Juliet and I watched Avatar - The Way of the Water in Cinemark XD RealD 3D tonight and my mind is still stuck in the magical realm of Pandora. This was my first movie theater visit in 3 years and I am so glad I picked this movie. It was an absolutely breathtaking experience and I cannot wait to see the next one in 2024.

I have been busy as always last few months and I don't foresee my schedule getting any lighter the rest of the year. I hope to travel more this year than last few years, especially since Leela is starting to enjoy attractions more now. Naveen is turning 8 in a few weeks and I have a dream of setting up a full computer workstation for him and installing older versions of different programs for him to play with - 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, Blender etc. He is extremely interested in programming and loved the few short lessons in Python I gave.

Juliet is doing well and keeping my spirits up while I slog through stressful work projects. She is going to take another pottery class at the local community college and it really helps her work on her fine motor skills as well as build a social circle here. Last semester she made a set of really pretty cube-shaped containers that we now keep in our kitchen to store Taco Bell sauce packets.

It's pretty cold outside these days and there's still some snow on the ground. Last year around Jan-Feb, I saw snowdrops growing unexpectedly all over my front-yard and I am really hoping they come back again soon.

For centuries, people have made predictions on what the world will be like decades and centuries into the future. I am a lot more interested in 5-10 year predictions than 20-50-100 year ones because the former are more actionable. Like many others, I could easily see that streaming services were going to take over the world and that nearly everyone was going to have a smart phone. Nothing worth bragging about as it was pretty obvious since 2005 unless something went terribly wrong.

What fascinates me are the things that I was wrong about 5-10 years ago, not because I lost money or respect over it (trust me, I care for neither of those) but because it means I was imagining a different world than the one we live in now. It means that today when I see 5-10 years into the future, I could be similarly wrong and it is best that I take some time to look back and alter my underlying assumptions that turned out to be wrong.

1. Bandwidth: I grew up with 28kbps and 56kbps dial-up connection and personally experienced the jumps to DSL, then cable modem, and right into the 2G, 3G, 4G/LTE speeds. And now I manage fiber and cloud networks at 5-10gbps daily. So you would think that someone in my place would be optimistic about there always being enough bandwidth in the future. But turns out I am not. At each of these stages, I could not foresee things getting any faster and instead spent my time optimizing and building for the current speed. While this sounds like a bad thing, it actually works in my favor in day-to-day work situations because it makes me build things that work fast now, not after everyone upgrades to 5G. However, if I was more "futuristic" in my thinking, I would build things for the future. So when 7G comes, my bandwidth-hog 3D video-streaming game-simulation app will be just what people try out first.

2. Video Streaming: Tagging along with my bandwidth shortsightedness, has been my ever pessimistic view on how much video streaming will really be possible. I always thought Netflix wouldn't be able to support streaming a hundred million streams simultaneously so they will come up with alternatives like P2P streaming, DVR-style recording/downloading, custom devices with terabytes of storage etc. But instead they did something that just blew my mind because of how plainly logical it was - they worked with major ISPs and put Netflix servers right on the ISPs internal network and wrote code that cached the most commonly viewed streams. This means that when I click 'Play' on my TV to watch a popular Netflix show, the file is coming to me straight from my ISP's building in my city a few miles away, not across the Internet from New York or California.

3. Compression: I was wrong about how limited the video quality would be too, as I watch nearly everything in 1080p and some 4K today. Compression has continued to blow my mind at how great things look and how small lossy video/audio files are. Sure, nothing beats 70mm film in theory but I can barely see any blurriness or distortion when watching a YouTube video on my phone. Even now I scoff at 8K videos, who needs that! But based on how wrong I have been in the past, within a few years I will surely be annoyed when the 8K stream I'm watching on my virtual glasses hiccups a bit. All of this is made possible due to the insane level of compression thanks to literal geniuses in math, signal processing, and computer science.

4. Battery vs. Phone Weight: I have absolutely been wrong about this and I still don't know why the world doesn't see it my way. My phone is thin and light enough. Even when it's brand new, the battery barely lasts 8 hours. Just make the damn phone thicker and give me a 3-7 day battery! Stop making the screen bigger. But turns out I was wrong. People want thin, light phones that they have to charge 3x a day. Literally every person I know connects their phone to charge the moment they sit down for an hour. I'm not saying I thought batteries would be better by now. I thought people would realize that long battery life was worth the excess weight. But turns out I'm wrong.

5. A.I.: I'm still every pessimistic about strong or general AI i.e. computers with human-level intelligence or beyond (super AI). I don't think that's happening any time soon. I was also always optimistic about weak or narrow AI that has a very specific task like image recognition or text to speech. What I could never imagine was that throwing a data-center's worth of computing resources into a narrow AI can actually make it perform close to a general AI for most purposes. In simpler words, while we don't have a magical smart AI genie, we have really good software that can translate between languages, and if we make that software learn the entirety of everything ever posted on the Internet, the resulting AI will not only be great at translating between languages but it will also be capable of translating between languages it has never seen before. It will also be capable of writing new text in any language, like news reports, based on a few key inputs. This isn't necessary strong AI but for all intents and purposes, it is good enough. If you've read a stock market summary of the day in the last 5 years, it's AI.

6. Bluetooth: I was more optimistic on this than reality turned out to be. I thought we would have better alternatives to crappy Bluetooth by now. Turns out we don't. I don't even want to get into why because it is just 500 pages of depressing.

7. Social Media: I easily saw where Twitter and Facebook were going to end up and the reality is not too far off from my expectations. I am not surprised with walled gardens and information bubbles etc. That was only natural. What I am surprised about is how easily you can still live without them. I don't use LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok or any number of cool social media apps. I still read and infrequently post on reddit and watch some of my favorite science/tech channels on YouTube regularly. However, I've easily gone weeks without so much as looking at reddit and I signed up to watch my YouTube creators on Nebula for $5/mo. Literally nothing in my life is going to change if any or all of these social media sites went away instantly today. I might have some more time to kill and maybe will read more. I am utterly shocked that something hasn't compelled me to start using them like kids school programs or neighborhood or medical community chat. As relieved as I am to say all this today, I am also still pretty pessimistic for the future. I'm fairly certain there will be a time when I absolutely will have to sign up for some social media site just to go about my life. Note that I don't hate them or anything. I just don't have the time or energy to maintain an online presence beyond this blog.

8. Remote Desktops: I was more optimistic on this too than what really transpired. I thought by now, we would all have an individual "computer" in the cloud that we'd pay $5-10/mo for and it would have all of our files and software that we could access from any computer, phone, TV etc. I thought may be a small token or app on our phone would make any computer/monitor into a full-blown desktop with all of our data. Technically this is absolutely possible today and it was possible 10-15 years ago too. I just thought it would be common. So if a friend came over, they would just connect to their remote desktop on our living room TV and show vacation photos. Instead, people text each other entire movies (hello #1-3 above) or "cast" their phone to a Android/iOS device connected to the TV. The latter technically mirrors my original vision but the phone is the source of the data, not a gateway to the cloud server, so it's not the same. I think if you are in the Apple ecosystem, there are some signs of going this way with AppleTV playing your iCloud photos/videos, sharing your purchased apps/games with family members etc. However, it's all connecting to computers that Apple controls and manages, not you.

9. Self-driving automobiles: I still can't believe we have these and that they work in most environmental conditions. I also can't believe that they are not already the standard in every new car. I thought it would take forever to have cars that drive on their own. Or rather, the whole world would need to install magnets or sensors underneath every road and highway so trucks and cars would detect them and stay in the proper lane. Instead Narrow A.I. (#5 above) got so good at image recognition and depth perception that it can drive cars and identify road markers in real-time. Totally blows my mind. I also thought that the moment one car company came out with self-driving cars, it would be just a few years before every new car would self-drive because that's the best way to ensure safety and remain competitive. But instead every company is selling a few self-driving features like lane-keep and adaptive cruise control in their higher-end models while completely skipping on these for their economy class. I get why they do this because of costs but I thought consumer demand would necessitate these safety features. Nope, I'm wrong for now.

10. Video Conferencing: COVID-19 did more for video conferencing in 2 months than tech advocates did in 20 years. There is literally no way I could have predicted every person with a laptop or phone totally being ok with multi-hour Zoom sessions. Sure, there is still a lot of room for improvement but my 5 year old spends 4 hours each weekday on MS Teams video conferencing with his classmates and teacher in virtual school. That is amazing!

I'm sure I have many other current assumptions about the future that will be proven wrong eventually but for now I am just happy that many of my pessimistic predictions turned out wrong. I am glad Netflix can do 4K on a thin, light cellphone that can also educate my kid during a pandemic. I think I'm going to spend some time on what I believe the upcoming 5-10 years in technology will be like and maybe come up with ideas on how I can create tools for that future instead of just making things for immediate use today.

Leela turns four months old today! She's doing great and babbling a lot more now. She smiles, grasps objects, and sleeps soundly through the night. She's even doing something called bubbling, which Juliet says is a milestone. My parents have been here for two months, helping take care of both the kids. They're planning on going back to India in less than a month. Once they leave, I plan to be with the kids on weekdays and resume our daily museum and library outings.

Unless, of course, everything shuts down due to coronavirus. We're not panicking but we are being cautious. Best Floridian analogy I can think of is a hurricane that's already ravaged the Caribbean is slowly heading north. Maybe it misses us and fizzles out of the gulf or it's hunker down time. Only time will tell but best to keep our eyes and ears open (but not touch them without washing hands).

In preparation of my new home daycare routine, I've setup a computer desk with my dad's help, where I can work and watch the kids safely. A decade ago I had a desk with 5 vertical monitors, with a combined resolution of 5250×1680 pixels. My new system has three 4k monitors at 3840×2160 each which is nearly three times the pixels. The real difference is the computer needed to power it. Back in 2010, I had a beast of a PC with three graphics cards powering the five screens. Now I have a tiny Mac Mini mounted under my desk, completely invisible from the view. Additionally, all the cables are now neatly tucked away and I can adjust the desk's height as needed. I'm still waiting for some more parts but once it is all done, I will share some pictures.

There is no better feeling than interacting with people who know what they're doing. I often have to contact companies for help with software issues and usually, that involves creating online tickets, filling out detailed forms, going through multiple levels of customer service tiers until I finally reach someone who knows the software well. Sometimes I never even get that far and just give up. But every now and then, I end up working directly with the person who made the software and it can absolutely make my day.

Many years ago I ended up buying a few licenses for Bvckup2 software for work. Backups are a big deal and I cannot afford to have them fail. Ever. But when you have hundreds of users, computers, and tens of millions of files, backups can be a nightmare. There are a thousand different pieces of software that take files from one computer and put them on another. Every use case has a different tool that works the best. For my case, Bvckup2 beats every alternative. I know this sounds like a paid ad but I'm just a happy customer. I've been getting my daily 'Bvckup2 completed successfully' emails for years now and I could not be more satisfied. However, every now and then it fails because of some new issue. Today it was me trying to backup a single file over 2TB to the cloud. No matter what I tried, the backup software kept erroring out.

So I just emailed Alex, the developer of Bvckup2, shared with him some of the log files, and he emailed me the exact changes I need to make to the configuration to fix the issue. This seems like such a simple problem-troubleshoot-solution process but I cannot even begin to describe how rare such an occurrence is for me. I currently have multiple tickets open with a software documentation company, a payroll processing company, a cloud storage provider, a network security firm, and a ton of smaller IT vendors. I swear if each of these companies had an 'Alex' working for them that I could email, I would save so much time each week.

I hope that whenever people interact with me for IT issues, they get the same experience but of course, for complex issues it is not always possible. So whether it is Alex who writes backup software, or Bud who fixed my leaking pool, it is always a wonderful feeling to work with people who know what they're doing.

The 24-hour news cycle could have unleashed an era of meticulous, nuance-driven news coverage but it gave us an echo chamber of soundbites. Imagine tuning in at 8am for public policy news, 12pm for local project updates, 4pm for geopolitical briefing, 8pm for fiscal analysis, and midnight-to-morning for a summary of global news in the past 24 hours. But instead we ended up with each hour starting with 6min of breaking news, then 12min of expression of shock, followed by 6min of reading of tweets and playback of soundbites, capped with 18min of yelling by disparate panelists. Throw in 18mins of ads and we got an hour of news. Repeat this 18 times a day with a different set of shouting faces and replay 6 of those hours between midnight and 6am and we have the global 24-hour news media format.

No matter the country, language, or channel, the format is essentially the same. You can't fault any specific entity for this because this is the natural order of any attention-seeking broadcast platform. Gravity makes all rocks fall down. 24-hour news cycle makes everyone repeat things 24 times a day. If they deviate from the norm, they lose viewers and shut down, reinforcing the format in the remaining networks.

Social media could have made all of TV news inconsequential. There is no specific air-time and the web doesn't end at 59 minutes. But it didn't fix any of TV's problems, but rather exacerbated them. Whereas TV started with experienced journalists repeating pre-approved talking points, social media gave a loudspeaker to anyone without any barriers. So whereas conflicts of interests sort-of mattered in the TV-era, nobody knows on the internet what biases someone has or which masters they serve. If it is in their interest to create outrage, they will create outrage. And boy have they championed the sport of creating outrage.

How we ended up here is relatively straight-forward. In a winner-take-all voting system, it is guaranteed that voters will end up aligning with one of two major parties. It doesn't matter how educated, rational, or compassionate the people are, if every voter can only select one person on a ballot, and whoever gets the most votes wins, it is absolutely certain that you will end up with two, diametrically opposed parties. And furthermore, over time the parties will continue to get further and further apart. If instead the voters could choose more than one candidate, preferably by ranking their choices in order of preference, then more than two parties can gain support and candidates who unite the people will win, instead of the most polarizing ones.

The same happens on the Internet when image macros, tweets, and 30-second muted video clips reduce the depth of an issue and leave you with only one of two choices - like/retweet/share or ignore. Remember ignoring is treated as dislike by social media algorithms so even if you think you are not making your opinion known, you are. When every bit of content online is judged on how much attention it receives, then only the most attention-grabbing content gets to the top. And there is nothing that gets more attention than something that causes us to fume in outrage and disbelief. How can X happen? I can't believe X said Y! Does nobody care about Z anymore?!

Our natural reaction to all of this is to exclaim that media is biased! Just like everyone has an accent but do not think they have an accent, all news is biased except the news you agree with. But biased isn't bad. Bias is natural. Our biases show where we come from, what values we espouse, what causes we are willing to stand up for. I am extremely biased in favor of legal immigration, interracial marriages, and having pets. Doesn't matter if it is suddenly proven that cats are destroying humanity or computer programmers from India will cause global meltdown in 2038. I'm not giving up my cats and I'm not voluntarily renouncing my US citizenship. I am biased and I stand by it. Biases aren't really a problem. The problem is our inability to recognize the bias in ourselves when we come across rage-inducing headlines and instantly give in to the rage.

I've been online for two decades now and not ONCE have I benefited from being instantly infuriated by something I read online. Not once has my life been better because of a visceral gut-reaction to an image stamped with some words by an anonymous troll. But I can't even count the number of times it has spoiled my mood, which most likely ruined a meal or a day trip. It doesn't matter if I was reading something true or false, important or trivial. All that mattered is that it instantly caused me to change how I felt, regardless of how my life was going normally. I could be having the best day with my family and friends and suddenly breaking news ruins the moment. Two days later it comes out that the original news while true is toothless because of some nuanced stipulation, and all of my rage subsides. The overly simplified news fed my pre-existing biases and caused me monetizable outrage. People made money from me being angry and frankly, I don't want to be a part of it.

So how do I de-bias the news I am consuming? One of the favorite things I learned in a Computer Science class years ago was how to use an unfair coin to simulate a fair coin toss. An unfair coin is any coin where the odds of landing on heads or tails is not exactly 50%, say if the coin is smoothed out on one side, causing it to be lighter and landing slightly more often. Flip a fair coin a trillion times and you would expect close to 500 billion heads and 500 billion tails. But flip an unfair coin i.e. a biased coin a trillion times, and you could get 430 billion heads and 570 billion tails. So how can you use an unfair coin in a fair way?

Just flip twice instead of once. If you get heads followed by tails, that's heads. If you get tails followed by heads, that's tails. If you get two heads or two tails, ignore the results and flip twice again. That's it. This method is proven to give you a fair, unbiased coin toss. Yes, you might have to flip the coin a lot of times in case you keep getting doubles initially - HH, TT, HH, TT, TT. But the first time you get either a HT or TH, you have a fair outcome.

Another trick I learned long ago that involved deciding the fair outcomes between two parties was about splitting a piece of cake into two. While both sides will fight to get the larger piece of the cake, there is a simple way to make it fair - flip a coin to let one party cut the cake into two and the other party gets to take either of the cut pieces. If the cutter tries to cheat and makes one slice much larger than the other, the picker can take the larger piece, leaving little for the cheating cutter. So it is in the best interest of the person cutting the piece of cake to make it as fair as possible.

To save me from outrage, I combine these two methods. First, regardless of how insane a news article seems, I wait 48 hours to decide. In two cycles of 24-hour news, the opposition will either properly refute or the original party will provide additional proof. I am willing to give the benefit of doubt to any side but I am not willing to give in to financially-motivated entities that profit from me to be offended. If something doesn't enrage me two days after I heard about it, then it wasn't worth being enraged two minutes after. Next, I mentally swap all proper-nouns in negative articles to people I like. If the article no longer antagonizes me with the names swapped, then I have proof of my hidden bias and no longer care about the original article.

This is not the proper strategy for journalists or media personalities with influence. They need to do what they believe is right. This strategy is like defensive driving for the Internet. I am not trying to solve the problem with the Internet. I just don't want it to corrupt my mind. Some motorists describe defensive driving as "driving as if everyone else on the road was drunk." I web-surf like everyone else is trying to indoctrinate me into their angry little cult. So far so good.

It started off as an elaborate April Fools' joke in March of 2019. I wanted to prank my friend so I wrote a simple script that used Google's new Duplex AI digital agent to call him at odd hours. The AI voice was "human" enough to fool almost anyone, interjecting pauses with "umm" and "aha", repeating the same thing using different words. Gone were the days of Prof. Hawking's monotone voice. My friend was now being nagged by a believable set of voices who were trying to book a scuba lesson in his non-existent swimming pool, buy his not-for-sale hair, and apply to his world-famous clown college! My script emailed me every hilarious interaction he had to put up with but by the sixth one, he started asking the bots if I was paying them to call him. On April 1st, I called him up and asked him to review some code I was having trouble with and waited until it dawned on him. I heard a series of loud cuss words followed by uproarious laughter.

"You know I totally believed it was real people," he said. "I mean the accents could use some improvement but I honestly believed someone was posting my number on Craigslist or something. I had no idea these were computer voices!"

Over the next few months, I got busy with life and forgot about the script until one evening I had to call my cable company. They had unexpectedly raised my monthly rate without increasing the Internet speed and I figured it was time they heard my true feelings. But I was on hold for so long, I realized that it wasn't worth my time or sanity. "Only a robot could hold patiently for 30 minutes and not get enraged at the poor customer service rep for an unexpected charge," I thought. Maybe it was frustration, maybe it was the prospect of another funny story, but I spent the night rewriting my April Fools' script to bargain with the cable company. The logs showed that it took about 3 tries before an agent at my cable company said "I totally understand you frustration. How about I revert back to your old price but you keep the new speed?" My pre-programmed script sighed "Ok, that will work I guess." I didn't want it to sound too happy lest they might think I was trying to pull a fast one over them.

I shared the story of lowering my cable bill with friends and family and they all wanted to try it out. I just needed them to send me their cable company name and account number. I already knew most of their home addresses. It took a few days but eventually I had a very detailed, realistic script written that could handle most of the top 10 cable companies and it could even change the tone when talking to supervisor. I analyzed the logs and the script worked right off the bat in 60% of the cases and took at most 3 attempts to get 95% success. I eventually created a simple online form for friends of friends to enter their cable company name and account number so I didn't have to manually type things out.

I woke up one morning with a billing alert from Google. Apparently I had used $150 worth of Duplex agent credits in one night! A quick peek at the site analytics told me things had gotten out of hand. Someone had posted my app to their Facebook page. So I did what any broke person who just got his 15 minutes of fame would do - I put a big banner on the page that said "Lower your cable bill by $10/mo" and put a $1 PayPal button under it. No privacy policy, no terms of service. Just gimme a buck and my robots will take care of your problems! It only cost me 10c/call so there was barely any risk. I figured maybe in a few months, the PayPal button will make me enough to offset the $150 I lost.

I woke up next morning with a $540 PayPal balance. Positive balance! Someone popular had mentioned my site on their podcast. By evening, it was $1400 and PayPal shut down my account thinking it was scam. Took all next day to get it unlocked. After a few days, I started getting calls from people saying Company X had started training their employees to ignore my script. So I spent a few hours increasing its vocabulary and fed it a few books on negotiation and customer service. That worked. First month sales were $24,000 and expenses were barely $500!

The next few months leading into January 2020 are a haze. I was receiving feedback and requests from people around the world at an overwhelming rate. I expanded the basic cable-company caller system to handle health insurance claims, Craigslist inquiries, and even added a business-ready module that could reschedule Outlook and Gmail appointments. But the one that went viral was the car purchase negotiator. You simply enter the car make/model and your zip code and my AI bots would look online and call up every dealership in a 100-mile radius. Then it would negotiate the best price, essentially making each dealer bid against the others in near real-time. Once the script reached optimal pricing, you would get an email summary and then could call the dealership to finalize the purchase. Only cost you $25 or if you joined the monthly Gold plan or higher, it was free.

Growth was good and rapid. Soon I had a team of talented coders, a horde of eager investors, and a following of lazy slackers who never wanted to make a phone call again. But replacing phone calls wasn't the end-of-line for us. We had stopped using Google's Duplex once Mozilla released their open-source AI agent framework Firefish, which could do a lot more than talk. It could intelligently fill out forms. So we added a premium "No Snails" service. All of your boring postal mail comes to us and we handle it. Late fees on car rental? We negotiate it down to near $0. Bill for a "free" service that keeps auto-charging you? We cancel it for you! $49/mo is not a lot to live a hassle-free life. The only mail in your mailbox is birthday cards and wedding invites. No more scary IRS bills. Our Platinum plan members got their tax issues resolved automatically.

Maybe it was the public's lack of technical understanding or their faith in our brand, but people stopped thinking of us as an algorithm company. As far as they were concerned we had a call-center full of 100,000 people fighting on their behalf. It was barely 10,000 cloud servers! By the time we needed a million servers, we had acquired ten million paying customers. We were still private, IPOs having lost their charm by the market failures in late 2020s. We wanted to do something special for our ten millionth customer and the folks in travel department came up with an ingenious solution - World Citizen plan.

We already had Full-Life management plans where we took care of almost every issue you could have from picking health insurance to finding the right job. But no matter what we did, everything was location dependent. Even if our system could help a Canadian citizen find a job in US and automatically handle the filling, mailing, and replying to all of the paperwork needed to get passport and work-visa, the person still had to go for an in-person interview for security reasons. What if we could negotiate some sort of deal between both US and Canada where citizens of either countries could bypass the interview as long as they met certain criteria? Well, since most of the politicians in both countries were already Full-Life management customers, it didn't take long for us to convince them to support our World Citizen plan. After all, we already knew our customers in more depth than any interview or background check could reveal.

As far as I was concerned, I had no interest in selling anyone's data or getting hacked. Sure we experienced the odd instance of run-of-the-mill corporate espionage but securing our systems remained our top internal goal. This helped sell the World Citizen plan to more than the North American politicians. Soon Europe, Africa, and India joined in. Beauty of the World Citizen plan was that since we managed the application and approval process on both side of member countries, our customer's didn't even have to proactively apply for a visa. Instead our travel department would suggest places for them to visit as soon as they became eligible for a visa.

It took a few years but we finally worked out the kinks in the visa-free travel process. Terrorism had always been the primary threat to visa-free travel and we found a unique solution, that our customers surprisingly didn't hate - bank with us. Once a customer moves 100% of their banking, investment, and credit accounts to our system, we could easily detect and prevent illicit activities. We weren't as interested in preventing crime as in having non-criminal customers. Shady financial stuff got you banned from our service permanently. And if you wanted to appeal, you would have to fill out the forms manually and make the calls personally. There was little incentive for criminals to join our service.

For the next decade or so, we continued to acquire more customers and around the time the ten billionth baby was born, we added our third billionth customer. Of these three billion paying customers, 400 million were on the World Citizens plan. We were essentially the fifth largest nation in the world albeit without sovereign borders, currency, or elected officials. We did have a flag though and although it wasn't planted on any planet or moon, it was quite popular among new customers.

Things seemed to be going well for us and our customers well into the mid-2040s but then things took a turn for the worse quite quickly. Our non-customers revolted globally and continued to do so with an unyielding frenzy. We all understood why but we didn't know what we could do that didn't further spread violence. They either made too little to afford our service or had history (criminal or objectionable as per our internal standards) that prevented them from signing up for even the Bronze plans. These folks rarely got approved for visas now that most of the UN countries had signed up to the World Citizens registry. They had a hard time beating our AI at finding decent jobs, dates, or even restaurant reservations. Our AI lawyers beat their AI-aided human lawyers in 90% of the cases and our banking system was better insured than most countries' reserve banks. In nutshell, if you were our customer, you did not have to worry about bureaucracy. Sure it cost you a bit more to get your kid enrolled in a prestigious school but you can be sure that once you set a $3500/mo budget, our system found the most optimal school that fit your budget, education goals, and even your morning commute. The school didn't have to update their enrollment process or website. Our system did everything like you as a human would have via phone, snail mail, and web, just at a thousandth of the cost and with nary a care.

As proud as we were of everything we did for our 3/10th of the human population, it wasn't great to be part of the other 7/10th. So after a few tumultuous years, on Jan 1st 2050, we made the entry-level plan free for everyone without a bad history. Bam! Five billion new users in a day! The rest were mostly kids under 13 or ineligible to sign up.

Looking back at my life, I am proud to say that I helped improve the world in my own unique way. No, I didn't cure cancer and didn't eradicate world hunger. I barely donated to charity beyond what my Full-Life Tax AI suggested. But I'd like to think that I made the world a better place because I got rid of stress and misery on a global scale. We are all but human. I never expected us flawed humans to always do the right thing and I could never convince politicians to fix the laws or update their convoluted processes. All I could do was write a few automated scripts to make living less bothersome. Who knew it could end up touching so many lives! And to think it all started as a joke online.

This will be a series of long blog entries because it is my attempt to put into words an idea that has been percolating in my head for more than a few years now. Ever since I figured out what newspapers were as a kid, I have attempted to soak up every bit of information I come across, in an attempt to build my grand unified theory of the human experience. Two decades ago I logged on to high-speed Internet for the first time, a whopping 64Kb/s fast track to the information superhighway, and got hooked. The Internet is amazing. But let's back up.

It took humanity one million years to learn how to control fire. It took another hundred thousand years for us to talk right. Then ten thousand years to grow food. Followed by a thousand years to figure out machines. Only took a hundred years to master human flight. Now we are ten years into the great experiment of connecting all of humanity via social networks. And we're barely a year into every tech company walking into our homes. My hypothesis is that we humans as a collective are not ready for this. As individuals we can fly space ships and prove conjectures but as a group, we are no more capable of accepting society-wide changes than our fire-phobic ancestors would have been a million years ago.

What led me to finally write my disjointed thoughts on this topic was a remark by Dr. Milewski in his first lecture on Category Theory. He posits that humans only know how to (1) break down complex problems into simpler problems and (2) solve simple problems. Every bridge every built, every CPU ever designed, every heart ever surgically replaced relied on our ability to break down complex problems into simpler problems and then solve these simple problems. But this is not the only possible way to solve problems. Some alien civilization could solve simple problems as a byproduct of solving multiple complex problems. They could solve complex problems directly without breaking them down into simpler problems. Or they could combine a bunch of simple and complex problems and have one large complex solution to them. But Dr. Milewski argues that we humans only know how to solve simple problems. You don't have to take this as gospel or even agree with it but this is the spark that got my brain-fire burning.

I've been programming professionally for well over two decades now. No matter how complicated the problem, coders like (and better than) me all over the world break it down into the smallest parts possible and then attack each unit independently. How do you get a computer to recognize your face? First level — break it down to image acquisition, image processing, and image recognition. Second level — break down each of these into sub-problems e.g. image recognition into detection, classification, and identification. Third level — image detection can be further divided into features like edge detection, corner detection, Hough transforms etc. Fourth level — edge detection can use first-order approaches like Canny and Sobel or second-order like differential or phase congruency. No matter what field of study we pick, from art and sociology to political science and medicine, beyond third or fourth level, things sound like gobbledygook to anyone outside of the field.

But Chirag, you say, the examples you gave just made things more complex at each level, not simpler! Alas, that's the problem with how our language evolved. The simpler terms are often assigned to the most complex things. Face detection is not simpler than phase congruency. Art is not simpler than avant-garde geometric abstraction. The more general a topic is, the more complex it is, because it is composed of a thousand nested sub-topics, like a tapestry made of textile, made of multi-colored threads, woven warp and weft with picks and piles. But unlike a beautiful piece of tapestry, which we can step back ten feet and marvel at in awe, there's no way for our brains to see the big picture of billions of cellphones feeding our deepest thoughts and emotions.

As a species, we have become quite adept at solving problems. Early on we realized that we had a problem with passing knowledge from one person to next. So we made up numbers and words. Then we realized we had a problem with passing knowledge from one generation to next. So we made up lore and epics, passed down orally. Then we realized we needed something permanent, so we started writing on stones, scribes, and parchment. A few thousand years of that and we realized that a room full of manuscripts isn't enough to pass down the ever increasing volume of information humanity was generating so we came up with fields of study, education system, libraries, and professional teachers. Your college may have just built a new student activity center with virtual reality games but at its core, education today is not much different from Taxila or Plato's Academy.

So great, we figured out a solid way to education the masses. What's the problem with that? There isn't. The way we break down the universe of knowledge into fields, and sub-fields, with different degrees each taking years, broken up into gradually advancing courses is fantastic! This is how we managed to cure diseases, build dams, and send rockets into space. Good job, humanity! The problem is that this only equips us to deal with the problems we had ten thousand years ago - health, economics, and politics. Any new problem we come across, we try to shoehorn it into one of our existing models of study. Sure, we come up with new fields like operations research and management science as we broaden our knowledge-base but all of these rely on the same education system we built thousands of years ago.

Again, what's the problem with that? The problem is that we are now left to solve collective problems using tools meant for individuals. The foundation of our economic, political, and health-care systems is that each individual human is independent in their decision-making and will make the rational choice for themselves. Money is a tool meant for individuals. Voting is a tool meant for individuals. Proper diet and exercise is a tool meant for individuals. It's not my business if you go broke shorting stocks, vote for a guy who wears a boot as a hat, or eat cheesecake for breakfast, you are a free human with the liberty to do as you damn well please. Better yet, we even have laws that protect me if your actions or in-actions have a negative side-effect on me. We have built our society to incentivize human independence in every imaginable way and speaking as an independent human, that's a beautiful thing.

But speaking as someone who has read the news at least once in the last few years, we have some issues. We have some major, unsolvable issues. I don't mean the staples of hunger, poverty, and war. We are actually tackling these at an unprecedented rate. And we're using the tools of individuals (education, money, technology, voting) to chip away at these problems. Go humans! I mean major issues that we barely recognize, let alone know how to solve. Take for instance tourism, or rather over-tourism. Policymakers around the world are trying to curb the ill-effects of over-tourism by restricting length of stays, limiting the number of people admitted to pristine sites, raising taxes, and creating new regulations to best manage the local tourism industry. At a glance, this doesn't seem any different than lawmakers trying to stop any other unwanted human activity like drugs, smoking, or loitering. Lawmakers gonna law-make! But let's flip things around and look at the demand for tourism instead.

Why are so many people going to Easter Island all of a sudden? It is certainly not the steady increase in world population. Analysts at Skift, a travel website, say it's because of bucket lists and perfect Instagram snaps. When Bucket List, the 2007 film starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman first came out, nobody could have predicted that it would lead to over-tourism in the Easter Islands. Sure, things like this have happened in the past for hundreds of years e.g. Dutch Tulip mania, but this is different. It's different because of the scale and the speed. Every well-off person on Instagram from India to West Indies wants to take that perfect shot under the big Jesus statue in Rio or push up against the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A hundred years ago, relatively few people knew about these places. Now they are must-see globe-trotter destinations, shared and retweeted a million times daily.

What's the big deal, you ask. Policies will be made, locals will adjust, and a sustainable level of tourism will be achieved over time. That's how our civilized world works and it's been doing so for a few thousand years. My problem isn't with the specific act of tourism. Tourism is great. More people should travel the world etc. etc. My problem is that a small photo with a caption can change our mind. My problem is that anyone can make that photo. My problem is that the photo can spread through a vast majority of humanity in mere moments. More people have seen Psy's Gangnam Style video in a few years than the entire population of Earth in 1950!

We have built our entire society on individualism. We now have methods to influence an ever-increasing number of individuals on a global scale. We can change a hundred million minds with a single photo in an instant! And we are all addicted to this steady stream of novelty that we call the Internet. We're on it. Our parents are on it. Our kids are on a slightly different flavor of it because what we use isn't exactly cool. But we're all consuming wholesome memes, outrage-fueled news, corporate astroturfing, rage-inducing CCTV footage, political propaganda, and outright nonsense all day. And most of the time, we have no idea who came up with it and why.

Our brains are addicted to new and we will accept anything that's new. Refresh, close, re-open, refresh. Sort-by-latest. Top-in-last-hour. Show me most viewed. I want to feel the pulse of the world. I want to be connected to my community, my town, my state, my country, my world. It's 2018 and I must form an opinion on every breaking news story. So let me drink from the fire-hose already!

This is the Internet now. The Internet and us. All of us. Yes, even you who deleted your Facebook or don't post on Twitter. You are with us now. Just because you get your fix from a different source doesn't mean you are not one of us. This is us.

In Part 2, I hope to write more about "The Internet" part and how we got here.

When it comes to language and word usage, I am what is often called, a descriptivist instead of a prescriptivist. Words and their meanings evolve over time and arguing that a word or phrase should mean today exactly what it meant years or centuries ago is futile. When it comes to grammar though, I am more of a prescriptivist, though not strictly. The point of writing is to communicate your thoughts and ideas clearly to the reader. As long as the words or phrases used by a writer convey the indented meaning clearly to the reader, there is no point in being pedantic about the etymological origin. However, using non-standard grammar, especially in written form, could confuse the reader so it is best to use proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

Let me explain with examples. It used to be that the word 'literally' meant 'in the strictest sense or manner'. However, overuse of the word in the past decade has now rendered it to mean 'figuratively'. Nobody literally dies when they run into a celebrity and then post about it on social media. They mean 'figuratively'. I am ok with this, prescriptivists aren't. The word 'computer' used to refer to women who performed mathematical operations manually on paper; now it means the device you are reading this text on.

But why should we care about this? Because there are many more words whose meanings are changing before our eyes and people are fighting all over the world to keep or revert these changes. Political and social disagreements very often boil down to arguing over the intended meaning of words. New words and phrases pop up every day and people get used to them. What was called yellow journalism in the 19th century is now called 'fake news' and 'click-bait'. The word 'organic' has been around for centuries but only recently has it been used to refer to foods cultivated without the use of chemical additives or artificial pesticides.

There is disagreement in word usage in almost every hot-button political issue. The disagreement about the word 'marriage' is pretty commonplace. Should 'marriage' mean a socially and/or legally recognized union between a man and a woman or should it mean between any two adults, regardless of gender? Some argue that 'marriage' should only refer to the union between a man and a woman and if two men or two women want the same union, it should be called 'civil union' instead, since the traditional definition of marriage didn't include same-gendered couples. If a 'civil union' works in the exact same way as 'marriage' and offers the same rights and legal claims, then why not just use or refine the word 'marriage'? The word 'dinner' used to mean lunch and was eaten around 1pm but now we're perfectly ok with making dinner and movie plans that start at 8pm.

Another phrase in the news now is 'assault rifles'. In the strictest terms, an 'assault rifle' must be "capable of selective fire, have an intermediate-power cartridge, have ammunition that is supplied from a detachable box magazine, and have an effective range of at least 300 meters." The AR-15 gun used in the recent Parkland school shooting as well as the mass shootings in Las Vegas, Orlando Nightclub, Sandy Hook, and Sutherland Springs Texas church, is technically not an assault rifle. So passing laws that specifically prohibit the sale or ban the possession of 'assault rifles' would not affect this specific gun or its variants. In this instance, people are trying to generalize the meaning of 'assault rifles' to include guns like AR-15. Generalization has happened many times in many disciplines and industries. Brand names become generic terms (e.g. Chapstick, Jacuzzi, Jet Ski), trademarks become verbs (Google this, Xerox that), and technical definitions get commercialized (e.g. real-time, cloud).

In the end, people will redefine, expand, and refine the meaning of words like they always have as long as others can understand them. Long ago, 'nice' used to mean silly, 'awful' meant awesome, and 'meat' meant any solid food including vegetables and fruits. If the definition and usage of these core words can change, then the redefinition of words like 'woke', 'salty', 'thirsty', 'lit', and 'basic' is just natural progression. Some of these will stick and become part of the vernacular, some will return to their original meaning, and some will continue to change.

I choose to accept these changes because they tell the story of our time.

I find myself at an unexpected place in life. I am used to clawing my way out of problems when things go terribly wrong. I am familiar with waking up stressed every day and striving to stay focused amidst a score of distractions. But I am struggling to motivate myself to accomplish some big but necessary goals because things are already going according to plan.

In mathematical terms, when life's at -1, I know how to push for a +1 to arrive at a comfortable net 0. But now that life's at a chill 0 and I need to push it to +1, I am having a hard time propelling myself. Looking back at how difficult life was at -1, I am thankful that it has been at 0 for such a long stretch. But complacency kills even the mightiest and I am no exception.

We are getting our kitchen remodeled. Juliet and Naveen are healthy and doing well. My sister is days away from delivering her first child. And I have my hands full with work, personal projects, and social events. Literally nothing to complain about. And yet I find it difficult to motivate myself to get to the next level.

I spent some time thinking about the possible root causes but haven't arrived at any eye-opening conclusions yet but I did recall something from my college years that I'm going to try again. When I had to write a long paper but had no motivation to do in-depth research or write detailed arguments, I simply wrote a rough, inexact outline in one quick burst. Seeing an incomplete and potentially erroneous draft frustrated me enough to fix and expand small parts of it, slowly getting me closer to my final goal of a well-researched, comprehensive paper.

When it comes to my work of writing code, I think I'm going to quickly write a basic framework with an unacceptable number of bugs and gradually fix them until the number of bugs is acceptable. It sounds tongue-in-cheek but it's pretty much the motivation behind Exception-Driven Development. Why waste time writing code to avoid bugs that nobody will encounter when instead you can use that time and energy to fix the worst bugs and user issues?

