Category: General

It was cheese, or the lack of it actually. When I slammed the door (for effect) and stomped out (for effect), I happened to walk past this pizzeria where the guy was just taking this huge pie fresh out of the oven. It was the usual fully cheese covered base with a heart-attack-lovin’ four or five further varieties of cheese generously poured (yes poured, not sprinkled, not grated) on top.

A couple of slices of that and I felt better than ever. I shouldn’t let primary nutrients like bodily cheese content go down to such critically low values. I get all mean and furious for no real reason.

If there is something such as arbitrarily directionless pure anger, I’m experiencing that state right now. Actually, it isn’t as much anger as it is majorly annoyed. And it isn’t as much majorly annoyed as .. no, it’s rage alright.

The weird thing in all of this is I don’t even know what I am angry about. Instead of feeling free and so on considering I am all by myself now, I feel fishing stifled. It’s like I’m trying so damn hard to get some extremely long and quality alone time, but I’m just constantly being hounded. I don’t feel.. free. I don’t feel in control. I am not at peace.

Summer’s over, and things are hectic at the uni, which believe it or not used to help keep me extremely calm. Now, there are these marathon classes in totally weird subjects (being ambiguous because that’s what chickens do) which make me want to.. I don’t really know. I just feel fishing stupid. And even more angry.

The useless computer issues, lack of stability in not-entirely-honestly-procured internet (long story, again being ambiguous because that’s what chickens do), having to check prices in stores, god awful tasting “store-brand” dew, still hurting and damaged nails from the move, perpetually .. ah forget it.

To top this all off, there is some maniac spam bot thinking that (rather useless anyway) shoutbox is a place people come to read advertisements. I’m leaving, if you’re disturbed or some such, probably this should soothe you, in theory.

You have to believe me when I tell you that’s Madras.

There was some left-over cruft from some extension (enigmail to be specific) that Thunderbird thought was installed when it really wasn’t. Cleaned up said cruft, and now I can read e-mail.

You probably already know I am not a big fan of competition. This is especially true for physical competition, sport, where attributes like strength, flexibility and endurance dictate who comes out on top. Since I have my I-detest-sport reputation to upkeep amongst my immediate circle, I had to utilize some extreme stealth during the past few weeks, because I was curious.

So here’s my dirty little secret – I did catch quite a bit of the Olympics.

At points, I was quite excited by what I saw (and I don’t mean the young nubile gymnast sorts doing their thing). I was cheering, I attached myself to some of the participants and rooted for them to win. I felt happy when they did, and almost sad when they failed. Within 10 minutes of seeing a sport I had never known existed prior, I would become some sort of expert and comment on how poorly or well the athlete was doing, in “technical” terms. Now that got me thinking. I seemed to be almost having fun, what was it I really detested? Was it the concept of competition? or the realization that there are various things in this world out there at which there are a ton of people who are insanely better than me.

There are a couple of competing schools of thought in my head, and I always end up picking the “better” one purely as a matter of convenience. On the one hand, you realize competition helps people push boundaries, and gives them clear goals to make themselves better and better at various things. Forget sport, this is entirely valid across most fields. Even something weird like military technology or space exploration. It’s fair enough to believe we’ve made progress at the rate we have in such areas purely because you’re always in competition with your “enemy” to be better (or in this case, too scared to be worse) than them. So when our lil-green-alien friends attack, for instance, we might be ready with the thermo-nuclear war head (or enhanced communication skills to con them into believing we’re a peaceful and harmless race) or whatever it takes to save our behinds. If you’re still not out of sport mode, let’s assume said lil-green-aliens have firepower that moves at (the appropriately convenient rate of) 10 m/s on small ranges. At least, as a result of competition like the Olympics, we will have the Maurice Greens and the Yuliya Nesterenkos who can outrun said bullets and survive to procreate later and repopulate the earth.

All this is nice and all, but I usually lean on the other school of thought, the one that avoids competition and declares it evil. You see, it is just as possible even greater progress could have been made if the bright minds on these “enemy nations” trusted each other and openly shared intelligence. That way, ideally, they’d be no duplication of work and no great ideas would be missed because of stupid trivialities like that country being wiped out in a war. And once you’re smart enough to do what you want, you have little to fear from our lil-green-alien friends. No matter how slow we run, or how unfit we are, or how far we can’t throw a heavy ball-and-chain.

I might not be a big fan of sport, or always understand the subtle nuances of most of them, but I do realize it feels good to win. Being better than someone (or everyone) at something and knowing everyone knows this does tend to make people all warm and fuzzy on the inside, at times. It’s too bad that Phelps can’t represent the uni because he’s pro. It’d have been nice to dominate.

Even if it isn’t you doing anything toward it. Or actually dominating anything.

I have a very strong belief system. Though I consider myself an annoyingly rational person, I also seem to have unexplainably strong faith in things that don’t necessarily fall under the realm of reason. At times, I am oddly superstitious, and I won’t blame you if you find my antics laughable. For obvious reasons (maintaining a serious tone, if it wasn’t obvious enough), I am not getting into those details. As for the things I am willing to admit however, I strongly believe in things like karma.

