SODA COKE PIZZA

Murphy's Laws

2007-05-06T17:14:00.000-07:00

Thursday 10 AM poster presentation - need a printout
*color printer jammed
*posterboard is in my friend's room( i don't have the key)

Thursday 4 PM laptop does not want to wake up.
* CALL IBM - they run a telephonic troubleshooting, I tell them laptop is dead, but the ibm calle, insists that I, (1)boot up the system (I say it won't) (2) Boot up and press F8 (I frantically say, that the nothing happens when I press the power button (3)Boot up and press f12! ( i say ok, i have given up hope) -> ....... few more useless steps --> concludes that something is worng with the motherboard...complint filed -> redirected to call another number to find the details of servicing.

Call other number :
They work only from 8-8 EST, have to wait till morning

Call in the morning
Out of parts, have to wait till next shipment (10 more days)

Meanwhile...270 report due next monday, 281 next thursday
Status 270 (yet to start) 281 report(ditto!)
All recent data is in laptop (wondering, why didn't I have the latest backup)

EECS helpdesk:
Can't read ext3 linux drive to recover data
Download and install ext3 reader for windows
Software cannot read ext3 data from SATA->USB interface.

Office:
Found laptop with the same config, decide to swap disks
No philips screw driver in the universe
Found something at last the opens the laptop!

Copied ~60MB of my precious data ( it's a shame that, 60MB can ruin one's life!)

....
ps. and you thought murphy was kidding.

Breathless, but worth it

2007-02-13T20:17:00.000-08:00

Out here in berkeley any cool place you can go is either uphill or uphill on the way back...tilden park is once such place, which involves a steep bike ride but 1) you are almost flying during the ride back 2) The view from the top is just cool, so I do it once a while! Figures on top are one of the views and a pastel rendering of it by me.

IITK in 2030!

2007-01-22T18:10:00.000-08:00

IITK in 2030...

I was reading up someone's(link) thoughts on what IITK might be in 2030, here's my version of it.

@PAN - IIT meeting (more resembling a congress rally)

Student: Hey, I am from IITK, where are you from?
Yet Another Student: I am from IIT Ram Nagar, which K is this ? Karai, Karimnagar ....?

Student(Embarrassed): Oh, I am from Kanpur, one of the original ones, you know.
Yet Another Student: whatever, btw did you know my school is being promoted to IIT status next year. we have
3 profs, which is 3 times more than the minimum number of profs you need to start an IIT.

Student(In tears now) okay :( btw, do you know when are they serving food? (why else come to a rally?)

JEE : Excerpt from "The Hindu Muslim Sikh ... (wraps for three lines)" newspaper.
The JEE exams are now reduced their syllabus to basic school math,physics and chemistry so that students from coaching institutes have no "unfair" advantage over students in the any other school. For those who did not attend(or were expelled/failed) 4.75% of the seats are reserved, bringing the total reserved tally to 99.9%. The community which does not fall in any reserved category however have filed a petition that 10 % of the seats should be reserved for them. The board of directors of IIT have agreed to do so, though they need to resolved how to increase the total reserved quota to more than 100%(a minor technical detail though).

@IITK:
Ragging: Juniors - Plz Plz Rag us..we want to know what its like?
Seniors - We don't know either :(
The senate meets to consider introducing RAG 101 to teach about ragging as an HSS course.

Hostels: Hall 73, is now under construction, Hall 23, 34, 66 are cribbing as they still have government messes and food menu is controlled by religious reservations.

Heath Center: Unfortunately, its still the same

Departments: Who cares about them anyway? Its all the same..you do an MBA(ya, 30 years is what it takes to realize the truth)

Class Rooms: Tutorials are in L7. Kalyanpur is engulfed into IIT K empire. The expansion of many iits however has been stopped as they have run into the boundaries of other nearby IITs.

