curiouser and curiouser

Here: http://umangjaipuria.blogspot.com/2008/05/marking-time.html

I've spent the entire morning trying to figure why my DVD writer will burn a CD-RW but bail out (and exactly at the same point each time) while burning plain CDs or DVDs. I've tried the common combinations of burning software and operating systems.
Any tips or pointers will be much appreciated.

And by the way, what is wrong with the weather! It's been this dull and gloomy for the past three days and no sign of rain. Why can't it just rain and make way for the sun. I think I'll go crazy listening to the wind howling around my apartment. It's impossible to open the windows even a crack. I should install one of them windmills and I'm sure I'll be able to generate enough power at least to recharge my laptop, phone etc.

Made an impromptu trip to National Market on Wednesday and found that the era of non-Bollywood and non-Hollywood films has come to an end. I was curtly told that there is no supply and none expected either. So I have to look for another way to get hold of what I want to watch. And no, I'm not stepping into that Cinema Paradiso (which can't even boast of a decent collection) or that Habitat place.

There's a Rooftop Film Festival a fortnight from now in Bangalore. I'm guessing it's a bunch of enthusiasts camping out on a roof watching movies all night. Sounds like something. But honestly, I'm a sucker for indoor comforts while watching movies.

Run along now.

Everytime I watch an Ingmar Bergman movie I am compelled to make at least a few others go and see it too.

Raw is the only word that comes to mind when I try to describe his movies. Brutally raw.

A kilo of salted kala jamuns and the Federer-Davydenko semi finals match - what more could one possible ask for on a Friday evening!

I wish someone puts at least parts of the match up on YouTube.

Plain White T's - Hey There Delilah

What I could really use right now is 48 hours in a day.

It can be so effing difficult to concentrate on even simple tasks on some days.

Here are some of the funniest cartoons I've come across:
http://www.cagle.com/

Especially the ones about the Queen's visit:

Making a point, in Camus' words:

In certain situations, replying "nothing" when asked what one is thinking about may be pretense in a man. Those who are loved are well aware of this. But if that reply is sincere, if it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity.

Well, most of our worlds in any case.

A very keen essay written by a friend dissecting the problem afflicting the young people in the IT industry in India:
http://harmanjit.blogspot.com/2007/04/notice-period-to-god.html.

Ever wondered on why everyone you talk to wants to retire as soon as possible and just live by the sea by themselves? I guess deep ailments need deeper cures...

This email is a popular forward recently and some one decided to forward it to everyone at work on Friday:


Click on the picture if you cannot read the text in it properly

The reply was also meant to be a joke and then everyone from the 5th floor clambered to the 6th floor to give the prankster birthday bumps!

In the days and posts since my shift to Blogger, the only thing I really find lacking here (and in perhaps all other blogging platforms) is the way LiveJournal handles comments. The ability to have threaded comments is a strong enabler of conversation which I think is what blogging is also about - two way communication.

This feature is sorely missed. So too the notifications if someone replies to a comment you had left on a blog.

There. I've finally created another blog at http://umangjaipuria.blogspot.com/.

The handle is a tad longer than my liking, but anything else I wanted was already taken - and not being currently used. What a royal waste of namespace!

Well, the new blog is more of a trial of Blogspot to see if it can replace this one on Livejournal. I'll be posting on both although I'm not sure how to divide my posts. Most likely the Livejournal one will be a little more personal.

I have been wanting to blog more and maybe having more writing space will hopefully make me blog more frequently overall.

After at least a couple of years I think I must have read a book in one go.
Sputnik Sweetheart may not be Haruki Murakami's best novel, but it is definitely among the better ones I've read.

Check out the blurb on the back cover here to see what's it about. The plot is not where the brilliance of the story lies but with the story teller. The way Murakami highlights out various aspects of ordinary, nay, less than ordinary life, has a certain charm. I liked the collection of individual insights through the narrative more than than the overall story.

At one time the narrator says to the protagonist: "... the earth doesn't creak and groan its way around the sun just so human beings can have a good time and a chuckle".
And reading this made me wonder: what is the point of the earth creaking and groaning its way around the sun if human beings can't have a good time and a chuckle! ;-)

There is another little vignette about being alert and calm which was very appreciable.

I will probably go this week and get me another one of his books.

What you probably can't read written in white on the back of the van is that it is a hearse and carries coffins. And in case you can't read the black-on-yellow text - it says "Today I am, tomorrow you". Heh.

Yes, this is a Bangalore rant.
And I think Bangalore infrastructure is tipping over.

