actuality.log

I’ve been a bit of a pig, or is that hog? over the past couple of days. I’ve been overeating like this, I don’t know, like this person from some land struck with a famine or something, seeing food for the first time. But, when I think of it that way, I feel more like a camel than a pig. I did go pretty much nutrition less for most of a couple of days before this. Hmm. This is so not good for me.

It’s been freezing cold outside, but I have been terribly underdressed, and yet extremely comfortable. There is just something insanely warm, and cozy about having your ears covered. Well, mine anyway. Like someone noted, probably they’re my biggest heat sinks or some such thing. So, the right hat and I really don’t have to worry about what else I’m wearing.

I just realized I have an extremely hard time typing these blog entry things when I am not at my regular computer. And that sucks, because I dropped my computer AGAIN today and it’s really undergone visible structural damage. It still seems to work fine, but at this rate, I am sure it’s going to die sometime soon. Right now I am busy over eating at a relatives place. It feels good to feel full.

Eat, drink and be merry, and tomorrow we diet. Or not.

I mean literally. I finally went home last evening after a couple of days. I could live here if I cared a lot less about personal hygiene and all that sort of thing. And the best part is I still don’t get whatever it is I needed done, done. I slept (more like passed out) on one of the nights and didn’t finish whatever it is I planned to get done. Got an extension. Took another day. Got it done, and I’m pretty sure it’s still not “right”. And even more importantly, it stopped bothering me. I am quite at peace (in a positive way) with the way things are.

Oh that, and one crappy bagel is enough to pull you through a day if you’re reaaaaaaaaaaaaally inactive, like me.

Today’s the day I think the Indian student group is having their Diwali celebrations. Now this is not a big deal when you’re really not involved or going even, but it’s kind of funny hearing people use words like “resplendent” to describe the show when normally, these people sound like I do. (Few monosyllable word sentences.)

And the site. Something’s happened. Had all those plans, all that enthusiasm, all that general excitement. It just “went away”. Sheesh, I am struggling right now to sit here to even type this little thing out. All major breakages have been fixed as far as I can tell. Quickies is up, bloogle is up, general blog related things function again. A bunch of links and pictures in past posts were hardwired back to the old place, so they need to be fixed in time. Need to figure out some simple sqldump -> search and replace all URI related text to new info -> reinsert new data scripted scheme of events. There is no way I am going to manually edit any past posts.

Either this consumed by the uni thing has gone a bit over board, or I am actually feeling a lot.. hmm. No, it’s not that. But I am feeling this huge dose of happy happy in life.

Am planning on a mmmaybe.wahgnube.org (broken) (yes, stolen plan from other popular free software projects, to hold future preview versions of the site. I like planning.

Extreme changes. Moving to a new domain and the journal now resides here Too many things broken to report. Slow fixes in progress.

reality, in the eyes of a wannabe.

Downtime’s good. I had more time to actually do things. Not a lot, just more. It sure beats the usual do nothing. As people have noticed, I wouldn’t be classified as too “driven” a person. I need to be pushed to make a change. I’ve had a ton of hobby pages/sites/forums/blogs and all that other sort of thing you get into when you really don’t have a life, but have never really seriously bought a domain, or used professional hosting. Now, that’s changed.

My new home, http://wahgnube.org and my blog http://actuality.wahgnube.org are up, but barely. With 500 MB of space, a ton of server side goodies, and some 5 GB transfer a month, I have big plans to make the whole site a lot more dynamic. I’ve always had the big plans, but never really bothered to move towards them. Editing static html for the main site involved a lot of jumping through SSI hoops which feigned a level of consistency, but it wasn’t always fun. Now all that should change in time. Slowly move to a newer, more streamlined XML+CSS website powered by Drupal. Maybe it will even look perty some day, like his, or hers. All in good time.

For now, it’s just a redirect back to the uni server and a hasty copy and paste job, and various portions are severly broken. For instance, quickies is down. First, I’ll fix them. Then, I grow. If there is something that is really annoying you and you want it fixed as soon as possible, let me know.

I am not sure whether I should replace the uni site with a semi formal site(page?) and move all “other stuff” outside. These are uncertain times. How exciting. I probably should have done this a long time ago.