Now you might think that’s the sort of thing a poor farmer might tell his child after the kid comes running crying to him and tells him how he has to work so hard on the field all day and go hungry, while rich neighbour girl gets to pig out all day and does seemingly nothing toward it. I haven’t been through an analogous circumstance, and no one’s had to make something like this up to pacify me, but I believe in it. I think I sort of like this concept because of the nature of the global governing “balance law” feel. It’s always consequence. You always get what’s coming to you. You’re always the one in control.

Stuff happens. Computers crash, women leave you, planes crash into buildings… . Some good, some quite bad. Some with reason, some without. You’ve got to be able to relax and deal with it. The world’s been good to me. I’ve done nothing particularly of note in return. I haven’t worked toward anything, but at almost every point things have magically fallen in place without reason. And since I don’t like things happening “without reason”, I will make up a pseudo reason and believe in it very strongly if I have to. I attribute it to karma. I must have been exceptionally good to the world at some point, and I’m reaping the benefits. Actually, it’s not entirely true that I don’t work towards things. I just tend to do it in a rather roundabout way. I’m a gentle, kind, nice, generous, understanding person most of the time to the world, and (but only because?) I expect no less in return. You have a tough exam the next day, you could work real hard on some differential equation you’re not going to solve, or you could spend the day helping an illiterate kid take her first steps on her path to literacy, and hope karma does its bit.

People, black rappers mostly, scream things like – “Don’t fish with me because I’ll fish you (I’m guessing in a bad way)” or something. Now I sing “I don’t fish with the system because I don’t plan to be fished by it”. And actually end up doing “I do fish with the system, but only when I’ve reasoned out to myself I have outsmarted it.”

Which unfortunately translates to, when I feel I have karma to burn, I have no real problems in being evil myself. Hey, I’ve done more than enough good to make up for it sort of thing.

You see, it’s easier to believe in an all-controlling-law, when you believe you control it.

My computer is quite screwed up. Currently, it “runs” windows. By which I mean, I can get it to boot without bad-sector-ridden boot floppies. It now hates the internet.

And I thought Windows XP Professional was more networking friendly than the “home” variant. I thought wrong.

The mail client renders its own gui wrong half the time, but fails to read mail off servers properly all the time [Update: For those curious, this is apparently window’s idea of someone checking e-mail]. Visual studio grinds to a halt each time I mistakenly hit “properties” on a source file, and that source file happens to be in fortran. McAfee prevents clean shut downs and causes an infinite “hang” state. McAfee also conflicts with DLA and the “windows installer” preventing me from removing or installing any software. McAfee also prevents itself from being disabled anywhere. I guess if you don’t have any software, you can’t really have a virus? Intel things like to install themselves in “My Pictures” no matter where I ask them to go. I have no codecs and can see/hear very little of my media. Windows attempts to update drivers for all devices on my machine by itself, but doesn’t know how to do it, so it complains. It then complains when I disable “auto-go-ahead-and-screw-everything-up-myself” mode.

Of course, since it wiped out my MBR and I lost my boot floppy to bad clusters, I’m burning a distribution install disc to see if it is smart enough to get me out of this hell hole and to a place where I can work.

And play.

Deviating to some informatively non-negative news. Though delineate‘s interface looks rather simple, the backend data holding and classifying scheme is quite capable, and complicated. I am currently figuring out how to unleash these features on to the page without cluttering it. What am I talking about you ask?

For instance. Hmm.. if you’ve seen the permanent links for the current images, they look like so: domain/shoebox/picture-title/. Now I picked “shoebox” specifically to give it an unclassified feel. I mean, you randomly dump old photos in a shoebox right?

But that’s not the only way of accessing images on delineate. Consider for instance, domain/genus/flowers. Sweet huh? (Yeah, it renders funnily on IE, but will be fixed before the official release of such things.) Internally, images hold some meta information related to their content, so such nifty look ups are easy. There are a bunch of other things like this which will be fun (and probably necessary) once the number of images grow.

I’ll leak said features a lil’ bit at a time.

There have been a bunch of rumours going around which I hope to clear up. Firstly, there have been those who dare proclaim that this journal is dead. That’s so obviously not true. I’ve just been “away” (for reasons I will enumerate later, though I must admit it’s been quite nice).

Then, some joker actually elevated said rumour to an all new high, that I am dead. Sorry evil one, not yet I am not.

With those out of the way, where do I begin? OK, this is either frickin’ hilarious or ironic depending on how you look at it. For some two years, I lived in a part of town where there are no interesting places to eat after 9 or so in the evening. Actually, there are no interesting places to eat even before that, but that’s a whole new story altogether. Anyway I could afford to if I wanted to. They just didn’t excite me enough for me to want to. Now, I’ve moved to a relatively fabulous locality, with a ton of interesting cuisine available even at the weirdest wee hours of the morning. Of course, the catch here is with the exceptional rent increase, I can’t afford any of it.

