sleep eludes me leonard!

i so cannot sleep just before the day i intend to leave town. :(

happened with b'lore. always happens with jamshedpur. i form a sort of bond and it feels sad. as if i am doing some kind of an injustice. hope the place misses me too. the people, they will. mummy and nanna were visibly sad. arat is worse, bechara. he does not yet know how to express. that way, i guess he is like me. and that is certainly not nice :-/

the train is fourteen hours late due to the fog and that makes the goodbye, and hence the incomprehensible atmosphere, even more extended.

i look forward to this Dayalbagh trip and am quite excited about the journey. sahej will pick me up from the station and i plan to spend 24th night at his place- first time ever. 

first time ever might come as a surprise since,well, it is sahej we are talking about. But hilariously, sahej has this whole bad omen thing about close friends staying at his place. apparently,in the past, relationships with friends who stayed over with him at his place have soured over time. 

i do not believe in this omen stuff too much. but that does not mean i wont say a short prayer to make sure one of the few constants in my life maintain their constancy. obviously along with some other constants. :-)

three emoticons already. haha! 

so the thts that.

see ya

storyline. yo!

storyline(CLICK HITHER)

why it is good to be a dog-- yes, even a toy one is fine

A dog has no use for fancy cars...or big homes or designer clothes...a waterlogged stick wud do just fine...a dog never cares whether u're rich or poor...clever or dull...smart or dumb...just give him ur heart and he'll give u his... 
A friend's status message today.. really appealed to me

first one from home

this just had to be written today. i am sort of upbeat with my parents treating me like i have returned alive from a war or something. i feel so at home here :-) ohhh ,wait...

even though i know that  the endless supply of hide-and-seek, the gourmet-coffee (hope u get the pulp fiction reference) and general-lazing-around-with-no-assignment-deadlines-to-meet is only temporary i like to bask in the fun of this fantasyland.

as i write this i realise that i need to confess about this weird habit i have nowadays. i suffix every sentence with a 'yo!'. it makes me sound more wannabe tamil rapper than ever before but still i love the new development. trust me, it has been hard enough typing this note till now without writing a yo!(in the flow as in..)

jamshedpur is a pretty big leap temperature-wise.. around ten degrees or so, in the celsius and i am shivering. the agra trip is gonna take a while getting used to :-) but then lots of things will change in this trip. lots of stuff to get used to. :-/

i watched nick and norah's infinite playlist - just got over with it. not (certainly,not) a movie I usually like . as un-coenish as movies get. but something ineffable about it appealed to me.
nick and norah poster-- especially love the caption(every night has a soundtrack)

so that is that for now. yo!

rebel with a because

exams got over today. First ever of this kind. Sure took a lot out of me. I am hoping I am able to scrape a nice grade in this semester. Of course, I did not study like I would have wanted to do for these few days. But then, after a while your grades don't really matter. Nothing does really.  Obviously I hope and pray for a grade above a 6 pointer (out of 8 ,mind you!). 6 translates to a B grade which translates to a GOOD.(A being very good and S being excellent).
Will be home in less than 48 hours provided naxalites don't do something to my train mid-way. And around Christmas Eve I should be in Agra. Again, provided naxalites don't mess up something in the  way.

One of our profs treated the entire class to dinner at Nesara(the on-campus fine dining thingummy). It was good fun, especially the part where we presented him with a 2K awesome parker pen and he refused.(btw, we still do not know what to do with the gift as the william penn people refused to take it back. My suggestion of burying the pen in front of the main  building was promptly vetoed,sadly).

NExt sem is going to be pretty heavy our seniors tell us. That is sad because I plan to take machine learning or game theory as an elective both of which are killer courses :-/ dekhte hain, about that. 

"Troubles always are ephemeral, only the good part in life is here to stay. YO!"

root three-- not mine... but i love this

I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three
The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine
For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic
I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality
When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three
As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer
We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands
Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed


:-/

this is for you and you alone

There is so much to learn from everyone and everything.
just saying...

I have been having assignment submissions and exams pretty much continuously for the past week. All the exams went moderately well and there is an exam on 9th i really want to do well in- probability.
Just two more exams after that and i will be pretty much done with the first sem here.

