OK, so the most depressing thing (well, not really, but let's imagine so) happened today. I got a ticket for jumping a Stop sign on my way to work… but wait, I was on a freaking bicycle! Yeah, that kind-of ticked me off, but hey, at least now you'll see me slowing down slash actually stopping at Stop signs. The world's a safer place I'm sure. I do have to answer a summons from the court though. Eech.

Meanwhile, I've started playing Escape Velocity Nova (or EV Nova) again and it's really this simple-yet-fascinating, addictive-yet-not-exactly-glueing game that's real fun to play. I suggest you give it a try. It used to be Mac-only but's now been ported to Windows as well. The developers have put in a tonne of work into this game and it is very, very, very detailed. I just love it for all the detailed descriptions and pictures of all the planets and systems. According to the developers, a total of 75000-manhours (8.5-manyears) were spent in making the game. That's a lot and it's easy to see where all the work went. This kind of stuff requires time, yes, but also creativity. There are also a whole bunch of references to a whole bunch of things in the game. One lot that I obviously notice are the Lord of the Rings ones. Every once in a while, a ship named Galadriel will send you a Hello message and there's a star system with two planets, Thror and Thraine. There're also references to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; for example, every now and then, you'll see a ship that's intriguing and blue in colour; it's name is ShadeOfBlue and it's Hyperactive. Ah, ye gots to tries it… (oh, and also, these people haven't ceased development; the latest version (1.0.10) introduces Intel support!)

Oh yes, and Happy Diwali. दीपावली के शुभ अवसर पर hope you had fun and all that. Apparently, it's a national holiday in Singapore. Ain't that sweet? I did go out for dinner at an Indian restaurant with some family friends here and it was good. I also spent six hours at work today because I didn't have anything to do and probably made and received a billion phone calls along the lines of "Happy Diwali". Sigh, no firecrackers here, no fireworks, but what I miss the most are the hundreds of दिये (diyas) and candles I used to light and line up in a row. And I used to do that with my brother and we had loads of fun but… I haven't done that since 2002 (since he went away to college). The last Diwali I celebrated in Delhi:

Yeah, I made my very own स्वास्तिक (Swastik), yet that Diwali was still kind-of sad too because (a) we moved to a ground floor house and thus no lighting-candles-on-the-rooftop and (b) lack of brother.

Oh yes, and to standardize speech terminology as well as to give myself a morale boost every now and then, I've now decided to define all kinds of sleep as naps. This means that I'm always taking a nap when I'm asleep and there's no distinction between the afternoon sleep and the aftermidnight sleep. They're both just "naps". Plus, these days, they both last almost the same duration of time anyway, so… It feels so much better when you're going to bed at five-thirty and have to get up at eight if you tell yourself that, in nap-terms, two-and-a-half hours is huge! Then you go and take more four continuous hours of classes, including one midterm and go on to work for another couple of hours before coming home and taking another nap. Sleeping is probably one of the most fun things I do and that's probably why my weekends go away so quickly. :-D

Labels: English

Unrelated story first: this would be the ninth of september. We were driving to see प्यार के साईड इफ़ेक्ट्स (Pyar Ke Side Effects), and on the way, this song ना तुम जानो ना हम (Na Tum Jano Na Hum) was playing on the radio and with all the god-given brain power I possessed, I was trying to remember which film the song was from, and I just couldn't… and I knew I knew it; so that was really frustrating. But then, my mother, who was driving, asked me "यह किस फ़िल्म का गाना है?" ("Which film is this song from?") and I instantly replied "कहो ना प्यार है" ("Kaho Naa Pyar Hai"). I quite literally gave myself the tiniest of shocks. I knew the film but I couldn't coax it out of myself. It took an external impetus to get me to say the name. That was just weird; I mean, I happen to be the person in possession of this information and it is actually accessible to everyone but me. Perfectly ludicrous.

Anyway, I was sitting at work today and it was nearing midnight and I said to myself, "Y'know this algorithms class… admit it, you're really not up to it and believe me, you're going to end up failing every exam in it" and I replied, "Damn right I'm failing it." Which is when I logged in to Axess and dropped the class. I also added a class 11 minutes before the Add Deadline but I'm not saying what it is. بسم الله الرحمن يلرحيم

Also, dropping this algorithms class will probably prevent my begetting of a brain tumour; this class was seriously way over my head. I mean, I've been in classes in which I've scored badly on the exams and the homework assignments have been extremely challenging, but I've always been able to keep up with what the guy's saying in lecture. But here, the lecturer's saying to the class, "Please answer; this is not a trick question; it's actually very simple." and I'm like "I have no clue what you're on about." Probably a bad sign. It's a junior-level class and I'll take it next year when I'm more comfortable with books that weigh three kilos.

