Category: General

Because they’re a lot easier than typing.

Catch a sneak preview of the latest iteration of the all new photo page here. It’s essentially the same thing as the older one, but with the text slightly rehashed and freshened, photos posted on journal linked to, and new albums included. Of course, all this in theory, and none of the links really work, yet.

Anyway, braving along. On to today’s photolog. I have pretty much signed the lease for a new home. This is some of the stuff I noticed on the way to the leasing office.

In the bus.

On a car.

On the footpath sidewalk.

Ahh yes, I can’t even say anything and attempt to be PC. So I won’t.

My tickets to go to India are confirmed. I definitely assumed I would be more excited when it was finalized. It should be a very big deal, and I should be all excitedly jumping around, but I am not. Nothing seems to matter. Probably if this were some exotic portion of Europe? Hmm.

Hmm. Maybe, when it sinks in in a month or so from now, and I’m not carefully picking up some apt thing for someone back hmm home. There are a couple of things I assumed I’d be buying which I’m definitely not going to need. I am not in a mood for any more “not my place” conversations.

I have found my first official hostee. Anita now maintains her journal here.

After over a year of answering clueless email related to admissions and aid, like it was some karmic duty, I actually responded to a couple of really funny people yesterday. And I must say I wanted to give them as much info as I could.

I’ve been drooling in my sleep. That coupled with generally unkempt and untied hair results in this ambiguous muck (ahh yes, the joys of not arbitrarily selected words) in the morning. That is definitely not good. But on the plus side, I love the texture of my hair today.

I’ve been sick to my stomach after I saw how good a bunch of performers were together. They were bonding, they were having fun, they were doing something they enjoyed. Well. And what’ve I done in the recent past? Shut myself away from most things pining everything on some arbitrary point in the future. I need to pick up an instrument or a mikkeeeee.

Old, but apt.

I’ve been feeling old and like I’ve let life pass me by lately. For one, I manage a bunch of bank accounts, handle any and all bills, and I’m preparing my own taxes. Yes, I’m feeling old because I am old. But� I mean, if you are “this old” you must be at “this point” in your life.

I am nowhere near there. Just old.

NP. Third Eye Blind – Third Eye Blind

:/

Imagine the (ultra cute) Marissa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny stomping on a hard wood porch and screaming (in all her nasal glory) “My biological clock is ticking like this!” BAM BAM BAMM.

Except remember the world we live in is different, for we are not cute.

According to my clock, I am physically, intellectually and emotionally awake between some 4 and 10 in the morning. This was all very good for a bulk of my life as I used to wake at 3-4 AM, do whatever I needed to do before 8 or so, head off to school/college to sleep (intellectually) and return home eventually to chill out some more before I sleep (for real).

Like I said, all of this was fine and dandy. Except, now I wake at fishing 8-10 AM after not going to sleep until 1-2 AM at least (this is when I do sleep of course). But magically, the clock (through changing time zones, age, diet, intellectual activity, emotional damage, change in general physical activity patterns etc) still sits at the same extreme frame. 4-10 in the morning. What this means in real world units is that I effectively have between 8 and 10 in the morning (if I’m lucky) to get what I need done for the day done, done.

Yes, the days are just packed.
(Arguably, the coolest 400 bucks or whatever I spent on a comic, ever.)

Now all we need is some pasta to drown this down with.

Ahh yes, an update on my inherent lonerisms and consequent lack of social skill. There was a bit of confusion brewing between a bunch of people when I tried to step in and chip in my (not necessarily warranted) two cents. And now:

Party A –

“pundit,
Thanks for being a voice of reason. I’ll never claim that I am a saint and like most folks I loose my temper every now and then.
…
An overly idealistic view in retrospect :)
…
I hope I can give back somehow.

Party A”

Party B –

“(To me)
Indeed. Your efforts are appreciated.
…
…
And thank you pundit, for being respectful and constructive throughout this whole thing. If only there were more people like you, and less people like Party A, the world would be a better place.

Party B”

Maybe I’m not so “inherently flawed” at this people thing. There is hope.

Yes there is.

Update:

Party C –

“
…
> New contributors should follow pundit’s example and not Party A’s.
…
pundit is awesome, no debate there.”

Hmm. Just what is it that’s going on?

