Month: October 2003

What people I don’t know and 3 million miles away say about my baby. And I was so mean.

Sniff. Sniff.

Update: Oh so obvious site update. Report blatant flaws here.

Oh my god. Yesterday was one of the most funnest days I have had in ages. Yes, obviously my standards aren’t too high, but they’re all I care about. And yes, “no work” and fun are synonymous.

While idling most (no actually, all) of the morning (and afternoon and early evening and …) and catching up on music, I was greeted to the news that Apple released iTunes and their music store to the masses, read Windows users. Then the usual mac zealot crap about how Apple’s stuff are the coolest things without contest ever. Sure, some of their stuff is very cool, like the iPod. But most isn’t, necessarily. They’re slow, sluggish and I don’t particularly care for the “let’s make everything translucent or metallic” design mantra. It’s plain unpalatable at times and even more so when you run their apps on Windows. Take Quicktime for instance. It just stands out (in a horrid way), and performs like crap.

Not being able to stand this mac zealotry, which seems to be quite high in this campus, I had to do something to shut one person up about the coolness of iTunes’ network music sharing prowess. One underpowered machine, running Shoutcast, streaming a few gigs selection of music to the whole network, without the iTunes “5 people restriction” shut him up. It felt good. Shoutcast’s another one of those very cool yet inherently evil because it’s not free software.

And the morning spent scouring for good radio stations had conveniently reminded me of its existence.

Keeping with the no work scheme of things, I tried to avoid using a computer yesterday, attempting to avoid even the most minor work, like checking (and having to respond to email), updating the blog and so on. But the idiot mac zealot ruined that. Anyway, it was worth it to wipe the smirk off his face. While I was at the machine, I also realized another WordPress was released. WordPress is essentially a derivative of b2. I installed it and started configuring it to match the site. You know, just for when sf decides glyx.sf.net/blog is an abuse of their resources. The current WordPress release is pretty sweet. It’s standard XML, it’s got rss, rdf and all the other sorts of feeds for programs like Straw and a lot more goodness.

But I stopped in a bit. All in good time I say, besides, I was supposed to be goofing off.

The evening was super fun. Finally went to the no class tour. It was expectedly very funny. Side note, I think I counted 3 non-whites, out of some 400 people? Hmm … , anyway it started off with a U of M student stand up wannabe, who was actually quite good before the real comics came on. Christian Finnegan was the first, and the humour was obviously tailored to a college crowd. A young, not very bright, college crowd. Totally fun. The next one up was Ed Helms, the reason I went in the first place. He was very funny too, and I didn’t realize his hair was all white in real life. He doesn’t even have the “No, it’s platinum blonde” story, like some other people. All is very funny, and everyone is teary eyed (in a good way). When Doug Stanhope walks in. Now the old man show was quite gross. The new one’s taken it to all new lows. They were each on for about 40 or so minutes. And a crowd of some 60% women reduced to some 20% before he was done. It was, vaguely put, crude verbal porn. But very funny, yes.

Feeling all good about my evening, I did one of the stupider things I’ve done in a while. Rather than wait for a bus, I decided to jog back home. I was, in a sense, high and not thinking straight. I made it home, yes, some 35 minutes later. And I couldn’t move. I was exhausted, panting, hurting all over, and crashed. After washing up of course.

I’m going to patent this “exercise is a cure for insomnia” idea.

Like I was saying, yesterday was one of the most unproductive days I have had in ages. It was awesome.

Today was one of the most unproductive days I have had in ages.

Slept in. I mean beyond late. Woke at 10:30 or some such? I don’t remember. I just remember feeling all nice and fresh. Sleep is good. Lots of sleep is better.

Spoke to my parents after a long time. (Where ‘long’ is measured in ones of weeks). Everything is normal and just the usual of course. But I guess they need to hear it from me at regular intervals just to make sure. Spoke to thatha patti too :D. Haven’t done that in a while.

