My problem with religion

I think I finally articulated my problem with religion in the popular form. Thanks to Ritika Dusad - discussion with her was instrumental in achieving this. The biggest, and likely only, problem I have with religion is that the way in which you are introduced to it, preaching or reading, starts with the premise that there is a superior way of life than yours. It ends up convincing you that what you are doing is not the best and therefore, you are not there. You come out humbled and feeling inferior to yourself, or your ideal projection and thus, become your own competitor. And perhaps that is what makes this mode of propagating religion so effective that a slight tip into it pulls you all the way in - nobody, and I mean nobody, can be spared this inferiority complex, because the competition is not with another human, but with yourself. And it doesn't stop there. You are also convinced that religion is the only way to self-upliftment. That's the glue.

Therefore, no matter what your state is, no matter how good you are (whatever that means - don't ask me to define good, but I won't be able to, but just think of it as a measure of how close you are to that ideal projection), you will always be split away from what you want you want to be, that is, when religion kicks in.

Ever heard of a religion starting with "You are great! Think of all the reasons why that is true."? Nobody is totally devoid of good. And that's the irony - the path to improvement has to begin with realizing your shortcomings. It's just that the goal religion places on you is so far ahead that it could make you recoil, stoking self-condemnation to the extent that you lose the ability to identify and, therefore, nurture the good in you. All that dominates is negativism.

Religion may be great. Its intent too. That's not even the question. But the popular form is surely not for the average person. And perhaps that is why so few really attain what religion aims. Why do you punish the laborer for not being an astronaut?

Work vacation

Work. Vacation.

Work. Vacation. Work vacation. "Are you getting it?" as Steve Jobs says it. You don't pay your bills. You don't drive around. You don't even pay a visit to the courthouse for that fix-it ticket they gave you. You don't go out to eat. You don't go get groceries. You don't go move your clothes from washer to dryer. And yes, you don't even take a shower.

Something is missing from that list. Something is naggingly off. Work. We never used that word! That's what you don't put aside. In fact, it's the only thing you do. Well, okay, respond to email like a master, so they know you're working. Forage in the kitchen. And when you really can't hold it any longer, answer the nature. But for all the rest of your 26 hours, you satiate the student in you, the engineer in you, the detective in you, that ferocious warrior in you who shall not be held back by dark ignorance, the prophet in you who sought the divinity of knowledge and understanding, and the dreamer in you who knew where heaven was.

You take that vacation into waters you want to sail. You are the master and commander of that ship. You choose the course. In a world where you never run out of time. You don't sleep thinking about the next morning. You wake up without remembering the last night, except that you were sailing, only to be able to sail again. That, my friend, is the "work" vacation.

26-hour syndrome

Let me explain. There are days when I want to go to bed at 12 midnight, and I get up at 7 in the morning. The next day, I would still want to hit bed at 12, but I'd get up at 9am. The next night I just keep tossing and turning for a couple of hours if I hit bed at 12. I feel if the day was a couple of hours longer, or if I could happily live a longer cycle - sleep more, wake more - things would work out much better. Isn't it possible that God made random errors in manufacturing human beings, and while many were aligned to the 24-hour cycle, some were not?

Amarok 1.4 on newer *ubuntu

If your newer (k)ubuntu comes with Amarok 2 by default, here's an easy way to install Amarok 1.4 even if you just have KDE4.

Research+ w/ Zotero & Jungledisk

Sometimes waiting a while is the best option. I didn't wait, I started to write my own pdf-manager but never really finished it. The goal was to keep track of all my research sources (read online papers in pdf form) with copies available offline whenever possible. Additionally, I wanted to keep notes on these resources as I read this. All bundled together, instead of notes and actual pdf's flying all over the place.

How I designed my to-be manager and what fate it met is a story for another day. Fast forward 3-4 months and find me falling back to Zotero. Why? Because now it's version 2.0. They have an excellent demo video on zotero.org, so I won't detail it here. The thing to note, though, is that I came back to it because they added a server-sync functionality in 2.0. All I needed, now, was a WebDAV server storage, which Jungledisk provides off the Amazon S3 storage for $2/month + 15c/GB-month - peanuts. WebDAV is just a protocol on top of http for generic storage access. Again, jungledisk.com is very intuitive and works right out-of-the-box. (No, I don't use Windows or Mac).

Conclusion: Firefox + Zotero plugin + Jungledisk a/c make it a breeze to keep track of your resources from anywhere, anytime. It's worth your time exploring these.

Caveat: It may not be possible to include your existing resources into the Zotero library. If you think of your research resources/projects as music albums, just switch to Zotero from your next album.

pulseaudio(amarok, firefox, xmms)

This article explains nicely the myriad of linux sound projects and where pulseaudio fits or why to use it. The pulseaudio wiki tells how to set up the alsa driver to route audio to pulseaudio server so that all applications using libalsa (alsa API) can work seamlessly.

I have youtube, xmms and amarok playing simulateneously right now. Did three tracks together sound sweet ever before?

P.S.: I'm not suggesting pulseaudio - it just happens to be the default sound server in most distributions today and it's easier to work with it than around. Things worked even before pulseaudio.

Universal playlist interface

I want an anytime-anywhere playlist interface, so that no matter which music player or which machine or which device I'm playing music from, if I "favorite" a track, it is magically recorded to my has-it-all, omnipresent, cloud-like personal music database, such as one on last.fm or iLike.com. It should also know which source file I was listening from and how I can get back to it. I should then be able to pull up all my favorites into my iPod or like with a single click, and keep it up-to-date as I listen to more new music.

That was from the user side. With current proliferation of server-side music databases like last.fm and musicbrainz.org, this shouldn't be too hard to do. I see two hurdles: 1 getting all client-side software to talk on a single interface, and 2 getting all server-side databases to share information. The latter should be easier to handle as long as the services are co-operative and willing to provide an API, which any reasonable service today does. The first problem also shouldn't be too hard to solve either as long as you're working with open-source and modern software, but legacy commercial players like Windows Media Player and Winamp may be harder to write plugins for and, unfortunately, form a large fraction of user-base.

The sleek part of this exercise would be the universal interface, which must be designed such that it can make it's way incrementally and unimposingly into a user's music experience. Do you know of any such existing solution? Or do you want to build one? Life is too short and music too big to forget and lose a track you liked in the first listen.