle’s son Jay married Reshma from the Brahmin community.
In Mombasa, the groom goes through a preparatory ceremony, and at the end of it, the ladies can daub him with ochre paint, and play around with him. I happened to be around, finding my own face daubed in yellow! Jay and I met after many years (we almost grew up playing together) and we relived memories by going to the lighthouse with everyone by the rolling, deep sea, had mogo (roasted cassava) and kachri (fried cassava crisps with chilli and lemon) like we used to. It was wonderful, the nights were very hot in Mombasa. We went around everywhere before Jay and jaan took off to Nairobi, including a sailing club. The party travelled to Nairobi, where we had a raas garba the night before wedding day. The wedding was entertaining, and they can be long, often two or three hours. The maharaj presiding was funny, and for the first time, a couple of youngsters talked about the profound meaning of all the detailed parts of the Hindu wedding in English which is usually in Gujarati. One of the final parts is when the couple in a golden chain of 21 fibres walk around a fire four times for each of Nature’s elements. Each procedure in the ceremony has a basis deeply rooted in the ancient scriptures of Sanskrit texts.
The Jaan
A jaan in a Hindu wedding is the wedding party, over forty people in our case who travel with all their ceremony hoo-hahs and bags to another city and are hosted and given hospitality by the receiving family, often the bride’s. This one was mostly my aunts, uncles, cousins and every which relation I didn’t know, all totally intent on creating the maddest bus journey. We had a court case between the men and women, and gossip in Gujarati is beyond compare for its ability to go deeper and deeper into the mire. It’s the most lovely and versatile language for arguing. But it's a way of being crazy with innocence and respect. So after my faiba smacked lipstick on some of the dozing blokes we stopped at MacKinnon Road, at a Muslim shrine where my dad always used to stop when I was little, by the Nairobi/Mombasa railway track. Everyone stops here, as its bad luck not to respect the pioneer of these parts. Jay said he wasn't happy that a healthy guy wouldn't work and begs instead. I took this on board, wanting to use it for brain juice in the future. The landscape is almost arid, sometimes the odd herd of zebra or wildebeest. At Makindu, we stopped for lunch at the Sikh Gurudwara, which serves all travellers food, irrespective of race or creed. This has been around for as long as I remember and is a very noble cause built and run by many donations and trustees from Kenya’s Sikh community. Outside we bought mpera, and many other nice fruits with English names that I don't know!
The way back from Nairobi to Mombasa was about the same with its own flavour of rugged festivity – you get the picture. The bumps were bone-crunching and the journey takes a full day, one way. In the back seat of the bus I once flew straight up in the air, making a fountain of my freshly squeezed passion-fruit juice. Everywhere we stopped were beggars, many, many people who'd occasionally push at my chest to give them a few shillings. The new visitor to Kenya should be prepared for the shock of their lives at the incredible poverty that exists. C'est la vie. Imagine what it takes to be such a good, smiling person but not have food for the evening.
Travellers Beach Hotel, Mombasa
My two night foray at the Travellers Beach was a blessing, making a real holiday out of a wedding. I remember this hotel when I was little, it’s got lots of water slides made of tiles which go into blue lagoons. The beach outside is Bamburi Beach, with hawkers aplenty, ready to sell you anything, with “Jambo, rafiki, yes my friend”. I made friends of the madaaf (coconut) seller outside who also sold me weed and talked to a Kenyan girl about London. She thought London was a different country to the UK. I explained how much faster life was, and how everyone was into their own worlds with little time to see friends, but I don’t think she understood.
The days were spent swimming in the pool and ocean and reading on the loungers. I noticed many stray, old European men with a Kenyan woman. In the evenings by the pool bar there were often do’s like bands which played everything from Elvis to Eric Clapton (which I requested!), and these mismatched and temporary couples would take to the floor as all the others watched. I studied the looks on the faces of all the “innocent” couples with much interest, not knowing what to think. The sex industry is now open in Kenya, more than before. Surprisingly, there were many workers the other way round – white women spending their holiday with local men.
