actuality.log

Are you a reality tv fan? Whose reality is it? Do people behave/talk/dress/… like that in real real life?

I’m pretty certain anyone who watches tv (at SOME point of time in the DISTANT past) found themselves a bit more involved with one of these shows than they choose to admit. I mean, who wasn’t? Today, it’s just too much. I mean a network can come up with only so many “shocking twists” before they aren’t shocking or awing any more, just awful. Things are getting downright predictable, not to mention dumb (not that they were ever too bright, but that is besides the point). The worst part is, they don’t feel real. Never did.

Who really watches these shows? Why do they show up on prime tv slots just to make me switch the channel? Don’t the advertisers know this? Why are they funded and still on the air?

And the shows themselves. Let’s look at the highly original ones with radically different ideas and concepts – who wants to marry a millionaire? who wants to marry a guy pretending to be a millionaire? who wants to marry an eligible bachelor? an eligible bachelorette perhaps? What would you do if you had to choose between the hot dude/dudette and a million (or two?) dollars? who wants to marry my dad/mom? And it goes on and on like that. For straight people, gays and lesbians too I suppose. You name it, it’s there.

While we’re on the topic of marriage related reality shows, for “For Love or Money” fans, <Nelson’s voice> haahaa </Nelson’s voice> Rob. When will he ever learn?

Anyway, back to the other class of stuff, the only one I like(d) is the amazing race. But that too, four or five seasons later, hmm.. not so much fun any more. How about some more back stabbing in survivor? or in the big brother house perhaps? or how about eating an animal’s genitalia for fifty grand?

GOOD LORD! Give these network geniuses half a brain, please.

If that doesn’t work, I know what will. Just make it a point not to support any of their sponsors by not buying their products. (Hmm.. this is hard, since you need to watch the show to see what’s being advertised so you don’t buy it hmmm..). Ok, share the responsibility with a group, one super lucky one per day being the dude(tte) who gets to watch the show and not gouge their eyes out.

It has GOT to stop. I neeeed sitcoms when I watch. I don’t get too much time (If you doubt that, just sneak a peek at your neighborhood grad student juggling PhDs in a couple of areas. Don’t see her? I rest my case.) to, but when I do, I’d rather not see some arbitrary person conning some other arbitrary person into marrying her mom who is actually her dad in drag whose ulterior motive is to get the unsuspecting soul’s liquor license to forward his just started restaurant in which two fires or so per episode is reality.

Sheesh.

I boot up, load everybody’s favorite messenger, gaim, when all hell breaks loose. I get a friendly message from M$.

(15:34:25) messenger@microsoft.com: You are running a version of messenger that requires an immediate security update. Please visit http://messenger.msn.com/Help/Upgrades.aspx to complete the update.

(15:34:25) messenger@microsoft.com has closed the conversation window.

In other words, please reboot to our OS and install our client, as part of our Trustworthy Computing initiative. They wish.

Continuing what I had started a few days ago, here are the rest of the bits from my slam book. I could have gotten all mean and split this over a couple more days, but decided not to.

Your attitude might not win you many admirers, but I really like and respect it man!
Cool, at least someone does :P.

You have a great way of making people feel good, especially when they’re down.
I try, sometimes.

One of the most originally intelligent people I know.
Good god, you need to increase the number of people you know, pronto.

Coolest, most down to earth guy I’ve known. Serious.
Yeah right, look up the advice given to previous dude/dudette.

I guess it’s when you’re different that you stand out in a crowd.
Go ahead and say it, the word you’re looking for is weird. ;)

You are the best teacher.
Attributing that to my near infinite patience with my tutee.

I would really want you to be a lot more patient, and not call others names if they can’t keep up.
hmm.. conflicting reports. Moral of the story, if you want me to be patient, you have to be my tutee. ;)

You are really capable and deserving of going to some top notch school like UMich or Berk.
Woah (s)he’s psychic.

Dear Pundit,
or should that be,
Dear “Omnipresent Light ~ the source that touches all”
That’s a bit extreme isn’t it?

I’ll definitely miss the guy who pulls his hair over his face to see its length.

Little shy at times, and verbose when it comes to people you know.

Sarcasm that you displayed was the best! The exaggerations were even better.
That one made me mighty proud.

In our numerous discussions, I figured you were somewhere between Gadget Guru and Geek God.
Of course, little one.

Hope you didn’t lose your sanity.
Written on some arbit page, diagonally, UPSIDE DOWN. Oh no, I am just fine with it.

