One of those days!

Ever have one of those days .. when you feel like the forces have decided to conspire against you! I think today was my day.

Most of my friends know I recently bought a road bike and have begun my venture into the world of biking. Thanks my overexcitedness, another friend of mine also got a bike. We planned to go bike along the coast at Nahant, MA (look it up, it looks really pretty) today. In preparation, I went to the bike store yesterday and purchased a map (waterproof no less - paid $10 extra) and an spare tube. This is where the issue started. I shouldve taken my bike to the store. Instead, I took the guy there at his word and purchased the tube he gave me (mistake #1). The guy assured me that even if it was bigger, it will fit fine with my bike. Me the guy green behind his ears when it comes to bikes, accepted that.

Come today morning, I work up at 7:30AM and called my friend. I got up, got ready and called him ten more times before he got back. I finally left my place at 9 AM, a good hour later than what we planned. Thats when I shouldve known that things werent going to go the way I had planned. I then took the back allies of Cambridge (mistake #2) to harvard square where he lives. When I got close to my office, I felt my rear wheel feel unusually bumpy. With a uneasy feeling, I got off the bike and found that I had a puncture. Annoyed with the proceedings, I called my friend and took my bike to my office which was the closest location I had access to. Next half hour, my friend got to my office and we detached the rear wheel and took it to his house which was half a mile away. The idea was that the lady at his place had a pump and we had a spare tube from mistake #1. Being a true CS engineer, I watched a couple of youtube videos on how to fix a flat.

We arrived at the house all excited to put to action our new found knowledge of fixing a flat. Its not that different from what we did in India, but as you will find out, we excel at screwing the simple things up. To start with, the spare tube was quite a bit bigger than the wheel. Undeterred, we put the tube, put the tire back and
started filling air in. Bang!! The tube burst and the two of us who were initially startled burst into laughter. Our  first experiment was clearly not well executed. Like we had learnt something out of the experience, we took the old tube, filled air into it and examined the holes. There were three holes which we meticulously patched. Satisfied with our handiwork, we started putting it back. I started filling in air once everything was in place. The tire said 130 PSI and I went all the way to 100 PSI. Satisfied with everything, I was attempting to remove the air pump when, for the second time, the tire went BANG! The very thought of the second bang makes my ears ring even now. We had successfully managed to rip the original tube into shreads - and when I say we, I mean me.

Cursing our bad luck, we looked up bike shops. Turns out all bike shops open at 12 noon on sundays and there was still half hour. We roamed around and got to the bike store in time. After waiting outside their door for ten more minutes, we got the tire fixed at the place. That took another 15 mins. The bike lady filled air in the tire to 110 PSI - I guess we just didnt have the talent. After another pit stop to quench future hunger, we came back to my lab all excited that our venture was about to begin.

After putting the tire back, we started to head out when I didnt feel right. I look at the front tire, and that had gone flat. I could not believe our fscking luck. We pushed the bike to another bike shop. Half an hour later, we got to ATA bikes on Mass ave. The guy there pulled the tube out and filled air in it and couldnt even find a leak. How's that for bad luck. Another $20 wiser, and armed with another spare tube, we finally headed out.

Five hours, fifty dollars and five tubes later we were on our way. We had now lost enthu to go all the way to the coast and decided to do the minutemen trail. Some would say the forces took a kind heart to me finally, but I'd like to believe that I overcame them. The twenty five mile bike ride was great - probably even more rewarding thinking about everything we had to go through to get there.

Yeah, it was one of those days ...

Update and introspection

It's been a while, and I thought I'd put some up before the hiatus hits a year. Lots of changes in the last few months since I've been here. First, I graduated!
I found gainful employment (debatable if one can call it that) across the country. I am now a postdoc at Harvard continuing being on paltry wages to do things that are closer to science fiction but more importantly exciting to me personally.
I went back to LA and did the whole wearing-robe-being-hooded-by-advisor-switch-tassle-from-right-to-left thing a couple of weeks ago as well. It was nice to have my parents visit as well - boy have they waited for this occasion :-|

It also seems like a transition in life for me. Somehow, grad school let me be in that irresponsible stage of life way longer than most of my friends. The past decade (2000-2010) was spent enjoying life in a very not-a-responsibility-in-the-world kind of way. I suspect the next decade (2010-2020) will determine what I have done in my life and what it all means. If the thought of writing a thesis was scary, this seems more daunting.
At the same time, I'm excited. I have the opportunity to work with some really good people in a fairly high profile project. I have also been given enough freedom to do things I consider interesting as long as I can make a good case for it. The coming months will tell how much of the opportunity I take advantage of.

