Ambiguously Olive

one word manifesto

2008-11-06T21:22:00.001-08:00

fleshing out an idea here: http://redisblack.com/nice.html

nice: a one word manifesto.

nice, as in the first word that comes to mind when something is really elegant or well-designed. or or frightfully clever. or perfectly articulated. or lightning fast. efficient. graceful ... well i could go on, but really, you know, something that is nice.

just a simple page, but I want nice to pervade through the structure of the code, through the font and the styles, through the reponse that it evokes.

really, just a one word manifesto. let everything i do be guided by it.

nice

snippy

2008-07-28T14:59:00.000-07:00

Conversations are getting political and snippy in certain places. I am quickly losing my patience with capital "L" libertarians, and supposedly liberal McCain supporters. The guy is a hawk, a big-business toolshed, opposes gay adoption, and is anti-choice. Also, "the economy is not his strong suit". And he has it completely wrong on net-neutrality, which could badly fuck up the intar-wubs as we know them today. And yet, somehow, this man is being bandied about as a moderate? Puh-leeze!

perverse desires

2008-05-30T14:35:00.000-07:00

I have this perverse desire to be *almost* hit by someone in a very fancy car, as I'm walking across an intersection where I have the right of way, clutching an expensive three-syllabled coffee drink, just so that I can throw my drink on their windscreen and yell, "No war but the class war!". Yeah - I'm fucking weird - I know.

e.r.

2008-03-16T20:31:00.000-07:00

we had our first visit to the e.r. as parents yesterday. the tinyness walked onto the floor heater grate and ended up burning her little soul[ole]s. lots of crying, but mostly 1st (and few 2nd) degree burns. seemed to be in much better spirits in the evening (long nap + tylenol/codiene) though. i guess we've passed a milestone.

freaky weak

2008-02-15T12:53:00.000-08:00

our baby turned 1 this week. she is in the first percentile for her weight - that means 99 out of a 100 babies her age weigh more than her. but she seems completely healthy, strong even. she had her shots this week. she screamed and screamed at the doctor's but seemed to be completely fine when we got home.
we heard gunshots in our neighborhood on 3 separate occasions this week. it makes me sad because i love the people that live here, but there always seems to be some messed up stuff going, possibly spillover from some kind of turf war from the west side. our baby slept through the night last week. but last night, she was woken up by the shots.

too many ups and downs - i need equanimity

mouse cliques

2008-01-31T17:13:00.001-08:00

cory doctorow has talked about this extensively, and i can't help but vigorously nod in agreement with him.

social networks that are based purely on real world connectivity (past or present) seem to follow a boom-bust cycle. they tend to attract lots of people once they hit a certain critical mass, since they offer the potential to reconnect with so many people that you may have lost contact with. but this virtually guarantees that these networks will hit critical mass 2, where you suddenly see your creepy co-worker, your kindergarten bully, your coffee shop grapist (groping rapist: someone who is a little too *huggy* for comfort) all crawling out of the woodwork trying to friend you. or worse, you have someone that you maybe met one time at a friend of a friend's party, who could be a nice enough fella, but could just as easily be a total nutjob. now, since there isn't a polite way to decline a friend invite, you are now stuck with the dead weight of all these social connections that you'd rather not advertise to the world. and before you know it all the cool kids have left myspace and moved on to facebook.

and facebook could face the same eventual fate. but they have scrabulous, which changes everything. i may not want to be best buds with the aforementioned weirdos, but i'd be ok playing a nice game of scrabble with them. well - facebook may not have scrabble much longer, given that hasbro is litigating the crap out of them, but for now they actually have the one killer app that transcends the social hierarchy. scrabble ... i mean scrabulous could be their ultimate savior

the primary draws nigh

2008-01-28T11:59:00.000-08:00

Identity politics has put an interesting twist on the race. If nothing else, I'm proud of the left hand side for even getting us to this point - not the stodgy white-male sausage fest that you see on the other side. I'm still really torn. I like the big O, but I am not convinced that America is anywhere near as color blind as the mainstream media thinks it is. And I think the idea of Bill as First-Man is hilarious. I can't decide if I'm voting for electability or if I'm voting for my personal politics. It would never happen, but is there any chance Hillary and Obama would run on the same ticket? I wonder ...

thinly veiled

2008-01-26T12:47:00.000-08:00

My daughter looks a little like both of us. And not really anything like either of us. She does, at this point, have light skin and blue eyes though. Which sometimes turns into comments from strangers along the lines of, "Wow! She looks exactly like her mother". This really just seems like a socially acceptable way of saying, "She doesn't look very Indian".

Now my partner and I can laugh and write this off as naivete, given that she definitely shares some of our physical characteristics on closer inspection. But I can only imagine what adoptive or non-biological parents must feel. "She doesn't look anything like you!" - No shit, Sherlock! And this affects my ability as a parent, how?