Respect your intellect but sometimes your geeky attitude gets on my nerves.

Meet you as department Chair of Mech. Eng. at MIT
Thank god (s)he didn’t expand the acronym and clarify which MIT (s)he was referring to.

Some day when you get your ears pierced and grow your hair.. I’m beginning to have doubts whether they’re ever going to happen at all, I’ll surely give you a pair of dolphin earrings. I only have one now, so I think I’ll buy a new pair.
Having doubts eh? hmm.. I HAVE to do it now. :)
YEAR LATER: Ponytail’s well along the way. The piercing, yes, still under consideration.

And there were also the standard (obligatory) comments about the longish hair, sudden extreme weight loss and about my being (brutally) honest and frank. :P
Obviously my personal favorite in that department,
Funky guy, lots of hair, and lots of brain hidden inside it !

Note to self. Read the comments about the long hair when you’re bald and weight loss when you’re obese again.

On a side and related note, my little experiment with this book just.. well let’s just say the results were interesting. It was supposed to end up doing a few things and answering a few questions. I believe it did.
1. Primarily, did people really care to read a simple instruction page and follow it ;)?
2. By hoping people passed it amongst themselves and filled it in some sort of order, I hoped to get a who-knows-who kinda relation tree. And probably, how long it stays in a clique before it moves out.
3. Since I had stated anyone, even someone who barely knows me could fill it, I was wondering how far it would go and would someone I didn’t know fill it?
4. And, if I was lucky one passing it on, let me observe how people react when they realised I had a slam book, in effect, admitting that I did care a tad about what others thought about me.

I realised people don’t enjoy reading README’s, even if they’re insanely tiny. They don’t care to follow instructions, especially since the person asking them to isn’t in any great position of authority :). Some people read instructions, and for fun, (and to NOT help my sanity) do totally the opposite. The rate of passing the book is insanely slow when not monitored by the owner. It’s, I would say, a 10th of what could have been achieved with me pushing, but bah, this was more fun. People, like any other element of the universe, tend to be most random. If it’s written, ‘Fill in order’, that’s the last thing I see when I see it now. Things don’t cross cliques easily, and matters have to be taken into the hands of the one who wants it done, me. Yes, even people I barely know have taken the time to write something. I was impressed. And yes, as I id get a lot of this.. OMG, you?.. this is Pundit right? You have a book?

It wasn’t a success or a failure. It was supposed to be interesting and it was. I’ll have to wait another few years and try this again some time.
And.. I realise people are inherently nice (..shiver) ;).

I normally don’t steal from /. (but do from other less popular places :P of course), but this is so kewl it had to be posted here. M.I.T is awesome, period. I wish I were in Boston, I could probably see the NSF, their source of money (obligatory, it’s my source of food too).

Read and laugh, child.

And you thought Malayalees sounded funny.

And a link to a screeny, the bloggers wet dream.

Yes, it’s official. I hate it. Until now, I was a free software zealot because free software is inherently, ethically, morally… all that jazz, cooler. So long, I’ve not really loved winxp, but found it good to do most things. Not any more.

And so my day begins.. trallallalllaaa.. I get this email which I read on evolution in my GNU/Linux box about how a McAfee 7 or some such is out. Woohoo! I go. 7 is so much cooler than 4.5, OBVIOUSLY. Reboot to XP, download 7, get off the network, remove 4.x, and install 7. All is fine and dandy (if you count the forced 2.5 hour system scan on install as dandy) until the reboot. Then BAM!, NOTHING works, except for some strange reason, fire and thunderbird.

Anyway, rush to control panel to try to uninstall it. No control panel, obviously. Rush to cntrl-alt-del’s task manager, no use. Keeps respawning the McAffee processes on being killed. All this nonsense goes on for a while. Any thing that comes close to killing the McAfee process gets killed and the machine locks up.

Many reboots later, I finally decide to try the safe mode. Yes, WinXP has a safe mode too. Same F8 and all that. Rush there, and like a linux console window, it only likes 640×480 as its resolution, and a box within my large screen is where all the action is taking place. Fine I say, at least now I can see the control panel and reach add remove programs. I hurriedly click uninstall, and snicker. Soon enough I realize, as it tells me, the uninstall routine needs some dumb windows installer service which doesn’t get started in safe mode.

Then, a few reboots later, after tons of general screwing around, I find the service manager in safe mode and remove any trace of anything to do with Network Associates or McAfee, so it doesn’t auto-start and take over the poor system.