I don't know if I'm going to wake up tomorrow pumped up to hack away at my computer but I do know that picking a better approach could help me concentrate even when my brain says "Eat some snacks and watch another episode on Netflix..." Here's to motivating myself!

As I celebrated my birthday with my family today, I tried to think of something profound about life, growth, and age but couldn't. I was living in the moment and there was nothing deep or touching I could confer with anyone. I can share my political views or opinions on economic policies instantly but I can't dredge up my own feelings and emotions without a lot of contemplation.

It's been like this for a few years now. For a while I thought it was just because I was living on autopilot doing all the routine things like work, chores, and child-care but lately I've realized it is something else - I am no longer a big mystery to myself. A large part of growing up is finding out who we really are. At age 18, I didn't know if I was the kind of person who puts family first or career first. At age 24, I didn't know if I wanted to stay in one place or travel around the world. At age 30, I didn't know if I would give up on my dreams and goals for an easy life or continue to work hard. Today I know the answers to those questions, as boring as they may sound: family-first, stay-in-one-place, and continue-to-work-hard.

I don't think these are choices that one can make; I believe these are innate traits one has to discover for themselves. You can't choose what makes you happy, you can only choose to accept it and be happy or reject it and be miserable. For years, I rejected the fact that I am a homebody and forced myself to travel a lot but it didn't make me as happy as I hoped it would. Only when I accepted that I am someone who likes being at home most of the time and occasionally likes to travel, did I start enjoying both being at home and traveling.

There is still a lot about myself I don't know but most of it is about how I would deal with adversities that I have not yet faced. From dealing with my kid's future teenage angst to health issues I could have later in life, there is much I will have to discover about myself as I age. Until then, I prefer to ponder over the joyous unknowns - how I will react when Naveen writes his first computer program, what will I tell Juliet after she cooks the first meal in our soon-to-be-remodeled kitchen later this year, what will I do when I get the news of my sister's first baby in the next few weeks?

My life over the past few years has become far from simple. The work I was doing started to get pretty hard and things at home turned serious once my wife began to grow a baby inside her. I feel I have gotten used to everything taking more and more of my time and power just so it is done right. I have never tried to be perfect, but as I grow older, I find myself wanting things to be done my way.

At first, I did not have a way. I just wanted to get things done. So I had to find a way and along that way, I slipped and fell many times. After doing this many a time, I learned that it was important to look before I put my foot down. Then I learned to put my foot down only on dry ground, not wet floor. Then I learned to slow down when climbing down stairs even if they are dry. Then I learned to hold the handles on the side in case someone else was running down and pushed me.

My fear of falling has turned me into a funny old man who takes too long to find where to put his foot down, only walks on dry ground, slowly, and holds on to the handles just so he doesn't fall. Believe it or not, this is the road I made for myself as I learned how to get things done without slipping and falling.

Why am I talking about this now and thinking about such things? Because for the past few months, I have lost a lot of sleep wondering how I will ever show my son all the wonders of this world without him being confused all the time about everything. My grown up life is anything but simple. It has taken me many years to figure out which boxes to fill on what pieces of paper and which keys to push in what order. And I am still learning how to talk to people when things go seriously wrong and when to open my mouth and when to keep it shut.

Growing up has not been easy. Learning has not been easy. Everyone around me keeps telling me how little sleep I will get once I have a child. So if everyone is telling the truth, raising a child, even if it is the best thing in life, will not be easy. What has me worried is that my life, which is already so full of worry, will get even more busy and hard.

That's why I have decided to be simple. I don't mean I still stop working on hard problems or stop filling out the different boxes on important pieces of paper. By simple I mean I will spend more time doing small, easy things that take me back to a life when I did not worry so much. I will spend more time in the kitchen, I will spend more time in the park, and I will spend more time doing things that do not need a computer. These are the things I need to do so I can raise a child.

My problem all this time has been that doing simple things, makes me feel like I am not going to have enough time to do work (both computer and paper work), which causes me to worry about money and keeping my promises. So I avoid doing simple things that could take time away from work. I now realize that that is the true cause of my life becoming so crazy and confusing. I only do things that are not simple! Of course my life has become nothing but simple.

There is no way to suddenly make my work and home life simple. That's not how life works. But the nice thing about a day is that there are only 24 hours and if I spend four or six of them doing simple, happy things with my wife and child, life will start to feel and slowly become simple and happy. Of course the things that worry me will never go away. But starting now, I will stop fighting them every waking hour. It's time for me to smell the roses, make some breakfast, and change a baby.

And to show that I can do simple, I wrote this entire piece using nothing but simple words from a table of only ten-hundred most used words. If you don't believe me, check it out yourself by going here: The Up-Goer-Five. If you have read anything I wrote in the past, I hope now you understand why this piece reads like it was written by a ten year old.

Life's going on as usual down here in Florida. I've been keeping myself busy with a variety of computer, house, and home zoo projects. Now that Juliet has a predictable work schedule, we've been spending a lot more time together doing typical married-couple things. We went to the farmer's market on Saturday and bought fresh fruits and vegetables. We're cooking more at home and living a pretty healthy lifestyle (except for my late night programming sessions).

I've already written about not writing more often before so no point in repeating myself but it's not the lack of time that has kept me from updating my 'blog - it's my state of mind. There are just too many things I can write about but don't know if I should even bother. Had Snowden, Syria, or Sequester happened a decade ago, I would've written numerous passages elucidating my thoughts and expressing my cynicism on every topic. But now it feels pointless to write about things I have no direct involvement in. Everyone is getting their news from the Internet today, no point in being one more source of textual drivel.

Even though we are all affected by the news indirectly, my opinion on each matter no longer compels me to stand up on a pulpit and yell them out loud for everyone to hear. My opinions have not gotten any milder, just my desire to voice them publicly. I wonder if this has anything to do with age/maturity or rather my current lifestyle, which is very laid back and full of non-stressful creative outlets. Do I (a) spend an hour writing about what the morality of doing X is, (b) go out for an evening walk with the missus, or (c) build a gravity-drain for the duck pond so it is easier to clean up? I used to choose (a) but now I'm choosing (b) and (c) a lot more often.

In a way, I am happy I don't have much to write about lately. It means everything is alright within and without my head. And if I really feel like typing furiously at the keyboard, I'll avoid online debates and channel that energy into writing something positive on my 'blog. Till next time!

2013 is off to a pretty crappy start. It started with lots of computer issues and sleepless nights, followed by the tragic death of a brilliant hacker. Then while I was in the middle of a bureaucratic paperwork hell, I got the shocking news of the untimely death of a close family friend in India.

In situations like these, you can't help but reevaluate your life's priorities. Should you work hard and save for a better future or should you make the best of today because who knows what's going to happen tomorrow? Even if you believe that it should be a balanced mix of both short-term and long-term goals, should you give up some of your long-term principles to make your loved ones slightly happier in the short-term? The problem isn't that these are hard questions to answer. The problem is that no matter what answer you come up with, life has a way of shaking the foundations of all of your assumptions, bringing you back to square one all over again.

Philosophical musings of such existential nature essentially boil down to the eternal question, "What's the point of it all?" While the question is communal, the answer is deeply personal. A few years ago, I resolved to answer this question for myself with the stipulation that no matter what happens in life, my answer shouldn't have to change. After all, if there is a point to life, it can't change just because I gained weight or lost my savings. I pondered over what makes me happy, what makes me excited, and what motivates me the most. No matter what "purpose of my life" I came up with, it seemed temporary. "Computer programming?" Who knows what's going to happen in a decade. "Raising a family?" Certainly, but it seems too generic and more of a commandment than an ultimate purpose. "Be the best at X?" Seems too selfish and if I lose my ability to do X for any reason, not a long-term answer.

After thinking about this question for days on end, I finally came up with a very simple answer that initially seems vague and pretentious but in fact has stood the test of time quite well. My purpose in life is to help others. That's it. I'll join you in saying that on the surface, it reeks of platitude and sounds patronizing. But the more I live through good times and bad, the more my resolve to fulfill this purpose strengthens. And it answers the hardest questions in life so beautifully. What's the point of it all? To help others. How do I handle tragedies? By helping others. Why do bad things happen to good people? Who knows, let's help them first!

While I can say I have found my calling, I haven't found the best means to achieve it yet. I can't afford to make generous donations to charities and I'm not the kind of person who feeds the homeless in soup kitchens. There are a million people who are more passionate about helping others directly like that than I am. What I am passionate about is building tools to help others. KType was my first serious attempt at that but it is far from my last.

Every time I hear something that makes me sad and start to question the meaning of life, I tell myself that the answer for me, is to help others. It seems like a feedback loop of perverse incentives but the sadder I get, the more determined I become to help others. My newfound defense mechanism against problems without solutions (tragedies, trauma, grief) is not to look inward but around. I don't know if that is a good thing or not but so far it's working - instead of being morose, I'm learning to be more empathic.

With condolences to the family of the recently departed Sudhakar Bhai Sampat, I remain hopeful that his memories will live on for years to come.

Instead of making new resolutions for 2013, I'm sticking with my goals for 2012 - keep on learning. Earlier this year I decided to learn as many different things as interest me - both in depth and breadth. I had no specific target in mind and let my curiosity roam free. Along the way I learned new programming languages, design patterns, and frameworks. I spent weeks digging into the history of the Middle-East conflict and petroleum extraction processes. I learned how to solve the Rubik's Cube in under 3 minutes. I watched hundreds of hours of videos on topics ranging from bio-mechanical engineering and sociology to linguistics and quantum electrodynamics.

I don't think my new-found understanding of how to efficiently compare nucleotide sequences is going to come in handy during my next database project but it makes me realize how much there is to know and how little I still do. I feel I know one percent of one percent of an iota of a minuscule amount of things that are knowable in my own field of computer science. And I know a millionth of that when it comes to biology, astronomy, or art history.

I've been programming since I was ten. During my over two decades of programming, I have spent countless hours digging into everything from transliteration and linear programming to network services and video encoding. Yet I have barely touched the surface of computer vision, neural networks, natural language processing, or machine learning. I have yet to build my own robots! 2013 is going to be the year I learn a lot more things. And I'm looking forward to it more than ever. Happy New Year!

Yours truly and KType got a mention in this Slate article about improving the computer keyboard.

Caps lock has to go...
Perhaps it should have occurred to me years ago, but it wasn't until recently that I fully realized that everybody hates something about their computer keyboard. I was in the company of several family...

I often encounter people who say "I am a visual person" and hence need to see things (like user interface, photographs, videos) in order to understand what I'm trying to explain. They usually say this when I ask them to "imagine the left 25% of the screen has a list of people and the right 75% contains the list of email subjects."

I'm not asking them to imagine something unfamiliar like riding into equatorial sunset of Mars on a goliath slug-whale wearing a sombrero. I'm not asking them to visualize something complex like a 4D hypercube intersecting a torus. Everyone I talk to has seen what a list of people looks like and a list of email subjects looks like. I'm simply asking them to imagine what they would look like when displayed side-by-side on a screen.

And it's not just visualizing computer interfaces. I receive similar responses when I ask people to visualize furniture being rearranged, building dimensions being altered, colors being changed, and even instructions being followed in a different order. The fact that people have a hard time imagining is unimaginable to me!

I don't know why others can't visualize. But I can try to explain why I've never had difficulty in visualizing almost anything, including a Martian sunset.

1. I read lots of books as a kid, mostly about things that I could not possible see in person - fictional lands, foreign countries, distant galaxies, superhuman beings, impenetrable forests, and tons of magic. While I love watching sci-fi and fantasy movies, they do not help you imagine or expand your mind. Reading a book does.
2. Nobody told me I was a visual learner, aural learner, textual learner, active learner, passive learner, or anything but a typical human adolescent. I read text, deciphered diagrams, and listened to lectures. There was no 3D animation of the solar system on a computer to help me visualize how the planets revolved around the Sun while still rotating on their axes. If I didn't understand something, I was not given academic labels as crutches to hold on to for the rest of my life. I was told to try again. Moreover, research shows that catering to "learning styles" is not helpful i.e. dividing students into visual-learners and aural-learners and showing presentations and visual demonstrations to the former and giving audio lectures to the latter does not improve learning.
3. I always thought that being able to quickly understand what people were trying to explain was a very positive trait and something I should actively try to do in all situations. If someone says they got into a car accident because as they pulled out of a parking lot, a vehicle coming up the road changed lanes and side-swiped their car, it is best not to ask them to draw a diagram for visual clarification.

I think the biggest reason why even grown-ups I encounter continue to have a hard time visualizing concepts, models, and strategies is because nobody has told them that everyone should be able to do that. If you're in a meeting and the boss says "I can't add 3 to 7 because I am a numeric person", everyone will gasp. But if they say "I can't picture 3 more icons to the right of the seven icons already in the toolbar because I am a visual person", nobody will flinch. In fact, the helpful ones among us will offer to do a mockup immediately after the meeting, thus reinforcing the belief that it is ok to not have the ability to imagine. Let's stop doing that.

I just had to sign some PDF documents and send them back to a software vendor. I hate the entire process of printing, signing, scanning, and emailing or faxing so I decided to find the easiest and most reliable way to do it online. After an hour of searching, signing up for various online services, and testing out their PDF-signing tools, I have to say HelloFax.com wins hands-down.

I had a scan of my real signature on my computer so that made the process easier but HelloFax lets you create signatures using a mouse or email a photo of your signature from your phone. I signed up for the free account, uploaded the PDF, uploaded my signature, placed the signature on the document appropriately, typed today's date & my name, and clicked "I'm done!" HelloFax instantly emailed me the signed PDF and I emailed it back to the company. The entire process took just a few minutes and did not cost me anything. I would have most certainly paid them $1/fax had I needed to use fax instead of email today.

I went to bed late last night and woke up to the sound of loud beeping alarms. Having survived an electrical fire that shook me up from peaceful slumber in 2005, I still panic a bit whenever I detect loud continuous beeps in my sleep. To my relief, I discovered that there was no fire - it was just a power failure and my security system and computer UPS were beeping to alert me that the battery backup had kicked in. Not knowing if it was just me or the whole neighborhood, I walked over to my neighbor's house to check and he said the whole neighborhood was without power because of a transformer malfunction. He called the electric company and was told the power would be back in two hours.

With no power to go back to, I ended up just hanging out with my neighbor and we talked about "The World". It's been a long time since I had a good, friendly argument offline and frankly I was surprised at how different the world appears to him than it does to me. To me, NASA, space exploration, and particle physics research are a necessity. Pushing the boundaries of science, regardless of how soon the research can have practical applications, is imperative. To him, all government-sponsored research was taking away money from hard-working people and giving it to lazy scientists so they could put shrimps on treadmill (depressing link below). In his view, all research should be funded privately and not at the taxpayers expense.

I argued that yes, while 1 out of 1,000 grants involves putting shrimps on treadmills, scientific discovery is not like running a factory. You cannot just say "cure cancer", expect a bunch of researchers to go into a laboratory, and come out with a single cure. That's only possible in Spiderman comics. In real-life, people from all over the world pour their hearts and souls into one single tiny aspect of the entire problem and tirelessly work on it for decades, and if they are fortunate, discover something meaningful. My neighbor has chronic back pain and I asked how would he feel if scientists discovered a special protein that gets released into the shrimp's bloodstream whenever it starts to develop signs of chronic fatigue and that we can create medicine that have the same beneficial effect on humans with chronic back pain? After a few moments of silence, I could sense his mind-gears turning.

Being cynical as I am, I expected him to quote yet another talking-point from some news article but surprisingly he said "You know, that's not so bad. What's half a million bucks when you can get rid of life-long pain for millions of people?" I exclaimed, "And that's exactly what science is! We don't know what is going to work and what's not but we have to keep moving forward. Going to Mars and beyond may seem like a waste of taxpayers money when you could be building more schools but without promotic scientific research, you will never be able to break out of the problems we have in the world today."

We argued back and forth for the next couple of hours about everything from drug legalization to policing of the Internet but before we parted ways, he thanked me for changing his views on scientific research. He said "You know, I never looked at it that way." That made me feel genuinely happy. I expect others to disagree with me on socioeconomic matters as it is quite often not a matter of black and white but rather infinite shades of grey. However, science is a matter of black and white to me. Science good, not-science bad. Of course there are shades of grey within scientific research itself but overall, the world will be a better place with more science, not less.

Sen. Coburn Targets Shrimp on Treadmill, Other NSF Spending
Sen. Tom Coburn is stepping up his crusade against the National Science Foundation this week with a new report that said the NSF funds frivolous research and fritters away its own management funds.

I've been working on a really neat problem this week for KType - how to compare phrases and find the best matching ones. If a user types "wnv u wnt", I want to autosuggest "whenever you want." Every computer and phone has spell-check to fix spellings but there is no established algorithm to convert abbreviated speech into regular English, especially for multi-word phrases. Certainly some words are easy to guess like wnv = whenever but what should "smtg" be? Something? Smoothing? Smothering? Smelting? Well that depends on a lot of factors like the popularity of the word, the subject matter, the words that come before, and most importantly the actual context. "I wnt to tl u smtg" most probably means "I want to tell you something."

I've been reading up on algorithms like Bitap, Levenshtein, Bloom filter all day and haven't come across any algorithm that I can directly use. Looks like I'll have to figure this problem out on my own. Fun times!

I've always had a love-hate relationship with sleep. While I never have a problem falling asleep and seldom wake up in the middle of the night for any reason, I rarely shut my eyes and just wake up 6-8 hours later. Between the time I fall asleep and wake up are hours and hours of dreams and nightmares that keep me engaged each night. I'm planning on staying up late tonight to "reset" my dream/nightmare cycle. I can recollect most of my dreams every morning if I want but usually avoid doing so.

Many of my dreams have recurring themes. One common dream I have is finding entirely new rooms and sections of my own house or my parent's house. A recurring nightmare I have is realizing I have a final exam today for a class I have somehow signed up for but never attended or studied for. My dreams are often surreal and geography agnostic - I could be in SeaWorld, Orlando and walk up to the street vendor in Kolkata for a quick snack. My nightmares are a cross between 24 and Everybody Loves Raymond - a ticking time-bomb of social awkwardness.

I have always had dreams and have failed to explain the cause despite my meticulous attempts to analyze my diet, exercise-level, moods, entertainment, stress, or health. I love finding patterns but I can't seem to find any with respect to my sleep cycles and dreams. What I do know for certain is that if I sleep less, I can't seem to recall my nightmares. This makes me a little tired physically but mentally I feel a lot more refreshed than if I sleep 7-8 hours and have 3 hours of nightmares. So every few days, I stay up late to try and reset the cycle so I can get more dreams and fewer nightmares. If I sleep more than 7 hours, I am guaranteed to have a bunch of nightmares that will affect my mood for the rest of the day.

In order to prevent or minimize the negative effect from nightmares, I used to control my dreams, but I stopped doing that because it was extremely exhausting and no different from being awake for many hours every night watching foreign films without subtitles. I've tried "planning" as I fall asleep - planning everything from my next day's todo list to life goals and dreams. I've tried meditating and clearing my mind as I fall asleep. None of these have any effect on the onslaught of dreams and nightmares each night. While one might say these nightmares are a result of suppressed emotions, repressed memories, or personal anxiety, I would disagree with that because (a) I live a pretty drama-free life with barely any social or interpersonal conflicts (b) I've had both vivid dreams and nightmares since I was a carefree kid, and (c) my dreams often segue to nightmares and vice versa so it's not a well-defined condition like after-effects of PTSD.

As a result of these dreams and nightmares, I like to stay up late and sleep fewer hours. But all is not lost. There are fun things I can do as I fall asleep. I can transition into a wake-initiated lucid dream as I slowly fall asleep and make myself hear any music or sounds I want. It's like the world's largest iPod library in my own head. I just think of a song and I can hear the entire orchestra with all the small, distinct notes playing clearly in surround sound. Or I can think of a voice and converse with anyone I want, just like in real life. Sometimes, I can even make myself "see" anything I want with my eyes closed. I only do these things as I'm slowly falling asleep. If I'm already asleep and realize that I am in a dream-state, I choose not to control it because it is exhausting like I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

When I'm not actively dreaming but still lazy enough to not get out of bed, I do a lot of problem solving in my sleep and love it. Often I will get stuck on a computer project during the day and find the most optimal solution during my sleep. I don't think I "dream" the solution but rather think of many different solutions in a relaxed state, devoting a larger part of my active concentration to solving the problem instead of sensing environment, taste, sounds, or sights. I would love to be able to get into this state more often, though not at the cost of peaceful sleep.

Sometimes when I've had just the right amount of wine, I go to bed and wake up feeling refreshed 8 hours later without any dreams. I'm sure I still dream but as long as I don't remember dreaming when I wake up, I'm happy. I just hate feeling tired every morning because I was writing, directing, and acting in a live-action movie in my head for the past few hours. Here's hoping for a dream-free night!

Juliet and I took a small vacation earlier this week. We cruised down to Cozumel and Costa Maya, Mexico on the Royal Caribbean ship Radiance of the Seas. We had a great time and met a lot of cool people. Check out the pictures.

It took me some time to upload these because my main computer died. I'm still surprised that it lasted for over three years despite 24/7 usage. I'm just using my Mac Mini and Acer laptop for now. I haven't decided if I should buy another desktop or not. My computer room is so quiet and peaceful now. Maybe I'll just buy a MacBook Air in a few months.

It's been over a week since I started my new schedule and I'm pretty satisfied with it so far. I've gone running with our two puppies almost everyday, worked on my projects like I intended to, fulfilled all of my commitments, and got a taste of being in the zone. My stress-level has gone down drastically and I've been feeling extremely creative all the time. I know this because yesterday, after a hiatus of almost 3-4 years, I felt excited to dabble in computer graphics once again.

I made a 3D city out of Jenga Towers (warning: 7mb) by programming in Structure Synth and rendered it using SunFlow. To see how I did it, read this and to do it yourself, read this. While playing around with 3D graphics seems like a waste of time unless one intends to make it a career, I know from past experience that once I feel creative enough to make some artwork, the energy and enthusiasm starts to flow into my code and projects.

In other news, we cancelled our cable TV and home phone line. We mostly watch shows and movies on-demand via Netflix Instant ($9/month) so there's no point in paying $100/month for less choice and worse programming. I've been watching Doctor Who episodes while Juliet loves to watch chick-flicks and romantic comedies.

My plans for our big desert/canyon trip in October are coming together. I planned the entire 1700-mile route last week and will make the reservations for the camping sites later today. I'm so excited!

I took a long walk by myself today. I had been waiting for this walk all my life and it was everything I ever thought it would be. Most people plan for success, many plan for happiness, and the rest plan for difficult-to-achieve goals. I took a long walk to plan for balance and self-actualization. Now that I'm not working full-time, there are too many things I can make myself busy with. Most of the things I want to do are computer-related and if my past-experience is any indication, they will bring me temporary excitement, momentary fame, and years of bug-fixes, feature-requests, and unpaid tech-support emails. In short, every new project I pick up comes with life-long baggage and even though I love these little things, they prevent me from doing the big things I really want.

I began my walk with the goal of simplifying my life while still enabling me to do everything I want guilt-free. This includes lots of computer things, family-time, exercise, kayaking, self-improvement, and social commitments. After an hour of pondering, I came up with a weekly schedule that will be nearly identical every day:

My daily chores would fit between 6am-7am and 7pm-11pm. All my interesting projects would be during 8am-6pm. Once a month, I will reevaluate my open projects and make changes to my schedule as needed. As of right now, I have prior commitments for Monday and Wednesday, at least till the end of this year. This leaves five days where I can do anything I want during the day. These five days were the most difficult to allocate. While I'd love to spend all of my time working on cool web apps like most of my projects or ZetaBee, I came to a realization that this is a never-ending, never-finished list. These projects have brought me immense joy and experience but have also taken up a lot of my free time in the past.

Additionally, these projects also conflict with my nature adventures. I want to go kayaking all day or hike a long swampy trail without feeling guilty that I'm not working on x-y-z. Then there is a big issue of getting in The Zone, "a phrase used by software developers to mean the ultimate level of mental focus." Working on six different projects in the same week basically means you don't get in the zone for any of them - too much distraction and shallow focus. I want the ability to get in the zone so I can do something with absolute concentration and utmost dedication.

My solution is to split the projects into (a) ONE-BIG-PROJECT and (b) everything else. The one-big-project is what I'll work on during Thursday-Sunday so I can get in the zone. Everything else goes to my "Too-Much Tuesdays" bucket. Every Tuesday, I will get to pick what I want to do that day. If I need to work extra on a project because of prior commitments, I can do that. If I want to go kayaking, hiking, or just have a Star-Trek movie marathon, I can do that. If I want to take a day-trip with Juliet, I can do that.

My goal is to stick to my weekly schedule without fail and push anything that would prevent me from staying on track to the Tuesday bucket. This will free me from guilt, distractions, and unnecessary busy-work so that I can work on my one-big-project for days on end. For the foreseeable future, my one-big-project will be KType. KType will be a mix of software & hardware to help people with disabilities communicate better. I'm certain that I will be writing a lot more about it in the coming days.

To make sure I stick to my schedule, I'm now tracking my time using Toggl.com. If it works well for me, I will write about my experience and methodology. Personally, I've never been too obsessive about following a routine and as long as I stick to my general schedule, I'll be more than happy. The goal here is to not stick to schedules but to create new, useful tools that help others. The weekly schedule, time tracking tool, and all these plans are just to make sure I don't go off-track, broke, or lazy.

Salman Khan is a famous Indian actor with over two decades of box office success. Recently, another Salman Khan is gaining fame because of a different kind of audience he holds captive. This Salman Khan, or "Sal" as he likes to call himself, is an educator unlike any other you've heard before. Sal runs one of the most popular and prolific online universities in the world, Khan Academy, from his home. Khan Academy is an ever-growing collection of YouTube videos that aim to teach a variety of subjects from math to history and biology to physics.

Sal scribbles down math equations on a digital blackboard and narrates each step of the equation in a very soothing but not boring tone. These lectures last 10-15 minutes and cover a small part of a subject. Currently there are about 140 videos spanning the subject of "Linear Algebra" and I've reviewed the sixth video in the series so far. I am in the process of reviewing a lot of math that I haven't touched since graduating from college six years ago. I plan on doing a lot of independent research over the next 6-12 months and I need to learn a lot of math behind digital signal processing, computer vision, and audio synthesis. That means hundreds of hours of learning calculus, linear algebra, physics, and complex numbers.

I've known about the Khan Academy for many years but didn't bother checking out any videos because I felt it was meant for middle and high school students. Indeed, that is how Sal started making these videos - to help his nieces and nephews with their school work. However, now that I actually want to relearn a lot of stuff I've learnt in the past but forgotten over time, I find Sal's videos to be perfect for me. They are very straightforward, he explains almost every detail, and since it's YouTube, you can rewind or skip sections easily. I watch a 15 minute video in about 8-9 minutes. However, there are some parts I watch 2-3 times if I don't understand them the first time around.

I've been listening to Sal's voice for three days now and I'm certain I will continue to do so daily for the next six months. I looked at a lot of other OpenCourseWare, including free classes by MIT and nothing comes even close in terms of quality to Sal's videos. I think the real reason is that while all the large universities are trying to upload videos of in-class lectures by professors and making books, notes, and exams available online, Sal is concentrating on what matters most - simple and clear instructions in small, digestible doses. An MIT OpenCourseWare lecture on Computer Algorithms is daunting. Each lecture is between 60 and 90 minutes long and contains slides, related content, assignments, exams, projects, multiple downloadable formats, and group discussions. Sal's videos run full-screen and have no distractions, interruptions, or extra work. If you want to truly learn a subject, Sal's videos are what you need. If you want to get the in-school experience of doing homework, assignments, and exams, then get started with OpenCourseWare from any number of universities.

My goal is to learn many different subjects in a short span of time. So in addition to Sal's videos, I'm reading books, writing programs to solve some of the new problems I encounter, and reviewing any scientific papers that interest me. 2011 will be an exciting year for sure. I can't wait to catch up on everything I missed.

We went to the Ikea in Tampa yesterday and surprisingly we found the food there better than the furniture. The store was setup amazingly well and there was a really good cafe. However, the furniture didn't seem to be of high quality and it wasn't cheap either. Plus I would have to haul it all the way home and assemble it myself. Just didn't seem worth it. So instead, I ordered a kitchen buffet online and got free shipping. It looks better than what we saw at Ikea and is made of solid wood instead of particle board or MDF.

Juliet spend the entire day cleaning the house and I rearranged the office / computer room. We still have a lot of stuff to move around but it's finally feeling like home. I need to get rid of my plastic cabinets and get some decent filing cabinets for all of our documents. Maybe once the house is painted, I will start looking. Tonight I have lots of homework to complete so that's it from me.

The tiles are done! The entire house looks so much better now. I'll try to post some pictures soon. If you are in the St. Petersburg / Tampa Bay area and need tiles or flooring done at a very good price, call up Michael from MCG & Associates. Mike's entire crew was awesome and did a fantastic job.

In addition to getting new tiles, we rearranged almost every room and gave away a lot of my old furniture. The baker's rack, kitchen table + chairs, kitty post, a small sofa, and tons of smaller things are now gone. This makes the house more spacious and now we can have a guest bed setup in the office room. Now we have to get all the rooms except the bedroom painted, the bathroom renovated, and give away a lot more stuff (old clothes, computer equipment etc.)

Last few weeks I've been so busy with school and this week is no different. I still have three more weeks to go before the semester is over. Since we're going to India in May-June, I don't think I'll be able to take summer classes. So in my free time, I think I'll work on some software projects that I have been thinking of for a while. I'll share more once I get started.

In 2001, I bought my first LCD, a 19" Princeton Graphics monitor for $1200. In 2004, I bought two Dell 19" for $600 each to replace the original LCD. In 2007, three Dell 19" LCDs for $400 each to replace the two Dells. Now, I can buy six 23" LCDs for approx. $200 each for a total cost of about $1200. It's funny how the number of monitors continues to increase while the total nominal investment remains constant.

I had been talking on and on for years about getting a 6-LCD setup and I'd even predetermined what I'd do with each LCD in a 3x2 layout (top1: IM/Chat, 2: Graphics Editor, 3: Putty/Shell, bottom 4: FTP/Explorer, 5: Text Editor, 6: Browsers). My techie friends laughed at me but at a resolution of about 2048x1152/LCD, I would have ample resolution for just about everything and I wouldn't have to alt-tab at all. My productivity in web-development would absolutely sky-rocket. And since could rig my own stand to hold the 6 LCDs in place instead of buying one for $600, I could get my dream-setup for about $1500. I had built my workstation in 2007 to easily handle 6 DVI ports when the time was right. Now all I needed was an excuse to splurge.

Last month, two of my Dell 19" LCDs died, leaving me with just one monitor. My wife joked that I needed new monitors because she didn't wanna be married to some one-LCD guy. She practically kicked me out of bed and told me to find my 6-LCD X-Mas gift. I spent three hours surfing Newegg, Dell Outlet etc. and finally found my dream setup. Right before I clicked 'Place Order' I yelled out "Honey if I click this button, I'm never leaving my computer room." I don't think she heard me but I clearly did and for some weird reason I didn't like it. I cleared my cart and started looking for a laptop instead.

I've always been anti-laptops because come on, how can you even compare a 3 or 6-LCD setup to a laptop with a tiny screen, tiny keyboard, and crappy batteries. However, something went off in my head at that point and I realized I didn't want my perfect 6-LCD setup even though it was right there in front of me. I have wanted 6-LCDs every single day for the past decade - ever since I started making websites. But it was when I yelled that I don't want to leave my room that I realized that I actually do want to leave my room.

Now I take my laptop with me everywhere I go and program whenever/wherever I want to. It's a very big change for me and my productivity has definitely taken a hit. However, my desire to code has risen and that is important. Who cares if I'm capable of being highly productive if I don't feel like it most of the time? I guess the take-home lesson here is that it is not the specs but the environment and experience the setup fosters. I still might buy my 6-LCDs someday, if I ever have a crazy do-or-die idea, but for now I'm just happier with a laptop.

I grew up playing with Lego and similar building-block toys but once I fell in love with software, I pretty much forgot that I could tinker with hardware too. For about two decades now I've been writing code to make computers do whatever I want them to do. Meanwhile my opinion of hardware has been that it is a failure-prone black-box that my beloved software needs to run on. If I could program tomatoes and watermelons to send email, share photos, and add numbers, I would throw away all my personal computers and go grocery shopping immediately. But since I am unable to do that as of yet, I will do the next best thing and start playing with building-blocks and hardware again.

A lot has changed in the past decade in the world of hobbyist hardware. There is a whole ecosystem now surrounding a tiny computer called Arduino that costs only $30. Arduino lets anyone write small programs that can interact with the world using sensors and motors to make things happen in rea-life. No matter how smart my code is on a regular computer, the most effect it can have on the real-world is to send an automated text-message or make a loud noise unless I buy some expensive hardware. Arduino can let me turn on/off LED lights, measure room temperature, detect infrared light, turn on/off motors, and much more. Basically, now my Lego toys can cheaply become tiny machines or robots and the best part is that I still get to write software to make it all work together.

I'm still waiting for my Arduino to arrive and already have an idea for my first, second, and third projects. The good thing is that being a beginner in this field, I get to learn a lot of new things in a very short span of time. After you have been working in a field for a decade or more, coming across new things becomes a rare event. It's not everyday that I hear about a revolutionary programming language or database system. But a tiny $30 PC that can inform me when my cats enter the kitchen? That's revolutionary!

We're back from our long weekend in the Florida Keys and here are the photos. We had an awesome time in Key West and in addition to visiting the Hemingway House and Butterfly Conservatory, we took an airboat tour in the Everglades and visited Miccosukee Native American village. I'm pretty tired after eight hours of driving and have a pretty busy week ahead so it's time to get off the computer and relax.

2010 is just two weeks away and life is moving along swimmingly. School is almost over, work is going well, and the pets are healthy and cuddly at home. 2009 was a very stressful year for both Juliet and I because of school, work, travel, and immigration. We hope to end the year with a relaxing weekend down in the Florida Keys. I can't wait.

One of the things occupying my free time these days is independent research. I've been researching about computer vision for some time now and have started to learn about various algorithms that enable computers to detect faces, eyes, cars, and other objects. I've always been fascinated by image recognition and have lately been spending a few hours every other evening reading research papers on the subject. I don't have much to share at the moment but I'm fairly certain that I will be talking more about this topic in the coming months. My goal for 2010 is to dedicate a significant portion of my free time to independent research so that I will be well-prepared when I get into a PhD program.

Yesterday evening we ripped off all the carpet in our house and earlier this morning I dumped off all the smelly carpet pieces in the landfill. Under the carpet was a pretty decent layer of laminate wood. It is much cleaner than carpet but still not decent enough. We will be getting tiles in our entire house pretty soon. I've been saving for new tiles for a while now and it's about time to get them installed. I also moved around the furniture in the living room and my computer room and the house now has a lot more open space.

We're going to Juliet's grandma's house tomorrow for Thanksgiving Dinner. I have an exam and a presentation due on Monday so this weekend will be study-time once again. Tonight, Juliet and I are watching a bunch of movies.

It's my 29th birthday today and I'm doing homework four days before it is due. I think for the first time in my life, I am nonchalant about my birthday. Any other year, I would be complaining about having to do homework and chores but I guess after 28 of these, it's getting a little repetitive. Plus 29 is such a non-milestone age. Maybe next year I will do something fun for my birthday. Also, I'm sorta sick with a bad cough so I'd rather not go out and celebrate. I plan on drinking lots of orange juice and cleaning the house tomorrow. I should also get some laundry done as I've run out of clean t-shirts and have resorted to business shirts.

Everything else is going well. School is a lot of work and will get much tougher next year when I sign up for tons of classes. I'm not working on any interesting projects at home right now and just concentrating on school and work. I'm looking for a good research field for my eventual PhD. I'm not sure if I want to spend 5-7 years in computer theory, systems, AI, media, economics, mathematics, or a mix of all of these. I still have a few years to figure that out so I'm not rushing.

My days after the ultramarathon have been super busy and the nights have been super short. Work is going well but since I am in the middle of a big infrastructure upgrade, I don't have a second to sit down and breathe. School started and I'm already busy with homework and projects. After two weeks of non-stop work and school, I went up north to Chattahoochee this weekend to see Juliet. She'll be there till the first week of October.

The past two days have been nothing short of an adventure. We went to see stalactites and stalagmites in underground caves, saw bats, swam in a freezing cold freshwater stream, had a little picnic, took more than a hikes in the forest, saw a river dam, chilled on a pier at a lake, got lost while off-roading, almost got my car stuck in mud twenty miles away from civilization, explored an abandoned fort, got terrorized by a loving puppy in the middle of nowhere, drove for hours along the beautiful Gulf of Mexico, and sang lots of songs off-key. Last night we watched a few episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and ate some yummy pasta that Juliet made.

I'm exhausted and ready to get back to work tomorrow. Long drives give me so many ideas for my computer projects.

For the first time in many years, I feel like a kid discovering how a computer works. I had been so busy with making websites, software, and applications for others that I forgot what it was like to just learn and explore like I once used to. I've spent the past decade worrying so much about clients, projects, and deadlines that whenever I had to learn something new, I rushed in, learned the bare essentials, and then got back to finishing the project. I never took a day or a week to just fiddle with new things. All I cared about was building something useful that did whatever the users wanted. While that seems quite productive initially, over time I started to lose the passion I had for computers, mainly because everything felt dull and boring because everything had predetermined specifications and deadlines. In a way, it limited the scope of my knowledge and skills by pushing me towards familiar, proven tracks.

I haven't been working on any major computer projects at home for a few months now and was having a hard time NOT working on something. The habit of constantly building something for others has become a chronic addiction. How can I sit around watching TV or spend 12 hours a Saturday training for my marathon instead of writing code? The feeling of "I should be doing X instead of Y" is one of the most guilt-ridden, debilitating experiences that an ambitious person can face. However, I also believe that all work and no play makes even the most interesting activities suck. How can I make something useful when all I care about is making something useful?

When I look back to see all the fun things I've made, I either made them when someone either asked me directly or when I was sitting around fiddling with something else. It's been a while since I've made random little things while playing around. Tonight I spent some time toying with Processing.js. It looks quite interesting. There are a million other neat projects that people around the world are working on. From a new database system to programmable art, there are so many things I want to learn about for the sake of learning instead of using them as tools for specific work-orders or turning them into full-blown business proposals. I'm excited!

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men often go awry. For the past two weeks, I had been planning for this three-day holiday weekend with Juliet and well, things got off to an unexpected start. I got a call this morning from a coworker that a water pipe burst at work and all the side-offices including mine were two-inches deep in water. Considering that all of our computer equipment and power supplies sit on the floor, that was enough to get me worried.

