Category: General

I was pleasantly surprised to see this in my email inbox this morning.

“May I use parts of your online diary in an English lesson here in Germany? Especially this day’s entry might be a good reason to start a discussion.”

The person had come across a post in my wordpress trial site, and left me this as a comment. The cool part here is, the web log system was smart enough to figure I wouldn’t be going through old posts to check for comments, and decided to mail it to me.

Unfortunately, being the slacker that I am, this main journal is still on ancient technology, so none of such niceties will work here. So if someone new (or not very new) has something to say to me, please email it to me if the post you’re referring to is “old”. And by “old”, I mean not on the front page. Thanks.

Oh, and before I forget the point of this exercise, welcome those who are being forced to read this as part of your lesson. Though there’s a high probability some of you will consequently have negative connotations attached to the experience, I’m really not a bad person.

Update: This probably defeats the purpose, and there’s a good chance I’m all wrong, aber Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch und Ich begr��e Sie.

Tch�ss.

Maybe I should attend more than extremely basic German class sometime.

Continuing with the coffee shop theme, here’s my totally healthy breakfast this morning. I feel so alive and active when I eat healthy, and I can hear my heart thanking me for it. It’s so good to know I’m not dying young with a heart attack.

Yes, it’s technically breakfast this morning even if I did have it only at 3:45 in the afternoon.

This arrived in my inbox a short while ago.

<mindlessdrone>
Muuusstt buuuyyy peeenniiss ennnlaarrggeeemmeennt pilll.
</mindlessdrone>

Or whatever else is being sold, from whoever it is that’s selling it.

Sheesh.

I was talking to H a while ago and kept (proudly?) harping on the fact that I wasn’t out of “study mode” completely. That I now quite enjoyed locking myself up all alone trying to read. He listens all patiently, and points to his computer reminding me of our friend article. When I had to study, I spent many a sleepless night on the code. Now that I don’t have to, and the code’s all I have to work on, I study.

Everyone knows everything and I am beyond predictable. Just great.

And the girl in the coffee shop (where I’ve pretty much drunk everything but, and hang out) is quitting smoking a day after her birthday. Why is that even remotely interesting and/or relevant? It isn’t. It was just cute to see how excited someone can be running around all “happy like”.

Maybe I should induce some pseudo-addiction, and quit after 11 years, just to experience this sort of rush.

Or maybe I’m just stupid and have waaay too much time on my hands.

I need to run in a bit, so I’ll make this quick. And by run I don’t mean run, but get back to work, of course. I now have a new housemate.

Let’s see, he’s
a he,
a geographer (betchya haven’t met one for real, have you?),
a neatness freak (which is amazingly awesome, I might add),
an elaborate cook,
vegetarian ,
got this Canadian lady that babies him,
not a smoker.

But, he’s Telugu.

Yes, I said “but”. Sue me.

And, ask (beg) and ye shall receive. Thanks to Anitha‘s generosity I now have a gmail account. Which is cool why? It just is.

Maybe I should give up all this education nonsense and become a professional beggar, you know, the dude who pretends to be homeless but has this cool stash powered by generous folk hidden away somewhere.

I think it’s finally dawned on me that I’m going home. And I must say I am beginning to get all excited. Which is pretty cool. It just takes a little to stop focussing on who you aren’t going to see, to realize the gazillion other people who you’re going to.

Which is pretty cool, even by my asocial standards. I cannot wait to babied again. Ah, how I miss that. I can’t wait to get back to a state where I feel everything’s taken care of and everyone’s familiar. Are some people forever destined to be big babies who neeeeed, well, babying?

Rhetorical question, don’t think too hard.

Curiously, I pack just like my mom. I’ve, for now, planned on taking just the one suitcase. Considering my freaking path involves first entering the country in Bombay (since Madras is a village?) and I need to go through weirdness like customs, shift airports, and other such general nonsense there. (It feels unnatural to not take a cheap shot at Hindi right about now, but I will be the bigger man.) I figured I’d carry the essentials. Where ‘essentials’ means stuff for everyone else. Anyway, back to packing. This suitcase just lies there open in the corner, and has been there for over a couple of months. Everytime I pick up something that seems interesting, I drop it in, and voila, when the time comes, I’m done. Well, in theory anyway.

Currently, all I’ve got is food and electronics, and it’s full. Forget clothes and so on, we buy them there I suppose.

Of course, I have some “enhancements” over the mom method. I have this huge list of people, and note down who I got what, and that functions as the TODO shopping list for those whose stash is smaller than others in the same “league”. Simple, elegant and rational.

It has to be a science.

Except it’s not classy.

I might as well get all these out of the way, because I’m the kind of person you’d refer to as “quite shameless”. So, roughly in order of desperation,

1. I would like a gmail account invitation. I don’t think it’s particularly fair that google offers blogger users free blogging (and auxiliary services) and an email account with a huge inbox. I’ve “had” a blogger account for a lot longer than most people, but I’ve never used it. Consequently, I’ve not been one of the “regular users” worthy of an account. I must say for a week I did try spamming that account, but google was too smart for me to get fooled.

So if you can’t see the desperation in my eyes (yes I am a geek), I’ll just say it exists. If you’re a regular gmail user and have an invite to spare, please remember less fortunate folk exist.

2. If you haven’t noticed yet, I now have a “donate button” on the menu on the left. So here’s the spiel that goes along with that:

You know you want to click it and send me love. Kids, if your mommy doesn’t give you 5 dollars to give to website maintainer man, she doesn’t really love you.

No portion (no, not even 2.34%) of what I make from this goes to support unicef or anything else truly worthy. However, you do realize I could have easily come up with a break-your-heart “But can’t you imagine our cute little bald Timmy smiling after intensive (and expensive) chemotherapy (which you helped pay for)?” sort of story if I reeeally wanted to, don’t you?

