ThePanda

This probably is my last post from Delhi, before I get back to Providence and 82 degree weather (is hot, is what Dashboard says I should expect on Saturday, though this is New England I am talking about), not that I leave tomorrow, but I leave soon, and let’s face it there really isn’t much to write about in an existence dictated by food, packing up, going out to eat, and other such things. Oh well… Today’s probably not the best of days for the world in general, it being the 10th anniversary of the launch of Windows 95, of the ‘you make a grown man cry’ fame, not that I am complaining because a little less than 10 years ago (a month, a week, not sure), me, my father, an old acquaintance who seems to have since disappeared, sat in front of a 486DX2 (state of the art back in those days), with no less than 32 disks, attempting to install said operating system, failing at least once (my memory fails me about how many times exactly we failed, or where exactly, though I remember something to the effect of the 24^th disk being corrupted), before finally installing it, and being introduced to an operating system which almost instantly booted into a GUI. The love affair was short lived, it crashed too often, ate into my computer’s resources, was slow, was not nearly as cool as the Apple IIsi my father possessed in his office, and which I had been introduced to a few years earlier. OK Apple love came later, I was OK with Windows 95, NT 4.0, 98, RHL 6, RHL 7, RHL 8 (in that order), for some time before I finally went on to a Macintosh. And for those who notice this discrepancy in the list, no I really haven’t ever owned a machine which ran either Win2K, WinXP, any of the Fedora Core releases, or any other flavor of Linux, though Babbage, Fermi and Marconi, the computers I used in the i-lab at the CS department did run a Debian version compiled specifically to take advantage of the 64-bit capabilities offered by the Athlon 64. Oh well Macs are cooler, but I did once own a computer running Windows 95, I did once believe digital watches were über cool, and I did once love most things about Windows 95, so yup it’s 10 years since it came out, and well it’s no longer supported by Microsoft, go figure.

Things change unexpectedly, and I am finally also doing something semi-accademic for a job, and something which promises to be über fun. Most things require background information, and a lot of changes can be blamed on the Facebook. The jury’s still out on its new design, though I am not entirely sure I like it much, the clunky (they called it so) blue boxes were kind of nice, and umm did a better job of keeping things separated, but oh well, things change. Which brings me back to my second change… About two months ago, I had walked into this office where most of the Math departments admin staff seems to sit, wishing to sign up as a grader for math courses (I guess my thoughts were somewhat along the lines of could be fun), and umm not running into requisite person, and having to leave for Park City soon, I left a message with someone else, which I thought would work. Except no one got back to me, many days passed, and I decided that once I was back in Providence, I will go back and check up on the entire thing. Like last year they were hiring graders well into orientation week, and there can’t be too many graders anyways, and well I guess if it didn’t work out, I could always blame luck or something. Well turns out they did receive my stuff, and the powers that be got back to me yesterday, and I am now helping grade/am officially called a grader for TFB’s linear algebra class, which bears the same number as the one I took last semester, though is supposed to be more geometrical, in true TFB style, so woohoo for that. This also implies I am earning more than financial aid takes away from me, which on a whole is awesomely cool.

Work however has its weird points, I am engaged in some sort of a training exercise Monday and Tuesday, 8:30-2:30, learning about help-desking and stuff, which is kind of nice, seeing as I have little idea about what I am supposed to be (perhaps other than a help-desk monkey), though does take away from time which I had planned on spending doing other things. And I need to figure out how to get futon and stuff back to 111, seeing as I have likely lost my originally planned source of transportation. This would be easier if certain other people were inconvenienced, but umm that’s not really a road I want to walk down, and umm it leads to other problems. It would perhaps also be easier if I had a driver’s license for the US, but that requires taking a test, which requires driving on the right side of the road, which requires being in a car more often than twice a semester, which requires other things, so whatever. I also just got conflicting results from one of those blog quiz things, something which says that my primary thinking style involves me being unpredictable and unknown, while my secondary thinking style involves me being super-rational and super-logical, two properties which on a whole are irreconcilable. But seeing as knowing about Vulcan’s not smiling, and other things led to another one of those things calling me a “Nerd God” who scored above 99% of the nerd population out there, I am forced to face the utter unpredictability, and uselessness of these things. But umm I was bored, and EDK had a few posted over on his LiveJournal.