The first night I had loads of vodka and lemonades after talking to an Icelandic pilot at the bar, and headed off to some club called Tembo, even though somebody told me I should go to Pirates or Bora Bora instead. I took a matatu. Something told me to strike at the heartbeat of doing things alone. I reached Tembo, realised I didn’t have that much dough, which is a bad situation in Mombasa. I watched the girls dance and there was hardly any clubbers. I had to buy two girls a drink just to talk breeze for two hours until time came for things to get busy later. Clubs start late.
Shasha in Tembo
I first watched her mesmerised, under the lights on the dance floor. She never moved from one place, and always faced the same direction while feeling everything in a Kikuyu song that was playing. Her skin was light beige, her backless dress revealed a figure that made me want to photograph these moments just for the crying memory, but I had no camera. She swayed like a palm in light breeze, absolutely gorgeous. Like a diva.
She liked my bright red shorts, and then we suddenly felt like dancing and so we went to dance, and I’ve never danced like that in my life. She was the breaking waves of the Indian Ocean and I was the shifting sand underneath. We were in a free world, we felt every rhythm of every song. I went into her straight hair and high cheekbones; I haven’t seen or felt much this beautiful in recent times. She was from Mauritius; her way was gliding, like a precious coral in calm waters. It was one of those moments when a swing to Lady in Red by Chris de Burgh would have found its most striking moment. Even the bouncer asked us to be less sensual and perhaps have a drink on the house. She came to the hotel and her sweat was like perfume, it lingers in my mind. The guards didn’t let her into the hotel, and then I thought that magic moments should just stick in memory and there was a line which I wasn’t about to cross. I sent her in a taxi to Mtwapa. I didn’t want to know anything more, this was the whole thing. I suppose this was one face in the cut diamond of a partner, which I’ve never really known.
Nairobi
A friend of my dad's runs Gamewatcher Safaris from Nairobi which has its own eco-camp. I also visited a connection with a sauce manufacturing plant who wants to get wholesaling their sauces to the UK. I wrote nothing in particular of my city of birth, except this.
The matatus on the street mingle like ants, almost bumping into each other but not quite. Reams of people shuffle in ramshackle cars, the occasional tinted-glass Land Cruiser making a change. The dust of the road mixes with the wet dust of the sun, muttering something like an undercurrent, never seemingly known, but always erasing on sight. The food is loaded, lively, and the people even more so, and simple. A banana seller approaches me with respect, and at my slightest frown, she moves away, having read a mind in a split second. Kenyan people never seem to frown.
The Mombasa Road to Nairobi airport is long, full of industry and manufacturing. Factories of foam, rubber and tyres mingle with a fine hotel, package holiday centre and a mobile telecoms glasshouse. The people wear dancing, often overfitting clothes like what I could buy at Oxfam several sizes too big, often in darker shades of khaki. The seldom lost savanna raves its head above a fiesta of building sites. Coarse bushes, hundreds upon thousands, dance strenuously, as if afraid of the herbivorous mouth of some savanna animal. The smell of the red African mud completes a scene that makes the pupils of even the coldest eyes turn warm and wide.
The rain doesn’t come. The men at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport seem to love sitting around. They probably think about the Earth, day dreaming as quickly as they look relaxed. For this is the good life, the life aplenty – a life of servants, housekeepers and drivers. Jingles run through my ears all over the city day and night, from matatus, conversations and singing. The night air croaks excitedly, like it knows what paradise is. And the good people smile and make me wonder if my people have the most golden and chaotic hearts in the world.
