Kedar's Log, Stardate 2009

All your life, you eat, sleep and do stuff in between. Everybody has a different way of doing these activities.. The way you live your life, sets certain expectations about it for you. You expect things to work out in a certain way, you expect people to treat you in a certain way and you expect people to see you in a certain way.

Only sometimes, there are situations.. where you have to compromise your aura, that decency or that level of sophistication.. You just live through these situations from time to time and get on with your life as usual. We have all experienced these.. I just thought I might remind you about some such situations here..

1. With a Haircutter -

Most of us have been getting a haircut since we were maybe 2 year olds or even before that? You must have noticed that no style or no arrogance on your part works here.. you simply sit in front of your haircutter with your head bent forward and the guy or the lady in charge of your head at that time, twists, turns and moves your head the way it suits him or her. He can even hold your ear, turn it aside to get to that lock of hair he wants to cut.. well, nobody or nothing is allowed to come in the way of his cutting tools and your hair.. not even you!

It is as if you sign off on giving special privileges and access rights to your haircutter when you go to his shop.. as if you are saying – “go ahead, it is safe for you to do whatever you want to achieve the end result..” ! He arranges your hair the way he wants, he combs it the way it suits him, he brings them forward on your forehead to level them off.. It is a mess, I tell you, you have hair falling on your face, in your lap, on your shoes.. the water he sprayed on your hair is trickling down your forehead, you are all tucked inside a towel, you can’t take your hands out to clean your face, it’s itchy, you don’t like how ruffled your hair looks in the middle of the haircut.. you prefer not to look at  yourself in the mirror at that time but realize that he/she is watching you nonetheless.. just when you are not in the best of your presentable self!

Then there is conversation.. between you and your haircutter.. ranging from what style suits you, you are losing hair, some expert advice on hair, to current weather, politics and everything in between! With your head within striking distance of his sharp tools, you can’t afford to have a lot of strong opinion (!) but you manage to keep yourself engaged. If you signed up for shampoo, you get your hair washed and return back to your seat to wrap it up.

I guess you don’t want to meet your haircutter in a mall, in a party or a restaurant because he/she has seen you in that, umm, messed up state! I mean, he has seen your face at its worst, so if you see him, you just wanna walk away, you don’t wanna look him/her in the eye..

2. With A Dentist -

A dentist is one of my least favorite types of doctor. Not that I have a favorite type.. but I mean you are sitting there in a chair with all those tools menacingly staring at you with lust.. and your mouth is wide open, you are getting your teeth drilled into or pulled out or scratched up or in general getting tortured.. it’s something straight out of a horror movie in my opinion!

Your visit to a dentist starts with you going in with a cautious smile on your face.. you await your turn and when it finally happens, you find yourself in this otherwise comfortable looking chair that packs two thousand different positions and adjustments to make you presentable to the “craftsman” – err, dentist – who is going to operate on you! Sitting perched up high like that in that chair, under the huge “limelight”, you prepare yourself for the ultimate “harakiri”.. you remember all the ice creams and chocolates you ate, remember last night’s BBQ.. all the smiles, memories flashing in front of you.. you think about how everyone else in the world is happily living their life away from this torture chamber!

Meanwhile, the craftsman.. the dentist, is getting ready himself.. he now has a mask to hide his sadistic smile (!), he has gloves so that you can’t take revenge on him with your saliva and dirt in your mouth, he has an apron so that you can’t spit on him..

With both parties ready in their own way like that, the ordeal starts..

The craftsman first gives you a mirror to see how dirty “the machine” has become, he will then blurt out a few familiar words – tartar, gums, molar, nerve endings, cavities… and finally the first command – “open wide“…..!!

.. we need to clean your teeth first.. all those pointy, curvy tools eagerly waiting to carve into and between your teeth.. the tweezers, sickles and all kinds of hand probes going after the leftovers of delicacies you have enjoyed all this time.. They pull, scratch, and lug at your teeth and you feel as if your teeth will just give up and come right out with those leftovers too! Your jaw is almost dropping with pain and fatigue.. and suddenly you come out of that trance of helplessness.. “Open wide!!“.. orders the dentist.. part of your brain orders the muscles in your mouth to oblige.. and it continues.. on and on.. scraping, scrubbing, pulling, carving.. somewhere a nerve gets surprised and takes you to new levels of pain..! Suddenly the craftsman feels a surge of sympathy, and lets you spit or uses his vacuum to clean out your saliva.. somehow your mouth has forgotten the instructions to close itself!! Your muscles have developed a temporary memory of that “wide open” state! You lose track of time… and you wake up in front of the same mirror – the dentist, the craftsman in him is proudly showing his work to you! All white, all clean.. you try to smile.. a wry weary smile – if you can call it a smile that is – appears on your face.