As expected. I mean, if the pattern so far has been sad happy sad happy …, after last evening’s sad, this is just, normal. Anyway, started hacking again on glyx. Put up a start page even. Not much, I just needed something different up there indicative of emergence from inactivity.

Some history no one really needs to know

A friend of mine, a long time ago, exposed me to the wondrous lyx. Now I am your regular Emacs texnician, but she being all excited, I tried it and this was easy, for short documents. Anyway, it defaults to a GUI based on XForms, which looks pretty bad. You could build it with QT, but QT is evil, so glyx was born.

Now during all this time, I hadn’t heard of or used TeXmacs, which was almost what I wanted glyx to grow into. And later reading up on the lyx page, I found some deep and fundamental connections of the devs to the KDE project. Now, this shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did. GNOME owns damn it. That coupled with TeXmacs C++/Scheme core, it’s GTK GUI, and yes, the fact that the project had ‘macs’ as part of its name, generally made it all that glyx wanted to be but wasn’t.

So, I guess, I stopped.

Now, coming out of flashback mode /*insert funky psychedelic color pattern changing thingy here*/ to the present, I just had this intense urge (yes, it’s normal) to sink my teeth into gtkmm. gtk tries too hard to be OO C, and I can’t stand it. gtkmm is at least in my native tongue, and is just a lot prettier. Actually, C# is even syntactic sugary, but I am a little wary of some M$ patent stunt killing Mono, and don’t plan to let a project die by writing it in C#.

Keeping with the geeky theme of things, I had plugged another game the other day and it just didn’t seem right that I hadn’t plugged a game from THE COMPANY yet. And yes, this is a screenshot, and not concept art like the other one. Bwahahahah Valve.

(People seemed to find it a bit too disturbing. Removed.)

Apparently, I had a boring day. Boring is good.

(Yes, I’ll tend to report on my day’s events from an even geekier point of view when nothing has really happened. Sue me.)

Apart from the urge to dive into gtkmm, slowly beginning to feel the need to get some sort of exercise routine like thing into my life. GAH! My mind’s been poisoned. (And by exercise, even a slow walk looking at birdies counts. But still, GAH!)

And an obligatory Friends quote:

Ross: One more time, “Hey, don’t you want a washboard stomach and rock hard pecs?”

Chandler: No! I want a flabby gut and saggy man breasts!

Disclaimer: What follows below is a bit more than a bit disturbing. At least for me it is. It gets down to levels of me questioning my own sanity. The information cannot and will not be used against me ever, like you’ve all agreed to, by being here in the first place. If it ever comes up, I was trying my hand at fiction, and that’s that. Mock me, judge me, pity me, do whatever you please. But if you have nothing positive to say, keep it to yourself. (Yes, I have more than enough difficulty dealing with and responding to the extremely large volume of comments and emails I get regarding what I say here.)

I’ve not felt so dull in a long time. My stomach’s been churning all day and my eyes are all teary. I haven’t really moved out of my bed, or gotten too much done. I just hate this feeling. The fact that I hadn’t eaten anything since last afternoon didn’t help either. The stupid sun setting at 4 and this cold and wet weather outside make things even more depressing. I am too drained to think about things any more. Events that’ve transpired, the way we’ve handled things, how it affects us, other possible ways things could have been – whirling round and round and round in my head until I can’t take it any more. I just fuse and lie there with this rotten feeling you get when you know you’re going to throw up. It’s just, sigh, it’s so much easier to destroy stuff than to build them. Now I feel, it’s almost ok to screw up when your decisions and idiosyncrasies don’t hurt other people. It’s totally not ok to cause pain just because you’re too clueless about the way the world works. Because you don’t see things the way people expect you to. Or scarier, you do and lack the communication skills to let them know. You can be clueless, insecure, insensitive, and all that in bits at different points in time. You just can’t be all that all the time.

(Random humour interspersed: (I need this here more than you can imagine) It’s like, you can be incompetent or lazy, but can’t be both.)

I wish, no, I know things have to change. I have to change. I don’t think I can (or people involved will) tolerate this extremely dumb (in all the things that really matter) bungling fool. All I ever wanted was to be able to smile and have people I care about smile.