Today was amazing. I’ve felt this way after a very, very long time, and I’m loving it. I’m writing this (yes, of the pencil and paper kinds) at a café over my second (extremely large) glass of hot chocolate. Mmmm.. chocolate. I’ve spent most of my evening here. No mucking around with broken meshes, no classes, no coding, no SGI annoyances, no homework, no music, no reading, no talking, no writing, no cute little kiddies running around, … no nothing.

Just me, thinking. Me, my pencil, and bits of scrap paper. Made some leaps in thought and it feels awesome. Finally.

Which now leads me to a very scary thought. Self sufficiency. My apparently apparent self sufficiency to be more precise. Why is it that some people are quite happy being all alone and fully capable of keeping themselves entertained/intellectually engaged/sane and productive and so on while there are others who’re in constant need of company/someone to talk to/spend their time with and that sort of thing?

I am not entirely sure if this is a sort of thing that people are born with, or whether it’s their life circumstance that drives them to behave in a certain manner. As with everything else, I am sure it is a linear combination of the two. But I think, for me anyway, it started out with me not having too much of a choice, and being forced to “evolve to handle it” strengthened some inherent ability to keep myself entertained.

For whatever reasons, when I was a kid of <insert insanely teeny age here>, I lived in this home in an area that didn’t have anybody else in my age group to play with. I had a bunch of toys, a TV I couldn’t understand, a mom, and me. I dealt with it the way I knew how. Contrary to the “awww, poor baby” tone I’m trying to pull off, this had some odd advantages that had begun to crop up even at that time. Stuff I noticed, and still remember. I had gotten into attempting to make stuff. Crafts and that sort of thing, within the bounds of my age limited dexterity.

There was this very nice teacher in pre kindergarten, whose name I obviously don’t remember, but her face I do. (I think I last met her when in fifth grade, when she comes up and goes, loosely paraphrased, “So young man, does your handwriting still suck?” Her only peek into my handwriting previously being those pre alphabet squiggles we did as kiddies.) We had some time to play with clay. The usual kiddies were doing usual kiddy things. Attempting to eat the clay, breaking it up into bits and throwing it all over the place, or struggling to roll it into a small (highly non spherical) ball.

I made her a (blue) necklace with a flattened yellow disc functioning as some sort of medallion. Sure, it broke as she was thanking me and attempting to wear it, (you have no idea how hard it is to control your hands to do what you want them to do when you’re 2–3) but it was the thought that, I think, counted. I was thinking about stuff. I was planning, I was practicing, I was trying to create. I’d begun losing the ability to say, fight with another kid over a crayon, or feel sad that someone didn’t want me as their friend.

Yes, things (my “social setup”) soon got better as I was just a little bit older. But by then the damage, and I’ll call it influence, had left its mark. I had realized I was capable of being perfectly normal all alone. I’d begun to do, and still do, different things to keep me occupied. And alone.

Learning multiple instruments, singing, dabbling in arts, craft and photography, baking, composing, a couple of PhDs, … maintaining a fairly useless journal? It is quite obvious what is going on here.

Of course, none of this makes too much sense without getting into why this topic scared me.

How can someone who’s in a similar state ever unequivocally prove to someone else they need them to be happy? I know for a fact, “Yes, I am quite happy alone, but I know I will be happier with you” doesn’t cut it. But then again, why do they have to? Might not someone exist for them who gets this without proof?

When people think your writing is so cool that they should periodically check in (aka send you reminders aka be desperate enough to ask more than once aka attempt to force/beg?) on how your contributions to their magazines are going along. Ones they requested for in the first place.

*me does the I am not worthy bow.* Of course, I did have legit reasons, which I elaborated.

Greetings again.

A while ago, I did think about what I wanted to say, and wrote out a few pages of a rough draft. I soon realized I hadn’t read the magazine before, and had no way of knowing what kinds of articles are acceptable for publication. I had originally planned on an article embracing our inherent curiosity and drawing on it to get a better understanding of the world around us. But before I knew it, it stepped out of that framework and quickly plunged into how deterministic we implicitly assume the world is (through schooling, and to a large extent as scientists). It quickly got more philosophical as it questioned the reasons for existence of higher powers, as everything was purely determined from its previous state by strict classical physics laws. I then gradually introduced the notion of quantum physics, as a saviour from this grim outlook painted by previously non-probabilistic frameworks, by introducing the notion of “chance”.

