The balls they keep rolling

Sitting here in my lab on a Friday afternoon 30 minutes before our group meeting, I feel so sleepy (nothing new about that) that I thought the best way to do something productive is to try posting something on my blog. It has been 3 weeks since I left the paradise called `Google Internship' and came back to grad school (or what some others call Hell, although I would beg to differ). Looking back I must say that life at Google was pretty luxurious, free food and no hassle of making food or cleaning dishes or cleaning up after yourselves. But the thing is that even though it has just been 3 weeks, I do not miss it at all and have happily gotten into the grove of my usual motions of waking up and putting a bowl of milk in the microwave and a pan on the stove with my eyes still half closed (mind you it does not mean it is really early, generally it is like 10 in the morning). And I finally wake up halfway through my cereal just in time to make sure I do not burn my eggs. And I must say, I do not miss the ease and availability of food there. But what I do miss are the great friends I made there, people with whom I used to have lunches and dinners and then go out for drinks. And I miss playing soccer every monday and wednesday evening and at times on friday afternoons. I made a lot of friends and acquaintances on the field (I hope I made some friends though).

And at soccer I was amazed to see so many people so talented at it. Such great ball control, great passes, great vision. It was really fun playing with them. And then I met people who never gave up, people with broken ankles who would still keep playing for the love of the game. After duct-tapes and wraps and ankle braces, they would jump on to the field and be awesome as usual. Looking at all these people, I felt so inadequate and useless. But I am just glad that I was allowed to play with them. Reminds me of my time in undergrad when I used to play with some other really talented people.

The thing is that I have played football long enough, but I still suck at it. But that is true for swimming for me too. I have been in a swimming pool since I was 5. You would think I would be some amphibian. But alas, I am a slower swimmer than people who have swam for less than a couple of months. I am sure there are a whole bunch of 5 - 6 years old kids out there who are quicker than me, and the only reason I might be able to beat them (if I can that is), is because of my longer stroke length and height. I guess I can never get better at swimming or football ever. Nor can I ever figure out why.

Sorry for digressing. So yeah, as much as I used to enjoy football at Google, I am back to playing water polo here at Tech. And as usual, it is painful as shit for me. But I do enjoy it, I just don't know it yet. And if only I could swim faster, I could have been more useful for our team. So my point being that even though I miss a few things from the summer, I am really glad to be back to my life here in Atlanta.

Now my meeting has started so I might have to get to the point of this post in another post. Later!

Confusion

Hungry at 2 in the night in San Francisco is not something you want to be. However, if you are hungry, eating some random hot dog being sold by random chick on some random street corner is probably not a good idea. You know what is worse - eating two of those at that. Well in my defense I would say that it seemed like a really good idea at that time. I immensely enjoyed the hot dogs a lot and felt really good after eating them. But, obviously, I learnt my lesson when I had to visit the rest room five times the next day. Without going into further details, I would like to say that even though this should be a lesson enough for me, I have a feeling that placed in the same situation again, I would probably make the same decision again. Probably explains why my sister calls me a hard headed dumb-ass (mind you I am removing a lot of expletives from the this title).

Well this was probably the most memorable part of my past weekend, because the rest of it was mostly sleeping. Endless shameless utter lethargy. Oh yes, I did go kart racing. And after racing continuously for 15 minutes, I was just hoping that the race would just end because it was really strenuous. Made me wonder how the Formula One racers would keep on racing for 90 minutes at much higher speeds, much higher g-forces and thousand times more stress. But when I was thinking about this, I started thinking about how I am thinking. Call it meta-thinking. Made me think how full of myself I am. Just driving a kart for 15 minutes, I started relating myself with Formula One car racers, people who have dedicated their lives to racing, and are the top tier of racing in the world. Oh well, I guess the whole thing is about trying make ourselves feel better about ourselves instead of seeing ourselves as utter failures.

But then I do not think much of introspection. So moving on. This summer I have been really really disappointed with the movies that came out. I am not an avid movie watcher, but being bored here in this small city of Mountain View where you do not have too many things to do, and having a movie theater 5 minutes from the my place made me catch almost every movie that came out this summer. I think that is also a reason why I came across so many movies where I just wanted to shoot myself. I mean it started off with a movie like Star Trek, which I liked a lot. Not being a big fan of the original series or the movies, I utterly enjoyed this movie. But then after that, it was all downhill. But I think the movie that broke my heart was Terminator Salvation. I mean seriously. You call that a movie. It is a bunch of out-of-place action scenes stitched together. At least the new transformer movie tried (emphasis on 'tried') to get a story in. But Terminator Salvation! I mean every 5 minutes of non-action scenes, you would suddenly have machines show up from somewhere and then explosions. And if that was not enough, an attempted rape scene in the middle of nowhere and the subsequent courtship between the two characters. Reminded me of the really tacky mid-90s Hindi Bollywood movies where the protagonist saves a girl from getting raped and so the girl decides to let the guy have his way with her. And to top it all, you have Mr. Batman after some throat infection treatment shouting "We are all dead!" every 10 minutes. I know that it is just a movie, like it or forget it. And I agree that I should not go this ballistic just because of a movie. But it really broke my heart. And as if the movie didn't piss me off enough. I hear more and more people telling me how they liked the new terminator movie. SERIOUSLY! I have to count till 20 to stop myself from punching them in the face.

And you know what I am most confused about. I cannot figure out why I care so much. It is just a movie. A crappy movie, but then it is not the first crappy movie I have seen. In contrast to this, I enjoyed the new transformer movie (I still do not remember its full name). But that is mostly because of the extended footage of (hot-hot-hot-hot)^100 Megan Fox running in slow motion whereas everybody around her is running normally. (Just so you know, she is coming in a new movie called Jennifer's body, after seeing whose trailer, I feel it is going to be all about her being nude in it, which in my opinion is going to make her lose a lot of sexy points) I mean why would you give the whole world what they want from you so easily so soon. You should play your cards right and save your ace in the hole for the right time. But maybe she does exactly that in this movie. I will only know once I see it. But I am confused, why would somebody give away that one thing that makes them sexy.

But yeah. Before I completely forget about what I was talking about regarding the movies that came out this summer, I want to just say that most of them sucked. Period.