I am pretty sure I have not worked  like this in my life. It has been a nice run till now. This place makes you realise how much there is to learn if one is willing to. Be it the library, or the general approach of most teachers, or the atmosphere on campus. I have read extensively, and I have savoured every moment of it.

Also a major addition to my repertoire of music collection is the kolaveri song. I despise it completely but it is good to know what people are grooving to once in a while. Exams get over on 12th and I go to Jamshedpur on 13th. I miss my people and really want to catch up. Obviously I cant catch up with all the people i miss. But I do have plans to visit agra too. I miss Dayalbagh. I really do. And I miss you too.
Hope I can make it this time.
:-/
Sayonara

why must I be the thief?

yay!! I Had a pretty awesome presentation yesterday- i presented erdos numbers and other nice applications of eigenvectors.

right now i am providing finishing touches to a darned important assignment- high performance computing. This is something related to parallel programming which I somehow enjoy a lot. It compensates for the hatred I have for some other subjects(no, you did not hear me criticising numerical methods :-)

I am slightly miffed I could not make it to Satsang. Tried my best, even woke up early- but ,umm... unavoidable circumstances..

What really gives me a kick are these november rains in bangalore though. The weather is swell in the mornings, evenings afternoons, pre-noons, basically all the time :-)

planning to go neeni now.
 its been a busy day
ciao \m/

oh wait i gotta tell you about this cool language called lojban.
or i will include stuff about that tomorrow..
ok no, i will try find the link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

and what was up with u when u wer 23?

long time, huh? busy days folks. really busy days.
I am 23 years and 1 month and 4 days old. Nothing special till now.
Well I have gotten tika twice, and participated in basant PT once and... oh , ok stuff has been special.
But i believe one should have a concrete aim by now. a well defined guiding principle that gives one a nice reason to justify every choice he/she makes.
And you really are living a very, very shallow life if that is missing. :-/
and that makes me sad. that is not the only thing which makes me sad, obviously.
Get a girl, people usually say to people.(do they??)
I think Get a Goal is the new Get a Girl.
like travis bickle said, "The days go on and on... they don't end. All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people."

take care!
:-)

a communist relative

welcome to "near-the-end-of-the-sem" time. "next sem i am going to be more disciplined" is the general thought in my head nowadays. obviously ,as soon as the last end sem is over i will be back to square one.

i am lagging behind in almost every course. it has more to do with trying to understand a bit more than was taught in class i guess. but that is regular me, and i am sure that will not change :-)

aaand i went to a carnatic violin concert by the mysore brothers yesterday. they are brothers, and they are from mysore, but what is not contained in their names is that they are really really brilliant. Nice music for a bit over ninety minutes. lovely really, and i appreciate the efforts of the council here to make sure the students keep their sanity in place.

aaaand i watched MITHYA yesterday... brilliant movie..i ordered it off flipkart.. like really really really awesome.. one might complain of the sad ending(depressing,really) but this is life ya know..

It is good to keep in mind that the worst might come to worst after all, as we all learnt in karma-101 :-)

now i click on publish.

we will agree, because it is easier that way

this could easily have been one of my usual rants.But i am in a frighteningly good mood right now.

Just back from Satsang where the youth did a path today. I felt lucky to be part of it. One of those recitations that ,on careful reading, seemed to answer some questions I really needed an answer to.

Thought I should write this. Because this is a good time to write. I like mornings. And I happen to be there for the sun more often than not. Of course this has nothing to do with me being a good boy and waking up early, but being a really awful one and sleeping this late. So, late infact the boundaries between day night dissolve to form something,well, dusky.(dawny, maybe??).


I have an assignment on parallel programming due tomorrow night, and it is one hell of a hard assignment. Mohit and I were trying hard to make sense out of it till quite late last night(or quite early this morning-- this is the usual glass half full- glass half empty revisited really (^_^) ). Hope some of our ideas work.

so long, and thanks for all the fish!!


what do you call two sardars standing on opposite sides of the road?
Ans : jokes apart!

not too good exam day

had a midterm today.
did not do well.
NOT AT ALL.
:-/
but still pretty happy.
how do you explain that??
gotta go again... assignment.. :-/

