Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

If there’s one thing I really hate, it’s making important, binary decisions. Over the semester I’ve been faced with the same scenario three times: There are two options available and both have their own pros and cons, but they are mutually exclusive. There’s no way you can have both, and it’s severely counterproductive having to go back.

Battleground 1: Pick Bass v/s Finger Bass

Scenario: I play the bass, some of it. I started playing out using a plectrum like a standard guitarist, while a vast majority of people prefer to pluck with their fingers. Now I’m used to playing with a pick and am quite comfortable with it. However certain songs aren’t easier to play using a pick, and feel and sound better with fingers. While most metal and punk styles of music is suited to by a punchy, high attack sound of a plectrum picked bass guitar, the elusive finger picking style is taunting me. However it’s quite dumb to try and do both, and rather get pretty good at one and stick to that. Now which one to pick is the question.(unfortunately, no pun intended)

Battleground II: Windows v/s Linux

I’m a god in my windows environment, and know how to fix any problems and what to do and what to use. However I love a command line and hate using a mouse, and something about a Linux desktop is just very appealing. A clean, minimalist feature packed gnome desktop is amazing. With great development tools, media support, and bliss for programmers and customizers, it’s great to use. Even the inferior audio quality was pure earcandy when pulseaudio came along. And best of all the cool screen color invert feature that made reading things on the screen so much more plesant.

Yet there were still so many things lacking. A rock solid IDE, ridiculously bad font rendering, loading qtlibs when I don’t use qt based apps, and many more. However I still liked linux. Until one day when I wrote a tree searching program and instead of setting the tree height as 4, I set it as 44 and my system tried to allocate eight gigabytes of memory and stopped working. After which the xserver on linux never seemed to work the same. Graphics on windows was affected too but I somehow got it to work. Bottomline, I’m not able to use linux anymore, and that desicion has been made up for me.

Battleground III: Python v/s C++

This one’s kept me going on for sometime. I want to pick a language and *master* it. While I know C++ like the back of my hand, python seems to be so good, easy and well designed. On the other hand, if I try switching between the languages, I tend to add semicolons or delimiting braces in python by force of habit.

More on this later. I have to go get some sleep.