Bloody HeteroNorms!

desi(red)

2007-07-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

First there is the unintentional desi reference. Then there is the realization that the shirt was probably Made in India. Mera Bharat Mahan!

dialectic

2007-01-19T18:58:00.000-08:00

Why do people feel comfortable commenting on the accents of people that aren't from around there? I find the statement "you don't have much of an accent" to be one of the rudest things you can say to someone. As if, the accented person is somehow inferior to the non-accented person. Seriously, if you were to learn a foreign language, and try living in a foreign country, you would be very very touchy about people commenting on the quality of your accent. Constructive criticism is one thing, but don't tell someone that they simply have a good or heavy accent. Grrr!

altruism

2006-12-22T17:54:00.000-08:00

I feel bad. A friend of a friend of a friend is doing this experimental math science homeless hobo tour, which basically involves bumming around the country, crashing programming language theory seminars, and couch surfing. This essentially entails living outside the system, while relying on the kindness of strangers for subsistence and shelter. I guess this is a very old-school Buddhist way of life. And by old-school Buddhist, I'm talking about Mr. Gautama Buddha himself. And a bit cyberpunk, at the same time. Old School Cyber Buddhism?

Anyway, I was confronted with a situation where I became the aforementioned stranger whose kindness was sought. Which I would, in all honesty, have given out freely, had it not been for the fact that we are dealing with some incredibly hard times with respect to the pregnancy. I am thus unable to offer my couch to the experimental hobo programmer, out of respect and consideration for my partner. Which all seems very reasonable, since e.h.p. has obviously dealt with this type of situation numerous times, and has probably expected to deal with this "no available couch" scenario in his life as a vagabond. But I still feel bad!

I suppose feeling bad is a sign that I haven't completely lost my soul. I would still love to support his choice to create, what amounts to, a zero-footprint lifestyle. But I can't - not right now. Too much else to deal with. Sorry man - I hope you understand.

There is one interesting sociological phenomenon that I noticed though. I really do like the idea of building relationships and creating communities where people support each other. But for me, the relationship building part generally has to happen first. I don't feel very comfortable asking for support until I have established some kind of personal connection. Maybe this is just a function of my introversion, or worse, priviledge. In, any case, there is an interesting paradigm reversal in his approach where he appears to seek the support first, and then hopes to use it as a starting point to build the relationship.

inverse strength

2006-12-22T17:15:00.000-08:00

We've been dealing with a lot lately, and there has been this lingering, lurking fear in the background. But I have discovered an unexpected source of strength in this process - let's call it strength in the other. When I am confronted with a difficult situation as an individual, my typical reaction is to freak out, and possibly shut down. The level of anxiety bears an exponential relationship to the severity of the issue at hand. However, when faced with such an issue as a relationship-unit, we see an interesting phenomenon. While one partner exhibits the standard freakout-anxiety symptoms, the other partner essentially assumes the opposite role, and displays signs of calm and resilience, in order to be strong and supportive for the freaking-out partner. Which ultimately reduces the total anxiety load of the partner-unit.

I guess we've been dealing with a lot of fear in this way. The act of putting things into perspective, and seeing what my partner has had to go through, has forced me to be strong for her, which, in turn, has helped me confront my own fear. This property also appears to be symmetric, so that my freakouts induce the equivalent sense of strength in her. Good stuff to keep in mind when trying to practically evaluate the benefits of partnership and support.

words, feelings and particle physics

2006-12-10T16:38:00.000-08:00

i'll try to post here every once in a while, when attempting to address the rather complicated ambiguities that surround the socio-cultural implications of my own peculiar shade of pigmentation vis a vis the standard modern-progressive idiom of western social democracy.

these pages will be free of irony (though i'll make the occasional exception for cheeky), as i try instead, to address the burning questions in my head, while simultaneously attempting to develop my paltry writing abilities. so forgive the overwrought prose, at least for the time being, and perhaps this exercise will lead us somewhere vaguely interesting.

i am a 29 year old (at the time of writing) person of indian (as in india) origin, with an XY chromosome pair, living in the greater san francisco bay area (oakland to be precise) with my lovely partner elizabeth. we are about seven weeks away from producing offspring - progeny that will ultimately have to deal with the many issues that are associated with terms like "mixed" and "hapa" and "hybrid".

for most of my life i have mostly denied and defied classification. my ambiguously olive skin tone, coupled with my ambiguously defined notions of sexuality make it easy for me to exist outside the boundaries of stereotyping and boxing. i have a visceral distaste for the term "nationality" - an outmoded construct that makes little sense, if you begin with the fundamental assumption that all humans are created equal. culture is different though - and it is this difference that i attempt to grapple with in this forum.

ok - that was quite a bit. i'll leave you with this page on particle physics. this has nothing to do with anything else, but i think it is neat anyway. no irony here - just earnest, sincere neatness!

fresh starts

2006-04-18T12:24:00.000-07:00

The old format was confining and limiting. There were too many lurkers, too many people that knew too much. Something had to change. Regeneration time. Let's give this a go, shall we?