Who is PC ?

I was born a cancerian in 1978, a little overweight, dark-skinned and the only boy among three children. I have 2 elder sisters who always tried to make me believe I was adopted or that I was found in a trash can in the muncipality dump. I was a silent kid, had very few friends, read comics when I was awake and dreamed about them when I was asleep. My favourite subject at school was Physics, taught by my favourite teacher Appu Sir. Despite my aptitude in physics, I wanted to be a doctor of medicine and I almost became one. Then the twists of fate made me an engineer, a software developer and now a blogger (these are not mutually exclusive).

After my brief struggle with learning medicine, I embarked upon a greater struggle learning engineering. I still remember being taught C++ in my first semester. The specific topic was arrays and the teacher was counting array members from zero. I really couldn’t understand why she was counting from zero when all my life to that point I always started counting from one. The teacher surely didnt understand the reason either, because she was angry when I asked her my doubt. Teachers always get angry when you ask them questions they dont know the answer to. That is a fundamental theorem of life I have established to myself through my keen observatory skills. I wouldn’t know the reason why computers count from zero till I study Microprocessors in my 4th semester. I am forever indebted to my Microprocessor teacher for firmly walking me through the process of learning programming. I had learned C++ in my first semester but I couldnt write a single program on my own, thanks to the skills of our excellent teacher as well as my whole hearted disinterest in the learning process. In my Microprocessors class I learned to program in assembly language and suddenly everything made sense. I must be a bottom-up person because I wont understand the whole until I understand the parts.

I hated maths in school because I couldn’t find any practical value in maths at that time. When I found that maths could be useful in real life, it was already too late. I sometimes take Thomas & Finney’s thick book on Calculus and enjoy the smell of a book unused – it gives me a tremendous satisfaction to smell the difficult math, solving them was never an option. So take the lesson straight from a loser – study your math or be a loser.

For completeness I should also say I hated History, Geography, Political Science, Economics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, English, Malayalam and Hindi. I loved the P.T (physical training) period where we could play cricket, football or more often seven-tiles, kings or similar advanced games. There was only one P.T period in one week and we always looked forward to it. The teams would all be chosen beforehand to avoid any latency and everybody would be pumped up with excitement, waiting for the biggest event of the week. Sometimes a teacher would unilaterally decide to take an extra class during the P.T period. Those were the biggest disappointments in my whole academic life. I am sure quite a few would agree.

Compared to my younger years, now I have much more friends, know a bit more about life and laugh a lot less. I love (in no particular order) playing chess & badminton, listening to music, reading books, hanging out with friends and browsing the www. I write software for a living and sometimes for fun. I blog mostly to annoy my readers. My favourite music bands are Black Sabbath, Mike & The Mechanics, Hootie & The Blowfish, Marc Cohn, Aaron Neville, George Michael, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Bolton, Richard Marx, etc. My favourite authors are Bill Bryson, P.G.Wodehouse and Vaikam Muhammad Basheer. I love Calivin & Hobbes and Dilbert.

Currently I reside in the beautiful Pacific Northwest city of Seattle making a living by writing code, fixing bugs and introducing some of my own. I mostly use C# but sometimes I have to tread the dark dungeons of C++. Although I loved C++ in a long forgotten previous life I hate it now. I also churn out a lot of SQL queries and they often piss me off like hell.

The wish I could write as amusingly as Bill Bryson and sing as soulful as Aaron Neville.

I think life is more complex than it needs to be. Well, I was not consulted on its design.

I have no ulterior motive in writing my blogs. I just write them for the happiness that I get from a creative endeavour (just how creative you decide). I dont want to sell my ideas to you, but I would like you to know what my thoughts are and where I stand on certain debatable issues. I would like to know what you think about what I think, so please dont forget to leave your comments.

I owe my friend Tejas Patel for the inspiration to start a blog and my friends at Tavant (especially Binil) for keeping me going.

If you want to know more about me, ask (no, I wont tell you my bank password).

This is how I look:

All content here are copyrighted. Means you have the right to copy anything you want. I cant imagine a reason why you would want to do that though.