Interestingly enough, or sadly actually, the most interesting thing is something like diwali is coming up, you need to wear new clothes. Now that reminded me of the most recent new clothing related incident, just before my birthday. I was gifted these clothes, including this denim shirt. Now I tried explaining to my relatives a denim shirt is just a bit (actually a lot more) over my level of ruggedness. I mean, I just can’t pull one off. But they’ve been insanely sweet to me, and insisted, so I did take it. I tried it some few days ago. Couldn’t keep it on for more than 30s. It’s still new. And it is going to be that way for a long time. Probably with my hair all greased up, slight stubble, leather gloves and working out and… no. Not happening.

Does anyone want one? Just pay for shipping and it’s yours. If it’s for some charity, I’ll ship it myself.

I also realized (and inadvertently blurted out) that I haven’t seen or worn my glasses in like 4-5 months and one “You should wear it you know” style sessions from my mom, and I’ve been wearing it continuously since last morning. I mean, it’s fun and all to humour them and still go on to do whatever you initially planned (which is what I usually do), but then that just sets up the even more extreme “I told you so” style session. And I’d rather wear it now and not deal with that in the future.

Another thing that hit me when the talk of festivals and what not came up, is that desi people over here are so much more into celebrating all these and even more obscure things. It’s like this intense need to preserve culture and what not. Why?. Damn hypocrites. Stuff they didn’t know or care about back home, they all magically start doing and celebrating here. What gives? Just be you, and move on not caring like you always do. Glad I got that off my chest.

Ahh yes, I was wondering what triggered the glasses thing. It was when we were talking about my brother. It’s like I lived in the same home, same parents, same school, same college… and yet he’s living this totally different life. Like different planet different. I never had a cell phone at that age, and I still don’t. Who would I need to keep in touch with that badly? No one. I didn’t have the thousands of bucks a month allowance. Hell I didn’t have one. Where would I spend it? I didn’t go out bowling or for pool or eat out… and definitely didn’t need it for gas money? I guess I was just amazed as to how different it’s been. Different as in living and not living different.

And when she brought up him dumping his glasses for (the implied cooler) contacts, I panicked?

With that call out of the way, the rest of the day has been plain relaxation. I do a lot of nothing. Today was more than most. Or is that less? Caught up on so much music. Rediscovered how glorious Blind Melon is. I finally listened to classic rock without being constantly told how classic it is (with an implied you must be pretty classic yourself if you still remember this). Listening to more stock stuff, Oasis, I realized again how close I am to completing my quest for owning all that they have released (and technically haven’t). Sure, it’s stupid to buy single cds from some no-name store in UK where the shipping costs more than the disc, but hey, I never claimed to be too bright. And on a vaguely related note, though Liam’s voice pretty much sucks, their live performances rock so much more than their albums. Which I don’t think I can say about any other band I’ve heard.

I also did some risky and exciting stuff (by my standards) by deviating from my little circle of music trust and listening to stuff from the outside, the radio. It’s not so bad. Some comments. People say Eminem helped Dido’s career featuring her in Stan? I’d say that’s my personal favourite Eminem song. In effect, she helped his music a lot more than he, hers. Some hard core person I know found, bought and forced me to listen to Norah Jones before her grammy fame. I did. And I must say I found it quite repetitive and dull at the time. Probably because it was a big jump in musical style from what I am usually used to, and I had to listen to the entire album in one go.

Anyway, none of that’s the point. I re-heard her “Don’t know why” after so long, and I loved it. And if you’re reading, and I certainly hope you are (being the reason for a lot more than just me maintaining this boringly detailed log of the smallest things in my life), here are some (slightly modified) lyrics from that song:

When I saw the break of day
I wished that I could fly away
Instead of kneeling in the sand
Catching teardrops in my hand

My heart is drenched in wine
But you’ll be on my mind
Forever

Something has to make you run
I don’t know why I didn’t come
I feel as empty as a drum
I don’t know why I didn’t call

And now I’ve got to get around to more goofing off, and eventually get ready for the comedy thing.

