Digital Personification My Friend's Soulmate.

This is my first blog ever,

Q. So what?

A. Nothing :D.

I was some how inspired to scribble or doodle by my friend Amit Mitkar, of course there were some curious overtures too. So this blog is dedicated to my friend Amit Mitkar.

Amit is sort of lonely fellow. LONELY? Yeah lonely in the sense we all software developers are. He is an excellent photographer; this can be qualified as a subjective perspective subjected to Amit's own thought process. Few days back amit bought his laptop I was with him trying to guide him through buying a laptop. I made a few valuable suggestions viz. installing XP with service pack2 rather that applying the service pack later and other such crazy suggestions. In the meantime I completely forgot to advice him on the most important thing of all i.e. is not to connect to net without prior Antivirus software installed. This neglect in doling out timely advice has resulted Amit's soul mate a.k.a his girlfriend falling ill. Now what is the relationship between the Antivirus- The Laptop- And Amit’s soul mate? Read on ...

I never give up a chance to act as an Oracle the all knowing, so today when Amit asked me why are all his files on his laptop are being associated with the servicemanger.exe program, I took it upon me to give out some advice. Tinkering, Tinkering Processing 100%! I was for some time misled into thinking that the servicemanger.exe was the host process for windows services (actually it is svchost.exe). All files being associated with THE ONE program? You mean ALL files types starting from MP3 to DOC files, it did not take us long to figure out what was wrong with his laptop. It was the Win32.passma virus http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.passma.html. We somehow got the laptop cleared, had lunch, and started working. Sitting next to him I watched him change his yahoo messenger status to "I found my soul mate". He he :D. I was not deceived for a second I knew he was referring to his Laptop as his soul mate. http://the-pic-stops-here.blogspot.com/2006/03/ive-found-my-soulmate.html

So now we see why negligence on my part has resulted in friend caring for his beloved who is virus riddled (ofcourse we fixed it with all care). So probably my blog should have been renamed as "Digital Personification My Friends Soul Mate - His virus infected Laptop".

What I find so special about this entire episode is the exemplification of Digital Personification, why do most of us as personify and animate our programs, our machines? Why our bikes seldom personified? We never say "My Bike went berserk" but "My code went berserk" sounds just correct ;). We somehow have a sublime understanding the Turing machine really thinks or lives, while I find it is totally incapable of doing either. Or is it that we are just too lonely any disconnected from the social world that we HAVE to personify the things we spend the most time with like Tom Hanks in “Cast Away”.