The other change has been moving from LA to Boston. I like Boston a lot. I'm almost not missing LA. There is so much happening around me in Cambridge. People have scared me of the winter, but it is summer now and I'm loving it. Its a little too hot and humid at times, but the city is so vibrant. I suppose one of the benefits of being in a place that gets really cold in winter (unlike LA) is that people appreciate the good weather they get. So every one is out and about doing things. Weekends are filled with activities and I'm never out of a list of things to do over the weekend. Going from driving to public transport is also something I like for the most part. The only time I missed a car was when my parents were here last week and I could not really show them around. But we did go to places were the T went (like the JFK library) and took long walks which I really enjoyed.

Let me end with a renewed enthusiasm toward blogging (with the caveat that that might dwindle anytime).
Go Lakers!

Visiting a "different country"

The last week and half I spent visiting my brother in Boulder CO. People say California is a different country by itself. Getting out of LA reminds me of that somewhat.

Firstly, the surroundings are quite different. Boulder is in the middle of green mountains. It is very pretty and I got to be there at the best of weather. CU has a beautiful campus. Having been in LA for as long as I have, I suppose I am starved of seeing vegetation which explains my admiration of Boulder.

Four of us did a very pictorial hike close in Boulder. The trail was the royal arch trail about 3.5 miles one way. It ended on top of a mountain where there was a nice arch and a great view of the plains. I shall put up pictures soon. I also attended the Independence day celebrations at CU. Since it is a small circle of people (in comparison to USC), they seem quite tightly knit and everyone knows everyone. There were Dumb Cs which I thought were quite well done but much of the crowd was less interested in them than I was. Got to play cricket and badminton a couple of times. I also took a couple of long walks around the area. Perfect place to take nice walks in random directions.

Now getting to some of the more interesting parts of my trip. We drove to Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone national park which are in Wyoming (the Northern parts extend to Montana) and Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. We stayed in this little town called Dubois about 90 miles south of yellow stone. Turned out that the owner of the Super 8 motel we were at was of desi origin. He was Gujarati to be precise, and I had some conversation with him on life in Dubois, WY. Apparently, getting a gun license costs $35. From the radio ads we gathered that guns were quite the hot commodity around there. There were ads for discounts on guns if you purchased groceries from a certain place etc. all throughout. This owner also told us that hunting was a major sport around there and the season started in October. All I can hope is that the animals in the national parks are not the ones being hunted. That said, we saw plenty of deer on our way to Mt. Rushmore - so there is no shortage of game I suppose.

Every place we went, we got stares like we were aliens. We included me, my brother and a couple of his friends - all desi and clearly out of the norm in these lands. The first night we went to this bar where the bartender (bartenderess actually, if such a word exists) was very sweet. She even got us a free round of shots (something she called sexy mexi which I have never had) and joined us which was sweet of her. The rest of the bar was not as kind. We got anywhere between strange looks and clear aversion atleast in the body language. We sampled the local brew which was not too bad .. except that one of them was called Moose Drool which is quite gross especially after you look at the picture on the bottle. The people certainly liked their alcohol, their country music and tattoos. All through our trip I saw lots of people with elaborate tattoos.

On the second day, we got back in time to catch dinner at a restaurant adjacent to our motel. There were this couple who were constantly staring at us. At one point, I thought the lady said something to me and I responded with an "excuse me". But I think she was talking to her man. After we exchanged a couple of excuse mes, she finally got to the point. She asked us where we were from. She said she and her worse half were trying to guess the same. I was obviously curious what their guess would be and asked her where she thought we were from. "I dont know, Iraq", she said. Not knowing if I should be amused or annoyed, I politely corrected her and said we were from India. "That shares a border with Iraq, doesnt it?", she said. "Nope .. it is quite far away from Iraq" I corrected her again. We wound up the chit chat with some more awkward small talk on the lines of what brought us to the beautiful state of hers. All this while, her worse half was clearly turned away and did not even want to look at us. That incident sort of summarized the general reaction people seem to have when the saw us. If i was not with my brother and his friends, I would have wanted to be a little more exploratory and go hit on some local women or some such just to see their reaction but we had little time and I needed a little more getting used to the surroundings.

Mt. Rushmore was somewhat of a let down as it doesn't have much other than the four Presidents. I bought a book on the history of native Indians and their history which I hope to read in the coming weeks. I bought a cool pictorial historical account of the Presidents of the US and what each President is best known for. My brother and I drove about 2000 miles in the four days which was a lot of fun. All in all, an interesting trip .. to a "different country".