If you are one of those fortunate people who get away with just this much in life, you should consider yourself to be one of the luckiest individuals on this planet.. But those who have to suffer a tooth filling, a tooth extraction, a root canal or more, deserve my utmost pity! The ordeal will last many more hours and visits and will leave you scarred – dentally and mentally – for days to come!

There, you face the ultimate in human torture tools. You will meet the much dreaded dentist’s drill, the unusually long needles of the anesthetic injection, the tooth extracting forceps, the bone cutters and more!

The craftsman almost appears like a car mechanic at that point. It is as if you have opened your hood, the mechanic puts a block in your mouth to keep it open just like a car hood has a support rod, there is a suction pump hanging by the side of your mouth to keep the place dry, and now the place belongs to him!.. he drills, polishes, vacuums, sprays water to clean his “work area”, goes for a walk keeping “that hood” open (!) on the support block, he pulls stuff out of it, he cuts, saws, welds, takes pictures… and in all this, he might just throw you a question that you can’t answer anyway – “are you okay?.. I am so sorry it hurts“! Ye, right, you think..!

When it all ends, you can hardly manage to close your mouth.. forget opening it!! So you just pay and go home.. leaving the horrors of that place in an attic for such things inside your brain….

3. With A Doctor -

A doctor’s visit is another such situation.. now if you are lucky, you just visit the doctor for a little cold here and there or a checkup.. occasionally you have these annual physicals and sometimes complicated procedures.. And one not-so-fine day, you find yourself sitting in a doctor’s waiting room with just a little apron on your birthday suit and a string tied at the back to hold it together! You are trying hard to make both ends of that apron meet at the back when you tie the knot, but it’s not working to satisfy your decency..

You are given a magazine, the nurse comes, checks your vitals and leaves, leaving you to your destiny in that waiting state.. you can’t even venture out much – dressed up like that.. Every time you hear a sound at the door, you try to sit upright mustering a little bit of panache in your posture (!). You lose track of the time as several minutes pass by..  and finally the doctor arrives.. in his nicely dressed self.. you might be the bossiest of bosses at your workplace or the strictest dad at home or the most stylish person on the planet.. but that moment, in front of the doctor, in that apron, you feel like a specimen of some alien species!..

The doctor examines you.. checking which part of this machine has gone wrong or might go wrong! I always think of this as an amazing form of interpersonal situation. Your other identity is right there.. your coat, shoes, your nicely perfumed shirt, cowboy jeans, your iphone, .. all of them waiting for you on that chair by the side of that examination table.. but you have to pass this moment on your own..

4. and all others -

There are many such moments which threaten your decency, your pride and your position in society apart from the three I have mentioned above.

As a child, you were never shy to show the “urgency” when you wanted to answer a nature’s call! As you grow up, you feel compelled to act in a manner suitable to your personality and age, even though you as a human being are still the same. Imagine you need to go and you are not finding the bathroom in a mall or you find it, but people are waiting in line..!! So you need to wait for your turn and at the same time, wait in a manner that will hide that urgency, that desperation, that irritating unrelenting unreasonable need to answer the call! You are walking a tightrope between your decency and nature in this case!

If you think, you encounter many such threats to your stature in your day to day life – when you use public toilets, or you get sick and throw up, or when you sneeze, or snore.. the walls of decency are always ready to crumble upon us like the leaning tower of Pisa and we are constantly trying to hold ‘em together..

It is funny how the very society we built with sophistication sometimes forces us to compromise that very promise of human life. It brings home the fact that in spite of all those layers of society there still remains a vulnerable living being underneath who has to shed all that when he perishes anyway…

I did not have a car back in 1996 and I badly wanted one. It would be 3 more years before I would get my first car. In one of those moments of wanting one, I wrote this back then.

the days when you struggled to get it..
and the nights when you dreamed about it?

Those roads you walked on.. the taxis you hired..
the cabbies you fought with, and the car-owners you admired?

The distances without those 2 pairs of wheels..
the suns you faced and walked after heavy meals?

do you really remember..?

that occasional rain and their cars splashing water..
your umbrella, the heavy bags and your drenched sweater?