Also, I finally have batteries (yes, plural, I have two) for my PowerBook G4 that are actually guaranteed not to explode. For the past two weeks, I have been using one that could have exploded just about any time and killed me. Sure, I would've gone out with a bang (that too in physics lecture or something) but it would've been sad and unfortunate. Besides, I prefer a death in which I get impaled by three black arrows like Boromir did and having some fancy dialogue with the King of Gondor before making an exit stage up… or something… along those lines. Also, now that I have two batteries, I can use my laptop continuously for about eight hours. Cool or what?

Oh, and also, my handwriting is actually being admired here. Can you believe that? Ce n'est pas possible. It amuses me no end because back in UAE, my handwriting was considered shit. Back in Delhi though, yeah, the handwriting scene was pretty bad (our school didn't exactly emphasize…) and I considered mine to be "neat" if nothing better (at least amongst the male population). Here, for the first time, I've heard my F's and I's being called "hot". Yeah, it made me happy. Also, my Chinese teacher likes my handwriting in Chinese. She wrote 你的汉字很好 (Your Chinese characters are very good) on one of my homework assignments and it made me glad beyond words. Gosh, I wish I didn't need praise to make me this happy. Oh for cathartic releases through blogging! I'm just not good at too many things.

Labels: English

Wow, it's been a really busy week. And even though I can complain that it was because we had two quizzes and two homework assignments for Chinese this week, I would mostly be lying because Chinese really isn't a lot of work at all. But, I don't want to ask anyone else in the class whether they share my opinion because I might come off looking like a jerk. Both homework and quizzes make me memorize the Chinese characters which is awesome because it's fun to read and write them. Anyway, yes, straying back to the original topic, thankfully there was no Algorithms homework this week because it would've been the death of me. I did have a Paradigms assignment which was thankfully small enough to get completed within five hours in the wee hours of Thursday morning (sans code commenting of course). And then there was the Physics problem set which caused the most nuisance this week and made me stay up till five yesterday and didn't even let me have the satisfaction of finishing it. No, I had to skip the CS lecture, not for sleep or pleasure, but to finish the Physics problem set so that I could submit it and get to work by… <oops, got distracted by a game of Tetris in which I just beat my own long-standing high score>… 1pm. Yeah, that was a race against time; I finished the PS at 12:47, left the dorm at 12:49, went to Hewlett to drop the assignment and reached work at precisely 1:00pm… which was good because there's this bonus you get at the end of the quarter if you made all your shifts on time and 1:01pm would've been bad news in that respect.

Four hours of work and I was completely exhausted, had dinner, started watching Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (with Wizard People commentary) with a couple of friends but was so sleepy that I couldn't finish watching that and went to take a nap instead. Got up from the nap about five hours ago and the room was empty; my curiosity did not compel me to call someone and ask where everyone was because my chain of thought was interrupted by an invitation to play DotA, which I gladly accepted. And now that I've made another high score in Tetris, it looks like this week's purpose has been fulfilled.

Oh yeah, and I went to this career fair on Tuesday. It made me realize how similar career fairs, glasses of milk and friction are - all quite necessarily but most undesirable. But, cool thing was that, at the Apple booth-stall-thing, instead of giving business cards, they gave away "One free song" iTunes Store cards (which actually haven't been updated and are still living in the "iTunes Music Store" era) and so today I ended up downloading Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a really beautifully sung song by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole (good thing I don't have pronounce stuff while typing).

And yeah, those red iPod nanos? So not interesting.

Labels: English

मुझे पता था यह होगा। कि देश से बाहर जा कर हिन्दी सुधारने की इच्छा बढ़ जाएगी। हिन्दी सीखना तो स्कूल की आठवी में ही छूट गई थी। और मैं कभी अख्वार तो पढ़ता नहीं था - न हिन्दी न अंग्रेज़ी में। तो भाषा का ज्ञान तो नष्ट होना ही था। मेरी हिन्दी कितनी बर्बाद हो चुकी थी इसका मुझे पिछले साल एहसास हुआ - पहली बार जब मैं अपनी नानी के साथ दैनिक जागरण पढ़ रहा था और वे मुझसे दसगुनी ज़्यादा गति से पढ़ रहीं थीं - हाँ उन्हें भी इस बात पर हंसी आई - और दूसरी बार जब मैंने थोड़ा बहुत हिन्दी में कम्प्यूटर पर लिखना शुरू किया और मुझे हर दूसरे वाक्य के लिए शब्दकोश का सहारा लेना पड़ा (वैसे जब बात आगे आई है तो यह भी कह दिया जाए कि हिन्दी के लिए मुझे अभी तक कोई अच्छा शब्दकोश मिला नहीं है - एक यह है जो सबसे ठीक ठाक लगता है पर यह भी कुछ खास नहीं है)।

