Writing

A few months back I picked up a Prestige portable hard drive from IT dot COM, a shop in Margao, Goa. It worked fine for a while, then one day the indicator light started blinking and wouldn’t stop. The drive wouldn’t show up on any of the computers I plugged it into. I was in Hyderabad at the time. I looked up authorised Iomega service centres nearby and found none. None in Hyderabad, none in Secunderabad. So I waited till I was back in Goa and took the drive to the store. ...

Got this email from Weebly after a week of inactivity. It’s genuinely good writing – playful without being annoying: It’s been 7 days, 4 hours, 13 minutes and 2 seconds since you last logged in, and we’re starting to get really worried. We were just getting to know each other. You created 1 site, 1 page, dragged on 1 element, and then… nothing. We were really excited for your new website, it had so much potential! ...

A thread on Hacker News about the eternal confusion between / and : jordanlund: Confession time… I always get confused about which one is the slash and which one is the backslash. I end up calling them “the one on the question mark” and “the one not on the question mark”. zem: Here’s a simple trick: \ leans back, / leans forward. grantrules: _ is a slash that got tired and lay down. ...

I commute from Margao to Bambolim every day. Normally a 30-minute drive. Today it took me an hour and forty minutes. There’s road construction near Verna that started four days ago. Four days of digging with no visible progress. And they’ve decided the best time to work is during peak hours – 9:30 am to late evening. Exactly when everyone is trying to get to or from work. I was late for an important meeting today. Had to apologise to my boss and to clients. All because someone thought it was a good idea to block a major route during rush hour. ...

Everyone tells you to go to college. It’s the default path. Finish school, get a degree, find a job. But is it actually worth it? The tuition costs are rising, graduates are struggling to find work in their field, and student debt is becoming a genuine burden. For some people, college is absolutely the right choice. The networking, the structured learning, the credential – it all adds up. For others, it’s four years and a mountain of debt for a piece of paper that doesn’t open any doors. ...

Sat at CCD today with friends and we ended up looking up people on Lemonlaw. It only took five minutes. I know that’s not the point of the thing, but it felt wrong how easy it was.

A friend mentioned recently that we’re going through too many changes. I didn’t really know what to make of it at the time, but it stuck with me. Later that day I did something daft — I reverted my Facebook profile picture to an old one. I knew it was pointless as soon as I did it. Changing a profile picture doesn’t anchor anything. But I think I was reaching for something familiar, something that hadn’t changed, even if it was just an image on a screen. ...