Viraj's Weblog

Hilarious short movie about callcenters.

Today I saw 'Thank you for smoking'. It's a satire about tobacco lobbyists, and I thought it was stylish and very funny. The lead is played by Aaron Eckhart, whom if you have seen 'In the company of men', can play a white-collar villain better than anyone else. In that movie he's exploiting women with his words. I remember him in that movie because I thought to myself, "what an evil bastard." In this movie instead of women, he's exploiting the public with his words.

The movie is really cool in how it visualizes spin. There is an amazing scene where he's talking at a podium. His mouth is moving, but you don't hear words, you hear a machine gun going in sync with his mouth, and he's spraying the whole room. That's probably the best depiction of spin I've ever seen.

There is scene with a movie exec (played by Rob Lowe) discussing how to make cigarrettes sexy again. They decide to add smoking to a sex scene in a space ship movie, blowing circles around naked bodies. It has to be in the future because smoking would be accepted then. They planned to release a new brand of cigarrete with the movie. It was hilarious but it's probably not too far from the truth when it comes to advertisements in movies. Speaking of which, I saw V for Vendetta. I'm not writing a review of that since everyone probably has seen it. Anyway, I caught the flagrant JVC advertisements throughout.

Anyway, it was a good movie that makes you think. Great direction too.

I've never been much of a software developer. I usually write stuff that start out as small hacks and end up as very large hacks. Throughout school I just did not have much interest in software engineering methodology. It seemed all theoretical to me, and I just wanted to get down and start coding. Design? yeh right.. My projects were small enough that I could keep everything in my head.

So this is probably why I find it hard to do test driven development. It seems when you write tests first, you are assuming that the modules you write will have a certain API. The problem I have is that API is a contantly changing thing for me. I may do things one way, and then realize I don't like it. Then I will redo it another way. My program ends up being blob-like and always changing. I don't like to make the assumption that one way, especially my first draft, is the right way, and things can always improve. I've always felt programming was like painting. The painter has something in his head and starts drawing. He doesn't do a UML diagram first. If he doesn't like the result he throws away the canvas.

So how do you deal with this? Think more hard about your design and API before coding? Sure that's probably what all those classes preached . Of course the proper thing would be to have the tests constantly changing as well as my API. Time then becomes a factor. I feel when writing tests I sort of lose my stream of consciousness. I lose the inspiration of my project by being interrupted to write tests.

Oh well, this is more of a rant than anything else. I do know the right way, I just don't agree with it many times.

An old but very interesting speech. An excerpt:

Out of the 168 hours in each week, my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.

My children watch 55 hours of television a week according to recent reports. That leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.

My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 6 hours getting ready, going and coming home, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours. During that time, they are under constant surveillance, have no private time or private space, and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course, my kids eat, and that takes some time - not much, because they've lost the tradition of family dining, but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals, we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours.

reddit has directed me to these funny videos:

• Real life Simpsons
• Amazing Ping Pong
• Space Balloon
• Natalie Portman Rap

At work there are really interesting tech talks that go on many times during the week. Sometimes they are not even related to computers.

I saw a recent talk about stone tools and their relationship to human evolution. Hopefully they will put it on video.google.com soon.

Anyway, it was explained that at some point in human evolution the pre-humans started making stone tools. One of the major possible benefits of such tools was breaking the hide of animals, accessing bone marrow, etc. This allowed humans to tap into a high fat meat diet, which in turn caused an increase in energy supplied to the brain, and further allowing an increase in brain size. A feedback look was created, and brain size skyrocketed from the apes. There was a direct correlation between human invention and human evolution.

What was also cool is the presenter went through brain imaging scans while trying to make stone tools, as well as did research trying to analyze the body physiology during toolmaking.

It made me think of how we can affect our evolution by our actions, and how much significance a change in diet was. I think we need to be careful what sort of diets we get into. Ultimately we eat to provide energy for our brain. If the foods don't do that, it may cause more damage than we think.