actuality.log

Last week was awesome, in an almost-tedious sort of way. I had something (arguably fun) to do every single day. Which is very different by my usually boringly-predictable life standards. Either I’m noticing opportunities I’ve previously failed to notice, or stuff that didn’t happen before has recently started happening. Either way, it feels nice, but I’m still quite certain I cannot maintain things at this intensity for too much longer. Being a hardcore geek type has quite a bit of inherent social phobia/anxiety attached to it, and I’ve had my quota of trying to dissipate its effects, for now.

So this week it’s time to slow down and rest. By which I mean get back to work in the lab.

Oh, and when someone tells you “Have you met <insert name here>? You ought to, you’d like her.”, how would you interpret it? And how would you respond to her?

Update: After much talk, I finally started on it. Maybe this will quiet the newbies a little.

Not a very talented one, but a painter none the less. No, not the Rembrandt kinds, the kinds that given a wall and suitable supplies can give it a relatively uniform colour.

It all began with a rather innocuous e-mail forwarded by our favourite incessant-forwarder, Louise. The original mail was from Ryan, a grad student interning at the ECIR, advertising an opportunity for community service and looking for volunteers.

Of course, I look at the mail and go, why not? and register to lend a hand. (Apparently, there were other such events prior to this, but I’d failed to notice as I wasn’t in Ann Arbor until recently.) Anyway, the work itself wasn’t at an old age home (as I’d earlier assumed), but at elderly people’s homes themselves. It was part of a “keep people in their homes” effort of a group whose name I should know but don’t. This was in a part of Detroit that’s predominantly Hispanic and (consequently? apparently) neglected.

As has been happening for a while now, I woke around 4 AM and did whatever it is I do. Got into “work clothes” (since we were warned they might get dirtied) and rushed off to the bus stop around 8:22. Which I thought was good since I had to be there by 9. But noooo. Buses that run every 20 minutes don’t leave at 40 minutes past the hour. So, since I missed our friend at 8:20, my next best bet WAS AT NINE. Not wanting to be late, I set off on foot. Yes, I was still late. (Let the record show I reached only 12 minutes late. Hey, it was relatively far away.)

Some damage control and a half-hour long car ride later, we were at this social service group whose name I should know but don’t. Once we were described the tasks, scrub down and repaint a bathroom or lay a cement porch, we were asked to decide what it is we wanted to do. Some shaky hand-raisings later, the groups were formed, and we were off to Mrs. “Name I should know too but don’t”‘s home to paint her bathroom.

Typing is too much work. I’ve had a hard day. Well, not really, but I’m just lazy. A few annotated pictures will have to do.

Ryan, with his (eventually not really necessary) wheelbarrow crushed into his trunk (bungee cords and all) as he readies to transport part of the “porch-fix” group to the home that needed its porch to be fixed. I wonder if it’s safe driving being unable to see behind your car. Anyway, no one got hurt. (Actually. Someone did apparently. One of the women got bitten by a dog and was rushed off to a hospital. That’s all I really know, and that everything is really fine.)

Our group, driven by Roger, ended up at Mrs. “Name I should know too but don’t”‘s home, and were introduced to her bathroom.

We soon got to work. Here are members of the team laughing while trying to fake struggling-to-open the can of paint like I asked them to.

Since we trust our painting skills so much, (after totally cleaning up the existing coat) we needed all surfaces not required to be painted to be covered with paper. Remember people, this makes for easy cleaning. (Another thing that makes for easy cleaning is to watch while the two Shivas do the cleaning.)

A subset of the happy team at lunch break. Happier still cause it was a break, and there was lunch.

After some relatively quick goofing off, things got busy again resulting in the final product. (Hmm. Looking at it now, that window needs a lot of work still. Ah well, there’s always a next time.)

Since the other group wasn’t finished yet (claiming their work was harder), we

left Mrs. “Name I should know too but don’t”‘s home to find the other guys (conspicuously sans injured woman) hard at work at the other place.

Since they were busy, us slackers decided to take a walk around the neighbourhood. Resulting in observations weird

and interesting. (Now I know I want 300 steps to my porch when I’m old. I can’t stand steep steps.)

Once everything looked fine there,

we headed back home to be greeted by extreme traffic.

Delayed just an hour and a half or so over our original schedule consequently, we reached Ann Arbor. Of course, I happened to notice the cutest balloon poodle ever during the bus ride back home.

It was a lot of fun. I will do stuff of this sort whenever they pop up and I’m able. Hey, I’m not uni-faceted.

