memorial day weekend

Ummmm.. memorial day weekend. Not quite so boring ever since we started playing cricket...

i saw batman begins on friday night... liam neeson put up a pretty good show.,. But I missed the point of destroying Gotham City. This is what happens when scriptwriters are underpaid and all the money goes to the special effects people. Saturday was spent playing cricket down at the Fuller Park and then watching 'The Sting'. Now the game was pretty sad, but then, we all need practice, lots of it.. and its not like I am in great shape to run all over the place either. The movie was awesome. This is what movies must be like, and regretfully are not, these days. Sunday, again, was cricket, and a movie. The cricket was ok, the movie, was just passable.. 'The Spiral Staircase'', rather melodramatic and with a weak plot.

the evil computer again

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
The only way to learn is by experimenting.
Do NOT press the red button.
Aphorisms which have become part of our lives. A suitable combination of them applies when you take an enthusiastic bloke and let him tinker with the .cshrc on a linux. One of the things not to do is to put an alias in the .cshrc which will change a basic command, such as >cd. Well, i did just that, and after compiling the .cshrc, i couldn't figure out for the life of me why >cd didn't work. Silly.

more on my evil computer

my computer does not generate sound. as in, i dont even know if it has a sound card. don't get me wrong here, i am a linux user,, not an admin. to be an admin requires knowledge, and more than that, courage. i lack the first for sure, and i make up for the second in sheer foolhardiness at times. why can my computer not generate sound? it behaves like an obstinate child who won't talk. i mean, are you really autistic, or do you just like giving me a hard time? in the meantime, i do have an ancient SGI (i mean ancient.. look SGIs are really cool and all that, but these days any decent PC or a mac can generate the same level of graphics at much less the cost. so these hulking brutes just stand around with a footprint like Godzilla and the performance of Stuart Little. as far as i am concerned. this contraption exists only to play me sound. now there snazzy things like iTunes and Winamp out there. you have 10 band equalisers, shuffle, crossfade and the rest. SGIs play SOME formats, do not recognise may respectable mp3s, and play stuff in single queue. they suck!!!!!!!!)

my evil computer

computers can be intuitive. my boss indicated to me yesterday that we may be getting new computers. it was as if my linux somehow sensed it and decided to be extra nasty for whatever time it has left to be nasty. its favourite trick is to kill firefox without warning. silently and deadly. somewhat like a commando strike, in fact. and the best time to do it is when i have written a LONG and IMPORTANT mail and am just about to send it. or a blog. that is why i have picked up this strange habit of copying the text every two lines or so. could i BE more paranoid?

its other favourite trick is to make 'open office' a misnomer.. as in, i open 'open office', i write something, i turn away for a moment, i turn back, and it's 'closed office'. as in died without a beep.

Detroit

The capital of the auto industry. This city traces its history back to 1701 as a fort established by a French officer called Cadillac. Rings a bell?

• History of Detroit


• http://www.historydetroit.com/>Another History of Detroit

Well, the graduate school had set up a day trip to Detroit and decided to go. It is something like an hour's drive to downtown Detroit near the waterfront. We were given little maps and told to not stray awya from the paths marked. So we legged it down to the waterfront. A pretty nice view of Canada on the other bank, with the Windsor Casino as the biggest landmark. There was a memorial dedicated to the brave men and women who operated the Underground Railroad which helped African American people escape slavery. Detroit was one of the jumping off points to Canada and freedom. The thing about this leetil walk downtown is something that still gets me here. The lack of people. On any given Saturday morning, any Indian city the size of Detroit will be, quite literally, teeming with people. Call it an anthill complex, call it what you will but here it is.

While walking downtown, we were accosted by a homeless/destitute/possibly mentally ill bloke who said some things about Indians making their own cameras and not eating beef. The connection escaped me. This brings me to another topic which puzzles me. The US of A is indeed a land of opportunity. This is the world's largest economy, there is more space than one uses and there is a functional social security system. Poverty in Asia means something. When you take away a bloke's job, you are, in effect, condemning his family to death by slow starvation. That is not the case here. Ok, so I do not really buy it when financiers talk about the 'creation of wealth'. To begin with, define wealth. How does one define something as intangible as wealth, except, maybe as material possessions which are indexed in value to some noble metal. But then, we cannot create wealth. We can merely move it around. And furthermore, in each 'cycle', there will be some 'frictional losses'. All we can do is make sure the cycle runs and runs as smoothly as possible so that the losses by attrition are minimised. But there will always be people who slip through the cracks. The point here being that the cracks are much finer here than in the third world and it is possible to carve out a life if one is willing to work to it. Why then, do so many people leave school and pick up guns? I do not have the answer to that, and what I fear is that the people whose opinions matter, do not either.