I spent the last day with my dad in Nairobi; we went to the Aga Khan Gymkhana, where people were preparing for the arrival of his highness from France. I had the best peri-peri fish in remembrance for lunch. It was lush, ridiculously cheap in British money. In the afternoon, we moved around Gigiri and Muthaiga. I was partly in awe and partly scornful of the huge houses, invidually designed for the mostly expats who lived here. At dinner, we went to an excellent Thai before going to the airport for the flight to London. I was overweight on luggage, but this is Kenya, and blagging my dad’s expired KLM Flying Dutchman card got me another 10 kilos. I spent time reading The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck before my eyes dropped into a black hole – and around five in the morning near Heathrow, the doldrum-yellow twinkling lights appeared and some truck took ages to tow the aeroplane into a docking bay.
The bags were late to the carousel. I could only put on an African smile as this exasperated Brit declared the reason, quite annoyed – incorrect loading from Nairobi!
Conclusion
On my first night in Nairobi, my face almost got eaten by mosquitoes, but I quickly realised the buzzing round my ears and moved to another bed. I remember the dark beach and feeling like the sand was one massive layer of coloured cotton wool. The sand was slightly bright from the night stars that were spread around like a Renaissance painting on canvas. I remember how this camel on the beach looked at me. It had large brown eyes, the most delicate, soft things that glinted with a thousand tiny sparkles. It simply looked, as if telepathically transferring some great wisdom that came from the divine.
I had a nice Saturday evening. Yesterday, I read a chapter of Jack Kerouac's biography very carefully. It freshened up my recollection that the Kerouac estate removed offensive (offensive to me, not talking about joe bloggs) statements that he made from public view. It was a fashioning of Kerouac to get the hippy and indie types to recognise a soulmate and romantic hero. In any case, anything has another side, and the other side of a coin is often dark and doesn't shimmer with a high currency value, the public side. Still awesome though, just takes your mind into overdrive to think there were massively horrible things that someone fascinating used to do. Who cares, Keouac's gone. Let's hit the next big thing.
Well that said, I have to write a white paper at work by Friday this week to do with agents and the semantic web for an incubated proposition. The language is not academic, far from it. My dad celebrates his 50th birthday tonight! I plan to visit an old French friend (the one I write with a fountain pen) at a house he's staying at owned by a journalist in Notting Hill. I watched Overboard, again, classic!. Nice flurries of snow in London lately. From the 6th to the 18th, I'm on vacation in East Africa, a wedding.
Grandma's been in and out of hospital. She didn't take well to the antibody stage of her chemotherapy regime. After a few days, she took the next phase of her treatment and her hair is now about half of what it was. She doesn't seem herself and sometimes rejects joyfulness.
Anyway, 'nuff fantasy! I've started writing Mokaa using Jakarta Tapestry after procrastination. Still pondering what to buy or do about mum's 50th birthday. In shopping news, I bought Good Will Hunting on DVD, having owned the soundtrack for years, and enjoyed Gus Van Sant and the Burroughs connection.
Recently, I've been remembering the rambling I did a long time ago in San Francisco. Looking at old photographs, I feel the vibe that filled me with everything-ness that one great time in this most lovely of cities. I will never forget walking up the stairs of City Lights, I felt like the ghost of the Beats sank in me for good. I automatically conjure up great ideas when someone speaks the words San Francisco. I remember walking down Embarcadero, by Fisherman's Wharf. The Bay Area fascinates me.
The wind was light that day, and it was me, a bench, and the world. Before the full light of dusk went away, I remember sitting there alone with the seagulls.
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art.
Every block is a short story, every hill a novel.
Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal.
That is the whole truth.
William Saroyan
On the left, there's a bottle of Dentyl in my bathroom. It says
SEE THE RESULTS IN THE SINK - causes of bad breath are removed and revealed!
How pleasant. On the right is the shells of all the steamed groundnuts I had for lunch on Sunday.
I'm sparking a really big website at the moment - it's truly massive! Details soon. In two weeks we have our company's New Year's party. Yes, I know. But at least it's better than having a Christmas party at the end of January. Unless this IS supposed to be a Christmas party. Great ghu, it's all so crazy! I'm working 10-12 hour days.