But hey wahgnube, you aren’t in any of the pictures. I don’t believe you were really there or touched paint.

Oh, really?

How about the fine droplets of paint on my glasses’ lens (which isn’t going away, scarily). Irrefutable proof I say.

or the blob on my shirt?

There, are you happy now?

This turned out to be a rather hectic week, socially. Yes, by my standards. And I think I have handled it rather well so far. Yes, by my standards. But I’m pretty certain I can’t sustain this regularly. In like, you know, life.

Fun is work. Work is evil.

The weekend is shaping up quite unusually also. I’ve got this volunteer work thing for all of tomorrow at an old age home in southwest Detroit. And if I get home in one piece (yes, I said Detroit), there’s this barbecue thing on Sunday.

Yipee, activiteee. *Shudder*

One more from the art fair. For no real reason.

I just made a most embarrassing goof up involving mistaking the reply button for the forward button on my e-mail client.

Why the hell do they have to be so close? Why the hell do I have to be blind?

D’oh D’oh D’oh!

*Turns beyond red*

Today was rather different. Spent most of the morning reading at home, and all evening at the art fair. It was waaay more crowded than I remember it being last year, and I was spending most of my time trying to find spots where people concentration was minimum while attempting art fair bingo!

Arguably, the most fun part of the day was at this one stall. Being an engineer/scientist type, there is a pretty good chance your life lacks colour. Everything’s usually in black or white or occasionally, the odd shade of grey. That’s about it. And here was this talented woman with all her pictures super saturated with brilliant colour. I was immediately drawn to it all wide eyed and started bugging her, Beverly, with the usual questions. “Oh, what’s this?”, “How did you achieve that?” … sort of general thing. There she was, (apart from being all creative) all patiently explaining things with a smile. Now I know how it’s done. Not like I ever plan to attempt anything of the sort, but it’s nice to know stuff.

For those who missed the not-so-subtle link above, here’s her gallery. (Because it’s fun to stare at pretty things.)

All of which eventually resulted in me buying my first piece of expensive art, “Charlotte’s Web”, from her today. No, not expensive as in expensive. Expensive as in expensive from a poor grad student’s perspective. Anyway, in all my crowd concentration minimization floating around, I kept running into patches of flowers on the grass. Here are a couple of the pictures I took.

And so it begins. I’m finally making the time to upload pictures taken during my trip to India. Here’s a teaser, sarees.

Sarees – Bring out the cross dresser in you.^TM

Pretty much spent the whole of my afternoon-evening out with S and J arbitrarily hanging, drinking and eating. Pretty sweet. The town is preparing for its annual art fair which happens over the next few days. So everyone’s all excited and running around all active-like setting up stalls and that sort of thing. It’s colourful, getting crowded, and very lively.

And remember the time I flipped when I serendipitously ran into papers citing stuff I’d co-authored? It was definitely cool to see my name in someone else’s bibliography. Something similar, but a lot cooler, happened to a portion of our group when they were in Austria a while earlier. There was this group from Spain, who’d picked up some of our pre-published stuff from Cornell’s arXiv and done all sorts of cool stuff with the framework we’d set up. Sure, they were apparently working with simplified material models and what not, but long story short, they had some very cool computational things going with our math. Something along the lines of a model which involved a broken bone, and stem cells being introduced. Through the computation, these cells find their way to the general area where the break is, differentiate and deposit material resulting in healing.

All of that within our framework. A problem totally unrelated to anything we’re working on and not tweaked-for at all. It “just worked”. And that makes me all warm and fuzzy on the inside. Of course I don’t know all the details since I wasn’t there myself to grasp all the specifics. But it feels good. I am pretty certain it would have felt even cooler if I’d experienced this in person. And where was I during all of this? You guessed it.. in India.

Not like I’m complaining or anything.

And there I was, sitting doing whatever it was when I happened to notice one of my housemates carefully powder his back and slowly slip on a loose shirt. Of course, I had to pass a “delicate darling back” comment. And he goes, “Don’t kid man, this hurts”. I’m like, “Huh? What does?”. And then he turns around to show me this black and red tattoo of a woman’s name and a broken rose. Apparently, he’d gotten it a couple of days before I returned here.

Woah. It looked cool and all that, but then I was curious as to what’s the story behind all of this. So a little probing resulted in him telling me this person was his ex. How much a 19 or so year old Indian male could have gone through with someone to refer to her as his ex, I don’t know, but apparently she was his ex. Religious differences (he being a Hindu and she a Muslim) resulted in parental pressure to split up.