I read random stuff each day. Usually it’s just normal and not terribly insightful or exciting or useful or any such thing. But once in a while, I run into articles that REALLY stand out. This article on “Structured Procrastination” by Prof. John Perry for instance. It’s a perfect description of how I get things done in my life. If some random individual were to observe my behavioral patterns and make comments, this is exactly what it would be. Exactly. It is also the reason for the existence of this (and other) blog entries.

It feels good to know, sometimes, you aren’t totally abnormal. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?

Went for another of the (now way less frequent, for me anyway) Rackham luncheons. The usual, quite classy events where you get to meet interesting people doing their thing, talk about stuff, and get free food. An everyone wins situation.

(And I mean everyone. It always (usually) ends up with the, “Oh there’s so much food and drink remaining. Steal enough for you, your family, everyone in your lab” style things.)

This time the invitees were international students, from engineering. So there wasn’t that much of a diversity. No mass media communication and psychology style majors here.

It was still fun though. I have got to realize people who don’t put their affiliation on their name tag are usually the important folk. So as to avoid the usual, “Hi, I’m wahgnube from mechanical engineering, what’s your major?”. “I’m a dean“.

Ahh well, all’s fine.

I usually don’t feel. I am quite cold. I am apathetic to events around me. I don’t get terribly excited or depressed or angered or anything by anything.

Usually.

For all my ‘engineering knowledge’ and general life experience (It’s not a lot, I just said, ‘for all my’, conveniently hand waving my way through to making it sound like a lot), I should have realized, systems aren’t guaranteed to work properly all the time. (This goes for people too, but I am not directing my anger at human incompetence right now.)

Yet I trust it to. I foolishly expect and depend on it to. When I want something done, I let the drones know so, and move along thinking it’s done. Things fail, I end up angry. Actually, now it’s more disappointed than angry. Last night, I was saddened. Saddened, because sometimes things just happen to mean more. During the course of today, one small idiot event after another provoked me to this state of anger.

I don’t really know how to deal with things. Especially feeling mad. Decided to totally get it off my head with doing something fun with my machines. Something they can screw up and no one would care.

It’s not much, but it worked. I’ve not thought of a name yet, and haven’t moved it into one of the artwork pages as a result. Right now, I’ve tentatively named it, flaming leaves. Terribly uninspiring and literal I know, but it will do for now.

Being the straight person that I am, I read up some article and now know that my kind of hair needs – Moisturizing shampoo, silicone spray, deep conditioner, spray sheen (oil/silicone).

And general instructions for its well being – When hair is damp, mix a straightening balm in your hands and apply up the hair shaft until almost to the roots (again, steer clear of those roots!) Comb through to evenly distribute, then blow-dry hair using a large, round brush. Flat iron for a super-straight finish.

Well, someone got paid to write that, (s)he must know what (s)he’s talking about. Doesn’t (s)he?

I’m sad right now. It’s technology’s fault. Technology is evil.

Riding back up to north campus, I was continually greeted to the strong aroma of coffee. And then, as I attempted to use my bag as a cushion/pillow, I realized, it was me. My clothes, my bag, my hair. Looking at my watch, I realized I had spent some 5 hours at a coffee shop, and I’ve never drunk coffee!

Coffee places are cool to hang out at. Now if they just made them more about the hanging and less about the coffee.

Work stuff, Sarah’s collagen primer again, along with the Sandia lab people. As usual, such things just clarify how little people know.

Back “home”, this was highlighted again. The undergrads here are fishing ignorant. Oh MY GOD. I couldn’t stand it. I was trying to get some stuff done in this lab where these three kids were discussing some project or something. I didn’t realize people could be so stupid. I mean come on, don’t you have a brain? I mean, at least a third each?

It angered me. I am not going to go on about this. I just left the place after some 10 minutes of losing quite a bit of blood. As I was attempting to simultaneously blind myself and chop off my ears.

