actuality.log

It’s some 2 AM, I’ve wasted all day and now I’m unable to sleep.. I need to get this out of my system.

With the royal wedding and consequently Princess Die on everyone’s mind…

Just what was the last thing that went through Diana’s mind when she died?
.
.
.
.
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The radiator.

And this isn’t really a joke but a major peeve.

Guy from the genital herpes ad: I’ve got genital herpes, but I don’t let it bog me down!
Me: Dude, perhaps you should.
Me: You know, for her.

That will be all. Now I can sleep. Or try to.

As I was busy pimping other efforts, I forgot to mention I saw Team America: World Police and Sideways last weekend. They were both very funny, in very different ways.

But I have to say, they were both overrated. Very good, but not great, as people make them out to be. Here is a page in flash sampling the kinds of things Team America is all about. It is not safe for children, or work. It isn’t even for the squeamish. Please don’t get caught doing something stupid.

Morals of their respective stories? Middle Easterners have a vocabulary of some 3 words, and don’t get caught lying to a biker chick who carries her helmet with her all the time.

And so, entropy begins to live. This time, I’m going to actually finish what it is I have planned for it, for real. Work-safe articles, work-safe photos, work-safe art, … you get the idea. Work-safe-non-work content in general.

That will be all.

Are you in grad school?
Are you constantly being bothered by random kids asking you the same set of clueless questions over and over?
Are you annoyed none of the people you earnestly-patiently help turn out to be hot young things eager to repay the favour in any way you’d prefer payment?

Then you probably need this. No matter what they ask, just point them there and tell them it’s already been answered.

The grad school FAQ.

Now newer, improved and enlarged.
Because size matters, unfortunately.

This has been a paid presentation for the Free All Grad Students From Useless Chores (F.A.G.S.F.U.C) Foundation

I just got back from pretty much an all night bar/club hop. Some observations:

1. Most of these places are dilapidated pieces of crap. It’s just that you have to be sober to notice.
2. The people flocking to them (including the supposed hotties straddling their poles) really aren’t all that pretty. Again, it’s just that you have to be sober to notice.
3. You know you’re old when you can be tired just by watching someone else have trying to have fun.
4. Prolonged exposure to dense cigarette smoke causes blindness.
5. I amn’t kidding when I keep saying I’m socially stunted. But then again, as with the business plan of the owners of these establishments, it doesn’t matter if everyone’s too drunk to notice.
6. Bouncers are paid to appear mean. They’re really nice people.
7. Good music is good music, however annoyingly loud it’s played.

I quite enjoy tweaking my medium of delivery. It is surprising how subtle changes can result in thinking about life in a different light. Points of view ever so slightly skewed from normal, and consequently potentially humourous… or plain ludicrous. You decide.

You know what people, I’m single. Oh yeah, I know you’re looking at me going, “That gorgeous bohemian hunk? Single? Now way! “. /Pause For Laughter/ But yes, it’s true. And you know how things are when you’re single, don’t you? All you see around you are couples. Everywhere you look. For as far and wide as the eyes can see. <‘accidentally’ drop glasses, squint while struggling to see> /PFL/. Yeah, sure there’s the occasional all-cozy threesome and even the unlikely ever-elusive foursome /PFL/, but for the most part, there are couples. Couples, everywhere! It’s like all the women are walking around wearing this big red sign that reads “Occupied <little glowing LED>”. It gets so bad that people forget number systems can start from one, and not necessarily two. I mean, you walk into a fancy restaurant, and the cute hostess, “Occupied” of course /PFL/, asks you excitedly, “Table for two, sir?”. Two? Why two? Here, look at me, do I look big enough to be two whole .. <look at large self> err.. wrong argument. “No miss, a table for one will be quite sufficient.” /PFL/

At one point though, and I’m waaay past that at the moment, you’ll get to a stage where such incidents stop bothering you. You even begin carrying an entire stash of random-yet-believable decoys to make sure you avoid eye contact with all those people you know are looking at you with pity. Books, the iPod, a DECORATED CHINESE FOLDABLE SCREEN /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\_____________ /PFL/. Hey, if they can’t see you, they can’t think you’re two whole people now, can they? /PFL/

Even though you’ve soon learnt to deal with the countless looks you’ll get from the four-eyed-two-bodied monsters /PFL/ roaming so freely in the wild, it’s not as easy tackling the ones you keep running into near home base. The most irritating one, of course, being “that guy“. You know, that guy who’s always going “my girlfriend” this, “my girlfriend” that? Like hello, newsflash — she’s got a name. It’s Audrey. I know, I’ve met her. You can say “Audrey and I are …”, you don’t HAVE to say “my girlfriend and I …”. It’s like he’s going, you see the “Occupied” sign on her? You do? Well, it’s here, anyway. Here. See? Here. <point to random portion of random woman> . See? /PFL/

But, it’s all not bad. Mostly bad, /PFL/ but not all. Occasionally, one of these Joe “my wife and I” Schmoes will actually bring his wife around to whatever, and then you can’t help but listen to your inner self laugh its deviously evil laugh. Ha.. hahah … hahahahahahh! <evil laugh mode… carry on indiscriminately> /PFL/. *Shudder* She’s hideous. And that nasal nagging voice, “Harold, would you be a dear and redo the dishes I’ve marked as insufficiently shiny?”. Hmm, I started the anecdote with Joe, didn’t I? I really ought to work thse things out more before getting on stage. But I’m not making this stuff up, I swear /PFL/.