(SA) turday

iNever thought iWould work this hard ever in my life. But iIsc has always been known to change one's view of life(and death actually). iFor one, never thought iWould care about submitting assignments on time. Of course if you observe my schedule for the past few days/weeks you wouldn't believe me. But the interesting thing is iAm reading up a lot of stuff unrelated to what doing the assignment requires.
iCompletely love the library here- awesome collection of books and the environment extremely conducive to studies(iDo watch movies in there once every few days though-- the earphones were a brilliant invention,weren't they??).
Recently we got to know how google's search algorithm works. yeah yeah, we all knew it uses pagerank and stuff like that-- but we got to now how it REALLY works(equations and all).

iHave learnt one thing here(actually many things, but one thing really major). We used the same books when we were at Dayalbagh, the internet wasn't too different either(okay, the connection speed was slower by ORDERS of magnitude)-- but we all learn to apply. and that is brilliant! once you see some algorithm, some technique or any such theory at work the feeling is really awesome. Am planning to apply something akin to, but much simpler than, pagerank for one of my minor projects.
Hoping it works.

Meanwhile you could enjoy this awesome advice to young people by donald knuth.(Yes he is my hero and idol and no, iStill don't get half the stuff in his books)

iThink he is cool! and iDo mind if you don't pronounce it right.(Ka-nooth)

This is where you click.<--- Knuth stuff

This is where you don't.


so long, human!

this is a secret message for you

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=k3od-ijY75U

:-) its completely not my kind of song. but i love.
a lot.

nice atmosphere!!

mea culpa

its been a while since i was here. its been.
it has been a not so very good stretch of four five days. hectic and all.
today at 12 i submitted a weird , incomplete programming assignment. not too proud of it. but i had a plan.
ritwik was here. and we went for metallica. opened by stupid wannabe bands though. apart from this, i discovered a nice scottish band called biffy clyro. not bad but it might have been the general feel of the place. Ritwik insisted we  reach 5 hours earlier and i was initially very pessimistic about this idea. But turned out it was awesome because we were in the front rows. :-)
but i really never was a metallica fan and was sorta relieved they played their more popular stuff.
i have an exam tomorrow and i hope i do ok. another night i won't sleep a wink?? these are becoming commoner and commoner.
life is getting curiouser and curiouser.
but if we understood everything, life wouldn't be fun.
right??

:-)

HappyCrackerDay!
Its weird how you check your mail after two days and it makes you smile. and it makes you happy. Was busy doing a REALLY crazy assignment.

We had an assignment submission at 12 tonight. diwali night.
submitted it at 11:57pm :-)

feels nice now. some friends working around me so can't really shout like i want to. :-/
the price you pay for geeky friends.

After hari and shila are done with their work we all might hit the pavilion. Celebrations and all, ya know. :-) well deserved too.

hope they don't take much time.

too much optimism is never too good.
So we end with a quote by hemingway tonight:


“If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it”. Ernest Hemingway

Mr. hemingway , with all due respect, go take a walk. :-)

the word mincing business

uneventful day today.. nothing special yet.. not much time or scope for something special to happen now..
finally got a nice iisc pic of mine.. this friend in the ed board was doing some photography club work when he asked me to pose with the cycle. I did. the result?
well:

courtesy:manish gautam

the extremely packed schedule here makes sure i am unable to shave too regularly. though that is hardly an excuse for being bad looking[yes we are into the word mincing business around here] :-)

as promised.

manic pixie dream girl

and another one.
:-/

the promise of a better tomorrow

sincere apologies.
schedule here is pretty damn tight.
It like Vietnam all over again-- the kind of chaos i have become part of here at IISc.
One exam atleast-- Prob and stats, I did get good marks. Yes. Checked and returned-- in a day. Thats efficiency for you. Two other exams happened too. went pretty ok.
Satsang early in the morning, we saw Gracious Huzur's Bangalore speech today. The one in which the concept of the evolution of the universe was explained to the extremely lucky kids who happened to be in bangalore during summer.
Yes.this summer was good for just about everyone :-)

miss it. miss it.

my new hobby

well badminton.
it is awesome. played three straight hours today. lost all matches. but still, worth it :-)
stuff is round the corner. And that makes me happy.
like really very..
all i can say--
is yay!!!

all fall down.

today was a dull day. Woke up at 9:00.
Everything happens for a reason is what i learnt today. :-)
good sometimes, and sometimes bad. Karma always returns to haunt you.