I drove off to work immediately, taking Juliet with me hoping that the damage would be small enough that she could sit in the car while I went in, picked up a few computers, and let it all dry out over the next couple of days. Alas. My entire office was flooded and it took my coworkers and me almost four hours to get rid of most of the water from the building. Thankfully, none of the servers were affected and all the office computers were working fine. Monday is going to be a rough day.

We picked up two movies on the way home, Seven Pounds and Juno, and just finished watching them. Juno was pretty funny and cute. Seven Pounds was a very touching movie and Will Smith gave a very good performance. I think tomorrow we'll go down to Sarasota area during the day and see the fireworks at the St. Petersburg Pier in the evening. After my long runs over the past few weeks, I took a break but I need to get back into some serious running once again. Sunday will probably be a long-run day. September is approaching fast and I need to get into some serious shape by then.

Yesterday, I ran the longest distance I ever have in my entire life - 35 miles (56 kms) in a little under 11 hours. To train for the 100 mile Grand Teton Ultramarathon in September, I have been running 20+ miles every Saturday for over a month now. Most people I know run considerably faster than me though they can only run 3-10 miles at most. While millions of people run marathons each year, very few run distances beyond 50 miles. Ultrarunning, or running further than the 26.2 miles of a marathon, is a whole different experience and requires a unique set of training, capabilities, and strategies. Since many of my friends and family have been asking me about the experience, I'll post an FAQ of everything I've learned in the past few months.

Q: Um, why are you trying to run ONE HUNDRED MILES?!

Because I suck at running. In fact, I run so slow that last weekend during a 3.3 mile Adventure Run, I finished 321st out of 331 runners. I was slower than 97% of the Marine Corps Marathon finishers in 2004 and the fastest mile I've ever ran was a little over 10 minutes. Most people who can run a mile, can run it in under 8 minutes easily. I can't. However, just because you suck at something doesn't mean you give up. Instead, you do it as much as you can. So while I can't run faster, I try to run further. Three months ago when I thought about running 100 miles, it seemed like an impossible goal and it seems even harder today because now I actually know how difficult it is to run for half a day non-stop. I want to run because I feel it's something I just can't do and wasn't made to do. Proving myself wrong is my favorite hobby. Running, kayaking, or sailing are just the means.

Q: Can anyone run 100 miles? Don't you need to be in peak physical condition to run that far?

If you can run 10 miles, you can run 10 miles, 10 times. However, you can only run 100 miles if you train right. You don't have to be in great physical condition and I'll be the first one to confess that I'm not. You do have to spend a lot of hours actually running though. Most people don't have that kind of time, energy, or desire.

Q: Do you think you will run 100 miles successfully?

I don't know. I try not to think about the result. I believe there are three steps to every bold ambition. First, is to have the drive and courage to dream big. Second, is preparation - putting in the time and effort to reach the goal. And third is the result - crossing the finishing line. No matter what the goal, we have control over the first two. I signed up for a 100 mile race and I am putting myself through the gruelling training. I don't know if I will finish or not because anything can happen before or during the race. I want to start the race knowing that I prepared to the best of my abilities.

Q: How long will you take to run 100 miles?

As per the race rules, the 100 miles must be completed within a span of 36 hours. That's a pace of 2.8 miles per hour or 21 minutes per mile. I am hoping to finish in about 30 hours, with an average of 18 minutes per mile. I don't intend to sleep and hopefully will not stop for more than a few minutes per aid station. My comfortable long-distance pace is 15 minutes per mile so an upper limit of 18 minutes per mile is quite conservative.

Q: How does a person run non-stop for so long?

Running for 30+ hours non-stop means your body has to be able to do its normal functions without any interruptions. So breathing, digesting, growing hair and beard, healing wounds, fighting diseases and allergies, everything must go on continuously the whole time. The goal for me is to make my body feel relaxed like it is sitting on the sofa watching TV the whole time I am running up and down mountains. And there is only one way to do that - run long distances without stressing my body out and get my body used to it. If I am exhausted after running 25 miles, I cannot run the other 75 miles easily. But if I ran 25 miles as if it was just a minor jog, I will be much more capable of running another 25 and then another 25.

Marathon runners train very differently than ultramarathoners. They aim for speed and strength. They push their body to the limit from the first mile right until they cross the finishing line. Ultramarathoners are in no hurry to get anywhere. The saying goes that "the secret to running an ultramarathon is to start slow and then slow down." Often many good marathoners fail to finish ultras because they push themselves too hard early on.

I am incapable of running fast so I don't have much of a problem with this. I just have to make sure I don't slow down too much. I jog at a speed that feels natural and comfortable to me though it's such a slow pace that people walk right past me! However, it is a pace that I have learned to maintain. I can keep moving at that pace as if I am sitting on the sofa watching TV. When most people want to get in shape and start running, they try to run too fast too soon and end up getting side stitch (sharp pain on the sides) or worse, injure themselves. The trick is to just run slower and further. You will burn a lot more calories if you can run three more miles a day than run 10% faster.

Q: How fit are you?

Not that fit. At 5'8" tall, currently weighing 177 lbs (80 kgs), I am technically overweight with a BMI of 27. I still have a relatively high body-fat ratio (18%) and don't look muscular or skinny. I am just like your average computer programmer in every shape and form.

I did lose about 15 lbs (7 kgs) in the first two months of training but haven't lost any weight since. I actually gain a few pounds every weekend because I like to eat a lot during my long runs. I can't bench-press much nor can I lift a lot of weight. Truth be told, I don't act, look, or feel like a guy who just ran 35 miles.

Q: So then how did you run 35 miles?

By not stopping when I wanted to and stopping when I had to. Ultrarunning is 99% mental and 1% MENTAL. The body is never in control and the mind must never lose control. I had been mentally preparing myself for a 40 mile run for over two weeks. I expected to run 40 miles in 12 hours after running 20 miles in 6 hours multiple times. This is the same pace I expect to maintain for my race. From the first mile early yesterday morning till the last mile at sunset, I kept a running inventory of all of my body parts and the condition they were in. It's like a video game where you keep an eye on all your soldiers, ammo, and equipment and make sure they are all taken care of for optimal performance.

Just because my feet hurt, doesn't mean I stop. Barely into the second mile, my left foot sent a message to the brain, "I'm in pain! Stop!" Had my brain listened to it, I would have run a total of 1.2 miles yesterday. Instead, my brain ran an analysis on the left foot's real-time condition and came to the conclusion that though the left foot is indeed in pain, it is stable, not on the verge of breakdown, and in no way severely in pain. So I kept running.

Over the course of the next 23 miles (8 hours), the temperature (feels like) rose from 83F (28C) to over 108F (42C) with humidity hovering at 65%. My feet, legs, arms, shoulders were all in pain but it was bearable. However, my brain decided it was too hot to continue at a good pace in this heat so I went home and relaxed for two hours in the shade. Once the temperature outside fell, I ran another 12 miles in 3 hours. At the slow pace I was going right before I stopped, I couldn't have completed 12 miles in 5 hours. My body was completely cool with pushing forward but my brain thought better. Stopping actually made me go faster. Had it not been for the high temperature earlier in the day, I could have easily gone 40 miles non-stop but there is no point in running 40 this week in blistering weather and being sick for the next month because of it.

Q: All of the above sounds horrible! Will your race be like this?

Trust me, the above felt much more horrible in person. Hopefully, the race will be quite different. I live in Florida at an altitude of 20 feet and this has been an excruciatingly hot summer. The race is in the Grand Teton area in Wyoming at 8,000 feet altitude with average daytime high of 70F (21C) and nighttime low of 40F (4C). Instead of this heat, I will actually be bundling up for most of the run. However, that also means running with more gear and dealing with low-oxygen at high altitudes.

I am planning to arrive at the race venue 4-5 days ahead of the race so my body can get acclimated to the altitude. After I donated blood a month ago, I had a first-hand experience of trying to run with 20% lower oxygen in my bloodstream. It's not going to be easy but I think I can manage, especially if I can stand to run in 108F heat. The other challenge is that the race will go up mountain peaks and down canyons while Florida is pretty flat. That's where gym training helps. I've been doing Stair Master and Elliptical machines at the gym for 2-3 hour durations at moderate speed to build my leg muscles up. Also I cross a lot of pedestrian bridges during my long runs and that gives me some training with steep inclines.

In reality, nothing can prepare me for the race as well as training on the actual race course. Since I work and live in Florida and Wyoming is a four-hour flight away from me, I just have to do whatever I can.

Q: What do you eat/drink these days? What about during the runs?

I have a pretty healthy vegetarian diet and have started to eat a little more protein than I am used to. I've been a vegetarian since birth in India and don't see any reason to change. I eat lots of fresh vegetables and fruits, drink tons of V8 V-Fusion, and avoid fatty or high-carb foods. Unlike runners who bulk up on high-carb foods right before a marathon, ultrarunners eat steadily throughout the runs.

Yesterday, I ate two foot-long veggie sub-sandwiches over the course of 11 hours. I eat one Powerbar Gel every 30-45 minutes. I drink water constantly (one sip every 15-60 seconds). I have a hydration pack that I fill up with Gatorade and sip it every 2-3 minutes. Sometimes I feel like I run solely to justify my hedonistic appetite for sugar. Of course, eating and drinking so much also means I have to take more bathroom breaks than normal but that is a good thing because it is clear evidence that my body is functioning properly and not shutting down or falling into starvation mode.

Q: Aren't you afraid of collapsing from heat strokes or worse?

Of course, I'm worried about heat strokes and thousands of other things that can go wrong during a long run. That's why I constantly check my heart rate, temperature, vision, balance, breathing, sweat-rate/salt-loss, fluid-intake, and skin irritation. One of the key lessons I have learned from my training is that nearly every bad condition is avoidable if detected early enough. A stitch in time saves nine is nowhere truer than in endurance activities like ultra-races.

If I so much as feel a pinch in any of my toes, I stop, adjust my shoes, socks, and insoles till everything feels right, and then continue. The mindset during a marathon is to continue non-stop at any cost. That's great when you have to run for another 2-3 hours but completely breaks down when you have 28 hours to go. It was actually pretty tough for me to change my mind about this because I constantly feel like I am slowing down my pace if I stop. Turns out, over the course of 11 hours, I only stopped for about 14 minutes total for the various adjustments to my shoes, socks, hydration pack, shorts, hat, headband, and water bottle. Failing to adjust any of these could have caused me to lose balance and fall, get blisters or skin abrasions, or in case of hat, headband, and water bottle, get a heat-stroke and pass out.

The most fun I had yesterday was stopping at every mile or so, filling up my bottle at a water fountain, and drenching my entire body in cool water over and over. It took only about 45-60 seconds but I gained that by running considerably faster. As a side-benefit, I avoided heat strokes and didn't collapse from exhaustion.

Q: Does the kind of gear you have matter? Won't any pair of shoes and water-bottle do?

The right gear is extremely critical! Every little piece of gear on your body will rub up against your skin constantly and drive you crazy. On some of my runs, I have desperately longed for a piece of string or rubber-band so I could keep some part of my shoe lace or hydration pack strap from moving in an annoying way. Whatever you choose, it has to be extremely comfortable and durable. This doesn't mean I spent $500 for a water-bottle but it does mean that I tried four $7 bottles till I found one that I liked and that worked well. Same with shoes, headband, and I'm afraid hydration pack. The one I have leaked during my run, causing a liter of Gatorade to flow down my shirt, shorts, and feet into my shoes and socks, making my blisters worse. I didn't even realize it till I got home for my break because my entire body was drenched by water and sweat. These are the kind of things that happen 7.5 hours into a run.

Q: Other than your long runs, what else do you need to do?

I have a pretty busy work week and have classes/homework couple of weeknights so my exercise regimen during the week isn't too intense. I try to mix in different activities to make sure I don't just exercise my feet. I swim an hour or two a week and train on Stair Master and Elliptical. I don't like running on the treadmill and prefer to train my calves, glutes, hamstrings, and quads with targeted exercises. I do some weight training with low weights and sets of 100-300 lifts. I also stretch a lot on days I feel too lazy to go to the gym. And at least twice a week I go running in the morning for 2-6 miles. The funny thing is that my long runs have trained me so well that I can recover from two hours of Stair Master within minutes.

Q: What does your wife have to say about all of this?

She knew I was a determined guy with odd ambitions before she married me so she has learned to just live with all of this. She fully supports me in all of my goals, as non-conventional they may be. She is in medical school to be a PA and studies take up most of her weekend hours. I use the same hours to train for my long runs so it works out quite well. She also makes my life much easier by buying most of my running gear and supplies for me. Oh and she picks me up when I decide that 108F is too hot to run and I'm four miles away from home. I don't think I give her enough credit for it but she's extremely supportive of my training though she keeps mentioning every now and then that I'm stupid for putting myself through this mess. Due to her school schedule, I doubt she'll be able to come to Wyoming for my race but if my weekend runs are any indication, I know I will be thinking of her every mile (mostly hoping that she'll come pick me up and take me home already.)

When I had computer science projects due in college, I used to read business articles for fun and distraction. Now I have finance homework and I find myself reading comp. sci. papers. It's not the subject material that I tend to avoid but rather the obligation. Reading for procrastination is fun. Reading for school seems like hard work even though I actually like the material.

Our hammock and stand arrived this week and Juliet and I got to relax in it first time for a few hours this morning. It's pretty cold outside so we were bundled up in multiple blankets with our pets jumping all over us. I can't wait till it gets warmer when we can lay out looking up at the sky all evening. Our backyard is quite isolated and there are no bright sources of light nearby so hopefully we can stargaze for hours.

I had a busy week and don't really feel like working on the computer today. My boss gave us two tickets (yay free! Go Eric!) to a hockey game in Tampa tonight and I'm excited to go. I'm not really a sports fan and don't follow any team in any sport but I love going to games and being part of the crowd, cheering for the local teams. Other than that, I just have a ton of chores on my list for today. School starts on Tuesday so I won't have much free time after this weekend.

I had a pretty busy weekend. On Friday, wifey and I saw Broken Social Scene and had some nice dinner. Yesterday I setup an old computer, learnt a new language, and watched a classic. Today I worked on some code and we watched a couple of movies. I didn't get much school work done but I have all of this week to get on it. Holidays are coming up and I'm getting exciting about our long road-trip to New Jersey during Christmas.

Juliet and I have been living together for about six months now and we have a pretty good grasp of each other's quirks. However, we're still discovering each other's phases. Quirks are little things like her habit of leaving paper towels all over the house when she has a cold or my obsessiveness about turning off the lights in any unoccupied room. Quirks are relatively easy to notice and remember. Most pieces of romantic text highlight the beloved's quirks fondly, even the negative ones. Phases are slightly long-term behavioral tendencies that expose new insights into a person and are generally hard to identify. We change into a different person during a critical phase and act quite unlike our usual selves. The Juliet I know in our daily life is not the same Juliet who has four exams and three labs over the next five days. It is much easier for me to understand her during the hectic school weeks when I realize that this is simply her trying to be a good, hardworking student. Recognizing the start and end of a phase is critical to avoiding conflicts and misunderstandings that can arise during the period.

I went through my periodic coding frenzy this weekend. I told her earlier today, "Honey, once a month, I will go completely bonkers over some arcane computer system. I will not shower, shave, or eat during those 48-72 hours. I love you forever and ever but during those hours, please do not expect me to engage in discussions about our travel plans or even what you should cook for dinner because my mind will not be anywhere close to reality. However, after the coding marathon, I will be a better, more educated, more skilled developer with a stronger understanding of the subject matter and that will help us in the long-term. So even though you might fear that I have gone completely psychotic, I am just going through a mini metamorphosis and will turn out alright in the end."

Even though she cares and understands my passion for code and all things cryptic, I chose to explicitly say all of the above for a number of reasons. In addition to recognizing my phases and understanding my lack of attention, she can help keep my frenzies under control. Looking back to the development of Chime.TV a couple of years ago, I now realize that I spent way too much time cocooned in my house writing some pretty nifty code and not enough time socializing with friends. After six month of near-constant coding, when I finally emerged, I felt I had lost the ability to speak to people about anything other than streaming videos. I certainly do not want to go through that again. On the flip side, once she sees how beneficial my coding frenzies are to my morale, ambition, and general outlook on life, she can encourage me to work harder on my projects and motivate me to take some bigger risks.

When we see behavioral changes in the people we love, we aren't always sure if they are temporary or permanent. If we are know they are temporary, we can learn to cope with them better without putting extraneous pressure on them. If we find out they are permanent, we can adapt, confront, or intervene based on our best judgment. In my case, she understood my point of view and supplied me with lots of yummy food throughout the weekend.

I had my first real in-class exam today after a break of four and a half years from college. I think I did well for someone who barely had the time to sit down and study. I have been pressed for time lately and this very lack of time is gradually teaching me how to better manage my todos, stress, expectations, and goals in quite an unorthodox way. I know my thoughts below will initially seem to be going all over the place but just hang on a bit because I will eventually reach the focal point that I intend to discuss.

The problem with life is that for most people, it really is the same story day-in and day-out. Even if you have an exciting work or social life, the excitement has the same flavor on a day-to-day basis. Then one day something changes and it starts to get more stressful. You can't change your life around immediately to counteract the increased stress, so it builds up. Pretty soon you fall way behind on your todo list and your goals and hopes are nowhere in sight. A few years later you ask yourself how did I end up here and whatever happened to my dreams and all those plans.

At the same time, you see successful people in every walk of life around you. The gym instructor is in better shape than you'll ever be, your coworker knows more about Excel than you thought was possible, your sixty year old neighbor can run faster and further than you can, the mechanic knows more about your car than you ever will, your friend has read more books than you can imagine, and even the stupid guy who interrupts movies on cable TV seems to cook better than you can ever hope for. It is as if we are being told we suck at life by being encouraged to be good at everything and we are going crazy trying to deal with it all.

Then New Year's Day comes around and the go-getters among us make resolutions and promises. Time to join gyms, lose weight, start reading, help the community, sign up for a music class, and take a course in web designing. All of this is supposed to make us a better person and help us grow. And I am all for it too, regardless of when and how you start. Knowledge, skill, and art makes one a well-rounded person so go for it by all means. The problem isn't that these things don't help us in the long run. The problem is that they displace the honest, self-actuating goals we had on our list and have forgotten over time. What was once a list of unique, personal goals, goals that truly mattered to you, is now a list telling you to sign up for pilates, swing dancing, and pottery classes just like eighty million others.

The trick is to not buy into it. I don't want to run faster than anyone and I don't need to be an awesome cook. I will not be jealous of my well-read friend's library and I will not try to be the best Excel number-cruncher (though I'm pretty damn good at it already.) What I will be, is the best me. I no longer want to be the best at anything and everything. If that means I get a B in Accounting while making more time for my wife and pets because that's what matters more, that is how it shall be. If it means my website gets fewer hits because I'd rather be sitting outside staring at the moon instead of computer code, so be it.

Throughout our lives we have been taught that it is a great thing to be good at something and success is what we should strive for. Society puts a great deal of value on the champions in every field. You cannot fight these uncontrollable urges to be better at everything unless you are consciously aware of your true desires in a given field. From the bottom of my heart, I do not care about running a mile in under six minutes. I never have and never will. However, the moment I see someone dart past me at a park, an annoying little bulb lights up in my head and commands me to "wake up early every morning and start running again so you can be fast like this runner." So I wake up the next morning, run for a few days or weeks if I'm lucky, and then give up. Why? Not because I hate waking up early or despise running, but because running is not something I genuinely want to do at this point in my life.

The simple reason most of our resolutions fail is because we don't want to do them. And on top of that, we are told that we are utter failures if we don't stick to our resolutions and plans - plans that we never even wanted to make to begin with. So this is where we are right now. We make our own dreams but get sidetracked when we get stressed in our day-to-day life and see others succeeding at their own goals. So instead of working on our goals, we pick up their goals because self-help books and self-titled gurus said so. We try hard but fail after we realize we don't really like bending over backwards in yoga or rock-climbing. Then finally we ask ourselves what happened to our goals and why life seems so stressful and joyless despite our every effort at improving things.

I learnt all of this over time after trying to do too many things too fervently and failing miserably at almost all of them. I still hope to do a lot of things but only ones that I really, really want to do and without trying too hard to succeed in most of them. The handful of things that I am passionate about and dedicated to, will still get my full attention but the rest of the things on my todo list will get sort-of done, whenever, if ever. By not caring too much about everything, I am able to care a lot more about some specific things and that I feel is the key to reducing stress and reaching one's personal goals.

I've been pretty busy past 10 days. My MBA program is starting this Friday and Juliet's MS program already started last Thursday. I just bought all of the books for my program from Amazon and some other sites. I've been busy last seven days moving over twenty websites from my old host to a new one as part of my financial organization plans. I will be so busy with my work and school that I won't have much time for web designing or much else.

I don't know what it is about getting married that makes a guy want to setup a kickass home-theater system but finally I have a nice setup. My 51" HD TV is now connected to Pinnacle ShowCenter 250HD that plays all the music, videos, and movies I have on my computer wirelessly without any special setup or software purchase. I now have an HD-DVR with 200+ channels on FiOS TV. And then there's Juliet's DVD/VCR player too. I realize I am doing almost everything I made fun of when others did it but somehow this all feels pretty good.

We bought a nice cage for the sugar gliders. The sugar gliders will be arriving pretty soon too. Once they're settled in, I will take lots of pics and share. I have a lot more website stuff to finish now. Next update will hopefully be from my new server. If it all works as planned, nobody will notice anything.

It's an awesome feeling to put back your tools after a job well done. I spent yesterday afternoon doing tons of fixups and cleanups around the house. My kayak rack is ready and looks pretty stable. It should hold up well in heavy winds because each of the two wood posts is buried four feet underground. I cleaned the carport and the backyard patio. Later, Juliet and I moved her sofa from my computer room to the newly-empty Florida room where my kayaks used to be. We moved some of her boxes to the Florida room too.

The house looks much neater and we have a lot more space now. We still have a lot more things to do before we can sit back comfortably. She has to paint the kayak rack and I have to find a tarp to cover it. We need to arrange the stuff in Florida room and find a cage for our potential new pets. I also have to combine our cellphones, find a wireless HD media-player for the TV, and get back into programming.

I presently have the worst headache of my life that I can remember. I used to get headaches as a kid but that stopped long ago and I rarely get them anymore. I think the prescription for my glasses has changed. Guess I need to get my eyes checked now. This also means, sitting on the computer staring at the screen is almost impossible. So I'm gonna go offline and cook myself a nice dinner.

I have so many random little things I want to write about. I don't want to sit on my computer for hours editing and pontificating so here's a summary of what could have been a series of 'blog entries.

I don't multitask. I have a one-track mind and find it way more efficient and productive to do one thing at one time. Multitasking is important for people who manage schedules, projects, and other people. For people that create something new that wasn't before, multitasking hampers concentration.

I don't have writers' block. Even if nothing is happening in my life, I can always find something that interests me enough to write about. Often I organize the thoughts in my head and just as I'm about to start writing, I close the window and go do something else. I don't lack motivation to write but sometimes I can't justify my time being spent sitting on a computer instead of playing with my spiffy new mini toy-helicopter (thanks Tay).

My showers used to take about four minutes. Thanks to Sandra's wonderful Christmas gift pack, now instead of using Head & Shoulders as shampoo/conditioner/body wash, I have three separate bottles from American Crew that do the same independently. It takes about 14 minutes to shower now. Also news to me was the capacity of my hot water heater - 7 minutes when shower is turned on full.

The ERP system at work has been in operation for well over a week now and everything is moving along as smoothly as I could have imagined. I still have lots of work to do but hopefully no more crazy hours.

I'm eating much better lately now that I don't come home at 11pm. I've started cooking every night and hope to do so from now on. I don't eat any meals other than dinner and yes, while that is very unhealthy for most people, it has always worked for me (and my mom). I understand how eating a big meal before you go to sleep doesn't burn all the calories efficiently and blah blah, but I don't care. This whole eating-once-a-day thing works for me well. I feel lazy and tired if I eat 2-3 meals a day.

The way I see it, eating multiple meals a day is a relatively modern norm just like the myth about drinking 8 glasses of water a day. I drink water when I'm thirsty. I drink enough to quench my thirst. Don't make this process any more complex. Early humans ate once a day or at most twice a day. I eat just as many calories, vitamins, and different food groups as I'm supposed to eat - I just eat all of it in one meal. I guess I have my own diet style because I'm pretty sure I have an eating disorder. I know it seems hard to believe but I can almost never tell when I'm hungry or when I'm full. So if I eat 3 meals a day, I usually end up overeating at each meal. Then I'll get busy with something and forget to eat for two days straight. I have actually asked my friends when we went out for dinner because that was the last time I ate. Relying on my stomach to gurgle and burp is not healthy. Now I eat once a day. So far so good.

I'm going to Tay's for the weekend. It's been a while since I had some social time. I'm excited.

I'm filling out the application for the Masters of Science in Innovation Management program at University of Tampa, starting September 2008. It's a long process and I have to get many documents in order before I submit the application. I ran across my old file of school report cards (all the way from nursery to high school) and it's pretty interesting to read what my teachers and mentors said when I was a little kid in India. Here are some of the more interesting random bits I found:

• Jun 25, 1984 - Nursery: "Intelligent, but careless." A in Reading and Parts of the body, E (average) in Drawing and Coloring and Hand Work.
• Dec 23, 1986 - Pre-Primary III: "Punctuality - often comes late. Went to zoo and enjoyed himself. Behavior - tends to be mischievous at times." A in Spelling, C in Hand Writing (thank god for computers!).
• Jun 6, 1988 - 2nd Grade: "Very intelligent child; very exact, perfect and quick in his work; very cooperative and helpful to others; handwriting needs improvement." 50/50 in Number Work.
• Apr 28, 1990 - 3rd Grade: "Grasping power is very good, tends to be careless, speech training required." Won 1st prize in Three-legged Race. A in Spelling, Science, General Knowledge, and Number Work.
• Apr 15, 1991 - 4th Grade: "Intelligent but tends to be selfish and not friendly or helpful." Punctuality: C, Perseverance: A.
• Apr 17, 1993 - 6th Grade: "Sincere and obedient boy; Class Rank - 1st; Result - Satisfactory" (I don't think my class teacher liked me much.)
• May 12, 1994 - 7th Grade: "Outstanding in Volleyball; Class Rank - 1st." Weight: 51kgs / 112 lbs.
• Apr 21, 1995 - 8th Grade: "Promising student; takes interest in all games but must try to excel in one; good in rifle shooting; sober and well behaved boy." Height: 5'8 (same as today).
• May 15 1997 - 10th Grade: "Can do better; work harder; improve the quality of answers." Highest score in Language: 185/300, Social Studies: 159/200. Poor in Math: 59/100 (stupid Algebra!)

After 10th grade, personalized report cards gave way to computer printouts of standardized test results with percentile scores. TOEFL: 99%-ile, SAT: 95%-ile, GRE: 80%-ile, 4 years of college GPA: 3.9. If my work gave out report cards with little notes, I think it would still say: "Punctuality - always comes late. Takes long lunches. Must stop wearing free T-shirts and torn jeans to meetings with prospective business partners."

I also have to update my resume for the Masters application. Here's hoping I make the cut.

There doesn't seem to be anything similar between the two movies I watched today, I Heart Huckabees and Reservoir Dogs. Both are awesome movies that I highly recommend watching more than once. One little bit in both films that I never noticed before, caught my attention today - personal anecdotes. "An anecdote is a short tale narrating an interesting or amusing biographical incident."

Personal anecdotes are the little stories we tell others to give them a glimpse into the world as we experience it from our point of view. I would not be the same person today without my teeth-gnashing story about how I nearly lost my opportunity to come to the US in 2000 because I clicked the stupid "Reply" button in an email instead of "Forward." My dad would not be the same person without his story of how he ran away from home in this teens but was caught by an employee at my grandpa's company. We repeat our stories to every new crowd. We talk about that one time we got so drunk in Europe that we had to be taken to a hospital and almost missed our flight. When stories are really embarrassing, we only tell them to four people - one coworker that won't tell others, one friend from school who is already privy to a lot worse, one ex-girlfriend who is still amazed by our antics, and one stranger we're standing next to in a pub because hey, who is he gonna tell?

I blog my stories. I call up people and tell them myself. I wait for the right topic to come up at lunch before I can unleash my harrowing accounts from times begone. I tailor my narrations to best suit each particular audience. When repeating the same story to my mom, the girl with no clothes is nowhere in the tale. When reiterating it to my buddy, she is the center of discussion for a good 30 minutes. Stories change over time and usually get larger than life. The little computer nuisances I caused for my internet provider in 1999 can become incidents of nation-wide system meltdown brought about by yours truly after a drink or two today. I exaggerate and if you think you don't, you're full of crap.

This doesn't mean we're all habitual liars. Life doesn't always happen the way we want it to. That girl didn't give me her number, just her email. That guy didn't tell you that you were the best singer he's ever heard, just that you were pretty good. What we wanted to happen was a little more than what did happen. So my damned stories are going to end with the girl giving me her number and you can tell your grandkids that the guy thought you were an opera singer. Why? Two words: Big Fish. This is the next movie on my list. If you've seen this movie, you'd know the power of good story-telling.

It's 2007 and computer hardware is still the bane of my existence. Like a good little nerd, I spent the entire Friday night and most of Saturday setting up a computer to hook up to my TV. I had the whole setup ready and was about to sit back and watch the latest episode of IT Crowd when the computer crashed. I spent two hours trying to isolate the problem and turns out the motherboard is dead. It's an old server motherboard that can't be replaced for cheap so now I have to find another computer. I love software but I truly hate the hardware it has to run on. It's like loving the brains but being repulsed by the body. Kinda like online dating.

Check out this nifty little tool I made tonight: Name that Color. Being a typical guy, I have no clue what Lavender and Mauve look like. You can show me Indigo and I won't know if it's more like Violet or Purple. So I made this little app where you can create a color on the screen (or copy-paste CSS hex# color) and find out the name of the closest matching color. The list of colors is pretty small now but I will soon compile a much larger list for better accuracy. My favorite color is somewhere between Steel Blue and Cerulean Blue, close to #5082B9. What's yours? Find out here.

Oh and did you know Magenta and Fuchsia are exactly the same (for computer screens)?

I'm not a big fan of productivity advice and lifestyle tips so when I casually glanced at the headline "The seven habits of highly subversive people" on reddit, I expected nothing more than a rehash of every other "Work Smart" Top 10 list. I imagine it was my disdain for this genre of articles that caused me to misread "subversive" as "productive." Now that I read the article without any preconceived notions, I can't help but pontificate about my own personal and lifestyle habits.

I'm not certain how this change came about in my personality but over the last couple of years, I have stopped buying things unless I absolutely need them. I don't go "shopping" anymore and don't order t-shirts, gifts, or cool gadgets online. I have no new collectible items to adorn my showcase and the only products I buy regularly are food and household items. I haven't even bought new clothes in years (sadly, it's starting to show.)

However, I realize now that contrary to my claim just half a year ago, I am not a bad consumer; I just spend my money differently. I've minimized buying things and maximized buying experiences. Instead of $250 to get a better cellphone, I got $150 wind-surfing lessons. Rather than spend $600 on a bigger TV, I'm spending $50/month so I can chat with my family in India every day on my drive to work for 25 minutes. The only major purchase I've made this year is a $2500 server/workstation to code Chime.TV on but that's strictly a development decision and given the expected four-year life of the PC, quite economical in the long run.

I remember asking my dad to take me to Fancy Market in Kolkata, India so he could buy cool wristwatches for me. It was a lot of fun to find a unique designs before others discovered them. Since then, a significant change in my thought process has occurred. You know how you love that one shirt or that book or that wristwatch or your lovely car? I don't. I barely care about objects anymore. My car is a mechanical device with a simple purpose to transport me around and requires regular maintenance. My computer is replaceable as long as the backups are current and my wristwatch costs $9. Stuff is merely stuff. And I refuse to allow my purchases to represent my inner-self.

I know this sounds pretty Fight-Club-esque and maybe I am going through the same disconnect with reality, after already having procured every minor item I thought would make me happier and not finding the satisfaction. It might also be that I have realized I don't have what it takes to afford a $12m house with heated pools and tennis courts and hence have opted to get out of the rat race altogether. Or my minimalism somehow makes me feel superior to the mass consumers out there and is just an elitist act to maintain my smugness. Or maybe I've woken up one morning to a fire in my apartment and realized that in times of life and death, the stuff you so gleefully bought is what gets in your way as you try to save your loved ones.

I often get caught up in long debates with my environmentally-conscious friends who think that I am single-handedly killing the planet because I am vehemently against most methods of recycling, use paper plates instead of washing dishes, and think purchasing carbon offsets is completely idiotic. While I can defend my position at length on all those issues, I would much rather explain that the best way to be green, save the planet, and be environmentally conscious, is to BUY LESS STUFF. Live in a smaller house with a bigger yard. Drive the smallest car you can manage with. Don't throw away things unless they break - upgrading for the sake of upgrading is sickeningly wasteful.

Learn to manage with less. Instead of a $600 GPS, buy a $15 Atlas. I did, and discovered that Okefenokee was only four hours away. You don't need a 650 DVD movie collection. You don't need a 32-piece set of steak knives. And despite your intellectual ambitions, you don't need a 3,200 book library. Manage with less, manage with alternatives, and manage with compromises. And with the money you saved by not buying the entire audio CD collection of Songs from the 80's, take Salsa & Merengue lessons.

I'm not the first person to say all of this either. Eradicating materialism has been the tenet of many a religion like Buddhism and Jainism. However, it's pretty difficult to give up all the things you're used to and care about. I can't give up computers and I rather fancy my kayak. Loving your pair of black shoes isn't going to destroy Earth so keep on dancing. All I'm saying is don't get in the cycle of desiring more objects, getting a more strenuous job to afford those objects, and then realizing you need more objects because your new peers have them, and working 70 hour weeks to afford these objects that you didn't even know you needed, only to find out that while you're working and buying and working and spending, you imprisoned yourself in a cage of debt, stress, and complete lack of direction.

So I say be less productive, less materialistic, and less successful and be more adventurous, more leisurely, and more content.

On the way home from work today, I stopped by Michaels (arts & crafts store) and bought about $55 worth of small wooden boxes, black and white pebbles, wood finish spray paint, sandpaper, and some black and white markers. Took me a while to find it all but I think I'm now ready to build my own set of Go board game. Originally I had planned to create the set from scratch but I found just the right-sized wooden box for me to turn into the Go board with minimal effort.

While watching Falling Down starring Michael Douglas, I sanded down the rough edges of all the wooden boxes and have it primed for spray painting tomorrow. I highly recommend the movie and sanding things down before you apply varnish. A Go set similar to what I'm making costs over $200. With just a few lazy hours of work, I can soon start learning this ancient Asian game.

As faster computers repeatedly beat humans at Chess, two games where even novice level humans still win over the fastest computers are Bridge (card game) and Go (board game). The game play of Go is very deep and the number of possible moves far exceeds those of chess, Scrabble, and Othello. The same brute-force and systematic methods that work for computer chess, disastrously fail at Go. Go requires the player to look at patterns and understand what they mean and how they can relate to each other, as opposed to simply running through 4 billion possible moves within seconds. In Go, there are trillions of quadrillions of possible moves and we won't be getting computers that fast any time soon.

The study of Pattern recognition is of particular interest to me because I think that's pretty much what human intelligence is - the ability to recognize a pattern and make judgments based on them. The day computers can learn to recognize patterns on their own without being fed everything directly, is the day we'll have truly intelligent computers. If you're interested in what the game is about, you can learn it here just like me.

I AM A HERO! My coworker came into my office, worried that his hard drive was quite possibly dying. I walk into his office and his office-mate asks me, "Please do something because the noise is killing me too." I go near the noisy computer, locate where the noise is coming from (the power-supply unit in the back) and hit it once with my flat palm, thump! Instantly, the buzzing stops. The fan on the PSU was out of alignment and now fixed, re-aligned. The Computer Guy has saved the day, once again!

If only my current project, setting up an ERP system, was this easy.

I'm here, just working on my computer stuff like crazy. I'll probably be this busy for another month or two at least. I talked to my friend Vishal in India and found out that he's engaged!!! Congrats Vishal :)

It's been over a month and my kitchen tiles are still broken.

One of the things I love about a kayaking trip is the long drive to and from the water. I often pick a single real-life incident and slowly generalize the matter, as if back-tracking to its source. On my drive to the Oscar Scherer Park in Osprey, Florida to kayak earlier today, I wondered why a close friend of mine gets offended whenever I ask her how some plan will work out. It was irritating me because she loves to answer why something happened yet doesn't like it when I ask how something will function. It occurred to me that depending on your personality, you fit into one or maybe two of the following types:

• Why Personality: The Why people want to know the reason for every incident and everyone's action. These are the psychologists and philosophers. They love to delve deep into the root cause of events to determine whether there exist logical bases for the same. Generally smart and inquisitive by nature.
• How Personality: The How's are the engineers, the scientists, the mechanics of the world. They could care less WHY the Universe exists, all they want to know is how did the Big Bang happen? And how does white light break into the colors of rainbow when it passes through a prism. You may think that many of the scientific questions are Why's, like "Why does an apple fall down and not up?" instead of How's. However, for a scientist, "Why" doesn't really say anything unless you can describe "How." We know "Why" the apple falls down: Due to Gravity. But till date, we don't know "How" gravity works and hence this area of Physics still has ample room for discovery. The How's are just as smart as the Why's and much more practical in nature.
• What/Where/When Personality: These are the folks that are living it up. They don't care Why or How, and instead just want to know what's going on, where's it going on, and when do they show up with a 6-pack of beer. The world is full of them and it's a good thing - they live in the moment and get things done. Most of the people you know fit into this personality. Next time you hang out with them, don't try to talk philosophy or calculus. Just raise the glass and have a drink.
• Who Personality: Of all the people I despise, I'd say the one thing most of them have in common is that they are always looking to put the blame on someone else. Who ate my cake? Who stole my ideas? Who told you that you can use my computer? If you know someone that begins half of their questions with "Who," I'd advice you to stay away from them. "Who" knows how they'll get you in trouble some day.

I'm mostly "How" and a little bit of "Why." I become the "What/Where/When" type every now and then though I do my best to never become a "Who." I'm pretty certain my friend is "Why" and hence loves to explain "Why" something happened. However, she just doesn't understand that other people may want to know specifically "How" she intends to make her plans work. I think that now that I've realized this, it will be easier now for me to deal with persons of different types.

So which one are you?

Often I look into myself and try to pick apart my personality for flaws and issues. While talking to a friend today I realized that I have one very good characteristic that very few people I know have, patience. Of all the people I know, my mother is probably the only one more patient than me, so I'm pretty sure that's where I got it from.

