death & taxes

The last couple of weeks have made this topic come to life for me.

We paid the highest amount of taxes this year that we have ever paid. I have never thought about avoiding taxes. It is just something I do every year. I try not to think about how they are used improperly by the government as that would only drive me crazy. I try to think how much I like the roads here and how wonderful are the public universities. I also like my freedom as that is priceless.

Having met my wife at VaTech and her grandfather was Dean of Argiculture for 30 years there, we have a lot of family history involved in VaTech. The senseless deaths of 33 people was truely a sad day for me. I have always thought about my time in Blacksburg as perfect and such a wonderful place to attend college. One crazy person has messed up my perfect view of that small town with an even bigger student population than permanent residents. One fellow worker told me his son pulled an all nighter and accidently slept in and missed his class. He was supposed to be in room 204 in Norris where 4 students were killed. What a perfect day to skip class and obviously GOD protected him. It just reminded me that mental health is so neglected in America and if you don't deal with the real issues, there will be consequences.

Today I learned that a good friend of mine died yesterday. It really made me sad as he suffered for the last year. Now he is gone, his young children and wife have to suffer, which makes me even more sad. Life can be hard sometimes. There are no simple answers to such suffering. Jim Cortese was a true friend in that he was willing to share his sadness and happiness with me. For two years we worked closely together and he is the best designer I have ever known. He transformed the product we worked on together into the most usable product at the company. What shocked me the most is that he was younger than I was. That is what really hit home for me. Younger and with surviving small children. Sometimes life just does not seem fair. Makes me want to enjoy every day with my kids!

fight over the backyard

I have been in a fight over who owns the yard behind our house for the last month. Two weeks ago, I lost the battle for that day. Yesterday I returned to the battle field as I want to win the war. Vines have been trying to kill my tress, but yesterday I taught them that I am in it for the long haul. Two weeks ago as I was moving the vines I had removed from some of the trees to a brush pile, I tripped on a stump, which I think was trying to get me back for hurting it's brethren. The farmer who originally owned the land, deposited a pile of glass and metal right where I fell and that is why I think the stump tried to get me. I cut my arm pretty bad and had to rush to the local Fuquay Urgent Care, where I was seen by a great doctor who gave me 14 stitches. I had a "nice" tetanus shot, which will keep me out of harms way in the battle zone for the next 10 years.

I have three different vines trying to kill my trees. The most hasty of all is the green briers. I have seen this enemy before growing up in Virginia. The bright green stems and the long yellowish thorns give them away. They really climb up a tree and they once they reach the top, the grow leaves and have no thorns. The second enemy is wild grapevine. It does not have thorns, but it makes up for it in the shear volume of vines it grows from one root. Once they reach the top of brushes or small trees they pretty much choke the poor neighbor to death. I actually have found a couple of grapevines 2" in diameter, which reach to the top of 100' trees. The last one I have been fighting is a hard enemy to conquer, it is Carolina jasmine. It looks so pretty this time of year with its yellow flower, but it really puts the choke hold on small bushes. It wraps itself around the trunk and a strangle hold. It you try to pull it off, then it will either break off or snap the tree or brush. I have one 50' tree that it crawled all the way up and made a cork screw bite into the tree half way up. It made sure if it ever died in battle it would leave a mark to be remembered.

For now I have 1/3 of the area cleared of vines and it is looking very nice. In other areas I am not going to clear I have wild raspberries and blackberries, so I am forced to leave the nasty vines alone to I can have the berries from the good vines. I also a have a couple of poison ivy vines, but I have to leave those alone as I am highly allergic to them, but that is another story...

walled offices vs. cubicles

I moved into my walled office this week, so I have to comments on comparing working in a walled office versus cubicles. Having worked in cubicles for 8 years out of a total of 23 years of my working life, I am speaking from experience.