Perspective

I was at the Pride parade at San Francisco yesterday. I saw a lot of things, a lot of ways in which people were trying to express themselves, a lot of which did not make any sense to me. But then there are a lot of things I do not know or understand. I mean I understand freedom of speech and expression, but what is the point of standing stark naked in the middle of the road while people around you are staring at you and taking pictures of you. This is not a rhetoric question. I am really asking. Unless being naked stands for feeling liberated and since the theme of the parade was freedom, it seemed fitting, but still kinda ridiculous.

So I did have fun and some form of weird social and cultural experience, it kind of reminded me of the kind of procession and demonstration going on in Iran. Even they are fighting for their freedom, freedom from the theocracy controlled by the religious leaders, freedom to make their votes count, freedom to have a democracy. And when I thought of that, this parade at SF seemed so superficial. It is not that I have anything against gay rights. On the contrary, I believe everybody has the right to do whatever they want as long as they are not hurting somebody else (but then again I cannot discuss the fact of where to draw the line on hurting somebody else). What I am trying to say is that asking for the freedom to choose your sexuality is a fair thing to demand. But it kinda loses any substance when compared to fighting for you actual freedom. But then it is human nature to always ask for more. On one hand, you have people who are getting beat up on the road and getting tear gas thrown at but still not budging, and then you have people who are getting invited to the white house and have an audience with the president and are still discontent.

I mean it is only fair to be discontent when you do not get what you want, but looking at all this, I have this weird feeling. It is something I am not able to explain. I feel it is fine that if you are just doing the parade with the desire to party, do whatever you want, it is your day. I am a big party animal myself. But what I hate is the so-called anti-establishment crowd who want to change the world by doing pot and playing guitar in their moms' basement. I think you have guessed right - I am talking about the ridiculous hippie crowd. A really good friend of mine aptly summed them as "They want to fight against what's happening in Tibet, but cannot point on the map where in the world Tibet is".

But then I feel I should not be saying anything about them - I am not doing anything about what is happening in Iran or give too much sh*t about it. I read about it, feel a little sad about it, have a sense of admiration towards the people fighting for freedom, but after that I simply go about with my day and Iran is lost somewhere in the plethora of information that goes into my brain. So who am I judge.

But I feel somebody should. Somebody who is deserving enough to do so, but then if somebody is deserving enough, he is probably too busy actually dealing with the problem rather than dealing with how people react to it or perceive it. However, if enough people actually care about their fellow human beings, about people they do not know and probably would never meet, the weak law of large number kinda says that eventually you will have somebody who not only cares but go farther and does something about it. But I do not think that growing long hair and sitting in circles is ever going to work.

Serenity

I am here sitting by Lake Shoreline on a bench at 6 in the evening while the sun is still pretty high in the sky and a really chilly breeze is blowing. It is so cold that I might have to leave soon since all I am wearing is a polo shirt and surfer short. But while I am here on my laptop, listening to my iPod, seeing all these people around me in the lake and the park around it, I feel strangely alone. And somehow it is so soothing. Not that I am in any pain of any sort, but it is really nice feeling to have a conversation with yourself once in a while. I wish I was asking my self questions like what I want to do with my life, stare deep into my soul and find out what is it I really want, but I was too lazy to do so and settled for writing this blog.

As I was saying. It is a strange feeling being alone in the middle of everybody. And sitting here on my laptop with Google's free wifi all around town, I am even connected to a lot of other people through this fancy box. But alone is good. But only at times. Unlike last night when I eventually visited San Francisco after spending more than a month in Northern California without going to San Francisco. But I do not like doing all the artsy/touristy stuff. Like biking across Golden Gate bridge or sitting in Golden gate park. I bike everyday to work thank you and spent a lot of time in green parks all my childhood. But then I guess this are uncommon things for people living in big cities which do not have parks and the only mode of transportation is a car. And I am not a big fan of museums or operas and stuff. So in a way, SF does not have anything that I desire. And if I think about what I desire, it seems I am simply a thrill seeking guy. And I think that this world is full of people like me. Thank god for them since it is because of them you have stuff like roller coasters and sky diving and snow boarding and so on.

Well what I am trying to say is that... actually I have no idea what was the point I was trying to make. And it has gotten too chilly and windy and I am going to head back indoors (which is atleast a 20 minute bike ride away).

Death and All His Friends

"Those who are dead are not dead

they are just living in your head"

- Coldplay - 42

A few days ago I watched this movie called Star Trek. I was a good movie in my opinion and I enjoyed it a lot. So as usual, I was busy dicussing the movie with my sister during both our office hours (I have no idea how we managed to get paid from our work considering how much we IM each other the whole day). Apparently she liked the movie as well (a thing to clarify here is that our opinions rarely match). Then she asks me the following question : "Did you notice Randy Pausch in the movie?" Obviously I reacted "What?!! Randy Pausch was in the movie!!" Subsequently she sent me a link to Randy Pausch's website where it did say that he was in fact in the movie, albiet for a short time. But that does not in any way lower the awesomeness of the fact that Randy Pausch was in Star Trek. Then innocently I say to my sister "I wonder how he is doing now." To this she replied "He's died dude!! Which planet have you been on? He passed away almost a year back." To this I replied with an expletive. You can imagine my surprise when I realized I somehow managed to miss a big news like this (to those who do not get it, read on, I will provide some premise). This reminded me of the time I first caught Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture" live at school. It inspired me to learn a lot of things. I was all set to write a blog on that and wanted to spread all the things I learned. But I never got around to it. And those lessons have been wiped away from the desert that is my brain and all I remember are small things. And right now I could have watched his lecture again, but then with the fear that I might forget to write the blog again, I decided to go freestyle.

Luckily I did make some notes about writing that blog and I did find them so here it goes. Randy Pausch was this professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University at Pittsburg (yes there is more than one CMU). He was very productive in his career and was supposedly a really great speaker. However, since life likes ironies, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and sometime in September 2007 he decided to give his last lecture. This lecture got a lot of following and was also made into a book. I managed to catch only a part of it (I was attending class!!!), but there were certain features of it which struck me very deeply. Even though he was giving his celebrated "last lecture" in front of the packed crowd at CMU (and also much more since this was telecast live at many other locations), he knew how to move the focus from himself to somebody else. He brought out a birthday cake for his wife's birthday in the middle of the lecture. Although I am not a big believer of the celebration of birthdays, it was amazing how easily he could take attention away from himself (if you notice, even in this line I had to bring the attention to myself by having to say what my opinion is on birthdays even though it is totally irrelevant here). In this world where everybody tries to shout over everybody else, rarely does anybody know how to or even want to not be the center of the attention.