I also realized earlier this week that my flight to LHR involves sitting in a 747-400 for something to the order of 9 and a half hours, something I am not really pleased about, like 777s are nice, and comfortable, 747s are not as nice :(.

Have mostly run out of things to write about, so that is probably it from Delhi.

Ze Panda

The previously mentioned changes seem to be upon us, with a shift to Textpattern, and I plan on keeping this alive for longer than my previous ill-fated experiment with MoveableType, for one I am on a more stable server base, and am more likely to not back out, since I don’t have to do any funky copying or anything to get my words out, that was one of the biggest problems I was faced with after I lost space on Pauridge and was forced to shift over to my project space on Sourceforge, since on Sourceforge files inside of htdocs could not directly write out to htdocs itself (trouble with permissions), thus forcing me to juggle with copying files and stuff, and well I had far more time then than I do now, I was really really bored back then (true of current instance, but this lasts for like another 6 days or less), and things were beginning to settle down after the disaster that leaving school had brought, and umm playing around with computers was comforting, a source of constancy.

OK so I am not promising that there will not be a drastic cut in the number of posts within a week or so, that unfortunately has more to do with me biting off a lot more than I can chew, than this shift to Textpattern. Anyways continuing with my appreciation for TextPattern, I absolutely love Texile, which is like this non-markupish language which TextPattern seems to be promoting, yay no more triangular brackets, no more worrying about those things, no more worrying about most things, wooohoooooooo… I must also say I have gotten little (as compared to my usualy copious amounts) of sleep since yesterday when I began playing around with this installation, and I just realized that all the past entries had been meshed together into one whole block of text rather than continue as little paragraph like things, and that is sort of my fault, so if anyone hadn’t yet read them, and wants a more readable version, might I suggest moseying over to my Blogger archives or e-mailing me and stuff. Ooh and new hosting place provides cool SMTP, POP3 e-mail access for accounts on my domain, implying I can finally make real [at] thepanda [dot] org e-mail addresses for myself, though I think I’ll hold off on that for a while.

The template is still not final, I doubt it really ever will be, I am not sure I like the image used for the header, which is pretty much a rip off of the image on the original template I was modifying to come up with this one, I admit very little has been modified, and therefore acknowledgment at bottom remains as such, the academic code having reinforced such things as attribution. I realize no CC notice has gone up yet, nor has any copyright information, I plan on putting that up soon, perhaps as soon as I finish this entry, though I am alternating between jittery, over-excited, and tired and sleepy (unaided caffeine high, weird), so that may affect such promises. The disclaimer, and the advertising section is being done away with (I will put up a button for the next MIT survey), and I am attempting other cool things over the next week, whee a week to play with a CMS and continue watching TV shows, a week to being back at Brown, a week to the beginning of next year, a week to return to doing cool research, yay….

Ze Panda

Many days it has been since this was updated, and while I cannot honestly use being excessively busy as an excuse for my absence, in some ways it was being busy without working which indeed kept me away. If I have had one really productive day since I last wrote, it has to be yesterday, when I did get a major chunk of work done at night, I guess I have grown lazy since I last wrote, and things have been strange. Let’s see, when I last left this blog I was nearing the end of my stay at Park City, and I figure it was right as I had two really cool lectures left, and other such things. Those came to pass, and the 3 days of flight happened to be upon me, the day before I actually flew out, or rather in a more accurate sense, the midnight of the day I flew out was occupied by such activities as acquiring the new Harry Potter (I flew out on the same day as it was released), attending parties for the release, and hitting up Java Cow one last time. I must express my love for Cows ice cream, and the Java Cow place on Main St, at Park City, it probably is the only thing at Park City that I shall truly miss, and I am forced to admit that the Canucks seem to have bloody good ice cream. It is interesting to note however that I don’t find this in the slightest bit strange, something I could probably attribute to this past year, seeing as before then I remember people not buying ice cream, and a subsequent noticeable drop in ice cream availability during the “winters” in Delhi, and to think of it Delhi doesn’t really get that cold.