That’s not being too greedy is it?

(Yes, it’s perfectly natural to be peaceful in the morning and sad in the evening and geeky and clueless the previous evening. And no, I don’t have any hormonal issues.)

Feeling strangely peaceful at the moment. It’s this mix of sadness and happiness and all that, but more importantly honest and peaceful.

I feel, lighter and higher up in the clouds… and yet less godly?

I can’t explain it. But it’s definitely positive.

I just got back after seeing Moulin Rouge. I have to say it was one of the more cooler movie experiences I’ve ever had. And it’s totally not like anything I have seen before.

When people called, I just agreed to have a laugh. I mean, I figured it’d be totally cheesy and mockable. I was so wrong. It takes a little to get used to the overdose of colour, but once that’s out of the way, the movie’s just as funny and original as it can be given the dark and sad story it’s trying to say. And the choice of music was amazingly, apt.

And I would totally love it if my life were like that. Oh, I have difficulty expressing something or someone doesn’t agree with me—let’s just “sing a song” and all will be clearly conveyed, and they’d “just know”.

That’d be awesome.

Now I got to get back to wiping those near tears caused by the ending (and getting a large dose of grey clouds, or anything not colorful). Sniff.

For anyone interested.

It’s fun sometimes to keep hitting your favourite (relatively frequently) updated sites at regular intervals to see if they have new content up. (Especially some *cough* ones with extremely gripping and relevant content). But when your “daily reads” grow beyond this certain point, this becomes more of a pain. People with sites know/sense this. So they try to do stuff to drive less people away. I mean, it’s not like they don’t realize having to read about the day in the life of an extremely boring person isn’t bad enough. So, they concoct something fancy, like “XML” feeds.

(Feeds, they will tell you, ease your pain. Deep down, they know they’re really trying to make things less “you actively going out and reading it” and more “they pushing content on you”.)

Feeds will ease your pain. Which is why sites set them up if they can. News sites, blogs and so on. (Not totally unrelated, as far as I know, Rediff blogs provides this by default. I could be wrong.) In order to use them, you need a program called, (not very unexpectedly), a feed reader.

There are many, but for this howto, aimed at a windows user, I am going to focus on one free application, called (you guessed it) feed reader. You can download the setup .exe from sourceforge.

(GNU/Linux users can use Straw and MacOS users can use net news wire. Of course, if you are capable of getting straw up on your own, you shouldn’t be reading this. Shoo!)

Once you have and installed it, on first run, it looks like so:

Not terribly exciting, I know. But no fear, you run along to your “favourite site” and look around for the words ‘feed’, ‘XML’, ‘RSS’ or ‘RDF’. If you’re lucky, and it follows usual norms, this just means looking for the ugly orange button that says xml. Yes, the one on the left somewhere. If not, find a link with one of those words above. Right click it and select “copy shortcut”, like so:

Now you head back to feed reader, and click the “New” button on the top left. (Or hit F2, if you are a keyboard junkie). That will popup the “adding new feed wizard” box. Paste the shortcut you just copied into the text box. So right now things should look like so:

Hit next, and it should find the site name on its own. If it doesn’t, enter it. Now things should be like so:

And that’s it! You’ve just added your first feed to the reader. Run and click on it and it will update in a bit to show you the site’s most recent content, like so:

Now you can read the title, decide if it’s worth reading, click to see the first few lines and if you’re REALLY interested, then double click the title to read it. Or do a “right click -> open in new window” on the “read on” link at the bottom, like so:

That should open a browser window with that article. Now in time, everytime you see this ‘feed’ link on other sites, you can do the same thing to eventually end up with more of your “daily reads” (with feeds) in one place. Like so:

And now the cool part is, you don’t HAVE to visit there unless you have something to say. And you don’t HAVE to keep checking at regular intervals for updates. This will do it for you and let you know if any of the sites have changed recently.

This was a technical document. And yes, the title should have read “extreme newbie”. I am sorry for wasting your time.

Feeling ‘retro’ all day. Must have been all the Led Zeppelin and Blind Melon. Ordered a ton of music. Mostly those two and Blessid Union of Souls. (Now if you do click the link to Blessid union, you can see that their domain’s expired. Some Joe is definitely going to buy it and sell it back to them at a profit. I can just feel it. No, I am not that Joe.)

