Unsagacious or simply “a load of tosh”?

TASK: To write a blog post without using the letter 'e' even once.
OK here goes:

What a task! To finish a blog post without using an … What..? You think I’d finish that? No, I’m not that daft you know.

But frankly, “daft” is a word I conjoin with on most occasions. Instinct prompts promptly, “Stupid fits too!” (Hints from school days now as I look back) I want to quip, “Ah! Synonyms dummy!” But as a worthy ambition, I allow my soul to R.I.P and abstain from voicing it. Anyway, no point in arguing. Got work to do.

As I scratch my brain working hard to finish what is turning out as a word marathon, I admit I am struggling. “Why am I doing this?” I ask aloud in frustration. What is additionally flummoxing is that I don’t know what to jot down about. Catching up with “Stupid” now? Good. On my own though, I would opt for “daft”, it’s British variant. Not as banal. Thus, not as inciting for an obvious conclusion bound to occur soon.

Now that our topic of discussion is strongly whirling around my frivolity (and much to my discomfort might I add!), I shall forgo its straightforward citation. In fact, I’m going to talk about my most sagacious of all inclinations. It’s what I call “waiting for a spark!” or “Baby. Chill out. Don’t boil & spoil it!” What I’m actually saying is “Look. Don’t worry. It’s still 1 min away. Wait till its Planck.. thingy away.” (Planck-what? Can’t summon into mind)

Anyway, is what I'm talking about still addling you? Look for “procrastination” in a dictionary. You should find an apt summary.

And NOW I think is a smart occasion to garnish on; A day prior to D-Day of that-thing-that-brings-cold-chill-down-your-back. Do you know what D-Day is? It’s called “Doom’s-Day”. *Nod*. And what am I doing? Trying to find ridiculous synonyms (which unassumingly I would bump into in works of archaic Lit.) for straightforward words. Without fail, tomorrow is going down in my history.

“Why don’t you just start studying?” you could ask indignantly. My reply? “Chill folks! I’m waiting for that spark which will do it. And don’t worry *wink* “Doom’s day” is tomorrow not today, right! Today is about having fun..” Huh.. truth is:

“Not for long, though.“ you would say. You should, truthfully. I’m thinking I should start looking for my books now. All that dust might "cost" us (a gracious act of library!).

Anyway, now you can firmly sum up with “What a load of tosh!” And also sadly, forbidding from using a particular you-know-what hasn’t paid off. I could still accomplish compiling a ridiculously long post. *sigh* Signing off! Shucks.. I can’t put my sign. It’s got a pair of you-know-what. :) C ya all!

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Phew! It's such a relief to write with the Es now :)

On the Dark Side of Programming.

OK. Taking cue from the many advices, suggestions, talks, reprimands which finally lead to threats, I'm going to keep this one very short. Or as short as I can make it.


I love programming more than anything else in Computer Science. Today's exam was a piece of cake. Web Technologies meant I had to design web pages & work out the code in the background. There was this one topic that I wasn't pretty sure about. This piece of code, you see, has been troubling me for quite some time. To be more precise, it's the only ever single thing that I couldn't get the output for while studying. I weighed my chances & decided that of the 17C2 combinations, the probablity of getting this one was very less.


I'm not going to go into colorful metaphors here. I don't have the time. I'll cut the chase and tell you, "Yes. I got the task of executing this program I had solely left out."


Oh well. I decided to give it a good shot. After all, it's the final exam. Cannot risk not trying, could I? After much concentration and thinking I finally finished writing the code. Only to see to my horror that the output on screen isn't what it should be. I was baffled. I am, so to say, quite proud of my programming skills. Time to get into action I thought, and called out to my Professor.


"Sir, could you please once look at my code, Sir, and see if there's anything wrong with it, Sir?" I pleaded with him putting on all the charm I had = which, I concede, isn't much. (NOTE: In India, we call our Professors "Sir" and "Ma'am" and attach these at the head and tail of every sentence as a mark of respect)



"This is not the usual lab to debug your code." he said with a smile but looked into my code anyway. I took it that he obliged more out of generosity than my charm. Very charming man, my Professor.


"There is a slight fault in your logic, ma..." he finally said and walked away. If I was baffled earlier, I was flabbergasted now. I looked through the code more seriously, found a glitch (I admit, the man is pure genious), fixed it, re-ran, still error! Now, I couldn't call him back showing him the same error. And I didn't know what else to do.


The problem with logical errors is that when you write the logic, you're pretty much sure it's going to work. If it doesn't, then you're left in the dark until another person walks in with a candle (I mean an idea). But who could be the Noorie in an exam hall? I looked around. If I don't come up with something sooner, I'm done for good.


So, I closed my pen with it's cap, folded the answer booklet, leaned back on my chair & I let my mind wander instead to some lovely photographs I saw last night, wondered what Ant & Dec were upto at the moment, and likewise other important stuff.


After twenty solid minutes & back to my senses later, I decided to do a more thorough debugging, did backtracking, and finally realized it was a syntax error. This conclusion didn't warm me, cause the syntax wasn't very comforting. It went something like this:

var pwd_re=/^[A-Za-z0-9!@#$%^&*()_]{6,20}$/;


Think all the special characters are hard to remember? Think again! It's numbers 1 to 0 and the next key on the keyboard. No need to remember at all. Easy. What're more bothersome are the brackets.


My error was, in fact, because of the brackets. I put ( ) instead of { }. See the difference? Look more closely (I didn't initially). And when I did see it after I came out of the exam hall, it was in that one glorious moment & with enormous contempt I used a word I shall not honor with here.


I have nothing more to say. Except a few more swear words which begin with A,B,C,D,F,G,H,W and some more I invented with the rest.


Gotta run! Another exam tomorrow!