100 things to do in berkeley

2007-01-21T13:11:00.000-08:00

So, i found the guide to a good living life somehere in my drawer which was given to us during the orientation. It has a section on 100 things one MUST do before leaving berkeley. Some of my favs are:
* Protest Something: catch a glimpse of what is is like here!.
* Have a converasation with a Telegraph Bum:....you might even make a good friend.
* Learn how to spell Berkeley correctly: If you have come all the way to berkeley and still cannot spell it, you should have spent your time on that college farm in Palo Alto! also don't ever wear RED.
* Get Arrested and Spend a night in jail: eeh!
* Play Ultimate Frisbee..yaay.
Also:
* Atend a PhD dissertation!

A wing page!

2007-01-13T11:18:00.000-08:00

Finally I got myself to put together a webpage for our wing(D -MID) iitk. It all started with the idea of making the page layout look like a wing with rooms and all and you could reach the personal webpages by clicking on the rooms. I just had to make this! . Check it out at here.. Looking at the pictures got me nostalgic again.

Nothing better to do :D

2007-01-10T20:47:00.000-08:00

Last few days I have done nothing other than eating, sleeping, playing go and watching southpark. I shopped at an Indian store, went to the Safeway twice this week and still looks like we are gonna run out of food before the weekend! If only I could hibernate i would be saved from all the trouble. Not to be..so here I am wiling away my time on the internet. For those of who love southpark, I collected all the "you know, i've learned something today" lines here. See, I really have nothing better to do.

Art or No ART?

2007-01-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

Kasimir Malevich, Title: Suprematist Composition: White on White

My last visit to the musem of modern art at new york confirmed my belief that most people apprecite the art not by its content, but rather who drew it. A huge line behind a Picaso painting while a a similar cubist painting by braque only got a careless glance! Embarassingly enough, after a while I too was looking for a picaso or a monet or a wharol while skipping the artists i didn't know of. Afterall any person can draw a white square on a white square( yes, thats an art!) so what is it about these art which makes them special? We tend to forget that skill and creativity are two different aspects of art and sometimes the later outweighs the former. Prior to the modern art era (late 18th century - today) we see paintings which were beautiful" in the traditional sense. Such was the trend so far and art was pretty, abeit, stagnant. Simplificaition of form began with impressionism and movements that followed took drastic steps which let art to gradually lose form and representaiton. This leap of creativity is what we should appreciate.

The Tale of Bitter Onions!

2006-12-19T12:03:00.000-08:00

Okay so we decided to cook after a long time. Recipe - potatoes, cauliflower and lots of onions. Being lazy as usual we decided to grind the onions in the blender. After half on hour of hardwork the result was an awfully bitter concoction of what was intended to be Indian dish. Damn it was bitter, more bitter than anything I've ever had. My roommate quickly jumped to the conclusion that it was poisoned. A quick google search revealed that the overcooking onions can make them bitter but it was not well known and not something cooking sites warn you about. Many a times I burn onions but they never turn bitter (By now my roommate is sure he has tasted poison!). Next morning my roommate has a sore eye and the first thing he does after waking up is throw the dish, holding his breath all the time of course. Some how I myself could not sleep last night, and still have that awful taste lingering in my taste buds. Sure I will be more careful with onions for a while. Back to maggi and pasta!!

Kurt Vonnegut and Space Time Volumes

2006-11-10T16:03:00.001-08:00

Unstuck in time! yes, thats the central style of narration the Slaughterhouse 5 (aka. The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death) by Kurt Vonnegut. The style of narration is unique as the central character(Billy Pilgrim) moves back and forth in time describing various events, complete disregard to cuasality. Its as if the each paragraph is generated by a random sampling of the space time(ST) volume(imagine stacking all the snapshots of a movie together) generated in the entire lifetime of the author's life. Recent research in computer vision aims to describe actions by looking at the ST volume generated by it. Not all voxels of the ST volme are interesting and you need a notion of what is "interesting". At a very low level, regions with high variance in space and time are interesting to look at.