I guess I was exposed to an exceptionally extreme set. I hope rather.

In the blood and gore front, I read the review of Kill Bill on the local paper. In over a year, I’ve NEVER seen a movie/play/album whatever being rated more than 3 stars, so I assumed it was out of 3. And today, I saw this rave review of this movie, and it got 5 stars. Intrigued, I checked out the filmography of the director. I was like, hmm, unheard of, unheard of, … “FROM DUSK TILL DAWN” and then stopped. Anyone who’s ever had the extreme misfortune of having to sit through even a small portion of this movie will realize no good can come out of a director responsible for something like that. It was just the C-est B movie ever made. And it was just plain over the top (gory) violent, for no real reason.

The reviewers and other people are obviously lying.

For some strange reason, one of the major events (from my pov of course) yesterday slipped my mind. During one of these breaks between sessions, I gravitated towards the nearest computer, somewhere in the basement of the league. Firstly, this place allows people to carry food to the machines, and their keyboards and mice are all gross and sticky. Eww. Now, I can mess with my own computer and that’s different. I know where I spilled what and what keys to avoid. Common machines, not good. I wonder who we got to write to, to complain about such things.

Anyway, more on that another time. It was this relatively decent machine, with Windows 2000 installed. Now I’ve never really used Win2k, so decided to probe a bit, not expecting it to be terribly different from anything else. During some snooping around, I realized, this was like some gamer’s wet dream. Everything from every single FPS from HL+CS to RTCW to strategy/RTSs like WarIII was installed. I rushed to Q3, since I hadn’t played in a long while. A year and a half almost. It felt so good. Practiced with the bots for like 3 minutes, getting my keys and mouse sensitivities, fov etc all perfect and was online getting kicked in multiplayer servers in no time.

That was the fastest 3 hours have ever gone by in ages. Even getting mercilessly kicked felt so good. I just need to get a few weeks of 18 hours a day practice sessions in, and will be half decent again.

On the software theme of things, installed Office 2003 today, where I am typing this, as a check. (Has anyone got any grammar error other than – “Fragment (consider revising) – The marked words might be an incomplete thought blah blah” error?) It feels all XPish. Complete with the gross ‘silvery gradients’ on everything, buttons and all. Ick. Point being, the uni seems to have made all sorts of deals with the evil folks at M1cros0ft, and we can just ‘take’ whatever we want off the uni servers. I guess it’s some sort of complicated ‘get em hooked now and they will buy when they can afford later on in life’ scheme.

Scary part is it works for most of these mindless drones.

Talking about the uni, I think I’ve screwed up? There were like a gazillion emails a few weeks ago on our local email lists about having to fill up some paperwork to get an M.S degree. a) I had applied and directly made it into the PhD program b) Didn’t really take the time to find out details. So decided that wasn’t for me. What was I thinking? That I wouldn’t get an M.S? I actually think that’s it. I assumed I was on some different path, where things “just happen” and having to request for intermediary degrees wasn’t one of them.

Hmm.. will have to fix this soon. Paperwork, bah!

Oh my god. I’m almost in tears. (In a moved, happy sort of way). This group that performed at the end of the conference banquet, the Amazing Blue, sung extremely well. I’m usually like the the filthy critic when it comes to commenting about (other) singers, but these people were just so awesome. They were different, young, fresh, had awesome voice modulation …

I can’t even begin to describe their awesomeness. (I don’t mean to abuse that line, it’s just, the way I feel about things at the moment.) I can’t believe the first time I actually bought theater tickets to a non-movie thing, and it happens to be clashing with the day AND TIME this group performs next at Rackham. Hmm, will have to investigate a bit and find out when and where they’re up next. It will be totally worth it.

This people, was the highlight of the conference. 15 minutes before they came on, it was the dessert. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. (Actually come to think of it, eating stuff as rich as that will result in death, heaven’s another story). The banquet meal was nice too, nicer cause you know you got to choose it :). Being one of the only vegetarians around has its perks.