Another striking thing he mentioned was to accept your mistake. You can try to explain as much as you want and bend stuff as much as you can, but in the end there was something wrong with your answer which made others think that it is a mistake. So learn to accept your mistake, take feedback and make you answer better so that nobody finds a mistake anymore. This is so hard for me to do. I try to smooth talk my way out of any mistake and I pride myself on that. But in retrospect, I would have learned so much and been so much better off if I had just accepted my mistake and took feedback to become better. But another point he raised was something I totally believe in. He said that in all his life's experience, he learned that doing the right time always leads to good things happening to you. This is totally against the doctrine that "nice guys finish last". What I feel is misunderstood about this saying is that people confuse being nice with inaction.

The final thing he talked about was the secret to success. And what he said seems so simple that it has to be true. Hard work is the only secret. There is no magic formula, no luck, just plain simple hard work. However, simpler the way, the harder it is to traverse it. Atleast in my case. He also said a lot of things and they were all equally important. But I shall stop here to say that with his life's work and with this lecture, he managed to leave behind a legacy. People will remember him. The nice thing is though that during his last few days, thousands of people were eagerly following his progress in the fight against cancer. And even though he did lose the battle eventually, he had a lot of people who were trying to give him some form of support.

On one hand, you can die with thousands wishing the best for you. Or you can die of a freaking drowning incident in your backyard swimming pool like Rajeev Motwani. I never heard him speak but I did read some of his works for research. And his work was pretty amazing. For those who don't know this guy, he was the advisor of Larry Page and together with Larry and Sergey Brin, created the 'PageRank' algorithm that was the backbone behind the startup which is now known to the world as the super giant Google. And Google was not the only feather in his cap. He was involved in a lot of startups in the Silicon valley including another big one called Paypal. I forgot to mention that he was also a professor of Computer Science, but at Stanford. I do not know much about him as a person, but from what I have read, he was a person who was always ready to help others. And even though his life came to an abrupt end at an early age of 47, he managed to accomplish more than what a lot of people combined might not have been able to achieve. I do realize that it is really hard for his family to cope with this, but considering the finality of death, they might be able to take solace in the fact that his work has touched millions in a good way. And the funny thing is that, when you help others, good things happen. For you not just for others. Maybe it is a simple cause and effect scenario or maybe there is a God (or something) counting your good deeds. But generally this is what happens (atleast what most people tell me).

Even though these two people died in different ways and touched people in different ways and in different magnitudes, but there is something common about these two professors of Computer Science. The UN mandate states that "all human beings are born equal", but I do not think they die equal. Some just die, while some others live in your heads.

Change the world, something like that

There is that innate urge to rant about how I didn't blog for almost 5 months now and how I cannot feel anymore and that I have gotten myself into a groove that I can't get out of. But the bottomline is that I didn't write so lets just not talk about it anymore.

The last four months have been interesting. After an awesome winter with my sister and brother-in-law, I finally got my sleep cycle in control and actually I spent the whole spring semester waking up before 10am almost everyday. That might sound nothing exceptional, but compared to waking up at 2pm everyday, this sounds like a big leap forward. And 10am is the worst case. Usually it was closer to 8-9am and I am so glad that I got my schedule right. In fact in the beginning of the semester, I started coming in relatively early, my labmates would be amazed to see me there. And I am so glad I have made it through 4 months of being a dayman (fighter of the nightman!).

Other than that, this semester somehow ended up being a semester all my projects reached a logical break points. So I ended up having 2 submissions in the span of 2 weeks. The first thing was started and finished in 3 months and I felt it was a decent paper but then my opinion doesn't matter, since the paper eventually did get rejected. But it is ok. Then the next two weeks were spent trying to finish off this other paper on which most of the work was done by my labmate Dong and exactly after 12 days, this paper was submitted in no other than a learning theory conference. And the paper was kinda cool, but it was obvious that the paper was cooked together really quickly so there were a lot of apparent silly mistakes and lo and behold, it got rejected. But I am glad it did, because now I have made some fixes and I am resubmitting :). Afterall thats PhD - reiterate until somebody eventually sees it your way :P. Well other than that, there is a paper on which I have been sitting for a while. Hopefully I will be submitting it in the upcoming deadline and be done with.

Other than that, the semester was pretty relaxed, except for a operating systems course (the easier one at it though). This semester I did manage to go to Mardi Gras at New Orleans at the peak time and it was awesome. By awesome I mean awesome. I am so glad I did go there because you won't believe whats going on there until you are actually there. Just that I cant say too much about it on the blog. Just that it is one of the best parties I have ever been (if only I didnt need to look out for the guys who were completely s*&t-faced).

But the reason for going for Mardi Gras was a conveniently scheduled water polo tournament at the University of Tulane. And that was fun too :). Talking about water polo, this semester was pretty packed with tournaments and it was a lot of fun. I learnt a few things about being the goal keeper. Applying those things in practice is a totally different issue and lets not go there.

And yeah I was thinking of writing something about changing the world. But am too lazy so that has to wait. Baby steps!

Watching the world burn!

I was never the guy who looked around the world and tried to understand what is going on. The reason for this being that I was never the guy in the news. It wasn't even anybody I was remotely acquainted with. But that luxury didn't last forever, and it made me look around. "Search for meaning" or "make sense of it all" as they say. I am not saying I put in much effort to do so, but even to my ignorant self everything seems illogical (although this might be self-explanatory).

