I don't believe in the mythology behind it (redundant, I know) but I've heard it's a polite thing to say in the days before and just after the twenty-fifth of December. An atheist also needs to make friends and not wishing people a Merry Christmas or a Happy Diwali is probably not the best way to go about it. Mark you, I've got nothing against the festivals themselves, only what they're based on. Seemingly, humans can't celebrate a decent day like winter solstice (albeit, a bit inaccurately) without a set of cock and bull stories about god's son, and, if I am to humour the right people, I would even be asked to believe that the stories were sent to the Earth by facsimile from heaven. How elaborate.

And this is what irritates me the most. Now, if I were born into a world in which everyone followed exactly the same religion, believed in the same one, true god, etc., I would be a lot more inclined to believe in that one, true god. However, I was born, more fortunately I think, in a world with many different religions, some of which developed independently. This helps me to take the more skeptical stance of, "Well, I'm not that much different from you when it comes to religion except that I believe in one less god than you do." Something convinced you that your religion was the one, true religion and ditto for your god or array of gods, and that convinced me that I had no reason to believe that any of you were referring to any kind of god (true or not) or that "god" even needs to exist.

Christmas is not celebrated today because it's the day Jesus was born. It's just an excuse to celebrate. It's a time to be with family, wear silly hats, give each other gifts and be happy. It's sad that we would need an excuse to do this. I'd much rather celebrate New Year's instead of Christmas just because of this. Also, don't you think it just sounds morally better that you do something good, say donate some money to charity, simply because you feel sympathetic towards the needy and want to help out and not because god is watching you and will reward you if you do good and punish you if you don't? Which one of those sounds better? I don't think about punishment and reward when I buy gifts for people or do something kind and I'm sure you don't either. But perhaps you want to have god as this imaginary friend whom you can always talk to if there's no one else around and feel the divine presence ("oh, I felt Him, I really did!") Maybe god is the imaginary friend which even adults can keep without being embarrassed about it.

God was an invention - a clever one that fulfilled the needs of the day. Those being that anything that could not be satisfactorily explained with logic could be attributed to god. What a great way to go. It's like a perpetual motion machine or the 100%-efficient heat engine; conveniently does a lot of work with little or no effort and, secondly, nonexistent. I would say that god is an invention that ought to have been outdated by now. After all, we've arrived at so many answers to questions with thinking and observation that were previously just left at "that's just how god's world is". To me, it's most insulting to the human race that most of us still need this "god" thing to gobble up those questions that can't yet be answered and to be this being that is listening to your pleas. Pathetic.

We should be able to deal with life for what it is, not planning for some afterlife that's not going to happen. I like churches and festivals and happy times, but I just wish we didn't have some ridiculous pretense to back it up all the time. I don't wish to be condescending but a lot of people do need to grow up.

Merry Christmas! Oh, and Happy Boxing Day too while we're at it!

Labels: English

I've just had two exemplary meals and some fresh homemade carrot juice. It's good to be home. Plus, I have big plans for this break. I'm going to go over my French and take the placement test in January, I'm going to learn all the characters from my Chinese textbook (yes, those pesky traditional ones too), I'm going to do something about learning Objective-C and Cocoa (finally?) from the many books I've downloaded. Okay, maybe not all of that because a very sizable week of the already-tiny winter break is going to be spent in the southern reaches of the country. But definitely the French and the characters. I need to do those. The good news is that I have now acquired a whiteboard and some dry-erase markers using which I can practice writing characters endlessly without wasting a single sheet of paper.

The grades situation is looking wonky. Now that I have all my grades for the quarter, it's the fuzzy grades that have significantly outpaced the techie ones and that's not a good sign. I did get the Chinese grade I wanted (yay!) but to keep everything balanced, my CS grade took a dip and has now landed at its first non-A. Sad. I really need to study more. Sigh… why do I hate working so much?! If only I hadn't started so many projects the day before they were due, I might have scraped some sort of an A in CS. Depressingly enough, I think the thing that really makes me happy is good grades and unfortunately, they don't just drop out of the sky. Wish they would…

Still, there's much to look forward to. Like another night's sleep that's not going to end in an alarm clock going off. Gosh, sleeping might be my favourite thing in the world… I'm screwed up.

Also, isn't it awesome how the character for "family" is basically a pig under a roof?

Labels: English

That reads "Hong Kong International Airport" - so don't bother translating. I have a 15 hours' stop-over here and they wouldn't give me a hotel because my "Special Fare" ticket won't qualify. I don't care - there's free official Internet (with signs all over the place proclaiming so), there's a place that sells an edible veggie burger and loads of Chinese characters that I'm trying to read. The fact that they use traditional characters here doesn't help too much because I'm learning the simplified form. Here's an example with the n-phrase "international airport" in both simplified and traditional (the more complicated one):


Some characters are recognizable, some are horrendously different. Anyway, the 14-hour flight to HKIA was pretty good, with like only 2 or 3 hours that I was actually awake. They also honoured my request for an Indian vegetarian meal and I had some tasty stuff, some of which I can't actually put a name to and some that looked suspiciously like idlis. It's really nice how now almost all major carriers honour the request not only for a vegetarian meal, not only for an asian vegetarian meal, but an Indian vegetarian meal. Either people have realized that India exists thanks to all that outsourcing or perhaps our numbers have now become too large to reasonably ignore.

