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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
THIEF's LiveJournal:
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| Monday, June 29th, 2009 | | 5:00 am |
| | Sunday, June 28th, 2009 | | 5:00 am |
| | Saturday, June 27th, 2009 | | 5:01 am |
| | Friday, June 26th, 2009 | | 5:01 am |
| | Thursday, June 25th, 2009 | | 5:01 am |
| | Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 | | 5:01 am |
| | Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | | 5:01 am |
| | Sunday, June 21st, 2009 | | 4:38 pm |
- There is an ongoing trend in CS that I think is rather silly in which a research group thinks up a name for their new tool that is both an acronym but also vaguely aggressive ("SLAM," "BLAST," "DART") or at the very least positive. I think the practice is long overdue for parody, and to this end, I want my career calling card to be acronyms that are deliberately non-aggressive/negative. I think I took my first big step by deeming our new algorithm/tool for the summer "TRASH," and I was very pleased to see that the fulltimers that I work with liked the idea. OK, now I'll really try to get this idea published.
- MSR hosts a recurring series of talks where they bring in big names in fields outside of CS to talk about pretty much whatever they want. There have been two so far, and I thought that the first one was really interesting. It was given by this guy, and the talk was originally titled "Seven Reasons Why India Cannot and Should Not be a Superpower." The audience got him to admit fairly early on that this title was somewhat of a bullshitty attention-grabber, but the lecture hall was packed and everyone really got into it. I would say that if you're looking for a modern history of India, his book India After Ghandi is probably a really good choice.
- There is a pair of undergrads, the male component of which is right down the hall from me, who have gotten progressively flirtier as the summer's gone on, to the point that it's starting to get distracting. The next time that the girl comes up supposedly to ask a quick question about Visual Studio or whatever and the conversation stretches on past 20 minutes, I think I'm just going to put on my best crotchety old man voice and yell "Oh just knock boots already and get back to work."
- It seems like a lot of the really fantastic discoveries in the sciences come about when fundamental results from two fairly different fiends are combined. I wonder what happen if research education programs were designed to teach people to be really in-depth in two areas instead of one. It would take a lot of time for people to be educated well enough to understand current work in two areas instead of one, but who knows, maybe it would be worth it.
Current Music: Symphony No. 3, 1. Allegro con brio - Beethoven | | 3:50 pm |
OK so first let's get names out of the way. Emma is a friend of mine back from my Purdue Symphonic Band days. Emma has a friend from Purdue named Samhita, who in a Lost-Season-1 level twist, lives in a house about two blocks from my apartment. Samhita has a mom (whose name I don't know), but who arranged for a driver to drive Emma and I around Mysore District and basically keep the dumb white kids out of too much trouble (so yes, in a sense he was a combination of Hadji and Brock Samson), all for about $50 between us for the day. Thanks for not being completely worthless yet, The Dollar. After a quick breakfast at Samhita's we got on the road for what was about a three hour trip to our first destination, which was good because it gave Emma and I plenty of time to catch up. For the first few destinations, it's really easiest if you just read this little bit of history about the Fourth Mysore War. I swear, it's just a paragraph. Done? OK. Our first visit was to the mosque where Tipu Sultan was when the British breached the water gate (if this and Helm's Deep should teach us anything, it's that It's Always the Water Gate). The mosque itself had quite a bit a ornate decoration, the main feature being two huge spires that housed a huge supply of (descendants of) carrier pigeons. All of the graves within the walls of the mosque house the bodies of people whom they consider to have been great teachers, and while we were there, kids were actively going over their lessons for the day. So this was where Tipu Sultan was standing when he saw the British breach his defenses, which gave him just enough time to decide to die defending the city, and they marked that place too. Our next stop (which was fairly close by) was the Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple. This visit would start an unfortunate trend for the day, where the most amazing places that we saw all did not allow photography inside. But we still got some shots of the exterior. We were met in the parking lot by the standard tour guide who ambushes the first group of white people that he sees, who first showed us a large, detailed, cart-drawn temple, and made a very conscious effort to show me, well, this. We then went into the temple proper, where we received the customary blessing mark. I know you were all hoping that I wouldn't say this, but if you've ever played a traditional RPG before, you honestly cannot help but feel the slightest sense of familiarity: the stone floors and walls with little enclaves, the columns going from floor to ceiling arranged in a grid-like fashion. Here, there are a bunch of different enclaves, and each one is a grotto containing a statue depicting a different form of Vishnu. This temple is known for having the largest statue of Vishnu in the state of Karnataka, and most of the people who are there (notably for religiously observance, not tourism) are in one line that goes through the entire temple to see him. We got in this line, and then were promptly led by our guide to cut out of it, skip over literally hours of waiting, and then bribe the line guard at the end to get immediate entry. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have gone through with this if I'd realized what he was doing before it was too late and I still feel kind of bad about it, and at the time I was pretty sure we were going to get (deservedly) beat up. Yet no one seemed to really mind, the sad truth probably being that tourists pull that shit all of the time. If you read the Wikipedia article, you know that Vishnu has taken (and will take) many incarnations. The form depicted in the statue that everyone sees is Ranganatha in a reclining position. The sight at the end of line definitely struck me as fundamentally different, and I can't really describe why. Maybe it's because in Catholic churches, the image of Christ if a) visible everywhere and b) typically of him in agony, so the image of a God in leisure that people have to wait hours to see really sits in contrast. The other thing that's notable is that this is a holy moment of observance for all of these people, yet when they actually get to the statue, it's very rushed: everyone keeps pushing along everyone else in line. That juxtaposition of something sacred with all of that bustle also felt really new. The temple also boasts the first of many parking lot markets that we would see that day, designed to ensnare tourists like yours truly who could be persuaded to take home a keepsake. The minute you step out on your way to the car, you're immediately met with at least one merchant and if you decide to cave and oh say buy two statues of Ganash for your friends and family back at home, you are swarmed for the rest of the walk by every merchant who saw money change hands. We literally had to push one guy back from the car so that we could shut the door. The next stop was Tipu Sultan's summer palace, which was yet another great site of which we could only get exterior shots. The level of detail in the decorations on the inside was absolutely amazing. Probably the most amazing thing were four murals that stretched over two huge walls, each depicting a major battle from the family history. This is one tiny portion: each mural basically had a few hundred guys as depicted there. Next stop was Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary, where we took a rowboat down on a river to see a bunch of, well, birds. But they were pretty birds to look at! And crocodiles! We then headed in to Mysore Proper and grabbed lunch at The Hotel Metropole (where I found the chest containing the dungeon treasure but didn't have enough time to solve the puzzle to get to it), headed back out of the city to see The Palace Hotel, then went back into town to visit what was arguably the focal point of the whole trip, Mysore Palace (once again, no photography of the internals. Arrgh). The palace complex is surrounded by a huge wall, with one temple on each of the sides, and some some pretty badass statues of tigers guarding the entrance. The interior of the palace is covered with paintings and carvings, with the occasional bed made of gold and chairs made of silver. Probably the coolest architecture feature is that the throne room is on the second floor in the front of the palace and there is no real front wall. This means that back in the day, the king could basically sit at his throne and look over the entire city. Or look up at his amazing paintings of the Hindu gods in heaven. He could really look at pretty much whatever he wanted, I guess. You're discouraged from giving out money to beggars in the parking lot, but at one point I was approached by a boy with a monkey who then had the monkey crawl on me. I decided that was definitely worth a few bucks. Also, when we were putting on our shoes after exiting the temple, some guys randomly came up to us and asked if they could have their picture with us. This has happened a few times since on occasions where I've been out of Bangalore. From talking with people later, I found out that this probably is an instance of what's been termed by some social analysts as the "White Skin Fixation." Its origins are unclear (many think it probably has more than a little to do with the British occupation), but there is a fairly strong strand in Indian culture that tends to associate lighter to white skin with beauty: most of the famous actors, actresses, and people you see in billboards all have lighter tones of skin. Combine this with no social norms against staring for maximum discomfort. After going through the palace, we headed up into the Chamundi Hills, first to see Chamundeshwari Temple. Unfortunately, the temple would not be open for another hour and it was already pretty late in the day so we weren't up for staying that long. However, we got a nice consolation prize. At the temple, monkeys are revered. There is a house that sits next to the temple. You can't actually go into the house, but you can see monkeys crawling over basically every crawlable part of the exterior and it leaves your mind to imagine an entire house run by monkeys. Furthermore, monkeys are allowed to run freely through the temple, which was where some of them were when we got there. It started to rain, and I guess they couldn't stay dry in there, because all of the sudden we saw a bunch of monkeys come running out of all of the holes in the temple, and scampering down the sculptures to the road, and then they all ran across the road in single file. So awesome. On the way back down the hill, we hit a statue of Nandi, vehicle of Shiva (who incidentally, does not have the first fucking thing to do with ice). This was Emma's favorite stop of the day, and I can see why. I think that part of it was the time of day (it was getting to be evening), but there was a serenity to that place that we didn't feel anywhere else on the trip, and I think that a large part of it is that Nandi is just one seriously mellow bull. By the time we made it back down from the hills, the sun had gone down, and since it was a Sunday night, this meant that they turned on the lights to Mysore palace. We pretty much had to stop for this, and at one point while waiting to cross the street, a random guy with questionable English skills struck up a conversation with us: Guy: You from US? You like Bush? /furrows brow a little Us: No no. Guy: Ah! Bush: pushed! Obama: master blaster! He repeated this line a few times and then left. I asked Emma if she could make any sense out of it, and her best guess was that he was just trying to rhyme whatever he could. But maybe, just maybe...We were pretty tired for the car ride back to Bangalore, and at one point the driver put some music on. The first track was, I kid you not, the DDR track that was later set to the video with the cowboy (obviously if I could remember the name, I would've just linked it). The links that I threw in during the post are to only a few photos selected from the whole set. Current Music: Moonage Daydream [Arnold Corns Version] - David Bowie | | 5:01 am |
| | Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | | 5:01 am |
| | Friday, June 19th, 2009 | | 5:01 am |
| | Thursday, June 18th, 2009 | | 5:01 am |
| | Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | | 5:01 am |
| | Sunday, June 14th, 2009 | | 5:01 am |
| | Saturday, June 13th, 2009 | | 5:01 am |
| | Friday, June 12th, 2009 | | 11:33 pm |
teaser edition
A lot of the content in this post is about to reach its one-week anniversary. This is basically due to the fact that almost every night, I get home from work and then maybe make it through an episode of Alias (Season 4) before unintentionally passing out earlier than I had planned, then waking up earlier than intended, which means I get an early start on work that day, which makes me extra tired when I get home that night, etc. Also, this post has been intentionally left boring, for reasons I'll explain in a second. Oh but first, I have to say: while I still think it suffers from not having a consistent, competent nemesis, I think that the actual individual episodes in Alias Season 4 have been a definite step up in quality over previous seasons. For the fans: I'm almost exactly halfway through the season. I should apologize for a deliberately misleading Twitter message that I left a while back: something about me being in a police station for 4+ hours. This was not an outright lie: it is exactly what happened. It is, however, misleading in that it may lead the reader to believe that I had fallen into some kind of excitement and danger that had forced Bangalore's finest to finally reign me in. Nothing could be further from the truth. Unfortunately, this was just the latest (though not final!) chapter in the police registration saga that you'll remember me first posting about as long ago as June 5. In this week's epsiode, our heroes (me and five other greenhorn interns) head down with completed papers in hand, with at least naive hopes of completing their mission by the end of the day. What actually happened was more like: - An overweight and surly desk officer checked all of our forms and told us that we needed extra copies of form A, "extra" both in the sense that they were more than we had and more than were asked of us originally. This forced us to get out of line, hazard a trip across the street, get copies made at a super-shady stand, and get back into line. We worked our way to the front of the line... only to have him tell us that we needed more copies of form B. Which meant another iteration of the whole process.
I can't confirm this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that that little stand has the highest copy prices in the city.
- When you complete level 1, they then tell you to go around to the front of the building and get a signature from "the guy who sits in this office," accompanied by elaborate hand gestures. These hand gestures are very necessary because absolutely nothing in the office is marked or labeled. For an added twist, the guy who is "in" the described office is only "in" it in the sense that a bird is "in" a nest. It may be where he lays to rest periodically, but he really spends more of his time in flight, a sizable crowd haunting his every step, begging for his signature. So it takes you a while to even figure out that this is the guy that you want to see before you get to play the ghost in Pac Man, except there are about a dozen more ghosts, and Pac Man just ignores you when he feels like it.
- When you eventually get a signature out of this guy he, and you probably guessed this, sends you back to the first desk, but at least you don't have to wait long, because they just forward you on to yet another desk this time... just in time for their 1.5 hour lunch hour.
- When the dude at that desk eventually gets back from his Dosa, he basically takes another half hour to look at the two signatures and then tell you to come back the next day at exactly 4:30 PM. At this point you realize that life is absurd and without intrinsic meaning, and take a rickshaw home.
The epilogue to this whole story is that when I finally picked up my final form the next day, I clutched it to my breast, allowed a single tear to escape my eyes, and thrust the certificate skyward. And when I did this, people I had never met cheered. I did not make that last part up. Man, looking back over that, that is about the single lamest explanation I could have had for that Twitter message. I'm honestly tempted to scrap it and tell you something involving opium dens, a bewitching girl whose name translates to "Flower of Passion" who I just couldn't forget about, and a jetski chase. Yeah, just make some shit up, and make it have those things. After this whole mess we were all in a pretty sour mood, so we decided to paint the town red and go find a restaurant for dinner that served drinkable beer (even I know enough to know that Foster's and Kingfisher are unacceptable). We ended up following Lonely Planet straight to a restaurant that one of the guys would later, some time in the middle of the fourth rock song that everyone at the table could at least hum along to, come to (accurately) name "American Expat Land." I think we all felt at least a little guilt, sitting there scarfing down pasta/pizza/steak with our Belgian beers but when it comes down to it, there are plenty of nights left, and south India is not going to run out of curry and dosas anytime soon. Under ideal circumstances, this is when I would launch into my story of my whirlwind one-day-tour of Mysore, and what a day it was. But I would really need pictures at my disposal to do it justice, pictures that Emma has, and unfortunately Emma doesn't understand basic facts about computer usage like the fact that you can't just say "I posted a zip file on the internet," but not say where on the Internet, and then leave email contact for five days. So I guess it'll have to wait until Tuesday. Current Music: Ziggy Stardust - David Bowie | | 5:01 am |
| | Thursday, June 11th, 2009 | | 5:01 am |
| | Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | | 5:01 am |
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