As you can see, it wasn’t very coherent and just an idea that was beginning to form. I was, I think, shelving it till I got access to a few issues, so I could see what was the norm. However, I would be lying if I didn’t admit the words “… electronic format, preferably in MS Word.” acted as a deterrent to some extent.

I will read a few issues, and get back to it as soon as possible.

Thank you for the reminder.
wahgnube

What is wrong with these people?

Said “people” are subpoenaing the UofM for students’ names involved in file sharing.

In other news, working on favicon.ico. Which for some reason only seems to show up on mozilla. Anyway, working with 16 colour 16×16 images is the worst thing ever. Even worse than DFTs. Gah. I could literally go to each pixel and set the colour I wanted.

I hate times like this. I love choices usually, but am quite annoyed by the actual choosing process. Firstly, I kinda like more than one home, and don’t know what to do. But that is a relatively minor thing on my mind right now. There are a bunch of other fairly life path determining choices I need to make. And that sucks.

Without getting into any details, I’ve got a bunch of paths to cross a bunch of hurdles that are coming up. There’s the usual person’s way, which involves seeing the goal, and trying hard and making it accross. Fine, and will 97.934% work, but not very me. I could con the system, and still cross said hurdles. But that has like a 34.523% probability of working. There is no middle path, because middle paths aren’t me either.

If you’re wondering, “Just what is there to decide? Just try hard and make it to the end point”. I’ve thought long and hard about it. I know how glorious I will feel if I make it to said end point without trying. But is it worth the 65.477% risk?

I’ve pulled this stunt on other major battles and lost. But then again, I’ve won some too. Why am I like this? Don’t I get the world owes me nothing?

Decisions decisions. Sigh.

Totally unrelated. Thank god I haven’t had to know things like signal processing or whereever DFTs and FFTs are used. Good god they’re insanely horrid. As if continuous space Fourier transforms weren’t evil enough.

NP. Third Eye Blind – Blue

For whatever reasons (and I think I do know them, but will stick with a generic whatever anyway), I’ve had this splitting headache that’s lasted a reeeaaally long time. I decided to try to sleep rather early last night, but couldn’t. It was sort of beginning to hurt then, but not major enough to bother. A few hours? of lying there later, I wasn’t any closer to sleep, but bits of our current story began to materialize in my head. There have been a bunch of things I’ve been meaning to say lately, but hadn’t quite found the right way to say it, till then. I lay there for a bit hoping the urge would go away, along with the slowly growing headache, but no such thing happened. I was up a little while later. Grabbed my generic scribble pad and penned down a good chunk of hSirah’s life.

Though it is fiction, any similarity of names, attitudes or circumstance to that of real people, living or dead, is purely deliberate.

hSirah is in no way connected to She-Ra, Princess of power. She is not a cartoon character, and definitely not the twin sister? of He-Man. (Why am I so ashamed that I knew that? And shouldn’t she be called She-Woman?) hSirah isn’t very strong, and doesn’t have her own unicorn. Really.

I was hoping I could get to sleep after that. No such luck either. So I decided to start typing it in. Transfering from paper to the computer is one of the most boring and irritating tasks, ever. At one point I really was beginning to feel sleepy, and my head was slowly getting worse. I stopped, and slept. It hasn’t gotten too much better over today.

What I’m trying to say is, those waiting for the sequel(s), yes you, will have to wait a bit.

Allegories – Now with 100% less animal analogies!
As a result, no horsies were harmed in the production of this piece.

This is the story of a princess. A poor misguided princess.
Princess hSirah (with a silent first ‘h’).

And yes, there is a good reason I didn’t name her Consuela Banana Hammock.
And no, the length of Consuela Banana Hammock had nothing to do with it.

hSirah had the perfect childhood. Well, not perfect (for what is reality but imperfection, or something insightful like that). She was a powerful king’s daughter and led a fairly protected life. She wasn’t free to roam about her land and play with the other regular kids, but she did get to be with a select few. The few nobles’ children, who all thought the same and were exposed to things similar to what she was. But she was the princess, the fairest and luckiest of them all. She had not a care in the world. Anything she would ever want was handed to her before she could feel want. Toys, expensive clothes, fine foods, the best tutors in the land… . She wasn’t allowed to roam outside her wondrous palace, and she honestly believed the world outside was just like the one she was living in.