Why care about patience when you have instantaneous alerts on latest sports events via text-messaging? If everything is immediate in this world today, isn't asking for patience just showing that you cannot deliver smoothly? When it comes to systems, projects, products, services, and technology, yes, everything should indeed be immediate and instant. There is no reason your check-deposit should take 45 days. However, when it comes to people, personality, emotions, and society, patience is a virtue.

I want my bank-transfer to happen NOW but I will wait two months while a friend sorts out their job situation before calling me. I want to watch the latest news NOW but I will wait a year before I ask my sister about her future plans. I will also wait three years for my Masters and six years for my Post-Graduate degree some day. I am also in no hurry to get rich enough to buy some mansion on the beach or kayak down the Amazon.

This doesn't mean I'm giving up on whatever goals I have in life. I'm just enjoying today while preparing for a better tomorrow, instead of stressing out today with the hope that tomorrow might be marginally better. Patience is realizing that not everything will happen immediately, especially things that you have absolutely no control over. Once a week my family asks me the same question and my reply is "at least five-six years." If there is nothing you can do to speed things up, why waste your time wondering when it will finally happen?

One thing people have to learn about patience is that you need patience to learn. We don't have fancy DVD-to-Brain devices like the Matrix so we pretty much have to slowly learn things over time. I didn't learn programming in one night and you didn't learn playing piano in a week. Why shouldn't I wait a year before I can play a musical instrument well and why can't you wait four months before you get used to that new computer software?

Somewhere among all the rapid global communications via Transatlantic cables and real-time GPS-based shipment tracking information sent directly to your Palm Pilot and Blackberry, the lesson of "slow and steady wins the race" is being forgotten.

After almost four years of daily use, I finally decided to replace my ConAir electric-shaver. I wanted an electric-shaver that was affordable, easy to clean, and cordless yet worked with a cord when not charged. The last part was the most important because I don't want to wait for 20 minutes while the shaver charges up before I can shave, especially when I'm in a hurry. I found Braun 1775 on Amazon for only $30 with shipping! I just shaved with it and wow, I'm sold for life. The shaver is light-weight and does not hurt your skin regardless of how roughly you use it. I just got the smoothest shave in years and now feel like I should be dressing up for a formal dinner at the Governor's House while a tall hot chick in black dress brushes the back of her hand against my smooth-smooth cheek and smiles coyly.

Man, I should be paid for that free advertising! The fact is, despite being a "computer guy," I'm not a big fan of gadgets and gizmos. I don't replace my toaster or cellphone till it drowns in water or catches fire, respectively. I guess I'm old-school in the sense that, if it's not broken, I don't replace it. My old shaver is in my linen-closet now, in case the new one breaks or has problems. My main computer is about four years old too and works pretty well. I'm just hoping I don't have to replace it anytime soon. I even bought my car hoping I'll be able to drive it for a decade at least.

I'm bad for the economy.

If you know me personally, you could use the adjectives 'practical' and 'realistic' to describe me. I'm not shy about the fact that I have my feet solidly grounded in reality with a near-absolute lack of fantasy in my life. Every thought in my head has something to do with things I've done, things I want to do, and things I want to understand. It can be math problems, computer algorithms, process-flow diagrams, kayak trips, how-to-build-X guides, or even socio-political disagreements. Every single thought is based on something real and concrete. In my life, there are no video games, no role-playing, no fiction novels, no drawings, no story-telling, no fantasy, and certainly no imagination-beyond-what-is-actually-possible.

Yet that doesn't mean I don't have ideas or creative thoughts. I do. Tons of them! But every idea is about something that I can do realistically. Every creative thought is about something I can make possible given my skill set and abilities. Over the course of years, I have become so practical that there is no room for flying llamas and unachievable goals in my life. Now, despite shaking my head at Anne McCaffrey readers for so long, I'm beginning to think my way of thinking is just not right.

While each person has those "special and different" qualities in themselves, I think most people have a unique blend of realistic and idealistic tendencies i.e. to say, some people are more grounded in their acts and thoughts while some others are just "out there." Like everything else in life, balance is the key. Just a decade ago I used to love reading fiction. I loved making up my own stories or rather, extending the ones my dad so enchantingly spun. My earliest memories of playing with my toys consist of kingdoms and wonderlands I had imagined. Gradually though, I migrated towards function, away from form. Who cares about a magical land with funny-looking creatures anymore? I have to build something that's actually useful! And I did. Lots of little useful things I built up.

Then one day I could build no more. I don't know why but my true desire to create just vanished. Nevertheless, out of sheer habit I kept going on, a piffle made here and a trifle made there; always wondering whatever happened to that fire in my belly that had forever made me stay up late at nights working on something fantastic. I had some idea but couldn't put my finger on it. It wasn't until I was spellbound by the 2005 film Mirror Mask earlier today that I realized the true span of my impasse. I have forgotten how to imagine the extraordinary.

The emphasis on the extraordinary points to the crux of the matter. My imagination engine is working fine, it's just not working right. I can imagine a pretty backyard and greener grass. I can imagine a week long vacation driving through the curvy cliff-hanging roads of Washington and Oregon in Fall. I can imagine performing Eskimo rolls while white-water kayaking in Colorado. My imagination engine is allowed to imagine this because my Reality-Sentry has analyzed the activities and approved them based on their high probability of success. What I haven't imagined is curing cancer. What I haven't imagined is becoming a Best-Seller author. What I haven't imagined is inventing the Anti-gravity shield. I haven't thought of these things because, come on, what's the chance of me actually doing any of that?

Big deal. I don't think of what is almost certainly impossible. What's the problem there? The problem is that with time, the Reality-Sentry becomes stricter and stricter. It starts with classifying world peace and flying flip-flops as impossible and then slowly starts to include robotic vacuum cleaners and online video-publishing websites into the impossible-to-do list. After all, I don't know much about robots to make an automatic vacuum cleaner and where am I gonna get the bandwidth, time, and publicity to actually make my own video-publishing website worthwhile?

What you just witnessed was my brain putting anti-gravity shields of science fiction and video-sharing websites of reality into the same impossible-to-do category simply because it tried to answer "what's the chances of ME doing THAT?" without actually letting my imagination and hands have a shot at it. While this certainly saves me from wasting my time and energy on every foolish idea, in the end the ideas that I'm left with are so dull and easy to accomplish that I don't even feel motivated enough get started with them. The other day when I was sick of tailgaters, I wanted to make a device that measures the distance between your car and the one behind you and flashes a warning when get too close. A practical idea indeed. Certainly not impossible to do with some proximity sensor chips, a MIPS processor, and a few LED lights. It's so simple a fool could do it! Which is precisely why I didn't.

This is not to say that every simple idea is worthless. The world definitely needs more Ron Popeils to make our lives easier. But for me, easy and possible just doesn't do it. If I'm embarking on a personal project, it has to be something outrageous enough for me to get excited over. However, with such a starved imagination engine, I'll never really get much fodder to be excited over.

Of the few things I'm proud of myself about, the willingness to find my own flaws and make amends under any circumstances is something I truly feel good about. I may suck but at least I fess up to it and do something about it. I need to dream again. And dream big. Not for success, not for fame, and not for fortunes glorious. But for myself; to help me create that which is truly fantastic.

One of the most underappreciated things in our litigation-happy casual-khakis modern existence, is a strongly-worded letter. Over the last few generations, with trained lawyers purporting to do all the "dirty" work, the practice of regular people writing formal letters for their personal objectives has become nearly obsolete. Did some company do something terribly wrong to you? Find a lawyer & sue them! What? No lawyer wants to take your case because it's not really worth over $1,000? Well, then stop whining! Suck it up and move on.

Often in our daily lives, we come across instances where we feel wronged and defenseless though not legally victimized. We give up, thinking if it's not worth a lawsuit then we should forget about it. When in fact, we do have a recourse. A little determination and a few hours of text-editing can do what weeks and months of complaints and nagging via phone calls and meetings cannot.

Last year, I had a lot of problems at my old apartment complex before I moved to my new house. So many little things had been going wrong that I just wanted to say screw you to the apartment people and get out as fast as I could. However, I had signed a letter earlier saying I'll clean up the entire apartment before I leave, failing which, they'll charge me ridiculous amounts of cash for pesky little things - $25 for failing to defrost the fridge, $2 per bag of trash I leave. With a new house that still needed setting up and lots of cleaning, I was in no mood to clean an old apartment after I had tons of problems with it. So I did what any text-loving person would do. Wrote them a strongly-worded letter and asked for stamped confirmation of their receipt of the letter and their signed & time-stamped follow-up decision.

In the end, I didn't have to go back and spend 10-12 hours cleaning the apartment. They didn't charge me anything for cleanup or maintenance. Cost me less than 2 hours of my idle-time sitting on a computer and typing away like I do anyway. If you're curious and not afraid of the dreaded PDF format, here's the ass-kicking letter to my apartment complex, the real name replaced with [Del Boca Vista]: Letter to Del Boca Vista.

In case you're wondering, I exaggerated a LOT in the letter. Things weren't half as bad as I claimed they were. But hey, I didn't wanna clean up! And I shouldn't have had to after going through all of that!

My 'blog has been kinda quiet lately because I've been pretty busy last few weeks with work stuff. Things are progressing quite well and a lot of the stuff I made over the years is finally coming together. Still a few more months before it's all done though.

So my backyard that was in very bad state last year when I bought my house, is finally starting to look decent. Last month I bought 20 cubic yards of fill dirt to cover the big holes and level the yard. Then I had the wild weeds cleared and just tonight, I tilled the entire backyard and half of the front yard. I added some calcium/lime mineral and some good weed & feed everywhere. Soon I'll add the grass seeds and hopefully I'll have a nice green lawn in a couple of months. Once the lawn is better, I can get on with my projects. I haven't given up on any of my plans, just got terribly delayed due to... ummm... the space-koalas eating my literature homework.

I haven't been doing much lately other than work and house chores. Last weekend it rained pretty heavily, albeit sporadically, and I didn't go out in the water. I'm hoping this weekend is better so I can have some fun exploring the wild again. I don't have any travel plans in near future so other than my weekly kayak trips, I don't really have much to keep me entertained. Especially since the motherboard on my PC-TV got fried. By PC-TV, I mean the computer in my living room that is wired to the TV and wirelessly connects to my 2TB Raid array in the PC Room that contains 300+ movies in DVD quality. I love to just sit back on the sofa and watch a good movie or two on weekends so now I'm kinda bummed that I have to wait for a few weeks till I find a decent replacement motherboard.

Well, there's always YouTube.

It's been a pretty relaxing weekend so far. Last night I took an unspecting Brian to see Snakes on a Plane movie party in Channelside, Tampa organized by Tampa Bay Farkers. If you don't know much about a movie, here's a brief summary without any spoilers. Basically, it's a very VERY cheesy B-grade movie starring Samuel L. Jackson stuck on a plane with thousands and thousands of snakes! The reason why this movie became a cult-classic with a huge fan-following even before it was released was because the movie accepted the fact that it was a really bad movie and didn't attempt to pretend like it was Jurassic Park or something. I like honesty. Sitting in the movie theater with tons of other screaming and cheering fans made me feel like I was watching a Rajnikanth movie in Calcutta. I absolutely enjoyed it.

Today, I've been just chilling around the house. I cooked dinner and worked on some computer-ish. Here's some pics I took of my kitties being lazy as usual. They love just sleeping at my feet when I'm on the computer.

I'm pretty excited about tomorrow. I hope to wake up real early and take my kayak out for it's maiden voyage on a 4-mile long kayak trail in the Weedon Island, about 15 miles from my house. I tested my kayak earlier this week to see the balance, speed etc. but it was only for 10 minutes. So tomorrow's gonna be real fun, especially since the island is known for some beautiful wildlife views, historic Native American settlement, and a 50-ft high lookout tower. Around 7am when I get into the water, the tide's going to be slowly rising. It's supposed to be best around high tide while will happen around noon. I'm hoping to take my camera with me. Let's see if I capture anything pretty.

Today marks the second year anniversary of my job at Formulated Solutions. I mentioned that to a couple of coworkers and they decided we go out for some good dinner. A little after 7pm, Kelly, Dennis, and I met at Sweet Tomatoes (the closest place to heaven on this side of the Atlantic). I don't think I've eaten so much in a long long time. Of course I could always eat more but I have to leave some for the rest of the people :)

Just yesterday I remarked to a friend that I don't remember the last time I woke up groggy in the morning and lamented "eh I gotta go to work..." No matter how good or bad I slept, as soon as I wake up and realize it's time to get to work, I can't wait. It's such an unexpected feeling though. Growing up I always expected work to be dull and boring. You're supposed to work solely to earn money and provide a good living for your family. Work, by definition, is work and not play. Yet every day I am more than excited to get to my office so I can try out the things that I was thinking of all night. I guess it's mostly because of the amount of freedom I have coupled with the appreciation I get for all my work that makes this possible.

Of course my latest big project was something of an oddity for me. Normally my projects change and improve things and hopefully save time/effort/money for others. However in this case, I had to migrate every single user/computer/device from an older system to a kickass new server setup. The goal was to change over everything as smoothly as possible, without disturbing or modifying any user's settings. In short, the best possible thing a person could tell me was "What did you do? I don't notice anything..." Like the quote from Futurama goes, "When you do things right, people won’t be sure you've done anything at all."

Anyways, stuffed and lazy right now. Very tired too. Gonna go relax and get back to work tomorrow :)

Just got back from my friend Megan's wedding in Pennsylvania! CONGRATS MEGS AND CHRIS!!!!! Such an eventful and packed weekend that I am still not over the excitement. First of all, this was my first time ever seeing Megan in person and yet we felt like we'd been friends forever. Well, technically we have; known her online via Fark.com for over five years now. Chris turned out to be even cooler and much more fun than I thought. I mean I didn't know much about him to expect anything. I kept thinking he reminded me very strongly of someone famous and then it hit me... Abhishek Bachchan - famous Indian actor. I mean it's weird to be reminded of movie stars when you meet real people but the resemblance, especially the walk and body language, was uncanny. Megan was definitely the life of the entire party... laughing and dancing every other minute.

The party for me started at the Tampa Airport on Friday afternoon. Having gone to work early on Friday and leaving early, I was already tired by the time I passed through the dreadded airport security. I sit down at this Mexican food place and ask the waiter for the biggest margarita and the biggest bowl of nachos they have. Next thing I know I'm in Philadelphia. I freshened up at my hotel (which did NOT look as polished as the picture makes it out to be) and decided to take a walk around Center City, Philadelphia. I took a few pictures and just kept noticing the little unique identity marks of the city. I noticed rows of houses sharing common walls, kinda like San Fran, but with buckets of flowers hanging from the front windows.

At 9:30pm, I finally got to meet Megan! First time I see her in person and she's looking gorgeous in a bridal dress. It's kinda cooler than meeting someone at Walmart. Also met her friend Wade & Lisa, and of course, the groom Chris. We had wine and vodka, talked for a few hours, and parted ways. Next morning, i.e. Saturday, I had some continental breakfast, Meg/Chris picked me up, and we drove to Chris' Aunt Kathy's house in the middle of the beautiful rolling hills of Pennsylvania Country. Quite possibly one of the most beautiful landscaping I've ever seen in my life with waterfall, and all sorts of trees and plants, which of course is easily explained by the fact that Chris' uncle, Tom, runs a landscaping business. Oh and their neighbors had ostriches. Yes, OSTRICHES!

I met their families as they slowly arrived and we started setting up the tables under the big (30ft x 60ft) tent in the backyard. Good thing everything was pretty much setup by the time we got there and all we had to do was put up the lights and set up the bar. Gee, I wonder who took it upon himself to make sure the bar was setup right :-P Around 4pm, the guests started pouring in. The most relaxing aspect of this party was the attire - casual - jeans 'n shirt! It was more like a big bar-b-que party than some formal wedding occasion. As the sun set, it started getting cold, and Tom got his son Luke to build a HUGE campfire. I think the fire lasted from 8pm to 3am! And I made sure it kept me warm - I mean I've so gotten used to the warm Florida weather now...

As the evening progressed, most of the older guests left, leaving us kids behind. The music was on, the fire was warm, and the drinksa' floweth. I made my special California Sunset mixed drink for Chris and got two more orders for it. As I tell everyone, I'm a computer guy by mind but a bartender by heart. Around midnight, we setup our tents under the big tent - to keep us warm and protected from the harsh winds. Oh yeah, I took a tent on the plane! It was hilarious because the airport people kept looking at me funny when they saw I'm getting on a plane so I can camp out.

Sunday morning was the familiar post-party lazy-wake up chore. Got up, folded my tent, and showed all my mad sleeping-bag folding trickzzz to Megan & Chris. We had some pancakes for breakfast, packed up our stuff, said good-bye to the twenty new people I met, and drove to Chris' grandfather's house. And that is where I think I saw the most memorable country-side - in the little town of Embreeville Mill near the historic Brandywine River. I don't know much about American history but from what I learnt, every other house in this area was built sometime in 1700's and Chris' ancestors owned acres and acres of land. They were one of the first few canners in the country - canned the mushrooms that rural Pennsylvania is so famous for. It kinda reminds me of my ancestors in India because my grandparents and their parents grew up in the same family house in the village that their parents did. It doesn't matter where in the world you were three hundred years ago, life wasn't too different.

As I walked around Chris' grandpa's house, I noticed the exterior walls were TWO FEET THICK! Chris' dad (harbor-master of Longboat Key Marina in Sarasota, FL and the only other Floridian) said it took four years to actually build this house sometime in 1770's. The construction was rock-solid and the design was rustic yet timeless. The cold-as-ice wine-cellar was probably my favorite part of the house. We saw wild goats right outside their front-door and I was told by everyone to NEVER mess with a male goat - as if that was on my list of 50-things I wanna do or something :)

One of the guests at the wedding was Richard Chalfont, a famous painter. I talked to him at the party and later learnt his gift to the newly-wed couple was a beautiful painting of houses previously owned by Chris' family. Pretty amazing stuff.

After about an hour or so, we left to drop me off at a nearby train-station so I could get to the airport on time. Neat thing how the Philly airport is so well-connected to the local trains. Didn't have a problem at all. But man... the good-bye to Meg & Chris was sad... I told them normally this is the moment I say "alright guys, see you next weekend..." or "give me a call if you wanna hang out sometime..." but I doubt that's possible. It's amazing how close I felt to them as friends, even though it was my first time seeing both of them. Anyways, my train arrived on time, I got to the airport on time, and landed at Tampa after two flights, almost on time. I won't say the return trip was uneventful because there were far too many annoying people, unbearable noises, and frustrating incidents for it to be uneventful. However, I'm home now, safe and sound, and more excited than ever to get back to work tomorrow after my mini-weekend-get-away-to-Philly.

In my quest to better myself, I often keep trying to compare my skills with leaders and stalwarts in my own field as well as in fields that I am pretty much an amateur, or at best a hack. So while I wonder if my proficiency in computer security will ever get close to Bruce Schneier's or if I'll ever be able to cook Punjabi dishes like my mom, I frequently remind myself that being better at many different things is not the ultimate victory. Somethings you just have to be able to do in life, no matter how good or bad. So here's my list of...

Ten things every person should be ABLE to do:

10. Memorize a poem by heart and recite it eloquently and with proper enunciation.
9. Unclog the sink. Fix the telephone. Replace a flat-tire.
8. Tell an adventurous story that keeps a bunch of kids thrilled for an entire evening.
7. Nurse a kitten or puppy that hasn't weaned yet.
6. Know the difference between there, their, and they're.
5. Not talk to anyone for a week and still stay sane.
4. Find your way around your house blind-folded.
3. Locate your favorite constellation on a starry night.
2. Dance when the moment is right.
1. Stay awake for 72 hours without batting an eyelid when a loved one truly needs you.

I found a good electrician last month and finally this weekend, he came over to complete all the projects I had for him. Initially, he was going to charge $350 for just a few things, primarily a new circuit to power my computers, fixing of my backyard lights, and fixing my old water pump. During this past Saturday, Sunday, and tonight, he spent about 15-hours inside and outside my house, as it usually happens, fixing a lot more things than originally planned.

In the end, for a grand-total of $700 I got a new 4-point circuit with its own breaker to my PCs, a pump with pressure gauge, pressure tank, pressure cut-off switch and main switch connected to my underground well, two twin-halogen 90w motion-sensing lights in my backyard, 2-point outlet in the backyard to plug tools into, a lightening arrestor to protect the electric devices inside my house in case of a direct lightening hit, a fresh new ground/Earth line for the main circuit, and pretty much all the wires on the main board reattached. It just feels so "clean" now that my main computer is connected to a strong 20-amp line with decent grounding instead of multiple UPSs split from one tiny plug without ground.

Now that my roof and electric circuits are done, I can get the 4-point inspection my insurance company wants me to get - roof, electric, plumbing, heating/airconditioning. Hopefully there's not going to be any issues with the latter two. Cost of inspection is probably about $300. In these three months, I've spent about $5,000 to fix up the house. Of course, a house almost exactly similar to mine down the street is selling for $185,000 - I bought mine last year for less than $150,000. So it'll be worth every penny spent when it's time to sell. But till then, it makes for some tight financial planning.

I'm also thinking of getting a sprinkler system installed before my lawn is fixed up. It's much better to dig trenches and install the pipes on barren land. It all depends on how much money I can save up for these projects.

Happy B'day Vishal! I'm pretty sure I called him last night all wasted and don't remember much other than the shouting and Lanie saying something too... Hmm. So, this weekend's been great so far. Friday night Liz, Dave, Vance, and Rodrick came over. We watched Monty Python's The Meaning of Life and just chilled. Early Saturday morning, Liz and I went to Perkins for some good ol' hearty American breakfast. We picked up Vance from the Super WalMart parking lot and drove up to Plant City for the Florida Strawberry Festival. It's basically a big fair with rides, games, food, and music.

Instead of $9 entrance fees, we all donated blood and got in for free. I donate blood normally anyway, so it wasn't a big deal. I'm just one more donation away from becoming a Gallon Donor! That's 3.78 liters! Now once inside the fair, we started going on different rides. After getting on what was quite possibly the scariest ride of my life, I ended up drinking a LOT of root beer and got a mad sugar rush. I got home around 3pm and passed out till about 7pm.

Mike called me around 8pm and said he's coming over. He brought over his computer so I could install a bigger hard drive on it. Meanwhile Lanie called and we told her to get some food on her way to my house. An hour later, we were baking veggie pizza and making iced-drinks in my kitchen. While consuming lots of yummy drinks, we watched what's quite possibly the most messed up math movie ever, Pi - story of a paranoid mathematician who sees patterns in the world, is chased by stockbrokers and religious leaders, and ends up resorting to Trepanation by drilling a hole in his head. Yeah.

I woke up early this morning and Mike & Lanie left a little while ago. I just mentioned to my friend that after donating blood, getting into crazy rides, imbibing lots of sugar, followed by copious amounts of liquor, "I think there's some blood in my alcohol stream." Good times. Now, I rest for a little while before I hope to go Kayaking with Mike & Lanie.

I know I should've been an English or Literature major. Here's my new drivelling away message for AIM: "Ah yes, the away message - that little blurb of text that lets people know I'm not a schmuck just sitting around on my computer but actually away, DOING something! It's my elementary broadcast to the world, telling them, "Look! I have a life! I have things to do and places to be." It's the definitive proof that I am already on my way to fulfill my life's inane destiny; each new away message validating my vacuous existence. A mere evanescent glimpse into the inexhaustible resource of trivial chores and routines that is me. The story of my life, one line at a time. I am the center - the alpha, the omega, and the infinite cosmos of monotonous zilch contained betwixt. And you my friend, are now among the enlightened few. Go forth and spread the seed of your new-found transcendental awareness."

Hurricane season isn't here yet but that doesn't mean the rains will stop. It rained in my city so bad today that the roof of a major store caved in with many people under it. Good thing nobody got seriously hurt. I was very anxious about my home as the roof above my Florida room (sun room) needs fixing. I got home and discovered that it leaked a little but nothing major. I received my new mailbox but I doubt the rain's gonna clear by tomorrow for me to set it up. I'm so excited about it though - it's my first slightly big project in my house!

At work we kept getting major power fluctuations and I had to turn off all the computers and electronic devices. So I didn't get much computer work done today and instead used the time to organize my office. After we moved in early January, my priority was to get everyone else up and running. Then right afterwards, I went to India for two weeks so my office was still unorganized. Finally today I set things straight, opened all the boxes, located all my computer stuff, and put them in my desk/shelves/drawers. Anyways, the joke of the day is that I've never been so tired by NOT working all day :)

Event 1 of 4 successful! Tonight was the Zara Hat Ke Quiz Show at The Regency Terrace and went on without a single flaw. The show was hosted by Shobhit Desai, invited specially from Mumbai, and the computer aspect of it was designed and presented by my sister. My sis controlled a little laptop and the image was projected on a 15ft silk screen. The Quiz Show consisted of eight unique rounds, mostly based on Indian Movies or our family pictures. E.g. Round 1 was "Jodi #1" (meaning Couple #1). Kinda like the game of 3-cups, you would see pictures of four members of my family (grandparens, uncle, aunt) on the screen, then they'd be covered with small discs, and after the discs move around all over the screen, the audience members would guess which two discs hid which couples - quite an interactive exercise. That was just round 1. There were 7 other rounds, each more engaging than the other - all designed by my sister with my dad's suggestions. Here's a cute pic of my mom & sis after the show.

About thirty more guests from around the country came in today and we had over three hundred guests tonight at the show. I was supposed to pick up a few guests myself but I wasn't feeling too well early in the morning. The change of weather has had some effect on me so I'm taking things easy - there's three more days of non-stop activities.

My buddy Vishal came in from Gujarat today. It's been over three years since I saw him. Glad to see that he's still the same. I'm very tired so I'm gonna go relax now.

Ok I'm done with my database stuff now. Basically, I just made an automated tag cloud for my site. A tag cloud shows you the most frequently used words. The more a word is used, the larger its font size, the less it is used, the smaller its size. Just see it for yourself to get an idea of what I'm talking about. With just one glance, it gives you a pretty good overview of what things I often mention on my 'blog, or in turn, what matters to me. Just look at my friend Tay's tag cloud for a contrast. It doesn't take a genius to notice the "music" is quite important to him and "computer" is just as important to me.

I got me a new phone: Nokia 3220 - totally love it so far. Has a lot of cool features like camera, hands-free, loud-speaker, web-access, and soon I'll be able to connect it to my computer for more stuff.

The doctor called me today and said my blood test came clean with absolutely no sign of any common disease. While I have all the symptoms of Whooping Cough, the Pertussis bacteria isn't showing up on the tests. This means either I have a very nasty case of whooping cough or I have something similar which they can't identify. It's funny that the doctor said that just looking at my blood test results, anyone would give me a clean bill of health. But of course, the coughing is totally ruining my work and personal life for past few months.

Oh and last week I tried the whole "say screw it to sickness and go run a mile" thing. It didn't work. I ended up coughing for over an hour after running just two blocks. I can't believe just one year ago I was preparing to run the marathon and now I can't even run two blocks.

I think that I've been very strong ever since I got sick and have done my best to stay strong to get better. But now I'm really losing my strength and patience. I don't care about anything anymore. I'm so sick of being sick. I'm gonna rest a lot in the next few days and most probably won't be on my computer much, unless I have to.

I don't think I fully understood the suckitude of being sick for the next two months. When the doctor said my cough will go away in 60 days or so I didn't put much thought into it. After just one weekend of staying home alone and doing nothing except watch TV and surf online, I realize how much this whole thing really sucks. I don't like to whine but right now, I can't do ANYTHING that I want to do. I can't go out with friends for a drink because anti-biotics and alcohol don't mix. I can't even go out with friends because I keep coughing non-stop and every public place I go to, people stare at me as if I have the plague.

That leaves doing things by myself. Well I loved kayaking but I can't do that or anything physically intensive as it only makes things worse. Plus due to the ear-infection, my head constantly spins and I have absolutely no balance whatsoever. So even running is out of the question.

So let's see, if can't hang out with people and can't go out alone to do things, it leaves me with the only choices: sit at home and do nothing. Well I could get a bit more productive on the computer or read a book or two but trust me it doesn't matter. I'm a social person and I love company. Or doing things. Now I gotta sit at home every night and weekend and do absolutely nothing. I can't even talk to my family or friends on the phone because I feel embarrassed due to the coughing. Urgh.

This was a pretty dull weekend and it just scares me that there's gonna be more and more of these.

/rant-over

"The strange new truth, according to census figures, is that the single largest chunk of American households now consists of people who live alone. No spouse or partner, no kids or other relatives, no roommate or boarder. Alone." Thus reports the Wall Street Journal. I am a statistic now. Here's the original Census Report in PDF.

The report goes on to say "Yet a list-topping surge to 27 million separate little cocoons is still disconcerting. Among other things, it suggests a demographic bulge of lonely souls. Even if you discount the college graduates who paint the town every night before crashing happily at their first pad, you're left with a huge number of people who have found companionship and lost it or are still looking for someone to share their life with. They may not be miserable or call themselves lonely, although many senior citizens do use those words. But most probably are missing something, and we don't mean the better health and the longevity boost that scientists have associated with marriage and other forms of intimate living."

The author of the article goes on, "27 million lonely grown-ups probably isn't great for society either." So that's one side of the story. The other side of the story is what random people are saying here on Fark: "Living alone is the greatest thing in the world." "People are choosing to stay single. I'm single by choice." "I wish I lived alone."

I can pretty much attest to the awesomeness that is living alone. I love the fact that I have a house I can go to every day without having someone nag me to depression on when I'm gonna cut the lawn or paint the backyard door. I love the fact that I can do whatever I want, whenever I want - nobody bothers me, nobody annoys me. If I feel alone or bored, I can either stay at home and entertain/educate myself or I can go out and hang out at my friends' places. I really don't see how living alone could be such a bad thing. I don't have to worry about anyone's dirty laundry and nobody leaves dirty dishes in my kitchen sink. It's awesome! Sure, I miss hanging out with someone 24/7 and that's why I have my friends come once in a while for sleepovers etc. We can watch TV and play boardgames all evening till late night and then have breakfast together. No force, no compulsion. So very stress free.

I think the biggest mistake this author made is assuming that living alone means being alone. Repeat after me: Alone does NOT mean lonely. I live alone, by myself, no other person in my house. However, that doesn't mean I am lonely or sad or feel neglected or unloved. This is just a different way of life than previous generations were used to. And as long as I'm comfortable with it, why should anyone care?

However, there's the economic side to this issue. Be it one person or two living in the same house, you're pretty much gonna use the same amount of electricity, phone, gas, and other utilities. If everyone lives alone in their own house, a lot of resources are wasted. By living together, people can save a lot and split the bills. Maybe that's what I will look into down the line - converting my computer room to a bedroom and renting it out to a friend. I'll be able to save on my bills and my friend will have low rent. But till that day, I think my kids are enough for me to take care of :)

Here's some pictures of my living room and the rest of the furnished house. Some rooms look good (Living Room, Kitchen, Bathroom) and others need work (Bedroom, Computer Room). Most of the rooms just need a new coat of paint and wood flooring. I get just that much done and I'm gold. It'll get there. Another thing I need to do is setup a mandir for Lord Krishna. I have space in the living room but no stand, so I might have to make one myself if I can't find anything good.

Hello from my new house :) I'm all settled in the house with only 3 boxes waiting to be unpacked (mostly stuff for the closet). All of this, thanks to my sweet sweet lovely friend Lynn. Had she not helped me pack, clean, unpack, and shop with a 10% discount off at Walmart I'd still be trying to find my clothes or paper plates. Right now, EVERYTHING is setup, from my computer room to kitchen to pantry to bathroom to of course, the living room :) This move was more trouble-free than I could've imagined. Absolutely nothing went wrong! Now I have to go around the house and take pictures. And best of all, the kitties love the house! They run around hiding in new places. I know they're happy.

After work I went over to my new house and replaced all the entrance locks - five in total! Man... homeownership is hard! Then met my neighbors on both sides. Turns out one of the neighbors is a senior-level computer programmer and we actually had a pretty cool time chatting out on the lawn. Now I gotta get back to packing in a few minutes, once I get some food.

Oh and I got new pictures of my house. Here is the cutest house in the world :)

Hard to believe that it's already June. Things are going good on all fronts - some cool new projects at work and kinda relaxed evenings at home. Don't really feel like going out and doing much. I did have some good food tonight with Brian 'n Linda. The kitties are awesome as usual and growing up really fast. And now that I separated my personal and my /tech 'blogs, I feel kinda relaxed - now I don't have to worry that I'll bore my family/friends with my computer-ish or annoy computer people with stories of my kitties :)

The weather is weird. And it'll only get weirder, now that the hurricane season has started. No hurricanes; yet.

As I mentioned before, I realized that I need to separate my personal and my tech 'blogs; so here it is - the chir.ag /tech blog :) Hopefully I'll keep it interesting and not too monotonous. And even better, people who don't really care about my computer stuff won't find it in here anymore.

My sleep pattern is pretty screwed up.

And here's what would happen if Costello buys Computer from Abbot. I haven't laughed this hard in weeks.

Here's the story of my work-life. Some guy explains it from his point-of-view, which is quite similar to mine. This is what happens to me, and pretty much everyone else in the world involved with making enterprise software.

Every project I take up, starts with a tiny minor requirement, "Chirag, we need you to make something that'll help us pay our bills on time." Sounds so simple that a middle-school kid can do it in Excel for Mac between soccer practice and karate lessons! Just put a list of all the current bills in one sheet and type in 'Paid' next to it when you pay. It's as simple as that. But who enters the list of bills? Obviously some from the Purchasing Department. However, they don't want to make a purchase order in paper and have to maintain the list of incoming bills on computer, so obviously, the solution is to computerize the Purchase Order system also. But wait, now that we have the POs in the database, we can easily use the data to help with taking the stock of our inventory because we know what's coming in.

Now all the system needs is something that lets you deduct the stock when we make a sale. Fast-forward tons of meetings with the heads of Production, QA, Regulatory, Accounting, Sales, and of course, Management, and where do you end up at? A full-fledged inventory control system with MRP features that integrate with a live e-commerce website and provides real-time stock figures. It took a while to make but everyone's happy with the system, right? Well almost. The system does everything it promised except one thing - help us with paying our bills on time! Due to some communication gap that occured in the initial stages of design, nobody realized that we do not get billed for each Purchase Order individually, and any bill can be towards a partial PO, full PO, or multiple POs. Sorry guys, if only you had told me this before... oops!

The guy in the link above explains this all quite well. I just wanted to share my experience. And it'll only get more complex 'n confusing as our company grows. Funny thing is that I love it :) Keeps my brain sharp. Of course, just like the guy above, I am not complaining about my job. I'm just saying how and why things take so long and how the simplest thing can and often does end up being so complex. Truth is, there really isn't any ERP Zen in the world. If you ever find it, lemme know! One thing I that I do often is to understand the user needs and find out a way to simplify them instead of just doing exactly what the user wants. Kinda like this guy.

Arthur sent me this sad news: One of the most brilliant computer science teachers I ever had, Leonid Khachiyan, has passed away from heart attack at age 52.

So I had a small fire in my apartment just about an hour ago. It's all ok now but man was it scary. At 7:27am I heard the alarm go off and realized I hadn't put on my alarm last night because it was afterall a Sunday. Turns out the sound of the alarm was coming from the bathroom and I looked in to find the exhaust fan on fire, spewing out smoke and burning down the wall. Flames were falling on the floor and burnt the tiles. Realizing it was an electrical fire, I just turned off the main power circuit in my apartment. Next I moved all flammable stuff outta the bathroom like mats and towels.

Right after that I called 911 and gave them my address, apartment number, and the type and severity of the fire (small). Next up I took out the two kitty boxes and put Tera in one of them. Giga was no where to be found :( I opened all my apartment windows and the main door and put Tera's box outside the apartment while I kept searching for Giga.

I scraped my shoulders running around the house and have bad carpet burns on my knees as I bent down looking for Giga under the sofa, tables etc. It was less than 3 minutes before the firefighters came and I walked out of the apartment directing them where the fire was. Took about 10 minutes before they extinguished the fire fully. My apartment was so full of smoke that I could barely look in and that made me worried more and more about Giga. I couldn't find him in the living room, computer room, kitchen, or my bedroom. That just leaves the bathroom which was in flames.

At some point while the awesome Pinellas County firefighters were in my bathroom, I realized Giga was in my bed all night so he HAD to be under the blankets. I put my t-shirt over my nose and told the nice firefighter lady that I'm just gonna get my cat from my bedroom and since this wasn't a life-or-death situation, she said ok and came with me. And lo and behold! There was Giga, right where I left him... under my blanket but quite scared and crying :( I took him out and put him in his box and took both the kitty boxes all the way at the end of my building to get a breath of fresh air.

I called up Brian and my family just to let them know of the incident. The firefighters seemed to be done and came out to ask me what happened and what I did. Apparently I did exactly what they would've done themselves so I guess I get full points for having the presence of mind to do the intelligent thing. Especially after last night when I came home @ 3am and was in the bed for less than 5 hours! The building maintenance guy is already here, cleaning up the bathroom etc. Hopefully it'll all be fixed in a few hours.

This could've been something extremely bad but thankfully it turned out minor. The only thing I lost is one roll of toilet paper :) Everything else was building's property, not my problem.

Went to bed early last night. Woke up at 4am this morning and been working on a big computer/work-related problem since then. Basically trying to find/plan which platform to create an ERP system in.

Last night my real-estate agent came over to get some papers signed and get a deposit check. I now officially have a contract on the house by the beach :) Giga and Tera kept circling around him and Giga climbed on the dining table and started purring. He said, "Wow! These are the nicest cats I've ever seen and I've seen quite a few going to people's houses..."

I love my kids :)

You know what I'm sick of? Family/relatives/friends who treat me solely like a free computer help desk! Sure, I know computers and work with them and don't mind offering important advice every now and then, but if the only time you EVER call me is when you need computer help, guess what... stop calling/emailing/IM'ing me because I don't want to hear about your broken software or hardware - especially since when you bought your crappy computer, I advised you against it and asked you to go get a good Dell with 24/7/365 tech support but you chose to save $50 instead. I AM NOT YOUR FREE HELPDESK. MOVE ON! Or maybe, once in a while, drop in and ask me how my life is going or if my trip to India was good or not. I DO NOT WANT TO TEACH YOU HOW TO BACKUP YOUR DVD DRIVES FOR THE SIXTH TIME.

Let me be clear. If I am a part of your family/friendship then I will do my best to help you out in any way I can - be it computers, helping you paint your apartment, or helping you move to your new house. I am not a bad lazy person. If you need help, feel free to call me anytime. But if 100% of your communication ONLY pertains to asking for computer help and never once have you asked me about my day, family, job, kitties, or what's new in my life, then PLEASE STOP IT. I DO NOT WANT TO TALK TO YOU EVER AGAIN. And I don't care how closely related you are to me. Thanks. That will be all.