ज्ञान को सुधारने की तो एक ही तरक़ीब है - सीखो और इस्तेमाल करो। क्योंकि आजकल दोपहर में मेरी कोई क्लास नहीं लगती है मैं कल से संस्क्रित की क्लास में बैठने जाऊँगा। मुझे स्कूल में कभी संस्क्रित सीखने की कोई खास इच्छा नहीं थी पर अभ मौसम बदल गया है। पहले हम मज़ाक उड़ाते थे उन लोंगों का जो फ़्रांसीसी जर्मन और रूसी छोड़ कर संस्क्रित लेते थे। आखिर संस्क्रित का असली उपयोग ही क्या था? पर अब जब मैंने इस बारे में कुछ ज़्यादा गौर किया है मुझे लगता है कि संस्क्रित हमारे लिए उस तरह महत्वपूर्ण है जिस तरह लैटिन अंग्रेज़ी के लिए है। मुझे यह क्लास लेने की और ज़्यादा इच्छा भी इसलिए हुई क्योंकि जो प्रोफ़ेसर पढ़ा रहें हैं उनका नाम हिंदुस्तानी नहीं लगता और अगर कोई अमरीकी पढ़ा रहा है फिर तो जिज्ञासा और भी ज़्यादा होती है।

चीनी सीखने में बहुत मज़ा आ रहा है। अध्यापिकाजी भी बहुत मज़ेदार हैं। और चीनी लिखना तो... बहुत ही सही है। अब तक हम चीनी में सैंतीस शब्द सीख चुकें हैं। चीनी की ध्वनि हिन्दी से काफ़ी मिलती जुलती है। कभी मिलूंगा तो सुनाऊँगा।

明天見 (Míngtiān Jiàn)!
(चीनी में 'कल मिलेंगे' या 'मिंग् तियेन् जियेन्')

मुझे कहने में शर्मिंदगी होती पर सच तो यह है कि मेरी हिन्दी बिलकुल रद्द है। गलतियाँ निगाह डालिये तो बता दीजियेगा। धन्यवाद।

Labels: English

Yeah, so I'm at work right now and about three metres behind me are 17 boxes each containing a 3.0GHz Quad-Core Mac Pro and 2 boxes each containing a 30" Cinema Display. They wouldn't notice just one box missing, would they? I want to be thief.

Labels: English

Just finished my programming paradigms assignment and submitted it. I really like their submission system, which is command-line based but really spiffy.

Computer Science classes have this very handy concept of giving students "free late days", i.e., you can submit your assignment/homework late x number of times without any grade-reduction penalty. In all the previous CS classes I'd taken, these "late days" were instead "late periods". Since homeworks were usually due on one of the lecture days, a "late period" meant you could submit the assignment on the next lecture day. This was most useful when an assignment was due Friday and I took a late period to submit it on Monday. However, late days are better because you don't always need an extra 72 hours, but perhaps just 5-10 hours and late days usually come in larger quantities than late periods.

This current CS class strictly uses late days and so you basically get 24-hour extensions. I just used one of those. We get five of them for this class and I think it's very generous (compared to the two late periods most other CS classes have). Granted, I used only 5 hours out of the 24-hour extension, without the late day policy, I would have been extremely unhappy. Late days are an extremely nice way of letting people be stupid without penalizing them excessively for it. I like it because I'm stupid, which is why I started this assignment at the time I wrote yesterday's entry instead of having started it a week ago.

Still, it was a fun assignment - the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. I'm sure you've heard of it.