I volunteered for CRISIS for 3 days, a homeless charity which runs an Open Christmas in the Millenium Dome. I washed toilets and showers and almost froze my goolies off outdoors on day 1 and helped out in creative writing workshops! It got violent some shifts, but we worked in pairs did our best to calm people out of a proper fistfight. On the last day, 3 guests from my writing group wrote a speech to thank the volunteers for sacrificing our holidays. The poetry written by the group came from the hard pain that only they knew. When they danced (in the entertainment tent), they danced like nobody was watching. They were crazy, real and emotional. They'd band and break into song and dance. The volunteers wore badges and they came with their own agendas. I came wanting to give my time and help. And now I'm addicted. I hope to do this again at Christmas 2005. Many families were re-united, many people were helped to rebuild their lives off the street, and I learned from countless stories. I'd walk out of my shift around midnight and see the towering Canary Wharf, the buildings besides it - HSBC, Citibank. Their windows would glitter against the London night like jewels. Above Canary Wharf was a powerful intermittent light, probably to warn aircraft. The Thames separated the Wharf from the Dome. A couple of times, I'd think about this from a Namibian guest
This is my vertical expression of a horizontal design.
He explained that he was the man lying on the ground, broken, and rarely, something would reach out and he could stand and see a better day.
Other than that, my grandma's been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Today, we went to the hospital and listened to how the chemotherapy would work. It runs over 10 days, and consists of steroids and other drugs. They monitor the effectiveness of the treatment in stages. Despite all this, the main part for us to know was the symptoms, which include fatigue, hair loss, etc. I suppose the only thing we can do is give her moral support.
It's been a rollercoaster at work. Today will be my third night in a row going out with work people (Chinatown's becoming like home now). I was at a management briefing two days ago where over a hundred of ATOS management came for an conference on figures and updates, seeing our Consulting HQ for the first time. In this session, which was themed as TV car show Top Gear, there was a Jeremy Clarkson stylee interview where 4 new joiners were selected for their fresh view on culture and opinion. Out of all the grads, I volunteered, even though I knew if I screwed this up, my future at this company would be in jeopardy (with the top brass watching!). I didn't screw up, I did well, the head of SI handed me a champagne bottle to big applause. I sat down back down, a bit dazed. I don't know what I said - I just spoke my mind about culture, profile, open source and open standards. A Director of Atos Consulting wants to meet soon, and a technology watch group, that incubates cutting edge stuff wants me to write a proposition leading to a white paper for multi agent systems. I was shocked. It's kickstarted my progression in this firm. All this means of course, I have to keep well informed and so I have no time which eats my private life. Some of you will get my Christmas poem, I'll send that out soon. I was also wrong about Google's stock price, which has now doubled, good for them you rock! Merry Christmas and see you in the New Year!
Comments have been switched off at babble after months of spam about Texas holdem poker and Viagra substitutes. After collecting 130 comments on my grape-picking story, I've also switched off comments there sorry. I'm on a mission to cut stuff, since time is scarce. You're gonna have to email me now, so to offer a better service, I promise to revamp my email answering from its lull.
This weekend I discovered the fantastic story of Hanson (look at how they've grown!), after digging up an MMmbop mpeg from the dusty corners. Then I read the lyrics and realised there's more. These dominoes of licking melodies have something really breathtaking going. Possibly the Jackson 5 of the 90's.
I've started using the Warez P2P client to get some movies that make me stay up late procrastinating. Today - on this fresh, grey Sunday, I'm planning an entry for a photograph competition at work. The theme is Tuesday, on your way to work. I've been racking my brains about an interesting subject, scene and moment in the journey driving from Pinner to Stockley Park in London. Sometimes, when I'm lost in the morning quell, I think about streets arranged in blocks, and then maybe I could take a different route to work each day. I don't have this pleasure, but on the other side (this is confusing), I take comfort doing the same road every day.
Grandma's condition still hasn't been diagnosed, and we are waiting for the results of a biopsy.
