The view from my hospital room

Additionally, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve shamelessly abused that pun. In brief, the nagging problem that has bothered me for seven years or so was a tiny black gallstone. Tiny like a peppercorn. Big enough to be a problem. It’s gone, along with its home.

What has this taught me about my lifestyle? Not much, really. Shit happens even if it shouldn’t happen to you till you’re 80. It did teach me a bit about the people close to me — for whom I shall remain forever grateful and to whom I owe thanks.

In particular, for the indomitable ET, who has been by my side since I first went into the hospital circus at Divali. She handled the paperwork, the preemptive phonecalls to insurance, sleeping in the hospital room on an uncomfortable futon, standing guard while I needed help using the toilet. To say nothing of the incessant legwork and crosstown driving despite a daily work schedule. Oh, and shuttling between FOUR hospitals through her own ill health at that. If we worked together, she would be insufferably efficient and I would be murdered.

To mom for being there and keeping all the shit together across a sick mother and son, multitudes of doctors, appointments and uncertainty. To Usha for keeping the home fires burning and the depressed dog fed, even if it meant hand-feeding.

To Shahnaz and Ketan for greasing the wheels, to Drs Rahul Kalia and Tilak Das for putting up with long-distance hypochondria and poor two-stroke analogies. To Jeetu & family, Ajay and Adeet for making it, sometimes across continents. To my in-laws and extended family for making sure I felt like there was an army to back me up. ET’s uncle insists I live with him for a while so he can fatten me up.

To Hari for lending us his car which made our hospital trips infinitely more bearable. To my colleagues who picked up my slack and ensured things worked. To HR and the insurance company, who sometimes do not deserve the poor reputation they’ve earned. To the surgeon who treated us like family even though the connection is distant — you have the undying adulation of the mrs, for completely unrelated reasons.

To the wife that complains that I never blog about her. There aren’t enough clichés…

It seems convenient to admit it now that he’s gone, but I was a fan of Michael Jackson. The years between his Jheri curls and my bald spot were sufficient for me to grow up and he to grow really weird. Still, through the grunge years, the adult contemporary, the drum ‘n bass, MJ remained—consistently—MJ. Increasingly irrelevant, until now.

As hackneyed as it sounds, something else did die with Michael Jackson—the extended childhood of my generation. Owned Thriller? Check. Bad? Check. Moonwalker bootleg? Check. Dangerous came at a dangerous time for the grunge-leaning. From then on, it was all just too bizzarre.

For me—as I’m sure it does for others in their 30s—it feels like the end of an era. I prefer to remember Michael Jackson as he was in “Bad”. Now go find Moonwalker on the torrents.

So we have a lot of social networking sites now. For me, it actually started with early players like Ryze, LinkedIn and Multiply—all of which I found worthless for my needs (if I had any driving need for social interaction on the Web to begin with)

Then came Orkut, which was interesting, but ugly. I have a MySpace account, which I signed up for just to see what all the fuss was about. I didn’t get it. Still don’t. I finally settled on Facebook, which is my current social network of choice. It serves little, if any purpose in my life, save for linking me to some distant acquaintances who I would otherwise be completely disconnected from. The apps are disgusting, their default behaviour is to spam, and the whole thing seems to bring out the idiot in everyone. I think there’s a vast population of Web users out there that seem to have adopted a completely retarded, obnoxious view on how to conduct relationships and interactions online. I also think that this population will eventually be the majority. That is when I will put my fountain pen to better use. Anyway…

So there’s a bunch of other sites I’m registered with as well (Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Digg, etc)—all of which have some ‘social’ play. Unsurprisingly, there are now services that help you keep up with or update these sites in one place. Some that I’ve tried include:

Pownce: This was supposed to aggregate Twitter, Jaiku etc. My expected behaviour is to aggregate my ‘feeds’ from those accounts for a single view, as well as a one-to-many publish option. I don’t get any of this, which leads me to just not get it.

Friendfeed: Same as above. What I find is that it behaves just like another stand-alone service. What exactly does it do?

At this point, I think I will begin deleting my accounts from these services, if they allow it.

One bright spot recently was the announcement of the new Evernote closed beta. After several sign-up requests, I finally got an invitation. This service, I believe, has the most potential to make an impact. The premise is simple: much like Google’s Notebook service, Evernote allows you to ‘clip’ pieces of web pages, images, whatever, and store them in an online archive. Where Evernote differs is in it’s more powerful off-line, native clients—currently available for Mac OSX, Windows and Windows Mobile.

But that’s not why I signed up. Evernote also does mobile really well. They publish your online notebooks as IMAP accounts, allowing me to access my notes from the iPhone’s own email client. There’s no search in this way, but tags show up as folders. Useful. There’s also a reasonable mobile web interface, which works as advertised. The killer app, in my opinion, is Evernote’s smart image recognition. You can take a picture of a label, billboard, business card or whatever, and just email it to your account. If the picture is not horrid, Evernote will recognize the text within it, index and enable search. Very cool!

So far, I’ve had mixed results with the recognition feature. A full-size 2MP image of a business card in low light just gave me a name, while a VGA snap of an ad-flex in good light worked better. The bookmarklet used to clip webpages is also spotty, but works for the most part. The potential is there though, and I’m hoping the service gets even better in this regard.

Props to rearset for his excellent coverage. He is a true man of steel for putting up with this tripe and still managing restrained reportage.

Me: I bought lots of life insurance for you. Have you bought any for me?
ET: (nods)
Me: Cool! How come you never told me?
ET: I wanted it to be a surprise. (giggles)

Sometimes I get depressed about the things I don’t have. But in other ways, I have exactly what I’ve always wanted.

please don’t wake me in the morning when you go

just kiss me and buggeroff

Forwarding is not replying. If you’re forwarding an entire message, sure, add your own remarks at the top, as a preface. But the idea that each new reply in a thread ought to contain the entirety of each previous message in the thread is silly, wasteful, distracting, and unnecessary.

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