It has been a long time since I had an awfully bad day, so I guess it was about time. Today started like any other day - wake up, play with kitties, talk to my family in India (yes, I pretty much call them every morning now). But then things took a turn for the unexplainable. Having a tough/rough day at work (when computers/systems break down) is different from having a day filled with angst and bickering.

Of course, nothing beats a day without problems but if I have to choose between computer issues and human resource issues, I'd rather have my servers crash on me every month - because I know that I can fix and at worst, replace them. Can't do much about people except shrug and move on. But I don't really understand people sometimes. I'd like to think that I'm a very logical person and I guess that's why I fail to comprehend why people behave so irrationally. Who knows maybe in their eyes, I'm the irrational one whose actions just don't add up.

So after a long day at work, I get home and find out that my kitties have absolutely trashed my living room. They somehow managed to get to the kitchen drawer I keep paper towels in and strewed tiny bits of paper towel all over my carpet, sofa, chairs, and even under the coffee table. Took me 30 minutes to clean it all up.

But how can I blame my precious kitties? It's just paper after all and they didn't do any physical damage. They haven't damaged even ONE thing in my apartment ever! Every once in a while, they'll chew on bits of paper or aluminum foil but that's about it. They splash a little water out of their bowl but only because they're clumsy. They are absolutely the sweetest kitties in the world. I think it's time I gave them some nice kitty treats :)

*Sigh* Yes, today was what I'd consider a bad day until about 5 minutes ago when Tera jumped into my lap as I was typing this 'blog entry and started kneading 'n purring. Life is good. Once in a while, the equilibrium is disturbed by external forces but things balance out soon enough. Especially when the purr machines kick into action.

I spent yet another weekend pouring over computer algorithms. This time, it's fingerprint extraction and identification. The whole topic came up from my discussion at work. I foolishly boasted that I could design a system that will let any of the 10-15 people use any of the 10-15 computers to log on to their user account by pressing any of their 10 fingers against a little Fingerprint Scanner. So in theory, if my boss's computer was busy, he could walk up to my computer, press his finger against the fingerprint scanner and it will automatically log him into the new business software that I'm gonna make.

So of course, now that I've told everyone it's possible, it's time to figure out how. The lazy computer programmer in me wants to spend a little money, buy something like the VeriFinger Standard SDK, hook it up to one of the cheap fingerprint scanners, let it do the scanning and recognition, write a small application to manage it all, and call it a day. It won't be cheap but it'll work pretty realiably. A lot of companies around the world have done it. The mathematician in me wants to do it all myself. It's not just the thrill of writing it on my own, it's the additional features that I can add on to it. So, if you are given the task of writing a software to do all of this from scratch, how would you go about it?

It's a known fact that every individual has absolutely unique fingerprints on each of their ten (or so) digits. If you want to design something that can let anyone use any finger to log on from any computer, you need (1) software + scanner on every computer, (2) a server that has the database of every person's every finger, and (3) some way of reliably matching a finger with the correct person no matter what computer they are on. So now we can break this whole operation into two phases. The first phase is the setup phase when we add each users's fingerprint to the database. And the second phase is application phase in which we recognize the user when they press their finger against a scanner. In either phase, a fingerprint has to be read, converted to a form that can be understood by a computer, and transferred to the server. Only difference is that in the first phase it is stored on the server and in the second, it is matched against every existing fingerprint on the server.

What we have are two different operations: Extraction and Identification/Recognition/Matching. Extraction is the process by which a fingerprint is read from the scanner and specific unique qualities about the fingerprint are extracted from the image. Identification/Recognition/Matching is simply looking up the server for other fingerprints with similar unique qualities. So how and what do we extract from the scan of a fingerprint? Look at your own index finger right now or if you don't have any fingers or fingerprints, look at this image. The first thing we notice and actually don't even realize is that the lines are actually ridges and valleys. The ridges are the thick bright protruding highs and the valleys are the thin dark low-lying crevasses. It is this pattern of ridges/valleys that is different for each person's each finger.

The first thought that comes to mind is that, if this pattern is different for everyone, just store a picture of their fingerprint and match it up against the database. Storing a picture to a database is easy. But matching up a picture of a fingerprint against a database is not. How do you match? Based on what? One idea is to just overlay the scanned fingerprint on to each of the 1000 fingerprints in the database and compare each pixel - if 95% of the pixels match, we have a match. That is how the older fingerprint matching systems worked. It works decently in identifying criminals, especially if you can wait 2 hours for it to match with 1000 fingerprints. But it's not fast enough for instant identification and poses a lot of problems, like what happens if your finger is positioned slightly to the left and/or at a 5% degree angle. It wouldn't even match against your own finger with 5% margin of error. So people have moved from the picture (raster) matching techniques on to the marker (vector) matching.

Instead of matching the whole fingerprint against 1000 others, why not extract unique characteristics of each finger and store them. This is called Minutiae Matching. Look at your finger again. If you notice carefully, you can identify many types of markers where ridges end, ridges bifurcate into two ridges, three ridges form a delta etc. If we can somehow chart this information like a graph or a map, then we can store this in a database much more easily. The information stored in the database, if read in English would seem something like this - "At the center of the fingerprint is a 'delta' and 5mm away on the right is a 'bifurcation.' 7mm below the bifurcation is an 'island' and 3mm to left of the island is another bifurcation." If this information is stored in the database for my right index finger, then when I press my right index finger against a scanner, the software asks the server to match my finger against all others who have a delta near a bifurcation and must have an island. This instantly narrows down the search only to those fingers which have deltas, islands, and bifurcations. Then it looks to see if they are positioned similar to my finger.

So now the extraction problem is just to find where the ridges end, bifurcate, or form deltas and map them on a graph. It's like saying plot Singapore, Mexico City, and Cape Town on a map. Not very difficult when you look at the big picture. The algorithm to extract markers looks at every pixel and it's neighborhood pixels. If they satisfy some special characteristics then it assigns it a marker type (delta, island etc.) and stores it in the database, relative to the position of other markers on the same finger.

Now comes the hard part - matching a finger's markers against that of the 10,000 in the database. If you think about it, it's actually an age-old problem that the ancient Greeks like Ptolemy busied themselves with - finding constellations. You must've heard of the constellation Ursa Major (The Big Dipper) or my favorite Ursa Minor (The Little Dipper). Astronomers and astrologers for centuries have stood under the night sky and identified tons of constellations simply by looking up and observing. They didn't need no fancy computers or telescopes to find The Libra in the night sky. We humans have built-in pattern-matching and pattern-recognition abilities that seem so natural to us but it is near impossible to replicate these on a computer.

Given a night sky full of stars, how do you find a constellation you are looking for? You can start by looking for small groups within the constellation. Maybe two of the stars in the constellation you are looking for, are really close to each other. So scan the whole sky for two stars very close to each other. If you find such a pair of stars then look for further signs - like is there a third star directly above or below one of them but at twice the distance. Stuff like this is what we humans are really REALLY good at. You don't even realize that you are performing one of the most difficult patterm-recognition operations right now - reading text from a computer screen. After all, OCR is big business. So is recognizing sounds (especially voice), handwriting, images, and videos - things that we so easily discern and detect.

Anyways, back to recognizing fingerprints. After the extraction process, the software will have to form a constellation with all the markings on the fingerprint. In the setup phase, this is stored on the server and in the matching phase this is what is searched for in the server. Searching a constellation of markers within each of the 1000 fingerprints in the database can be done in the following way. One of the things we need to realize is that due to the randomness of the physical act of positioning a finger on a scanner, you will almost never get two exact readings. However, the marker data in the middle of the finger will be much more accurately readable than the markings on the fringes or towards the sides of the finger. So give more importance to a bifurcation in the middle of the finger than an island at the far left - after all, it could be just a normal fully-connected ridge but the person might not have pressed the finger fully on the scanner.

My extraction method would be to start towards the middle, spiral out in a clockwise direction and note the position of every marker. Note the distance between each marker and nearby ones and store it in a cyclic data format. Now search the database for only those fingers which have similar markings in the center as there is a very high probability that center readings are accurate. Then narrow down the list to only those with similar markings near the immediate area surrounding the center. Keep narrowing down the search till you have at most 5-10 fingerprints. Then just cycle through each of them and compare each of them to the reading. Leave some margin for error, take into account the rotation and position of the markers and we should have a pretty damn reliable match. If you don't account for rotation or slight movement in position, you will almost always get an incorrect reading.

Note that throughout this discussion, we have concentrated mostly on the 1:N and not the 1:1 matching. 1:N matching means that one fingerprint is compared against N (10 or 10,000 or 10 million) fingerprints to identify the person. This is mainly used for easy identification, say to let people into a Government building. 1:1 matching is used for secure authentication - that is to verify that a person really is who they say they are, say to allow you access to your own safety deposit box in your bank. The 1:N method is geared towards faster searching and the 1:1 method is geared towards more reliable matching. It is quite difficult to design an algorithm that performs equally well in both situations for you can either do it fast or do it accurately, rarely both.

Anyways, I'm still writing algorithm for the pre-extraction phase right now. Before you extract markers, you gotta convert the true-color ridges and valleys to two color lines and gaps. Using a very simple algorithm, this is what I've come up with so far. In the next few days, I should get my own fingerprint reader and then I'll improve upon this code and do more cool things with it :) If I'm successful, then maybe I'll open-source the code for scanner and recognition and make it easy for others to use it in their applications. While I'm almost positive I won't be able to make it as good as these guys, if I make it sufficiently workable, it'll certainly make them review their pricing. These people have been doing this for years and have received national awards so I don't think I'm gonna be much of a competition (neither do I care to be). After all, I've only known about fingerprint techniques for less than 24 hours now :) But it seems like the whole scientific world has been at it for ages.

I still dunno what/how I'm gonna be setting this up for my work but all I know is that I really want to. Good thing is that I can add this feature to my work software anytime so even if it takes me months that's perfectly fine. Let's see what happens first once I have a fingerprint scanner sitting on my desk.

So I spent this entire weekend trying to discover the world's first 30-digit Keith Number with no luck. It's kinda like Fibonacci Numbers. Basically, take any number and write out it's digits. Say we pick the number "123" and then write out 1,2,3. Now add all the digits up and put the sum at the end of the list. 1+2+3 = 6, so now the new list is 1,2,3,6. Now drop the first number and add the rest and put it at the end of the list again. Drop "1" and add 2+3+6 = 11. So now we have 2,3,6,11. Of course, you can keep doing this till infinity. Now the fun part happens when you pick a number like 197. Let's see: 1,9,7. Then 1+9+7 = 17. So we get 1,9,7,17. Dropping "1" and adding the rest we get 9+7+17 = 33. Drop 9 and adding 7+17+33, we get 57. Then next we get 17+33+57 = 107. Next we get 33+57+107 = 197 -> The same number we started with!

So if we get the same number as we started with, then it is a Keith Number. There are only two 3-digit Keith Numbers - 197 and 742. There are six 2-digit KNs - 14, 19, 28, 47, 61, 75. Try it for 47 -> 4,7,11,18,29,47! But it doesn't work for any other numbers. 48 -> 4,8,12,20,32,52... No "48" in this list. A few 4-digit KNs are: 1104, 1537, 2208, 2580 etc.

Keith Numbers are very rare and only about 90 of them are known. The largest known Keith Number is 988242310393860390066911414 (27-digits long). We don't even know if there are infinitely many Keith Numbers (though it seems so). There is no award or anything for finding new large Keith Numbers but there is a huge prize (and worldwide glory) for finding out a simple method for generating all Keith Numbers easily. Basically, the problem of finding Keith Numbers can be likened to solving the Knapsack Problem. Of course, if you solve the Knapsack Problem with a simple method, then you've just discovered a method for solving the P=NP problem which has a $1million award from Clay Mathematics Institute.

While I don't understand the whole P=NP problem as clearly as I want, I do understand it enough to be amazed by it. The biggest mystery in computer science right now is whether P is equal to NP or not. So what is P and NP? First of all, Computer Science (my primary major in college) is not about how to make PowerPoint presentations or write financial database software for the stock exchange. In the simplest terms, Computer Science is very much like pure Mathematics - studying problems and solving them using simple equations. Of course, if it was just solving math problems, then it would be called Math and not CompSci.

Computer Science normally deals with a different type of problems, that which involve a lot of calculation and especially estimating the time it takes to calculate. E.g., if someone gives you 10 different business cards, how do you sort them alphabetically by a person's name? Well one simple way is to put all the cards on a table and go through the list and pick out the ones that begin with A, then B, then C till you are done. You basically went through a list of 10 cards, 26 times (A to Z - 26 letters). Of course, you'd be a lot less than that, since everytime you pick a card, there's one less left in the pile. Anyways, this is a very simple sorting algorithm. Computer Science deals with sorting algorithms a lot.

Another thing is searching. If someone gives you 10 business cards and says find "Chirag Mehta." Well, you'll have to go through 10 cards at most to find mine. If it's a one-time thing then it's fine but if you often have to find a business card from a bunch of business cards, you're much better off alphabetizing them once, so that next time someone asks for "Steve Buscemi", you can directly jump to the "S" pile instead of going through all the cards. Computer Science also deals with searching and inventing better methods to find stuff from a bunch of stuff. This is why people love Google so much - it makes easy to find stuff, using their own special search methods. You just type in "flying pigs" and it looks through billions upon billions of documents to find pages which have the phrase "flying pigs" in it and returns those pages within milliseconds. Amazing isn't it!

So what does all of this have to do with P=NP problem and the million-dollar award? Well, after decades of research, computer scientists have found out that there are some problems like searching, sorting etc. whose answers can be solved within a fixed amount of time - seconds, hours, days, centuries whatever. Basically, if someone tells you to find "Chirag Mehta" from 1000 business cards, and you can read 10 a minute, it'll take you 100 minutes at most to find the card. If it was 1000 billion cards, it would take you 100 billion minutes. So the problem of searching has a fixed execution time and it can be very accurately estimated. Same goes with sorting.

However, there are tons of other problems out there, where we can't even estimate how long it's going to take to solve the problem, let alone solve the problem itself. For example, let's look at the Travelling Salesman Problem. Suppose you have to go on a business trip to 3 cities and you can go from any city to any city, what is the cheapest round-trip route that visits each city once and returns to your home city? In other words, if you live in Mumbai, and have to go to London, Beijing, and Los Angeles, what is the cheapest round-trip route that will visit each city once and end up at Mumbai? Of course, you'd need a list of all the airfares, say Mumbai to London (or back) = $100, Mumbai to Beijing = $50, Mumbai to Los Angeles = $200, London to Beijing = $50, London to Los Angeles = $100, Beijing to Los Angeles = $150. Let's assume the reverse fare is same in all the cases, so London to Mumbai equals Mumbai to London equals $100. Currently there is no way accurately find the cheapest route without going through all the combinations (Mumbai-London-Beijing-LA-Mumbai, Mumbai-Beijing-LA-London-Mumbai, Mumbai-LA-London-Beijing-Mumbai etc.)

So you think what's the big deal about having a simple computer go through all the 20-25 combinations and finding the best? Actually no big deal, until you increase the cities from 5 to 50. Or 50 to 5000. Then even the largest supercomputers in the world combined would take centuries to find the solution. Basically, there exists no way to predetermine how long it will take to solve the travelling salesman problem for x cities. We can't say if x = 5, then it'll take 5 seconds and if x = 10, it'll take 10 seconds. We can't even say if x = 5, then it'll take 25 seconds and if x = 10, it will take 100 seconds. Truth is, we don't know. Of course, if you are British Airways, you do want to know, otherwise how else are you going to schedule the flight route of 500 airplanes around 200 airports around the world? Even though the perfect solution doesn't exist, computers can do a pretty good job of going through a billion or so combinations and finding out the best routes. Yes, they cannot go through all the possible combinations, but in practical cases, going through a few million combinations results is pretty good, say as opposed to the 1950s when all the flight pattern/routing was done manually! Without the special flight-routing computers, the whole airline industry would be in chaos because nobody would be able to schedule flights between cities where there is most demand, most people, highest airfare etc.

While the airlines are using computers to plan flight routes, they are doing it as best as they possibly can, not absolutely the best. It's like me going out and asking 100 girls on a date and deciding to marry the one I think is the best. This doesn't mean she is "the one" because I did not ask the other 3 billion girls. It just means she's the best of the ones I asked. Similarly, airlines plan their flights out of the 10 billion combinations instead of the 10000000 trillion possible options. Still 10 billion is better than 100,000. And yet, it is not as good as 10000000 trillion. So there is absolutely a LOT of room for improvement.

Another similar problem called the Bin-Packing Problem, which is closely related to the Cookie-Cutter Problem. If you have 10 items and you need to pack them into 3 bins, such that no bin weighs more than 100lbs, what is the best way to do it? Of course, trial-and-error might work with 10 items and 3 bins, but what if you are the world's largest steel manufacturing company and want to make sure that you can ship the most amount of steel bars of different sizes into trucks while never putting more than 10 tons per truck and of course not overflowing any truck's container. Or if you are my mom and are making cookies. You make a big rectangle piece of dough and then use a cutter to cut fancy cookie shapes. How do you make sure you use as much of the dough as possible and not waste any? Or if you are the world's biggest cookie company and have the same problem. How do you solve it?

Turns out, there is no exact "optimal" way to solve this problem in a fixed or predictable amount of time. In other words, there is no polynomial time method to solve any of these problems. And now comes the beauty of computer science -> all of these problems, from finding Keith Numbers to Knapsack Problem, to Travelling Salesman Problem to Cookie-Cutter Problem can all be solved if even one of them is solved! Oh and the game of Minesweeper also falls into this list. So if you can find a perfect way to beat Minesweeper each time, guess what... you've just solved the world's greatest computer science problem and would most likely get the $1mllion award.

Well I've still not explained what P=NP really means. P means that the problem is easy to solve. Easy doesn't mean you can do it in your head. Easy means it is possible to do it in a fixed time, like searching, sorting etc. NP means that a solution to a problem is easy to verify. That is, if someone gives you a Keith Number, you can easily check in a specific amount of time whether it is a Keith Number or not. Or whether the flight-route from Mumbai-London-Los-Angeles-Beijing-Mumbai covers all the 3 cities and starts/ends at Mumbai. So what we don't know, is whether problems that are easy to verify can be solved easily or not. That is whether NP = P. Currently there is no known method for solving any of the problems I stated above in a fixed/predetermined amount of time.

Most scientists believe that P is not equal to NP and a lot of them believe that given the current state of knowledge in computer science and mathematics, we can't really answer this question. We need to learn a lot more and look at this P=NP problem from the different angle in order to solve it. Maybe that's where computers that work using Quantum Mechanics could help. I don't know much about Quantum Computing so I guess that I can take care of next weekend :)

Hope you enjoyed my little computer science introduction course. Oh and according to my calculations, looking for a 30-digit Keith Number involves going through about 10^30 (10 followed by 30 zeroes) numbers. Currently, I can verify over a hundred 30-digit numbers per second, about 10 million a day. That's 10^7. So it will take me 10^30/10^7 = 10^23 days to find all the 30-digit Keith Numbers. Suppose a million people join me in finding the 30-digit KNs, and 1 million computers run my software, it'll still take 10^23/10^7 = 10^16 days. Which is about twice the age of the Universe! Of course, if we involve all the 1 billion computers on this planet, and instead of doing 10 million a day, find a way to speed it up to 100 billion a day on each computer, then it'll take 10^30/10^11/10^9 = 10^10 days, which is still approximately 27 million years.

So how the hell am I gonna find a 30-digit Keith Number (if it even exists)? By pure luck :) My program just randomly generates 30 digit numbers and tests to see if they are KN or not. It has gone through about 8 million 30-digit numbers already. Of course that's like looking into a bucket of seawater from the Florida coast order to find the pearl necklace you threw into the Indian Ocean a million years ago. There's a VERY high probability that you won't find anything, but hey... who knows, you just might!

Oh and also I think there's more chance of me winning the World's Largest Powerball Lottery than finding a 30-digit Keith Number, even though I haven't even purchased a lottery ticket! But I guess it's good for my computer since it's getting some good exercise now :)

So I bought two new hard drives and setup a clean installation of Windows on one of them. And thankfully I was able to salvage almost every single file from my dying hard drive, including latest emails and documents. Now I'm trying to see if I can recover all my program settings as well. If I can do that, then I'll actually be better off than I was yesterday because now my computer is running MUCH faster than before :)

So all's well in the chir.ag world.

This morning as I was brushing my teeth, I realized I haven't posted a 'blog entry in a week. I thought, maybe people will think "no news is bad news." Personally, I think "no news is good news" when it comes to personal life. If you ask someone, "How's it going..." and they say, "Same old..." then at least you know it's all going as usual and nothing catastrophic has happened.

Like you know, finding out that your primary boot hard drive is damaged. After brushing my teeth, I went over to my computer room and turns out my main PC was stuck at the hard-drive detection stage in the boot process. I turned it off, turned it back on, phew, thankfully it detected the hard drive. Then Windows starts to boot and after loading the GUI, during the "Applying Security Policy" stage, it gives me the Blue Screen of Death due to "Hard Error." Doesn't even say "Hard Drive" or "Hardware" error. So I turned it off, and got to work.

I think I'll use a Knoppix CD to salvage my data on to a new hard drive, since my old hard-drive is not fully dead, just damaged. I don't think my registry is damaged either - just some random data sectors. Of course, I have backups but since I configure my system VERY VERY finely, it will probably take me weeeeeeeeeks to get it back up the way I am used to.

Anyways, I'm gonna try to stay cheerful. I have a lot of things at work that need patience, optimism, and excitement. Can't let personal stuff get in the way of work stuff.

So there I was, sitting in my chair in front of my computer, playing with my kitties, and watching something on TV when Brian called. Said he was really hungry and stuck in Clearwater. The only place he could eat was Hooters down the road and he didn't wanna go there alone. I've never been to a Hooters place before so I said sure, I'll come. Turns out, this was the original Hooters - the place where it all started. It was a pretty good restaurant and from the looks of it, our waitress was definitely a former stripper. Ha! Anyways, I loved the food and the atmosphere was pretty good too. I ate a bit too much and my tummy is soooo full right now. But it's kinda cool though - my first visit to Hooters was actually at their first location. It's kinda like losing your virginity to Eve! Hehe.

The Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics.

Had a looooong day at work. Got home and assembled the new desk for my 3rd computer. Still have to setup the computer itself. Lots of things I need to do - not enough time.

Thanfully I can walk! Today I'm gonna go buy me a second desk/chair for my third computer :) Life is sweet...

No matter what good things I say about my job, something happens right after that tops it all. So after taking me to lunch for my birthday, today my boss and buddies Brian 'n Scott at work, decided to take me out to dinner. We went to this cute little restaurant in downtown St. Petes near the ocean-front. It was a British-India style restaurant with a wide variety of dishes on the menu. For me, it was Chana Masala. For them it was Chicken Tikka, Pasta, Salad, and Chicken Burger. We talked and chilled for about two hours and topped it off with yummy deserts - Chocolate Volcano for me :)

One of the reasons I love this job is not just the atmosphere but the real work itself. Right now I have to setup our inventory with barcodes. So here's the plan. We purchased Symbol PPT 8846 barcode scanner. It's runs WinCE 4.1 on Pocket PC x86 hardware. This tiny little device has a built in scanner, wireless ethernet card, and support for Microsoft .Net Compact Framework. It used to be that if anyone wanted to program devices like barcode scanners, remote controls etc., they would need to interface directly at the low hardware levels with the devices. Not so anymore. I can write full-fledged Visual Basic.Net or Visual C# applications that will run in the tiny 32mb ram scanner and perform all the required functions smoothly.

So basically I'm gonna have to program it in VB.Net to talk to our internal web server running WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) over 802.11b network using XML. Here's what will happen: Anytime the scanner scans a barcode, it is sent to the web server that process the input and sends back an XML document which will be parsed by my VB.Net software and displayed to the user for further input. So basically, I can walk around with the device and scan random barcodes of all our inventory and simply enter the physical quantity of stock and all the computer systems will be automatically updated. This is by far one of the coolest things I've ever worked with. I can barely sleep at night because I'm thinking about what I want to program the next morning. Eight hours of coding a day is simply not enough. I want more!

So I've been making more and more artwork lately. I'm absolutely addicted to it. Today to see if my art is any good, I decided to print it and if possible, hang it in my computer room. Here is the picture of my artwork on my wall :) I feel quite proud of it. In addition I made a pretty damn hi-res wallpaper for my friend Tony. Here are his dual LCDs with my image as the background :)

I wanted to sleep more but for some reason I couldn't. I have become so accustomed to waking up early on weekdays that I can't sleep till noon on weekends. Anyways, it's been a long time since I had a little session of retrospection and introspection.

So what's going on with my life, you ask eh? Well my job's going great. I finished a major project last week and started working on another huge project this week. While I can't say too much, I can say it's basically the new Inventory System for my company that will handle purchasing, sales, formulation, batching and production. The frontend is MS Access and backend is MySQL. I know every other programmer out there is laughing at me for writing code in Access but truth is, if you saw how smooth, secure, and efficient my code is, you'd change your views about Access. Oh well, for me the only thing that matters is whether my company will benefit from my system or not. And from the looks of it, it will.

Something else that I've miserably put off for a long time is running - practicing for the marathon. I injured my foot playing soccer last week and can barely walk without limping :( As a result, months of training have come down to a screeching halt right now. The marathon is less than 45 days away and I can barely run a minute without crying out in pain. I really REALLY hope my foot gets better soon or else I'll be walking the marathon instead of running it. But something tells me it'll all be good. I have my hopes all set on finishing the marathon and you bet I will! Also, no more soccer for me. Don't wanna get any more hurt. Thankfully my boss and his brother are cool with my decision. They rock!

Today I'm driving up to Orlando to meet the guy that made Dilly. He's gonna explain to me how The Dilly works - the whole infrastructure. Once I know how everything works, I'll start coding :) Can't wait!

So there you have it. My simple life. Main job, a side gig, and lotsa soccer and running before I got hurt. In the meantime I made Chime Note and now I think I'm gonna buy me another computer! I wanna make a nice server I can use for learning new programming languages and databases. PostgreSQL is my target for now.

I've been working a lot last two days. Basically setting up a few computer systems after work hours, since during the day those pcs are in use. Very tired right now. G'nite world...

Here's a 'blog entry that everyone other than me and the girl involved is going to laugh at. I don't know if she's ever going to talk to me again or not. So here's the background info. I've been talking to this really sweet, smart, and funny girl online for about a week now. For her privacy, I'm not gonna name her. We've talked from computer stuff to philosophy. After a week of chatting, we decided to meet up and get to know each other more. Tonight was supposed to be our first "date."

I was willing to drive up to where she lived but she insisted on meeting halfway. Since I've only been here two months and hardly know the cute little date places, I figured, we could just meet at the big Parkside Mall/Theater. So I gave her the directions, we chatted for a while on the cellphone, and she drove over. I left my apartment, talked to her one last time to make sure she got the directions correct. She was slightly ahead of me and reached Parkside before me. I called her up to confirm if she reached safely and that's when all hell broke lose.

Parkside mall was closed. The movie theater was shutdown. And the area was under construction. From her point of view, I had lured her into a desolate parking lot with construction trucks all around. I reached there and told her to follow me to the Olive Garden restaurant nearby. In the Olive Garden parking lot, I tried to explain to her that I was sooooooooo sorry and that I had NO idea that the goddamned Parkside was closed down! I just went there two weeks ago with Lynn!

Guess she was too mad at me to even talk. She told me we'll do this sometime again once she's in a better mood, possibly in Tampa, where she lives. I'd really like to believe her. I think she just added tonight to her list of "worst dating nightmares."

From my point of view though, it just stinks. She'll probably cool down in a day but I don't think my feelings are gonna heal anytime soon. It was NOT my fault at all! How the HELL am I supposed to know that a whole movie theater that I went to FOUR TIMES in the past two months had closed down for some reason? I think it's God's way of keeping me single forever. Here I was about to meet such a sweet girl and bam! Things blow up in my face, she leaves thinking I'm some creepy pervert, and I'm home by 7:10pm! What's funny is that she asked me why I'm single. I guess I can add this incident to my list of why I'm single...

Just bought an insanely cheap computer from Walmart Online. It cost $258 with shipping/tax and has AMD Duron 1.6Ghz PC, 128 DDR RAM, 40GB HDD, CD-ROM, Keyboard, Mouse, Speakers, and an Ethernet card. Now that I have a decent living room, I will hook this PC up to my TV so that I can watch Divx movies on my TV :) This is gonna be fun.

So we survived :) The hurricane hit land about 100 miles south of us at Fort Myers. There's nothing to worry about anymore and hopefully all my stuff is safe. Now I gotta go home tomorrow and set up my computer back again. It's gonna take a lot of time. Oh well... there goes this weekend.

That's it. I'm scared. I've evacuating too. Going to my friend Taylor's house RIGHT NOW. Taking my computer with me in the car. Hopefully everything will be alright :-/

WE ARE SCREWED. The hurricane is 99% going to hit my county the worst. Winds will be upto 115 mph, 4"-8" rain, 10ft storm surge!!! The eye of the hurricane is supposed to hit land exactly where I live! Such an event hasn't happened in decades and just two months after I move to Florida (tomorrow being the two month anniversary), we get hit by a major category 3 hurricane.

Over 800, 000 people are being evacuated in my county!!! There is no regular gasoline available - had to buy premium grade. I've filled my bath tub with water just in case there is no water for the next few days. Half the people in my apartment complex have left. I guess the other half like me are ignoring the mandatory evacuation. I'm gonna stay in my apartment and weather the storm. My two biggest worries are my car and computer. If there is a storm surge in 10 feet, my car is absolutely screwed. Storm surge is when the ocean level rises and rushes inland. So basically with the predicted 10 feet storm surge, my car will be under 4-6 feet of water!!!

I've stocked so much food that I can survive for months. I have water and my UPS has enough juice to power a light for a couple of hours. Since the storm is hitting land 2-4pm tomorrow, it's slightly better than a midnight storm.

They say "if you don't like the weather in Florida, just wait five minutes, it'll change." I hope they're true and tomorrow turns out to be a no biggie. I really don't want this storm to hit us.

In the news right now: "A state of emergency was declared for all of Florida on Thursday as the one-two punch of a tropical storm and then a hurricane raged closer, the first time the state has faced such a potentially messy plight in almost 98 years." Basically, there are TWO hurricanes that are coming towards Florida right now and should hit the land by tomorrow afternoon. Some are predicting serious disastrous weather while others are saying it's just a normal hurricane. No matter what it is, it's gonna be scary. I just hope my computer is safe :)

Oh and there's no way I'm getting my new furniture this weekend :(

More boring computer statistics. At work I'm been working on a major e-commerce website for about 4 weeks now. That's about 21 business days. Of these I mostly program for 6 hours a day. So it comes to 126 hours of raw coding. In this time I did a lot of non-coding work, like setup the database, graphics, and consulting my co-workers. I say I've put at max 100 coding hours into this project. The total lines of code I wrote in the meantime is slightly above 7,000. So that's 70 lines per hour of debugged error-free (almost) code. Since I don't comment my code, there's not a lotta filler text in it to lengthen the code.

The code is about 285kb in size. That 48 characters per minute. My lines are on average 40 characters in length. While they say it's not about lines of code, they also say that productivity CAN be measured by the number of "clean, simple, correct, well-documented lines of code per day." While each programmer has his/her own style of coding, I'd say mine is very clean, simple, and easy to understand. Hence, un-documented :) Cuz everyone knows, real programmers don't comment.

Quote for the day: "Strong typing is for people with weak memories." (If you're a girl and you understand this quote, email me :))

Had my first day at work today. It was pretty good. Met a lot of new people, had lunch with my boss/client, set up my new computer, and two other computers. In the beginning my work is quite simple, just setting up a systematic environment for everyone but pretty soon I will be making some spiffy new websites, software, and systems. Now I've the whole night for myself. So let's see what I gotta do...

In Memory Of The Bunker: I'm getting sentimental thinking about tonight as the last night in my bunker. It's been just over a year living here and so much has happened. All those long nights I spent working or studying. All those movies and TV shows I saw alone. All those movies I saw with my friends. It's all coming to an end. People don't realize how comfortable the bunker makes me feel. It's my home away from home away from home :)

Of course, now that college has ended, life's gonna change drastically. No more midnight pizzas from La Familia and no more pasta at Gerlanda's. No more skipping classes to go back and sleep in the bunker. No more waking up late for a meeting at work (well hopefully). No more seeing my friends every day :( I didn't cry when my last class ended. I didn't cry when I graduated. But I'll definitely cry when I leave my bunker. Such sweet fond memories.

It's a tiny 10x8 sq. ft room that has taught me how to live independently. The bunker taught me how to enjoy my life when nobody's around to enjoy it with me. From movies and TV shows to little hobbies like paper-cutting. The bunker taught me how to be clean, organized, and prioritize my chores. The bunker taught me how to make baked potatoes and alfredo pasta in microwave. Those nights of drinking hot chocolate with Horlicks, they will be missed. So will those days when Arthur or Mason would come over to watch The Family Guy or South Park with me. Or the times when I studied for annoying computer exams with Linda. Or the Pulp Fiction movie with Jeannette. So many memorable days the bunker saw.

I learnt how to make my special Maggi-Macaroni mix in the bunker. I made great friends with my landlady - Sunny. And above all I realized it's not the size of the bunker but the space in my heart that matters. I know it's pretty childish to call my basement room a 'bunker' but now all my friends and even family members call it the same. To you I might sound like a blooming idiot referring to my place as the bunker, but my friends are so used to it, they ask me all the time if I'll be at work or at "the bunker?" Ha.

It's unusual to associate yourself with a place so simple and plain. But that's the beauty of it. I moved into a tiny room with no furniture and I made it my home. And tonight I leave it. Oh the sorrow...

Henceforth, I am officially a graduate of Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Today was my graduation ceremony. I graduated with the highest honors in Computer Science and Economics and was awarded one of six Honors Scholars distinctions. My aunt, uncle, cousins Sneh and Sagar were there to see me finally achieve what I've been working hard at for four long years. My buddy Arthur graduated with me too! Neeeeeeeew Brunswick!!!!! Home of the Scarrrrrrrrlet Knights!!!!!! By God we did it man. We did it :)

Nobody in this world could have topped my success today, except my sweet little cousin Sneh. She participated in the Miss India NJ/PA/DE competition and she won the Runner's Up title! Her answer to the judge's question was frankly 100 times better than I could have ever come up with in such spontaneous circumstances. Congrats Sneh!!!

So here I am, all set to visit my Kaushik Mama (Uncle) in Queens, NY tomorrow. Haven't seen them for months now. I most definitely want to meet them once before I move to Florida.

I officially have over 1.2 terabytes of space on my computer - 9 hard disk drives from 3o to 250GB in size. Hopefully I'm not gonna run out of space anytime soon :)

My major sites are down right now (Photo Gallery, Chime main etc.) because I'm moving all my websites to my new dedicated server. If that doesn't sound English, just ignore it. Basically things could be hectic and dysfunctional for a few days, including but not limited to all my websites, emails, blood pressure, cholestrol level, and tolerance to dumb "computer" people. Sorry about it.

I think you're gonna like the new cookie I setup for my 'blog. It basically tells your computer to remember when you last visited. If it's more than one but less than 30 days, only the entries since you last visited show up! So basically if you don't read my 'blog for a week, then next time you log on, you'll only see the last seven days (in chronological order). That way if you check in every few days or even weeks, you're not gonna miss out any mundane incident in my life! Aren't you excited? Just kiddin' :)

I figured it's kinda hard to read what's the latest if you don't come everyday. This way, everytime you visit, there'll be something latest :)

As usual one thing leads to another. A new Fark photoshop contest is coming up with "Photoshop theme: The ABCs of Fark. A is for asshat..." My entry is this long A-Z of Fark (let's hope I win). What got me thinking, was that the word "Asshat" is what kinda brought me and Art together. I remember sitting in a boring Computer Architecture class and some guy's cellphone went off. I muttered "asshat!" and Art, sitting two seats away from me, laughed and said, "Wow, never heard anyone say that in real life." I guess from then on, we've been cursing a lot more together.

So tonight, I sit down and see if I can come up with one word or phrase for all of my friends. Some of these phrases probably won't make sense to anyone except the person involved but bah! Least they mean something. And sorry if I forget you. Feel free to remind me. After all, this is a list that's hopefully gonna grow throughout my lifetime.

So without any delay, presenting the Binding Phrases list, part of my new section TWIST.

I just spent 30 minutes walking on the snow for no apparent reason. Well there's a reason and I'll explain that later. Last 24 hours have been extremely blog-worthy. I don't remember so many different things ever happening within such a short duration. Almost every problem I had yesterday seems possible to solve now. Yesterday I went to the Goldman Sachs Internship Presentation on campus. Between 6:30 and 8:30, I got a good overview of what working in the corporate world after getting out of college could be like. While I was quite intimidated in the beginning during the DVD presentation, later after talking to the recruiters, things seemed a lot more homely. Goldman Sachs is one of the largest investment banking firms in the world and being a Computer Science and Economics major, I could either join the Technology sector or the Banking sector of the company. Obviously I'm leaning towards the tech side.

After talking to a few people from different divisions, I met with the Technology guy, who talked to me for about 25-30 minutes. While they were looking for 2nd and 3rd year college students to intern at GS over the summer, he said if my background is strong enough, I could be considered for a full-time position. At the end, I gave him a copy of my resume (or MS Word) and after getting back to my bunker, emailed him a copy just-in-case. Today I got an email from him saying I need to be more descriptive in my resume and explain which platforms and languages I used for which systems/applications. Here's a tip he gave me: "When applying for Tech-jobs, don't pay attention to the 1-2 page limitation because we want to hear EVERYTHING that you know." So now I'm going to release an Extended Edition of my resume and send it over. I wish I had read these resume tips before.

While waiting in line to talk to him for 30 minutes, another interesting thing happened. This cute 18yr old Russian girl standing behind me started talking to me. While she seemed really nice and all, in my head I kept saying "don't be distracted by a girl - you are here for a job!" After 15 minutes of polite small-talk though, she said she loved computers and wanted to get into the Technology field ever since she was a child. She doesn't party a lot and would rather read a good book or go to a museum instead. That's when sirens went off in my head. Whoa there lady! You're young, pretty, quite intelligent, like to learn new things, AND love computers? That's a first one I have to admit. During my talk with the Tech guy, she stood right by me and she asked a few questions herself. Afterwards we walked out together, she took my cell# and AIM screenname. I'm not sure if she'll ever call or IM me, but hey at least it was an interesting incident. Maybe I'll run into her on a bus sometime. But for now, all I know is her first name is Ally.

