As I was wont to do in days gone, let me start with books. I spent a long time re-reading books, sometimes more than once. Seemed to take a lot less effort than reading new books. Ditto movies, when I had enough time to watch them. Of course, bite-sized chunks of TV series were easier to grok as well. With a conscious effort now, I’ve started reading more new stuff, the latest of these being Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Gripping book, that. Incidentally, if you’ve not read Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, you’re missing out on what I am certain is one of the best SF works in recent times. Have been promised access to the remainder of his novels featuring Takeshi Kovacs, so looking forward to that.

On the music front, I sold off my guitar a year and a half ago (the neck warped too often) and now intend to buy a new guitar. Saw a fairly decent and not-too-pricey Granada at Furtado’s, and it’s now somewhere near the top of my acquisition list. As before, my tastes are (a) relatively esoteric, and (b) temporally out of phase. My latest obsession are the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, about whom Rolling Stone has a brilliantly written article that borders on idolation.

Moved to a new house, and unpacking and settling in slowly proceed. All the running around before this and now mean that I still have to establish a proper working environment and discipline. I’ve been trying (with only moderate success) to maintain a reasonably “normal” diurnal cycle. Should be more successful as things settle further.

I’ve got a couple of work related blog posts lined up in my head, but that’ll have to wait for later. I hope this particular post heralds some exercising of atrophied writing muscles.

Good night, world.

As some of you might already know, my next step, which has had me bouncing off the walls for the last month, is to join the great folks at Collabora Multimedia working on the PulseAudio sound server. I’ll be working from home here, in Bangalore (in your face, 1.5-hour commute!). It is incredibly exciting for me to be working with a talented bunch of folks and actively contributing to open source software as part of my work!

More updates as they happen. :)

In addition, pkgcore 0.4.4 has my patch to support HTTP proxies for rsync. This was a fun patch to write, small as it is. The code is beautiful, and Brian Harring (ferringb) and Patrick Lauer (bonsaikitten) walked me through a lot of it. Good stuff!

I’ve also been working on splitting the gnome-python* ebuilds to make the dependency trees for packages that use these bindings a lot saner. This has been longer and more painstaking that intended. It wouldn’t even have happened if Jim Ramsay (lack) hadn’t made an excellent start with the gnome-python-desktop split, since all subsequent work was based on that. Hope this is useful to someone, though. :-)

As I said, a good week.

The talk was preceded by a short speech by Arun Shourie. He had the audience in fits, slamming politicians, and actually making the point that NRN was trying to make a lot better. That is some dude, that is.

The power connection in my room was out the last 2 days, so not much activity online. Instead, I played a little squash, some tennis, disgusted myself over billiards, read a little Vonnegut, and generally lounged.

Last night, and I had a visitor in the tree right outside our rooms — a Common Hoopoe (the Wikipedia entry reminded me that I’d seen one of these in Haroun and the Sea of Stories). The little guy fell asleep somewhere amidst our boring photography session.

Then there’s the one about Gandhi.

Oh, and last May, I got one of these:

What is it? Nothing much, other than open to interpretation. :-) The tat’s done by Deep at Dark Arts, Frazer Town, Bangalore. Didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would (some disappointment there). Thanks to for the pointer.

My future wasn’t just stolen. It was taken into a back alley, beaten, raped, stabbed, and then tossed back out into the street to die right in front of my eyes.

Ignoring relative rankings, I scanned through for a list of colleges I recognised. There were a few of repute there, the Bangalore colleges I knew of, and some I knew of from people studying there. And the bottom line is that all the ones I know, in the words of Cartman, suck ass when it comes to education. And maybe that tells us a lot about the state of private education in India. That’s one I’ve sung before, so ‘nuff said.

What I wonder now is whether the next generation of adults is going to be the most cynical in recent history, or if we’re all going to delude ourselves into believing we actually learnt anything (and I don’t mean “lessons in life”) in college because it’s just easier that way.

And maybe it doesn’t even matter. Here, watch some Taylor Mali and feel good about it all.

Whether working for two years before doing an MTech was a good idea is still somewhat an open question. Well, there are a lot of questions there, but one thing I got was perspective.

Mundanely enough, I understand a lot more about personal finances than I did, and that’s a good thing. (I just read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Content is okay, but presentation is very much teh suck)

Secondly, I now have a lot more perspective on how exploitative work life is today (hope a certain friend doing 16-hour days isn’t reading this … if you are, don’t tell me I didn’t warn you). Whether we want it or not, we all (I’m generalising, so sue me) fall into the trap — this needs to be done, this is a really important project. Agendas (agendae?), prioritised action items. It’s how we’re programmed — hard work good, life bad. So fucking forth.

To what end? More work, greater responsibility (so that’s okay), more stress, a litle more money for me, a lot more money for my employer. Corporations continue to exploit customers and consumers. The rich slowly get richer, the cog turns a little faster, that it’s master needn’t wait so long to rake in that much more. Time with your family? Don’t make me laugh. Participate in social activities (there are things other than cocktail parties, cherie)? The Master owns your society, and deigns that you need not participate.