(Feeling a bit down too, for, ok, I will just say, no real reason. I over react.)

Anyway, once you run off and hastily pay for 20 or so discs, you feel poor. (Damn you one click shopping sites.) Then I remembered this article in the news paper. Point being, some day, when someone asks little kids what they want to be when they grow up, you’re not going to hear movie star or astronaut, they’re going to say, university president. $677,000+ ? Then I did some really rough ‘back of an envelope’ calculations and figured I (a student researcher) easily cost(s) them some 50+ grand per year. Now that’s scary, because it totally makes you wonder what it is that you do that deserves anything close?

Feeling poor, and feeling the need for even more music can only lead you back to look around for good free music sites. I’ve been using the sites on these lists for a while now. And am slowly beginning to be able to pick out the better ones. I do plan to make a more detailed/informative list sometime. Right now, (since my life isn’t terribly interesting, and this IS what parts of my day were spent doing, this is what I can write about), I just love Irate. It’s a pretty stupid program, in that it doesn’t seem to care about my preferences and still downloads whatever it wants to. Which is turning out to be a good thing since I find I like a lot more than I choose to admit. Like Cirrus’ boomerang (sample), which is technically dance electronica trancy hypnotic? (Totally loved it, OMG, totally). Of course, it finds stock awesome stuff too. Point being, if you need to know about non mainstream music, this is one of the coolest ways to find out. Just don’t expect it to be too smart in realizing you don’t like salsa. I do plan to buy some of these smaller bands stuff sometime. The other very cool ones so far are garage band and epitonic.

If you’re beginning to lose hope, remember, fringe benefits include a clean conscience and slow death to “stars”.

In other news, I think I better improve posture in general. After hearing it some 5 billion times from parents (mom mostly) and now from other people (some more random than others, some quite important), I’ve started realizing it might have evil effects in the future. Or so I let them know so they’ll stop bugging me. No, I am just kidding. Or am I? Also managed to further break my already broken glasses somehow.

And I am still waiting for tips from “people with hair longer than a certain length and it NEEDS to be tied so that it’s not in their face so they can get on with whatever it is they do” do when they sleep, if they are “sleep on my stomach”ers too.

For now, it seems I had over reacted. I don’t seem to miss anything unrecoverably important. Apparently ALL those folders was where my “useful” stuff was. Of course, I’ll never really know until I NEED something and can’t find it. I left work when the evil events of the day happened. My data has been under a bit of fire lately, last evening’s power surges and today’s typo, and I didn’t want to sit around for more weird nonsense to happen. I was not in a frame of mind to deal with it.

It’s like, I do very little, the last thing I need to deal with is losing the little I do. And I don’t really like it when events make me, lose self control.

Forced to stay indoors most of the day. (It’s not like it’s terribly different from any other day, but the other days I choose to be indoors, today was all windy and cold and blizzardy.) Had the usual work meet, over lunch. Which is strange since I’ve slowly phased out lunch from my daily meal plan. It’s currently at breakfast and “dinner” at whatever time between 3 & 6 in the evening when I can’t take it any more and HAVE to eat.

Saw Lisa after a long time. Observed a bunch of other things that’re just random and useless. Like this person using a pink pen to write in a pink book and then struggling to read it. Like a bus being TOWED. I just assumed buses don’t “break down”. Like these two dads standing in line for something at a store with their little daughters, one set of sisters literally clinging on to/playing/laughing/totally happy around/.. their dad while another was just calmly holding her dad’s hand staring straight. When it came to actually buying them stuff, guess which dad got his kids what they wanted and which was lecturing about the “usefulness” of things and why what she picked wasn’t “necessary”? Hmm.

Need to get in touch with this person who took a pretty cool picture of the moon. Need to find out his (her?) trick. And, when I think of needing to get in touch, I can’t help but remembering all the these recent requests I’ve been getting from totally random people about services like Friendster. I’m usually quite lazy while declining their offers, and direct them off to other blogs where people have talked about this and feel the way I do. Today, I found some more stuff that’s more closely mirrors the way I feel. And I plan to use a derivative of this when I decline the next time someone brings it up.

