On the roofs of uncertainty

On day 1 I drank a few glasses of Jack Daniel's with friends at The Bench.

On day 2, I drank Glenfiddich. One glass. Silk.

On day 3, I got lucky with Bourbon. Feels nice. Oh I forgot, I also watched Rocket-Singh with the Bourbon.. :P ... I can't describe the feeling, but I'm pretty sure, this is what Armstrong meant when he said, I have now reached the moon !!!

Also, in between all this, I enjoyed some more snow. Took a quick chilly bus ride to Philly. Enjoyed a 24" pizza between the 5 of us. Drove to Pocono. Ski-ed my ass out. Crashed into a pole, while hoping the pretty instructor standing beside it would prevent me from it. The only reason I could not hear the thud and the crackle was because it was drowned by the roar of the laughter all around. With the ski-gear on, I was all on fours, probably the most awkward one ever. So much for a smile and some four-play. :-P

More soon. Merry Christmas or Happy festivities to whatever your persuasion is !!

The title of this post is of course, inspired by a famous Floyd number, Poles Apart. The song has been playing in my head for a while now.

Blizzard play

The season's first heavy snow... post exam craziness !!!

Such is life!

My first semester at Stony Brook just came to an end. A marathon 3.5 months of work, work, craziness and more work. Looking back, I feel nice.

I shall summarise it in 140 words, twitter-style...

Samuel Adams, Network Security, Philly, Illumination, Patchy Skies, Dunkin-Donuts, Bloomberg, Thesis, Stony Brook, Free Food, Paul Thorne, TUIO, Python, SecondLife, American soil, Know-More, NewYork-NewYork, Reason-11, Jameson, Affie, Pancakes, SSN, Chapin Mailroom, Strawberry Fields, Computation Biology, The Dome, Ummmn!, RNA Secondary Structures, String Quartets, Radiance, Computer Vision, Joan Osbourne, Linear Algebra, Liberty Bell, Weight Matrix, American Professors, Awesome Friends, Friends' whose name begins with a silent 'p'.. :P, Posterous, Squeak, White Bus to SAC, Gotcha!, Eigen Faces, Apache, Boston,Frozen Parathas, John Harvards brewery, HoneyGlazed Ham slices, Daylight-saving, Jersey City, Perez Sky Model, Snow, MIT, Fiducials, Wolfie, abs(), TLT MediaLabs, Hershey's kisses, Aha!, LIRR, Great-Value Choco Cookies, Smith Haven Mall, Edward Tufte, 731 Lexington Avenue, Inference Detection, Matlab, Below Zero Temperatures, Central Park, Princeton University, Harvard Square, All-Nighters, Oh-MS!, Latex, Blog-Art, Dollars.

Looking forward to some sound sleep, catching up on some reading, Dexter and meeting up old friends. More later. Cheers.

Feeling blue !!!

18th February '07 I thought was the most exciting day of my life. I stood in a endless queue for almost 3 hours and then got to see Roger Waters live. 18th February '10, I might be going for yet another live concert. And the least I can say, is I am excited.

I might be listening to Eric Clapton.

He will be playing at the Madison Square Gardens with Jeff Beck of Clapton-Beck-Page fame. Epic stuff !!!

Anuj, are you listening ?

Lost in translation

Came across this, in a friend's Facebook album. A classic example of a literal translation of Bengali to English doesn't get better than this. Right from the title, 'Do or do not list'... :-P...which probably means things which we should do and things which we should not, at this beach resort 5 hours off Kolkata.

For people who understand both the languages, laugh on. For the rest, just make your own explanation up for something like, 'Don't drink nakedly in the sea beach' !!!

If you don't agree with the interpretations of some of them, dont quarl or else, I shall send you for amusement ride !!!

Phew. Such comic relief, curtsy the manager's fluency !!!

:-P

Intellectual Property

Now do I read this correct, Patent no. 7617530 ?

M$ has gone ahead and patented 'sudo'. This is what sudo does. This is a command close to every Ubuntu user's heart. This is more than intellectual property. This is emotional property.

More comments on this later. Let me first run to the Patent office and get a patent for chicken wings.

Of photographs and the art of computer programming

More often than not I have asked myself, `Is there a story behind the photograph I am looking at ?'. I feel the ideas conveyed, subtly, talk volumes about the uniqueness of a photograph. Sometimes it even overshadows the technical brilliance of it all.

Talking about stories told in photographs, I was quite pleased to see Pictory. A site which grows mainly from the contributions of people mailing in their clicks, this is a beautiful montage of photographic perfection as well as neophytic uniqueness. Take a peek .

This is also another idea I had in mind when we first thought about Reason-11. I was hesitant though, to share it. Would we really be able to project well enough in the photos, the tales woven in our minds when we actually clicked them? Maybe we will. Maybe we wont. Some days back, we uploaded a bunch of pics, we called it `The Radiance series', where we have tried to express words with light. Baby steps !!

Diverting far far away from all of that, here is a brilliant Donald Knuth interview I came across. `01 good a read', irrespective of whether you understand my compliment or not....

:-P