Subsequently post Park City I have gotten back to Delhi, and contrary to suggestions from certain quarters, I am not engaged in, or even planning on engaging myself in any acts involving cattle and such things. Delhi’s been pretty OK so far, it has been hot for the most part of it, and well I took a week off from Delhi to go off to Orissa, there really isn’t much to write about from Orissa, I saw a few cool places, and had some really good food, though it still doesn’t match places like the Andamans on the food front, I guess sea food, despite the fact that it is on the coast, is not Orissa’s forte/is expensive/is not eaten by people unless special occasions arise/... It was intriguing in other ways, I guess I have done a good job of staying away from that one place for a really long time, or well to be more accurate, my parents have been indulgent with my requests not go there, and I guess now that I’ve been there once, I really don’t plan on going back for a long time, as someone I know put it, the world’s still out there waiting to be explored. Delhi’s sort of lonely though, so far I can count on having called four people at most, one of them doesn’t live here, and is merely visiting for a week or so, and the other two have been around, I still haven’t hung out with people I usually hangout with when I am in Delhi, and said people are currently busy, which makes absolute sense, but is at the same time not conducive to the entire notion of hanging out. Well the food’s been good, not eating at Subways everyday is a good thing, I guess, and it is kind of nice to have two refrigerators full of food just lying there, though I guess my snack coffers are still as empty as they usually are. I also ended up going to school, my first trip back since I went to Brown, and I guess it’s still there, but it has lost its novelty, its not the place I used to spend whole days at, and the only reason I have been really about going to school this time round is because of the people I knew in there, and even they are fast disappearing. It is interesting though, I have gotten over a lot of what school was, I love Brown now, nearly everyone I know is at Brown, and being back at school isn’t as exciting as it once was, I loved being at school through 2003, even after I had graduated, it was probably the closest thing to a second home I had at that time, and now it is just there, it is in my past, left there to never be forgotten, and a part of me, but not something that I really miss or anything. Exun however is a completely different matter, and I guess I was back at school because of Exun, and we had this little (like it was tiny compared to some of the things I have done before) programming thingamajig, telling people about recursion and DP, and trying to inspire some ideas, and I guess I noticed quite a few anomalies between how me and IB used to do it before and how we did it now. For one, because of our own divergent reasons, a lot of our explanations involved not talking about the code part of it worked, in fact if it wasn’t IB, I had this entire grand plan about not writing a single line of code through the recursion part of it, but between Azgez and IB we kind of had to write code. I am however not entirely sure about how I’d deal with this if I had to do it again, I can still write C code, it’s not even hard to do, it’s just that between MATLAB and all the Scheme and OCaml I did last year, and all of the being annoyed over Java has really turned me into not liking what I did all through school that much anymore, and I guess I was just weirded out by some of the things I was doing, and I guess I managed to freak a fair number of people out. Pizza Hut has grow more expensive, and that’s a weird thing, their pizzas really haven’t improved, they need to learn from Antonio’s even, and Antonio’s isn’t even close to the best pizza I have ever eaten (that was thanks to NTM in the city).

Other than sleeping, eating, and watching copious amounts of television (it hasn’t improved, it has gotten worse, I have little else to do), I have been writing e-mails and reading papers, which contrary to how it may sound is pretty exciting, and I ran into this really cool thing yesterday, which had me all excited, and I have a mail from R of R&N (the book) fame, and I am kind of pleased about that, like it’s really cool and all, and I guess the research is beginning to sound like more fun, even though I am hopelessly lost trying to figure out how Expectation Maximization works and about all those things I missed while I was lazing around in Delhi/Orissa, I kind of which I had my copy of R&N with me, though between the 6 books I am definitely carrying back, and the 3 or so others I plan on fitting in if I have space, I don’t think bringing R&N would have been a really good idea.

Ooh things to appreciate, I forgot to ever mention that while I was dreading the entire act of American Air from Boston to London/Heathrow, I really really loved AA, it is the best airline I have been in so far, and the 777’s they fly are majestic, they have absolutely gargantuan seats, the in-flight entertainment is good in an extremely non-sucky way, the food is good, and the people on it are really really good, and if it wasn’t in the red whenever news about its financial status seeps through, I would make an effort to fly them wherever I could. Then of course of CNET’s shenanigans in response to their 10^th anniversary/birthday, and I guess I really like the The Top 10 Tech We Miss list, though I wish I had had more direct experience with a Newton, I have heard a lot about it, though I have never really seen one.

Less than 3 weeks to Providence, that’s worth looking forward to, yay.

Ze Panda