An interesting Sunday...

This Sunday was supposedly the *official* version of Friendship Day, but anyone who's ever been to college in Mumbai knows that this particular event is celebrated at least three times a year...In fact, I didn't really know that there was such a thing as an official Friendship day - somehow I'd come to the conclusion that it was one of those social consensus things that happen every now and then...

Anyway, on an MSN chat on Friday night, Thite suggested a geek meetup on Sunday. This idea went down pretty well with all of us, and we duly turned up at Inorbit mall for pizza at - you guessed it - Pizza Hut...

The aforementioned *we* were Thite, Sagar, Swapneel, Gautam, and yours truly...The last two chaps haven't been mentioned on the blog before - Thite introduced them to us yesterday. And I'm also the latest member of the new Code Monkeys blog! Well met, fellow code monkeys...

Anyway, Gautam ended up leaving early - he had to get to a party organized by his girlfriend's mom - weird...Before he left, though, he fervently entreated me not to fall into the Ruby trap - Thite and Swapneel both do Ruby, and he's the only one who does Python. Since I also use Python frequently(hell, I keep it open during SRMs...), he was hoping to equalize the odds...

Still gonna take a look at Ruby, but since our final year project involves Python(well, Jython actually), I won't be shifting over any time soon. The language seems a little weird after so much C++, Java and Python. Plus I want to learn LISP sometime, and I have Prolog this semester...

Sagar suggested catching a movie, but we decided to give it a miss when we found out that we'd be missing at least 10-15 minutes of it...After a short wait at Barista, we decided to check out MovieTime and see if there were any movies worth seeing. Turned out that The Island was scheduled for 8:30 PM, but since we didn't have that much time, we decided to head back home...or so we thought.

Thite had to stop off at Sagar's house to pick up a book for DCOM. I decided to come along - didn't really have anything better to do.

We were supposed to make a brief stop - what happened was that we ended up watching a small part of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, listening to Sagar's favourite song(it's in Swahili, and IMHO, sucks big time...) and eventually saw two episodes of Coupling. Definitely the most hilarious stuff I've seen in years - just tremendous...Have to remember to grab some of the episodes from Sagar...

We eventually managed to get away, but only after 10 minutes of politely refusing Sagar's mother's near imperial commands to stay for dinner...She actually handed us a bunch of chocolates to make sure we wouldn't *faint* on the way - the sad part is that I'm not quite sure if she was serious or joking...

What I thought of it all
I'm not a very social person by nature...in fact, I find most social occasions tremendously boring. Not that I hate socializing per se - in most cases, I just don't give a damn. Given my usual reaction to these things, I was surprised to note that I rather enjoyed myself. Being the analytical idiot that I am, I couldn't resist figuring out why...

Two words: the company.

99% of the boredom I experience at social events is the people. I don't make small talk very well - I prefer to talk about bigger issues or about tech stuff...Even the little small talk I make inevitably turns into something bigger...Most people can't take this - most of them fall into one or more of the following categories:

1. They're shallow and so don't care about what I'm saying.
2. They're shallow and so don't get what I'm saying.
3. They don't appreciate subtlety, so I turn them off.
4. They're not techies, so they have no idea what I'm saying.
5. They're really concrete minded people, and don't like the abstractions I favor.
6. They're just plain dumb.

Sunday's group was all tech - so we could actually discuss interesting stuff. We ended up making jokes about wireless tech, dumb teachers, families who constantly have to be spoon fed technical stuff, call center horror stories - in short, the kind of stuff that non-tech people("Muggles") can't really appreciate. As you might(or might not) expect, we had a whale of a time...

Of course, if I'd started talking about the non tech stuff that often occupies my thoughts, even they would have crumbled. People who actually get that stuff are much rarer than techies - at least in my circle. The ultimate are the vast majority of my classmates - they don't know any tech stuff aside from what they've been taught, and they don't know much about other things either. Go figure...

The remainder - people who get everything I say - are practically non-existent. Since my thoughts are connected rather weirdly, even tech brings non tech stuff to mind - I often end up pulling information from stuff I've read about history, or mythology, or some language or the other - all the weird stuff that I know and which really bores my friends...

Just noticed an interesting thing - while tech often brings non tech to mind, the converse is very rarely the case. Looks like it's a directed graph :)...

Decided to start doing some Div 1 probs - I'll need them for the TCO qualifiers, and I'm getting tired of div 2. The probs aren't that challenging anymore - leaving aside the occasional silly mistake, it's practically guaranteed that I'll crack at least the easy and medium - and the hard in most cases. Now if only I can go blue and stay blue...

Back to my Intelligent Systems assignment now. Work, work...