The obvious absence of optimality in the schemes of killing innocent people is apparent by the vague goals of the schemes. I mean other than the very common "spread terror" and "send a message", I don't see what else they accomplish other than obtain the brunt of public hatred and bad faith of people in power (this doesn't mean that they actually care, but do it just for the sake of it because everybody wants to look good; I don't mean to say not caring is bad, I am not judge of that, I am just saying that lot of times people do/say stuff they are supposed to do/say, but actually don't care about it). I am not sure where I am going with this but I can't understand what is the agenda of terrorism. However, if a "powerful" country did what they do, it would just be the protection of independence (read Israel and China). But these countries do seem to have agenda - it amounts to land = money = power = etc and at times just suppression of opposition. I was just wondering if terrorism will be called anything else if they got themselves a more concrete agenda than "freedom of holy land" and "punishment to innocent people just because they have been wronged". I mean they must want something. They don't want to spend their whole lives fighting (although the futility of the point is apparent in the fact that the leaders are the people who actually don't do the dirty work and live in luxury, equivalent to leaders of any country using its military forces). They must want something - money, land, what. Or is there hidden agenda - population control, and they are doing a favor to the world?

Lot of things that I have said here lacks a lot of general knowledge and information and I am just a bystander standing really far away, and although I might be in someway affected by all this, I wouldn't know about it until it hits me in my face.

Come to think of it, with the same argument, I can say that the spending of millions of dollars for running a huge collider to understand the origin of mass and sending a huge telescope to figure out the origin of the universe is equally pointless. Or huge build up and the eventual victory and celebrations of the first African-American president of the United States. It is probably because I am an alien here, but I don't understand why this is considered a great leap in democracy.

But a little thought makes us realize that we do not always need to look big issues or events to understand that the lack of logic in human action. I have heard of people living their lives as per some great quote by some great person. I mean how do you understand anything by applying something someone said thinking god-knows what. This doesn't mean the quote is not artistically great (and I can't be any judge of that either), it is just that it was about some other person. What I feel is that we try to justify what we do by these things. It is not the reason, rather the justification. We have already made the decision, we just want to look good to others, so we compare ourselves to somebody whom most think of as great. But like history, the greatness of something or someone depends on who is talking about it (read whoever in currently powerful).

Talking of the way we make decisions, I feel our decisions are generally locally optimal (not necessarily temporally, rather on the number of people being affected). Religion, as I see it, is just the same thing, but with some people spending time to find a global optimum. I am not saying that any religion is more optimal than other or that they have been able to obtain the global optimum.

But if I am asked if I would like to change something, I would say no, but that is mostly because of my lack of knowledge, not because of the non-existence of anything better. What I feel is that the world as a whole is trying to find a global optimum and these perturbations happening all around are implicitly intended towards that. What we need is a guide for the world, analogous to the gradients in any optimization problem. But on the other hand, if we reach a global optimum, what next?

Random Rants I

When you are running a race, you can't breathe. Because your heart is pumping hard to keep you going forward. And even if it is not getting what it needs, it keeps going. It keeps going it wants something. It wants it bad. But you know that at the end of the race you can stop and breathe. But what happens when you are chasing something. When do you stop and breathe?

I have made many false starts in the past months, but I could never go around to writing again. Blame it on work, laziness or anything. But I feel it is because I am changing. I am changing into a person who no longer tries to see the different perspectives of things. A person who only looks at the bad side and keeps complaining. Maybe that is why I cannot think of anything to write.

Lot of things have happened over the last few months, but I feel that nothing of consequence has happened, and hence I do not feel the urge to write. Among other things, recent incidents have been such that it should have prompted me to feel. But now I feel what is the point of writing about it. What is the point of saying it aloud. It does not mean anything. I mean there was a time I used to write my journal and believed that it is just plain ridiculous to express my deepest inner feelings on a public platform. I have not written regularly in my journal for around 7 years now, and I think the last entry was sometime in August 2007.

I got distracted here. Brought myself back after some time.

Well I feel I have been running too fast for sometime now. Did not get a chance to sit back and look at the things around me. And not just see it, but really look at it. And since I have been running, I am just breathing in puffs.

A really long weekend

Well that's usual for me. Having a 5 day weekend and a 2 day week :-). But those weekends are mostly spent inebriated or trying to recover from it by sleeping 12 hours a day. But this weekend was different. It included me doing somethings for the first time, including going to my sister's house for the first time although she has been away from home (as has had her own house) for almost 6 years now. No. Come to think of it this is the second time I visited my sister . This is first time I visited my sister for the first time in the US.
Phew! The thing I did do for the first time was canoeing. And I must say I suck at it big time. And I mean real big time. Actually if there was any sport for drifting on the water with a boat (as opposed to with a car on the road), I might be considered a good beginner. But it was fun anyways. The only sad thing was that the water at the creek was so "dirty"ish (I don't know what to call it exactly since it has high content of blue green algae and that actually is not dirt but instead is a life form in its natural habitat) that it was not safe to swim in it. Otherwise it was a perfect day for a swim at the creek. Things to try after this is kayaking, jet-skiing and wake boarding (which from what I hear can be a little bit painful).
Following that, I played mini-golf for the first time, and realized that I am just too strong for mini-golf. I ended with a score of 19 which means worse that one shot below par for each of the holes, which is not too bad, considering how I started. On the same day I tried my hand at the batting range; and being the overconfident guy that I am, I went into the fast lane. As expected, I managed to hit just one out of 20 pitches. But I wouldn't give up easy, so next time around I made some adjustments to my stance and positioning and finally managed to make contact with at least 10 of the 20 pitches. This was pretty good for my ego, but as it turns out, not for my hand. I found out first hand why the batters wear gloves in baseball.
I also worked on hurting my hand in another way. I started playing Mortal Kombat on PS2. This was also a first for me, and after the first 10 minutes, I realized that my thumb was going to regret it big time. Although I could do some stuff, I was unable to explore that whole depth of the moves in that game because my thumb just wasn't fast enough.
So I must say it was a great weekend, but it was incomplete because I went to Indianapolis, the capital of NASCAR and kart racing, and I didn't watch any (not that I am sad that I missed it, I am more of a formula one fan). I did kart race once although that was not a first time.
And how could I forget. I managed to break the left Ctrl button of my laptop. That was a first too and probably the last. For sometime now my laptop is going to look a little ugly :-(

