Tagged: random

The heat is on


Just came into the lab. Read some disturbing news, both on the national front and the US front (national == India) It seems that the ceasefire between India and Pakistan has ended, as the countries exchange fire on the LoC. Ironically, this comes on the eve of the crucial Siachen peace talks, [[http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/804252.cms|ToI reports]].

Meanwhile, the much hyped Google IPO seems to be landing into some trouble. News.com is running a whole [[http://news.com.com/Getting+jittery+over+Google/2009-1030-5298699.html?part=dht&tag=ntop|bunch of stories]] on the controversy surrounding the Google IPO. Google [[http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/20040805-4074.html|has admitted]] to a stock goofup — the company has been (allegedly) giving out stock to its employees for quite some time, but failed to register them. This could shake Google’s credibility and dampen the investor enthusiasm so far.

Its all in the seat


Have you ever wondered how when you walk into a seating place (be it an Auditorium, the Airport, a lecture hall, a seminar or any other place), you always seem to “want” to sit in some particular spot; and you’re feel disappointed when that spot has been taken by someone. Mind you, this spot might not be precise — infact, mostly its very fuzzy, and depends highly on the context (class/movie/game etc) — however, it is consistent in the sense that in more or less every lecture you’d find yourself sitting (or intending to sit) at the same place.

I have often thought about this, and its my strong belief that the choices we make for our seats (much as the choices we make for anything else) can tell a lot about our psyche and personality. More than once, I tried to embark upon an experimental evaluation of this theory, but it never worked out. The most interesting aspect of course, would be to draw some generalized conclusions, such that given a person’s seating pattern, you would be able to say something about his/her personality and psychological make up. Wouldn’t that be interesting? I’m sure the intelligence agencies already have stuff like this that they don’t make public!

Wasted weekend


Another wasted weekend. Well, not *really* wasted in the sense that I did exactly whats supposed to be done on a typical weekend — nothing! Nothing academically productive, that is. I hung out with friends, caught up a bunch of movies, and just chilled out. Not too bad, I’d say, but I just feel that kind of dissatisfaction if at the end of the day I haven’t done something which I think is not just “timepass”. I guess this blog entry is a part of that effort, since it *does* take some amount of “thinking” for writing the blog :)

It was Manish’s birthday today. We bashed him up good last night. Some of his american friends had come over and they were playing poker, and when the clock struck 12 as is customary we picked up Manish for his GPL (*not* the GNU GPL please). Himanshu planted few, but really really solid kicks, while Suchit just went crazy .. I guess he has something for spanking and asses!! I vent my share of wrath as well, as Manish’s friends watched shocked and dazed.. they were so totally out of words, it was actually funny!

I called the weekend wasted because we had a nightout last night and I absolutely hate nightouts. Why? well because the next day gets completely screwed up — you get up like 2 in the afternoon and you spend rest of the day figuring out who the hell you are and what the hell is happening with your life.. I find it depressing and disorienting. Nevertheless, last night was fun and infact the day didn’t turn out to be that bad either.

We saw the classic comedy “Gol Maal” first, and then at around 5 in the morning we started watching “The Day After Tomorrow”, but that was just about okay… the story was ordinary, the acting was below average and the plot was hardly gripping. The only nice thing was probably the affects and nature sequences. In the afternoon I got hold of Himanshu and made a trip to the Indian store to refill our supplies of Indian stuff. The Indian stores here suck so bad, they don’t have any other hair oil except Parachute and Dabar Anwla!

After that we drove out to Cardiff by the sea and Solana beach.. the weather was fantastic and the drive was really fun. That reminds me… I was to have done reading the DMV driver’s handbook over the weekend. So much for plans… wonder when I’ll finally take that damned test!

Happy birthday to moi!


For a change, I had fun on this birthday! I mean, not that I didn’t have fun on my other birthdays, but somehow I never felt like celebrating birthdays. I mean, what is it so special about a birthday? Why is it always a “happy” birthday?

I guess the spirit behind the notion is that there are people around you who feel you are special and important and that this day is to celebrate that feeling, and to enjoy in the company of loved ones. But to me it often seems that this meaning has been long lost. These days, the “happy” birthdays are just associated with birthday parties where you go with a present, eat drink and then come back. How often to do we **actually** feel happy for a person on his birthday? How often do we really find our selves thankful to have enjoyed the company of a person, and thus want to celebrate this occasion?

Atleast to me, it seems that this is happening less and less. Nevertheless, I had a great birthday. Its actually on 21st June (which, I like to tell everyone but most people don’t appreciate, is the summer solstice too… or was it equinox?? well something!), but since 20th was a sunday and a treat from Himanshu for his internship in Qualcomm was also due, we decided to celebrate on 20th evening itself.

The day didn’t start off very well, since I was slogging on this paper but not making much progress. Then finally sometime in the afternoon I made a breakthrough which lifted my spirits and put me in the mood for a party. Initially we were thinking of going to an Indian or Thai restaurant, but since we didn’t have a car, we really didn’t have many options. We ended up picking California Pizza Kitchen; a) coz we’d never been there, and b) coz i’d always wanted to go in there :-D We made it to CPK at around 9:30 or so. Nishant was generous enough to sponsor the drinks. We started off with a bottle of red wine. I still haven’t been able to develop a taste for wines

I feel wasted


As was I chasing random links through the web, I ran across the page(s) of this kid — [[http://www.aaronsw.com/|Aaron Swartz]]. If you think the name is funky, then wait till you find out more. Here’s what his website says:

> Aaron Swartz is a teenage writer, coder, and [[http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#WHAT_IS|hacker]]. He was a finalist for the ArsDigita Prize for excellence in building non-commercial web sites at the age of 13. At 14 he co-authored the [[http://purl.org/rss/1.0/|RSS 1.0 specification]], now used by thousands of sites to notify their readers of updates. He’s a member of the W3C’s [[http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/|RDF Core Working Group]] which is developing the format for the Semantic Web and [[http://www.creativecommons.org/aboutus/people#15|Metadata Advisor]] to the [[http://www.creativecommons.org/|Creative Commons]]. He’s also the author of rss2email, xmltramp, HTML diff, and html2text.

Beat that! I feel so wasted!! I’m 22, and what have I accomplished? Nothing :-O argh!!! Anyways, this is something I keep worrying once every few months. And its good reason to kick back from self derogation and get back to doing some productive work :-)