They rode the highways.. warm in their cars..
when the streets at night, were cold below the stars..

oh.. do you still remember all of it..?

the pain, the longing, the desire, for that car..
yes, the one you always saw, but the one that looked so far?

yes I know it too, I really do.. because, I am still without a car!
–
Kedar
Jan 10th 1996

“By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.”

–Charles Wadsworth.

Please try, pleeease try.. you need to believe in it.. you can do it.. your family needs you.. your friend needs you.. I, who fed you everyday with power, need you.. I took you places, never left you alone, through thick and thin, we were inseparable, on the breakfast table, in the bedroom, at work, in meetings, while playing with my son, on the Tennis courts, in restaurants, outside the trial rooms in shopping malls, at the airports, in the car, out in traffic jams, at the salon, in grocery stores, in doctor’s waiting rooms, .. you were always the last one to say Goodnight to me.. we were so much in harmony, so much in sync, so together.. and yet.. you forsake me now..

I know I let you down when I fed you power, even when you were still wet from inside after your tragic fall into the bathtub from my son’s hands.. but I promise, I have learned my lesson.. A scalpel is on its way in mail so that I can open you up and try to operate on you.. but I ain’t no doctor, and I don’t wanna send you to one, ‘coz I fear they will just kill you and tell me to get a new one..

so please wake up, and rise from your coma, like a Phoenix.. I patiently await your resurrection….. o’ my dear iPhone!! sigh..

Ever since man discovered how products can be traded for money or other goods, he has been building this giant ecosystem of shopping and trading. Starting with simple necessities of life, people started using their skills to create products for everybody who either didn’t have the skills to make them or didn’t have the time or interest or the tools. Others ‘bought’ these goods and the world was happy.

Then came competition, when more than one person in town started making the same thing. I guess, that’s when the makers felt the need to inscribe their names on their creations – so that people can come back to them. Starting from such modest roots, we got what we call now – the consumer “Brands”!

In today’s consumerist society, people have access to a mind-boggling array of products created by an equally mind-boggling number of producers competing ferociously with each other. Modern times have changed our attitudes immensely. We live in a culture full of consumer lust for more products, fancier labels and larger than life product promotions.

We have so much of everything but still…

… it is just not enough to have a car these days – it needs to be either a BMW or a Mercedes or a Lexus or one of those Italian beauties to get an eyeball.. it’s not enough that you are wearing a suit – they will ask you if it is a Versace or Armani or Prada.. you got a handbag? – well, is it a Gucci or Coach or Michael Kors.. hey, what do you know, it’s not even enough to just have clothes on your body these days – are they designed by Tommy Hilfiger or Calvin Klein or Polo.. and even if you just want to wear some skimpy bare-all swimwear – which, by the way, may not even be worth $10 in actual material costs – you had better spent hundreds of dollars to get some designer swimwear like Speedo, CK, or D & G – if you want people to notice and talk about it!..

So you see, it is just not enough to have watches, perfumes, phones, cars, sunglasses, jeans, skirts, purses, jewelry, makeup, wallets, shoes, boxers, underwear (!).. they all have to have a prestigious label. That label has a price and that price is what decides your value in the society!

When I was a kid, we used to have a tiny bottle of perfume for the whole family. I don’t think it had any special name on it, my father must have bought it from some small shop. It smelled good and for it to smell good, it did not need a Calvin Klein or Hugo Boss or Chanel or Elizabeth Arden or Kross or Nina Richi on it. Back then, I never knew what brand my clothes were made of, or what shoes I was wearing or which backpack I was carrying. But I guess nowadays it is different..

I think Shakespeare was way off when he said “What’s in a name.. That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet”..!

I am not anti-brand.. I guess I am more anti-brandism! I buy branded merchandise too.. but I am not brand conscious! So if I want to buy a bed sheet or a comforter, I don’t go looking for Tommy Hilfiger or Laura Ashley or Calvin Klein or Martha Stuart – heck, for that matter, most of them have some of the most boring designs on the planet IMHO! I am usually in the market for a good product and not for a good brand..

These days it is prestigious to shop for the brands, or rather it is stupid and cheap to buy unbranded products..! People proudly declare their brand allegiance wherever they go, they go out of their way and wallets, to go buy branded merchandise.. so that they can show it off to their friends and family. I wonder sometimes whether it is us buying the branded goods or the other way around!

I use the word ‘brandishing’ for this very reason. People flash their branded merchandise to gain attention, to feel that momentary superiority, to show the world that they don’t settle for anything less, to feel that sense of being-a-cut-above-the-crowd, because someone in some advertisement told them that it takes a connoisseur to recognize and use their brand!

