The Lair

I’ve been lurking around Facebook again. The fancy seems to strike me in fits and starts. I resisted for as long as I could but I am now gripped in the throes of addiction. Well, I still don’t know what people actually do there - but like the cat chasing the feebly squeaking mouse because it can - I too have launched myself head-first into the Facebook era.

Sans a picture, though. There are limits to my online perversions. There have been odd wall posts berating me for not including a photograph. It’s Facebook - because you’re supposed to have photographs. Of your face. Who knew? If my face were akin to an open book of any sort, it would most likely be illegal.

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By the time I write this, the bride would have duly walked down the aisle and all that. Actually, I just got an IM from a person so I may have jumped the gun a wee bit, but no matter. Either that or the person attending is typing away at IM furiously while seated at the reception (Possible, but unlikely).

Muchos congratulations to K and R and best wishes. I’m terribly sorry I couldn’t make it, though.

Quite apart from the obvious reasons for the wedding being noteworthy, it is possibly the first blog related (or should that be blog inspired?) wedding in SL. I am a mere degree of separation away from geek history being made in SL. Not often that happens.

And I’m stuck in freezing fogland. Gah.

Poland (who sits opposite me) told me that there was a Sri Lankan student in the first year CompScis. “Oh”, I said and left it there. Not entirely disinterestedly, you understand… it’s just that I’ve found it a safe (if somewhat antisocial) policy to avoid people of my own nationality. This is completely different from my parents behaviour, for example. Whenever they’re in these parts, they actually take great pains to hang out with fellow Sri Lankans and attend social gatherings and do the whole socializing whirlygig. Not me.

It’s not entirely distrust or anti-social behaviour. It’s not that I suddenly don an accent and start behaving more Brit than the Brits either. I just don’t seem to find very much in common with these people. My route through life is usually that of least resistance and for me, where meeting folk from the home country are concerned, discretion is very much the better part of valour. It’s a nasty (but possibly accurate) generalization that the size of the house and the model of car and where the kids are being sent to school are the prime topics of conversation with a certain set of SLans away from SL. That and the whole political/war thing, which I really don’t want to get into.

So, a Sri Lankan in the first year. Interesting. York is actually quite unusual because you can play “spot the brown” (I stole that phrase from Rustifer) really well. There are a few Bangladeshis running the Indian restaurants in town (funny how that happens, huh?), a few Pakistanis running kabab shops (yup, weird) and that’s about it. The nearby Gurkha regiment usually provides the South Asian flavour in these parts. Bradford or Leeds and a melting pot of immigrants it is not. So yet another Sri Lankan turning up in the frozen north is a noteworthy event, at least.

I demonstrate the Scheme programming language to the first years, so I know them by sight if not by name. After Poland informed me of a compatriot, I played a few guessing games trying to figure out which guy it was. In the end, it proved inconclusive so I had pretty much given up (not that I was particularly interested in finding out anyway). Until today.

Someone asked me to explain the almighty lambda and I was trying to figure out how much he knew. So, I asked him (what I thought was) a fairly trivial question as a starter and I got a typically Sri Lankan response.

God knows, men!

It’s difficult to convey the precise nuances and accents of that particular phrase, but trust me… it sounded very Sri Lankan. Huge grin and I asked the guy if he was… *blink blink* Yup, he was. How on earth did I guess, huh?