Three days ago after reading some whiny British students say how hard it is to pay tuition fees of £1,125 a year, I posted on Fark that my debt is so much more than them and the job market doesn't look good at all. After reading my post, someone emailed me to say he's hiring people with C++ experience in Texas. Now my first reaction was "haha funny" but I emailed him my resume anyway and today got a phone call from his Human Resources Dept. I have a phone interview this Monday at noon. Till about one hour ago, I wasn't too keen on this deal, till I Google'd the guy's name. That's when I got a little shock. Unless the guy who emailed me has an identical twin living in the same city and doing the same tech work, I think he is someone quite quite famous. A little bit of Googl'ing showed that he wrote this chat software and sold to Apple for $25 million! So let's see if it's the same guy or not.

And finally I met with my research advisor Prof. Dinesh Pai and he suggested a few things I could do. One of the topics I liked was sound synthesis. That is why I walked on the snow for 30 mins. Prof said that I could find a way to generate the sound that is made when a person walks on the snow. Right now when movies and video games have people walking, it's mostly recorded sound. What if I could write a software that automatically simulates the sound based on a few conditions like the type of shoes, thickness of the sole, weight of the person, amount of snow (or sand, gravels, pebbles), and the type of surface like wood, cement, concreate etc.? Well if I can actually do it, that would be awesome. Now I have about 3 months in which I can either do it or fail trying. I think I'll do it. I'm optimistic.

So that ends the eventful 24-hours. Now I wait for a few hours and will prolly go to the bars with Kat. Haven't seen her for a loooong time now.

Well another bad news, though nothing very serious. I just got my GRE Computer Science Subject test score. Turns out, I did awful. Not just bad-awful; more like my-future-is-screwed-awful. I got only 660 scaled score and my percentile was 27%! That means I did worse than 73% of the students taking the test. This pretty much takes away any chance I had of getting into a good grad school. Hell even Rutgers has a minimum of 50-60%ile I think. I guess I'll just have to give the test again if I want to get into CS graduate school. But frankly, I don't even care about the GREs. How can someone measure all my 12 years of knowledge, experience, and hard work within a stupid 3-4 hour multiple-choice question test! I think I'm just going to work hard on my research work this semester and if it goes well, then good, I'll pursue education. Otherwise I'll just get a job and then see how it goes.

Once again, things have got too busy for comfort. I gotta finish my friend Aript's site Books4Lease.com real soon. Have been working on it for days now. Just a lot of repetitive database stuff. Had an interesting web conference with another client today.

About 15 of my client's customers from all over US & Canada went to this site and logged on to see my client present a web demo of this site I made last month. Basically anything my client does on his computer, everyone else who is logged in, can see in their browser window. Pretty cool concept. Add to that phone conferencing and it really did seem like a great way to meet with small groups of people for quite a low price. Lasted about an hour in which my client loaded me with a lot more work.

Now with work comes money, so that's good. But then I really didn't want any more work this year, since I already promised Arpit that I'm gonna concentrate on his site. Oh well we'll see. For now, I'm just gonna get Books4Lease done as soon as possible. God it's cold and boring here!

Been setting up my computer all day. I got about 890GB of space now :) I'm sure I'll fill it up soon enough.

I just saw one of the most beautiful girls in my life and she asked me for "some spare change!!!" I swear. I was walking down to my fav. mexican restaurant (Tijuana Burritos) to get some food. She was dressed in cheap/torn clothes and was holding some total bum's hand as she walked down the street. As soon as she saw me, she let him go and came to me with a real sad look on her face and asked for some spare change because she was very hungry and hadn't eaten in days.

I just walked on, didn't pay attention (and didn't want her tall fierce looking guy to come after me). Sad world I tell you. It didn't look like she was an abused helpless woman. More like a totally screwed-up-in-the-head college dropout. Sad sad. So then I walk into the restaurant and was waiting after placing my order. This cute girl behind me, was telling her two guy friends how she's trying to get her boyfriend to agree to her plan but he's not willing. I couldn't help but overhear that her plan was to wake up at 5am everyday so that she could be at work by 7am. She could work two jobs till 9pm every night for the next two years while her boyfriend gets his Masters degree. Right now he can't find a decent job to support even himself, but she can - for both of them. So she was willing to go through all that just to get him to study more and he wasn't interested. At the moment he's sitting on the computer everyday playing games. He has been doing this for about a year now.

Her friends said that that's exactly why she should have left him a year ago because he hasn't changed one bit in 12 months and is pretty much hopeless now. So here we have a pretty hardworking girl with a lazy good-for-nothing boyfriend and there we had a hot begger who walked around with a guy who never passed 4th grade. Sometimes, it's people like these that make me lose my faith in world. But then of course, I manage to run across a gorgeous Farkette who is going for a PhD in Neuroscience and has full upper-body tattoos. According to her profile, she "can go from business chic to punk rock girl in 5 minutes flat."

So what's my point? Basically that there's all kinds of people out there and most of them are pretty screwed up. The secret to ending up at the right destination, lies in walking the right path every day. One little wrong step can take you away from a bright future to a sad bleak hopeless existence. Of course, you can get back on track but it's hard. I think in the 16 hours that you are awake everyday, you can do one of the two things overall - figure out or complicate yourself. Either you can figure out stuff, like how to do your work better, or have fun without spending a lot of money, or how men/women really work, or what your goal in life is. OR you can complicate stuff, like screwing up your work day-by-day, or running around after worthless things, or doing the same stupid things over and over that make things worse. I know I didn't write this out very eloquently but my point is still simple - all these people who seem to end up at the place where everyone else goes 'what the hell!', don't realize that they ended up here by not doing the common sense thing every single day. Sure, ignore the fact that your boyfriend abuses you almost every day because you "LOVE HIM" so much. And ignore the fact that your boss gets mad at you for not finishing your projects on time because obviously he/she is a total jerk. And ignore the fact that you are lying to your family about your grades in college because what do they care. When after 5 years your boyfriend beats the crap out of you, or your boss fires you, or your college kicks you out for bad grades, don't blame anyone but yourself.

And don't blame me when I don't give you some spare change. I earn my money by working hard and so should you, especially if you are 14 yrs or older and have no major disabilities. And remember kids, idiocy is NOT a disability.

Behold the website of Travis E.W. Doom, Ph.D Computer Science & Engineering. He is known, not surprisingly, as Dr. Doom. He even admits that the reason he got a PhD was so that people could call him Dr. Doom. Now that's a great reason to get a PhD...! I guess he can now join Professor Chaos :)

So sadly my hard drive deal was NOT honored :( Turns out it really was a typo and well nobody wants to sell a 120GB HDD for $60. So instead I ended up buying four Seagate Barracuda 160 GB drives from NewEgg, which will give me about 480 GB of storage under RAID 5 for $580. And seeing as how I'm already buying non-stop, I went ahead and purchased another one of those wonderful Princeton Graphics Senergy 981 19" LCDs for $890 from PC Nation. Let's recap: $90 RAID-card + $1 Mic + $33 Mouse + $70 Headphones + $580 HDD + $890 LCD + $16 Shipping/Tax = $1680 within 24 hours on computer stuff that I could have lived without!!! Why? Don't ask me. I have too much money. Just kidding.

Actually, all of this is simple investment. If I stick to slow old systems and never bother to upgrade, the quality of my work remains stuck to the same level. If I have my own RAID 5 setup, I can put on my resume someday that I have the skills to setup a RAID architecture. Of course, having a redundant half-TB storage means that unless my whole bunker gets flooded I don't really have to worry about losing my data anymore. Obviously a decade of data is more important than a few hundred dollars. I've already had three major data loses this year and can't tolerate more. I couldn't work for over 3 weeks due to these and that's a big productivity loss. Dual monitors increase productivity and wireless optical mice just plain rule. I don't really NEED noise-cancellation headphones but trust me it's worth it when I think about the peace it will give me no matter where I am. I will be able to study better in library and student center, I will sit peacefully on the bus rides, and I will transcend into a blissful state of oblivion while I write my precious code. This sure is going to be the best personal computer ever.

Took me about 34 - 8 = 26 hours to complete my final project for computer graphics. I'm quite satisfied with the results. Will post a few screenshots here later. I have Econ assigments due Monday and Tuesday and a comp sci homework due Tuesday. After that, gonna study non-stop for my GRE Comp Sci subject test - exam on Dec 13. This is one of those really big exams that will probably decide the course of my life. Much more strongly than all the graphics projects, all my web sites, and all the studies I've been doing in college. So I am gonna try really hard to do well in it.

Here's some breaking math news for the day: Perfect Magic Cube of Order 5 discovered. The reason why tihs excites me, is that technically someone like me could have done the same using a normal desktop PC and basic math skills. Come to think of it, one could actually write a program in BASIC to do exactly what these mathematicians did. So technically, it's not a very complex thing. Just not something you would think of using your computer for.

(If you're a CS major, you should read the original article I wrote this long blog entry on. If that is too confusing, feel free to read my interpretation and extension of it.)

Here's a long article linking computer science, philosophy, and quantum physics, by Jaron Lanier. You probably haven't heard of him (I certainly didn't) but you've definitely heard one little term he coined in the 1980's, "Virtual Reality. He looks more like a English major with a Philosophy minor than a computer scientist who "co-developed the first implementations of virtual reality applications in surgical simulation, vehicle interior prototyping, virtual sets for television production, and assorted other areas." In this paper, he looks at computers from an entirely different angle than we have been used to. Computer scientists (and in turn the rest of the world) basically think of computers as a bunch of electric signals being passed over wires at a very high speed. At any given time, there's really only one thing happening on your computer. You may think you are reading this website, listening to music, moving your mouse, and chatting online at the same time, but at the lowest CPU level, only one of these programs is running for a few split nanoseconds of time and then the operations for the next software are run. The context switch happens so fast that we get a perception that everything is running at the same time, which it isn't. Just like a 30 frames per second film reel, which is composed of a small number of pictures that are played just fast enough to give us perception of motion.

Real world of course doesn't work in this way. There isn't really some smallest amount of measurable time (at least not that we can measure with the current technology). Also in real life things do happen at the same time, that is you can be driving and drinking coffee while talking on the cell phone and scratching your head. Computers can only fake this kind of multitasking and that is where the problem lies. Fifty years ago it was very easy to conceptualize computers as simple straight-forward machines that receive input and product output. This led to instantenous implementations of the mathematical models of Turing machines and the first software. Sadly that is exactly what we are doing five decades since ENIAC - giving input and getting output. That, explains Lanier, is the reason why image recognition, voice recognition, video analysis and almost every application of artificial intelligence fails to product smart, intelligent results - because the current computer architecture is built to be perfect under perfect conditions.

Think about it this way. Theoretically, if you move your mouse cursor to the left, it MUST move to the left. There is nothing written in the software code for the mouse driver to move your cursor otherwise. But mouse cursor isn't the only process running in your system. Your stupid Word document will crash the system because there was a big photograph in it and your mouse is now stuck on the right corner of the screen, refusing to move. Theoretically, the code for mouse cursor did not fail, but your operating system did, and as a result brought down the perfectly functional code for the mouse cursor. The mouse cursor code is thus written perfectly to work under only perfect conditions. The alternative to this, he offers, is to write individual pieces of code, that don't rely on perfect protocols and systems to function with high accuracy. In his own words, "Wouldn't it be nicer to have a computer that's almost completely reliable almost all the time, as opposed to one that can be hypothetically perfectly accurate, in some hypothetical ideal world other than our own, but in reality is prone to sudden, unpredictable, and often catastrophic failure in actual use?"

Now if you've used a computer for more than a week, you know that computers are NOT perfect. In reality, of course not. But in theory, the science behind computers is perfect and predictable, mainly because it is built on the logics and functions of mathematics. If you add 2 and 2, you must get 4 under all circumstances. Find me a computer on which the Windows calculator gives anything but 4 for 2+2. However, the problem he says is that on small scale, perfection is relatively easy to achieve. Making small programs that work to specifications, is easy. But making a 10 million line program that analyzes the structure of the DNA is never going to be perfect, simply because of the scale. And Microsoft Windows has 50 million lines of code! How can one expect every line to function in tandem with the other 49,999,999 lines?

One obvious solution is to write better code and reuse the same code modules. I'm sure the brains at MS have thought of that before I just said it. And surely they tried to reuse as much code as possible. Yet they end up with 50 million lines. This only means that today's computer technology requires them to write 50 million lines to accomplish what they want - to provide us with an operating system that can play music, burn cd's, run datacenters, operate critical hospital equipment, and let you sell stuff on eBay. The keyword here is "today's", because there is nothing other than the limits of current technology that restricts anyone from writing smaller more efficient code. There is no need to obey the speed of light in order to write more compact code. There is no mathematical formula which predicts that in order to accomplish 'burn a cd' operation, someone must write 30,000 lines of code. Theoretically, we could design a CD burner that knows everything there is to burning a CD and all we have to tell it, is what songs or files to burn. But instead, we use a full-fledged CD-burning software to help us burn CDs. Then when the software fails, the burn process stalls midway and the CD has to be thrown away. Sure there is error correction built into the CD burner that will avoid jitter and prevent buffer overruns, but that is a unique solution to a unique problem. According to Lanier, there really should be no need to perform error correction. The CD burner should talk to the computer and as long as the computer managed to say 'hey I'm all ok' with 99% accuracy, it should go ahead and burn the CD.

Yeah I agree this sounds just as theoretically perfect and practically useless as every marketing campaign for some quasi-revolutionary killer-app released every other day, but it's hard to deny that with the current state of technological affairs, unless something is done to reduce the complexity of code being written for large projects (think, your utility company, the telephone companies, the stock market etc.) there is only so much that computer programming will be able to accomplish. Using pseudo-smart code can let credit card companies determine if someone's credit card might have been used fraudulently, but that means they have to first write the exact code to catch it. We humans don't learn anything exactly. When I drive a car, I drive with my left hand on the left-side of the steering and right-hand on the bottom, though my driving instructor taught me to put both hands in the 10-2 position. With him as my instructor (programmer), I learnt efficient driving but made my own adjustments to function better. Given the current logic circuits and architecture of computers, it's almost impossible to build an artificial intelligence system that can adapt to the world as humans. That is why we don't have talking robots and flying cars yet. Because it is not possible to design complex systems using zeros and ones. We've gone as far as possible using fuzzy logic to mimic true quantum states. But if there's ever a next stage in computers, if computer scientists ever want to break through the bounds of for-loops, return-values, and type-casts, they'll have to think of computers VERY differently from today.

How differently would you say? Think about magna-lev trains and dog-pulled sleds. Both do the same, take you from point A to B, but on entirely different levels. Today's technology is the bullet speed train that can achieve something at a really fast pace as long as the electricity is running, the magnetic track is well maintained, the passenger-load is within specifications. The pack of huskies pulling a sled on the other hand, may be 50 times slower, but they will easily walk around a big rock on an icy terrain without being reined to do so. Today's best computer software fail to achieve that. Think about it, as breathtaking as it was, the Mars Polar Lander was barely able to move around the mildly rocky Martian surface on it's own. A two year old child can run around faster and better. Why? Because the child's brain has millions of neurons and billions of connections that work at the same time, unlike the CPU of the robot, which no matter HOW fast, will always perform one-instruction at a time.

That is why Kasparov remains undefeated by the machines. Because he can think of 10 moves at the same time, while remembering 50 different layouts from the past, while the computer can only think of each move and layout at one time, although a billion times a second. A billion is still not larger than 10 to the power of 50. Someday the computer will be fast enough, sure, but it still wouldn't be able to laugh at a blonde joke. This is, I mean, if computers and software progress in the direction they currently are (and have been for fifty years). What is needed is an entirely different perspective on algorithms to get to the next generation, otherwise we have to stick to feeling 'intelligent' for writing software that opens doors for cats.

In addition to the current state of computer science, Lanier also connects computers with philosophical ideas, like the existance of objects, something that Peter Unger did in few of his papers. At the moment, I feel obviously unqualified to analyze Lanier's philosophical theories. Hopefully someday I will be qualified enough.

Last night, I pretty much met every error they put into Windows. One of the most interesting ones was Unreadable Dynamic Disk - when Windows could not detect my Movies M: drive! Took me a while to fix it, but it's all back. I had about 2 hours of sleep. All because of that goddamned virus. Thankfully, everything is back but only after I spent 12 hours like a nervous wreck. Sometimes I wish I had simpler computer problems, like icons being deleted or colors changing by themselves. Instead I have WINNT\system32\config\system corruptions.

Have you umm... driven a couch lately?

Oh boy, the making of Kill Bill. Can't wait to get home to see it (at computer lab right now, no sound).

Last night, for the first time in my life, I was stupid enough to catch a nasty virus, Parite.A. If I run into the guy who made it, trust me, I'll kill him with my bare hands. Within 2 hours it infected over 5000 executable files that I had on my computer. EVERY GODDAMNED .EXE file was infected! Since I had a full backup of my system, thankfully, I was able to restore every file. It took me about 10 hours to finish the restore. So that's how I spent my Sunday. And tomorrow everyone's gonna be like, so what did YOU do over the weekend, and I will punch them in the eye. That is how angry I am right now.

Yes, it was my mistake that I downloaded a file and ran it without checking with an anti-virus software. However, this doesn't mean I was totally negligent. Last night I was looking for a good FTP client and was randomly downloading 9-10 files at the same time. Usually I download all the files together and then run anti-virus scanner on them and then test them out. Once a month, there's a file with a virus in it, so of course, I am always careful enough. Last night however, 9 of the 10 files downloaded and I didn't realize the 10th was still downloading. I ran the anti-virus, it said every file was clean, just after the scanner ended, the 10th file finished downloading, I noticed that's a new file, so I thought lemme run the scanner on it again. And then instead of right-click, I used the left-mouse button and my system got nuked :( Yes, stuff like this happens even to the best of us. The solution is to have a virus scanner running in the background 24/7. I dunno, that's just too much pressure on my system (no matter HOW fast the system is).

Anyways, my pc is back to it's pristine perfect condition, thanks to a very recent FULL backup of EVERY FILE :) Restore process is slow though, because I need to tell it to restore only executable files and not all other files. Oh well, thus ends another barely productive weekend.

Last night (well till 7am this morning) I designed a new system called BotBlock that'll let anyone copy/paste a few lines of code to freely implement a fully functional CAPTCHA system. What the hell does that mean? Well basically you see, there's a LOT of form spamming going on these days. A lot of people have forms for comments/email on their site. Spammers have written software to automatically fill these forms with cheap spam advertisements. There's really no easy way to know if the form is filled by a Human or a computer.

Enter spamming-killing CAPTCHAs. These are softwares that you've probably seen if you ever tried to create a new Yahoo! account (scroll to bottom) or bought tickets from TicketMaster. The website shows you a picture of deformed text and you have to just type it in to a text box. The text is on a picture that is colored oddly or skewed so that no software can read it or recognize it - only human eyes. The bright folks at PARC also research this. So the technology always existed. What I did was make it VERY easy for anyone with basic PHP/HTML skills to use it on their site, without having to understand the whole science behind how to generate efficient images. Now, people can just go to my site, get a free username/password, copy/paste the few lines of code that generates the BotBlock image (via my server) and that's it :)

All I need is a few people to start using it and this could become very popular. You can see a demo for BotBlock here.

Everyone knows computer viruses are written by script kiddies with nothing better to do. Well mostly. But who knew a PhD researcher consciously invented the computer virus!

Sometimes things go so fast. I had my CS Graphics exam, told the professor that I wish to work as his research assistant next semester and that I'm applying for Grad school next year. Also signed up for GRE Computer Science subject test (Dec 13. is the test). At the moment, top schools on my list: Rutgers, Princeton, MIT, and NYU. I'll probably apply to a few more schools in NJ/NY and Boston area. Let's see. Ideally I would just like to keep my current job, get into grad school and pay for it myself, instead of becoming just another Teaching Assistant (TA). However, if I get to be a Research Assistant (RA) for some professor, that would rock, cuz then my tuition would be free and I'd get $1500 a month for living expenses (which is better than my current status - since I'm paying a hell lot for tuition).

But I live cheaply anyway, so I don't care about the money at the moment. I just want to get into a good grad school and see where it leads me. Damn can't believe it's Nov. 2003 already and I'm applying to grad schools. Huh. Oh well, got 2 projects due this week and one major one due on Monday. Gotta get back to that (and lotsa client work too!)

Last night I talked to my mom and dad :) They're back from Nepal. Had fun. Ah those rich people.

Last night I also worked on securing my client's site using OpenSSL for PHP. I think it's one of the most complex stuff I've ever done. Took me over 8 hours to get the implementation right (meaning I went to bed at 6am). As it stands now, even if a hacker manages to get into EVERYTHING on my server, he/she will not be able to decrypt the table of credit card numbers without a neat little password. It's done quite beautifully. I use an RSA public/private key pair to set it up. RSA is one of the sweetest little encryption systems. There's 100 more ones invented after that, but nothing so simple yet beautiful.

Basically, take two prime numbers P and Q and multiply them to get a real big number PQ. Now unless you know P and Q, you would need a big computer to factor P and Q from PQ. Well if P and Q are small, that is P=5 and Q=7, PQ=35 and if you are given 35, it's easy to find P and Q from it. But if PQ is a 10000 digit number, it's highly unlikely that you'll be able to find P and Q easily. Now, do a little more math and make D and E from P and Q. Like D could be P-Q and E could be P+Q or something. Well to get this to work, D and E are calculated in a special way as detailed here. Then encrypt the data using (PQ, E) and decrypt it using D. That's it. Unless the hacker knows D, they can't decrypt. Everytime my client needs to see credit card info for any client, just type in D, which is like a nice short word: SKYISBLUE or something, and it's decrypted. I feel so funny being excited over stuff like this. Hehe.

Last night, I saw Kill Bill - most definitely the most violent movie that I've EVER seen and yet it felt as clean as Bridges of Madison County. This morning, I woke up from a series of weird dreams centered in exotic locales about leathally skilled assassins. The last dream was pretty interesting - I was in a casino around this special table with an LCD screen. Everyone who sat around the table had their name on the screen. The computer would pick one of the players and assign them a random task. If they complete it, they get money or lose the bet otherwise. Players would join and leave tables nonchalantly. The computer had a profile on every player, so instead of this being a game-for-money, it was a game to show off one's skills. The Japanese lady next to me and the Russian, took some mahjong tiles and played with them like Michael Moschen would. Everyone around the table was wow'ed by her skills. Then the Russian's name came up on the screen and I wondered if the computer would ask me to write an algorithm for shortest-path-between-two-nodes instead of juggling samurai swords. And then my alarm rang and I woke up. From SUCH an awesome dream! THIS is what Kill Bill did to me. I kept thinking about it for the whole night.

Actually not just Kill Bill, after that I saw Pulp Fiction with Jeanette in the bunker. I feel kinda dumb cuz I didn't understand major parts of the movie, like the whole Bruce Willis character. But the movie was still good. Tarantino is my hero. Lately, I've been watching a series of movies by a small number of directors and I realize these are some of the best movies I've ever seen. Coen brothers, Tarantino, Coppola, and hopefully this weekend, Kubrick, for this 1964 classic Dr. Strangelove, starring one of my all time favorites, Peter Sellers. Good times :)

In the past hundred thousand years since man has communicated his emotions to his peers through verbal or physical gestures, never has he faced the emotional complexity that the everyday AIM conversation solicits. In one of my computer classes, I'm learning about something called: Context or Task Switching. I realized the same thing happens in my brain while chatting with more than one person - instantaneous switches between multiple moods and personalities. In one tiny window, I could be talking to Art and telling him how something is not going right and in another window chatting with Kat, I become all excited at her wonderful news from the family front. Then talking to Tay, I remain calm, comforting, and give the best advice I can offer so that he can salvage his 2,500 music files after iTunes "organized" them without permission. Another window, I'm laid back, discussing the pros-and-cons of reading books before watching the movie, with Jen. And back to Art, I wail how the hell might I get out of this current problem. All of this happens at the same time; my brain has about 1/100th of a second to switch between wise-and-composed to neurotic-and-whiny. I do this everyday. And everyone I know who chats online, does this everyday.

This doesn't seem to be an out of the world experience either. It's something very common and everyone I know is quite accustomed to it. However, from a psychological evolutionary point of view, this is something that is entirely new, brought upon us by the dot-com generation. Our personalities and behaviours change depending on who we are interacting with at any given moment. Around your teachers or customers, you put on a helpful or obedient mask, and around your friends, you quite possibly take off that mask. Right now, people who chat online, do the same, except 100 times an hour. Maybe this is something I noticed and probably doesn't deserve an observation. Or maybe this is something that requires intense research, to learn what happens to an individual's personality, after he or she is subjected to such rapid context switching for 6 years online. I am not a psychology major, but I feel the effects of chatting with multiple people simultaneously should not be ignored. Various psychological aspects of the computer life have been extensively studied, from causing social anxiety and reclusiveness to increased violence among video game players. However, I wonder why nobody has tried to explore whether engaging in multiple simultaneous conversations online increases the probability of developing or worsening Dissociative Disorders. Any Psych majors reading this? Tamara?

In my computer graphics class right now. Had a bad Advanced Econometrics exam. I hope I get at least a B though. And 3-4 hours of studies more tonight. Hope we can get it done sooner.

Oh to be an Economics and a Computer Science double major who reads /. - here is a very long article worth reading: The Law of Accelerating Returns in technology, by Raymond Kurzweil. It's an in-depth look at how technology is rapidly growing at an exponential rate. It is only natural that it starts with: "You will get $40 trillion just by reading this essay and understanding what it says..."

I don't EVER remember being THIS tired. I have been programming non-stop for 23 hours now, with 3 hours of sleep. However, I can say I FINALLY did my computer graphics project. I have never EVER studied so much for just one class/project. I think I already spent 55-60 hours behind this project! Got a bad headache right now, but gotta study more - Advanced Econometrics exam tomorrow. It's ok, I'll survive. I'm just too damn tired to even whine.

Happy B'day to me! 23 and counting...

My monitor's officially 1 year old now. We have the same b'day. My mp3 player is 1 year 2 days. This year I didn't buy anything for myself, cuz funds are short. Anyways, lotsa people wished me already. Thanks! Too bad I have more work and homework than I wanted this week, but it's all due in 2-3 days so I have to study now. Will prolly go out or something tonight. Nothing planned. It's always better that way.

My computer graphics class really IS hard. VERY hard. I spent 18 hours on the project already and have barely completed 30% of the assignment. And the project's really important too - 20% of my final grade. Ok, homework time.

Went home today. We had a lunch buffet @ this Indian restaurant right behind our house, less than a 3 minute walk. Cool stuff - my uncle/aunt bought a used BMW 318i yesterday and I just took it on a quick spin with Sagar (for 30 mins hehe). Awesome stuff. It's automatic and manual/stick-shift both! Good pickup too. Only 48,000 miles, 1999 model I think.

And now I think my computer hates me. After my hard drive, it's time for my sound card to screw up. It's not entirely damaged, but for some reason the voices are all cracked up. So wasting no time, I just bought Hercules Fortissimo III 7.1 from NewEgg. So now I should be getting a new sound card in addition to a replacement hard drive (it was still under warranty). Hope things don't get any worse. Well they kinda are, I spotted 2 dead-pixels on my monitor yesterday... :(

Oh well, gotta get back to work now...

Between the SAC and Frelinghuysen Hall, facing the Raritan is a tiny slope with lush green grass. Often between classes, on long tiresome days, I go down the slope half-way to catch a breath. It's one of those rare spots that everyone has seen before but no one really knows it's beauty. Located in the tiny corridor between two buildings, it's one of the windiest sites around New Brunswick and this secret belongs to me. It's right next to a busy campus bus stop - isolation amidst the congregation. Last night after my hard drive died, there is exactly where I wanted to be.

After I was sure that the drive was dead, I turned off my computer, got out of my bunker, and decided to wait outside in the storm for Cigir. She came after a few minutes, I told her what happened, and how I just didn't feel like going indoors at the moment. So we walked across College Ave. campus and headed for the river-front. I showed her the slope and spoke highly of its wonders. She thought I wasn't serious but just after sitting down for a few moment, she knew what I meant. "It was a dark and stormy night..." and now I felt much better. We walked down to the little park on the river-front, no one else in sight. The wind was roaring and all of a sudden, a cloudburst hit us. There are these tiny fake huts with benches where people sit on sunny Sundays afternoons to read a book. We huddled there simply to shield us from the rain. I was shivering. Not wanting to fall sick, we briskly walked back to my bunker to dry off. Indoors was comforting again.

It was pretty cold inside too (the bunker's air conditioner is always on) and what better way to get instant warmth than a little Vanilla Twist? Three shots and I was already slurring. It had stopped raining, we went outside. It rained again, we came indoors. It was the perfect weather. Like the time in Digha when I was around six years old. I remember the palm trees in the distance, bending dangerously low in the wind, someone in the background calling me indoors. I was out in the balcony with my eyes fixated, knowing that any moment now one of the palms was going to snap. The weather was like that last night in New Brunswick.

It's been a long time since I blogged. So what am I upto. Studies, work, select friends, and books. Ah books. Growing up, I used to devour the books my dad read, mostly works by Jeffrey Archer, Sidney Sheldon, and John Grisham. After I discovered computer manuals, help files, and FAQs, my interest in books dwindled. Last semester I took a class that got me interested in books again - Trauma & Literature; albeit a very different genre of books. This weekend I completed a book I'd been reading for over 2 months, Everyone's Burning by Ian Speigelman. Now I'm reading Andre Dubus' House of Sand and Fog.

This being the senior/final year, most of my friends are busy with their classes/homework so it's hard to hang out with them. Moreover, I have evening and night classes and work during the day. While it's great for me, since I get enough free time for studies, work, sleep, and just relaxing, it's hard to meet up with people and chill. I see Arthur every other day, just to chill, since he has a lot of free time in-between his classes. He gave me a ride to my aunt's house to pick up some of my client's mail. Then we went to an Indian food store and I bought some maggi for him. One by one I'll get all my friends addicted to it. And while my friends are gonna get fat eating Maggi, I have healthy lunches - today I had some good Chinese fried rice with tofu and vegetables. Since I have enough money to buy me mostly any food on/around campus, I have to be really careful with what I eat, especially if I get sick, there is nobody to take care of me on a daily basis. So I watch what I eat, but then people start thinking I'm on a diet. Look what Kathleen just said online with regards to my memory and eating habits: "You're an elephant with an underweight disorder. I'm calling you my anorexic elephant friend." But then just 2 hours ago I was with Cher eating some yummmmmmy french vanilla icecream, though only a single scoop.

I knew food would become a slightly bigger part of my life once I started living alone and well it has. I care a bit more about what I eat, when I eat, and how much I eat. But I never though cleaning would become anymore important. It is. I dust my room every other day and clean my bathroom once a week. What's my point? I'm turning 23 in 2 weeks, and finally I'm acting like one. No more excess drinking, eating, sleeping, working. No extremes - I'm becoming 'Fair and Balanced'. Hehe.

Anyways, my studies going on good. I have homework due tomorrow, on Wednesday, and on Monday. I already did the stuff for next Monday! Well simply cuz it's computer graphics and something that I absolutely love. Homework for tomorrow and Wednesday is pretty interesting too - mostly programming with a few question/answers. Nobody likes to do homework, but this is the first time I don't absolutely hate doing my homework - mainly cuz it's not repetitive or boring, rather interesting and creative. And as usual, my work's going awesome. I got one website to complete as soon as possible and got a new project for my university that I just started this morning.

Everything's going decent in my life right now, EXCEPT the weather. It's September and raining here as if it's the monsoons. Now I have nothing against rains, in fact love them. However I live 10 feet below the earth in well-sheltered bunker. I can survive a nuclear blast but I don't think I can easily survive Ms. Isabel - a Category 5 hurricane that could hit the US East Coast quite hard in a week or so. If by some misfortune the Raritan River in New Brunswick floods all the way to Easton Avenue (my home), I have no idea what I'll do. I'll probably move all my stuff (and trust me I have a LOT of stuff) out to the first floor of our house but it'll be a lot of work. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Finally after 3 years of college, I get to take a class that is actually interesting and new to me - Computer Graphics. While the course material is still unclear, we'll learn a lot of cool stuff on making software that makes 3d rendering possible. This course is not how to USE a 3D design software, it's how to MAKE it. I'm excited.

Just went to the Livington Surplus Store w/ Michele. She needed a new monitor. My buddy Chris told me they sell 17" monitors for $20! I am thinking of buying a 19" CRT and hooking it up with my 19" LCD. Desktop space will be a problem, but I'll def. get a lot more work done. Hmmm let's see...

As much as I hate computer viruses, I love this one.

Today was a long day. I worked till 12:30 pm and my buddy Arthur came to pick me up. We went to my aunt's house, I got dressed, and we drove to Freehold - for Michele's mom's viewing/wake. It was a sombre atmosphere and since I had never seen a corpse before, I was kinda scared. Not scared like a child, but by the realization of inevitability - the fact that this is how it's all gonna end, always, for everyone. As usual, Mich seemed to hold herself strong. She's a very strong person and I know her friends love her. It's gonna be hard for her but I'm positive she'll manage. She's gonna live on College Av. campus now and so will be just a 2 min. walk away from me.

Art, being the awesome guy that he is, dropped me back to my place - prolly 4 hours of driving for him all total. Thanks a lot buddy. I REALLY appreciate it. At 6pm, my friend from work Mason called and said I should dress up well for the ResLife Banquet. We reached the Busch Dining Hall at 6:30pm and I was amazed to see how formal it was - I simply thought it was a nice dinner for the 150 students who monitor the all dorms. Turns out it was a formal event, that takes place every year just before school starts, to prepare and wish best-of-luck to all the students. These are the same 150-180 people I have been showing my system to, in the last few weeks, and almost all of them recognized me as the 'computer guy' or the 'new system guy.' While it sounds like an informal and quite insufficient title (considering the work I do is pretty complex), it's amazing how good it feels, just talking down Easton Av, and hearing 'Hey man! Good job...' just randomly.

Mason introduced me to a few close friends and we just chilled around the dining table. Food was decent and since I wasn't that hungry it didn't matter. What mattered is how I felt. After an eight year gap, I had a rush of adrenaline that I used to have in RKC, right before the prize giving ceremony - the feeling that what I do is important. Last few years, I've been making softwares, websites, and systems for people I never see. Half a million people have downloaded Glass2k and TrayPlay, and I have seen not 20 of them. Tonight, as I walked alongside Mason, everyone smiled at me, said they love the new system, and congratulated me on a job well done. Stuff like this never gets into my head. I don't suddenly feel all important or heroic. I simply feel accepted and loved. This is a good feeling. Something tells me, this final year in college is going to be wonderful.

I've decided a couple of things. I am NOT going to complain anymore about my studies. I pay FAR too much to study and fretting over homework is just plain immature. I have already decreased my website load and not taking new clients - meaning I'll have a little spare time to relax and unwind, like tonight after the banquet. I went over to Mason's place, we played James Bond 007 and some other Boxing Video game. He kicked my ass in both the games. Hehe. Yes, I suck at games. And then we grabbed a beer, opened a bag of popcorn, and watched Terminator III. I just got home, and here I am.

Gotta wake up @ 7:30am tomorrow, so I better head to bed.

It's Friday evening and that means creative computer time for me :) I'm trying to integrate text-to-speech into my remote and was thinking of some voice like Dr. Sbaitso from the old Creative Labs - SoundBlaster era. After failing to implement Microsoft DirectX Speech libraries, I started looking for alternatives and frankly I'm blown away. Turns out IBM has a great TTS (text-to-speech) solution that you can test online. AT&T has an even better natural voice solution that is soooo real it's astonishing. A couple of years ago they said TTS was gonna hit big. I think the technology has finally advanced now to an acceptable level. I wouldn't mind hearing my news spoken by Rich and frankly Claire sounds creepily like Madeline Albright. Oh and they even have Anjali talking with an Indian accent! Of course I still have to find a good TTS library for my remote software. Hmmm.

So I finally gave in to my cuzin Priya's nagging and took The Geek Test. I'd seen it many times before but didn't take the test cuz it was too long and I was afraid of finding out the truth. The truth is, I am only 32.94% Geek. That's like saying I am not even geeky enough to be a real geek! Urgh. Well the truth is, I am not into Star Wars, LOTR, Anime, D&D etc. and thus I scored zero on them. The only places I prolly scored 100% were the computer questions. Oh and I can count upto 1023 using binary fingers.

Errrr. You have a little computer problem?

I'm not too much of a gamer but I think this game is prolly one of the coolest I've seen lately. But then sometimes I'd rather play God than play games.

And I never knew Nissan owned Z.com.

Mmmmmmm! Finally glasses with in-built computer screens are here! Not THAT expensive either - $700. Most 17" lcd monitors fall in that range so it's definitely a good buy. Now if only I could find a justifiable use for it. Hehe...

Quote for the day: "Nothing more fun than degaussing my computer" - Nick

So my computer @ work is undergoing usual maintenance etc. so I got a few mins to kill. First up, bad first lines of novels. Pretty funny. Sometimes my blog even sounds like it. Next, the US budget is pretty much screwed. Economy's gonna go bad though one of my friends (stockbroker) tells me the stock market's gonna go up in next six months. Let's sit back and see. Sit back, cuz well, I don't really have any investments, so nothing's @ stake here.

Anyways, things are back to hectic. I called up my home (Calcutta) last night and talked to everyone except my dad :( Well he was @ work. And this morning I get an email from him saying he doesn't love me anymore because I didn't call him up on his b'day :( Guess I have no excuse. I had talked to him just 3-4 days earlier too. So I thought I'll call after a week and talk in detail. And now he is not talking to me anymore. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! DADDY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WOOOOOOHOOOOOOOO! I am now on my new computer :) It's fully functional and thankfully nothing went wrong. Got a lot of stuff to setup and working full day tomorrow. Oh well... Going to bed in a few.

Now if only I had these superpowers, my life would be so much more fun...

Here are 10 best things about US and to keep things in balance, here are 911 things to hate about US. While I don't agree with either of the lists 100%, out of the 10 best things, the following really hit a nerve:

"In America the destiny of the young is not given to them but created by them.: Not long ago, I asked myself, "What would my life have been like if I had never come to the United States?" If I had remained in India, I would probably have lived my whole life within a five-mile radius of where I was born. I would undoubtedly have married a woman of my identical religious and socioeconomic background. I would almost certainly have become a medical doctor, or an engineer, or a computer programmer. I would have socialized entirely within my ethic community. I would have a whole set of opinions that could be predicted in advance; indeed, they would not be very different from what my father believed, or his father before him. In sum, my destiny would to a large degree have been given to me." - Dinesh D'Souza

To the average reader, he is just another minstrel singing patriotic songs about the US for the upcoming 4th of July weekend. But delve a bit deeper and you realize that even though the Indian-born author only talks good about US, the article seems to be his way of justifying the burning question within himself (and everyone like him, including me) - why did he leave India and his family to come to the US? I used to think that once I've been here long enough, the guilt of leaving my family, friends, and all that I loved, for a better future in US, will vanish. It's far from the truth. While I have adjusted pretty well to the American life, every once in a while the question begs an answer - is money, career, education, name, fame (insert materialistic goals here) really worth leaving what God gave you?