Dying brain cells

Something is off. I can't think of anything useful to talk about. I mean I just ended an internship at a big company like Google where the work was interesting too (in a way :)). I spent 2 months in India where I met family and a lot of friends after quite some time. Even met some people whom I remembered as kids themselves have kids. I heard about friends getting married and things happening. And even after all this, I don't feel like writing. Something is way off.
Maybe it is just plain laziness, lack of patience to just type for so long. But now that I have managed to start somehow, I'll try to make something coherent of it. Let us start with "not-so-life-changing" experiences. Two months at internship with a lot of luxury somehow made me realize how much I liked to be in grad school. Today morning I was having my usual humongous breakfast and it took me an hour to cook and eat it and clean the dishes. And while I was cleaning my dishes, I was remembering how I just used to eat a huge breakfast and then just dropped the plates and left. But somehow I liked this thing more than that. It was like everything was in my terms. Maybe it was just the change that makes me like it right now. So I can't say anything for sure, but it felt nice (doesn't mean I didn't enjoy being in the company). The bottom line is that it was really a great experience to be in an internship in that company and to work with my really smart and helpful mentor, but I really don't mind swapping that life of luxury and money (lots of it at that) with poor and hard (people say so, I don't, not yet) life of a grad student.
Moving on. Met some good friends in Bangalore. It was really fun checking up on them (although I was indecent enough to not bid farewell to them properly, but then I believe goodbyes are too overrated, why waste time in goodbyes and (maybe) tears when you know you will meet again and have more fun than ever, and even if you don't meet again, you'll remember the good times together and not the painful goodbye you had thinking this is the last time you are meeting. The best goodbyes are those you have thinking you'll meet very soon). With some I relived the fun times I had earlier, and with some I had some awesome-r time than ever before. I also spent something like 5 - 6 consecutive hours playing AoE after a year, and I realized that I sucked at it as much as I used to if not more.
Coming back to school wasn't bad either. Met up with them and caught up with two months worth of action. Got back to cleaning my own shower and scrubbing my own dishes, and it didn't feel bad or sad at all. Got back to water polo practice after more than three months and it was painful (more than usual). Have taken some courses which should be fine too. But one thing I haven't got back to yet is research and thats whats really worrying. I have two months' worth of research to catch up with and I don't know where to start. Actually I think I know where to start but can't think of a good way to do it. I hate not doing any research because it is actually fun if you can get past the stage of going through pages of existing literature.
Well I am interrupted now so maybe I'll try to think again. Right now maybe I am just breathing in puffs.

Enough! Enough now!

For the past four months, I have been obsessing about the new Batman movie. And now that I have seen it, I don't know what to do. I tell myself that enough with this obsession and now it is time to move on. But all this time when I was eagerly waiting for it and obsessing about it, I never thought of what I would do once I did see it. It was a great movie and I enjoyed it a lot, but here today I am not going to give a review of that movie. I am just wondering what to do with all that obsession'al' energy pent up inside me with nothing to direct it to.
As in obsessions are good if used properly. It can be used as a motivator to do something you need to do, but are not actually too excited to do. I have found this technique very useful. But I must admit, that all my obsessions ended with me obtaining the object of my obsession (a sentence with too many words starting with 'ob'), and me not knowing where to go from there.
I am pretty sure that like always, I will again obtain a new object of obsession and the cycle would continue. It is just that every time I reach the point I am at right now, I feel a bit lost and confused and disinterested (yes, I am like this right now just because of a stupid movie). As all the wise men say - "All things that are, are with more spirits chased than enjoyed".
People say that obsession is bad, but I feel that obsession drives me forward, much more than I would have normally tried for. I guess it does have the capability to push us into the abyss, but I have always been too stubborn to learn from others' mistakes. I take pride in making my own mistakes and then blaming myself for the rest of my life. So I shall continue with this flawed cycle of obsession until one day I become wise enough to say "Enough! Enough now!".
Till then I shall continue searching for my new obsession or chasing one.

Homeward bound

Sitting at the new Bengaluru International airport and having an hour to kill, I thought writing a post would be not too bad an idea. Considering that I have had a pretty awesome experience with flights, I decided that today I shall get to the airport in time. For that, I took the shuttle to the airport which reaches the airport around two and a half hours before my flight. Turns out, the traffic was better than usual today and we reached the airport half an hour before schedule.So here I was at the airport, three hours before my flight. I was in time for my flight though.

Well the thing is that I am going home (finally some would say) to meet my family. Took a couple of days off from my office. My mentor was awesomely accommodating about it. He is quite experienced though, and luckily I am getting to learn some things from him.

Unfortunately, right now I am feeling very sleepy and no ideas are propping in my oh-so-fertile mind. Although I must mention that the Bengaluru airport is pretty awesome (much much better than the Kolkata international airport) and the fact that it is so far from the city is not that big an issue if you consider the fact that the authorities have provided the cities with hourly shuttles from all over the city all throughout the day. I kinda like it, though it is a bit inconvenient for domestic flights compared to the previous airport and for frequent domestic fliers. The thing is that Bengaluru does need an international airport and this is a price the city has to pay for that. But you can always look at the bright side and say that the city is getting a chance to expand instead of cramming up in that minuscule of a city.

I am slowly realizing that I am one of those kind of people who have an opinion to give on any topic under the sun, even if they have never heard about it before. And this just reduces my own confidence in the reliability and credibility of my own opinions, which is kind of sad and disappointing. Although that is in no way going to stop me from continuing that.

Moving on. As I mentioned earlier, my gymming days always end in tears. Slowly but surely, I can feel my will to work out every morning become weaker every morning. And now that I am going to have a five day break, I don't know if I can force myself to get back to that schedule. Lets hope for the best.

Now I guess the next post will be after I come back from home. So later readers!

Moving on

Most days I promise to myself that tomorrow would be better. By better I mean more productive. But I guess I can't change things in one go. What ends up happening is that when I ...... wait!! What the hell am I saying. Moving on.

Got myself in a routine again. Wake up in the morning, go to the gym and work out (although I know that this never ends well and I will never have a well shaped bod), then go to my table and press a bunch of keys, then come back home and sleep. Oh I forgot. I hog. A lot. I mean A LOT. A more of a reason why the working out at the gym is not going to make too much of a difference.

Well I must add that Google does take care of their employees. I was thinking of writing about my experience here at the internship, but well I haven't had any. It is just that I have a problem and I am trying to solve it and not being very able to do that much yet. Well one thing though. My desktop machine here is a 4 dual cores (that means 8 cores - I know it is simple math but I just wanted to emphasize on that point) with 8GB ram and I don't know how much hard disk. Just that it is a monster of a machine to be a desktop machine alone :-). I should probably run some of my personal experiments on this machine ;-).