Cool, on reboot, FINALLY the little V on the bottom is crossed out. Woohoo! Run to control panel and it finally uninstalls. In previous reboots, I had got a copy of the real (not UMified) scanner V4.x. Install that, service pack and super dat it. 20 Reboots later, I can use my machine again.

Productivity. what productivity? Share your windows horror stories right here.

Finally got all the pythonisms straw needed to work. I rushed to some blog reads to figure out their xml rdf linkage, but strangely not too many have them. Even those using “ready made” blogging solutions. I have to screw around with some more php to get my xml feed up and running.

Here’s a screeny any how.

Check out some of the geekiest features, ever.

Rock on.

And let’s see what google fight seems to think of this nifty new feature :D.

<MK Voice>FIGHT!</MK Voice>

And here they are, as promised, in small doses. The italicized stuff are the quotes, and the other regular text are my own comments, if any.

First, I never expected YOU to have a slam book. Since you’ve decided to have one and it’s come to me, I shall do the honours.

I’ve always thought of you as this brainy, intense, moody guy who went around with his head in the stars. I always thought of you as being slightly out of my league. Which is why, when I finally did get to know you, I was pleasantly surprised. You’re very approachable and have a nice sense of humour.
DOH! hmm.. would I have preferred not being known and not bursting that bubble?
YEAR LATER: And to think she thought I was out of her league.

Our friendship doesn’t end here.
Huh? What friendship? Do I know you?.. Kidding. ;)

I know for a fact you’re smart. That should take you places.
Places hmm.. I wonder where though.

One of the people who has his convictions all well defined and won’t hesitate to stand out of a crowd standing up to your values.

You’ve got yourself a very apt cover photo on this book – but then again that doesn’t surprise me one bit – after all it’s pundit.

Keeping with the blast from the past scheme of things, here are my thoughts just before I left home. I found it some old sqldump of an older blog. Sniff Sniff. Timestamp modded it and pasted it here. Recycling is good for the environment, and you.

The recent sobig.f worm rampage has left most people with painfully slow networks and resulted in a general loss of productivity.

This is a very interesting read that indicates why diversity is important, for survival.

Of course, I was one of the many who went HAHAAHAHAHAAHA when Jeff Goldblum interfaced his mac with an alien mothership in ID4.

Ack! This is just a post to get this blog to feel like the actuality.log that I had originally planned it to be. No, it needn’t be interesting. It is a log of events, to help my brain. That is all.

Today started off as any other. Generally lazed around and finally reached the lab. The network in EECS is SO SLOW. I was getting like a 20% ping success rate at google, and that was one of the better sites. So, generally struggling around, finally got to check email, just to find the usual few hundred spam “I love you” – No, you do not. “Re: Your details” – What details? Who the hell are you?.. and the usual suspects. But the silver lining, in a day of training, the spam filters in thunderbird seem to now effortlessly kill all these worm mails off the IMAP server. This is very good.

Anyway, after screwing around not knowing how to get anything done (plus irritated with one too many seg-faults, DAMN YOU icc), I decided to leave, considering it was an exceptionally bright and cheerful day. (Insert birds’ chirping sound fx here). I went back home, dropped off my stuff, and then randomly started walking at some 2-3 P.M. Before you know it, it’s some 5 and I am at a museum. It was fun. Among other things I got to know today, did you know just the tail portion of a blue whale weighs more than an ELEPHANT? And that a moderately sized blue whale consumes EIGHT TONS of food per day? Of course, I did learn a bit about history and other wild life, but it’s not entirely interesting to “normal” folk. Made my way back home around 6 ish.

In picture news, got some cloud snaps. Don’t have enough or half-decent looking ones worth uploading. Will just move them and other such odd pictures to some “assorted” set sometime.

This post has been stolen from an earlier blog of mine. The post itself is over a year old. Notice the profuse smiley usage. Gah!

In another moment of weakness today, (you know, the one you have when you think about the past, a kinda partly nostalgic, partly wishing time reversed RIGHT now, and you could go back to a time that seems so much more carefree and fun), I decided to update my address book with contacts from my little (failed or highly successful depending on the way you look at it) entropy experiment, erm.. my slam book. I didn’t plan to do much. Just add some names and email addresses, considering everybody’s changed their physical location on the globe.

Well, almost everybody.

I couldn’t help but read some parts of the slams themselves in the process. I mean, I might feign being not curious and all that, but I am human, I think ;). And so I suddenly forget about my PDA and concentrated harder on what’s been written about me (as opposed to furiously turning the pages to the ones with contact info in them and punching them in using that, oh SO slow, teeny keyboard). Yes, it’s only been four years in this place. Yes, four years is an insanely small period of time for a person like me to open up to anybody. Yes, that means people barely know me, and what they say shouldn’t be accurate.