Anyway, I’d definitely rather be single than married to that. /booo oooo/

What? It’s OK for the couple demons, you know with their four eyes and two bodies /PFL/, to haunt you ever so often, but can’t laugh at the three that don’t scare you?

Jeez, that’s rich, I’m leaving. <Leave>

Preliminaries:

1. I am definitely not the insensitive type, but I can play one if the moment calls for it. This is one such moment.
2. I don’t usually talk about such things, i.e. things of common general interest, but of no immediate consequence to me, because:
   a. However I act or whatever I claim, I am an inward looking self centered bastard, and don’t really give a damn about happenings outside my little bubble.
   b. Talking about such things is tantamount to admitting my life is boring, and a desperate attempt at whoring for hits and comments from interested third parties who’d like to hear another opinion, and more importantly, have their say on the matter, yet again.
   c. I am not really into current affairs and so on, and really don’t know what happens in the world. Nor do I care, of course. I know a lot of cool stuff in areas that I am passionate about. For details, refer (a).

But returning to what it was I was trying to say.

With the whole feeding tube debacle now slowly crawling out of being the most often brought up story on all major (and minor) news programmes, I shall open my mouth on (what could be, you never know,) my take on things.

I submit exhibits A and B.

Exhibit A: The woman on a normal day:

Exhibit B: The same woman after she’d been through some changes (her heart stopped at some time in the past, oxygen to the brain was cut off, and she was left brain dead though the heart was soon restarted):

(Images stolen without permission from AP. But then again, it’s not like as if everyone hasn’t already seen at least the second one some 34,739 times anyway.)

Now, whether or not she really wanted to die or someone was being untruthful, whether or not she “was killed” or “allowed to die”, whether or not scientists were “playing god” “killing her” or they were “playing god” keeping her alive with machines in the first place, whether or not “she was a vegetable” or she was conscious, “spiritwise”, whether or not courts have more rights on these things than individuals, whether or not parents have more rights on these things than spouses, …

None of these really matter. Not one thing.

I, for one, am quite sure what she really didn’t want was to have that disheveled image of her be the only one people have of her, as everyone (news organizations, courts, lobby groups, C-list celebrity wannabes, …) capitalized on her deteriorating situation to make an argument in front of the entire country.

Whatever the decisions reached, or the perceived moral implications attached, people should primarily have a right to do things without it turning into a circus. A circus where that picture is flashed every 20 seconds.

A chance at dignity ought to be a fundamental right.

After much thought over the past few months, it is clear I am not bright enough to cut it at this level. This is quite a harsh realization and it took me a long time to bring myself to admit it. But I realized there is no point trying to fool myself anymore.

I’m leaving grad school, and will probably do some travelling (emptying the extreme savings account one can fill up in grad school) before I decide what I now want to do with my life. And where I want to do it.

Social service sounds like a plan, but you never know.

Update: Please check the post date after you’ve begun your knee-jerk reaction. I thank you all for your concern, but enough with the e-mails already. It was nice to have a laugh at your expense though, and thank you for playing. You’ve been fabulous.

For those not tuning in often enough (you bad reader you), you probably need to catch the earlier piece to figure out what’s going on.

Summarizing the earlier exposé, the prospect of coming up with something bleh (technically speaking) has left me mortified.

Backing up a bit here to hopefully give you a better idea of what is going on, the thing that brought most of this uneasiness to the fore is the fact that I’m taking what’s called my “preliminary exam” (prelims) this term. This is something of an overall research plan articulation, where you officially declare your committee and let (these and any other interested) people know what it is you plan to achieve, where you’re at along the way, where you think you will be in a while, and why any of this is a path worthy of exploration. Loosely paraphrased again — let them judge if what you’re suggesting is new, and cool enough.

The problem here, you see, is that I am a lot smarter than most people I know (including you, obviously). The standards I can (and do) set for myself in these intellectual realms are only matched by my lack of standards in any other avenues. They are much stricter than what other people expect of themselves, or have their academic overlords expect of them.