Being in Bangalore has its advantages (other than the royal treatment by Google). Atlanta is scorching hot at this time of the month, whereas Bangalore has a cloud cover most of the days with an occassional day of rain or two. And I get to meet a lot of friends from undergrad and even earlier. Met up with a family friend from my school days, and I also met her two year old daughter. It was good. I am an uncle now. And in that room, I felt I was of the intellectual level of the kid and could only relate to her. The rest of them were talking about work and stuff. I am still at school!!! Well the point I am trying to make is that I feel I am too young and immature to be an uncle, but I guess most of the times you do not have a choice. Just that it was nice to catch up with people from the past.

Well I forgot to mention one thing. I went bowling the Friday before and totally sucked at it. I mean I kind of mastered the art of aiming at the far right corner and taking just the tenth pin out on my first roll. On Saturday we went go-karting and paint balling. Inspired by the likes of Schumacher, I tried too much in the go-karting and ended up spinning out and giving way to the pack behind me. Paint balling was different. I never realized it was so much more about planning than about shooting. Shooting seemed to be the last step. But this is pretty much the outing I had during my stay at Bangalore.

Nothing much to say. Surprisingly because I am writing after a long time again. But then as my sis says - all I have to do all day is go to office, hog and work out, I guess life (literally) doesn't get any more interesting.

The Summer

Since it was summer time, you would expect me to be free and hence go on a flurry of blogs. But then, the god of Machine Learning does not believe in the existence of summer. Or atleast our idea of summer. His/her vision of summer is to work like a madman because you have no other distractions like classes. That is why the god of Machine Learning decided to put the submission deadline of one of the biggest conferences in machine learning smack in the middle of the summer (The conference is by the way NIPS). Not that I have anything against this conference, but it is just that it is not something you would expect.

That is one of the reasons why I have been a bit lazy about writing on this blog. I had an excuse that I was working towards publishing in this conference. Well as usual, I spent a lot of time trying to do something contributive to submit. Then after a month of hard (apparently not hard enough) work, it turned out that we couldn't accomplish what we set out for - this just means I was not able to submit.

But my summer didn't end there. I had something else in store for me. I had the opportunity to do an internship at Google, Bangalore for the summer, and the Google people were 'googly' enough to accommodate my schedule (since I had to work on a submission). So I flew the day after my submission deadline.

I should give a detailed description of the flight which was via Paris this time but I don't feel like. I'll just mention that my stop over time at Paris was just an hour, and my flight left Atlanta 30 minutes late. Eventually we reached Paris half an hour late, and I literally ran to get to the next flight. But the good thing was that there were a lot of people that were connecting to that flight, so the plane was delayed a bit for us, and we made it to the plane in good time. Other than that the flight was pretty uneventful, and I was lucky enough to have nice neighbors in the flight. I reached the Bangalore airport around 1 in the night. The airport did seem a lot different, but it didn't strike me until I was in the taxi 10 minutes later that I found out that this airport is some 30 - 40 km from the city. But I did reach my place in an hour or so, and so ended my journey from Atlanta to Bangalore.

And the next day I started at Google, and I must say, Google does care a lot for its employees. Not that I am rooting for Google or anything (because there is a rumor going around that the world is going to be ruled out Mountain View in a few years), but I give them credit for what they are doing. And as the reputation goes, they do have a really good kitchen.

Being in Bangalore is awesome in some other ways too. I get to meet a lot of friends here. It is good fun.

Frankly, other than the unsuccessful paper submission, I have a full opportunity to make a great summer out of this. I just need to work hard and party harder. Just wish me luck with that :-)

After 8 months

I have been too lazy to write. Not that I was overly busy. It was just that I didn't feel like writing. But today I somehow convinced myself that I would write something, however crap it may be.

First I want to announce is that my dear dear sister graduated this Friday. Congratulations dear sister. You are freakin' awesome! Knowing you as I do, and hearing all about your lazy husband (nothing personal Smruti, in your defense I would say that we all guys are like this, it is not your fault that you are a guy; in fact I would be much worse than you when my turn comes, but lets get back to the original sentence) and your oh-so-awesome adviser (I must say something here lest people think that advisers are demons whose only purpose in life is you screw you over....remember Prof. Smith...but what I am trying to say here that advisers are humans like us, and only when we have been in their shoes do we have the right to comment on how they 'advise'..enough about advisers...let get on with the business), you have accomplished a lot. You inspire me to be an all rounder. Thanks a lot! And also congrats on your job :-). I really wanted to attend your graduation, and am really sorry for being such an a$$ of a brother (for people to understand the extent of my crime you should know that I did not attend my sister's graduation because I was busy, but because I FORGOT about it). Readers must be wondering why my sister still talks to me. Well I'll tell you why. Because she is freakin' awesome.

But when I was thinking about what to name this post, I thought why not reminisce on my quest to answer questions. It has been 8 months (2 semesters) since I started doing research. I must say I have learnt a lot. But the thing is I could have learnt so so much more and I have wasted so much. The good thing is that I have a very encouraging adviser who keeps guiding me in the right direction, but I should really start walking now.

Other than research (about which I don't know much actually), I have learnt how to LaTeX. I must add though that I just know very elementary stuff, but before I came here I knew squat, and now I can make presentations in LaTeX.

I haven't learnt much about coding. I am still afraid about pointers and every time I do some stuff with pointers, there is no way I can get it right without one seg-fault.

I have learnt a bit of water polo. But not much. I have learnt how to get beat up mostly :-D. But I have learnt how to party at the water polo tournaments.

What I feel like my most useful but most unused lesson is that time flies. I can't even comprehend the fact that two semesters have passed by already. Days go so quickly and if you don't be careful, a month goes by with you having zero progress (or maybe negative progress when you start forgetting stuff). The thing is that even though I know this thing, I just can't take heed to it. I still keep wasting time doing useless stuff (and by useless I don't mean playing water polo or learning guitar).

When I was starting this post, I thought I was on a roll. But now I am starting to feel very sleepy and my brain had switched off around two minutes ago. So me off to my new bed.

Hopefully more coming soon.