Oh, and I might have sold two iPod Shuffles on my way because both the security officials in both San Francisco and Hong Kong were like, "MP3 Player?" And I was like, "Yes". And then they asked "the new iPod?" I agreed. The SFO guy couldn't believe the thing stored 1GB of songs instead of the 75MB he thought it did (and I actually had to say "one thousand and twenty four megabytes" because apparently "gigabyte" was not in his dictionary); the HKG guy took it better.

Going further back in time, the CS final took place on Friday and it was damn hard. Not harder than expected because I did the practice final they gave out and that was damn hard too. I hope I manage to scrape something respectable, though, in this class, for the first time, I actually doubt it. I don't think I've ever gotten a non-A grade in CS, but with this class, the times are probably a-changing. In another nine and a half hours, the nice peeps at the registrar's office will presumably put up the grades on the Internet for our viewing pleasure, if, that is, you filled out and submitted all the teacher evaluations. If you haven't done so, you'll have to wait another couple of weeks before they show you your grades. Sometimes they achieve their goals by rewards, sometimes by punishment. History has shown that punishment works better. It's also more affordable. In fear of being parted from my grades for what would be an interminable period of time disguised as two weeks, I chose to fill out all the evaluations approximately five minutes after I got the email with the link in it. I don't pray, but those of you who do bother with the procedure, do append a little note at the end of your prayers for my grades, won't you? Thanks.

Also, finals' week was apparently when the time was ripe for watching musicals and plans were made and executed for watching two of them - The Sound of Music and The King and I. The first one I liked, the second one not as much. Western musicals are basically what regular Bollywood movies are, and regular Western movies are "art films" in Bollywood. I'm sure you knew that already, but there's no harm in reiterating. So, basically, there are songs in these movies every three to five minutes that have raison d'être ranging from 0 to negative infinity. That's okay when you have good songs because you like listening to them. On that note, The Sound of Music is where a lot of the "classic" English songs come from (the ones even Indians have heard some time during their lives). Unfortunately, the movie had no appreciable plot. The plot thing is true for The King and I as well except for the fact that I thought most of the songs completely sucked and some of them were rather unbearable. One of my roommates (the one who does not, in fact, read this journal) would call me a hater if I told him my actual thoughts on the matter because he considers the movie a "classic". Anyway, I've acquired the music from The Sound of Music and some of it's going to make its way into my ever-growing My Top Rated playlist. In fact, I think I shall do something about the "ever-growing" part and trim it a tad bit because I no longer enjoy of the tunes in it. That should hopefully eat up some of my time. Also, thank you for participating in my effort of killing time by reading this entry.

Labels: English

I'd like to write about how scared I am of the physics final exam tomorrow but I don't have time to flesh out my thoughts any better at the moment, so just wish me luck!

Labels: English

For a number of days, I had been telling myself that I needed to plan out the remainder of my college days a little better. Knowing what's coming in the future is always a good thing. So, tonight I sat down and finally made my four-year plan (that too in Excel). Before leaving for college, the only other person I talked to about study plans was a Chinese girl who had already planned out, quite intricately, exactly what she was going to be doing for each of the four years in college; I, on the other hand, didn't even know which courses I was going to take for the first term until two weeks before it started! So, making a four-year plan actually made me feel a good deal happier and it looks like I don't have all that many courses to take to survive complete the computer science major. Either way, I do hope to be able to complete some sort of non-technical minor while I'm here and my guess is that it'll be in some language or another. I did take French in school and I'm going to give take the placement test here to find out if it might be worth it to continue it and get some level of proficiency in it ("it" overload!). Even with my sort-of "fetish" for languages though, I don't think Japanese is going to happen simply because I don't have time for it… 我没有时间… I'll just have to content myself with knowing a little bit of Chinese. Oh yes, and speaking of Chinese - I had my Chinese oral exam yesterday and it totally rocked! 10/10 and everything. Now, if only I can get 99% or higher on my final exam, I'll have my first-ever A+. Sigh, that… might not… be happening.

In exciting events - I saw my first Chinese (okay, Mandarin) movie ever, "Hero" and really, really enjoyed it. I'll bring it with me to Delhi over Winter break; it's really good. I also saw Pretty Woman yesterday, which, incidentally, I hadn't seen before. It was a really good movie but I don't see why it's considered such a classic. It's good, but not that good. Did have some really funny moments though; I enjoyed it. Also, Kimberly (of "hating monosyllabic names" fame) bought a Gingerbread House Kit and so, the better part of today's 6-8pm was spent constructing an edible house which used icing as glue to hold it together and included: (a) a chimney that kept falling off until someone mercifully ate it, (b) a little gingerbread man made to look like Santa leaning against the back door, but who was actually a child rapist, (c) a swimming pool full of viscous yellow liquid that was actually butterscotch, and (d) a patrol robot made out of something chewy. That was fun.

