Columbus Day Weekend 2006, the weekend of instaparties (yes they exist), reading papers on online games and contacting lots of professors. How else will we remember the early October Weekend which changed little, the weekends spent trying to install Xen because the guy who presented Xen could switch between OSs in a manner we previously associated with fast user switching. The weekend when using the royal we seemed like a good idea, until it sounded so much less interesting, and so much more dorkish.
For those who’ve been curious (there have been a few), yes I am still here, I just stopped writing for a bit, there was much to be done, there still is much to be done, and sometimes you just have to live through what’s left to be done, rather than taking the time to painfully document it, since much like code, the rest of the world self documents to a large extent. For those insanely weird questions about what is up at this point in time, I have a list: algorithmics, writing an OS, weird graphics models, looking at grad school, thinking about the GRE, and other such thing. A few weeks ago Northern Exposure was on the list too, but I am done watching seasons 1 and 2 at this point in time, and I don’t know anyone who owns the rest of the seasons.
Classes, I am in this amazing graduate seminar on Economics and Algorithms, and as much as I have never liked econ, I really really enjoy this class. This might in part be because of what I have so far considered economics to be, and and what this class seems to be portraying it as, perhaps economics would have been more enjoyable had the 9th and 10th grade attempts at motivating its study dealt more with rationality and selfish-agents and less with how much rice the farmers in India produce. Maybe that’s what was wrong with the entire idea of “social studies” all through school, too much emphasis on where things are produced, too little emphasis on fun things. Other than that, I am taking the standard combination of OS class, and OS lab, something I knew I’d eventually take, if only to add to the writing an operating system part of my life. The one big thing which has come out of all of this, is that back when I was attempting to write Aurelius, and failing, the problem was not so much getting code written, as an inability to actually rank what was important. Getting stuff to boot up on the x86 was a fun experience but largely unnecessary at that stage, writing everything else would probably have been as much if not more fun, and would probably have led to more productivity and more actual work.
I need to find an advisor for research and a graduate thesis, so far my limited efforts have been somewhat successful, successful in that I know of at least one professor who’s considering figuring this out for next fall, and I have e-mails out. I am interviewing with Microsoft sometime soon, might as well prepare for next summer, seeing as none of the professors I have spoken to yet will be around over the summer, and I can prepare to work from pretty much anywhere. Then again I should perhaps be working now, but it is Sunday on a 3 day weekend, maybe I need the break, need to stop thinking about warfare (in the past) and rational agents (in the future). But then again, there are all these other things I need to do, things are going too fast, I need to find a way to get more things done in less time, a way to both be in Boston next weekend, so I can program for a competition, and in Providence, so I can take the sample GRE. Oh well, I think I already gave up on Boston, so Providence it is.
As I sit here this night, seeing the world take a step closer to the craziness that has become a hallmark of the times, funnily enough, right after we spent hours coming up with bad movie like endings for what lies in everyone’s future (I disappear into a Caribbean island), it is somewhat funny to be jarred back to reality and realizing it is only less fun and more crazy. It is also funny that during this weekend I have received e-mails which have amused me, e-mails from people who I am not sure I’d ever imagine to be working during a long weekend. I am a little stressed knowing what I know about work in the near future, did it ever strike anyone as odd that the more predictable parts of the future get, the stranger it gets.
This came up sometime this night, so I am going to put out feelings on this. Back when I was in high school, there were three distinct classifications to people, people I liked and spoke to, people I did not like nor spoke to, and people I didn’t care much about. Now I find myself not caring about the distinction too much, not overtly anyways, the few people I have run into from the last category, I have been forced to talk to, because they sort of initiate conversation, and it is socially unacceptable to not respond. However in general it feel like to an extent, people I know of from school, I talk to at times, if only because we share common history, and common history is perhaps overrated, but it makes people some of what they are. That being said, I am not really sure I am the same person I was when I walked out of school, 3 years and some months ago. It also feels like before this year, there were all these times when I met all these people I knew, and now, it has been over two years since I met some people I was close to, especially since my last trip, nearly a year ago, did not involve meeting too many people.
This doesn’t matter most days, I know too many people here, and I am always engaged in too many things with the people I know, and the people I don’t know, and sometimes it feels like I have always known the people I know really well, and by now I figure I have had as many meaningful conversations with their parents, as I have ever really had with all my other friend’s parents, and I know them pretty well at this point in time. It however matters on days like what used to be today, two hours ago. You see, the day that was, happened to be the 8th of October, and the 8th of October is a normal day, there might be some significance attached to Christopher Columbus, the Gregorian calendar was implemented in a few countries, and Germany annexed Poland on this day 62 years ago, but not too much of this matters for this. What does matter, is that the 8th of October is the birthday of a very close friend of mine, and it used to be that on most October 8ths, we’d eat a little ice cream, enjoy a few rounds of badminton at his house, and celebrate this fact. When I moved to Brown, I was careful to note down the dates of such occasions, and until last year, was very good about sending greetings and such, but at this point in time, I am not even sure I have the right e-mail address any longer. The last contact we had was a brief message on Orkut, and Orkut scrapbook messages are a lot worse than Facebook wall posts for people who know about such things, and was never really followed up on by me. I figured once I stopped actively trying to keep in touch with the two people I had tried really hard to stay in touch with, mostly because they were my two closest friends, it was no loner worth trying to keep in touch with anyone else. But now I am left with all these synchronized calendars which keep track of such events, what am I to do, delete them, and risk losing history, though anything on the internet never goes away, or just commemorate them by thinking about the people I once knew, and how someday we shall meet again.
To the few whom it matters, I am going to be home for winter break, I should be in, and not jet-lagged once we get to about Christmas Eve, and I actually have a cell-phone number in India that works, and should hopefully have access to a mode of transportation. E-Mail me for the phone number, and it shall be yours. This is especially important since I won’t have the same landline number as I have previously had, and I have no clue as to what my number would be.
It is hard to come up with an ending for so wide-ranging an entry, let’s just say I continue my search for rational agents, jobs and research projects. Let the craziness that is the world continue getting crazier.
Ze Panda