Life: Totally upside down

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months sleeping completely protected from everything bad in the world, and you are in the safest place in the world.

A friend of mine just put this idea into my head and I started wondering that it does seem an attractive idea. So much so that the fact that I have this huge thing I need to finish for tomorrow has to wait for some minutes while I jot down my brainwaves before they vanish into the ether. As I was saying (since I don't have time to wander into irrelevancy today) this does seem a great way to live life where things always get better, as opposed to the present paradigm of life which just seem to get worse (as in we always waiting to get to the next thing, and we do get excited once we get there, but the excitement is short-lived and all that is left is a lot more worries). I so want to elaborate on this point but don't have the time.

Just think about it, and that would serve my purpose.

The return of the Sun!

Another arbit post

This has been a really weird year (that's what the people who have been in Atlanta longer keep telling me). Well as I was saying, it has been so weird that it has snowed in Atlanta in March (although it was just flakes you could see and they melted way before they touched the ground). Then there was this freak tornado you must have heard of on the TV. Although the weirdest thing was that my house was very very (literally very) close to where I live, and I didn't feel a thing. The way I found out about the tornado was my sister calling me up from Bloomington because she saw this on the news (ironically, the most damaged building was the CNN headquarters I think, and as put by someone, "they finally got to use their 'situation' room"). Damn I keep losing track of what I am saying with these parentheses.

So as I was saying, this year has seen the weirdest of things happen to the Atlanta weather. I guess this is just the global warming kicking in, and I think its high time we get that huge chunk of ice from Neptune and drop in the Arctic ocean. I don't know if it is actually correct, but I feel there is a pattern in the weather. It follows thus: A really sunny day with really pleasant temperature of 15 degrees centigrade (I still can't figure the Fahrenheit thing), followed by a really sunny and hot day. Just when you think that the winter is over and start packing in your winter stuff, you see really dark clouds in the sky followed by really hard rain. And the rain really brings down the temperature to around 5 degrees centigrade, and it is time again for the warm clothes. Now you go on with the warm clothes for a couple of days. Then one fine morning you leave house wearing a jacket and/or a sweat shirt, but surprisingly, by the time you reach the school, you are sweating. Then you take out your computer and see the temperature, and you find out that it is a fine 17 degrees centigrade. Well thats how the weather has been going on in Atlanta for the last month. I am not saying that it is bad - in fact I find it kinda hopeful, considering the fact that it does get really hot in Atlanta, and I loathe the heat although I am from a place that is really really hot throughout the year.

Well today was one of those pleasant sunny days where everything is just perfect. And on a day like this, I find the trees really blooming with flowers and you can see a variety of colors around the campus. Luckily I had my camera with me and I managed to capture certain stuff that caught my eye. But I kinda feel this is end of the really weird weather and the sun is back for good, and we are really in for a hot summer - the real wrath of global warming.

Well weather aside, I wish I just get out of this rut I have so brilliantly managed to get myself into. I really need to get loads of stuff done, like every other graduate students. I keep making lists, but they never materialize, and the list just becoming longer and longer. Maybe I am kind of linked with the weather and the moment it makes up its mind, so can I and get stuff done.

If nothing, this post just gave me a candidate to blame for me not getting any work done :-)

The Future of Computing

Disclaimer - this entry is totally based on MY interpretation of the talk and not what the speaker actually might have meant and I might have misunderstood, and most of the things here are more of my thought than anybody else's.

We had this talk by Jeannette Wing (also known as the Dragon Lady by the people who know her). She was talking about her vision for computer science for the future. This talk made me ask some questions to myself, and I hope one day I might be able to find and answer to them.
The most interesting thing I found was the title of her presentation - Computational Thinking and Thinking about Computing. The way she put forward the idea of Computational Thinking was of the essence of the ability to comprehend a problem and systematically trying to solve it. That is what she claims to be one of the things we learn as computer scientists. She had the vision of trying to teach everybody this way of thinking. The first thought that came to me was the idea of coding/programming - as Douglas Adams put it - "you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with". Somehow I felt this is the most basic and elementary way of picking up computational thinking.
According to her, the biggest question is "What are the effective ways of learning (teaching) computational thinking by (to) children?". Here she provided the analog to mathematics and how children are taught numbers in Kindergarten, algebra in 7th grade, calculus in 12th grade. She wants that computational thinking should be somehow incorporated into the education system as Math itself.
But somehow I feel this thing already exists. It is in every facet of life - it is just that we learn this the hard way through experience. And what I feel is that it is kind of thing that you have to learn, you can't put it in somebody's mind. Maybe I am totally wrong!
Somehow I think of something different - I feel we are trying to answer the wrong question. I feel the main purpose of computational thinking should be such that we can find a solution to any problem, but somehow utilize the good things about computers. The computers themselves cannot solve problems of any consequence (or maybe they can) - but they are useful in a lot of many different ways and it would be a lie to say we can't solve difficult problem relatively easily with the help of computer. So the goal should be to teach people to optimally use everything that a computer has to provide for our help, but also develop better computers which are more helpful - a symbiotic relationship if you may (if you consider computers alive that is, but then they have some intelligence and they can accomplish non-trivial things, so maybe they are actually living things).
I don't know, this is kind of what I feel computer science should be - to help people solve problems - not make people dumb, but I don't know how that can be achieved in the right combination.

Another thing I found interesting about her talk was her reference to how people are attracted to certain sciences - origin of life leads to biology, the origin of time and universe leads to physics. I guess the origin of intelligence leads to computer science. It is just that maybe in all the different things going all around in computer science, we have lost the actual question.

Spring Broken!!

Last day before spring break I start this blog.

It is said to be normal to feel lazy on this day and have zero productivity. Moreover, the gloomy weather of Atlanta adds to the effect. So nobody can blame me for not doing anything substantial today and eventually turning to my blog. But wait!! Hasn't my whole semester been like this?
I have just 2 courses, and luckily my schedule worked out just perfectly such that I have classes only on two days a week. So technically, I have just a 2 day week. I wouldn't go on to say that I spend the rest of the days enjoying my five-day weekend. I do go to the lab every day and try to do some work, and later in the night chip in a little more. But for me spring break is no new thing. I have been having it the whole semester. So why am I having this pre-spring-break-laziness syndrome.