Ego masturbation aside, as a first step toward determining my prelims proposal, I decided to jot down bunch of notes as to where I saw myself going with all of this and circulated it within my immediate academic overlords. The feedback I received, within moments, included among other positive things — “FIENDISHLY AMBITIOUS” and “A KAMIKAZE MISSION”, but always ended with something similar to “… but rightfully so.”

So, obviously, what I claim to be able to achieve is enough. More than being just enough, these people (who’re insane geniuses in themselves), honestly believe what I’m talking about is complicatedly cool.

My problem, you guessed it, is I that don’t see it as particularly cool, or worthy. Unfortunately, by definition, if I was able to think of this in such a short period of time (couple of years), how cool or groundbreaking could it really be?

I reiterate, for those kids at the back not paying any attention — Nothing I say can be “cool enough”, purely because it was something I “just thought” of.

This, ladies and gents, is the root cause of a lot of confusion in my life at the moment. I’m wandering in the dark sort of semi-lost-hope, semi-scared, semi-ego-bruised, semi-<insert anything queasy you want here>, and I don’t really have the fortitude to oft dwell on it here as well.

This is why there haven’t been any substantial updates to the journal recently. This is why the only few posts that do show up are to do with something arbitrary and not real-life pertinent. This is why there hasn’t been a picture posted on delineate for so long.

And I don’t believe any of this is going to change any time soon. Not until I come up with the next grand theory of something or the other that no one else’s dreamed of.

As you have undoubtedly noticed, there has been a marked drop in quality and quantity of the content on this (and sister) site(s). You might have also noticed, there is clearly a lack of real-life-pertinent content, and just a whole lot of arbitrary filler material that, well, to put it mildly, is plain mediocre.

The problem here is not a lack of time or the lack of semi-interesting things to talk about. The problem here is not some new found disdain toward the idea of whining about my semi-mundane existence, while trying hard to inject some humour to make it palatable. The problem here is not some fear of an arbitrary stalker-type mad(wo)man.

The problem here seems to stem from a surprisingly hopeless disposition I seem to have gotten myself into, coupled with the fact that I see no way of getting myself out of this state any time soon. The details of this are hard to put down in words, but that hasn’t stopped me from seemingly-aimless blabbering before.

With that intro out of the way, let’s get on with things.

In case I haven’t made it clear enough already, I am in grad school pursuing a (bunch of) masters and a (bunch of) doctoral degrees. While some may argue that it is a trivial task conning universities into parting with degrees, they only succeed in utterly missing the point. The purpose of a prolonged stay in grad school (apart from the belief that the “work” one puts in at the time will result in major future payoffs) is to think of (/come up with/do/make/any other similar measure of intellectual contribution) something new and cool. If this weren’t clear enough being an unsaid rule, unis usually proceed to spell it out on the degree requirements for a PhD — “… substantial piece of work that presents and analyzes original contributions to the field …”. or something similar.

Crudely paraphrased, new, cool, and yes, worthy.

For some people I know, this really isn’t a rigid rule, and they tend to treat it more like a friendly guideline they’d like to follow, but can choose to ignore without any consequences. To put it bluntly, I’ve seen people getting away with doing… what could only be classified as a complete joke. Their “work” is neither original, substantial nor even particularly relevant. Therefore, it just ends up being something they spent some time on, voluntarily or otherwise. I openly mock such people every single day. Yes, I mock a lot of things (and people) but these are the sorts of people who perpetually remain near the top of my frequently mocked list.

And what’s my sudden problem you ask?

Alarmingly, I’ve begun to sense a tiny-but-ever-growing chance I might end up being one of them.

(Real life details resume soon.)

For those interested, I’ve almost gotten my computer to a state I wanted it to be in. With all the moving data out, formatting, repartitioning, reinstalling OSing, moving data back in, … I’ve managed to reclaim over 20 gigs of space I’d arbitrarily given up earlier. It’s amazing how much you can save when you have only one copy of a piece of software on one OS installed and not have redundancies running all about. (MikTeX/LaTeX, MATLAB/Octave, Windows/GNU/Linux, …)

Strangely enough, I don’t miss Visual Studio, I miss the frickin’ Canon “EOS Viewer”. A tool made by Canon to read my photos in Canon’s own RAW off the camera.

On to lighter things.

Since I am not one to read laundry instructions, I ended up washing a new woolen sweater in near steam when it wasn’t designed to be exposed to over 50° C or something, twice. The first time, you would say that the result was an overly snug fit. The second time, I have just one word for it, (OK, two) — Sports Bra.

Cue tasteful humour.

I, apart from being a certified sociophobe, am also what you may call a phonophobe. As in, I don’t really make or receive telephone calls, and more amusingly (to you), I am extremely terrified by the prospect. Therefore, for the most part, my phone is just a $300 clock, and not a very good one at that.

Amazingly enough, for the first time in… forever, I looked at my phone this morning as something… more.