Gulliver's Travels - Part 2 - Japan

I was at ICRA 2009 couple of weeks ago which was held at Kobe, Japan. I took a week off after the conference to see Japan. Armed with my Lonely Planet (which, needless to say, is awesome) and a marked doggedness to stay vegetarian, I traversed from Kobe to Osaka to Nara to Kyoto to Tokyo with a little stint at the northern tip of the Japanese alps. It was a very revealing experience for me and I thought I should put down my thoughts of the trip afresh. I took close to a thousand pics and will refer to them as and when I think they aid my monologue better. Let me start by some things that struck me.

Technology Penetration

I'm an engineer at heart. Can't fault me at fawning over the country's love for technology. This is the first thing that struck me. We all hear about it all the time, but seeing it in action is a surreal experience. Most of us have come across the famous japanese toilet seat that can do much more than rest your posterior. We have also heard of the shinkansen bullet trains that travel at speeds upto 200 miles an hour. But the devil is in the details. Every thing is designed with much thought. Most of the seats in the trains could automatically or manually turned the other way depending on which direction the train was traveling. There were vending machines that would serve you freshly brewed espresso - and I actually mean freshly brewed; it would grid the beans, pour a shot of espresso, add some milk and sugar etc. Similarly, there was another vending machine that would serve ramen noodles that was quickly heated up then and there. It was the rainy season, and my hotel had this little device in the lobby where you put your umbrella in and it would seal the umbrella with a plastic bag so that the umbrella wouldnt drip. This is what I mean by putting thought into everything they do. I took a video of a car being parked in one of them robot parking lots. They are fairly common as well. I'm not sure if I would be comfortable with the idea of my car being transported up and down some building by some automated assembly but it was cool to watch. Everyone loves their cellphone; and use them to do anything but talk. Most of the time they are typing stuff into it (I can only presume they are texting in japanese) or playing games on them. It is also not uncommon for grown men in suits to pull out their PSP on the train and go at it with the vigor of a little kid.

Japanese Women
I'm a singly guy and maybe this is something I noticed especially, but anyone would be hardpressed not to notice the women. In one word, Japanese women are dolls. Everyone is petite and in shape, look not a day older than 20 and are always made up. It amazes me how pefect they look be it 9 AM, 12 Noon, 5 pm or 10 pm at night. All of them look like they just got out of the beauty salon. The other noticeable thing is that everyone (well, almost everyone) wears heels. No one complains about how they cant walk in them. And it doesnt matter if they are going shopping, going for a stroll or going to the night club - the heels are always there. I could go on and on about the virtues of Japanese women, but I'll stop and move on to other things.

Culture of Interaction
The Japanese culture is I think one that is at crossroads between the modern westernized ideals and what has been in vogue for ages. I should start off by saying they are extremely helpful and kind - atleast to foreigners. Everytime I asked for directions, the person would not just point me in the right direction but take the effort to lead me to the place I was going dropping everything he/she was doing. If you ask them something, you can see the regret in their faces if they are not able to help you adequately. While the language is a barrier, they try their level best to help you in any and every way possible.
It is also an experience to see two Japanese people interact. Firstly, they have an acute sense of hierarchy. Looking at two people interact, you can clearly see who the senior is in the interaction. They also have extreme respect for each other and every interaction consists of a series of bows. It is especially interesting (almost funny) to see an exchange of business cards. The person bows before giving the card, after giving the card, after reading the card and so on.

Language
The language is a huge barrier for any foreigner visiting Japan. Even in most urban areas, it is very hard to get by without knowing Japanese. Even though I stayed only for a week, I picked up bits and pieces of little things so that I could get by - especially things like no meat (nikku nai), excuse me (simi masen), one beer (beeru hitotsu) and thank you (oregato gozaimas). The last phrase you will certainly get bored of; entering any shop or exiting it, going to a restaurant or the local corner store, you will constantly hear gozaimas from multiple directions.
One of the things I learned late in the travel was that they can actually read/write english quite well. They are just not comfortable conversing in English. This suggests that I couldve benefited immensely by writing stuff down instead of jumping around trying my version of the sign language in vain most of the time.

It was also interesting for me that Japanese is written in two scripts - Kanji, Katakana and Hiragana. Kanji is apparently chinese characters for japanese syllables. One of the guys from our lab who was at ICRA knew how to write in kanji but couldnt pronounce it. This is something that is very unintuitive to me but I suppose the language could be non-phonetic like English. Many times he wrote it down and the person could understand what he had written.

Alright, I think I have rambled on enough for a day - I'll get back to it tomorrow with more specifics of each city I went to and things I did there.

I'm Back!!