Well I guess being lazy is what I am. Everybody has there calling, I guess mine is being lazy.

The whole spring break went by and I am here one week later, adding to this post. I might have said that I have done a lot of stuff in this one week, but alas I haven't.

The highlight of my break was when one of my friends' parent came to Atlanta from India. They cooked and called us for dinner, and that they I ate so much that it literally hurt to move. And the food wasn't over even then. So much so that they packed us the leftovers for later. I found out eventually that they have been cooking for around six hours for us. And to think that they had just had a flight across half the planet.

The rest of the week was spent sleeping and playing my guitar. I forgot to mention that I got myself a new guitar (Kramer Focus series). The guitar is really good, probably too good for me. I have to practice for a really long time to be good enough for the guitar.

Well there was this issue about a project submission today (yes, a project submission in the middle of the spring break). But to think of it, it wasn't that bad. I didn't do anything the whole convincing myself that I can accomplish all this in the break week. And I also took up a thing about which I had no idea about. But as always, I got lucky and got the exact required papers and so I managed to implement the whole system as required.

One thing was weird though. Generally when I go about coding, once I finish the preliminary coding, it doesn't take too long to get rid of the compilation errors, and in no time I get my program compiling without any error.

The second stage is taking care of the seg fault (better known to people as segmentation fault(), sometimes you do have core dumped too, but I haven't yet been fortunate enough to encounter that in my life - touch wood!!). So I was saying the next part was getting rid of the stupid memory assignments I might have made all over the place and shot myself in the foot. Generally it takes some help from gdb and a bunch of printfs to actually get rid of them.

Surprisingly, I was done with them pretty quickly. I was a bit amazed, but I continued with the final stage. The stage where we check if it is actually giving the output which we expect. The most weirdest thing was it gave the exact result in the first try itself without any unexpected weirdness which I inevitably face in this stage. There is this other thing I am working on, and I have spend around a month now trying to get through this stage and still haven't. And now I get through this program in one go. Thats impossible!!!

So I spent some time to figure out whats wrong with it that it isn't giving any error (yes it is as weird as it sounds). But I still couldn't figure out, so I have made the submission still feelings sure that although it has worked fine with me, it will break down in the first trial when somebody else is testing my program.

Now here it is, the last Friday of the spring break and I haven't had no fun nor did any substantial work. Just answering my calling - lazing all the time.

Water Polo + Cover Trees = Blue Screen!!!

Damn I am tired right now. As I always am after two and a half hour of intense water polo practice. After that, trying to wrap my head around something like cover trees has the same effect on me as the 'Pan Galactic gargle blaster' (for those of you who haven't read 'The Hitch hiker's guide to the Galaxy' nor seen the movie, this is what they have to say about it "the effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick").
All this started when I decided to torture myself every Mondays and Wednesdays with water polo practice. It starts with warm up, which goes on for so long that halfway through it, I forget how much I already have swam. And I am so slow and have so less stamina than my teammates that they lap me a million times. I spend the next half of the warm up praying to God when will this torture stop...
Once this is over, every single time I make the mistake of convincing myself that it would be all downhill from here, which it generally is not. The actual practice starts off lightly, and I start to feel good and not too tired. And then they start shooting at me. Even thats not too bad. Its when they start passing around and then suddenly shooting that it gets crazy. You don't know which side the shot is coming from, and you need to keep covering every side, and trust me, treading water continuously from one post to another is no light matter. Sometimes the whole move goes on for so long that I start losing my temper and have that urge of shouting out "make up your minds a@#@#$#s and shoot quickly". But today wasn't the worst. They didn't ask me to put on the weight belt (yeah it is what it sounds like, and for those who haven't figured it out yet, I play goalie).
Now that this gets over, I try to get back as much energy I can get out of chugging down Gatorade bottles. I need that energy to bike back home, and it is not pleasant experience on days like these. Then somehow grabbing something for dinner, I get to my room and my bed. But alas, if only I were that lucky. First I need to shower to get rid of all the chlorine from the pool, and then smear my whole body with cream to counteract the dryness of the skin the chlorine causes.
Now that all this is done, I still can't sleep. The reasons are threefold: Firstly, ever heard of the feeling "too tired to sleep". By this time, the whole body is aching so much that I just can't sleep. Even if I fall on the bed, I won't be able to fall asleep. Secondly, it is always the case that even at around 12 a.m. in the night, I have a substantial amount of work to be done thats due the following day (which technically has become the same day by then), which leads me to the third reason. I have gotten myself in this awesome rut for the past few months where I just can't sleep before 4 - 5 a.m. in the morning, and I end up waking after noon (and even thats early for me).
So I am only left with one option - start working. And off late, I am working on this tree data structure called Cover Trees. Now the thing about cover trees is that among almost all tree data structures (e.g. ball trees, kd-trees), this is supposed to be the fastest in most cases for different types of nearest neighbor operations. (For those who do not need to know these things ever, the whole thing in a nutshell is that in a dataset in an n-dimensional space, if you want to find the nearest points to a particular point of interest, the general practice is to store the whole dataset in form of a tree, where you can reduce the number of computations required to find the nearest points by climbing down the tree and cutting off branches of the tree which are farther away than the nearest point I have found as yet. Now there are many kinds on trees used nowadays, and this cover tree thing which is supposed to do this thing really great. Now read on because I think it might make sense to you now.)
One thing about these trees is that there is no proven worst case time complexity to do these computations. They are supposed to be awesome empirically (i.e. experimentally). But this cover tree thing HAS one such worst case time complexity, which is a first in this field, and hence a big deal.
But then there is a thing that almost everybody has learnt from experience - nothing so awesome is rarely trivial and simple. Neither is this one. It took me teeth clenching and hair tearing to understand the paper on cover trees, but once I got to the code, I was plain pissed off. Dead tired, I was trying a while ago to understand the code, and within half an hour, I had this hateful urge to bang my head on the wall or the head of the coder (no offense to them actually, I must commend them for this truly great idea, but if only they could have commented the code, I would have been a much more happier person). And my tiredness from the water polo practice wasn't helping either.
But as any other problem, I am sure I'll find a way to figure things out. And then come next Monday/Wednesday, you'll see me leaving my lab at around 7.30 p.m. for another gruesome session of water polo.