WORK
I hope projects in my firm take me to new lands, like Torino, Beijing or Sweden. Honestly, I love my job! I spent time going through cycles of questioning our working ways, which are inherited from best practice guidelines across projects.
Simple concepts which tech-savvies take for granted like wikis and weblogs find themselves in a mess when mapped to benefits and impact in a medium size IT project.
I was reading with interest about much touted enterprise blogging. In the battle of Experience (Tried and tested Quality Assurance) vs. New Idea, the juicy stuff is in understanding the vacuums of an idea. A part of this article quotes a good argument (given below), but when you think about what it means - fundamentally changing the way information is documented, I don't see enterprise blogging just by itself as workable.
The answer instead might be to recognise information flows in large projects and to allow realtime messaging that goes beyond aggregating blog entries or notification. In effect, think of enterprise blogging for a large I.T. project (say 50-150 people), which has portal content set for groups, with pre-configured triggers and alerts. Now add to the mix, integration tags to documentation and code versioning tools (e.g. Filenet/Documentum/Rational Clearcase) and the facility to escalate decent improvements from the "project level" scope to "company knowledge base" (hence adding recommendations to help future projects run better). Finally, throw in a customer-facing portal that aggregates status reports and latest releases automatically in a snapshot, so they can see where things are at in real-time. For a company that works on bespoke IT projects, like mine, this could be a useful app.
Development team late delivering a software release? Fire an alert to testers for parallel testing to section off more resources. Fire another alert to the client liaison so that the front line knows of the lag. And finally, the dev. team blogs about their excuse on their portal. If that was the case, and there was flexibility with other project tools e.g. for planning it would bolt the simple idea of blogging into a myriad of other things that really work. Okay, now imagine developing this thing in Tibco, an application on top of a proven API and messaging/alerts platform (Rendezvous/Hawk). Imagine marketing it with Tibco as your right hand man, now that you've given them an incentive. All those systems integrators who use Tibco (the people who'd really benefit) are suddenly listening. There is products out there, but they seem to target smaller settings. Anyway, thoughts on a grey Sunday.
Different voices can appear — In every workgroup there are those who are outspoken and comfortable expressing themselves in meetings, and there are those who aren't. When group conversations are limited to vocal interactions, the group often misses out on the opinions of those who are shy or quiet. With the weblog as an additional communication outlet, the voices that are rarely heard in meetings may open up through writing. People who aren't comfortable speaking on the spot may find the asynchronous nature of the blog more appealing. Someone loath to suggest an idea in a meeting may feel perfectly comfortable proposing it to the group via the blog. The removal of face-to-face conversation changes the dynamic of the interaction, and that results in different conversations.
Okay, back to stuff that's actually going on - I'm hoping a team in India gets back to me with a plan to code Mokaa. I sent them needs last week.
This is the 100th post on BigBabbleBlog! I got blogging through some of the first bloggers I ever read, like Hal and Andrea.
It's shocking - the lack of iPods for sale out there! Today, I had the urge to finally buy an iPod, that love machine with a wheel! I had visions of it arriving in a few days. But alas! Even Amazon takes 1-2 weeks, with the earphones and the dock taking 4-6 weeks - it's not making it by Christmas! A workmate has been wearing iPod earbuds in my face, taunting me. People are going nuts about it! I'm still procrastinating.
Yesterday night was spent with 3 ladies - Shiv, Sian and Frances. Sweet Frances told me a few things that made me melancholy. She told me about women's needs. A little alcohol was around.
My grandmother's condition has not yet been diagnosed.
I found this Bruderhof article about dating culture. The tone changes - self-proclaimed geeks will appreciate this. This week, I installed Tibco's PortalBuilder at work and now I'll be fiddling and developing this biyatch for the next few months. It powers the content portals of Yahoo! woo. A project working with 3step for Wenta has reached realisation, thanks Gaz.
Check this out. LOL!