Coffee Talk

7.5/10. This is the coffee shop on Waialae and 12th avenue. I spend quite a bit of my time there with a laptop or a good book.

It is reasonably spacious but with enough tables such that you can find a seat even on crowded days. The clientele is the usual college crowd taking refuge from dreary dorms while trying to get some work done. Their best asset is free wireless internet which I have not seen anywhere else in Honolulu. That includes Cafe 2000 on University Ave, all the Starbuckses and Borders/Barnes &Nobles coffee shops.

The coffee itself is decent but not spectacular. However large degrees of customization (such as extra syrup in mochas) are possible due to the friendliness of the female staff. Male staff members are somewhat rare and not-so-friendly. If they are present it is mostly behind-the-scenes while the female takes care of customer interaction. Perhaps the management understands that high male quality is not being employed.

From the food point of view, the situation is not so rosy. The sandwiches and burgers are mediocre and best avoided. I recall a hot melt with such poor qualiy pastrami that one would need a crocodile's jaws to break off a piece. The cookies are quite good though, especially the peanut butter ones.

The decor is allright overall speaking, but perhaps also a bit cheerless. It feels unfinished...like they started with some kind of retro ambitions but lost heart midway. Tables are small and circular which makes it challenging to manoeuvre both a sandwich plate and a laptop. Some bigger tables are available outside. There is no sofa section which means that there are no bums and most clients are awake. There is an outdoor section which is frequently populated by hard core smokers who are also at times serious-looking chicks in very dark clothes, some body art, rings etc. They tend to give me a coolness-deficit complex. I have never sat there, but that is mostly because insides are less warm. Speaking of that, I'm not sure if they have an AC for the interior. Sometimes it is a bit cool but mostly rather warm, particularly in the afternoons.

Concerning ambient music, there seems to be a heavy bias towards very emotional romantic songs of the "love me tender, love me true" variety. Lots of Air Supply too. This can make me a bit nervous after a while, but I suppose that depends on taste.

So, as coffee houses go, this is probably the best in Honolulu. But, if there is another place out there with decent coffee and free wireless internet, I would like to know about it!

Tsotsi

6/10. O.K. this is a good movie belonging to the induce-depression-win-award genre. As one would expect, the background is Africa - Johannesburg to be exact.

Essentially it's about a teenage dude who has had a hell of a life. His mother died of AIDS (presumably) and the alcoholic father broke the family dog's back which resulted in the boy's running away from home to live in spare sewage pipes. Henceforth he grows up to be a small-time hood. Then, one fateful day, he shoots a rich woman and decamps with her car only to realise that her baby is in the backseat.

Well, you guessed it. A babyful life causes our man to reflect, improve, redeem and even fall in love with a girl who is initially forced to breast-feed the baby at gunpoint. Unfortunately though, when he has almost become a nice guy and sets off to return the baby to the parents, he is apprehended by the cops in a dramatic moment outside the baby's home. And so ends the movie with our friend's hands up in the air.

Call me a cynic, but haven't we seen this before somewhere? Actually we haven't. The deja vu comes from the chunks of acclaimed cinema that have been put together to create a "new" art production. A little African poverty, some AIDS placement, a hood's inner goodness, some innocent-baby factor...that's about it. This is as close to an art movie formula that you can ever get. The acting is very good though which I suppose is the movie's redemption. Note: It has since come to my notice that Tsotsi is based on a novel. In that case my view is that the movie was made too late i.e. at a point where all important features of the story have already been shown in other movies or documentaries.