To me, if an unbranded $5 T-shirt looks better than a $75 branded one, I will take it, no matter what someone might say or how much money I have..

I was never a stage person. Every time I tried to do that when I was in school or college, I could not hide the fact that I was nervous. I have sung on stage, spoken a few words, received prizes, given a brief thank you speech.. but all that, quite reluctantly. If I had my way, I would love to receive an award in a jungle or sing a song in my bathroom and transmit it to the world – err, I mean the audio of it

The fact of the matter is, I was never a stage rodeo! So public speaking was not my forte. Although, I used to fantasize being a smarty pants on the stage. But I never tried to bring that fantasy into reality. Because one step on the stage would bring the cruel reality crashing down on me!

Now in my mid-life crisis, I am realizing all kinds of missed opportunities big time, and I am trying to catch up with what I can. Public Speaking is one of those adventures.

I joined Toastmasters about 4 months back. My first thing there was to speak about something during the Table Topics session – impromptu! Not an ideal way to start your public speaking, I was saying to myself on my way to the podium. I was trying to smile, yes sir.. was trying hard to hide under that translucent curtain separating the world outside and a volcano of fear boiling on the inside! Every step of the way was like a step towards the gallows! I thought I must have taken an hour to walk those 10 meters!

The Table Topic for that day was to prove how some of the celebrities would have been better in some other professions than theirs. My combination was to prove that “Paris Hilton would have done well as a terrorist” ! I don’t know what I said, but it was somewhat humorous.. I saw from the corner of my eyes that some people were actually laughing at my apparent joke rather than me! I wound up my little blabbering quickly and just walked back. My heart, was almost popping out of my mouth at that point! Back in my seat, I just wanted to hide under the table – for some reason, I thought everybody in that room was staring at me. Oh God, save me.. I am just a poor man.. save me from this moment of eternal embarrassment!

But, thankfully the meeting moved on..

Next stop, my icebreaker speech. What an apt name.. “Ice breaker” – to break that frozen fear of public speaking. I was supposed to talk about myself in my ice breaker speech. One thing that I had on my side was the fact that I was fond of writing. I already had a blog in place (http://blog.somik.net) and people had told me that they enjoyed what I wrote. Armed with that little tool, I set out on my journey….

In my ice breaker speech I talked about how I missed all kinds of opportunities to become famous throughout my life.. how I never stood first in an exam after my 1st grade or how my childhood dream of being a Superman just didn’t materialize..! Surprisingly, it went quite well – without anybody realizing how crazy my heart was palpitating!

In the days and speeches ahead, the palpitations kept going less and less crazy.. and I started enjoying the whole public speaking ordeal..! I embraced humor as my most favorite track in public speaking. I spoke in front of a TV camera, participated in a couple of contests and secured 2nd place..

I have yet to reach the stage from where I can influence or motivate my audience. I have yet to reach a stage where I can just go on stage and talk for several minutes without being conscious about it.. I have yet to reach anywhere for that matter.. all I have done at this point, is to muster up enough courage to be able to stand in front of people without going weak in my knees and choked up in my vocal cords!

I wasn’t born to be a speaker, I am just trying to break my silence.. and my adventures in Public Speaking have just started..

Trying to type in ‘Marathi‘ (my native Indian Language) here:

मराठी पोस्ट

This wasn’t working for me earlier and I completely scrapped and rebuilt my blog just for this. Before taking such a drastic step, I did basically try some of those “migrate WP db to utf8″ scripts, read scores of documents on the web related to this, tried changing the MySQL db, tables and column collation to utf8 manually, messed around with wp-config.php, but all I got was ????? in the post body (post title was working fine and the values stored in the table were fine too when I checked from phpMyAdmin!).

So finally I made a copy of whatever I wanted from wp-content/ (plugins, themes, gallery) and deleted Wordpress, exported all the data from WP tables to SQL, dropped the db, created a new one, installed latest version of Wordpress from the actual download (and not from Dreamhost’s One click installs), ran the installation, set the options as they were before, restored plugins, themes and NEXTGen gallery and finally imported the table data one by one taking while into account a couple of dropped fields (wp_posts.post_category and wp_links.link_category) into the new Wordpress tables.

And here I am, with UTF8 characters working for me just fine and most of blog is working as desired.. Definitely not a task for the faint-hearted!

My technical notes finally found a permanent place. I have had this Tech Blog since 2003, but I did not work on it regularly. I recently resurrected it and moved it from Blogger to Wordpress hosted on blog.softricks.com domain.

