A good Monday

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Today didn’t go in vain. It was satisfactory, if not a productive day. I was reading about the possible outcome of Japan’s nuclear accident [if it goes bad and blows up] in the Economist website. Typically I have a tendency to click/drag and select the content that’s of importance whilst reading to emphasize. In this article when I did that I saw a cute little context that popped out. Read about it, liked it and have now put it up here, in my blog.

It’s called “Apture Bar”. It is very good and if you want to know what it is, all you need to do is just select some text, say “Apture Bar” or for that matter you can highlight “DMK” and wait half a second and say “Learn more” and it loads you with Google results, video results, image results and all. Who knows it might throw up with the article I am talking about!. It also shows up at the header of the blog.

I also read an article on Tehelka about the famil(y)iar political empire of DMK in Tamilnadu. Their history has got striking resemblance to the fictional Don Corleone family. May be Dravidians are poles apart from Southern Italians but the way they all do politics sounded dangerously the same. May be it’s been like that since time immemorial as they say “All in the family”. Cant conclude if it was a case of reel following real or the other way around.

Today despite being a Monday, I felt good. Obviously I didn't do any work but read quite a bit apart from what I wrote about, above. Maybe I should have studied politics or history or literature or something exciting. I don’t really know what it is but I know for sure that it must have been something where I learn and read a lot everyday.

I don’t know why and how I ended up in a job to write software code to earn my bread. May be it was that stupid paternal uncle who suggested it to my parents or maybe it was that decent-enough-for-every-government-employee-and for upper middle class-kin range money. I really see all these bums lying around in these typical clerical not-so-exciting 9-6 software coding [not programming] jobs and I pity them [me included] and I think we as a nation are producing certified talented clerks to the world to do the shit jobs.

The irony is that I was happy to have that Apture bar since it was making my life easy. I am into reading and it makes me avoid a manual search and it’s attractive and easy-to-use. When there is really so much content, it makes your job easier and that is where at maximum the technology stops fascinating me. Once I have to do that and much more [business programming] to make [someone far off in the west] rich, who in turn pays peanuts for my bread and treat me like a paid clerk, that’s when I get pissed off.

If not for this IT revolution, I would have been happy doing what I wanted to do. I am not sure about future group and the multi national banks and multiplexes and alcohol/tobacco manufacturers and shopping malls though, if they are with me on this.

I caught up with the brilliant "Inside job" movie a couple of weeks back and there is one quote by Andrew Sheng which they used very well, right at the end to sum it all up:

Why should a financial engineer be paid four, four times... to a hundred times more than the, uh... real engineer?
A real engineer build bridges, a financial engineer build, build dreams.
And when those dream turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it."


And one thing lingers on:

What about We, the software engineers?
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