T9 Retaliates

I've been having a lot of fun screwing around with people with text messages lately. (Link)

Apparently, T9 didn't like it.
And yesterday was time for its payback.

A concerned friend sent me the following message:
"How is your Google Internship thing going?"

I typed my reply.
It read "They selected me."

That is not what I had written.

Ever felt that even a predictive text software can point a finger and laugh back at you, as if in response to your mockery of others?
Oh! The humanity.

Lesson of the day

1. Never sign into GTalk in IPC.
2. If you do sign in, put "REMEMBER TO LOG OFF" on the desktop in font size 256.
3. If that is too difficult, set an alarm that repeats every five minutes reminding you that you have to log off before leaving.
   
4. If you are already back to your room without doing so, calculate the chances that someone you know (and is not evil) will go to the IPC and sit on the same computer and will saintfully sign you out, and try to relax.
5. Never sit next to Mayank Mohta in the IPC. The mofo won't sign you out even if he finds out that you have left.
   
6. If nothing works, contact ChunChun.

GFU!

A good friend recently told me how messages over Gtalk can be easily misinterpreted, and how the misunderstandings caused by these can leave misleading impressions of you in the most misfortunate ways.

For example, since I first had a chat in 2001, I have considered :x as a smiley for anger.

Turns out the definition has changed. It now stands for a kiss.

When confused, she did prompt me for it and I did learn the commonly accepted meaning of it. (Thankyou for clearing that out), but it also made me think of all the people I have sent that smiley to in the past eight years and what all they've thought on seeing it.

All the mis's mentioned in the opening statement occur because of two reasons:

1) We are always typing and reading too fast, mostly without thinking too much.

2) We use too many abbreviations.

Consider this.

A friend told me yesterday how she had got a Pom PAship.

To start with, Pom looks a bit like Porn when you quickly dash your eyes from left to right, doesn't it?

Anyway, thats not important here. I was sane enough to read the message again.

Once I got the meaning and had a breath of relief, I responded to the good news with "gfu!"

It was supposed to mean "Good For U!"

Now, I don't know what she made out of it.. but I used the same "gfu" in a conversation with this other friend on GTalk today and he interpreted it as "Go Fuck Urself!"

Lesson learnt: Always use the phone for important conversations. If at all you use GTalk for casual ones, make sure the other person is smart enough to analyze things based on context.

Algo (rythm?)

This APOGEE, Computer Science Association is conducting a programming event called Algorythm.

This is what the introduction reads:

Ever felt that all the semicolons, braces, syntax etc. etc. are slowing you down. AlgoRhythm is a contest in which you need not worry about anything of this sort.^{[citation needed]}

Sounds good, eh?

Take a closer look.

The rules section says:

1. Use indentation to indicate block structure. The statements of the constructs should come as per the indentation, towards right.

2. Looping constructs such as for loop should follow the format i -> 1 to n-1

3. For comments use ‘//’ at the beginning of the comment.

4. Any assignment to any variable should be of the form: A[i] -> 5

5. Variables defined within a given procedure are local to that procedure. They can’t be used globally.

6. A variable representing an array or object is treated as a pointer to the data representing the array or object. For all fields f of an object x, setting y->x causes f[y] = f[x]. Sometimes, a pointer will refer to no object at all. In this case, give it the special value NIL.

7. When objects are passed, the pointer to the data representing the object is copied, but the object's fields are not.

8. The boolean operators "and" and "or" are short circuiting. That is, in the expression "x and y" x is evaluated first.

And these are only SOME of the rules!

Now, give it a thought.

The aim of the competition was to not worry about braces, semicolons and syntax, and in the process of doing that, they have made the participants learn a completely new programming language.

That adds to the "worrying about syntax".. doesn't it?

So once you have spent one week in completely understanding all the rules of this new language, you can proceed and spend the remaining three days before the deadline on actually solving the problems.

This, however, should encourage you to take part. Being the ONLY participant, it will not be much of a fight to win.

On a more serious note, I encourage you to participate in all events conducted by CSA this APOGEE.

Visit the Code & Simulate section on the Website. There are a lot of interesting and innovative competitions to choose from, both online before APOGEE and on campus during the event.

My latest Hobby

is to judge people's intelligence and presence of mind by intentionally misspelling words in text messages.

For example, I sent "Coming as east as I can" to a friend waiting for me in C'not to which he responded with "Which side of C'not is east?"

"Freakin' T9!" is what I replied.

Of course, most of my friends are pretty smart and understand what "Lets go for a wall", "How did it in?" and "Dual you!" are supposed to mean.

In fact, they're either smart or just text message geeks, but whatever be the case, it is satisfactorily amusing whenever somebody falls for it.

And that is how I an passing time there days, Dear diary.

Morning Tea

DiD - III

Unfortunately, its a true story.

DiD - II

I do go for the occasional morning walk.