To be a good cynic I have to offer solutions, not just rant and rave. How would I make the movie given the chance? Well, the baby would certainly not be returned. He would instead grow up to be a mafia don in support of his surrogate father - sort of like Amitabh Bachchan's double role in "The Great Gambler". Or not. Anyway, he would get into South African politics, defeat Nelson Mandela, and be confronted by his real father in a final showdown. His weeping real mother would then show up and have a war of words with the fake mother. But their motherly war will turn into sisterly affection due to the shared male bond. (Note: I know this will work as this is what makes polygamy possible). The emotional cup will run over at this point and it will be assumed that the female energy will force everyone to live happily ever after. Enter: the South African police. They will show up to enforce law and order but sadly will have no clue as to what they should do. Hence they will end up shooting the fake father in a shocking gunbattle culminating in a spray of "Kill Bill" style blood. The movie will end there and all the girls in the audience will emerge weeping while the guys will feel vague desires to be "dons".

Oh well. The world is far from ideal.

Road Rage

So I dropped by the subway on kapahulu that advertises "Open 9am till 12 midnight!" for a snack at 11pm today. It was closed. There is something so hawaiian about that...sorry, cannot kokua, not so late...

Changing gears, the purpose of this blog entry is solely to vent on the work visa situation. It seems h1s in academic positions such as postdocs cannot simply transfer to industry jobs. This is unlike the taxi driver on an h1 who can flit from one employer to another, or be wholly illegal pending citizenship by default or amnesty or whatever. Academic h1s have to again go through the annual cap and start work in October. Nor can they use any unused OPT lest by chance the sysem work too fairly. Since this year's visas are finished, nothing can be done until next year. Catch-22.

I've been trying to rationalize that this is nothing. There is a whole world out there caught in the same vortex of American stupidity, but in much worse ways. There are tiny bin ladens squirming out of vaginas across the world, fully formed with vengeful beards because of this stupidity. People are getting their asses blown off in Lebanon and British Pakistanis are one step away from hiding nitroglycerin in their bladders, ready to explode in a shower of urine inside American aircraft. My problems are nothing. And here I am sitting in Hawaii complaining I cannot accept offers to work on wall street. It's so trivial. Yeah right...

So, why does everything that touches American politics have to be so stupid and self-defeating? Hard to believe how much misinformation people here are willing to put up with. Speaking of that, random surfing brought Mr. Kim Berry and his "Programmer's Guild" to my attention. He is leading a jihad to send people like me home. Never mind that top science and engineering graduate programs nowadays have about 70% foreigners, if not more.He has a little propaganda item on his website which says that h1 computer programmers on average earn several tens of thousand dollars less than the median wage among all American programmers. However, h1 visas are valid for a maximum of 6 years which means that the pool of such workers in the survey has an experience level bounded between 0-6 years. Also, government statistics are only published for new h1 holders who have even less experience. The median for Americans does not place any bounds on experience. So, big surprise that one group seems to earn less.

Besides, every h1 from India is not an IIT-ian and neither is every Chinese from Tsinghua or every Korean from whatever is the hot university in Korea. Quite a few are from some mid-level college somewhere with poor english to boot and there is no reason why they should get paid as much as a graduate from a US university.

I suppose Berry will put on his thinking cap and ask, where is the need to hire such "poor quality" programmers then? Well, the answer is that a good fraction of programming jobs are now commoditised, which means that anyone who has taken a single advanced programming course can do them. You don't need a BS in computer science from a good school in such jobs. What people need to do is get their graduate degrees if they really want to differentiate themselves. It doesn't even cost anything - teaching / research assistantships are a dime a dozen.

The Guild in effect says that Americans love math and are dying to get their Masters and PhDs but are "discouraged" by the h1 shenanigans of the likes of microsoft. Sorry, but I have taught in UT's classrooms for six years. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of American undergraduates believe that ignorance is a virtue, especially when it comes to anything scientific. And then, the poor dears have to feel entertained in their courses, you know. This concept of omnipresent entertainment is not unique to the classroom. I was told recently that an a fellow postdoc's wife watches Fox news simply because "they make the news so much more entertaining"(!) . Not so surprising, given that Bush has converted ignorance into public policy. At least I can understand why Berry got fired - I wouldn't hire someone who cannot follow simple statistics.

Anyways, I'm not going anywhere, so ya'll are just stuck with me. And I'm not even a programmer. Ha...