John Lennon's Ha66y Birthday

happy birthday john lennon!

not so happy are you?? He was assassinated by mark david chapman, who apparently was inspired by Catcher In The Rye to do what he did. One heck of a book this one is. Well written?? probably not. But the world it is set in-- oh god! scary..
worth a read. the protagonist, like in all good novels, a misfit.
:-)
Holden Caulfield is so much like Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. Or probably you do not see the similarity. then again, maybe you do.
so much for lennon.
Some iisc new maybe? till last week the coming one was going to be a real easy one. No such work. One assignment, hopefully doable. Would have caught up on my lost sleep etc etc. Friday changed it all. Three tests scheduled this week. 11th(P&S), 13th(HPC) and 15th(DSP). One more sleepless week. Insomnia here isnt something to be scared about. It becomes a way of life. "Oh hello Vasudevaramanjunathadeva! you got insomnia too? Join the gang!" is a statement you hear nine days out of ten at breakfast(some ME guy from CSA saying it to some PhD guy in MBU, for instance). Heck, this is even a conversation starter for half the junta here.
So um yeah, another weekend ruined.
cheerio!
PS: Vasudevaramanjunathadeva is just that guy's nickname. His real name is much, much longer :-D

four floors isnt that high

location: CEDT lab 

Mohit works here. under Prof SK nandy.

Midterm-I just got over.
I wouldn't say I am completely saddened by my performance. Though I would have loved to crack the probability test. BAH!One can't have everything.

My facebook page and then NDTV news tells me steve jobs is dead. I do not have a single apple product presently. I feel guilty. An iPad just to show solidarity?? Piyush says it is almost like reliving the time around when Kurt Cobain died. Not that we knew about Cobain then. But yeah this is what it must have been like.

I might go to nandi hills today. MIGHT. I need change. IISc is sort of getting on my nerves.

:-/

Breakfast at 3:30 AM. Bengaluru Airport. Coffee. Good coffee. Satsang after that.
Did I deserve what I got?
Did I deserve what I got?
Did I deserve what I got?
Did I?

Pessimists are so full of quit

I

I have a new favourite philosopher! Wittgenstein he is called. To quote a weird source on the net, he looks like a serial killer. But i think he is pretty darned cool. Born into among the wealthiest families of Austria(Brahms apparently used to come to his house to play), he gave it all away and actually had to borrow money from people when he needed funding for his book- The tractacus. He fought in the front lines for the Austrian army. He is apparently the first known pioneer of self loathing.

In his opinion(and of many others,btw) his book had the solution to every philosophical enigma of his day.

And speaking of wealth I got richer by exactly Rs 16K this morning. Bought myself one half of a terrabyte and planning to buy a book(The tractacus maybe??).
Buying my dad a book too. Apparently a highly rated thingummy on how to circumvent back pain.
Bhai already has his gifts. Mummy will pakka get a nice kurta this time. :-)
So yeah thats that!
Got a numerical methods paper coming up.
Stay awake.
Look Closer!

deja vu

It is always cool to show off you have Godel,Escher,Bach on your book shelf.
The cool part is that I never knew when buying that it is an indispensible part of the hacker culture. Alongwith Hitchhiker's guide. And AI koans. Apparently I am doing everything a good programmer should. Apart from being good at programming, of course!

You can also have a look at the coolest musical piece ever .The idea is cool,atleast. Though nothing beats moonlight sonata.

Have You seen this before? So you know what Deja vu really is :-)
Click Here
ciao!

arat murty's happy birthday

today is my younger brother's birthday. bought him a radiohead t-shirt and a book called a mathematical mosaic. I pray and hope the t-shirt nullifies the geekiness quotient of the book being presented. But somehow I feel gifting a book is pretty damn awesome. There is just some sense of permanence.. something beautiful about it .. I dunno.

Today is also aditya mohan's birthday. He is the fattest friend I have.
Happy birthday mohan!.

btw, i am back on facebook.. this was after i forgot about sarabjeet's birthday..  that just is sad and pathetic..
:-/

continuing with the wishing-people/websites-born-on-27th-september-motif:here is wishing google a happy thirteenth birthday..
is saying happy birthday on your thirteenth an oxymoron?

so, um , thats that for now.. Got a numerical linear algebra test tomorrow.
wish me luck!

