Thursday, October 02, 2008

Dancing with the Engineers

Dancing with the Engineers :
Contestant 1 : He wrote the Linux kernel and now he is here to do the Salsa...
Contestant 2: He designed the chip with a complete optical interconnect, and he is here to do the Cha-Cha.

Now that's what I call a show!
Okay so quick background check.

Engineers - people who can fix-er-up your satellite dish to your toaster, so you could cook breakfast while you watch re-runs of the Starship Enterprise. Aaah, the breed of nerds, haunched over their laptops, pummelling their keyboards. Give us a bag of Lays, a nice soda [preferably diet, we want to watch that figure, as much as the next seat does ;-)] and a C compiler, and we will bring the world to you!

I digress.
This was meant to be a blog post on us engineers; of us our "moves" on the dance floor. I mean while we can co-ordinate those cruddy semaphores and mutexes in perfect binary unison, we find it difficult to do the two-step on the dance floor. But fear not - on my current trip to Finland I've found the perfect recipe to produce dancing engineers - Its called an on-site in October.
Or as I see it pictorially: o| o
And those are the exact components in the male anatomy which freeze over first in the weather. There I was life going along swimmingly in rustic Bangalore - aah the smell of fresh garbage and IT coolie sweat wafting through the early morning vortex of traffic at Bellandur junction. How I miss that! But here I am finding my penchant for all those dance moves.

In class 4, Mrs. Fernandes taught me as part of a dance routine for the annual day function. She called it the gypsy dance - I have no idea how I got into it - teachers would pick volunteers - I call them conscripts. This was worse than the army - I mean here you are a pre-pubescent 10 year old with a 40 year old woman screaming in your face to get your damn steps right. Since I was the tallest kid in the entire dancing troupe I got pushed to the end of the dance routine - or perhaps I was the worst and hence got send there, but I never really cared to find out. I came out with flying colors!

So here's to finding novel ways to keeping warm and keeping fit. Head to Scandinavia for the winter. I am sure you will find the right moves to compete in the next edition of "Dancing with the engineers"!

Don't forget to unpack your woolies!
My shoulders are haunched in the picture because my folks wanted to see me in something other than my crummy pull-over. Here Ma, I stand before thee - a frozen popsicle :-(
Oh and I call that the Robot-Dance.

No comments: