A Tsunami triggered by an earthquake in Indonesia killed thousands. It felt sad to know that hundreds died in the city of Chennai. I lived there for 17 years. Strollers and joggers on Saturday morning in Marina beach in Chennai would have seen 30 feet wave heading towards them. I can only imagine their panic. I am wondering why they weren't able to predict an earthquake of such a high magnitude (8.9 on Richter scale).

I watched "Lemony Snicket's A series of Unfortunate events" on Christmas eve. 4 of us went and had the whole movie hall to ourselves. The movie was good, maybe a little too dark for kids.

I watched "House of Flying Daggers" yesterday. Pretty good. Great visuals, every shot was so vibrant and colourful. As in earlier movies of the same genre like Hero or "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon", the martial arts scenes were exaggerated but they were lyrical and blended well with the visual poetry. I kept wondering when will Indian movies reach this standard. I mean the Chinese movie industry is not much older than Indian industry, and Bollywood churns out hundreds of movies every year. But very few of them could compare in technical standard with Hollywood or Chinese movies. Maybe its the money involved or maybe its the problem with Indian audience, the Indian directors are giving what they want.

I finally scratched my long standing itch about wanting to buy a digital camera. Thats a supposedly funny way of saying I bought a digital camera. The final choice was between Canon S500 and Sony DSC-W1. I heard good things about both. Sony's is a little larger, but its LCD display is full one inch bigger. Canon's comes with proprietary batteries while Sony's works with standard AAA cells. Sony's costs about $50 less than Canon. But Canon's storage is (more) standard Compact Flash whereas Sony's storage is their Memory Stick. I checked the prices and Memory Stick costs almost twice as Compact Flash. Also among my friends circle, I knew at least 3 owning a Canon (2 of them have S400 and one has S500) and all of them seemed happy with it. I knew no one having a Sony digital camera. I think its the Memory Stick thing that puts most people off. Anyway, I bought the Canon S500 from Amazon. Here is a mugshot of me shot in front of a mirror. You can see how small the camera is. I like its metallic body, gives a sturdy feeling in hand.


My new Camera 


I watched Ocean's Twelve on its first day of release. Read this review. I agree with everything it says. You would too, if you waste $10 to watch the movie.

Just finished "Neuromancer" by William Gibson. Really an intense read. All his descriptions keep snaking through dream, reality, cyberspace and back. I really had to concentrate hard to follow the story. This book was the origin of terms like "cyberspace", "jack in" (to mean connecting to a network). The book was written in 1984, when Internet was only beginning to become mainstream, but Gibson already imagined global networks, ubiquitous and wearable computing etc.
Of course, Neuromancer was the single biggest source of inspiration for "The Matrix" movies. Look here for a list of comparisons.
Hmm, now I am thinking of picking up "His Dark Materials", where I left it from.

Gmail now has POP access. Neat.If you use pine to read email like I do, here is an easy way of accessing gmail from pine.
Create a file called .gmail with the entry

inbox-path={pop.gmail.com/service=pop3/ssl/user=yourgmailusername}

To read gmail, just type

pine -x .gmail

Diwali came and went. No fire crackers. Boohoo. At least I had some good home food,thanks to Karthik and his wife.

Yesterday I went to "Diwali Night" organised by IIT alumni. They had a competition of sorts between the different IITs, which was fun. Most of them enacted some skit parodying Hindi movies. I felt the whole hall was overflowing with pride for being an IITian. Thats not unfounded,IIT alumni list will read like the who's who of computer industry.

I didn't think I will feel cold at 50s. Being used to sub zero at Michigan, I thought I could just laugh at people who say its cold here. I do feel the bite sometimes here. Not as much as in Michigan, though. Goes to prove what I am really used to is the 100s in India.

I watched The Incredibles yesterday. Hilarious movie. Computer animation is
getting more and more realistic. Bay area movie theatres are so crowded.
AMC 20 was sold out for most of the night shows. And there was a huge queue
to get into the movie hall even if one had a ticket.
I kept telling my room mate how in Ann Arbor we can just walk into a theatre,
few minutes before the movie begins, buy the ticket, go to the snack stall to
buy sour patch and there would be still enough time to get to the hall and
find good seats.


Currently reading Philip Pullman's "His dark materials" trilogy.
Entertaining read.

I went to Castro street in San Francisco on Halloween evening. Didn't stay there long enough, so I probably missed the actual fun which might have happened later in the night. Nevertheless, I saw people with funny and interesting Halloween costumes.Pity I didn't take a camera. There were two guys wearing Bush and Kerry masks and boxing trunks and gloves. They were mock fighting, with the guy in Bush mask getting knocked out all the time. There was another guy with silver paint all over and performing robot dance movements for Michael Jackson songs. He was pretty good at it.

Well, other than that, nothing much has been happening. I pretty much follow the same schedule of going to work at 9 and returning at 7 during weekdays and sleep the whole weekend. Work is interesting, so I am not complaining. I am planning to rent a car this month, so hopefully I will do something interesting during weekends.

My sister gave birth to a cute baby boy. I am an uncle now. Man, that makes me sound old.

This article on speeding tickets was pretty hilarious and humbling to me. Oh well, let bygones be bygones.

I have been eating out a lot lately. My current favourites are Mango (Jamaican cuisine) in Palo Alto and Banana Leaf (Malaysian cuisine) in Milpitas. Of course I meant favourites that are not Indian, I can go any time to Saravana Bhavan.

I am finding myself not doing much physical activity lately. I am missing all the badminton and racquet ball I used to play. Should start running or something.

Long time, no blog. Past weeks have been kind of busy. I flew to California, and after a week I had to fly to Houston to attend a conference. The Houston trip had lot of firsts for me. First time I rented a car by myself, first time I drove this huge Dodge Magnum, first time I drove alone on freeway for such a long time (about 70 miles), first time I got a speeding ticket on the way back. The speeding ticket was very unfortunate, it was 4:30 am and I was driving from Galveston to Houston to catch a 6:00 am flight. Apparently I was doing 75 mph on a 60 mph zone. There was absolutely no one on the road, it was dark I never noticed the cop car, it suddenly
materialised behind me. I don't know how much I have to cough up for the ticket. I was kind of nervous after the ticket incident, I don't know how I got the parking brake on in the car, and after I started driving, I didn't know where the lever was, it was not on the right behind the gear lever. I drove the rest of 20 something miles with the parking brakes on. Serves the rental company well for ripping me off by saying they didn't have a compact car.
Yesterday I went to IKEA, now I know why Mike likes IKEA.

I was woken up at 4:00am by loud beeping noises from some car in the parking lot. I guess it was the anti-theft alarm triggered by a skunk or something, or maybe there was some loose contact. It was loud and continuous. It wasn't a constant beep by had different pitches and notes. Part of the time it will like a fire engine bell, part of the time a cop car's sound and so on. It would stop for sometime and then start again. I lay on my bed too lazy to change clothes,go out and see what was causing it. The annoying part was, it wasn't continuous. The expectation that it will start anytime again was not letting me sleep. Anyway, exhaustion took over finally and I fell asleep. I dreamed of getting into my car, going to office, getting the baseball bat, coming back and smashing that delinquent car's wind shields and headlight. I think I was jumping up and down on the bonnet, shouting "Stop! Stop or I will kill you..". But it wouldn't stop.. Aaaaaah!

Just finished reading "Cuckoo's egg" by Cliff Stoll. It started out interestingly, but began to be repetetive for most part. And then the ending was drawn out too long. Most of the book is like "My beeper rang, I run to the switchboard/printer, call someone to make the trace,call originates in Germany, blah, blah, blah....". Yes, this is exciting to read once, but this routine repeats ad nauseam without variation for at least 10 chapters. And FBI tells him to stop snooping, only to call back later to continue snooping. This happens 1001 times and the author writes about every one of them. Of course they happened many times in real life, but thats no reason to put every event in the book. Overall, I felt, what should have been a few chapters
novelette has been beaten thinner and thinner and has squeezed out of all excitement.

It's a picture perfect view from my balcony. It just rained a bit, so there is refreshing smell of clean air. There is no wind, so everything seems so still. There are some ducks swimming lazily in the pond. The droopy willowtree leaves add to the lethargic mood of the scenery. Shouts of children playing is faintly audible. I just woke up from a short siesta (man, I love these afternoon naps) and am sipping hot tea sitting in the balcony, swallowing the scenery also through a screen of thin vapour going up from my cup. Life is beautiful.

Now, let me go hack simplescalar.

I watched Hero today. Good movie, great visuals. The stories pace wasn't hurried, but the fights were fast and terrific. I would say it was like visual poetry in martial arts, with lot of exaggerations just like poems, but but only to convey the beauty. Should watch more Chinese martial arts movies..

When I was in California, I went to Muir woods, just north of San Francisco.The tall Sequoia trees were really amazing. Fog set in during the walk in the woods. Really, fog in between tall trees or clouds clinging to the peeks of hills etc. increases the beauty many fold. I am waiting
for pictures from my friend, I'll upload once I get them.

Going through post vacation slump. (Just want to rename the perpetual slump to whatever suits the occasion, hehe). Anyway, got lot of work in my plate, should get going on them..

Yay! I am in sunny California now. Past 2 days we were at Hotchips conference. There were some interesting talks, and some boring ones. The talk about Mars rover was great, although its got nothing to do with chips. Anyways, 2 days of good exercise for the brain
cells.

I am staying at a friends place for the rest of the week. Looking forward to some good Indian food, and other stuff I cant easily get in Ann Arbor, like warm Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Jamba Juice.

My room mate Szabolcs (its
pronounced Sabolsh) works on some haptics stuff. He wanted me to be a test subject for one of his experiments. There was a chair mounted on a platform which can move sideways. The chair had a joystick attached to it at the right armrest, and the idea was to accurately control something using the joystick (in this case, a cursor on a computer screen), when the chair was shaking randomly. Apparently, with no haptic feedback, the control accuracy was poor, and with some feedback to the joystick (similar to the jerk you get on game controllers when you hit something or get shot in a video game), the control accuracy improved. I don't know by how much, but I had fun being a test subject, sitting on a violently shaking chair. I got scared a bit the first time the platform jerked abrubtly to one side. I had a good time..

I finished reading "Dragons of Summer Flame", one of the books in Dragonlance series. Bit of extreme fantasy, I think. I like fantasy stories,but this didn't have even a wee bit of logic in it. Random events kept happening all along. It seemed like the authors didn't know what do with
all the characters. Anyways, I managed to finish it because it was a easy read and didn't take that long.

Next week, I am off to Bay area with some of my group members to attend Hotchips. I am staying there for the weekend. My taste buds have already started to anticipate some authentic south indian food at Saravana Bhavan.

I had been wanting to do something about my resume for sometime, it looked so unprofessional. So I copied some script from the net and made a more maintainable form of my resume. From a single Latex file,the HTML, PDF and text form of my resume get generated. Pretty cool.


I went camping to Michigan's upper peninsula. The campsite was pretty domesticated, but still I enjoyed sleeping under the stars for a night. We visited walked along the shores of one of the Great Lakes,visited St. Ignace downtown and went to Tahquamenon falls. Overall, a refreshing break.

Fank, Rajiv and I went to Diary Queen today. We had a rather amusing
(according to me) conversation that veered off into multiple directions.
Here's an approximate version of it..


kvm : You know how many calories an adult requires per day?
rajiv : 2000 maybe...
kvm : (pointing to chocalate malt that rajiv was sucking on)
Well, thats 560 of it.
rajiv : Oh, man!
fank : Hmm.. I wonder how they calculate the food calorie rating.
(All of us wondering..)
rajiv : Maybe they calculate it using the formula E = mc2
kvm : Hmm, what's the unit for energy again? How come its
kgs times metres squared over seconds squared?
fank : Is that right ?
kvm : Well, I don't think Einstein would have invented a formula
in which the units don't match up..
(Laughter. More wondering..)
kvm : What is energy again? Force times what..?
fank : Force time distance..
kvm : So it works out. Energy is force times distance and Force
is mass times acceleration. kgs times (metres over seconds squared) times
metres.
fank : Ah.
rajiv : Ah.
kvm : Ah.
...
fank : Man, in high school I used to remember all these formulas
very well. In fact, formulas more complex than these..
kvm : In high school, my physics teacher used to cut off marks
for not writing correct units for answers.. He would ask "Whats this?
x oranges? x apples? "..
rajiv : We used to do complex problems, right? Like calculating
sine and cosine components of force, and so on..

Well, it went on in some other nerdy directions, that I don't recall
fully. Like I said, It was amusing.

Bad things keep happening to my car. When I turn on the AC or the headlights or the right indicator, the windshield wiper switches on. Really weird.Also, I drove on the freeway today. When I went beyond 60 mph the car started having an eerie vibration. I have never gone faster than 60 mph before, so this is the first time I am noticing it. Maybe I am imagining. Should ask a better driver. Another visit to the mechanic to fix the wiper is adding on to the car's cost. That sucks.


Four of us went rock climbing last weekend. Lot of fun. Thanks to Florent for the pictures.

All avid readers of this diary are complaining about the inactivity.So here goes..

I got a car, a 1993 MAZDA MX-6. I thought it was quite a good deal, but I had to spend more money on it to replace its muffler. Doesn't feel like a good deal anymore. Anyways, if it holds good until I finish my Ph.D, I will be satisfied.


I locked myself out of the car. Left the headlights on, the battery drained,the remote wouldn't open the door, the key wouldn't open the door, and due to an enthusiastic maneuver by Fank, the key broke in half and one half got stuck inside the driver door. I am not blaming him, the key was already flimsy. Anyhow, I got a free tow to the mechanic from AAA, got the half key out, made a new key.


I got a 20 inch flat panel in the office. Pretty cool. I used to have 1024x768 resolution, the 1600x1200 used to hurt my eyes for some reason. I started to try the 1600x1200 on the new monitor, its quite ok now. Maybe my eyesight improved.


Fank blogged about fireflies. I was reminded of a bus journey I had between Chennai and Bangalore. The bus was going through thick vegetation, not a forest exactly, but a stretch of road with no towns. I remember 100s of fireflies near bushes and around trees. It was as if a whole tree was aglow. I see fireflies here, but I never again saw as many in one place.

I watched the Tamil movie Virumaandi yesterday. I liked it a lot. It sure deserves an Oscar in my opinion. Too bad it won't even make it into the fray.Kamal Hassan is one of the better actors in Indian movies. With this one, I should acknowledge he is one of the better directors also. Not many people beyond the borders of South Tamilnadu can understand the story, its strongly related to the culture of a particular caste there. Anyways, I enjoyed the simple clean story telling.

I am kind of juggling three activities at work. Its kind of fun, when one gets boring, I can switch to another. But usually, its the case that all three are boring :).

Yay! I got a gmail account. I was boasting to my friend about it, but he thought it wasn't that cool. There are lot of privacy concerns surrounding gmail. These sites (1, 2) raise good points.Personally, I think the targetted text ads are better than those annoying blinking ads that appear on every page in those other free emails. And, of course, gmail offers 1GB. I don't look at the ads anyway.

I thought there was lot of wasted space on my front page, so I made my del.icio.us
links show there. del.icio.us is a real cool tool.

Alright, I made a new template for my homepage. The layout is completely CSS based now. No tables! There seems to be a border around the bulletin board, I couldn't figure out why. Well, I didn't want to spend any more time on it, so just left it as such.

Bittorrent rocks. I found this site , which has torrents for lots of tamil movies. I have been downloading quite a few movies lately. I am a veteran cyber pirate now. Arrrrrrrr!!!

Yesterday was the Micro paper deadline. After a long refreshing sleep and post deadline slouching for the whole day, I went to watch the recent Harry Potter movie. It was better than I expected. Unlike the earlier ones, this didn't just narrate the book word by word. The screenplay made the movie exciting enough, even though I knew the story. I realised I haven't watched a Tamil movie for over a year now. Should rent one or two from the local store.

I want to change the theme for my website. I have started hating the rounded corners. I guess the post deadline slump is a good time to embark on this..

I think I am suffering from compulsive mail checking disorder. Whenever I am at a computer,

pine -i

is the single most executed command. Its like that guy from Verizon ads suffering from compulsive "can you hear me now?" disorder. Every fews steps he takes, he has to say "can you hear me now?". I was thinking, maybe I should alias my

pine

command to

echo "Go get a life, you pathetic moron". 

The plate is full next week, with Micro deadline and all. I want some parallel activity, maybe I will start reading a book, now that I am finally done with Silmarillion. Maybe Diamond Age.

I setup a bulletin board on my homepage .Not that I am expecting great activity on the board. It just provided me with a short period of fun, hacking up Fank's script to work for me.


On a different note, I was deemed fit to continue with Ph.D program by our department's faculty. I don't know whether thats going to make any big difference to my pace of research work. Oh well, one formality out of the way.


Here's a really cool optical illusion. Needs FLASH.

I thought this was pretty cool, live preview of html code.
It even understands "div" tags. Try <div class="captiontext">Test </div>

You type HTML in here:

...and the results should appear here:

I went batting today. I was barely able to hit the 65 mph ones the first time. Next time I went into the cage, I decided I won't try to swing the bat, but just try to stop the ball, kind of like a cricket defense shot. I was quite good at that,and it helped me in getting used to the pace. In the last few pitches, I went for the swing and was able connect two or three times. It was pretty cool.


And then I went bowling. This was my first time. I got a score of 82. Well, Nate says 82 isn't terrribly bad for a first timer. I even made 2 strikes. Ok, I suck. Anyway, I liked bowling, should do it again some other time.


On the research front, I am back into Java code writing mode, for the new compiler our group is trying to build. Summer is going to be kind of busy, lot of stuff on my plate. Hmm..I am already longing for a break.

Ha, I managed to get my recent del.icio.us links show up here. Check out the box on the left.

If anyone's watching, checkout my new template. There are no images to get the cool curvy corners, just some neat CSS tricks. I would like to acknowledge the original site from which I cogged the idea, but I have not bookmarked it.

Today, I had whats called "preliminary examination". I basically had to make a presentation about the research I had done in past 2 years to 3 faculty members and they judge whether I am fit to continue in the Ph.D program. It went on well, I guess. Well, I will get to know how close my guess is in a couple of weeks. On the bright side, its over, and I am really relaxed now.

I got rid of Haloscan to do my commenting. I installed the open source commenting system from Blogspeak . I don't expect anyone leaving comments on my website, but it was fun installing the script and trying it out. May be I am spending too much time on useless, non-consequential stuff..

I registered with Haloscan to add commenting to my website. One can now annotate any of my pages with comments. I really should have written my own code, it seems easy. Oh, well. I will do it some other time, I guess.
I also wanted to add my del.icio.us links to my site, but I couldn't get the del.icio.us server to send me 304 response when I send If-Modified-Since header entry in the HTTP request. I don't want every page display on my site making a full download of my links from del.icio.us.

Next week is going to be moderately busy, with a report due, and I have to practice for my prelims talk. Prelims is a major milestone for lot of grad students, but with the CGO paper, it seems a mere formality for me. Unless, of course the examiners are going to make it difficult, and screw me over. Let's see..

Long time no blog. Past weeks have been kind of busy, with homeworks,
paper deadlines and all. So much so, nothing exciting happened.

Days are getting warmer. I actually sweat when walking to the department,
sometimes. The fun part I get to go out and throw the ball or play
frisbee. I also bought a baseball bat. It has been fun playing
pseudo baseball/cricket kind of game. Well, should come up with some real
rules to make it more exciting.

I added 2 Asterix books to my site. (See the link on the left box). The
boxes become kind of cramped when I set the image width to 700. But the
letters are not legible at lower width. Oh well, its good enough, I think.

I made a small change to my site's style.css. Visited links now appear with
a "visited!" stamped across them. Its just a background-image attribute to
the a:visited tag.

I found this cool site which can make ascii art from jpeg images.
Here is my mugshot in ascii art.

Few may know why I had this photo taken. For the rest, this was taken
in some obscure corner of Sunnyvale.

I had a weird experience yesterday. I had to go to my friend's place in
Sunnyvale and Dave August dropped me at my friend's apartment complex.
(How we spent a long time going up and down the Mary Ave. searching
for the cross street, and how I depleted his cell phone's batteries is a
different story). Anyway I hadn't heared my friend's apartment number
properly when he told me over phone. I thought it was 103 and knocked at
that door. A old lady opened it. I knew my friend doesn't live with any
old ladies, so I said sorry. She asked me which one I was looking for. I said
maybe it was 133. She said its on the other side, so I thanked her and
started walking to the other side. She started following me, pointing to each
apartment and saying, "No this is not the one, not this one.." and so on.
I was thinking, maybe she is over zealous in trying to help. Now,
thats an Indian neighbourhood, and some Indians were walking on the street.
She started pointing me to each of them and started asking whether they
knew me. Man, I was embarrassed and just wanted to disappear from there.
Anyway, I couldn't find 133, and the old lady was still prancing around
trying to find it. I had my friends phone number, but I didn't have a
cell phone myself. I had no other choice but to ask the old lady whether
I could use her phone. She accepted gladly (bless her soul). Now, when
I entered her apartment, it was totally dark. Weird part is, glowing
eyes started popping up here and there, just like in those cartoons. There
were so many cats in her apartment, I counted at least 8. Then the
reek of cat poop hit me. It was so strong and pervasive inside the closed
space that I felt I was going to throw up or faint or both. Anyway, I made
the call quickly, and found out my friend's apartment number was actually
1003. I nearly ran out the old lady's apartment, barely thanking her.
Yeah, she was really helpful and all, but the whole thing was really weird.

I just finished my talk in the CGO conference. I guess it went ok. I can
enjoy California weather for the rest of the week without worries now.
Lot of friends to meet up, lot of restaurants to go to. I made a list of eating
places to go to before I left, but I have forgotten some items in the list.
I remember Udipi (check), Saravana Bhavan, Krispy Kreme. I am sure there
were a couple more. I hope I remember them before I leave.

I scanned some of the photos shot during Pittsburgh trip.
Here's one with me gazing at the Ohio river.






And here is one with me and Rajiv in front of the temple.

I spent a lot of time this week thinking about homework problems. The answer to
one of them eluded me for a long time. It was kind of frustrating.

Next week is going to be busy, I got to prepare slides for the CGO
conference. That means I have to recall what was in the paper. Its been only
a couple of months, but seems like a long time. I have already forgotten
what was in it :(

I have been reading Tolkien's Silmarillion. Its not an easy read, with 1000s
of names and events. Worse still, same person is refered to by different names
in different places. Basically, its the story of middle-earth, from the
beginning of time until before "The Hobbit" story. I hardly get past
2-3 chapters in one sitting. Its quite interesting though.

Spring is here. It was in the 50s and I walked outside without my jacket.
There were little patches of snow on the ground. I wanted to laugh
a villanous laugh at them and say, "Thats the sound of your death!".
I am being silly.

I found this poem in some forum. I bet anyone who did schooling in Madras can identify with all of what it says. Especially the part about playing cricket with writing pad as bat, and "Big Fun" bubble gums. Man, that brings nostalgia.

Some song has been driving me mad past 2 days. I heard it in radio and
recognised it as one of those I used to listen to long time back, and I want
to listen to it again. Worst part is, I can't seem to recall either the
lyrics or the tune, but am sure I can recognise it when I hear it again.
Its frustrating not being able to recall...

Its still cold and snowy in Michigan and I have got lots of stuff to do
this week. So even though its spring break this week, its neither
spring, nor break for me :(.

I went to Pittsburgh yesterday with Rajiv and Somesh. We visited the
popular (with Indians) Venkateshwara temple there. It was nice to hear
Thiruppavai chanting after what feels like eons. The temple kitchen
served awesome Uppuma and curd rice.

We also visited some museums there. I saw a whole T.Rex skeleton for the
first time. But for the cold and wind, we would have done some more
exploring around downtown. We just walked to the Ohio rivershore, took
some snaps and had to run back to the car to escape the cold.

One of the highlights of the trip was the visit to Krispy Kreme. Thier
fresh-made melt-in-your-mouth glazed doughnuts were simply divine.

I hope I survive this week without much work backlog..

CSA department of IISc (that's where I went for masters) had an exciting
programming contest yesterday. My roommate and I had fun solving some
of the problems. We could have solved all of them if we had not been busy
during the day. Here are the problems , for the inquisitive. I wonder whether such problems will come up in real life at all.

I have been wanting to add a comments feature for this diary. The fact
that not many read it is not helping me greatly. Anyways, it will atleast
serve to amuse myself with PHP hacking for few hours. I am not sure
when I will get those hours, though.

3:00 PM

It is "just" cold now, not "bitter" cold or "someone please kill me" cold.
I guess not having a wind takes half the cold out.
And today is also one of those "postcard" days.

8:00 PM

Ok, its again "someone please kill me" cold. Brrrr....

Its been a long time since I bought books, so I thought I will order some
today. I wanted to buy Neal Asher's Line of Polity, because some friend
told me it was good and also I read some good reviews. Amazon didn't
have it :(. Anyway, I ordered The Silmarillion and Oryx and Crake.

That was a long gap. I wasn't extremely busy or anything. I guess it was
a combination of lethargy and a the fact that nothing really happened
to put in the journal.

The assignments for the algorithms class have been coming regularly. Its
amazing how seemingly simple problems don't look simple at the second
look. The nice (or not so nice) thing about algorithms is, it is like
an art. Even though there is lot of theory funda behind stuff, it
requires imagination and a flash of genius to come up with a good
solution. In my opinion, systematic scientific approach is very
difficult, or impossible, for coming up with elegant algorithms.

I have been playing some old Super Nintendo games lately. These
are the games that most Americans who were kids during 80's grew up with.
That reminds me of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and an ATARI I got from my
uncle when I was in sixth standard. They both still work. I used to be
very good at Pacman on ATARI.

Hmm.. Haven't seen a movie in a while. No good ones are coming this
weekend. Maybe I should watch some old ones..

Looks like something is wrong with my counter script. I had a file with
pairs, one per line. Last week, all of a sudden it got
erased and the counts started at zero. Maybe there was some problem with
locking. Luckily my log file has all the hits in the NCSA log format, so
its no big deal. I should change the counter script it to use a database,
maybe.

When you come out of a movie discussing with your friends how some
alternate endings could have made it better, then it must be a better
than average movie, right? Butterfly Effect is a better than average movie
by that standard. It has time travel, but without all the science
fiction baggage.

Hmm.. This week was mostly uneventful, just classes and meetings. Oh yes,
I started to code in Java a little. I never thought I will program
in Java in my life, always associated it with web application programming.
Its a language which was consciously designed from scratch, and not
something that evolved over time like C/C++. I am not saying its the
best language to program in, though.

I ran 2 miles and played 5 games of badminton this evening.
"Hard Days night..."

I used to be good at badminton few years back. I was totally out of
touch, especially my back hand shots. The shuttle simply wouldn't go
when I hit it with back hand. Should practice that.

I updated my publications
page. I wrote a script to log
the clicks to the papers. Thats the only exciting thing about it.

I finished reading Speaker for the Dead. Not as exciting as
Ender's game, but still a good read. Should start some other book next.

I was chatting with one of my friends from undergrad days. She
reminded me it has been almost 10 years since we started undergrad.
Thats a long time! I was chewing the cud for some time, trying to remember
old events and friends. Nostalgia! Whats was I thinking what I would
be 10 years from then? Maybe I should have written a diary. Oh well,
the term blogging hadn't even been coined then, I think. I didn't have
internet access until my 3rd year. Boy, its scary think of it now,
but again, how can you miss something if you even don't know about it?

I managed to submit the final version of my paper today, way past the
deadline of January 9th. I observed this when writing the paper : I am
thinking in English. Back in my undergrad days, I never "thought" in
English, because I was speaking in Tamil most of the times, with friends
and even with professors outside class. When I went to Bangalore, most
friends didn't speak Tamil, so I had to converse with them in English.
Even then I used to think in Tamil and translate to English. I am not
able to pin-point when the transition happened. I guess when I went to
work for HP, I was speaking English most of my waking hours, so may be
it started then.


Today is
Pongal, one of my favourite festivals. I am missing the sweet pongal
jaggery/coconut thing that we used to have during this festival. I
ate so much that I invariably used to get a stomach upset after it.
And of course, the sugarcanes. Boy! its more than 2 years since I ate
sugarcane :(


I have started running, afterall. Ran 2 miles today. Its an indoor track, kind
of boring. But better than not running.


It snowed and snowed and snowed today. Probably 5 inches. It was a pain
getting around.

Culture is a virus. Atleast it spreads like one, according to Neal
Stephenson in "Snow Crash". I finally finished reading it. I took a long time
since I started reading it about 3 months ago. The book got me thinking on
couple of things : Why are human languages so different? Why do they tend
to diverge instead of converging? If our brain is a hardware,
is it reprogrammable? Anyways, it was a nice thrilling science fiction.


I saw this movie "Groundhog Day". I am convinced Bill Murray is the
funniest actor. The movie had an interesting concept too. Bill Murray is
caught in a time loop that spans a single day. Leads to some hilarious
as well as thought-provoking situations. It had a nice screenplay too,
not involving unnecessary sci-fi like scenes.


Classes have started for this term. I have been trying unsuccessfully to get
into a groove, so that I can plan my regular running times. I guess I will
start once the final version of the paper is submitted, which I am quite
close to.


India is doing quite well in the match against Australia. I can't go to
sleep with such an exciting match going on. Which means I will wake up
late tomorrow. So much for the groove..

Happy New Year!

I am sort of glad the break is over. The freedom during any break begins
to become fulsome towards the end, especially if you are not going on
trips. I guess its the case with lot of good things in life, like sweets.
Anyways, classes begin Monday and I am sure I will start complaining about
the lack of freedom soon.


I watched Peter Pan few days back. Decent movie. I think it was much better
compared to the earlier Robin Williams starrer.


I was watching an old Batman movie today. They were flashing interesting
tidbits on the bottom of the screen, which were hilarious. When Batman and
Catwoman were kissing, they said "Bats and Cats have different mating
seasons". When an helicopter with Batman and Robin gets hit by a missile
and is nose diving, they said "Bats can fly much better during night". There
were many others which I don't remember, but I had a good laugh.