Who can blame the poor child?

hSirah was extremely gifted and intelligent. She enjoyed learning, and got the most out of her royal tutors. She soon surpassed them in knowledge. She was talented. She had the voice of an angel and her extreme psycho-motor skills allowed her to handle any musical instrument or craft tool she was handed. She was creative, and was capable of making the most adorable little trinkets from anything and everything she found around her.

hSirah was the perfect little child. Caring, compassionate, curious, honest. Just your regular sweetheart. Yes, some might say she was a little lazy, but being almost spoiled, and having never experienced the need to work toward anything, either it being handed to her or it coming to her naturally, she can be excused.

(Hey, but the title block said “poor misguided”, hSirah doesn’t seem to be poor at all. Course not dummy, I didn’t mean poor as in monetarily. I meant poor as in hapless. Unfortunately, for all her perfection, and the “perfectness bubble” surrounding her little tower, she wasn’t exposed to a lot. Hence the “misguided” in the title. And HEY, am I telling this story or are you? Sshh, and listen.)

hSirah was one to form her own opinions on things, and rarely took anything told to her for granted. For a little while, as a young child, she wondered if extrapolating how the world is outside based on her rosy (but she didn’t know it at the time) life was the right thing to do. But she did what she could at the time given her state (couldn’t crawl yet, and was being pushed around in a (cute lavender and pink) pram); she made an intelligent assumption. “Well”, little hSirah went, “It must be nice outside too. I couldn’t be born and raised at some singularity could I? How probable would that be statistically?” So, before she learnt math and probability formally, she had started doing something that would stick with her for the rest of her life – Making assumptions about things she didn’t or couldn’t know yet.

hSirah is now a little older, and by now her beliefs about the world outside were very strong. She stopped being curious for a while. After all, there was so much to learn and experience here. Why not crawl before we fly? “Weee.. pretty flower.”

hSirah was the perfect little child. Caring, compassionate, curious, honest. Just your regular sweetheart. One evening, a long time later, she was setting up a telescope (No, not to look for flying carpets with singing genies. Do you mind? It is my story.) to study some constellation patterns to see which one’s the best choice for her to join to spell out a special message for her mom, the queen’s, birthday. She had it all planned out. She had the optics wired to shine a tiny laser on the inside that connected these dots based on coordinates she’d specified and she was beginning to plan phase two. She was beginning to fashion an idea in her head. To get her mom to look through the telescope on her own without her guessing what’s in store.

(Anywho, that diversion has little to do with the progression of our fine tale, so moving along.)

Unfortunately, for all her brilliance, she had unduly high expectations on the functioning of subsystems and had a bit of an absentmindedness problem. She hadn’t tightened the screws on the telescope stand tight enough (yes, she wasn’t as strong as the other princesses) and it slipped out of its position and was now no longer focussing on her carefully selected star set. Instead, it now gave her a brilliant view of the city outside.

(Again, did I have to make it so elaborate as to how she got to peek outside? Couldn’t she have just been curious and actually done this voluntarily at some point in the past? Sure, but hey, WHOSE STORY IS THIS?)

She was awestruck. (Yes, it was night, but a very well lit city. Good king, great civic utilities. Streetlamps included). It was so pretty, and filled with people. Bustling with activity.

And then she saw…

Continued soon…

(Yes, if big studios *cough* The Matrix guys can do it, I can too. Good night.)

Elmer Fuddized webpage. Clickey!

Update: Not really updated or related, but Google has opened an R&D center in Bangalore, India – our first full fledged engineering facility outside the United States. We’re looking to hire talented software engineers, top programmers and visionary computer scientists. The engineering development team in Bangalore will mirror Google’s other engineering offices, with the same scope of work, hiring standards and unique Google culture.

Details here.

The news here are those “fictitious” resumes. Good god.

“Back” to large (or small) bodies of boring text, for a bit. Most of my days have been consumed with work, walks, helping out here and there with the gimp, and conversations. Actual conversations with interesting people, about fascinating topics.