Its close to a year since my last post, and I didn't want to keep the rest of the world waiting for any more time. So, here goes.

The last year was interesting - lots happened. Most significantly, a good friend of mine passed away (well, was sadly killed!). I really hope justice is done on this matter.


I interned at Berkeley with the Firebug project. This was fun! I saw two applications for sensor networks - fire fighting and inside mines. I learnt a bit about TinyOS and did some tinyos programming. Did a fair bit of field work - and most importantly enjoyed living in Berkeley.
Berkeley is a really beautiful town. Full of coffee shops and little restaurants. It is also close to San Francisco which I think is the New York of the west coast. I highly recommend going to House of Nanking - a chinese restaurant in china town. Probably the only place I really liked chinese food.

I watched the San Francisco gay pride parade one weekend and the Fillmore Jazz festival the next weekend. SF has a lot to offer and I would really like to settle down in and around SF.



There is not much that I did in Fall. Spring 2006 I am TAing a course which has been quite exciting for me personally. We've been playing with these new embedded systems and I am learning bits and pieces of uCos-II, a realtime preemptive OS. My research is progressing well also.

Belief!!

Today there was a religion and culture awareness drive at the center of campus. Animesh asked me to stop by his meditation booth. Its really interesting to talk to people about what they believe.
First I heard the advisor of the atheist group speak. One of the things he said and I quote was "We want to convert people from being believers in God to being believers in mankind". That was enough cue for me to go chat with him. I first asked him why he thought both of those were disjoint. We spent a little time discussing what the objectives of his organization were. It seemed like a liberal group that thinks of "God" as something not needed in everyday life.
Next up there were three students (or they looked like ones) who came up on stage. They had T-shirts that said "I am a whore" in the front and "Yet he married me" on the back. These were kids who believed in Christianity. The statement being made via the T-shirts was that even though they were drenched in the worst of sins (prostitution), Jesus Christ still embraced them (marriage being the ultimate communion). A radical way of accepting one's mistakes I should say. I had a bone to pick with these guys. People are pushed into prostitution for various reasons. How can anyone judge that that is the ultimate sin? I know, its deviating from the general message that he was trying to drive home. But sure enough, I went and spent a good half hour with this guy discussing what he believed in. Turns out this guy graduated from UCSB and now spends all his time evangelizing Christ. That is amazing to me!! How can one give up life as you lead it (especially during your youth) and spend it away evangelizing something that you neither know is true or can verify to be. His claim was that every life had a purpose and he feels that his purpose is being fulfilled in doing so. Fair argument at some level. However, as someone who has been taught to be skeptical about everything told to you unless proven, I sure would not go down that path. However, I do admire his faith. I wonder if I would ever be that devout to anything?

Now to the lighter side of things. I finally went to visit the Pagan booth. At the outset, let me point out that there was a cute girl manning (heh .. ironical) the booth. That was motivation enough. But I also wanted to seriously find out what this was all about. I was handed a couple of pamphlets about how they were witches and .. well, that pretty much lost my interest. So, Im not sure what else.
I am standing at the booth when a girl stops by. This girl asked the girl behind the booth if she would finally get back with her boyfriend. The girl behind the booth handed this girl a pack of cards and asked her to shuffle them. Then she picked three cards from the top of the pile and placed them on the table face up. One said "Be strong". The girl rattled advice on how this girl should be strong. The second one was Aphrodite (I forget what the card said). It said something on the lines of eternal love. The girl behind the counter concluded saying "you and your boyfriend meant to be together forever .. right now(I know .. I see the irony). . You should be strong. Focus on yourself. Make yourself feel good. Go to a spa or a massage parlor ..." etc etc.
Reminded me of the parrots coming out of their cages and picking cards back in India.
Looks like this is what cute women believe in .. their lives depend on a bunch of cards. No wonder I dont seem to find anyone who matches my thought process!!! :-)

All in all, it was a fun afternoon. Now, back to work!!

KAR.

Lazy long weekend!

Had a rather lazy long weekend. Celebrated Sankranthi with friends. Made Ven Pongal alongwith coconut and tomato chutney. Thats a big achievement for my cooking skills. Watched Russell Peters again. Man is this guy hilarious!

Watched the movie Raincoat (review). Interesting movie .. atleast moves away from the usual dance/song/action routine. However, I find it hard to appreciate or identify with the artificiality of the relationship between the two characters. How can two people who like each other have such egos as to not tell each other the truth?
Ok, before I get carried away with my rants, I thought both Aish and Ajay did a great job. Aishwarya seems to have gotten better. She was very good in Choker Bali as well.

KAR.