Oh, and in other happy news, an Age of Empires II revival is happening here, and starting next term, a bunch of us are going to start playing multiplayer! AoE2 is a totally amazing game which I've been missing out on and this makes me very, very excited. I can't wait 'til our first game.

Labels: English

Now, this is not going to be a treatise on towels. And it's definitely not going to be something along the lines of h2g2 because I won't be teaching you how to perform martial arts with your towel or carry emergency vitamins on it. I simply wish to describe what I expect from my towels.

So what makes a perfect towel? Well, first and foremost, it must be very good at absorbing water. That seems to be the raison d'être of the thing anyway. In addition, it must be good at absorbing a lot of it. You know those towels that, as soon as you start drying yourself off, feel like they've absorbed all the water they can and you keep wiping but it feels like nothing's happening? I hate those. A towel must not give the feeling that it's not absorbing water; it makes for a most miserable after-shower experience. Secondly, and this is very important, a towel must have, on either side, a different and distinctly recognizable pattern. One of my towels, for example, is plain on one side and has a pattern on the other. This allows me to maintain the two sides of the towel for different purposes and any reasonable person can see the advantages of that. Thirdly, the towel should not be too soft. In most cases, I've found that towels that are too soft are usually the perpetrators of the first immoral act I mentioned - it doesn't feel like they're absorbing any water. Lastly, you must also get a towel of the right size. Too long and it'll be touching the floor while you're drying yourself off (the very thought makes me shudder); too short and you won't be able to comfortably wrap it around your waist, which will be awkward let me assure you.

Good towels make us happy are an essential part of life and I think it's important to recognize that. This entry celebrates those towels.

Labels: English

It's that time again. The deep breath before the plunge, the intense apprehension just before gulping down some really bitter medicine, the time spent in an airplane waiting for it to take off… it's Dead Week. Exams begin on Tuesday for me. "Three hundred lives of men I have walked this Earth and now I have no time." It's always like that, isn't it? (And boy do I love that quote!) I hope you caught the reference.

Anyway, tracking back a few weeks, for Thanksgiving break, James and I went to Cincinnati (in the state of Ohio) to spend four very enjoyable days with Kimberly and her family.

Traditional things to eat for Thanksgiving are pies and turkey. Since I couldn't eat turkey, I invested as much effort as possible in the pie department. The day before Thanksgiving, everyone in the house got together and we made three delicious pies - apple, cherry and pumpkin (I've never had pumpkin, and to me, it looks about as appetizing as a three weeks' dead frog that got run over by a car). My part in baking the pies was basically peeling the apples and stirring the sauce, both of which I think I did with aplomb if I may say so myself.

Now usually I'm not a great fan of board-ish games, but this one week I really felt like playing all kinds of the stuff like Catchphrase, Scrabble, Taboo, Telephone Pictionary and The Naked Game™ (sigh, no article on Wikipedia I can link to)… and I had loads of fun playing 'em. Telephone Pictionary is possibly one of the most entertaining and least demanding games I've played and The Naked Game™, with a sum total of ten people including four parents, two of which are Finnish, is simply hilarious.

One of the most satisfying things I did over the course of staying with Kimberly was fixing all the computer problems her dad could throw at me. The best part was that none of them required something weird like tweaking the registry or something that's actually not possible to do without rewriting the OS, but simply things that normal people don't know about and features that are cleverly hidden in Windows. Of course, the fact that they're cleverly hidden might shed some light on the mental stability of Microsoft engineers, or maybe you can just call me a hater. Nonetheless, fixing stuff makes me happy.

Pictures from the trip should be up on Facebook, depicting our adventures in and around Cincinnati… James watching ducks, my glasses fogging up because of the 50º temperature difference between the greenhouse and world outside (Fahrenheit of course; damn these Americans!). Oh yeah, it was pretty cold there… the mercury is basically in love with the freezing point of water in Cincinnati.

Moving a few thousand miles westward, I should probably declare my major as Computer Science at the beginning of next quarter. I'm finally enjoying my CS programming class; unfortunately, it's at the end of the quarter. I just wish I'd gone to office hours for this class in throughout the quarter like I did for my previous CS class because it really does help and makes sure my programs are bug-free and high-scoring. Sigh… those grades are never going to come back. But, moving forward, I'll probably doing Compilers next quarter, which is taught by my very own Academic Advisor and it's rumoured that he half-wrote compiler-theory himself. Oh, there are just too many brilliant people here… way too many. Also, I think I'll continue with both Arabic and Chinese, schedule-permitting, and hopefully do some kind of minor with both of them. Probability Theory? It's this required class I have to take for CS. It's like getting an injection except for the fact that it's going to be like getting an injection every other day for three whole months and a bad grade to top it all off. Winter's not looking too hot for me. Nyeh, heh.

But, sigh, I'll just have to suck it up… for now, let me get to my first "take-home exam" ever… I'm excited.

Labels: English