Do not make me go down that road. Conning people to make a living is not what i do, usually.

Bandwidth costs money. I lost my ‘will work for bandwidth’ enthusiasm a long time ago. So if you like what you see, and would like to see more of it, help me keep it up.

You are kind, generous, and have positively delightful taste.

3. Ok, if that’s not your thing either, you will notice I have a “my wishlist” button too on a menu over there. If you’re feeling generous, but aren’t too keen on throwing money at me, maybe you’d be more open to the idea of buying me something.

Wouldn’t you care to see me smile?

No, I didn’t think so either, but it was worth a shot.

There aren’t too many reasons I fail to update this thing. Either there’s “too much going on which I’d rather not talk about”, or there’s “nothing going on and I’d rather not further bore anyone”, and then there’s the “I’m getting my daily release elsewhere”.

It doesn’t matter why, I’m just not really in the “share details of my day here” frame of mind. To make matters worse, I’m still stuck in some sort of post-quals-slump and areas of my life (which weren’t exactly rip-roaringly active anyway) have grinded to a complete halt. Not happening.

I figured I was going about the mom-gift-buying thing entirely wrong. I was aiming for thoughtful/personal, practical/useful, not el cheaponess all in one magic item. The moment I thought a little outside the box, the ideas came flooding in. Now all that’s left is the actual implementation.

That’s about it.

I feel fishing horrid.

I am deficient. And it’s not something that can be cured by some stupid vitamin deficiency pill. Who’s to say what’s important in this world? Who’s to say what’s the appropriate ‘testing mechanism’ to quantify how ‘good’ you are in all those regards? If you haven’t really experienced someone, would you even see their score card? So what if you don’t measure up to other better players on the score card? Does that mean you’re automatically destined to a life of mediocrity and unhappiness? What sort of lame system is that.

We don’t arbitrarily pick out the dumb kids and throw them out of school telling them they’d forever amount to less now do we? We observe them better, spend more time with them, help them out and soon, they’re having all the opportunities and experiences everyone else has. Why does this have to be the case in aspects that don’t really affect me, but have to be a lot more stern in areas I can’t easily handle myself?

God damn it. I was bordering on normal-to-happy just a few hours ago. What did I do to deserve this constantly happening to me? I’m a decent person. I don’t harm anything or anyone. Shouldn’t there be some sort of rule against being hurt?

Maybe it’s a guy hormone thing. Who knows?

NP. Led Zeppelin – The Best of

There are some things that bother me about shows like queer eye for the straight guy. I mean, just what do these guys know that normal people do not? (apart from the 73 grades of table cloth and the appropriate occassion for each’s use, I mean). Every single time they get to “transform” a guy with just a little more hair than normal, they say something akin to “women want their men looking like men” and chop it off in a jiffy. Is a gay guy the first person you’d go to for ‘advice’ on what women want? Sheesh.

Take this:

And if you don’t shut up, I’ll do something even more drastic, like this:

Don’t ask me what’s it with the colours. It’s from one of the many abandoned projects at confused times.

I know they can’t hear me smartypants. I just needed to let this out.

Vaguely related, I decided to propose a change to the style used for the gimp wiki. See how it looked, and how it does currently. I think it’s pretty subtle and professional if I do say so myself.

You have to watch this. For the lower-bandwidth skeptics among the crowd, you have my word that this is totally worth your download time. Honest. Now enough, here’s what I am talking about.

Click me to laugh. [ ~1.65 MB ]

No one’s saying anything about whether I agree with what’s being said on the video or anything like that. It’s just funny.

The fountain on north campus taken lying down amongst some plants somewhere.

Fountains are perty.

You know you don’t wash your clothes often enough..

.. when this is the only way you can get enough detergent into your washer.

I decided to clean out my bag, and I thought I’d finished when it occurred to me that though it seemed “empty”, it still weighed a ton. Some snooping through the super secret secret compartments led to this,

and this.

GAH! I must have been travelling ON PLANES with this thing and their stupid X-Ray machines seems to have let me walk through security each time. Thank god these people aren’t responsible for national security.

No wait, they ARE.

I’ve been finding it hard to get out of this “read cool things for the high of understanding them” mode. I can’t explain it, I usually HATE work and intellectual work does fall under the blanket term, “work”. I especially hate studying. I must admit I quite enjoy classes handled by good teachers. It’s like, then the ideas are directly fed into your brain when all you had to do was not be unreceptive, a win win situation.

Anyway, totally sidetracked. Point being, at totally random points of time, and for uncharacteristically long periods, I’ve been picking up rather complicated books and reading through them. And I have been enjoying it. All of this is new, uncharted, and consequently scary territory. We’ll see where it leads.

I’ve also been sleeping a whole lot. And I mean a lot. I slept at some 9-10 last night to wake at 10 in the morn. I went back to bed around 11 (yep, was awake a whole hour), and woke at 3. Now I’m sleepy again.

In my remaining copious free time, I’ve been cleaning up the home. And I mean fairly thoroughly. I’ve scrubbed most things that can be scrubbed, and the carpets scared me. The sheer volume of hair I found everywhere; my friend’s “shed champeen” cats will be proud. Such things usually don’t bother me, but I can imagine myself 10 years down the line looking very different, in a very bad way. Not a pleasant thought.

I think it’s time I start looking into things like Rogaine. Then again, their “before and after” pictures, even with the “not standard results” disclaimer on their website leave much to be desired.

But then again, according to other ads, all you need to do is take that one pill and EVERYONE around you will see and think you cooler.

They just won’t know why.