How does knowing whose friend is whose help me make friends? Really, it is just a complicated, expensive way of saying, “here are some people. Maybe you’ll get along, maybe you won’t, but your friend knows them.”

In reality, if I don’t have many friends, I won’t have many friends of friends, and if I have a lot of friends, why would I need this service?

And another that was meant to be funny but saddened me.

What we really need.. is internet liquor, something that makes you and other people seem wittier and more attractive online than you or they are in real life. You could call it eGoggles, and make it like a forum, only allow people to select questions and responses from a list of quotes by really witty people, and avatars of really attractive people. Then you might have something.

This is just a bunch of notes to self.

about
. rewrite fluctuant with intj input to make it fluctuant
. add/redo facts

entropy
. long hard eval of subsections – mercilessly kill
. increase blog linkage – elevated things
. free music section – here or links at link
. ferity/glyx start pages

resume
. use this as a template for the detailed thing
. and this as a template for the short thing

pictures
. redirect comments from guestbook to blog entry specific to photo comments
. add cheap thrills like voting for best picture?
. pic specific comments

artwork
. draw/mod pics/at least text fx

info
. update with latest stats
. complete new blog disclaimer thingy and incorporate
. fit all this formally into the TODO list
. explain usage – gpg key/xml feeds

blog
. ramp up version number
. fix hits text to match
. match up rist of version

– Use as info for report?
– Slowly migrate all to legolas?

I did say they were notes to self.

This is the sort of random nocturnal blurriness I was talking about. This is one of the less unpretty ones.

Yet Another Blackout

So here’s the thing. You come all wide eyed and excited (or unmoved and uninterested) to a “First World” country from a “Third World” country assuming certain things will be different in certain ways. For instance, you’d assume power cuts are now a thing of the past. But that’s, sadly, not true. First, I had the pleasure of experiencing the Great Blackout of 2003 and last evening again, we lost power around 6-7? and it returned at some 5 in the morning.

This is stupid. Even Madras doesn’t lose power so often or for so long. Or for that matter, even fluctuate so much that your TV spontaneously fails.

I should have been wild and irritated (and all panicky? to mirror how people here respond) but so wasn’t. I was just getting ready to do some work and was beginning to get agitated because I didn’t want to do it. I then decided to update my blog/reduce the pile of unanswered email, but I was lazy and that began annoying me as well. And then it happened. Extreme fluctuation for a few seconds and then total darkness. Well, not total, because the moon was insanely bright, and pretty.

It just felt so peaceful. Tore into some useless devices, like clocks, and stole batteries for my torch. I spent a good deal of the evening just walking round a quiet, unlit, peaceful town. It felt awesome. Met and spoke to all sorts of random people (I assume also doing the same thing) as I passed them. People do leave their homes and interact when TV or whatever isn’t coming on. As I had expected, all the streets were slowly beginning to clog with traffic as the signals were out. And there was police everywhere regulating traffic and all that.

But it was the moon that was the prettiest. It’s not everyday you get to see it without all other lights and things getting in the way. I decided to get back home and come back with my camera. Tried a bit, but shooting an object so far away is not easy without the right equipment, and all I ended up with were sucky blurry things. Will figure out how to do it, and what I need, in time.

It was insanely windy. Forecasts predicted 60 miles per hour (~ 100 Kmph!) gusts. Perfect evening for a walk around town. What people do to feel the wind in their hair. Some buy fancy convertibles. Some wait for days where the wind’s gusty and take a walk.

(Earlier in the day, I had gone for this talk in the math department. It was interesting and informative. It’s just, mathematicians are funny people :). You should see 4-5 mathematicians running around trying to get a projector to work with a laptop. Complete with comments like, oh, “so we can’t get the picture centered on the screen”, “let’s just move the building”.)

In another “oh so obvious” site update, I’ve added a variety of XML feeds for those who are too lazy to actually visit blogs using web browsers. Like me.

If you’d like to check it while checking email or whatever.

That, plus you can keep track of what’s going on in a lot of places and visit only if you have something to say. But then again, though that sounds cool in theory, very few people set up feeds.