I’m bad at articulating this shit. There are many who are infinitely better. And all for nought. Noam Chomsky likes to think that the revolution is coming. That’s a load of bull. No such thing is happening. And I think he Gandhi said something cloyingly optimistic to the effect that The Man is always beaten. Fat fucking chance this times. You’ve been pwn3d. Deal with it.

Ah yes, it’s Chuck Palahniuk that articulates it better. I remember now. Him and a bunch of others.

Alright. Break’s over. Back to the wheel, boys and girls.

Not much book reading done. Lolita. Subject is horribly sick, writing is beyond words. And Nabokov rues the fact that it’s written in English, which isn’t his native language. Possibly reason enough to learn Russian. Prachett’s Carpet People is next, borrowed from Eloor. I’ve till tomorrow to finish it. Need to get hands on some Chuck Pahlaniuk. Our library’s got Fight Club, but it has been (temporarily) purloined by some daft child.

Went to Palakkad for a wedding. God’s own country. There was a strike going on this one day. Went to Malampuzha Dam, three of us on a motorcycle. Nice dam. Cops caught us on the way back. Got off the usual way. Next day, we’re leaving, Dad was haggling with porters. It was interesting to see these people. In most other places, people are openly greedy, openly corrupt, and make no bones about being this way. In Palakkad, though, there seemed to be some strang, skewed morality there. The cop insisted that “we don’t have this sort of thing in Kerala” (refering to bribery) with a whole lot of righteous indignation, before accepting the money (amidst continued protests of honesty, and insisting that a group of 3 people is a congregation). The porters started off with a ridiculous figure for transporting the luggage, but seemed offended when we suggested that this was so (he settled for a third of the original amount, so there is certainly a contradiction there). Maybe it’s just a different negotiation style there, or maybe the people are too proud to have outsiders suggest such atrocious things as “you’re greedy”.

Words of RHCP wisdom — “Staying high and dry’s more trouble than it’s worth”. Gurgaon, Kanpur … here I come. Superman’s Song. Nice.

In a surprising turn of events I watched Lage Raho Munna Bhai today. It was funny in bits, but basically the second in the line of pedantic, preachy Hindi movies I’ve watched (the previous being Rang De Basanti). It’s quite hilarious, how all the people who watch these movies go home feeling nice about themselves, or about the issues the movies address (the sorry pathetic state whatever whatnot), or convinced they’re going to Do Something About It just like he/she/it did. And then they wake up the next morning and push those stupid space monkey buttons. Ha.

Almost bought Fight Club (did you know there’s a book?), but it was too expensive, and I decided to borrow it from the student library in college (some good things to be said about its span). Really wish I could’ve read the book before watching the movie.

More humour — the latest Microsoft Media Center Edition ad speaks of getting back control of your media.

Need to get down to studying in the near future.

Read Nabokov’s A Russian Beauty. Quite … nice. Lolita up next, possibly.

Someone down the hall takes it to his head to play NIN’s “Fuck You Like An Animal” really loud every once in a while. Most puzzling.

I need sleep.

So what is “That thing”?

To quote the much venerated Chester Bennington, “Shut up!”

Saturn 5, Voyage Around The Moon. So it took me several years to figure out that all the bands in the That Thing You Do! soundtrack are imaginary. Right?

Does Liquid Groove have any albums? I seem to have some of their music and this song called Track 3 is stunning. Astounding music, and the vocals just come in perfect.

I am Jack’s lack of sleep, and then some.

So in exchange for 5000 bucks a month, we’re supposed to put in some amount of work here. I elected to help admin the lab. Seem to have to do more than the average amount of work. Or I’m just bitching and moaning.

Irish ballads rock. Ummm … does “Whiskey In The Jar” count as a ballad? Stand and deliver!

We’re behind some dumb proxy here. Some of the setup here is very lame-ass.

I’ve made friends with all sort of insects here. The benefits of living in a forest.

Enough, already.

Got here (== UP) a couple of weeks ago. Getting monstrously slammed in Math, but studies are interesting, and being done far closer to right than under the aegis of the much venerated bastion of education of which I am but a chipping.

Rooms are decent, food is decent (except that I’ve transferred my malignant swearing from the peacocks to potatoes).

Turns out the audio on my laptop uses a Conexant chipset (Intel HD Audio using a Conexant codec chip for audio/modem). I hope I have better luck with getting it to work (with reasonable volume, now) than the last time. For what it’s worth — the codec’s a PCI ID 14f1:5047, which is, I believe, a CX20551-22 chip (not documented in their literature even).

Other news … I got way too many books (heh … there is no such thing, I realise) here. Slow progress. some Nabokov, some Amanda Cross, and Stephen Donaldson. Formal update to booklist when time permits. Currently, the Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

Yahoo(exclamation-and-all) Mail Beta sucks. If I want Outlook, I’ll use Outlook. Except I won’t want Outlook.

Now to get some lassi and ponder in vain some “elementary” problems in probability (… and whiner, too).

I want, I want!