Also got to meet a bunch of wisc mad grad students at the banquet. Fun people, and now they’ve made me want to design and print cool business cards. Why you say? No reason, just for coolness’ sake. Why not? I say.

And I can’t believe I’ve wasted so much time not being a patron of music theater. Also need to find out from Eric when the music school people do their thing. I imagine that will be very good too.

(If you’re seeing this and wondering what’s the cause of this blog weirdness, there is none. It is me. This was typed in at a later time and suitably time stamp modded and inserted in this place. Though I finished typing it after the banquet blog, this is where it belongs, chronologically.)

Finally got around to getting my tickets for the Comedy Central No Class Tour coming this weekend to the Michigan Theater.

Skipped midway during one of the talks this cold and wet (yet totally not depressing) morning down to the ticket office at the union. Where I had one of the more interesting ticket buying experiences I’ve had. The conversation was quite normal, as was expected, until I indicated I was a student and needed the discount. Along with the usual (don’t you trust me) do you need to see ID?. Of course she did. Anyway, then the conversation slowly migrated to how much my hair’d grown in this time. The ID had a year old picture. Anyway, she’d forgotten how many tickets I wanted. I didn’t realize 1 was such a hard number to remember.

And when she’s like, did you say three, I start smiling uncontrollably. This B-movie dialogue kept running in my head, “No, I said one, but I meant two if you’d join me” or something similar. I was laughing so loud inside.

And we ended up with a pleasant conversation about how her hair doesn’t grow so fast. :)

YAT (Yet Another Talk) is over. I wouldn’t say it went off well or that I had fun doing it, but it’s over. I just wasn’t terribly excited or anything close. I guess sleeping at 4 am after many repeated failed attempts to parallelize solvers is to blame. Now to make best use of the free food and free knowledge gaining (which are pretty compelling reasons to attend these things) during the rest of the events.

And who’d have ever thought that people would mail lil ol me for insightful advice. I mean, oh my god, am I that old already? And got a mail from someone I’ve been meaning to write to for a while now. Very pleasant surprise. Another walking tour of a city with her sounds very fun.

On an unrelated note (not like any of the above thoughts were related in any way), I might have jumped the gun when I went about proclaiming intel compilers are the coolest pieces (apart from inherent non-free related evilness) of software. GiNaC, is insanely awesome, and it’s free software.

I can’t even to begin to describe its awesomeness.

Actually, I re-read that post. I did no such thing. All I did is proclaim intel compilers are insanely cool pieces of software. That they are. But inherently evil nonetheless.

Here I am, tralla lalla laaa’ing my way down to the uni (to finish up (start) some stuff on the now much talked about talk) when I ran into one of my neighbours. Apparently, she had observed my curious behaviour yesterday as I was taking Bug’s eye view.

And by curious behaviour, I mean lying down in odd positions on fallen leaf covered grass. Anyway, after she approached me (with some caution I might add), we got around to talking and it soon became clear I wasn’t some nutcase who does funky yoga or whatever on the grass outside (Not that I have anything against nutcases (or sane people) who do funky yoga or whatever on the grass outside). By which time, of course?, she’d indicated curiosity to sneak a peek at my “work”.

Luckily us geeks carry our computer everywhere. Which has added benefits like having a digital copy of your picture collection at all times. Complete with that special folder filled with the ones you know came out better than most, just for days like these.

So, right there, on some footpath sidewalk somewhere, I got my few minutes of glory. She was impressed.

It’s funny how the weirdest and smallest of things can make you grin so much. :D

On a side note, during the rest of the walk (mostly downhill), I kept having this intense urge to reacquaint myself with a skateboard. I don’t know whether it was a seed sown when I watched Dave (another Dave) literally ride into class, or all this scheming about riding down one way and using the bus on the way back.

Hmm.

Gah! I just realized I’m almost THIRTY.

