Happy Diwali!

Let's take a moment to list some good news.

First, yesterday was Diwali, a holiday in honor of someone or other, depending on who you ask. It's about this guy, who is a God, and who slayed a Dragon. Or it's about some other guy, who is also a God, who came back home and people lit lights for him. The full list of interpretations is on Wikipedia, including the different opinions on when exactly it should be celebrated (Sunday, yesterday, or tomorrow. Trivandrum itself seems divided on the issue). Alternatively, it is a festival in honor Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and so during the celebration people convert their money into fireworks and burn it. It's a fun way to flaunt how rich you are, and to teach young children how to play with explosives. For instance:

<----Before After---->

Good good. Quite an improvement there Kini!

Second, more good news. I am a volunteer coach for two speed roller skate athletes. Binesh, here on the left, is seen winning the his race at the regional qualifications, and Shery, on the right, seen winning her race during the same event.



With the help of a small PLT Scheme program, I graph their times and shout it at them on every lap until they get faster. And they did -- they got faster and they went to win two solid gold medals at the KV Junior National Speed Roller Skating Competition. Way to go team!

Most impressive, they did it without any pasta. Normally, athletes eat nothing but pastas during the 24 hours leading to a race. This loads the body with the form of energy that most readily available for the muscles (That is, aside from sugar. Sugars may be the most available, but they cannot be stocked, since any extra intake is immediately burned in the form of a sugar rush.) So, since I do not know what is the nutritional equivalent of pasta in the Indian diet, and that here pasta is a rich foreigner's food that I can't afford (or anyone), Binesh and Shery had to win from the force of their own will -- no pasta-magic helped them. I am so proud.

Third good news, Kerala's celebrated its first web site to reach a Google Page Rank of 7. The State's tourism web site, was propelled to 7 when a sizable crowd of Bangalore bloggers linked to it as they prepared to travel to Blog Camp. The site managed to reach this position in spite of violating two core rules of web design circa 2001 (1- have no scrolling marquee, 2- have some substantive content on the first page). The news of the web site's success was discussed on the evening news, and printed onto the pages of the State's edition of respected national newspaper The Hindu, whose web site represents all the best rules of web design as they stood in 1997.

Fourth good news, and perhaps the most important, the neighborhood grocery store, in an effort to improve their imitation of a western-style grocery store, begun storing delicious-delicious Lindt chocolate. The jump from what was previously available is big: the members of the taste panel we organized were unanimous: At Spencer's, they sell one brand of awful chocolate, one brand of merely bad chocolate, some ok chocolate, and Lindt -- the only chocolate worthy of God's own country.

Sing with me!

I love software memory transactions
I love lambda closure
I love the whole world!
and all it's set! too.
boom de yada! boom de yada!

Watch me walk as I think

Attended Blogcamp Kerala. Met a lot of a fascinating people. Did an abridged version of the wrist talk, as well as a live demo of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Came back with a caricature of myself giving a talk.


People were taking picture of me like I was a tourist attraction. 100 guys, 3 girls and one Guillaume, and everyone is interested in the Guillaume (and the Guillaume is interested in the 3 girls.)

Spoke of the kinship between Kerala and Québec during the panel on politics. Trivandrum hosts one general strike a week. Members of the opposition party start the strike by threatening to throw stones at buses that dare bring people to work. Then the ruling partly declares a strike to complain about the opposition lunching too many strikes. Québec, on the other hand, boasts the first unionized McDonald's and the first unionized Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart responded to the unionization by closing the store and the employees sued, since it's illegal in Québec to close a store in retribution. During my talk I made a bold prediction -- that the employees would win. When I arrived home, I found out that they did win -- they won yesterday. (When we play the prediction game on December 31, can I get points for that?)

By order of the Ministry of Tourism of Kerala, the conference had to be held on a houseboat, and so it was. We drifted down enlarged Venice canals in what is essentially an enlarged gondola with a roof. I am quite glad that I came across this relatively mundane occasion to ride the houseboats. Traditionally, you have to get married.