PS : Please expect these weblogs to change flavour in a while. :-/

parathas

Ankit(to me)::this is it. no more of your south indian food! tonight we go out!
Me: ok!
that led us to cycle around for approximately 8 kms across Bangalore. worth it though!! found an awesome paratha corner round the,well, corner.

My first outing in a loooooooong time.. Boy! it was awesome..
Ankit, Mohit, Vasu and I.. Fun day.. Scared about the exam though :-/
There aint no such thing as a free paratha.
click here

You gain some, you lose some.

ankit, anurag, mohit.. little boy in the mirror is vasu..

constructive witticism

one thing being here at iisc does to anyone is completely disturb your circadian rhythm. there never is enough inclination to do your work when there is ample time.. procrastination i believe it is called.. and the eating joints here seem to encourage weird sleeping cycles..
The pavilion closes at 3AM i believe, Tea Board around the same time, Faculty Club is far behind at around 1, but the food there is comparatively nicer.
And they ALL have earned a lot because of me. A lot.
But you gotta balance your classes etc along with this stuff otherwise you land in trouble.
the audit concept here i really love-- i audit graph theory presently.. I plan to do game theory next sem..
Exams now.. midterms with loads of weightage.. and I am not prepared..
:-/
stop redditing, stop stumbling, stop 4chaning, basically, anything fun for awhile and you are halfway there..
guess i will get back to cubic splines for now..
So long! ---(and thanks for all the fish)

sad day

You always tend to have a favourite prof, out of all of 'em. Even if they all aren't exactly brilliant, sometimes the least worst of the lot becomes the fave. :-)
You also  form an opinion on the least favourite one. But lets get back to being positive.
My favourite here is Matthew Jacob T.-- a  teacher of high performance computing and among the stalwarts here. Something about his jokes, his knowledge, his entire way of approaching the subject-- I just know he is the kind of teacher I want to be if I ever become one.
Why sad day, then?
Well, he plans to leave. The course was supposed to be taken up by two profs, a fact most of us in the class blissfully chose to ignore.. let the good times roll.. blah.. blah..
Obviously, this is assuming that the other one wont be as awesome as Prof Matt. which is imbecile, maybe..
But this is just sad. He made cache replacement policies accessible to me.  That really is something.
You will be missed, sir :-/

most of this is ephemeral

waking up after 12 hours of solid, no nonsense sleep is enough to make anyone feel like a philosopher. the really obvious thing to do is to type in infinity on the google search bar and really hope to get an interesting result. on the 16th page of the search result(yes! sixteen) i get this link to infinity pools. i really don't have a clue about these. CLICK!
MY MIND=BLOWN!!

triggerpit.com/2011/07/15/incredible-infinity-pools/
Gotta go to one of these some day...
To put things in perspective it is probably a good time to mention i dont know how to swim..

good...

in other news, i get to know that the world's shortest poem is shorter than its own title:
The poem?
Adam
Had 'em

The title of the poem?
Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes...

 Mad world,eh?
Take care!

the mysterious case of the awesome roomie

all my life i have been nothing but lucky. Be it my parents, my brother, the friends i have made. no reasons to complain. Add it to the fact that Fate made sure I was born into a family who are the followers of our Faith. Facebook made sure I was lucky in other aspects(More about that later)...

Coming back to room-mates: this was probably one factor that pulls my luck coefficient down-- like big,big time. Actually I wouldnt say I have been unlucky, They have just not been the kinds i would prefer as roomies. My engineering college experience was so bad i eventually had to be shifted to my granny's home in Agra.

IISc has been a good luck charm for me that way. My roomie- Anirudh from Chennai is the coolest! Although spiritually and musically inclined(Rahman only mind you!), he is an avid watcher of TV shows from the US. Third Rock from the sun, 2 and a half men, BBT, you name it.. Also an MS from UT,Austin this boy is brainy as hell..

Still Doesn't qualify for cool?? haha.. wait.. here it is.. this guy only uses Johnson's baby soap.. Yes sir! no amount of coaxing from scantily clad women endorsing the multitude of other soap companies works on monsieur Anirudh. Johnson's baby it is then! He bought three today by the way.. and proudly tells me he has been using it for the past 23 years.

I rest my case!