Yes, 7-8 years is not a really long period of time.

I realized I hadn’t updated the picture page in a while. So rather than idle while doing some mundanely choresey stuff (no, not preparing for talks) like laundry, I decided to take a few pictures of all the colour outside. Uploaded a few to the picture page. My favourite in this set is, “Fall, a bug’s eye view”.

It’s sehr kuhl, I know. Thank you very much.

Well, I guess I lied. There were no “frequent updates”. There however, has been an update to the picture page. It will have to do.

Thinking about my ‘not entirely high energy’ state for a while, I decided to try some stuff out. Probably it was malnutrition (aww), probably it was lack of sleep (aww), or probably I just needed to get my mind off stuff and go ahead and do something out of the ordinary. Probably it was a combination of all of these and other things which I can’t see right now. Damn, I need all of you to have native MathML compliant browsers (by which I mean, run along to mozilla.org and install mozilla, a real browser). Then I can say something roughly like,

my state (element of) span ({malnutrition, lack of sleep, … })

And be done with it. Concise, accurate enough, and a whole lot less work.

Anyway, deciding to do something about it, I left the lab at (drumroll) 8 pm (gah! not caring about whether FEAP was parallelized or not), instead of some ungodly hour like 1 am or what not. Decided to go to some nice place down at central and stuff my face till I was uncomfortably full. Now comes one of the more interesting observations over the past few weeks. I remember a time during the end of school and early undergrad when there couldn’t be a single place I could go to in Madras and not run into someone I “know”. Yes, I don’t go out much or too many places and I use the word “know” very loosely. Point being, through school, school events, JEE classes and all of that, you pretty much “knew” most people in that ‘finishing school getting into college’ age group. And that means there is a very high probability of running into one of these people, when you’re out. I’ve, over the past year or so, reached that critical number of people here. Whenever I’ve been out doing anything, however small, I’ve managed to meet someone and have a talk beyond how good/bad the weather is, since we did have something in common.

If any of that made sense, moving along, last night was no different. Met up with this group as I was stuffing myself till I couldn’t walk (as planned, so no aww), and made it back home, early early. And went to bed before 10 pm. No computer, no music, no STAND UP COMICS, no nothing. Just home, sleep.

And here I am the next morning, waking 12 hours later, and still not feeling terribly different. Or am I? Time should tell.

I am not doing too much. Rather, I feel I am doing a lot and nothing’s getting done. This week has been one of exceptionally low efficiency. I’ve been continuously “busy” and tired, and I can’t look back and see what was really achieved. Except of course, some FEAP stuff involving different platforms and different compilers. I also replaced the base solver with SuperLU, and almost got it parallelized on legolas. (Note to self, need to take some classes on parallel computing for coolness’ sake.)

What am I saying, none of that was work, in the sense of it NEEDED to be done. I still don’t have my talk ready for Monday. I haven’t made any major inroads into the growth code. I haven’t made any major inroads into the remodelling papers. I haven’t even been able to keep up with going to the analysis classes, let alone doing home work and all that. Fat chance trying to figure out stuff in classes without doing work for them. Damn these non-spoonfeedy educational systems.

And god, not another talk. All I’ve been doing for the past few months is talk. Yes, it’s fun and all, for a while. Now it’s become so mundanely normal. Forget fun or exciting or that sort of thing, it isn’t even making me tense anymore. It’s become “just a talk”. Mundane things aren’t fun. I’m used to them. I try to adjust my environment so it is predictable and mundane. It makes things easier, not fun.

I need to break this cycle. I need some radical enlightenment halo moments. I just want to snap my fingers and see all this magically get done and me suddenly be at some state that all I want to be clear, be clear.

Idle ranting apart, :) someone remembered my birthday. And, the GameCube it is. Hmm.. probably that’s it. That’s one of the major changes over this past year. Probably gaming was the brain fuel that kept it active and feeling young all this time.

Hmmm. No.