Wednesday, April 04, 2012

Putting an extra [s]mile! :)

I brought my new car , and when I went to the showroom (with my family), I had such a nice time, and so many unexpected events - maybe they are common these days, but they were new to me [at least!] (because this is the first car I'm buying, not the first I'm driving thou).

The puja ceremony was organized (as communicated by the sales person), and as soon as I completed the paperwork, the pujari was ready, on time, after all the usual stuff, he handed over the keys to me, and said "you can start the car now" ! :-O (cosmopolitan!), he even said "good luck, and happy-n-safe driving" when I put the dakshina! :). Then, the sales guy took a photo of us, and gave it to us, framed, so quick!, with (now, this is the best part, which I like..) a pack of Chocolates! :-D Yum!. I squashed the lemons which were placed under all the tyres, they popped confetti, and I drove away... it all seemed so good!

It might have hardly cost anything [compared to the price of the car!] to the showroom guys, but it definitely makes a difference!

Programming = math? Nah!

Now, if I think back, I feel I was so dumb while in PU II!, I didn't know which stream I should pick, what should I do going further, nothing was clear to me, nor did I bother. But, one was clear, I always thought, engineering = lot-of-math, and I never liked math!, I was more of a art
guy.
art /noun/ : The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture
I loved to make clay/thermocol/paper models, caricature, water paintings...
But Math! yuck!. Biology always seemed interesting to me (maybe because I could draw all those plants/trees/organisms easily!), so I thought, why not MBBS ? But my parents gave me this advice (not force!, just advice), that "we can support your MBBS, but think, do you want to study till you're 30+ ?, if you cant manage to get a MD seat on merit, lakhs have to be spent for a seat!" This made me think hard, and I took Engineering, and since I didn't even like Electronics, I took Information Science (Computers seemed fun, as I had learnt/did some fun stuff in school ... 6-8 years before! Duh!)
When I joined my first company, one of my teammate happened to be my classmate, and he was schocked to see me there - as a programmer (well, lets glorify the title a bit, as a software engineer! :) )
But then, when I think of it, I haven't been that bad!, the reason seems straight forward, if you see the most blogs, or books on programming, they are not called science of programming or math of
programming, the most popular one is of course:
The art of computer programming (but this one, is full of math, and I haven't read it ! :-)). Recently, when I visited my old book on Regular expressions, I came across the phrase "Far from being some stuffy science, writing regular expressions is closer to an art", and I love regexes!
Had programming been anything closer to pure science, I would not have been here, doing it day in, day out, with passion :)