Three days after the LHC's first beam, I started teaching

I started teaching on Monday, and I love it. Love it! Love it! Love it! Academic presentations are like theater. They are clockwork assemblages of tightly wound sentences, each one carefully chosen for maximum information delivery. Then the talk is rehearsed until sunset on Venus (58 days), and delivered as a spectacle. Teaching, on the other hand, is like improvisation. You start with an outline of the main points, then you play it off the audience and, if you manage to raise some interaction, you play along with them. I never had so much fun on the job since 1999 -- wait, since 2000 -- wait... well, since a long time.

I am settling into a routine, and it is quite a pleasant one. I train with a 15-year-old roller-skate athlete after work, where I make a big show off my graphing lap-timer in DrScheme. I meet with Kitty in the evening and we pun each other to death over chocolate cake. Then I share traditional South-Indian dinner with Shailaja, Venkatesh, and their daughters Kini and Mandriva, which usually ends with Venkatesh and I debating on the best way to verify the soundness of the firewall with Alloy while Kini dances Bollywood around everyone.

This routine is about to get extended. I visited Kovallam this weekend. There, I played beach-soccer with six refugees from Tibet who are also members of Kerala's team at the nationals. That was a remarkable event on its own. But the high of the day was the discovery of a honest-to-goodness espresso. Which, of course, means I will go back. I don't remember how I passed my Advanced Complexity Theory course anymore. I seem to have left my proof-making-ability somewhere. So, with the help of Venkatesh, I am trying to get better at mathematics. Finding a source of good coffee was my first step towards better math. (cf. Paul Erdos).

Wisdom of the locals

me: I want to drive around and see the temples
riju: In order to drive in India you need three things: good horn, good breaks, good luck
____

me: I have just received my water bill. It is written entirely in Malayalam. How do I pay it?
venkatesh: It is a complicated procedure
____

kitty: I wanted to be a psychologist, but mom said no
me: You should've said lawyer
kitty: I did, but mom said no
me: Or something else rich and glamorous, like hotel management
kitty: Mom said no
me: What did she agree to?
kitty: Accounting
____

me: The bad pop music of the 80s and early 90s made waves here, but it was not nearly the traumatic event that it was in America. Yesterday I asked the restaurant to stop playing the Michael Jackson and C&C Music Factory mixtape whenever I came for dinner. They couldn't see how much it was tickling my PTSD. Bad pop music was such a powerful cultural phenomena in America, it wiped off entire sentences from the English language.
colleague: Interesting
me: By the way, the network is down
colleague: If there was a problem I'll solve it

Doctor, it hurts when I do this

March 1, 2004 was a sunny winter day in Providence. I was hard at work at home, crouched over my laptop. Earlier, my advisor and I had made a decision. I would abandon my current project and develop an unrelated idea, one that I had just sketched out on his office white board. The idea was good. It would become my master's thesis and an award-winning paper in a respected academic journal. It was also small and self-contained, which made the switch possible at all, this late in the program, a mere three months before the deadline for submission. It was a daring, almost reckless switch. It set me up in a race against the train to the crossing. I agreed with the new plan because, frankly, I love trainrunning.

The week prior to the sunny winter day in question, my wrists had been bothering me more than usual, though I took only passing notice of it. Mostly, I spent my time two miles deep into focus, coding, oblivious to the real world. But that afternoon, the pain finally grew beyond my ability to ignore it. I stood up, tried to make step but I was overwhelmed by the pain -- it sapped my balance and I kneeled on the floor, holding my injured arm with my merely-bad one.

That was the last time I programmed with my own hands. In the intervening four years, I have designed three large programs and directed the teams set up to construct them, but any lines of code I wrote I wrote as the copilot of a coding pair. My hands refuse any contact with a keyboard with the virulence of an immune system response. If I try to type, the pain creeps up and stops me before I have accomplished much. So long as I keep away from keyboards, I am mostly fine, and my condition has improved with time. I enjoy the occasional day without symptoms, and I rarely need to fetch my electrotherapy machine anymore. In comparison, there was a time when I spent entire days under ice, begging for forgiveness. I'm glad that's over.