As an aside, I read an article by Joel Spolsky once of what he thought about this topic. I see he is still writing about this topic as they are considering moving to a larger space. I am in no way as creative in my thinking as Joel, but then again he runs a company and wants the best for his employees, which is a great thing.

For me, there are both pluses and minuses about either walled offices or cubicles. At the moment I cannot decide which I like better.

	Good	Bad
Walled Offices	Privacy when you need it to make a personal phone call Can listen to music without headphones Can put up posters and paintings on the wall Personal white board to sketch designs and to-do notes Wife and kids can come and I don't feel about being loud	Harder to have interaction with team members Must work at communication to learn what others are working on Others may need your help, but must walk to see you for help
Cubicles	When surrounded by team members, easier to know what everyone is working on Perfect for Extreme Programming, if no walls are present Easy to help others when they get stuck and need help Fosters team environment in getting to know team members	Everyone hears personal conversations or phone calls When loud talkative people around, can be very distracting Little room for personal items, unless they are small Hard to pair in small cubicles and show someone your screen Suffer through gopher syndrome : people popping up out of chair and talking across cubicles

Eklavya

The latest film my wife and I went to see was called Eklavya. We saw it at our local movie theater called Galaxy Cinema. Much of the film was shot in the Devigarh Place in Upaipur, India. If we had unlimited money, then it would be a fun place to visit for a 2nd honeymoon! I enjoy movies like this one, because they have a point instead of being pure entertainment with no thinking involved. I liked how they took a traditional story from the ancient Mahabharata and came up with a story in the present that showed the same struggles as the original story. The struggle of following traditional values in a new age at any cost is such an important topic for today. The original story on the surface does not seem to be applicable for today, but the same question remains, should I follow dharma or not?

Names in Hindi

Rick : िरक
Sarah : सारा
Nathan : नाथन
Daniel : ढानेले
Andrew : एनडरू
Jake : जेक
Jessica : जेिसका
Evans : इळनस

Hindi Unicode Editor

Learning Hindi हिंदी

My current long term goal is to learn Hindi हिंदी. A group at work is learning Hindi during lunch breaks on Mondays. I am not a huge fan of the book we are using as the font is so small. It is the classic book for learning Hindi called Teach Yourself Hindi.

I really like the Hindi Script Tutor web site as I can see how the letters are drawn and can hear them spoken so I don't have to guess on either.

As soon as I can get a grip on the Devanagari script I am going to go thru the NC State Hindi site by Afroz Taj. He is also on local TV in Raleigh on Time Warner channel 18 from 9-10pm on Monday and Wednesdays.

These are my other 3 attempts at learning non-English languages:

1. 1980 to 1982 - while in India I was mostly in in West Bengal and Bangladesh so I learned Bengali using the LAMP method. The beauty of this method is immersion in the local culture. I lived with people who did not know English so I learned the language by listening and knowing what was the correct thing to say in the appropriate situation. This is so much better than learning by translating from English to Bengali. I taught myself to write and read the script only when I returned to USA when being around Bengali friends.



2. 1983 - to graduate at VaTech I was required to take a foreign language, so I chose Spanish and took a compressed full year of Spanish in 9 weeks in summer school. The class was 3 hours a day 3 times a week and we had to speak 1 hour of each class to our Cuban speaker in Spanish only.



3. 1987 to 1989 - while living in Saudi Arabia I taught myself how to write Arabic since I love the calligraphy of the language. I enjoyed the artist value of the language as they use it as an art form as well as a language. An example of this is Hassan Massoudy's art

So far I have learned how to write the vowels and my name is pretty easy to write: िरक, using this on-line Hindi unicode editor.

Geocoding

What in the world is Geocoding? The basic idea is to supply your address and find the matching latitude and longitude values like this free geocoding service. Maps within Google use this technique as well as other web maps. It is kind of scary how much information is available from your physical address or publically listed phone number if you also retrieve the census track number. While there is free US Census TIGER data, the alternative is expensive up-to-date Tele Atlas data.