1. It took me an hour and 15 minutes to get back from work this evening. Twenty of those were spent covering the last two kilometres.

2. There was bad traffic at 10:20 pm in Koramangala

3. Mobile phones never work properly, what with the bad signals and call drops. There are just too many users and the service providers aren't able to cope.

4. Service for anything is awful.
- BSNL customer care sucks - I wasn't at home when they called on the landline instead of my mobile as I asked and now they are refusing to entertaining any further complaints because I DIDN'T ATTEND THEIR PRECIOUS CALL!
- Shopkeepers don't care if you are disgusted with their behaviour. They can afford to lose customers.
- Desmonds' - a restaurant I have always lauded for its hospitality and service - was terribly mismanaged by a rude usher (probably because he couldn't cope with the waiting crowd).

5. I cannot do anything after work on a weekday because the traffic makes it impossible to get anywhere in time.

6. Watching a movie or a play or anything remotely popular needs you to plan weeks in advance otherwise the million other people would have already bought the available twenty tickets.

Much as I love the city, I don't think it can offer any quality of living any more.

Not life, but good life is to be chiefly valued -Socrates

http://indexed.blogspot.com/
and
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TuppersSelf-ReferentialFormula.html

And so it came to pass that I twisted my foot badly while walking about downstairs yesterday evening. And I've been hopping around on one leg all day and nursing the bandaged appendage and OD-ing on analgesics.

And I get to miss proto.in. Drat, drat and double drat!

Saw Grosse Pointe Blank today. Good movie.

Maybe I will spend my undeserved free time this weekend moving this blog out of LiveJournal. It has been unbearably slow lately and I would like my blogging platform to be a little more advanced. Any suggestions? It's going to be Blogger by default.

So I managed to go for a couple of talks while in the bay area: one at SRI and the other at Stanford. Both said to focus on the next generation of search and both were rather disappointing although they were in an area I suspect having at least half of all the computer science research thrust. It can probably be equated to the armament race - the race to the next breakthrough in search.

The first speaker (someone who had just started his own company and was in the process of building the core technology for his product) seemed like his only purpose was to generate interest at various different levels for his company. The real matter of his presentation must have had only a few minutes of his time. The second speaker (a very well known fellow of computer science research), Andrei Broder, was disappointingly disappointing. He didn't even go deep enough into the subject to incite interest in what he was working on - probably an artefact of being at a very high position at a large company.

The talks confirmed what a friend had said to me - a lot many talks in the Bay Area are just that: a lot of talk. People like talking more than like doing. I would say a tenth or thereabouts of the talk consists of actual matter; more than half of it is a sales pitch to either prospective investors or prospective hires. Or both. But I noticed another small fraction in the break-up of the pie that had a lot of value - they can really get you thinking. Just hearing what you think you already know and a smart question or two from the audience are enough to stimulate that chain of thought.

However, don't go by my experience at two talks. A colleague attended a talk on unsupervised learning that I managed to miss and from the description I got from him, this talk would have been super interesting.

Some other talks I wished I had gone to (but didn't find out about them until much later) at PARC were really very interesting. I did catch up with the audio recordings: Peter Norvig on Web Search as a Product of and Catalyst for AI and Stuart Russel on Uncertainty in an unknown world. Ofcourse, the names might give you a clue as to how good the talks would have been! I found the former much better (also because it was easier on my limited mathematical skills) and some of the findings presented in the talk are quite consequential.

So far an eon or an age has meant a year or two. Two and a half, perhaps. But this one beats all time spans I can recount.

I went to school Monday before last after five years perhaps. It was closed for the holidays so some of the classrooms and the assembly hall were locked and it looked uncharacteristically deserted.

I was there with a couple of friends - one who had studied there like me and another who was visiting Calcutta and was getting an unwanted, albeit entertaining, audio tour of the place. It was fun coming back to memories shelved long ago - jumping out of the windows, bunking classes and hanging out on the steps of the Round Chapel by the field, watching the girls walk in single file to their classes, the pranks on teachers, monkeying around in the chemistry lab...

I had forgotten that school had been so much fun. Then. It would be torture doing it all over again now - growing up pains and all that!

Anyhow. I've become a bit of a rambler.

The point is that both of us (me and the friend who had studied here) felt that school seemed much much smaller! The huge field which used to be a trek from one end to the other, rarely undertaken during the short recess, just looked like a few strides. We ceremoniously agreed that it must be because we had been through school at an average height of about four feet. And the disconnect in memory over the gap of five odd years probably made the difference more stark. It was very amusing.

I do wish I had taken my camera along.