Boy was I pleasantly surprised.

Some of the stuff I read was beyond correct.. creepy. Most of it was sarcasm and humour, that’s fun, but the insightful stuff interspersed was just that, it was insightful. I was almost.. moved (Or probably I was and that’s as close as I am going to get to admit it). I even got a few comments about how cool my name was written on the front pages. :)

I then decided to pick out 20 or so random stuff that make me laugh/tear me up(with joy :P)/just plain send a shiver up my spine and make me all goosebumpey. They aren’t in any specific order. And I am not going to explicitly state which ones are right and which ones are dead wrong, and hence funny, in a way. The ambiguity should add to my fun when I read this in say 20 years or something.

Of course, like any self respecting site traffic watcher, I shall stop here today, and let the slams trickle out over a short period of time. Stay tuned.

In related news, I realized how easy it is to recycle generic stuff like so. Be prepared to read this, and other things over and over again every once in a while.

I’d taken a break from this for a while and a lot of stuff’s happened in this time. No, I am not in a mood to type it all out i.e. strain myself expressing my thoughts. A summary includes meeting my cousins. Well, this is an event since it’s only the second or so time I am seeing them in my entire life. Well, what can I say, I met them. I also met their large dog, and I was afraid, very.

No pets for me or any one living with me, ever. People who can’t handle that will have to leave.

In other news, I was furious with my parent(s). Never ever happened before. And yes, it is a big deal. No, not really really, but it shouldn’t happen, and it did and hence a big deal. No details, but no, it was not my fault. And yes, they have raised me to be, well, more idealistic than they think they have.

I know what I am doing, and I will not change. Sorry, but that’s how it’s got to be. And that’s the way it will. I might as well go ahead and say it, I am never wrong.

But the important thing is, will I do something stupid as a result of not thinking straight? I would like to assume that I won’t, and that I am and can be cold and level headed always, but we just have to wait and see.

In other news, I was thinking of some stuff to put in the music section of entropy and I remembered something I had thought of/read/seen before. Let’s suppose Martians observe our behaviour. Most things, gathering/preparing food, having and caring for offspring, etc. are all normal, comprehendable behaviour. But music? Listening and performing, doesn’t really seem to have that clear a purpose does it?

Yet, for some strange reason, we are inherently hard wired to respond to music far more easily than, say, reading or writing. Want to distract a baby? Sing a lullaby, NOT show her a book, however colorful or whatever it may be. Listen to a tune, you can hum it, or drum to it, or tap out keys on a piano. You can’t “just do” calculus can you?

Why is it that we’re seemingly wired for something that’s seemingly not entirely useful? Sure, it feels good. Even other pleasure seeking human responses seem to have some purpose. Music, I just don’t see it.

I know it is a very very important part of me, and I assume everybody else. I wonder why.

It’s odd. As I had mentioned earlier, housing issues have been quite chaotic over the past few weeks. I did plan to best (ab)use the situation to my advantage of course, as usual.

So, ads were put up, people came, saw and all that jazz, and I had pretty much made up my mind to say no to every person however frivolous the reason I made up. Just as a friendly reminder to the ex-roomies that they are not entirely bright.

Anyway, today was different. The dude who came to see the place was actually nice. Not to mention, I can’t wait to improve living standards and not have to convince 3 other people each and every time it is not a waste but a necessity. Where, it can be anything from broadbroadband to digital cable, to anything that every normal human being needs. And of course, living with people of different cultures should be an experience.

I mean, that is one of the whole points of coming gazillion miles from home to study isn’t it? If it were the thair chadam cases that were the attraction, I’d assume IISc would have been a better bet. Not that there is anything wrong with that, not just what I am looking for at the moment.

Of course, the minor drawback is he’s a male. First, amma can breathe again. And secondly, 2 out of 3 isn’t so bad, for now.

I almost can’t wait for his response, and almost hoping and so on it’s a yes. Who’d have ever known?

And in an unexpected turn of events, I am actually busy today. Not so busy that I don’t have time to blog. But so busy that today’s entry won’t be more than these two sentences.

Update: I wasn’t entirely truthful. I’m just lazy to think or really type. Limited the google box in the main site footer to just the umich personal domain. Also fixed bloogle. Now the blog search really works, instead of just occupying space.