Author smoking weed

This is how to tell if an author of a technical book has been smoking weed, the first paragraph is usually messed. I picked up a new book on Enterprise Java Beans, let's call it a programming methodology for lack of a better term, and this was the first paragraph
"One day, when God was looking over his creatures, he noticed a boy named Sadhu whose humor and cleverness pleased him. God felt generous that day and granted Sadhu three wishes. Sadhu asked for three reincarnations—one as a ladybug, one as an elephant, and the last as a cow. Surprised by these wishes, God asked Sadhu to explain himself. The boy replied, “I want to be a ladybug so that everyone in the world will admire me for my beauty and forgive the fact that I do no work. Being an elephant will be fun because I can gobble down enormous amounts of food without being ridiculed. I will like being a cow the best because I will be loved by all and useful to mankind.” God was charmed by these answers and allowed Sadhu to live through the three incarnations. He then made Sadhu a morning star for his service to humankind as a cow."
Interesting story to be sure, but at this point I was completely confused and then the author said "Enterprise Java beans have also gone through three incarnations" This is probably the eirdest way someone has explained the versions of a technology. Plus, I don't think lady bugs are all that pretty anyways ...

Match fixing

A big problem in the world of sports is match fixing, People get into all sorts of trouble because of it, and a lot of people loose money while making bets. I have the perfect solution to the match fixing problem. Make it legal. That's right, if match fixing is legal no one can bet on anything, there is no motivation to place bets on it, since it's fixed anyways. These are the kinds of thoughts I have when I'm fielding in a cricket match in 50 degrees (Celsius) heat. Cricket was fun, my team lost and I didn't make a permanent spot for myself. I guess I should stick to what I'm good at, running. Not much of a sport as far as teams go, but I am good at it. Any who, back to work.

Today's funny moment

Telephone: Ring Ring
Me: Hello ?
Guy on the other side: Hello, Syed Wajahat?
Me: Speaking.
Guy on the other side: Hi, I wanted to know why your phone extension was not working.
Me: ????
Me: uhh.. it works now, thanks
Guy on the other side: Your welcome

Buying a suit

My mom wants me to buy a suit, weird.. I never thought I would be one for suits, but shopping for one is a pretty cool experience. In the end I decided to get one stitched. Not that expensive really, but the guy cut a piece of the fabric I picked (dark blue pinstripe) and stuck it to the bill. Now, I'm wondering what would happen if I changed the fabric on the bill and told the suit maker he must have misplaced my suit. I mean, I am the customer right? Besides having these kinds of thoughts my day yesterday was spent on trying to open a bank account in the bank I work at. It was like I was trying to escape from prison, they gave me all kinds of weird looks and in the end they asked me "Why do you want a bank account?" At that point, 2 hours of waiting, I was thinking of saying "Because I have a cocaine connection that deals only through your bank, so I need an account at your bank to pay him, want to come over to my place later today and get high?" I mean, I want to give them my money!! I wonder what would happen if I applied for a loan? shudder shudder
Anyways, I have been really thinking about taking creatine, it's not a steroid and it supposedly really helps in muscle development. It's naturally found in red meat and some sea food. I'm still debating it, I'm still seeing gains from working out so I'm thinking I will wait until I reach a plateau that I can't get through by just working out harder. Plus I'm really worried that if I take creatine I won't be able to fit into the new suit I just got fitted for.

low fat choclate & wiki

After having lunch today at an Iraqi restaurant I grabbed a bar of low fat chocolate from a diet center that was right next to the restaurant. I couldn't even tell there was no sugar added to it! and it was all dark chocolate. I mean, chocolate and no calories. It's what the doctor ordered. Oh, and I also found out that the movie 300 wasn't exactly 100% correct. The eldest son of the royal family was exempt from the Agoge, the part where kids beat each other up and stuff. Plus they skipped over the whole pedophilia (gross) thingy that were incorporated into the Agoge. Anywho, I got a wiki up and running at work. A wiki is just a software you can use to share information and edit information. I mean everyone has heard of wikipedia, and this is similar but is meant for a more private implementation. I used this one http://www.vqwiki.org/. It worked like a charm. Plus check out their logo, it's really cool. I'm thinking of getting their shirt just because the logo looks so cool.

Java Craziness

About two months ago I would never have understood the following paragraph.

Annotating the entity’s instance variables directly avoids the overhead of method calls and provides a slight performance optimization, since the persistence manager talks directly to the fields. Annotating the property accessors provides a simple way for the Bean Provider to intercept and perform custom logic during all attempts to read and write property data.
This latter option affords the Bean Provider a chance to lazily derive persistent property values on demand, if desired. However, be aware that any validation or side-effect code on the property accessor methods will be called during entity state transitions. As you’ll see in the next chapter, if the Bean Provider wishes to initialize transient data or refine persistent data at the time the entity’s persistent state is first loaded, or prior to saving changes out to persistent storage, it is preferable to perform these steps using entity life cycle callback methods. Using the combination of field-level annotations and entity life cycle callbacks has the benefit that validation and other code in the setter methods will only be called when a client calls the setter, and not when the entity is being instantiated from persistent store by the framework.

Chances are that anyone reading this now probably doesn't understand a word. All sane people should have given up reading it half way through. I do have a quote for anyone who tries to make any sense of it, ignorance is bliss. Plus it really doesn't help that the author says something like "I'm not not holding a ear that isn't my left ear" rather than "I'm holding my right ear" Welcome to the world of bad prose. I'm sure all fields of knowledge try to hide information from outsiders this way, but is it really necessary? I mean the medical community has it's own style of communication, which to an outsider might as well be gibberish.

Speakingsi Englis?

It's an interesting thing to note that we Indians (from the Indian sub continent) speak our own form of English. For one thing we tend to use the word 'only' in every possible conceivable, and quite a few unconceivable, place in a sentence. Our vocabulary really isn't all that poor but we do tend to pronounce words in way that render them impossible to understand. For example we usually don't pronounce M properly. When we say it, it sounds more like "YEM". T
here is a whole list of other characters and words that we tend to mess up. To top this all of, our head movements are quite indecipherable to people who aren't used to seeing people shake their heads sideways. The yes nod and the no nod are combined to form sideways rotation. In a way it's action and the emotion it expresses are similar those of a dog when it is wagging it's tail. It means the person showing that shake of the head is in an agreeable mood. Well enough about that, English really isn't the best language in the world but it is one of the simplest, and that tends to makes it highly adaptable. The adaptability is both a boon and a curse to the language, Since two people can be speaking in the same language but would probably never understand each other.

still alive

So it's been a really really long time since I last posted and I'm under no illusion that this one single post will make up for all those lost posts so I will, for now, ignore the fact that I have not posted in a while and pretend like everything is fine and the world is still as it was when I stopped posting.
My sister has a really bad habit of taking exercise to the extreme, and then giving up when it gets too hard. Her train of thought runs something like this:
I want to walk today, But that won't help me much so I will run today. That won't help me much so I will run uphill today. But that won't help me much so I will run uphill with a heavy back pack today. But I don't have a heavy back pack so I might as well stay home today.
Makes sense ?