You know, because they’re different species and all that, and their children will be poor misfit mutants otherwise.

Anyway, the deal here is how passionate must you be of something or someone to go about bearing a couple of weeks of physical pain and having a permanent reminder on your skin what it/they mean(t) to you? I don’t think I can do such a thing. I mean, this person’s supposed to be someone you should try to forget right? What about closure and all that. Forget closure, what about other people who might show up in the future? Won’t they ask questions? Why unnecessary hurt and so on?

As in, oh honey, I love you now, but I loved her then and this thing’s permanent, deal with it? It’s just a name.. INSCRIBED PERMANENTLY ON MY SKIN.

And the weird part is he isn’t doing this to prove anything to anyone either. Apparently not too many people, and especially not this ex, know (and will know) about it.

You know, this reminds me of when people write stuff on wet concrete or attempt to engrave things on the barks of trees? It’s like they’ve figured things probably won’t be that way forever, and they’re trying to take a snapshot on a medium they assume is more permanent. It’s not like your little heart drawing on that concrete slab is going to be eroded away anytime soon.

Isn’t it just enough to tell someone how you feel? Is all of this really necessary? Forget tell, isn’t it enough if you know?

Speaking of snapshots and people, I’ve heard enough of the “wahgnube, you ought to start taking real people in your photographs”. I’ve begun reading a most fascinating book. Watch out world, I’m getting there.

Anyone care to model? The only qualification you need to have is to be a little patient. I know I suck at this, but will improve. Humour me. You never know, it just might land you this big modelling gig. Either way, you still get some compensation. I’ll take you out to a cup of coffee or whatever it is you fancy.

And I just realized I was wrong in blaming different computers for my inability in putting things down. It has nothing to do with computers, it just dawned on me that I got most of my thinking done in the shower. Long shower, elaborate post. No shower, no post.

Or a picture gets uploaded.

From the register.

Microsoft can roll out countless studies that point out how proprietary software is cheaper and more practical than open source code. But how can Microsoft counter open source software’s ability to make a Japanese woman give birth to a horse in a convenience store?

This awesome creative outburst can be experienced here. No one can match up to Japanese levels of advertising. This StarSuite is roughly based off OpenOffice.org.

Roughly translated:

“Sourcenext products are just 1980 Yen?! Oh, my Goodness….!” She faints suddenly. A guy rushs to her and says, “She is having a baby!” Everyone looks at her anxiously. The guy says, “Now, the baby was born!” And for no special reason, she had a colt. It tries to rise unsteadily to its feet. “Oh! It stands up!” Everybody is moved.

Probably they should stick to products and leave ad making to those more.. ad-making-inclined?

In what could best be described as an attempt to pamper myself, I’ve decided to build a computer capable of playing Doom ]|[. And play it, of course. I’ve decided to document some of the stuff along the way. You needn’t be afraid people. It’s just a game.

It all begins with intelligent selection of components. You first look at what you want done, and determine the hardware that will suffice, falling within the rough budget you’d initially decided on. You then drool over far cooler hardware, throw the budget out of the window and buy those components instead. The following is the current list of stuff I need to buy/have already bought leading toward that rig. Suggestions and so on are welcome.

1. Motherboard – Asus P4C800-E DELUXE
2. Processor – Intel Pentium 4 3.0E GHz, 800MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache, HT
3. Memory – Crucial 512MB DDR PC-3200 (x4 = 2GB)
4. Video Card – ATI RADEON X800 PRO, 256MB GDDR3
5. Audio Card – Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
6. Monitor – NEC MultiSync FP912SB 19″ CRT (I prefer CRTs to LCDs)
7. Speakers – Logitech Z640 5.1 Speakers
8. Hard drive 1 – Western Digital Special Edition 120GB 7200RPM IDE
9. Hard drive 2 – Undecided (Higher RPM, smaller drive)
10. Keyboard – Undecided
11. Mouse – Logitech MX500 Optical Mouse
12. CD/DVD R – Pioneer 16X DVD-ROM
13. CD/DVD R/W – Plextor 12X DVD+RW/-RW Drive, Model PX-712A
14. Floppy Drive – Mitsumi 1.44MB 3.5Inch Floppy Disk Drive
15. Ethernet Card – Undecided, in addition to the inbuilt one
16. Case – Undecided
17. Thermal paste – Artic Silver 5
18. Additional power/cooling – Undecided, depends on case

Am I missing anything?