Non linear story telling can be extremetly interesting if done well. It breaks the monotony, gives enough hints for the reader to guess the next part and nothing beats the effect of when the story turns out to be totally different than what you were guessing. Movies like memento, the usual suspects are classic examples of this.

Still, unstuck in space

soda-coke-pizza

2006-11-10T15:58:00.000-08:00

if you are wondering what my blog title soda-coke-pizza means, stop wondering and read the following.

Three important things in my life

COKE and PIZZA : do I have to say anything?
SODA Hall : Place where the prev two items are found for free. This hall is also know for housing the lowly cs grads at the university of california, berkeley.

if you are still wondering, then I can't help it.

In the eye of the storm

2006-11-10T14:55:00.001-08:00

Whats life without a little adventure and sometimes when things get so messy and out of hand that its best to sit back, relax and enjoy the chaos! Yes, I was at the heathrow airport on the beautiful morning the terrorists planned to blow away planes on air, ruining my breakfast among other things. Even before all this there was a last min mixup of tickets and I was given a ticket for British Airways. This was a cause of limitless tension thanks to the delay by the agent in disclosing that the previous ticket was not actually booked and issuing new ones.

Looking out of the window, I realized that the plane was going around in circles when I saw the London bridge for the fifth time! Thanks to marvels of engineering, flights have become extremely boring except for the slight vibrations one experiences when flying over turbulent regions. I was to get down at terminal two and go to terminal 5 to catch at flight to san francisco at 1:30. I had 4 hours to kill between. I joined a long queue for additional security checks which drifted slowly, so far blissfully unaware of the real scale of the chaos. Only when I walked to the check out point that i realized what was going on looking at the wide screen TV showing that most of the flights to US were cancelled. Help desk was an utter chaos and I found out that most likely my flight was cancelled too. British Airways cannot guarantee alternate arrangements right now. I was to take care of your own arrangements. Thank you very much!

I went to terminal 5 anyway. All flight counters were jammed as passengers were trying to make alternate arrangements. All kind of liquids were banned inside flights as the terrorists were planning to smuggle liquid explosives in drinks bottles and assemble it on air. Moms were allowed to carry milk bottles for their little ones if they drank some before the guards!! I was relieved to find out that my flight was not cancelled though it was delayed sine die. I threw away me deodorant bottle and checked in everything. With my belongings in a plastic cover I went to the terminal, where the passengers in modern flights are "conditioned" before the enter the flight. I grabbed some food and sat in front of a large TV, where a BBC spokesman was describing the shocking scale of the terrorism, in a beautiful british accent. I was joined by others who were on the same flight. The reporter described that the passengers were sacred and lots of them were heading back home! It was rather funny that I was not feeling even a tinge of scare, nor was angry with the delays in the flights, sitting right in the eye of the storm. Indian conditioning, huh! or Perhaps the storm is easy to bear from the inside. Internet is extremely costly though I shelled out a few pounds to let my near and dear ones that I was fine and the person who was to pick me up to check the schedule before coming.

Finally 3 hours later the flight took off. It was waiting for a while on the air strip to get a ack from US of A to take off. The woman beside me on the plane was scared that there might be a bomb on the plane and that she did not want to die as they had finally saved enough money to buy a house. funny, eh ? Its amazing how a little calamity brings everone closer. everyone was talking to one another and helping in any way possible. The air hostess were being extra nice too! Darn another 20 hours of boring flight. This time there was no turbulence either.

Finally I reached SFO. More delays at the luggage counter. My first time to US and i was excited even after more than 24 hours of torture! driving though the highways at night on the bay area resembled so much like the NFS Underground 2 scene :). My friend dropped me at my apartment. My roomate arrived hours later. He flew by lufthansa via frankfurt so had a less agressive story to tell. I slept peacefully. Strangely, the jet lag hit me a week later!