Sometimes I think yes, sometimes I think no. I used to think well I'll get the answer the day I make my first billion. Now I think I'll never get the answer - frankly because this isn't a question/answer, it's an irresolvable conflict. On one hand I could have been happily married by now in India but in truth I will prolly be single for many more years to come. On the other hand, I wasn't satisfied by the education, computer-projects, and business contacts there, but am more than satisfied with everything here. So ya, the confusion and conflict remains. In the meantime, I go out and see Cigir after a LONG time :)

I used to think my new computer would be cool before I saw this.

I'm still using my old pc. My new pc is all messed up. Let's say the mother died while delivering the twins (meaning the motherboard fried up after we installed the dual AMD cpu's). Sad sad. Gotta go through a long process and return it and get a new one. Urgh... I was without a computer on Monday! Can you believe it?

That Monday night taught me a lot of horrible sad things about myself. First of all, in my room I have no means of entertainment outside of my computer - no TV, no radio, no CD/DVD player, not even phone numbers of some of my friends! Sure, I could go out and meet up with a friend, but I mean if I'm alone in my room, there is nothing to do other than read a book. I eventually ended up reading Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos all night. Great book. Highly recommend it to people who love math, people who hate math, and people who are absolutely scared of math. What scares me though, is that without my computer I felt extremely helpless - no confidence, no self-esteem, no strength. I was so panicky and nervous. Next day I told my friend Derek how bad my night was and asked if I could be suffering from extreme internet or computer addiction. He said you're feeling just like a mechanic who has lost the tools of his trade. As crude as it sounded, his answer comforted me. But just like Sharon said the other day, we've all become slaves of technology, myself more so than anyone I know.

I do think I am addicted to the Internet and to computers in general. However, as far as I know, it's not affected my real life. While I have refused dates because of website work etc., I've never said no to hanging out with a friend because I wanted to chat online. So I don't think my addiction is in the disease stage (yet). The day I tell someone sorry I can't go see a movie because I have to read Fark will be the day I need serious help. So far so good...

Now, on to better things. On Sunday, I saw The Graduate on cable. I'd heard about Mrs. Robinson syndrome before and knew it was from this movie, but finally I got to see it. While I loved the movie, what I loved more are the songs. I knew about Simon & Garfunkel before, but this was the first time I paid attention to their songs and now am absolutely in love with their music (at least for this movie). Looks like they are reuniting this fall.

Anyways, gotta get back to work. Lotsa stuff to do...

Tomorrow I'm gonna upgrade my computer to a dual AMD CPU with 1GB RAM etc. It's gonna be a tough upgrade. I'm crossing my fingers...

Whoa! Guess what I just found on the Internet: Remember the evil-genius HAL computer from Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Oddessey? What do you get when you add one to each letter of HAL? H -> I, A -> B, L -> M = IBM! Kinda spooky. Like those Bill Gates is the Devil things. But of course, Clarke denies any connections... just a coincidence.

Since early this evening, I've been busy writing The 'Blog Potential. It's my view on how 'blogging can and probably will change the world slowly. It's presumptious for anyone to claim that 'blogging will ever cause any major social revolutions, but that's exactly what they said about art, music, radio, TV, computer, and the Internet. I still have to complete the article... might do it tonight, might do it next year. I dunno...

A lot of you have probably seen the Honda Cog advertizement by now. I used to think that it was a computer generated animation, but I was just surfin' my friend Tony's journal and found out it was actually 606 takes worth of real effort! I can't believe how some people have so much patience. The making of Cog - a true masterpiece in advertizements.

It's not everyday that a 65 year old lady talks to me for 15 minutes and makes me laugh like a best friend since first grade would. My landlady, Sunny, an asian woman (I don't if she's Chinese, Korean or Vietnamese) came down to collect the rent for this month. My bunker is right under her bedroom so sometimes when I play music loudly, I worry if it bothers them or not. I told her to instantly call me anytime my music is too loud. She calmly told me, "Chirag, you need your music. It doesn't matter to us if you play your Indian music, Rap, or Hip-Hop loud, because we have learnt to live with it." There are not too many people like this in the world, people who want to "step into a college student's shoes and look at life their way."

Sometimes I wonder what makes some people so understanding. She told me she recognized some song I was playing yesterday and I told her it was Frank Sinatra's "That's Amore." Her husband, Ed, told me when I first signed the lease, that he was a big Sinatra fan too. She admitted Ed sings quite well, but just lacks the "something" that was in Sinatra's voice. So every now and then she sits in front of Ed and his microphone and tells him to "talk to me... sing for me..." I tell a lot of people that I don't really want to live beyond 60. I mean come on, what exactly will I do after I get old? Just sit around and nothing! But just imagining that if I'm lucky, I could end up with someone like Sunny, who can make each day seem like the best day of your life, makes me want to live beyond 100.

Her elder son she said was into Heavy Metal, even had his own band and played guitar really well. But obviously only one in a million makes it big in the music industry. After years of trying to break into the music industry, he ended up being a successful accountant on Wall Street. At his wedding, she told him to cancel the regular wedding-band and instead get his own Heavy Metal band to play the music that he lives for. Her son's friends call her Ozzy-Mom, basically since she told someone her favorite musician was Ozzy Osbourne. Nowadays, she said, some people are calling her Hip-Hop-Ma since she likes listening to the latest music by Eminem and Naaz.

Times change and the only ones happy, are those who change with it. And yet she said "technology is not that good and someday you will realize that only music and nature will bring you true happiness, not checking your email." It's at this point, I guess I differ from her. I'm sure most of you reading this actually side with her but I can't. For me technology is just another aspect of life that brings me pleasure. I'm not writing this 'blog just because I want to write. I'm also writing it because I love writing and instantly sharing what I write with you. And technology is an integral part of it.

I dread the day when I might look at a computer and curse at it that it ruined my life. A lot of people have told me it'll happen someday. I have, of course, cursed at specific softwares on dreadful days, but never have I looked at a computer and thought that it has caused me pain. It's second nature to me. Call me a nerd/geek/whatever but technology brings a form of joy that is unfelt by me otherwise. I'm not an artist, I'm not a creative musician, but I am an innovative programmer. I don't understand how thinking up a new and faster way to access websites is any different from writing a poem, because as far as I know, both bring the same amount of joy to me, first when I create them, and second when others appreciate them.

The cliched saying goes that "Technology is most efficient when it's invisible." I'd like to say that "Technology, once it becomes invisible, is no longer technology at all - it's art; inspring, life-giving, and comforting."

Just saw the latest funniest thing online - Red vs Blue - Episode 8. I've been watching the episodes 1-7 for a while now and from the looks of it, RvB is growing in popularity as much as, if not more than, HomeStar Runner / StrongBad. Basically these 7-8 guys write a funny script about a buncha army men stuck in a box-shaped crater in the middle of nowhere - the Red team fighting the Blue team. Then they enact the scene by playing a video game Halo and record everything on to a computer. Then dub the script on top of the Halo game sounds and bam! They come up with the funniest stuff ever :) WARNING: You will need a cable/dsl internet connection (at LEAST 24kb/s) and the latest Quicktime plugin to view these videos. But trust me, they'll be worth it.

Just got back from Bruce Almighty :) Finally got to see that movie, with my buddy Mason from work. I'm backing up my all of my hard drives right now cuz well, there was a thunderstorm today and my computer went off! I'm really scared of what might happen if my hard drives ever crash. So I'm backing up as much stuff as I can on 9 CDRW's - most prolly all my work + important stuff. I don't really care about my collection of songs, movies, software - as there is nothing I can't find online - except of course, the software + websites + graphics that I made myself. Though even that stuff is gigs and gigs! Wish me luck backing everything up!

If I don't wake up tomorrow, then PLEASE call the cops and report the following person - Arthur Baczyk. He is 6 foot tall, Caucasian with short hair and glasses. I just found out that I got an A IN MY COMPUTER CLASS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Arthur is in the same class and awaiting his grades. He's in my room right now studying Linear Algebra for his exam tomorrow. After seeing me jump up and dance like a madman (upon receiving my professor's email regarding the grade) he gave me a very weird *look* - you know, the one full of envy, spite, and jealousy!!! So ya, I gotta be REALLY careful of him tonight.

HAHA! Just kiddin'! He's my bud :) He has another exam tomorrow - Physics, same as me. He's done with the Physics and I'm just starting. I dunno how to continue studying - I mean I'm just sooooooooo damn excited with my A in CS and 99% probability A in Econ. Of course, there's still my potential B in Math and B+ in Trauma & Literature :( And I do have to study for my Physics if I wanna get an A in that class. But anyways... I'm EXTREMELY elated right now :) Now back to studying!

In a world going wrong, at least something went right finally - I got Optimum Online cable internet in my new place! I didn't buy the TV package, since well, it's all too expensive. Each month I'm paying $500 rent, $50 for my cellphone, $50 for internet, $150-200 approx. for food. So there goes $800 a month on just basic survival. Of course I need to pay for my college also. But no worries. Here's why:

"Hi. This is Chirag. If you are the phone company, I already sent the money. If you are my parents, please send money. If you are my financial-aid institution, you didn't lend me enough money. If you are my friends, you owe me money. If you are a pretty female, don't worry, I have plenty of money."

Anyways, here's my moving status: After my last exam on 13th, I'll slowly start moving my stuff. Hopefully by 18th (next Sunday) I should be all set in my new place. Life is easy and smooth from then on. Gonna go to my cuzins' dance show tonight and also next Saturday. I really can't wait till Econ & Physics exams are over. I'm not getting all A's this semester - mostly A's and B+. Let's hope I don't get a C+ or B in any class, since I know my computer and math exams didn't go as well as I prepared for them. Overall, I'm more than glad this semeste's coming to an end.

After studying consistently for days and weeks, I totally messed up on the computer finals :( Not feeling good at all. Got another exam (Math) in 4 hours. Urghhh... God when will this be over...

Gonna go study in a few mins now. My friend Chris just told me about Cinema 4D, a very hi-q rendering/modelling software. Would you believe that this is a computer-generated-image (CGI)? How about this?

So yet another day goes by. I can't believe I read all the books for my Trauma & Literature class! I read The Diagnosis in just two days! Sure, if I had nothing else to do, I could read it within a few hours, but hey, I've got a lot of other stuff to do too. Got a few study things this week, but nothing too stressful. I've been feeling much better lately and chilled w/ Mich all day today.

All this reading is having a weird effect on me. I walk around and I feel as if I'm a character in some novel. I enter a room and can just hear a paragraph being written in real-time, describing the scent, the posters on the walls, and the number of times the light flickered before finally turning on. More than once, I felt like stopping whatever I was doing, grabbing a pen, and jotting down my thoughts. And more than once I realized that I can't really write with a pen anymore. Of course I can still 'write' with a pen, but I have lost my ability to write essays, papers, or letters on paper. I need a computer :( Maybe I might just start writing a novel some day. Who knows, I might just start writing a novel on my 'blog itself.

My life is sooooo weird. So I didn't study enough for my Physics exam and expected to get 60-70% in the exam I gave on Tuesday. Imagine my surprise when I get 94/100 :) And the math quiz today - I didn't do that good, but I think I did better than my last two math quizzes. Let's see how I fare. Talked to my Econ professor today and he suggested a few good topics for my econ honors project. In the next few weeks I have one math exam, two books to read, one 6-8 page paper, two econ labs, three physics webassigns, and one computer science homework. Thankfully it's all spread apart and I'll be able to handle everything much better now. Also I need to catch up on Ms. Sleep ;)

I went home tonight and got my glasses back + some summer clothes. Spring's right around the corner (hopefully this Sunday will be bright and sunny and not too hot/cold.) My last week was really stressed out but things kinda look chilled henceforth... let's hope :)

As much as I like my econometrics Professor, I just don't think it's fair that he assigns a new lab every goddamn week! I just handed in the econ lab this morning and there's another due next Wednesday. There goes my weekend... cuz I don't wanna delay till Tuesday night (cuz look @ what happened last night - I ended up doing the lab from 6pm - 3am!) I didn't even eat anything yesterday, cuz I was studying all night. Soon, in 5 weeks, all this will end... (or so I keep telling myself...)

Of course, when you stare at the computer for 14 hours a day without your glasses, and sleep for 5 hours, you end up with a splitting headache. I still have to write a paper for my literature class and study for the math quiz that got postponed cuz of the snow on Monday. Tonight's not gonna be easy on me either - going home late and then sleepin late and waking up early cuz my job starts @ 7-8 am tomorrow. Why am I whining... I don't know. It's just that I'm really really really out-of-my-head right now.

Walking like a zombie, doing stuff without really thinking/paying-attention - this can't be good. I don't have much time, but I should decide something really soon - Either I live like this for 12 months more and end up with some really enviable degrees (CS + Econ + Math + Honors) or I drop my Math minor or drop my Econ major to minor, and take life a bit more easily. I'm gonna go for a Masters + PhD anyway, so it's not like my whole life will be ruined if I drop my degrees - At the least I'll have a CS major + a lot of classes in Econ and Math and Honors. I'll think over all this, this weekend - when I have no plans - other than sleep and study and relax :)

My present status: Inebriated by stress, inundated by work.

My eyes really hurt when looking @ the computer screen right now. I'm on 800x600 resolution on my 19" LCD and the fonts are all big and ugly. But my eyes keep getting watery every few minutes. Damn WHY did I have to forget my glasses @ home :(

Went to Sam's Club today with my aunt. She bought a lot of stuff for house/store and got me Eclipse strips :) I'm just relaxing @ home right now while they're having dance practice downstairs.

So anyway, I found out about Project Gutenberg today and am pretty impressed with it. Basically these hard working guys take books, type them into a computer, and make them freely available for the whole world. Pretty generous of them. Like, here's a bunch of plays written by William Shakespeare. Here's some of the English (prolly translated) text by Rabindranath Tagore. And best of all, here's almost every book written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, available for free, online!

What a beautiful day... to LOSE HALF YOUR EMAILS!!!! I am sooooooo angry right now. Stupid stupid stupid computer! Ok here's what happened. Last night I printed out a couple of things and left the printer on. Then I ran the 'Compact All Folders' option in Outlook Express, and as it was going on, I simply turned the printer off. Nothing wrong in that, right? Hell the stupid computer crashed with a Blue Screen of Death error. I turned my pc back on and lo and behold, all the emails I had ever sent, and all the emails I had stored in my 'Rutgers' and 'Records' folders disappeared! This means I have now NO records of any of my financial data, college data, emails to clients - NOTHING! You don't see the crisis in here? Just think how would you feel if you turned of the TV and all of a sudden your living room got flooded with raw sewage! That's EXACTLY how I feel right now.

Stupid USB printers! Anyway, I had a decent backup from mid-January, so at least I got some of the stuff back. Also, all the personal + work emails that I received are in tact. It's mainly the Rutgers emails, Financial (Bank Statements, Online Purchases, Credit Card Statements etc.), and all the emails I sent to anyone after mid-Jan that's gone poof! Oh well. I guess I'll just manage somehow (and backup 7 times a week now!)

Life's busy. Mostly with work. I've been trying to figure out my near & long term academic plans. As far as this summer's concerned, I'm taking 3 classes - two economics + 1 math class. Just three classes are going to cost me over $3500! Yeah, so now I gotta figure out where to get that much money from.

And in fall '03, I'll take 6 classes, and 6 more in spring '04. Hopefully if I get every class I want, I should graduate in May 2004 with a Computer Science + Economics double major, Math minor, University College Honors, and Economics Honors :) Ya I just found out that I can do a one year research project in Economics by myself and use it towards my UC honors also. It's kinda weird, but in the end, it gives me more recognition for not too much work. I had a meeting with my academic advisor today and she says I'm prolly the best/brightest student in UC @ the moment, cuz nobody's doing so much crap in just 4 years. So I guess I should be proud of myself.

With the whole spring break thing, I've been pretty stressed out. I mean it's spring break and most of the people I know are either relaxing or partying on pretty islands. Instead I'm working :( Now I know everyone says I should take out some time for me and blah blah, but well I just dunno. I really want to do all that major/minor thing I talked above and for that I MUST take classes this summer. And for that, I must somehow make $3500 before May. Only solution is I work my ass off in the next two months. Oh well...

Oh I did my income tax night before yesterday. Great news - I'm getting a tax refund of $1000+! Yay! So hoping that it arrives by May, I now need to make $2500 instead of $3500. I guess it's not impossible, but still, it's not a cakewalk either. Ehhhhh money! I'm tired of it. There's just too many expenses. My main aim is to graduate by May 2004, so that I can work for 3-4 months during summer of 2004 and start my grad studies in fall '04. Hopefully with the summer '04 work, I should be able to pay off more than half of my loans and since I'll be making some money while doing my grad, I'll prolly pay off all my loans by 2005. That means *hopefully* by May 2005, I will be out of debt and have CS + Econ double major and doing my grad studies.

Now I'm 99% going to do a MS in CS (hehe). However, if by any chance I don't get admission anywhere, I can do MS in Economics here @ Rutgers. I just talked to an Economics advisor and she said since I talk well and have got great grades, it'll be very easy for me to get into the free Econ program here @ Rutgers. I'll just have to be a Teaching Assistant for a class or two every week, and they'll pay for my tuition and give me some money every month for living expenses. So ya, as far as I'm concerned, studying more, is not too hard.

When people ask me what I'm gonna do after my BS, I say MS, and after MS, PhD. What after PhD? I dunno. Prolly depends on how Chime's doing at that time. I'm hoping to keep it alive :)

You know sometimes with all the work + studies I'm doing, I get all stressed out and start thinking I'm a moron cuz I'm not enjoying my life enough. Maybe I am a moron. I dunno. But I do have a few things that make me feel good about myself. I guess I keep reminding me these things from time to time, just to keep my spirits up.

First of all, I'm really good @ computers. I'm not showing off or anything, rather just being content that I fortunately am good at doing what I love. Second, I'm paying for a US education all by myself. Many people don't realize this, but $20k a year for 4 years in a foreign country is kinda hard to pay for. But I'm doing it. It's hard, but I'm doing it. I'm also paying now for living expenses, which are like $5-6k a year, depending on how comfortably I wanna live. Third, I have two great jobs - one for my college working as a Database/Web developer and other making websites for people through Chime.

But above all, I have people who love me a lot. It's more important than all the three things above combined. At the moment I am not near any of them, and I guess that's what hurting right now. All my friends are home and all my family is faaaar away. I'm just a poor little lost boy from Calcutta now... in this big eerie empty town. Ahhhh I can't wait till spring break's over.

Here's to another great free lunch @ the Busch dining hall with Michele! Thx girl :) Well you see, me and her have Physics lab together on Monday (we're lab partners) and since we always finish our lab before everyone else in the class, we leave early and she takes me lunchin' @ the dining hall. She's got a 50 meals per semester plan, and since she doesn't eat @ the dining hall everyday, rather than waste 50 unused meals, she feeds me :) I love free food! Hehe. Sure... it's not that expensive and I can probably get my own meal plan (actually, it IS kinda expensive), but the thing is, I don't get hungry during the normal dining hall hours. I am hungriest after 10pm in the night, and they close at 8pm. So it's pretty much useless for me. However, free lunches... aha... I'm ALWAYS hungry for them :) Ya ya, I'll prolly have to make it upto the girl some way or another. I know she loves Taco Bell, so let's see...Hehe...

Anyways, tonight some guy's gonna come to see my room and decide if he wants to move in or not. If he does, then I'll be sharing my room with him till May-end and it'll save me (and the other 9 people in our house) like $65 a month! However, it'll also mean I lose some of my privacy. But oh well... let's see how it goes...

I got a class @ 4:30pm, then going to my room. Will do some computer science homework, setup two websites, and if I have time, work on Chime Away! v2.0 :) Yup, there's a v2.0 coming soon, basically cuz everyone wants to cycle their own away messages. So ya, I'm gonna try my best to finish it asap. You know what I love about my life @ the moment? I'm not bored. There's always some work I can do (and hopefully it's something I like).

And if you're reading this Vishal... you rock dude! And I miss you and Chetan - the two best friends I will ever have. And if you're reading this dear Dad... u da bomb pops! And if you're reading this grandpa 'n ma... I love you... And if you're reading this mom and sis... you are the two loveliest women on the planet and I love you both... And if you're reading this Niki, Keval, Sneh, Sagar, Chris, Megan, Vicky, Mich., Kath, Art, Manzinder, Syed, Steph, Aript, Ritesh, Vu, Steve, Taylor and whomever else I forget, you have made a big difference in my life, even if in small gestures of friendship; you guys have certainly made my life worth living and it is because of you guys that I look forward to waking up everyday (and those stupid 10am classes). And if you're reading this Jackie... yes I know I just mutilated and slaughtered the good ol' English language, but you know what, you inspire me and you better keep writing. And if you're reading this Jenny... you already know how much you mean to me, and just to annoy you even more, I won't write explicitly why you're the coolest chica I know.

There! Now I sound just like a high-school girl on her sweet-sixteen birthday! Hehe... Ok class now - it's already 4:25!

I declared my majors today!!! Computer Science and Economics! Also declared my minor - Mathematics. Ah... Back to work now :)

Thus ends another fine winter day :) Had Physics in the morning and then Computers. I found my buddy Mihir's also in my computer class, so it's gonna be great studying with him. Shhhhh don't tell this to anyone, but I am sooooo jealous of Mihir. Not because he's 6 foot tall, looks like a Bollywood male-model, or because he's a preceptor (= free living on campus) and a TA (= teaches CS 112 course), but simply because he has a GPA of perfect 4.0 after 95 credits! I've about 81 credits and have a GPA of 3.963 :( Urghh! I'm sooo jealous (and shallow!) Hehe...

Anyways, after computer class, I hopped along to my work and nothing great happened there. But after work, I decided to go to this special seminar on Nuclear Physics and before you jump to conclusions, nuclear physicists don't make 'weapons of mass-destruction.' Nuclear Physics simply deals with the study of small lil particles like atoms, protons, electrons, mesons, muons, photons, gluons, bosons, positrons, and a hell lot of other 'ons. Of course there's also neutrinos, positrinos, higginos, and a lot of 'nos too :) Part of the reason why I attended the lecture was well, the pamphlet for the seminar: "Don't go to those Greek Frats & Sororities like Alpha Delta Gamma Phi Kappa Zeta! Come to the Physics seminar and actualy learn what these particles do. Free Pizza + Soda." Yeah, so first, the pamphlet was kinda catchy, and second, FREE FOOD! Hehehehe. I had 3 slices :) yummmmm and lots of coke. Hehe.

The lecture was indeed very interesting. Lately, I've been reading a lot of theoritical Physics material (stuff on space/time/dimensions/universe) and the Prof. answered a lot of my questions. It was interesting to see how much he personally believed in Supersymmetry theory and despised the String theory. Also he talked in quite depth about the future projects at CERN, like LHC and CMS. Ah real interesting stuff if well, you like all this stuff. My interest in all this, is of course, still from the computerization point-of-view.

Here's why I am interested in particle Physics - it needs The Grid to succeed. What's the grid? Well you know how the Internet has connected millions of computers to exchange information; now just imagine if instead of download html files and images, you could literally download processor time and speed - that is, if you could use the whole Internet (consisting of millions and millions of computers), as if it was your own personal mega-super computer! That is what the grid is intended to do: make a giant supercomputer by using the raw processing power of smaller, cheaper computers, in such a way that anyone (ok not EVERYONE, but the scientists) can tap into the sheer speed and perform trillions of calculations per second. Ok so why does CERN need the Grid? Simply because every time there is a particle-collision inside the particle accelerators at CERN (that could be anywhere from 1 to 40 million times a second), gigabytes & gigabytes of data is generated, and it needs to be stored, processed, and analyzed before the physicists can make any new scientific theories. Physics, from the good old days of Archimedes running naked in the streets in Greece for discovering bouyancy and Newton observing falling apples, has progressed to a highly industrial science, where each experiment can literally take months and months of preparations and cost billions of dollars. However, research as such is crucial, not just because we're humans and humans love to explore, but more so, to understand how the Universe works from the largest scales (galaxies, stars, planets) to the tiniest scale (atoms, elementary particles, quarks). And with this understanding, we will someday be able to find a cure for every form of cancer, make tiny (of molecular size) robots that can go inside the arteries and unclog clots in the heart, and may be device means to fly off into the space at the speed of light. Ah who knows!

Ok I sounded a bit too much like a Physicist there! Hehe. Well what can I say... I love science :) Esp. the ending where computers come in, solve all the problems, fight with the villians, and take home the princess :) Oh wait... wrong 'blog! Haha...

Anyways, it's late and I got an early class (in my dictionary, 10 am is EARLY). G'nite!

Happy Republic Day all my Indian folks! I am having sooooo much fun working and listening to the best Indian songs :) Ya, I know it's past 2am and I'm still awake. Actually last few days I've been really really busy. I'm working on two sites @ the moment: Golden Tan and Derm Renew. I've got the main page done and need material from the clients to fill in the site. I think finally my sites are looking as hi-q as one of those NYC media/web-design firms. Hehe.

Anyways, it's been a loooong time since I 'blogged. So what have I been doing? Well all sorts of things, from doing laundry, cooking Indian food (or in other words, microwaving pre-cooked food in a bowl), reading some really good books, like Original Bliss by A. L. Kennedy, making websites, doing homework, cleaning my room, and just chillin' and sleeping too much. Life's good. The semester's starting up and by next week, I'll be knee-deep in puddles of studies. I'm taking a Computer class, a Math class, one Economics class, Physics II, and an honors class: Trauma in Literature. For my Trauma class, I'll have to read TEN books in this semester. Sure, this seems like no biggie (since they're mostly 200-300 page novels), but most of these books deal with, well obviously, trauma, depression, tragedies etc. I didn't really want to take this course, however, since I want to graduate by May 2004, I had to finish my honors requirements this semester, and this is the only class I can take (other than Health studies, which deals with Biology, and I'm not interested in that either). Well, I attended the first Trauma Lit. class on Wednesday and from what it seems, it's not that bad. However there'll be a lot of papers to write and a lot of work to do. Urgh.

Rest, life's good. I like the feeling of waking up @ 9:15 am, showering, and being in class by 9:50 am :) Ah the joys of being on campus.

Song for the night: "Aasaman Ke Paar" - Shankar Mahadevan - Rockford

What a day... it was soooo relaxing. I woke up @ 8:30, attended Physics & Computer class, went to work, but since the back-end server was down, came back home, slept for 2-3 hours, went to the gym, had the world's WORST chinese food (veg. lo mein @ Schezwan Express), and swore I'll NEVER EVER eat there again. Hehe. And here I am, watching American Idol 2 on TV.

American Idol is like a star-search for pop singers, and guess what, my buddy Danny from Computer Architecture made it to Hollywood! He's one of the best old-school assembly programmers I know and I felt soooo very proud to see him on TV :) Let's see what happens next week...

Anyways, I'm gonna munch on some Cinnamon Toast Crunch right now till I'm tired and then go to bed. Got LOTS of classes tomorrow!

I'm soooooo full. Had wonderful dinner tonight - Chilly paneer, Chinese spring rolls, Manchurian, Pizza, and lots of sweets. I went home and we all cooked (Aunt, Uncle, Sneh, & Sagar) and then set up my Uncle's computer. Then Sneh & Sagar came back to check out my room. It looked like they both liked it :) May be in a few weeks, I'll take them for a fun night out in New Brunswick. Hehe.

Anyways, today I bought a lot of stuff from WalMart with my friend Syed. Finally my room is all set and ready. I got shelves, drawers, desk, chair, side-tables all set :) Prolly gonna take a few pics soon.

Guess where I'm writing this 'blog from??? Yup! 41 Mine Street! My new home... I just hooked up my computer but still have a lot of other organizing to do. Also gotta go back home and do a few other things before I finally settle here. Ok, I'm off now...

Hello from Salt Lake City, Utah! This has been one eventful day. I started at Newark, New Jersey at 6 am, then flew to Cincinnati, Ohio. There I had a nice pretzel with nacho cheese @ the airport and continued to Las Vegas, Nevada. En route, the pilot decided to be nice and took us on a 10 minute tour of the Grand Canyon! While I'm sure it's 10000 times more better in closeup, the view from the tiny little airplane window was breathtaking nevertheless. Once @ Vegas, I got to see a few casinos from the airport lobby, like the Stratosphere, MGM Grand, and Mandalay Bay etc. From there, I flew to Salt Lake City, Utah - my final destination.

I'm sure you're wondering why I took such a weird route (that took over 9 hours!) Well I bought my tickets a bit too late and this weird long route was the only thing I could afford. If I wanted a direct flight from Jersey to Utah, it would have cost me over twice the price I paid. Plus it was all fun. I got to be in 4 states in one day! Hehe.

Anyways, I'm here @ my grandma's sister's house. She's pretty young actually (about as old as my dad) and her daughters (technically my aunts) are same age as me. It's been a few months since I last saw Purvi & Priya (at Sneh's Sweet 16) and so I was pretty excited to meet them. Well, we had a nice lunch and then just relaxed for a few hours. And later in the evening, Purvi and I went and rented some ski equipment for me! Tomorrow I'm going skiing!!!!! While I'm excited, I'm still not sure what it's all about. So more updates on skiing AFTER I do it. Oh and I got an email from my dad cautioning me not to ski! Hehe. You know what that means! I HAVE to ski now 100%! Haha.

Along with ski equipment, we also got two movies tonight: Mallrats (upon Priya's request) and Monsoon Wedding (Purvi & I hadn't seen it). First we saw Mallrats and it was a pretty fun movie. In fact so much fun that I was not at all interested in seeing the other movie, because I knew it wasn't a laugh-out-loud comedy. But then since we had nothing else to do, we decided to see Monsoon Wedding after all, and well, let me just say that it is one of the most thought-provoking films I've seen in months, probably years.

Here is my interpretation of Monsoon Wedding: If you want to know as much about India and us Indians in as little time as possible, then just go to Blockbuster and rent this movie. While I am not an avid supporter of the high-profile pseudo-artistic foreign-film-festival-fodder Indian movies made by pretentious directors who prefer to portray modern India as a backward, uncultured, and crime-ridden confused country rather than a slowly but steadily developing nation, I have to admit that this movie totally negates any preconceptions (rather misconceptions) I had about it. This movie very honestly and truly depicts everything that happens on every street corner in India every day. From the ostentatious marriages in rich families to the poor "event manager's" simplistic romantic saga, the movie attempts to give a magnified view of how life goes on in a country chiseled by customs, traditions, class divisions between the rich and the not-so-rich, and the strong bonds that somehow integrate every family unit. India is not just about Taj Mahal, elephants, snake-charmers, hunger, beggars, Kama Sutra, Computer Software engineers, or cheap skilled labor. It's about the people, and this film successfully draws a vivid portrait of my huge one-billion strong Indian national family.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but thanks Mira Nair and keep up the good work. While a few of her past films failed to impress me, this one succeeded. Maybe, because this is her first movie that I have seen outside of India. But I didn't see this movie with the eyes of a foreigner. I saw the movie, as if trying to remember and reminisce, the first 20 years of my life back home. I am glad I haven't forgotten what India is. And I'm glad that there is a movie like this to remind me in case I forget.

Four words of advice: GO RENT THIS MOVIE NOW! Ok, it's five words, but still, you get the point... it's worth it!

I am VERY nervous right now. I just gave an 'interview' to the current residents of 53 Morrell Street. They seemed to be really nice people, all in their twenties, studying and working. I checked out the place and it's pretty nice & clean. There's only one problem though: two-three other people want the same room as me! So now it's like a contest and they will all decide whom to pick.

I am a good salesman when it comes to selling my work. But sadly, I realize that I'm not too good in selling myself. I know I'm nice and everything, but when it comes for people to select me based upon my behaviour, personality, and appearance, I really don't think I fare too well. They'll let me know if I get the place or not in 4-5 hours. So till then, I'm gonna hold my breath and hope for the best. The ball is in their court and there's not much I can do about it.

As I type this, I realize there's an interesting thing going on with this 'blog. If you are reading this before I wrote my next 'blog entry, then you are in the same boat as me - anxious to know if I will get it or not. But if you are reading this 10 hours from now, then I've most probably written whether I got the place or not. So to you this line is just one extra line you will have to read before you know the result. For me, it seems like the longest line that I've ever had to write.

Oh well, on a different note (and a much happier note), I GOT A 4.0! I did it again and don't ask me how! I got six A's :) in all my classes. I was nervous about Physics and Computer Architecture but I did really good in the final exams of both the classes. So this teaches me that last night cramming actually works for me! I am extremely happy with my results. Phew. Glad I didn't get a sore B in any class. Hehe.

Ok, so now I get back to being all nervous again. As my old man always says: Hope for the best and prepare for the worst!

As promised, here's the looooooong 'blog! Enjoy.

Lemme start with the most exciting news of all: I'm moving out! Yup, I finally decided that the simplest way to decomplexify my life was to find a nice place near my college and go live there :) And I found it! This morning I got a call from the current roomies and tomorrow I'll go and meet them. The deal sounds pretty decent: $450 a month including everything (water, gas, utilities, electric, cable tv, wireless hi-speed internet)! And you know the BEST thing? It's about 200 feet away from my work place! Yup! Just a 45 second walk to my work, College Avenue Student center, Au Bon Pain, Wendy's, College Avenus Gym, Computer Lab, Bus Station, and pretty much EVERY damn important place on campus :)

You know what I just realized? Some things are just supposed to happen, and some are not. And no matter how much we try to make them happen, some things won't. For instance, buying a car. I wanted to get a car since months. At the moment, I can even afford a real good car. But somehow I just don't want to pay so much for something that'll only give me transportation to college and back. It's just not worth it. But then last week when I thought about moving out as a viable alternative to buying a car, things suddenly started making more sense. Sure, it would cost $600-700 a month to live all by myself (including rent, food, amenities) which is the same as it would cost me to buy a car, but life on campus would be just soooo much more exciting. While life @ home with my family here is great, it's just too much like a school. I go to college during the day, study + work all day, come back home right before things get interetesting, study + work some more, then go to bed and the cycle continues.

But if I'm on campus, everything will be different. I would not have to worry about the lack of time to do things. I will have enuf time to do everything I want, since I wouldn't have to worry about coming to campus or being at home or anything. It's just simple - no tensions. My life, my time, my work. Damn I'm a selfish commie! LOL. But the bottom line is, finally, I can live the life of a college student. I can wake up when I want to, I can sleep if I want, or I can stay up all night talking to my new roommates or other friends on campus. I can finally be around people my age all the time (although a change would be welcome from time to time - that is home visits twice a month). And I can finally just wake up, brush, and WALK to my work! Haha. Hell if I practice enuf, I could probably hop to work! Or skip rope to work! It's only a stone's throw away.

Actually it's just good luck that I found a place so damn near everything. And see that's exactly what I'm saying! When I wanted to buy a car, nothing seemed to go right. Every dealer would give me weird prices, the car I almost bought wouldn't start, the insurance company would give me stupid extra-high rates! It just wasn't meant to happen. But now, as soon as I decide to move out, I coincidentally find a place right next to my work! There are over 800 houses in the area near my college, but most of them are at least a 10-15 minute walk from the student center. It HAS to be a big coincidence that I actually find a place on the SAME street as my work! My office is at 12 Morrell Street and this house I hope to move into, is at 53 Morrell Street! Talk about location!

Ya so I'm extremely excited 'bout this whole moving out thing. I talked to my uncle/aunt/cuzins and they agreed that if it's easier on me (oh yes!), and if I can afford it (yes I can), then it's best for me to move out. Of course, no more commute, expensive taxis, waiting for buses, or begging ppl to let me sleep over for the night. I'll be right in the think of things with ample time for socializing :) But I think my uncle and aunt were kinda disappointed though. I've been happily living with them for over two years now! And moving out away from them seems like a major decision. They didn't see this coming :( Anyways, I will be coming home regularly because I still gotta keep Chime Softwares alive :) So it's not like I'll run away and never come back. Hehe.

Okies so now we go on to the next item of importance: My vacation to Salt Lake City, Utah. I leave Newark early morning on Saturday and come back next Sunday evening. So it's like a 7-8 day vacation in the beautiful Rockies :) I can't wait to meet everyone there: Masa/Masi, Purvi, Priya, and their friends!

So what else is going on... Oh ya college! It's done for the month :) Although I start work on Jan 6th, my studies don't start for 2 weeks after that. Anyways, I'm hoping to get A's in all my classes for this term. Let's see what the final results say.

Ok so this was long enuf. It's vacation time and I don't wanna spend any more time on my computer. After all, once I come back from Utah, it's gonna be LOTS and LOTS of work non-stop all the time. So lemme just go and watch a movie or two in the meantime :) Later!

3 down, 2 to go. Computer Architecture in 4 hours. Gotta go and study...

Done with Economics. I'm afraid I didn't do my best. But seeing that I did really good in the two midterms, I have a really good chance of getting an A in the course. Anyways I got A in Physics Lab, and an A in Computer Science - Discrete Structures II. Three down, three to go :) Tomorrow I have Comp. Architecture review and lots of studies for Calc4. On Thursday I have both these exams. Can't wait for Physics to end on Saturday... ahhhh sweet freedom...

This article says that 20% of all accidents are caused by sleepy drivers. Well does that mean that we should ban driving who stay awake, because they cause 80% of the accidents? Hehe...

Anyways, I had my first exam this morning -Computer Science - Discrete Structures II. It went pretty well. I'm really hoping for an A in that class. I did good in the last exam and the homeworks too. Tomorrow I have economics. Gotta go study for that now :)

Sweetie, we need to talk! Hehe. Just kiddin! I mean, I feel like talking :) Aren't you glad? Hehe. So let's see what's happening in my life overall. First up, studies, exams, and college. Next week is gonna be hell, but I feel like I am decently prepared for everything. I am not too worried about Economics and Calc4. I am slightly worried about CS 206 - Discrete Structures II. I am highly tensed about CS 211 - Computer Architecture. And I am extremely nervous with regards to Phyiscs I. I don't think there's a pattern here as to which subjects I feel are easy or hard. Basically I'm worried about the subjects in which I haven't done too well till date (CS211 & Physics), and not too worried about the ones I've done good in (Econ & Calc4).

Other than academics, I got a lot of pending stuff in college. First off, my tuition! At $6200 a semester, my college is taking away almost every penny that I have in my bank account :( I'm not gonna pay up till the next week, but still, it's gonna hurt real bad to see my nice four-figure balance drop to two figures :( Well anyway, at least my job on campus is going good. One of the systems I made is under extensive pre-user testing right now and will be in place for the general student/faculty users in January once college starts. My latest project is just starting to shape up well and hopefully I'll have something substantial before Xmas. Remember, I can't talk in detail about my work because of confidentiality reasons (I feel like a secret agent right now. Teehee...)