Well wahgnube, the 2.5 grand or whatever all of this will eventually cost seems mighty steep to just play a game, is it really that cool?

How could you ask me such a question. It has a brilliant story line, it will rock. You have this Union Aerospace Corporation see, and they’re performing these super secret teleportation technology experiments, and (not surprisingly) due to some miscalculations and some arrogance, the UAC opens a portal to hell. Of course, the demons invade. And it’s your job to stop this invasion and prevent the Earth from being overrun by this demonic invasion.

Sheer brilliance, told ya. *Drool*

Once you’ve answered all the trivial life questions: What’s life about? Why are we here? Who am I? Where did we come from? … all that’s left is to answer the only thing that really matters. What kind of a wings do you have? Yes folks, you heard right. The words that follow are quite insightful. Read them well.

Your wings are DRAGON wings. Massive and covered in scales, they shimmer with strength and magic. They are the most obvious display of your power – though it runs equally throughout your heart and mind. You are uncompromising and grave, with a profound sense of justice. You have firm ideas about what is right and what is wrong and set out to fix what problems you can. You realize that you are more capable of dealing with life and evil than most, and as such you see it as your responsibility to protect those who cannot defend themselves. You have existed since antiquity and as such you are wise far beyond your years in this lifetime. While you strive for fairness and peace, if someone should steal from your cave of treasure (though not all that glitters is gold) or compromise the happiness of you or one who is close to you – they have signed their death warrant. You have a mighty vengeance and will unleash it upon such people immediately and mercilessly. Arguing with you is useless…you rarely back down and are known for holding firm in your beliefs. Sometimes you feel intensely burdened with the troubles of others…acting as a Guardian can get so wearisome. But you never give up…you see it as your life’s mission. Often very introverted, you can be so smart…it’s scary. Such a combination of intelligence, creativity, power, beauty, and magic is often intimidating to those around you – who are also unlikely to understand you. Arrogant, proud, over-serious, and sometimes a bit greedy or obsessed with whatever treasure you choose to pursue…you have enchanted people for centuries, and will continue to do so.

Claim Your Wings brought to you by Quizilla.

Well I have been here for a while, and besides theatrics, the title doesn’t serve too much purpose.

I can’t believe I haven’t written here in so long. Initially it was “work”, then it was laziness, then I apparently became active, well activeer anyway. It’s so hard to get back to this once you realize how much less work not writing really is. But I will brave on.

The trip back home was uneventful, in a good way. I reached and chilled at my aunt’s place for a couple of days before coming home home. Surprisingly, home home wasn’t all robbed, dirtied, and burnt down. It was neat, tidy and organized. I think in an even better state than I remember leaving it. Roomies aren’t all bad, apparently. They aren’t all good either. In the one month I was away, the clowns’ behaviour has resulted in every single bill remaining unpaid, leaving me dealing with consequent fines.

But they made up for all of that by keeping the place tidy.

In a remarkable turn of events, I, the one who was more than happy with his one meal a day, am now constantly craving food. I think going home to mom’s cooking and near infinite stock of goodies to munch on will do this to you. For instance, my pre-mid-day consumption has gone roughly like so. Wake -> breakfast -> post breakfast snack -> pre early lunch snack -> early lunch. You know? Something needs to be done about this, and fast.

In an even more remarkable turn of events (well, not really), I’ve decided to do something about it. We can either hit the cause (the many meals a day) or the effect (the bellieder than people on TV tell you it’s OK to be). For now I’m going to aim at the effect. I am going to exercise or whatever it takes. For starters, I’ve started with the forced 8 (exceptionally large) glasses of water a day. You spend so much time walking between wherever it is you hang out and the bathroom closest to wherever it is you hang out, you’re working out. Of course, I’m using working out very loosely.

Ah, so that’s how all that water is good for you.

Once I finally (groggily, you know, all jet lag and all) made my way to work, pulling email resulted in 1094 unread messages in my inboxes. It’s going to be a while.

One who knows where to look I mean.

Should it scare me that I don’t really miss a place that could look like this?

Well, not just. I reached a while ago and it’s taken me a long time to step out of that shower. Being clean feels nice.

Surprisingly, the trip was pleasant, uneventful, and my baggage followed the same path I did, spatially and temporally.

Not to sound like FOX or anything, but details at 11.

Can’t wait?
OK, I am heading back home in a little bit. All I need to do is buy stuff, arrange stuff, pack stuff, sort bills, … and hopefully make it to the airport in time.

This whole trip thing was waay more eventful than I had originally planned.