Anyway, we came to the 'eastern market' for brunch. Brunch was an omlette, a large one with corned beef, veggies, hash browns and a side of toast with marmalade. Heavy! The restaurant was crowded something awful and I guess I know why. The eastern market was like a somewhat posh Gariahat/Yesvantpur. But wholesale markets cannot be that much different, and this one brought back memories of home.

There was a shop which sold nuts. All kinds of nuts. It was full of nuts of every description. A Kabuliwalla would have walked away with a happy soul. Another shop advertised itself as 'Spices of the world', and it came pretty close. I picked up some Italian pasta seasoning. Yet another shop advertised sausages of all kinds. It beggars description. A meatlover's paradise.

After spending sometime there, we hopped into the bus for the trip to the Arts Institute. Now there are museums and then there are museums. Science museums, I like. History is also good. One loves looking at broadswords, tapestries and mummies. Art befuddles me. Show me a nice painting and I will say that it is great. Show me daubs and streaks and ask me to find meaning and I am flummoxed. I know it is old fashioned, but I believe that art should speak for itself and not necessarily need an explanation. The kind of painting that needs a note attached to tell you what you are supposed to be seeing appears to me as slightly silly. And the fact that people spend good money on that kind of stuff, well, it is better than spending it on nukes, so why not?

That was Detroit. Later, with a smaller group and no time restrictions, another sightseeing trip perhaps...

Theorists

My sister is a theorist. That may well be one of the reasons why i chose to be an experimentalist. Anyway, she was at a neighboring institute for some sort of a symposium. And with the supreme arrogance of a theorist, she tells me that 'there were hardly any talks on physics. All we heard was a number of experimentalists.'

really silly questions

The other day we were at a restaurant. Now I realise that sometimes people wait for other members of their team to turn up, and it does make sense in that context. but not here. At this point, we means the two of us. And the bloke comes up asks, "table for how many, Sir?".. Yes, thats a smart question. I should have come back with, "just one, I plan to stand and watch", or something to that effect. But then, my new year's resolution of 1999 was to be a nicer and more polite person. Part of that resolution was to not verbalise all that I think. I am still working on it.

Then cut to today morning. Me at the bus stop. Bus not there, perhaps a little late. Note that this stop has only one bus coming by. Its not Gariahat. Its not Jadavpur. It has one bus coming by every twenty minutes or so. Young lady I vaguely know (which means we have been introduced and I have mentally classified her into that big tray marked "Boye gyachhe") comes up asks, "Has the bus come by?". Now in which plane will that make any sense. If the bus has, indeed come by, I would be on it. The relevent question, of course, would be "How long have you been standing here?". And again, I wanted to say, that yes, the bus has come by, and I decided to wait for her. But that would lead to a world of trouble

stupid computer

towards the end of a rather long blog on the detroit trip, firefox died completely. with the blog. unsaved.

two weeks ago

i spent the most boring week i have lived through in recent times... now during semester, i typically have two homeworks, labwork, about forty odd prelab reports to grade, experiments to teach, presentations to complete and the like. and somehow, things fall together in place, and it all works out. the last week of april was the transition between labs. this was the most boring week in a long time. semester work was over and done with. there is a limit to how many times one can check mail/orkut/yahoo etc etc. now that i am back and with a clearly defined set of things to read, yes, life has meaning once more!!

there seems to be a rather large number of adaptations of comic book tales to the big screen. the most famous among this would perhaps include the lara croft franchise. now, a scantily clad jolie pouting while the baddies empty magazine after magazine and do not hit her has its adherants, but i am not one of them. i saw sin city last night. i was quite impressed with rodrigues' work. the fringe is breaking into the mainstream with a vengeance. once upon a time, people like tarantino and rodrigues would be relegated to the back shelves and the more off beat artsy theatres. times have a-changed now... and one has such wunnerful movies like sin city hitting the screens and making it big.

back

back. semester closed, prelim done. got to earn my bread and butter now. well, bread and stale margarine, at the very least.