Archive for the ‘Life’ Category
Episode 9: A Note to Myself
This post is exactly what the title says it is. Just a small note to remind me what I should be focusing on. Spending a weekend playing with genetic algorithms in Scheme is a wonderful learning opportunity, but it detracts from some of the bigger projects I’m working on. Idle curiosity can do more harm [...]
Episode 8: Recap
Despite a large number of exceedingly uncool events taking place in my life (along with a small but encouraging number of astonishingly cool events) I have managed to neglect my blog completely. Episode 8 of A Series of Uncool Events offers you this exclusive, once-in-a-lifetime chance at catching up with the oh-so-exciting happenings in the [...]
Episode 7: Parenting License
I watched The Dead Poets Society today. It’s about an English teacher who tries to teach his students how to live. Go watch it.
The Dead Poets Society struck a chord with me because I have been thinking about the same issues it talks about for the past few days. What got me thinking was a [...]
Episode 6: Getting Things Done
I’m currently on a mission to increase my productivity up to a respectable level. Right now, I don’t know about any metric that can effectively measure productivity, so I’m using a very simple metric of my own. Out of the total time not spent on life-sustaining activities (eating, bathing, bathroom breaks etc.), how much time [...]
Episode 5: Something to Do
First things first. Python and Django programmer for hire this summer (June and July). If anybody in or around New Delhi needs something built, I’m your man.
Now, on to the trivialities.
The results for Google Summer of Code 2009 came out on April 21, and I failed to make it. According to my mentoring organization, I [...]
Episode 3: Ergonomics, Thou Art a Bitch
Update [March 31]: Added a pic of my setup.
Owing to Google Summer of Code 2009, I have been spending more time using my MacBook than ever before – hanging out in IRC channels, building Haiku (the project I applied to), writing code and doing a lot of reading. The result? The entire last week spent [...]
Episode 2: What Grinds My Gears
Buzzwords. This is what Wikipedia has to say about them:
A buzzword (also fashion word and vogue word) is a vague idiom, usually a neologism, that is common to managerial, technical, administrative, and political work environments. Although meant to impress the listener with the speaker’s pretense to knowledge, buzzwords render sentences opaque, difficult to understand and [...]
Episode 1: Perspective Shift
Somewhere in the depths of my hard disk, lies a small RTF file titled “Goals for 2009″. It has largely been forgotten. It was an ill conceived idea, anyway. The RTF said: “write at least 150 blog posts this year”. Evidently, whoever typed in that number did not belong to civilized society. Want to smell [...]
My Adventures at the Zonal Transport Office
Whenever I hear someone mention a government office of any sort, I find myself thinking of middle aged women who look strangely like that distant aunt of yours who likes to give you unsolicited advice because “.. youngsters like you need the guidance of your elders.”. I associate government ventures with forgotten, derelict buildings and [...]
Computer Science FAIL – Higher Education in India
Update (March 13): He’s back, but now he’s simply shying away from what he doesn’t know.
Update: The professor in question has been reported and is now banned from taking any more classes.
This piece might come across as one intended to bad mouth my own college, but I have a sneaking suspicion that things aren’t all [...]