Also, I'm sorry but I'm really not going to do as my professor wishes and use emacs to edit my source files. It doesn't have colour-coding, automatic tabbing, drag-and-drop, easy-to-learn keyboard shortcuts and is topped off with what I perceive to be an unpleasant and unfamiliar UI to anyone who's been using graphical interfaces for the last ten years. So yes, I'll keep a Terminal window open to compile and run the program but I am going to write it in nothing but TextMate, my editor of choice, which makes programming so efficient that it makes me feel warm and fuzzy deep inside. It would have taken me three times longer if I had had to do the assignment in emacs. Honestly, it's time some people stopped enforcing the command-line on everyone. Sure, it's good to know to do some basic UNIX editing for all that hacking I'm sure you do, but writing out big projects in CLI is simply a pain.

And I'm so sleepy right now, I don't even want to walk over to the bed. This whole 3-4/hours a day sleeping regime is doing me no good. Thank god for the fact that tomorrow falls on a Saturday.

Labels: English

Second week of college is going great… well, sarcastically speaking at least. Already had one almost-all-nighter == I was up till 6.05am but still went to Chinese class which I never intend on missing ever… 很好 (hěn hǎo). Sorry for the random Chinese characters that are going to show up everywhere on my entries from now on (in addition to the Hindi that will sometimes come up) because I'm kind-of obsessed and if I don't get a good grade in Chinese, I shall be sorely disappointed. But Chinese is definitely the most fun class I'm taking this quarter. It's true that you should have a fuzzy class just to dilute all the concentrated techie classes. I would not be alive right now if I had Probability Theory instead.

And shit, I am definitely a CS major. I'm talking to someone on IM and when he gives me the wrong answer for a question, I tell him he's got his "return types" mixed up… eek I'm a geek. However, CS has this bugging little component called mathematics that I'm really bad at and I just submitted a problem set yesterday in which I wrote proofs that made absolutely no sense to me or to anyone else. And I think I made a really bad decision in taking this class before my probabilty class anyway because there is a bunch of notation and a bunch of terms that I don't understand at all and the professor basically has this major problem of thinking that everyone else in the classroom is as smart as he is. He does something really complicated with logs and then says "see, it's just simple substitution" and I just shake my head and start nodding off, because, aside from being incredibly difficult, his class is also freakishly boring. Freak!

The other CS class that is Programming Paradigms is fine with me… the paradigms part that is. Programming? Not so much. Unfortunately, it inherits from a long line of classes that believe in assigning you big projects to do and I always end up starting them a day before they're due. Such a bad idea! For example, I have to devise an algorithm and write a program in C++ implementing that, test it, debug it, and everything in the next 20 hours. Oh, and I also have to squeeze in sleep, classes, meals, etc. into the same 20 hours. Gonna be fun? You bet!

Algorithms… Sleep… Class… Time? No.

Labels: English

OK, so the exciting news is that (a) we finally bought a futon for our room (from IKEA) and (b) the number of entries I've written on this journal now equals a millionth of the number of clock cycles my first-Mac-ever could run through in a second. Trippy, eh? Oh yeah, and I've also been using the word 'trippy' an awful lot for the past two days. And that was 466MHz for the wonderers…

But yeah, happiest happening? I just acquired a new computer. I know what you're thinking - "another one?!" And I'm going to have to say "eeyup". This one's a 12" PowerBook G4 with a decently powerful 1.5GHz G4 processor and 1.25GB of RAM. The graphics card on this machine (an NVIDIA GeForceFX Go 5200) has 64MB of dedicated VRAM and actually performs better than the model that replaced it - i.e., the MacBook. When the MacBooks came out, I thought the most ludicrous part (apart from the MacBook's horrible name) was that they actually performed worse on some benchmarks than the computers they replaced (those were mainly the gaming tests). As I've noted before, Apple has not been wise to eliminate its contestant in the 12" Pro category. The PowerBook G4 I'm currently using not only retains its star status amongst the people who use it, but also, any unbiased person will tell you how much they wished that there was a 12" MacBook Pro - for both its size and its ultra-sleek look. I, for one, do. Am I in love with my computer again? Possibly. When the Core 2 Duos come out though [and if they are compelling], I will probably sell this and buy one of those.

Also, the hammer falls now. All those classes that were merely boring last week are now both boring and tedious, with their problem sets and homeworks being due either on Thursday or on Friday. Yeah, I'm kind-of screwed. There's also a Chinese quiz tomorrow, as there is on every fourth day. Taking up a language is quite an experience. The class meets everyday, homework comes in a continuous stream rather than discrete packets and without constant practice, you're going nowhere. Still, our teacher, or perhaps I should say 老师(lǎoshī), is pretty awesome… and she also distributes some weird Japanese (!) candy which actually tastes pretty decent if you're brave enough to stick it in your mouth.

Labels: English