Oh tonight the sorority that Mich is a 'sister' in, is throwing a party and I'm invited. The theme is 'Sex on the Beach' (Don't get any dirty thoughts! 'Sex on the Beach' is actually a well-known cocktail. Check out its molecular-structure here! Hehe...) After I'm done w/ my two pre-exam review sessions today (Physics & Calc4), I'll go do some work + studies till the party starts :) I'm 99.99% crashing over on campus. Don't really wanna get back home in that *condition* you know. Hehe.

Ok so now we come to the most expensive detail of my life. Car. More specifically the 2003 Mitsubishi Lancer GS. Well, I got a real good quote from a local dealer and I can lease (=rent) the car for 3 years for $245/month. I can totally afford that! No problem. So why didn't I buy it already? What am I waiting for? Well you see, I'm in New Jersey, the state with the worst auto-insurance policy in the whole country, where the rates keep going up more and more! So interestingly, guess how much it would cost me to insure a car that I can lease for $245 a month? Hold your breath... $365 A MONTH!!! Yes, that's how much my insurance company told me would cost me a month IF I leased that loveleh Lancer. Can I afford it? Yes. But am I stupid enough to pay more money to insure a non-luxury economic family-sedan than actually lease it? NO! I can understand $200/month on insurance for a brand-new car, but how can insurance cost me 150% of cost of the car itself? I'd rather buy TWO cars! And if anything goes wrong with the first one, I will use the second damn car! It'll be CHEAPER! And I'll appear 'rich'. Hehe.

Ya so I'm REALLY pissed about the whole car thing. I asked my insurance company, (which is well-known for being the best company with cheapest rates) as to which car would I have to buy to keep my insurance low. Her answer was: "For any car you buy as a PRIMARY driver, you'll have to pay over $250 a month, since you are a single male, under 25, with less than 3 years of driving history. It's best if you buy a car in Jan 2004."

But dammit, I can't wait THAT long. I NEED a car right away. And I need more money to afford it. Well you know what I do when I feel like I don't have enough money? No, I don't try to 'save' money. I don't begin to cut-corners, save pennies, or collect coupons. I don't try to curtail my expenses smartly. And I sure as hell don't cry and whine that I have no money. I MAKE MORE MONEY :) That's what I'm gonna do now. If I have to earn an extra $5k a year to afford a car, by God's name that's exactly what I am gonna do, no matter what! If that means I have to work 20 hours a day and sleep less than 3 hours (it takes me at least one hour to brush, shave, shower, eat etc.), I'm gonna do it. I WANT MY BLOODY CAR! Hehe. Ahhhhhh sometimes it feels good to be mildly enraged. Hehe.

Have you noticed? I almost never ever get angry. Getting angry I feel is a sign of weakness (except in case of my dad, cuz everytime he gets angry, he gets even more powerful! hehe). So anyway, I keep changing subjects a lot. I think the appropriate phrase is: Random digression. My friends call me the 'Random Boy', because I might be talking about something and all of a sudden I jump to something else.

Ok back to reality, I gotta go to college now. Hopefully Angie's gonna get me free food @ the dining hall. Yay! Remember that quote about free food? Yup, it's the best kinda food in the world. Mmmmmm. Anyways, I feel like I've talking enough. I realize now that no matter how quiet I want to be sometimes, most of the times I like to yap non-stop! Conclusion? This 'blog will survive. Don't worry.

My 5-day vacation starts today! Yay! Well I'm mostly stuck @ home doing stuff for the next 5 days. Oh and it snowed a bit last night. Thank God not too much. No shovelling required :)

I have soooooo much stuff to do in the next 5 days, from homeworks, websites, to house cleaning and raking. And I also got a lot of work from my on-campus job to finish up before Monday. My only problem now wil be food, since till yesterday, I just ate on campus, and now I have to either prepare my own food, or go outside the house just to eat. All my friends are going to their homes to see their families. So I'm stuck being all alone. Oh well, at least I have stuff to keep me busy.

First on my list, Computer Science - Discrete Structures homework. Due on Tuesday.

My new computer arrived! I've been installing all the stuff for 4 hours now! It's a LOT of work. But it's fun :)

Woke up @ 10 this morning :) Well classes start @ 1:10 pm, so why should I wake up any earlier. Hehe. Then I called Chetan and talked to him for 24 minutes! Well 24 minutes cuz thatz how long the phone card lasts when calling Calcutta, India. Hehe. Damn I miss everyone @ Calcutta... esp. Chetan & Vishal. And here I am in the Livinston Computer Lab.

I think I did really good in my Computer Architecture exam. I really really really need a good grade in that exam, since I messed up the first one quite bad. And now I study for tomorrow's CS Discrete Structures exam! Yay for the 2nd wave of mid-terms!

Some random guy went to my Chime.Tv site and decided that I needed to hire employees, and so he sent me a 4-line resume without asking. It's pretty interesting actually, since it looks like he's trying the computer field cuz he realized his english major is not worth a dime! Here's the resume:

Professional Profile:

• In-demand Web developer/designer with proven ability to transform concepts into online, interactive reality.
• Combine creative, artistic talent with Java mindset to deliver revenue enhancing, marketing oriented sites.
• Savvy web developer and polished, persuasive designer with three years of experience.
• Advanced Computer

What the hell does the last line mean anyway? He has an 'Advanced Computer' in his house? Or he is himself an 'Advanced Computer'? Maybe this email was actually sent by an artificial intelligence robot? Who knows...

I just bought this computer with some upgrades (XP1600+ CPU, 256mb RAM, 16xDVD etc.) for $395! I remember my dad purchased my first ever PC in 1995 (I think) for around $1500! This is the 4th computer in our house now. I'll set it up so that my cuz Sneh can use it and give her old PII Compaq Presario to my uncle, so that he can do all his business stuff from the den. Still gotta figure out how to connect this PC to my home LAN, since it'll be in a different room and I don't want wires hanging around the house.

While doing my Discrete Structures II homework, I found this piece of text online:

"A typical digitized picture on your computer screen is 640 pixels long by 480 pixels wide, for a total of 307200 pixels. Using only 256 different colors, you can get decent resolution. Now if you take 256^307200 (256 times itself 307200 times) you get... well, a pretty big number, but a finite number nonetheless. That's the number of different images you can have of that particular size. Any picture you would scan into a computer at that size and resolution will necessarily be one of those images. Therefore, contained in those images are the images of the faces of every human being who ever lived along with the images of the faces of every person yet to be born." - The Math Forum

How I feel: "I am so high... I can hear heaven..." from the song Hero - Chad Kroeger

I dunno why. I just feel all happy. Maybe cuz I finished my Physics webassign, made my schedule for Spring 2003 semester, and completed this site (except for one feature)...

My schedule for the next semester is pretty intense once again. Physics Lecture + Lab, Design & Analysis of Computer Algorithms, Math - Complex Variables, Econometrics, and an honors class, scarely titled, "Trauma in Literature." I have no idea what they're gonna teach me in half of these classes, but I guess it'll be pretty interesting. Hey at least I'll have Thursdays off! That way I'll work on Thursdays and get Saturdays off. Right now I'm working on Saturdays cuz my whole week is busy.

Ok time to get back to more studies and work.

It's inspiration time for me now. Tuesday & Friday mornings I have 30-40 mins before class starts and most times I sit in the Livingston Computer lab... surfing... getting inspirationg... checking out tons of cool sites. After all, I don't want all my websites to look-alike. Do I?

Just woke up a few mins ago. For the first time in months I got some extra time to catch up on sleep. I really needed it badly. Well, my worries are not over yet. Tomorrow I got a big exam - Computer Architecture, where I have to know stuff multiplexers and flip-flops, things totally unrelated to what goes on in the real world. Anyways, I better get clean 'n shiny and then get started w/ studies, cuz I have NO idea what the hell is going on in that class. Hehe.

Wow! I'm done with my physics webassign! Yay!!! But it took me SIX HOURS! Damn I'm slow. Oh well, at least it's over. Tomorrow all day I study for my computer exam. After that about a week of peace - no exams...

I'm back. Haha! Ok that was taking it too far... I certainly don't love any weather better than a computer lab, so I guess I'll stick in here and type out more random stuff. Well, now the list of cool ppl who wished me so far, in addition to my cuzins & uncle/aunt that I mentioned above: Eric, Kiran Uncle & Family, my Dad 2nd time (in a sweet email), Steve, Yogesh, Ali (aka Alf), Nikhil, and the oh-so-lovely and cow-kissing Megan. Damn the list is getting longer. Hehe.

Ok now a reflection on my life. Everyone lives two lives: one on the outside and one on the inside. On the outside, I'm studying, making websites, making software, buying expensive computer stuff, buying cool mp3 players, and of course working 20 hours a week while taking 18 credit hours - 6 days a week, from 7 am to 2 am. On the inside, I'm easily handling studies, having lotsa fun making websites and software, getting extremely happy for finally being able enough to buy myself decent equipment to work with, loving my job 101%, and totally feeling guilty for not having enough time for my friends and family. So overall, I'm all good on the outside, and almost good on the inside; that feeling guilty-for-not-socializing part ain't good. But guess what? Things are just about to get purrrrfect... I'm buying a car soon. It's 100% confirmed. Just need to decide how to go about it now. I know one thing for sure, once I buy a car, I'll def. have a LOT of extra time, so of course, I'll spend it with my friends and family (and prolly online too. Hehe.)

I was kinda worried a last night about buying a car - after all it's a big expense and there are 1000 things that can go wrong. But then this morning I got an email from my dad saying he too bought a used car too longgggg ago. And now I'm suddenly not worried at all! After all my dad's best of luck & wishes are right here with me :-) So Daddy... I'm getting my 1985 Toyota Tercel right away! Haha! Just kidding. No matter how badly I need a car, I'm not gonna buy a crappy one. It'll be something nice and decent, and quite possibly much cheaper.

So there you go... a long 'blog. Happy now? Got any questions? Well then

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You gotta love StrongBad!

It's mega blog time! I have an hour before class starts and so well, lemme just blurt out random stuff. First lemme begin with:

Song of the day: "Brand New Day" - Sting

I love this song, it's one of my favorite songs ever. Just makes me all fresh and optimistic everytime I hear it. Last night I put that song (along with 39 others) on my Nomad ;-) Oh and trust me, it's the BEST thing I've ever bought for myself. I'm listening to it as I write this.

Anyways, this morning my cuzins Sneh & Sagar woke me up by shaking the hell outta me! I was so shocked that I thought the damn house was on fire; turns out it was only my b'day :) Hehe. Then later my uncle & aunt wished me "Happy B'day" and here I am... on a lovely beautiful cloudy cold day, in a computer lab, writing my 'blog - couldn't be happier (except of course, if I was with my parents & sister instead).

I don't know what my fascination with cold gloomy windy rainy weather is. Everyone around me seems to totally hate it. I just love it. Hehe. I'm prolly weird. Who cares! It's beautiful outside. I'm gonna go and chill outside under a tree and read a book. Ok, good bye, see you.

Just did my physics webassign while sitting in the computer lab, instead of wasting my time online :-) I'm so proud of myself!

@ the College Ave. computer lab right now. Yesterday was a such a busy day. I had classes from 9:50 am till 5:50 pm non-stop! Of course, there were 20 minute breaks in between, but well most of them were spent commuting from one class to the next. Came home late last night and did some important web design work. Still have a lot to do tonight. Studies are getting harder once again; time is on short supply. My cuzin Sneh's Sweet 16 party is coming soon too. So I have a lot of work piled up right now. Of course exams starting in 10 days. Urgh. Yup, life's back to normal!

Can't believe this! Last week, all types of video games (computer, consoles, hand-held, and even in cell-phones) were banned in Greece! And you thought the Taliban was bad... Damn. The biggest irony is, it was the Greeks who started the Olympic Games and are hosting the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

My... What a day @ college. I talked non-stop through my computer class and slept in my physics class! Fun = 100%; Education = 0%. Hehe. Actually they were revising stuff in both the classes, so it wasn't important at all, since I still remember most stuff. Oh in the the computer class, I made this really neat friend: Manzinder. She's so damn nice! And after class we just chilled for a couple of hours and talked random stuff. It's nice to meet ppl who're cool to talk to. Oh and she also gave me a ride from our computer class to my physics class :) Thx girl!

Ah what a lovely day it was! Kinda hot, but still good. I had only one class, but was settin' up my office computer most of the day. I came back home, had some great pasta, and have been just chilling since. I have sooooo much work piled up! Guess I'll start everything tomorrow... Ahhhh...

I just spent almost 40 mins crawling on all fours in our basement just like that Gollum character! Why? Cuz I just lost my *precious*... one tiny little screw from my glasses fell somewhere in the basement as I was walking down there to start my workout. So I started looking for it and I kept looking and looking, but I couldn't find it :( I'm soooo bad @ finding lost things. Now as I try to see the monitor without my glasses, it hurts me eyes :( It's a Sunday, and there's no place I can buy a tiny little screw for my glasses, meaning, no computer 'n TV for me today :( Damn damn damn... one little screw has screwed up my plans for today! Urghhhhhh...

Seems like I 'blog less and less everyday. I guess it's mostly because I am busy with a) My job on campus, b) Doing computer stuff @ home, c) Watering the plants around the house. I think c) takes the most time. Hehe. Anyways, things are going decent. I hate the weather - it's over 100F again! Thank God for ACs and fans!

WHOA!!! WHOA!!! WHOA!!!! I'm sooooooo excited right now! I just found out my Computer Science grade and I just CANNOT believe that despite the fact that I got a C in the mid-term, I got an A in the whole course overall! I was actually expecting to get a C+ or a B at max, but somehow, I managed to get an A. Whoa! I'm sooooo happy. That means I got a 4.0 this term :) Hehe... Me happy...

It's nice to know that some of my friends actually know the real me:

Navish: So when are you going to India?
Chirag: This Sunday - May 26th... can't wait buddy...
Navish: How u gonna last without a computer at your disposal 24/7 ?
Chirag: LOL... I have a computer @ my home in India...
Chirag: Slower net :-( but I will survive
Navish: lol....this is like Survior for ya man
Chirag: LOLOL *falls on the floor laughing*

Today is a good day for science, actually computers. This BBC article talks about UK's first major exhibition of video games running at the Barbican Gallery in London until September. Scroll to the middle of the page and you'll see: ZX Spectrum, a tiny little keyboardized computer that in 1989-90 changed the course of my life forever. According to the article:

"The ZX Spectrum was one of the first affordable home computers and played a big role in the creation of the 'geek', a person (usually a man) that derived immense pleasure out of computer coding in their bedrooms."

Yes I am a victim. I never owned ZX Spectrum, but one of my dad's friends did and I used to go to his house just to make stupid circle and boxes on his TV screen using the 'computer'. I was 'supposed' to play video games on it, but I ended up teaching myself BASIC at the ripe age of 10 (I think). Yes, this is how innocent happy childhoods are destroyed and devious one-tracked socially-devoid teenage minds are born. Haha. I'm talking bad stuff about myself right now! LOL. Just kidding.

What I mean is, just because I found the ZX Spectrum, I fell in love with computers. Now I might not be the best programmer out there, but I still think I am pretty good with computers. It's kinda sad/sorry/weird/odd/nerdy/geeky/spiffy/blah-blah-adjectives, but yeah my whole life has been influenced by computers and although things haven't been hard, they have been different from what most people go through. I mean while at 17 my friends were worried about whether their crushes like them or not, I was worrying if I could finish the Hind 2000 email client before someone else released their dummy version of it.

Funny thing is, I am 21 right now and I'm still having the same problems. Don't believe me? Well although I agree that 'Imitation is the highest form of flattery,' I resent the fact that this asinine company literally stole the design of this site that I made (actually still making)! Now technically I can unleash a wicked demon upon them to pretty much ruin their site, but I think I'll control myself this time. After all, the site they came up with even after copying me, is pretty crappy! Haha. Time for me to go to bed... Good night sweet world :) Good night ZX :) Good night Helen... mmm....

Everybody knows I'm not a big Mac/Apple fan. But today I went to CompUSA on Route 1 and I saw the Apple 22-inch Cinema Display running on OS X. I have to shamefully admit it, that it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen in my entire life. Seriously. I don't have words to describe how amazing, surreal, and exceptionally gorgeous the system was. Ya I know it's SAD that I'm talking about a computer like it's some Sports Illustrated swimsuit chic, but you have to see the thing to believe me... Now if only I had $5000 spare lying around somewhere, I would buy myself one of these... I would prolly never use it, cuz as I said, I don't use Macs, I'm a Windows guy, but I just want to own this Mac machine... it's like Batmobile - even though nobody can drive it on the traffic-jammed highways, everybody would love to own it.

WOOOOOHOOOOOO!!!!! I just called my Calc3 teacher and he told me I got an A! Whoa! That's some good news. So right now I know that I got A in 4 classes (2 honors, Linear, and Calc). Now the only grade I don't know is Computer Science - Discrete Structures. Even if I get a C in it, I'm still good :) Hehehe... Chances of me getting an A in that are 1 in 10000000. But I think I 'might' get a B+ if I'm lucky... *pray pray pray*

Calculus is OVER! Yay! Finally! 3 terms of Calculus done! One more left :( Anyway, it was a good class, the teacher was very helpful, and it was fun studying with my friends. Ah... it's the end of an era... I have one more exam: Discrete Structures I (Computer) on Tuesday and then I'm done :) Yay!!! So even though I don't want to I still have to go and study now :( Uh uh...

Oh and I forgot, I just came back from Bombay Bistro (undisputably the BEST Indian food restaurant in New Jersey!!!) with my family. We all love the food there, especially Sneh and every time we go there, we come back soooooo filled up. Hehehe...

Anyways, today was the last day of college! Yay! Now I have exams on 9, 12, and 14 May. Then I am a free bird :) Tonight, tomorrow, and day after I study for Linear Algebra... then it's Calculus and then Computer. Oh Calculus... reminds me... today was prolly the last class I'll ever have with Kathleen, Vicky, and Jim. And most prolly Steve too. Jim and Vicky were with me for 2 terms and Kath had been for three! In fact she's the first person I met after transferring to Rutgers New Brunswick in Jan 2001. I've already missed Ross and Steph a hell lot throughout this term. And on top of it I'm now gonna miss all the bad Calculus jokes I made and all the fake laughter from my 'friends'. Haha... Ah... it's the end of an era... Next term I have 5 interesting classes... I'll meet more new people... but first... We all gotta get through the damned final exams!

Of course summer's going to be heaven! I think I've begun to hallucinate a lot lately. I keep thinking I am already @ home in Calcutta! Hehehe... This morning I woke up dreaming that I was in my room back home... then realized I was here in US... oh well, I love being in both places! Hehehe... I know one thing for sure, as soon as I reach India, I'll miss New Jersey. I've begun to love this place...

Oh wow! For once I'm actually studying something big these days in one of my classes. In my Discrete Structures Computer Class, we're studying Turing Machines and it actually relates to a major Clay Institute math problem called: P=NP? (BIG pdf file) conjecture.

Good News: I finally got a decent permanent job on campus :) The pay is pretty good ($20/hr) and I get my own office, a super-fast server, and hopefully I'll be able to buy my own car soon :) The job's pretty complicated and I now have a LOT of responsibilities. I'll be working 20 hours a week during school days and 40-50 hours during vacations. They want me to start right away but well I have a lot of stuff to complete. The job starts as soon as I come back from India (prolly July-end or 1st August). I'm pretty excited @ the moment since I get to work on the main Rutgers internal databases and all cool classified stuff! I can't tell you exactly what I'm doing because if I tell you, I have to 'terminate' you. Haha. Today was a pretty good day for job hunters I guess. Kath got her old summer internship job back too. And my friend Chris from computer class also got a job! Hehehe...

(Warning: This is my longest 'blog entry EVER): OHHHHHHH MYYYYYYY GODDDDDDD!!!!!!! Today was probably the most surprisingly exciting day of my life EVER! If you're not Indian, there's a very high probability you will not understand my excitement. But if you are, then you probably won't believe me! Naya Andaz is one of US's biggest dance competitions for Indians. This year the chief guest was one of India's most famous choreographer Farah Khan! Also her brother Sajid Khan (scroll down a bit) was there too. (Sushmita Sen was supposed to come too but had schedule problems, so she could not make it.)

As I said earlier, I was handling the projector, live-video feeds, and of course the computer presentations that included the individual interviews of all the choreographers. Tough work but not impossible. Right from the start, I could literally feel the adrenalin in my body... I have a MASSIVE stage/backstage excitement content just like my dad. From 11 am today I was at the State Theater of NJ and only returned home to get dressed before the real show. I realized today how much I have always loved being a part of big shows like these and how great the feeling is when everything is working fine and well coordinated. One thing I have to admit, the theater team (sound, video, lights, backstage) provided by the State Theater itself has got to be one of the best in the country, if not the world. I've worked with tens of crews in the past but there was just so much perfection in each and everything these guys did, that it's beyond belief. Daddy, you would LOVE to work with them! Trust me. The light-man knew when the sound man would lower the volume and so he would fade out the lights at the same time, while the video-guy slowly zoomed out in sync. I mean, it was a symphony! Of course we were all on head-sets and communicated live to discusss what was supposed to happen next. The funny thing is, there were two shows going on, one on the stage, and the other off-stage in the headsets! It was soooo funny, the light man Craig would constantly curse the video guy's mom! LOL. I was laughing throughout the show...

Some not good news: My aunt's both groups: Sagar's Koi Kahe and Sneh's Mera Mahi, did not win :( I am pretty sad for it and I know Sneh is not gonna feel well for the next couple of days, since she had put all her mind, body, brains, efforts, energy, EVERYTHING into both the dances. My aunt also was disheartened but she's a fighter and understands well how fierce the competition was. I mean just getting one group in a competition like Naya Andaz is impossible, and my aunt had two groups! Funny thing is, just ONE year ago she did not even have dance students, and now she has her own Dance School : Aakar School of Dance with over 20-25 regular kids! So what if we lost Naya Andaz... things can only go up from here...

I am hereby thankful to Bill Gates for not crashing or killing my computer while the show was going on. Trust me there was ONLY one thing I was afraid of and that is a 10x12 foot Blue Screen of Death that the whole audience would see and laugh at! Thank god EVERYTHING went fine without ANY (not even ONE) problems! This is a major miracle in itself. Anyways, my main job was to display a video clip before every song and although seems a small little thingie, there's a lot of work involved. As soon as my last video was done, I went backstage hoping they'd announce my name so that I would come on stage to show off! Haha. And they did! Piraan, the main guy for Naya Andaz called me specially on the stage in front of thousands of people and made them give me a big hand because of the 'great computer projection work'! God I was in heaven. At that moment I was thinking, things cannot get any better! Boy was I wrong...

As I was about to pack up my computers/monitors/s-video outputters/blah-blah stuff-equipment, Piraan told me to come to the 'after party.' I was like... err... I don't want to, cuz what's the point of sitting in one corner of the table feeling all unimportant while the big-guys sit next to the chief guests and talk about the latest projects and industry gossip? So I said no but he insisted and thank god I said yes. I drove over to Akbar's restaurant on Route 1 and walked in at the same time as Piraan, Farah Khan, Sajid Khan, and oh yeah, that Kusum hottie from Kyonki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. I forgot to mention, she was the main hostess/M.C. of the show. Believe it or not, just cuz I had an all-access pass, EVERY YOUNG/OLD lady who saw me, literally begged me to take them backstage to meet Kusum. I was like... uh... no... sorry! But it's just weird. I've heard she's a big star in the TV serial, but since I've never seen it, I'm not too impressed by her, except that she's damn hot and almost as tall as me (or maybe taller). The irony is, we were talking backstage for like 10-15 mins and I was the one who was getting bored! Hahaha. Seriously! I don't like her personality a lot, so what can I say... I'm not interested. HOWEVER, I am a big fan of Farah Khan and have always liked her more than Saroj Khan or anyone else. So being at Akbar's with Farah Khan seemed like a good thing.

So guess what happens when I arrive at Akbar and everyone starts getting seated? All chairs are taken EXCEPT one and that was right next to Farah Khan! And guess who got to sit right next to Farah Khan for dinner? Yours truly... :) Yups! I was next to Farah and her bro Sajid was next to her. So, I actually had a great dinner conversation with the two, and not just sit in a far-distant corner smiling stupidly! Here's a little excerpt:

Sajid Khan: You know, although smoking is bad for health, it's pretty much the same as living in a polluted city, like Calcutta. Hey Chirag, you look thin! What happened? You started smoking?
Chirag: No, I come from Calcutta!
Everyone: HAHAHAHA.

Anyways, I had a really neat chat with Farah and in the end, obviously, we exchanged numbers :) The thing is, she doesn't have a website and is looking for someone to get her started with it. And what a coincidence! I am a web designer!!! Haha. At first I thought she's just another celebrity who will forget me after 2 hours, but she herself kept telling me over and over again to give her a call as soon as I'm in Bombay! And Sajid told me about his beach house in Juhu... and that we could get together definitely this summer and work out the web site stuff. Both of them want one each! Now this might be my big break into the industry. If I can do their site nicely, I can get a lot of other cool clients! Who knows.

For now, I am just walking 3 feet above the ground. I mean I just had dinner sitting right next to India's Filmfare Award winning choreographer and her brother who hosts one of the best game shows at the moment! And all I wanted this morning was my computer to not crash... That's all I was hoping for... and I got this... god sometimes life can be soooooo weirdly good.

It's 3:55 am right now and I have SOOOOOOOO much work/study to do tomorrow. Actually Farah asked me, "So Chirag you study full time in college, are doing computer and economics major, and YET you find time to do all these computer presenations. That is REALLY COOL" And I said, "You just choreographed Amitabh Bachchan, Shahrukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan in K3G! How cool is THAT?"

Yeah this is prolly the longest 'blog I've ever written and if I actually see them again in Bombay this summer, then there's one more bigger blog coming up! Haha. Well I really don't care if for 'filmi' reasons I don't get to ever see them again or they don't reply to my calls or something, but I am just damn glad that things worked out beyond my wildest dreams today and that is enuf to get me through the next few weeks of hard work :)

Just got home. VERY exhausted. It would have been a totally forgettable day IF my friend Mary from my Media Sciences honors class had not taken me on a joy-ride pretty much all over the state! Our teacher ended the 3 hour class almost 2 hours early and so by 7 pm, we were free to go home :) Well Mary is a paralegal and I needed to show her some court documents etc. that my uncle wanted clarifications on. So instead of staying on-campus in some hot hellish lounge, we went to the Borders store in East Brunswick mall and hung out there for some time. She was really sweet and explained everything to me in layman's terms so that I understood what the whole court case etc. was about (don't worry, nothing crisis). Then she came to drop me off @ our house. Oh and on the way we stopped @ her condo to pick up some stuff and oh my god... her balcony has the BEST VIEW in the entire world! It is just sooo pretty I can't believe it... I HAVE to definitely check it out in the spring and fall when all the 1000 trees in the forest have flowers or change colors. So overall, today was one good day :)

Thought for the day: "God, grant me the serenity to accept a post I cannot change, courage to walk past the computer without turning it on when I'm running late for work, and the wisdom to know the difference between "come to bed now" meaning "lets have some fun" and "come to bed NOW" meaning that computer has got to go!!"

In the campus computer lab right now. A really funny thing happened before I came here. I went to get my paycheck from the Billing Office and I put in the wrong date! I thought today was 26th March instead of 27th! Ahhhhhh. But oh well since I have days off on Tuesday, I tend to forget that. And I'm wearing a different watch these days, since the old one with the big display and date feature has a problem with the belt :( I love that watch... going to get it repaired when I go back home this summer... AND gonna buy like 50 new watches too! Seriously!

Here's a sorry little chat excerpt from my online life:

Jacquelin: I'm past my bed-time.
Chime: I don't have bed time. I have eyes-close-and-open breaks.
Jacquelin: Typical computer g**k.

On campus right now. I bid farewell to all my friends @ Cook who're all going to cool places over the Spring Break. Right now I'm just sooo sleepy that I can pretty much snooze off right in this uncomfortably low chair in this computer lab. LOL.

Yet another long day @ college. I found out my computer class exam result and it is BAAAAD! I am soooo mad right now. Since I haven't seen the answer-sheet myself, I'm pretty sure that something's wrong here. I definitely did a lot better than what I got! Me mad! Urghhhh... Got workshop due tomorrow and lotsa work! Tomorrow is last day of college before Spring Break. Phew. Then about 10 days of rest :)

Let's just say that March 07,2002 is probably one of the most beautiful days in my life. I know it for sure that 20 years from now when I'll be nostalgic 'bout my college life and look back, I'll remember days like today... It was such a perfect carefree beautiful day! The weather outside was soooo perfect... it was warm but not hot, it was breezy but not windy, and it was sunny but not parching. I went to work and I had no work! So I just chilled for a couple of hours, talked to my Dean and her secretary. Then out of the blue my really good friend Jessica came online and we talked for almost an hour. God it's been such a loooong time! I want to go to Newark and see her sometime... cuz she's soooo much fun. And then I literally walked for one and half hours from College Avenue campus to Cook campus! I mean I could have easily taken the college bus but it was just too beautiful outside! Felt like spring was here... I was just walking down the road when I met my buddy Ross's roommate Ian - he's one helluva cool guy! Then I walked a little ahead and met Andy! Whoa! This is one good day for socializing :) It's been almost a month since I met him and he said Kathleen was in her apartment so I could prolly go and visit her...

So I goto her apartment and her friend Megan was there too. We chilled out for some time and then Kath had to buy something so me and her go on a short drive. God she drives like a speed daemon; but it's fun :) When we came back @ her apartment, her roommates Astrid and Vicky were back too! Ah..... I hadn't met them in weeks too! They (Kath/Astrid/Vicky) are the three most wonderful and lovely girls in RU! Trust me...

Then in the Calculus class, we did pretty much nothing! Our TA just said that do whatever you want and didn't give us any assignment/homework! Yay! I mean HOW perfect could this day be?

Next me and my other friend Vicky (not Kath's roommate) goto the computer lab and I give her a 101 lecture on how to use this really weird math software called Maple cuz we have an assignment due in it. It was fun... because she's a Mac lover and I'm a strictly PC guy. For atleast the Maple Lab homework I converted her to PC! Haha... Aw come on Vicky... you know PCs rule! Hehehe... Oh well... I wish I didn't have a class after that cuz I really love hanging out with her too! We fight a lot though... but it's good nice fight...

Well then I goto my honors class and I see the most interesting movie I've seen in years I think: Being There - starring Peter Sellers. Trust me this movie will blow away your mind! It was such a simple yet beautiful movie...

After the movie I come home, have dinner and here I am! God this was one wonderful day! Seriously...

I have to admit, I haven't been updating this 'blog regularly and also not doing it whole-heartedly. The simple reason is time... rather the lack thereof. I have just toooo much studies to do. Everyday I wake up @ 7 am and goto bed at 2-4 am! I hardly sleep anymore! Don't ask me where the time goes... between the long commutes to campus and the 5 hours I have to be on campus before my classes start (cuz I don't have a ride), I end up wasting half of my day doing pretty much nothing. So I just study or goto the library or computer lab and read stuff online. Ahhh. I've got to get a car soon or else my studies will start going bad... Even a used car will do for the moment... Once I get back from India, I can go ahead and buy a nice new car, but there are two whole months of college left! I'm open for advice... (and donations! hehe)...

My computer class got cancelled so I came home. I went to PC City today bought myself this mouse. It's pretty neat. My old mouse was acting up strange and had lost almost all it's precision. This new one's spiffy :)

Right now I'm in the Douglas Library on campus. I forgot that my class starts at 2:50 pm on Thursdays and NOT at 1:10 pm! So I've got a lot of time to just chill out and do nothing :)

Anyways what a weird day (in a good way) this has been so far. I woke up in the morning thinking this will be yet another gloomy boring day but turns out things have turned out quite the opposite. I went to Walmart and I found this great workout bench at a much much lower price than I expected. The guy working there was pretty nice and showed me 10 different benches before I picked the one that would suit me. He ordered it for me and said I should be getting it within a week :) Yay!

Then I went to the First Union Bank near our store to open an account with them. I've been there many times and like the service they provide so I thought it'd be great if I can get things like online-banking, credit-card-payments-online, atm service, direct deposit etc., for a fee of like $10-$15 per month. Guess what? The girl there told me that since I am a college student... I can get ALL of the above... for... $0 !!! Yup! It's all free. There is no minimum balance, there are no monthly or yearly fees, there are no transaction fees, no charge for anything! I asked her specifically... umm... what exactly do you guys make for giving me all these free services? She said: Nothing. We just hope that when you start working, you will extend your account and get a full checking/savings account with us. I think that's only fair.

She instantly added me to the bank-database and I deposited $50 :) Now within 3-4 days I'll be getting my debit card (which I can use like a normal credit card) and so finally I can buy all the cool stuff online! Yay!!! There are sooooo many things I need to buy... Ah... The list is endless :) The cool thing is that this is a debit card and not a credit card. So I don't have to pay up stuff at the end of the month and blah blah paperwork stuff. If there's money in my bank account, I can use each and every cent to buy stuff online and if I don't, then the transaction won't take place. So I don't even have to worry about someone finding my card no. and using it to buy a $350,000 Aston Martin with it, since well... my account won't have $350,000 in it (atleast not in the immediate future... hehe).

Anyways after I got out of the bank feeling really great, I went to buy some computer parts (D-link Router, 256MB RAM etc.) since someone I know needs it. Guess what? The guy gave me 10% discount on everything! Whoa! This day is going great! Haha... Then I went back to our store, got on the bus and came to college, thinking I have a 1:10 class.. but turns out my class is at 2:50! Doh!

Woohoo! I just bought a really inspiration computer book from the local Barnes & Nobel bookstore. I know inspirational and computer both should not be used in the same sentence, but this book : User Interface Design for Programmers : is really really interesting to me. It discusses and teaches things that help programmers make simpler and easier to use programs. Just think about it... how many times did you just sit frustrated in front of your pc wondering how the hell does some xyz program work? Now only if the developers of that program had read this book... :) The author: Joel Spolsky also writes a 'blog regularly, called Joel On Software - be forewarned... this link rates 11 out of 10 on the techie scale.

I'm in the RU Computer Labs right now, doing next to nothing. I could not get into the Economics class so now I have only 17 credits and two hours free-time on Thursdays :( Oh well...

Ahhhhh. Back home finally. God I'm soooo tired. I left our house @ 8:30 am and came back home @ 9:30 pm!!! That's 13 hours of college! And this is exactly how my Wednesdays and Thursdays will be like. Ahhhhh. What fun it is! I am soooo tired and I have soooo many things to do.

My work project on campus is going pretty good. The system is up and running and surprisingly crash-proof so far. I couldn't get into the economics class today and I really doubt that I will be able to.

The interesting news for the day is that today I discovered that I'm a victim of mathematicization: I have THREE higher-level math classes almost everyday right one after another! I took this Computer class called 'Discrete Structures' and two math classes 'Calculus 3 - Multivariable Calc' and 'Linear Algebra'. Turns out, Discrete Structures is also a math class although regarded as computer. Damn!!!!! I have 3 math classes and 2 honors classes! What a messed up schedule! No interesting classes, no fun, no nothing :( On top of that, each math class has weekly quizzes + tests + homework + 3-4 exams. Urghhhhhhhh. If I don't respond to your emails, stop writing this 'blog or disappear completely off the face of this Earth without trace, then you know what to blame!

Anyways, I should start doing all the homework I got and I still have a couple of projects to complete by this weekend. Ahhhhhhhhhh. 4 hours of sleep... Not enuf not enuf...

Ok! 'Blog time :) Today was my first day back at the new semester and the first thing I did was go and meet my friends on Cook campus - Kathleen, Astrid & Vicky! It's been a loooong time since I saw you all! *hugs* (hope your shower is fixed by now. hehehe!)

After that I went to my office to work for about an hour and then went for my computer class, but it was cancelled. So I went to sell my books from last term. Imagine this... the books that cost me over $200 last term, sold for ONLY $44 !!! God this is SOOOO expensive. Who said knowledge was cheap! After being disgusted by the book-rip-off-episode, I went to chill out in the computer lab for 2 hours and @ 4:20 went to economics class. Now I haven't been able to register for this economics class since it's already full. I'm trying to get in, but since it is a class that most 4th year students take (as it's very important for graduating) there is a high chance that I'll be denied entry into the course. The teacher was pretty neat though and it would be very interesting to study under her. Love her Ukrainian-Russian-type accent O:-)

And now I'm back home! Dinner was good. Will get started on a new website project now. I'll post details of that later in here :)

My cuzins downloaded these Simpsons Icons and replaced the My-Computer / Internet-Explorer icons with them. Of course I wouldn't be caught dead doing that myself, but I think some of the icons are pretty cool.

Have you ever wondered if we are actually living in a computer simulation like in movies like The Matrix / Thirteenth Floor etc. ? Here is a full fledged in-depth philosophical argument: Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?. For more articles on this topic, check out The Simulation Argument.

Now that college is closed for a month, there is not much to talk about. Yesterday we went to Chichi's for dinner. The food was pretty good. I like Mexican food. Now I get back to designing sites and blah blah blah computer stuff. Boring boring boring. But tis ok, cuz I like it.

There is a computer theory that if an infinite number of monkeys sit on an infinite number of computers for an infinite amount of time, eventually one of them will type out word-for-word, The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Looking at, how every monkey today has a keyboard, that day is not far off. What do you think?

Just got back home. I think I did pretty good in my Calc2 exam. Not very sure though. I might have made a silly mistake here and there.

Tomorrow we have a party @ our house and about 100-110 people are gonna come over. Meaning everyone has to do a LOT of work to prepare for the evening. I personally have to peel potatoes, peel onions, lift and setup tables, rent about 100 chairs and set them up, set up the computer and big screen tv for the game that I'm gonna host, and blah blah blah. I'm still dead tired from my Calc exam late-nights and lack of sleep. My friends say I look like a zombie... oh well... I'll be happy on Sunday! No work no more! (Or that's what I HOPE)...

I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but will people STOP going to my site!!! Well actually the thing is, my new prog Glass2k, which I made last week, got mentioned in Slashdot.org - The biggest computer discussion site in the world!!!

As a result, over half a million people came to my Chime.Tv site within a duration of 5-6 hours. This resulted in the crashing of my servers, excessive bandwidth usage, and shutdown of my main site. Not a pretty thing if you ask me. Well believe it or not, I GOT SLASH-DOTTED! You may not know a lot about Slashdot.org, but believe me, getting mentioned on front page of Slashdot is probably the biggest honor a computer professional can achieve (except a million $ in raw cash). Haha.

Oh and my Dad is now the most famous Dad on the Internet! LOL. You see his pic was in there in the screenshot for Glass2k and I'm sure over a million people have already seen this pic.

So what if I'm still awake! Atleast I found a neat site where ppl can find the definition of almost every computer term!