I saw a doctor within a week of my injury. He gave me injections of cortisone and sent me home without two crucial pieces of advice (1. Don't type through the pain. 2. So long as the medicine is active, your tendons are as weak as al dente pasta.) The doctor I saw before him, in 2003, gave me a brace and sent me back to work. In 2002, I tried to consult with the company's ergonomist, but the waiting list turned out to be longer than my internship. In fact, the onset of my tendinitis can be traced back as early as January 2001, when I complained to my family doctor about occasional wrist pain. He reassured me that I was not showing the symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome, and wished me luck for my new life in the United States.

My story is shockingly common. In the period between 2002 and 2006, each year one of my colleagues would develop a serious disability due to keyboard usage. Behind them, there was a long tail of programmers with various amount of wrist pain. Recently, I had the chance to stand on stage and ask a room of programmers for a show of hands, who had wrist pain? Nearly everyone did. This is not okay. It makes computer science by far the most dangerous department to work for. Physicists in rapid explosion labs do not injure themselves nearly as often as we do. Biologists in level 5 labs working with revived strains of dangerous viruses do not injure themselves as often as we do. They are careful. Why can't we?

Something about RSI makes it fall through the cracks of the Western system of medicine. The efforts necessary to prevent RSI do not seem to fit in the 15 minute window that compose an appointment with a generalist doctor. To compensate, sometime in 2005 my colleagues Jenine, Liz and myself coalesced into an ad hoc RSI prevention team. Together, we taught the physiology of the wrist and the rules of ergonomy as a compulsory lecture to the incoming students. Throughout the year, we continued the teaching, one-on-one. We invited ergonomy experts, made ice packs available, and put together a lending library of ergonomic keyboards. It made a difference, and I have hope that the habits the community learned during that time will persist, since we also taught the students to teach each other.

I have gathered these lessons into a single article. Then I translated it so I had a French and English version.

• Your wrists hurt, you must be a programmer
  Vos poignets font mal? Vous êtes programmeur, donc?
  

If your wrists hurt and you want to prevent them from creeping further after you, read ahead. If your wrists are fine, read as well, so you can help the programmer in your life whose wrists are probably hurting in silence.

Playing for the crowd

Yesterday I met Vincent, the gym teacher of a local high school. The school is built as two floors of mezzanines surrounding a central badminton court. We entered the school grounds during recess. Here, like in any schools, whenever a stranger intrudes in the daily routine, it is an event. There I was, a stranger, strange and a foreigner no less. Within seconds, I had two floors worth of high schoolers around me, their eyes following my steps. I have never felt such power over a crowd. At that moment and I could have yelled «cricket sucks!» and generated a riot. I choose instead to wave enthusiastically, and the whole crowd waved back ecstatically. Trust high schoolers amplify emotions; you can't beat that kind of energy.

Vincent and I set up a badminton game on the outside court, and I proceeded to attempt to beat the entire school. This was my first badminton game since my injury forced me to stop playing. My goodness, this sport is as much fun as ever. But more importantly, this match means that I am healing, bit by bit, year by year. And perhaps one day day I will be able to play at coding again.

Look to the right

This, is a tuk-tuk.

It is a three wheeled contraption that fits three persons conformably (counting the driver), four if they squeeze, and 10 if they are Indian. Tuk-tuks are made of single layers of sheet metal, yellow fabric, and Krishna stickers. Also known as autorickshaws, they are the modern art of transportation: minimal and effective. In comparison, Western cars look like a government payout to the steel industry. They are all so big on the outside and yet so small on the inside. In that sense, mainstream cars are reverse-TARDISes. I prefer the simple three-layered construction of the rickshaws: humans on seats on wheels (The frame is only there to hold the stickers.) There is so little space dedicated to non-human-body elements, they depend on the unfortunate miracle of the two-stroke engine to make them go.

Which means, of course, that they pollute like the farting of a sacred cow confined to a small bedroom. Bangalore is a parade of out-of-tune 2-strokers running off of salvaged lubricant. There is a real business opportunity in opening a shop that would pacify the exhaust of tuk-tuks for free, then sell the resulting carbon offsets on the market.

Until someone figures out how to build a small electric engine out of the recycled parts of a 2-strokes engine, India is stuck with this ugly, evil, insidious device hatched by misbegotten Communists.

Rather, the future rests with hip, cool, great ideas, such as the Topia HUVO.


Wish us luck.