For reasons I don’t need to explain to you, the W-word if offlimits.

I’m quite proud of the self control I possess. I’ve been this way since I was very little. At points, it is waay more than proud. It is such a huge part of who I am, I have to keep making sure it stays that way. I’m the most calculated and rational person I know, however I might sound. And actually, it has worked very well for most aspects of my life. Obviously, it fails for the really important things, and I keep screwing up over and over, but for everything else I think it works better than most. Another scarily important aspect of this control, is self denial. I can, quite happily, deny myself something I know I want, just as a show of power by my brain. It’s just its way of going, listen up all outlaw wannabe rogue parts of the body, I own you. Accept it, or I’ll make you.

I’ve been directing some of this (self proclaimed) control to cut my diet in half. For whatever reasons, I decided to drop my body mass. I decided to drop it, in this country’s units, some 20. Actually that’s not that much, it’s just scaled up and makes it seem like a lot more than it really is. I was thinking of reaching a body mass I was at a certain point in my life, without exercise. Why? Because I need to remember that I can.

To put things in perspective, and to make sure no one is starving, here are my old and new diet compared. Halving my diet just sounds a lot worse than it really is.

A bowl of cereal and enough milk
A glass of orange juice
4 (rather chunky) chocolate chip cookies
A large sandwich
An awful lot of soft drink

Half a bowl of cereal and enough milk (with half the fat content)
Half a glass of orange juice
3 (rather chunky) chocolate chip cookies
Half a sandwich
A lot less soft drink
More water than soft drink

I know 4/2 cookies does not equal 3. But cookies rock, and even I don’t have that much control. The big deal here is I’ve decided to always drink more water than soft drink if/when I do drink it. It’s working like a charm. There is only a finite amount of fluid I can ingest at a given point of time. I’ve done this for a while now, and I have reached hmm 60% my target. Which means I have 8 units of body mass left, before I can find the next big thing to prove something to myself with.

Maybe exercise exercise instead? I know I hate work work. But the weather is a lot nicer outside, and I am thinking of becoming a wee bit healthier. Not just reducing body mass, just push that heart attack sort of thing a few years later down life’s path. In related news, I’ve slowly started doing some of my yoga. It’s kind of funny, I was sort of forced to formally learn a routine before I left to help me out when I’m stressed. I was all pffft me? Stressed?

Ok, I admit it. I’m still like that. It’s just, I can feel like I’m probably relieving some (non existent if need be) tension can’t I?

And now, the new (hopefully) permalinks (aka tentative sitemap):

intro:
wahgnube.org/ – primary intro
wahgnube.org/fluctuant.html – fluctuant intro
wahgnube.org/factual.html – site ad disguised as factual intro

articles:
wahgnube.org/entropy/ – primary articles page, to link to real pages
wahgnube.org/entropy/interests.html – interests and related articles
wahgnube.org/entropy/articles.html – not so clearly classified articles
wahgnube.org/entropy/elevated.html – links to past “decent” journal entries
wahgnube.org/entropy/projects.html – different project info page(s)

journal:
actuality.wahgnube.org/ – the journal

artwork:
wahgnube.org/art/ – primary art page, to link to real pages
wahgnube.org/art/original.html – original art
wahgnube.org/art/textfx.html – text modification effects
wahgnube.org/art/manipulations.html – photo manipulations
wahgnube.org/art/screenshots.html – screen shots of my desktop and other such non art

photos:
wahgnube.org/photos/ – primary photo index and favourites
wahgnube.org/photos/setname.html – photos in that set
wahgnube.org/photos/misc[n].html – n=1,2,… miscellaneous pictures

links:
wahgnube.org/links/ – just a page with odd links, for now

guestbook:
wahgnube.org/guestbook/ – the guestbook, redirects to umich for now

credits:
wahgnube.org/credits/ – people and technology credit space

details:
wahgnube.org/info/ – primary index, to link to real info
wahgnube.org/info/disclaimer.html – site disclaimer and usage policy
wahgnube.org/info/todo.html – site todo
wahgnube.org/info/compatibility.html – browser/platform compatibility notes
wahgnube.org/info/statistics.html – site access logs and reports

contact:
wahgnube.org/contact/ – a page to obscure, yet show, email id

No, I really didn’t have too much else to say.