So here you go – http://blog.softricks.com is where my technical blog will actively reside.

I will still post some of my thoughts here on Technology in general – some examples of these are my posts on Windows vs Mac here – “Lifetime Change” and here – “Mac vs Windows.. the War begins” and here – “I broke up with my new ‘girlfriend’!!“. But the real technical discussions (like all kinds of Step-by-Step instructions etc) will be on this Tech Blog. So go check it out if you are technically minded.

Christopher Columbus once said, “You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore“….

AOL has been like a shore for me for the last 8.5 years! I am not sure if I am really crossing any ocean or not, but it is certainly a start of a new life. When you come to think of it, I guess you have very few absolute endings in life.. probably just one! Everything else is a new start.. so, I consider this not as the end of my AOL life but a beginning of my life @VeriSign.

And it feels surprising how fast I reached this decision to leave AOL.. especially since I always used to say that I can be here forever! There was still truth in that, except that it was a bit tainted at that time. I really loved the folks @AOL, the environment, the flexibility in everything.. I built a life for myself while working there – considering I had at least 6 important life events during that time.

During my stay, I must have survived at least 8 layoffs.. and I knew there was no way that I could’ve continued to be lucky forever! Now the question was whether to stay and continue to hope that someone else gets laid off instead of me – if it comes to that – or just leave and find a new hope.. The question was whether I can feel motivated again.. And the question was whether I was ready to start all over again (I had even lost my manager in the layoffs)… And finally, the question was also whether I could live with a survivor’s guilt which I had never felt so closely before…

Within two days, I had the answer in my mind – the answer was to get out. There was no way anyone could’ve advised me to stick it out.. I had already done that for 8.5 years! Also, I was almost getting numb and complacent about being in AOL.. yes, I was getting older and older!

In my farewell email, I accepted the possibility that life might not necessarily be better after this decision, that life might actually be more difficult outside of AOL.. but decisions are always like that.. you have to be open minded about the outcome. So I walked out of AOL on March 27th 2009.. with no plan to be back on the following Monday..

I still see so many AOL branded goodies around me – an AOL cup, an AOL frisbee, AOL pens, AOL jackets.. and it feels quite strange to be alienated from these 3 letters now…!

I download a lot of songs. I am no position to brag about having the largest collection of songs, because I really don’t have the largest collection by any standards. Right now, I only have 535 MP3s – some Hindi, some English, a few Marathi songs and Bhajans and a handful of Marathi Stand-up comedy mp3s. Now I am a fanatic when it comes to organizing things! So I have created quite a few playlists such as Old, 70s, 80s, 90s, 200x, New Songs, Fresh, Dance, Disco, Marathi, etc to organize my audio collection.

Here is what I have been doing recently to keep a good backup of my music on an external drive and have it in the same organized manner as the way I am used to having on my iPhone.

Exporting to directories:

I don’t like the way iTunes organizes the physical files because it categorizes by the Artist and then the Album. Sometimes the ID3 tags contain all kinds of crap, and that creates strange directories in your iTunes Music folder. So there are 2 ways in which you can avoid this -

1. Fix the ID3 tags before you import the file into iTunes – I use Mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) and Audio Shell Mp3 Shell Extension (http://www.softpointer.com/AudioShell.htm) for this. I clean up all ID3 tags to my liking using these tools before I import the file into iTunes. But this just ensures that you don’t have weird directory names. iTunes will still organizes by Artist and Album – which doesn’t work for me.

2. You could use an exporter that can export the PLAYLISTS to physical directories. Now I did not find one that did that. So I wrote my own (iTunesXP). This will soon be available from my site – Softricks.com.

Organizing files into Playlists:

Prior to this, I used to drag the mp3s by hand into appropriate playlists.

Today, I thought about setting the ID3 tag Genre as the name of the playlist and making all playlists Smartlists that look for certain strings in the Genre. What if a song is in 2 playlists? Well, use comma separated names in the genre. The Smartlist can say – where Genre contains “xyz”.

More..

I started downloading some relevant Artwork for every song in my collection. I know it is a bit too much.. but I kinda’ like to see the artwork whenever a song is playing on my iPhone rather than have a blank space.

I realized that iTunes allows for mass updating various ID3 fields. Many downloads come with some junk in the “Comments” field or “Lyrics” field. If you select all songs and do “Get Info” in iTunes, you can, say, blank out “Comments” field for all of them at once!

I know it’s a lot of work.. but I guess I like to have a quality collection!