Two young lives lost in Kerala in a quirk of fate
Two young lives lost in Kerala in a quirk of fate
Idukki (Ker) (PTI): It was a quirk of fate when two young lives were lost in Kerala in separate incidents–one while trying to enact a suicide scene she saw on television, the other after a mistaken April fool prank.
In Pathanamthitta, an eight-year-old girl died on Tuesday while enacting before her younger brother a suicide scene she saw on television. In another tragic incident near Idukki, the traditional All fools day ended in a tragedy for an engineering student who drowned in a reservoir. The student’s friends mistook his struggle to stay afloat as a prank and failed to rescue him in time.
The girl, a fifth standard student, while playing with her five-year-old brother Appu on Tuesday in the absence of her parents, attempted to demonstrate the scene of the hanging, she saw in a TV serial, police said. While enacting the scene, she went to a room and closed the door.
When she failed to come out, Appu shouted for help, alerting the neighbours who broke open the door and found the girl hanging from an iron bar placed across a window, police said.
In the Idukki incident, Aswin, 19, a first year student of a private engineering college went for a swim in the Malankara reservoir alongwith his friends.
Soon after he entered the water, Aswin was seen struggling to stay afloat but his friends who watched him drowning from the banks of the reservoir mistook his cries for help to that of an April fool prank, police said.
By the time they realised their mistake, it was too late for the student who met a watery grave.
His body was later fished out from the reservoir by Fire Force with the help of local people, police said.
Tags: april, fools, pti
Oh, I think my argument is somewhat more specific than your paraphrase. To wit, “for Google to do what Google does right now, Google needs to sell eyeballs to advertisers.”It’s naive to think that this fact does not affect what Google does, how Google does it, and what Google will do in the future, just like it’s naive to think that search is Google’s main product. It’s not. Eyeballs are.
It’s not about the money…but it’s about the money.
I just don’t see it that way. Google uses open protocols, open sources many of their projects, provides fucking amazing search results and many useful applications for millions of people. They just changed the wireless phone industry via. their conditional bid suggestions that will benefit everyone more than anyone can even imagine right now. Not to mention google.org. It’s true they use advertising to power everything they do but so what? This is a capitalist society.That whole article was a bunch of whining anyways. “Fuck Google for providing food and laundry to their employees - those bastards!” Sounds like a great place to work. Other companies should emulate them rather than point their bony finger and whining that their employees are coddled.
And you’ve got a good idea of where computer programming will help?
Just curious, so feel free to not respond or respond privately.What field, are you married, do you have any dependents? Entrepreneur? Combined with smart use of the stock market? I’m wondering how you pulled off a retirement at 40.I’m not on a path to do that in ~10 years, although I’m not sure I’d necessarily want to dedicate the next 10 years of my life to that purpose.
Evil? Really are you sure?
Once more, the whole point is that they are charting their own lives–but not before being swayed by the allure of Google (I would be too), going to lengths to start work there, quickly getting jaded when all they get to work on is drudgery, and finally quitting–which is the whole problem Google is facing now. People are getting wise to it not being all it’s cracked up to be.
“make new AJAX applications”Google Maps was one of the single most jaw-dropping-first-impression apps I’ve seen.Yes, just one anecdote, but my point is that it’s kind of dumb to suggest that it’s not possible for an AJAX application to also be a brilliant nerd achievement.
Yeah. To me, those amenities also seem kind of regressive. I mean, if I really wanted to have free food and on-site laundry, I could just move back in with my parents.
Gladly.I graduated college with a degree in mathematics. I was encouraged by my professors to go to graduate school for abstract algebra, but had an offer from Google on the table around the time my friends were taking GREs, and decided that I would join the company.I had hoped to be working on some kind of difficult problem. Some medium to large scale computing task that challenged me. I would have even settled for some make-it-work-in-IE Javascript work if I knew that my work would be used by many people.Know what I came up with? Re-formatting Microsoft Word documents from HR people into some kind of reasonable HTML for publication on the internal network. Yes, we tried to use Writely (doesn’t allow enough customization…imagine that).So there I was, having just completed several intense semesters of analysis and algebra, and I was reformatting Word’s failed attempt at HTML into something that doesn’t suck. That $150,000 education was a good investment.Yes, I was a bit of an edge case because I was not hired into “core engineering”. (To get hired in there, you need to be from Stanford, MIT, or a founding member of the Apache Foundation). When I joined, I assumed there would be some software development work. Well there was, and it was PHP over MySQL. Whoopee.Anyway, I know this sounds like a butthurt complaint, and to some extent, it is. My real-world work at Google was virtually useless beyond being able to put it on my resume. The most valuable thing I took away from it was all of the architecture how-to I learned from reading documentation and other people’s code.I ate plenty of the food, but I have to tell you, free food doesn’t taste so good when all you can think about is slashing your wrists with the butter knife because your job is so fucking boring.In the end, I quit the G, took my 1/4 vested stock options, and started my own company with some friends from college. We’re still at it, and even though the food isn’t free, I don’t wake up every morning pissed off that I have to go to work.
The author of that article should read Peopleware and start over.Sounds more like he’s jealous of what they’ve accomplished.
Is it sour grapes to say this makes me happy I didn’t get a job there? Seriously, now I get to work from home 100% of the time. And I’m not a consultant. And I get to work on lots of different interesting problems. And I get paid very well and have great benefits.Who needs free food and toys and crap when you have the freedom to work from the coffee shop. Or take off in the middle of the day to visit your kid’s school without stressing about getting back so your boss doesn’t see you’re missing? Or sit in front of the TV and watch Stargate reruns in gloriously loud surround sound while hacking code? And no pressure to work 12-16 hour days because people will see you’re not around the office and assume you’re not fully part of the corporate “culture”.Google makes for great resume fodder in many corners today, but even that may wear off as more and more people realize it’s really pretty much as described here: overrated.