Frickin’ ironic.

Unrelated, I’ve been having the weirdest computing trouble, apart from the obvious lack of internet at home. Do you remember the “old” Apple switch ad campaign? In particular, do you remember Ellen Feiss’ story? Now I had a similar experience, except with far more disastrous consequences. I was sitting there, like, doing whatever it is I do, and all of a sudden my computer goes, like, berserk. It’s all *beep* *beep* *beep* and reboots to come up with what is essentially a useless blank screen. Not like I panic, but I am annoyed.

I reboot to GNU/Linux and continue on with life as if nothing happened. Until there is a need for my wireless ethernet card to work which is insanely flaky on it. Angered, I decide to reinstall some things to remember the #&@$**$! geniuses at HP have a sort of “disaster recovery disc set” that wipes out all your data before actually “fixing” anything. So I shell out some money and get a copy of Windows and attempt to “fix” my install. Now this is even more of a genius. Apparently it doesn’t like doing this sort of thing either and warns me that it will wipe out “My Documents” and other folders in the process. Crap. So I cancel setup, only to realize it’s now wiped out my MBR and it only boots to my non functional windows installation. F’in genius.

So, I almost didn’t have a computer, except for me figuring out grub weirdnesses and making a boot floppy so I can get back to my trusty GNU/Linux partition after all this excitement. Actually, said boot floppy had a ton of bad clusters which led to a lot more excitement, but I value your time and will stop.

Anyway, for rather interesting reasons I choose not to get into, most current activity has been diverted to delineate. If you’re one of those relatively long term frequenters of this site, there’s nothing really new to see, but otherwise you might want to take a peek. It might be interesting.

In related news, I’ve finally figured out my next major photography related purchase. A Canon EOS 20D body with a 17 – 85 mm, F4-5.6 EF-S IS lens. Now that lens is obviously just a start, and I think that camera has to last a while with a temporally expanding set of lenses, filters and other accessories since it’s now priced at just under 2 grand. *Shudder* But then again, it’s apparently capable of things like this [>3MB!].

I’ve really got nothing to say. Being annoying-roommate-free is good, but being unable to afford the basic necessities like broadbroadbroadband sucks.

If someone knows one of those easy-to-rob bank places I’ve been hearing so much about, please drop me a line. I have a ton of shopping left to do.

Speaking of a ton of shopping, I’ve worn out one of my credit cards and it’s (embarrassingly) failed to work twice over this past week. I’ve asked for a new replacement, but I had to endure the “how much more careful women are with their things than men” lecture from the bank lady.

Speaking of lady, I’ve slowly migrated from “exceptionally asocial” to “quite social” in the recent past.

OK, so I probably did have something to say.

I’d gone on this trip, and not having access to the internet was weirdly interesting. (Some pictures here and more general verbosity will follow later.)

Oh, and I now have a phone.

This is from a café close to my new home, because I don’t have an internet connection (or a phone, or even TV) yet. I finished the move sometime last evening and as of now there is still a whole lot of stuff strewn all about the new place. I am tired, I am hurting a bit and quite disoriented. I woke rather late after sleeping very early last night, and I’ve still been groggy and weak.

Hmm.

In unrelated news, delineate moves out of beta and a first release candidate exists. Currently known issues include:
1. Rendering issues in some IE versions.
2. The (previous and next) graphical buttons misbehave/don’t function on IE.
3. The comments popup needs a lot more polishing. And the link to the comments popup gives away a lot of information (that it is a php file,
post id number and so on) which I am trying to obscure.

If you have further comments (yes I will answer the unanswered comments and e-mails regarding it soon) please tell me your browser, operating system and screen resolution so I have a more decent idea of where it works and where it breaks. Actually, give me that information even if it works, so I’ll know where it looks/behaves fine. Thanks.

Well, not good enough anyway.
Did I say good? I meant strong, yes strong, that’s it.

You’d be surprised

– How much crap a poor grad student can accumulate.
– How weak a 20 few year old male can be.
– How much he can actually move given how weak he is.
– How much physical damage and trauma he can go through.

And the delineate commenters, thank you. Your concerns will be addressed as soon as I can. For now I am bruised, am scratched, I’ve chipped nails, jammed fingers, stubbed toes, … and tired. But I did it, and the eagle hawk li’l birdie has landed.

Well, not really. It is still horribly broken and there is a lot more to do. But clickey anyway

After some more work, delineate’s beginning to look a lot more like that picture I drew. So here’s the regular drill.

How it looks in my head/the GIMP.
Here’s how it looks now on my internet explorer.
(Screwed, but will be fixed.)
Here’s how it looks now on my mozilla.

How does it render on your browser?

After much thought, I decided iteration 6 was as good as I wanted it to get, for now. I’ve started coding it.

So here’s how it looks in my head/the GIMP.
Here’s how it looks now on my internet explorer.
Here’s how it looks now on my mozilla.

How does it render on your browser?