The reason for this sudden change of perspective? I spent all night on the phone with an old friend from college, and we got around to talking about all sorts of things. And I, as in I the one who really doesn’t care about what other people are up to because it “doesn’t really matter”, cannot believe how nice it feels to actually catch up with someone and get a glimpse into how their lives are at this point in time.

In the midst of all this, there was one thing that was said that’s still bothering me. She said something vaguely akin to, “If you didn’t find anyone you’re interested in so far (referring to undergrad) and you settle for some random person (referring to a random person in general, but more directed to someone of possibly not the same cultural background) now (as in so soon), it basically reflects the fact that you haven’t met too many people, and you’re selecting the first person you’ve taken the chance to know.”

I reiterate, this bothers me. Of course, I didn’t say anything about it because it seemed to make sense at the time (plus women are usually correct about these sorts of things, and everything else), but thinking about it, this reasoning is flawed (because it’s assuming something that isn’t entirely true). I’ve jotted down some rough dates on that napkin nearby, and it is quite clear I am going to spend more time in Ann Arbor than I have in any school or college so far. Definitely more than undergrad. Consequently, the chances for my spending maximum time with someone, and letting myself know them better is actually higher here than it has been anywhere else. Given this scenario, I don’t believe it’s alright for someone to assume, “Oh, poor guy, he just settled for someone after all these years of not knowing all these other people” because there is a good chance that’s not going to be true.

“He realized he liked someone because he spent more time with and got to know them better here, as he decided to spend eons in grad school”, will probably be my take on the whole scheme of things.

And no, I don’t particularly care if you agree.

partially. But there have been semi-major data losses (including said posts) with the whole computer not being OK thing. And that sucks.

So, while I was salvaging stuff and waiting for many many gigs of data to get copied over to the new external hard drive, I wrote this up.

Why would you care? You don’t. I was just trying out some new CSS to get a “console” like feel for the command line stuff. And it looks sweet.

A few months ago, my computer sort-of-hung as it was booting into the windows partition. I watched the hard drive LED stay on continuously for some 10 minutes, after which it continued to boot seemingly normally. Once I logged in though, things weren’t so normal any more. It had “reset” its state back to a factory fresh state. The data and programs on the hard drive weren’t too messed, but the operating system, as a whole, seemed to not be able to see them properly.

This was a horrible pain, because though critical work-like data existed more so in the GNU/Linux partitions, there was still a lot of arbitrary junk (but my junk, you know, photos, ogg vorbis files …) sitting on the windows partitions. The primary reason for this being one OS could read the other’s partitions, but the other way around was not so seamless. Anywho, I grudgingly decided to find the original HP discs, only to remember the freaking things totally wipe out the hard drive before reinstalling 4 year old buggy software — not particularly useful, or fun. So, I painstakingly moved relevant data out of this machine to others with large drives (scp is your friend) at work, went out and bought an OS disc, redid things from scratch, mostly, and slowly moved the data back in.

All was well, except, yesterday, a few months later, the exact same thing started to happen on bootup. Of course, this time I hit the power button after it stalled for a little while. The end result? it’s “reset” itself to somewhere midway. Some things work, most do not. (And by “stuff not working” I mean fundamental things — like the address bar, or the rest of explorer). Reconciling to the prospect that I might have to do this once in a few months, I decided to at least reduce my pain and ordered myself an external hard drive last evening. The plan now is to clearly separate data from the OSs and programs, and store them outside. This way, any time things begin to go awry again, I can do the seriously hard-core step of wiping out and reseting from scratch, without too much of a bother.

Oh, but I don’t think there will be a next time. There is a good chance I will be nuking the windows partitions and resizing the GNU/Linux ones to use the entire hard disk.

The reasons I kept the windows partition around (I payed for it (twice), my random wireless card, Mathematica, less of a bother with overhead projectors when I am giving one of my talks, Visual Studio’s debugger) are now slowly becoming mostly moot. I have written off the windows costs as a loss, my wireless card now works flawlessly, I have gotten proficient enough with GiNaC (I always was, just lazy) and if I need it there’s always Maxima, and I can handle the projector issues when the crop up.

The only thing I will probably miss is Visual Studio’s debugger. Though I am a Free Software zealot, I don’t think there is a better software development platform than Visual Studio, on any architecture. Not one that I’ve seen anyway. And the crazy part is I don’t even use it as an IDE. I do all code writing in Emacs, because there is no better editor, period. If, and this often happens, things don’t work and I don’t see what’s going on, I give up rather soon on gdb and end up with Visual Studio — It’s just that good.

Yes, and I’m yellowbellied^*.

(^*I wanted to use another word here, which conveniently double entendres with young cat, but that’s apparently derogatory toward women. So, yellow bellied it is.)