Deep Sarcasm

When I was giving my tenth standard chemistry practical, I was pretty much unprepared for the write-up. Memorizing equations by heart just isn’t my thing, and chemistry was never that much fun anyway. So after mixing some acids and bases together, passing in the occasional egg-smelling H2S, and creating hot toxic fumes, I stood there for a while staring at my answer sheet.

I must’ve stared too long because I looked at my watch, and lo I barely had five minutes left. Almost everything was done except the final answer, the question was basically asking how much % HCl was in the given solution.

The one problem here was that I had forgotten the molar mass of some compound I don’t care to remember now. Note that by this time almost all students had left and I was practically the only person left in class, except a classmate who was just about to step out. Since I didn’t have enough time to calculate the mass myself, I asked this person what the molar mass of [whatever] was.

He told me, and I calculated my result. Then I turned in my paper to my professor - we didn’t exactly share a very friendly relationship, if you had asked me before this one day I’d say he somewhat enjoyed picking on me. So he looks down at my answer and then looks up at me - we were the only two people in class, besides
the lab assistant, who wasn’t paying attention.

Him: This is wrong, you idiot.
Me: Eh?
Him: The molar mass of [whatever] is [something].
Me: Right.

He goes on to tell me the correct answer, and hands over the sheet for me to fix it; I do, and hand it back to him. Considering that this was one of those examinations where the grading is done by an external board of education and is hence technically out of the school’s jurisdiction, he essentially went out of his way to help me.

Guess you can’t judge a book by its cover.

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This isn’t much of a blog entry, but I felt like I just had to write this. Take a look at this story here, it’s just completely horrendous. What kind of hospital lets a patient die after two hours of unattended, casually observed suffering? I’m not one to judge too soon, but it’s apparent that this particular medical facility was not particularly concerned about the welfare of its patients. I just hope they are aptly punished for their negligence.

Besides incidents like these, which are usually isolated, hospitals aren’t very charitable - So you ran out of money? It’s out on the pavement with you. It doesn’t matter if you have a sore throat or fatal cancer, as long as you aren’t paying you might as well curl up and die - just don’t do it on our premises, ’cause we might get in trouble, got it?

This kind of attitude would probably not cut it in a small town or a village, because of the close knit communities and mutual back-scratching. In an urban setting, however, it’s usually the norm to ask questions first and saves lives later. After all, a doctor who learns after saving a life that he isn’t going to get paid is going to want to kill the patient anyway, right? So let’s just let him die now, instead of wasting precious resources on a worthless existence.

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I was planning on releasing this plugin tomorrow, but I decided against it - couldn’t make you wait, couldn’t wait myself. I’m talking about “StumbleUpon Favorites”, a plugin that basically allows you to list your most recently liked StumbleUpon pages on your WordPress blog as a widget.

Wait, you could do that with a normal RSS widget right? True, but this thing comes with a bunch of bells and whistles, plus the promise of more to come (either from me, or from some clever third party out there - probably me, but feel free to modify this!). You can see the widget in action to the right, although yours may look different depending on the settings you choose.

Current Features:

• Easy integration - just type in your StumbleUpon username!
• Option to display/hide the StumbleUpon logo
• Option to display/hide the number of votes for a bookmark
• Automatic conversion of long links into links shortened by ellipsis (…)
• The items display quotes and ampersands properly despite StumbleUpon’s double-encoded HTML entity system (The RSS widget will not do this)
• All links are nofollow by default
• All links open in a new tab/window, depending on whether the browser supports tabs

Installation:

1. Download the plugin archive using the link below
2. Extract archive contents to folder (stumble_faves recommended)
3. Upload folder to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory
4. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
5. Place the newly available widget in your sidebar and configure it

That’s it, five simple steps and you’re done. Now, without further ado, I present the StumbleUpon Favorites plugin as a free download!

Download StumbleUpon Favorites (WP 2.3 to 2.5.1+)

To Do List:

• Integrate favorite website screenshots
• Improve plugin based on feedback

I will be happy to offer support and troubleshooting through the comments of this post, as long as you leave enough details about your troubles and maybe a link to the problem site.

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If you were lucky enough to have visited Deep Sarcasm in the last 6 hours, you would have noticed a tutorial sitting right where this post is. What this tutorial taught you was how to hack wordpress to get a certain “widget” up and running. Well, I’m happy to say I’m now working on a plugin to do the same - that tutorial started off really easy, and got way too advanced towards the end.

Besides, it’s not always a good idea to hack the WordPress installation - future updates would essentially kill everything off. Also, some of the sweet bells and whistles I wanted to put in there would have been a problem. So yes, keep your eyes peeled for my first WordPress plugin, which will probably be an utter failure and a dark splotch on all of humankind…

One thing I have learnt in my painful journey, other than the fact that Firefox does not think “learnt” is a real word, is that it is really hard to actually make code that works with someone else’s code, following standards made by someone else. Or maybe it’s just that I code like crap and most of my code is based on the default WordPress widgets, which means conflicts abound.

Since I don’t want this to be just a rant about plugin-ing, I will leave you with my Facebook quote, which I wrote myself:

“I do not have a favorite quote,
I find none much endearing;
But if there’s one that earns my vote:
it’s good at disappearing.”

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Apparently, chance has a bone to pick with me. Other than the fact that it’s going about the whole thing the wrong way, its attempts to “number” me are becoming quite amusing. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, continue reading.

This post would never have been written was it not for my logging into Google analytics today and finding out that it had happened yet again. Somehow, the number 666 keeps showing up in the most random and unexpected places I happen to look - granted, analytics is chock full of numbers and it would be quite probable to find all sorts of symbolic numbers - but hey, I never said this is a supernatural occurence. Besides, I’m not a Christian and it’s not like this bothers me in the least.

A good number of visitors

But wait - that’s not all. It couldn’t have been, otherwise I wouldn’t have made this post - it’s too small a coincidence to bother writing about. The whole point of this post was to point out how much fun it is to find that number in the most random of places and maybe take advantage of it (or at least try to, heh). Therefore, ladies and gentlemen (or whoever is reading this blog - cue the crickets), I present my lunch coupon from DPSMUN 2006:

Mmm...lunch - Note the serial number

Incidentally, there’s a story behind this one, though the narration hardly does it justice. Or maybe it’s just the fact that this post was based on a mere two coincidences…perhaps I would find the number of the beast more often if I actually looked out for it.

For chronicling purposes, I must write down that I met Dhruv yesterday at Priya (after mistakenly going to the wrong place due to not listening on the phone), where we didn’t exactly do much, other than commenting on the random puddles, cowdung, beggars, dead pigeons and dogs eating said pigeons in the marketplace. We did discuss some ideas and planned some stuff, but more on that later if and when it actually shapes up.

It’s a miracle they managed to keep the cows out of the movie theater.

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