It's not the thought that counts

It is with mild disdain that I relate to the fact that those moments when the mind is drowsy, such as a just-awoken state or a near-sleepless one, are the most interesting - such as this fleeting, hopeless, reclusive thought that I cooked up today: "Swallowing its pride, the lion swallowed its pride".
Really, how juvenile does a person have to be to think of such phrase-mocking statements as these, even in the most unstable of conditions?

What is probably more disturbing for me is that the thought ferociously stuck even after I was fully awoke. And, well, I had to pretty much swallow my pride in order to post this one.

More than a feeling

It's humbling: trying to condense my last eight years into a single page, and finding out there's still some space left at the bottom.

Another Oracle takes birth

If you're a gamer, the next year is going to be one massive joyride, with the gods of computer gaming that are Blizzard, ID, Bethesda, Ubisoft, Maxis, Valve and EA prepping up to give us an orgasmic barrage of titles that can satiate, hell wreak total havoc, on even the most casual and unyielding gamer. Me, I again descend into nostalgia, remembering the time when a friend and I bought six epic games together, and I went breathless for a moment, unable to grasp the gravity of the situation. I guess most of us are urban escapists, one way or the other. The familiarity yet the distance posed by films, music, novels or gaming - showing worlds unbeknown to us - draw us ever closer to them, eventually leaving us hip-deep in chimerical alternate universes. *twitch*

These fits...these...convulsions...
Should I live this world?
Or play it?

Quasi Una fantasia, Op. 27, No. 2

It was late in the evening and I was walking back home lugging the overweight laptop and lost in thought about nothing in particular. I usually glance back at the clock on top of the tower as I tread on the grass beneath my foot and silently recollect the crunch of snow during winter while also feeling, quite viscerally, the acrid humidity in the air recently. The clock read nine. The sun still hesitated to dip below the dotted horizon, and started flinging harmless, tingling shots of orange and yellow into the far sky in a dying gesture that hinted at ingratitude. To whom was a mystery. Is always a mystery.

The chimes began to ascend into the heavy air. Warmth around, and void inside. I find myself asking the same dreaded question - Will it all just be a chimerical fantasy? Silence. The cadence in the evening sky continued still. Right around the eighth strike, I realized I was subconsciously counting every chime, feeling it like a heartbeat, relinquishing the last while anticipating the next. It was like a roller coaster ride where the sudden turns no longer held any surprise. I knew exactly when the next one would come. Just around the corner. There you go. Nine. Elementary Arithmetic has a strangely comforting feeling.

The moon started to peek shyly through the leaves of the nearest tree. The night had just begun.

And another....

Yaawn. Staying awake has never been so frustrating. I await the despondence.

Cold Peace

So I watched Eran Kolirin's brilliant and hilarious Israeli debut The Band's Visit this evening. Beautiful!

One more cup

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm slowly yet progressively getting addicted to caffeine.

Willkommen

I unboxed a Macbook Pro today. Sadly it belonged to a friend. And as I slid my fingers over its keyboard, I came to the realization that I was destined to buy it someday. I'm a sucker for everything that's eye-candy. Afterwards, we watched Frida on the new Macbook. Such a beautiful film; but Julie Taymor looks to be a tad too eager to prove herself, frequently imbuing the film with stylistic touches that were otherwise unnecessary. Somewhat like Joe Wright in Atonement. I just regret not watching her latest, Across the Universe, when I had the chance.

Stuck in a moment that I can't get out of

So I wake up this morning and there it is. Tijuana! A name that's stuck in my head since morning. Ever had a word stuck in your head for unknown reasons? It's mildly disconcerting, like a distant splinter that the eye can barely see and stubbornly refuses to ignore. So every few minutes now, this word keeps popping into my head while I'm in the middle of something; and all I care to know about it is that it's a Mexican city. And this is not the first time something like this has happened; at least the third. I think the last one was some European politician who hung around mysteriously, stalking me for a couple of days and then disappeared in a puff of smoke (ok, maybe not that last one). So, Tijuana, how long will you be staying?

If only I could turn back time

This C&H strip appeared the day before yesterday. Perfect timing. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just too blunt/instantaneous/careless/rude/insensitive; can't even seem to count the number of times I metaphorically bit my lip in the last two weeks alone.

[update] Of course in the strip, Calvin does it intentionally. And the title is alludes to a song from the 90's pop band Aqua.

sigh

It's one of those nights; the heart is restless; the mind is excited; the body is a slump. I'm not able to sleep....

No mon, it wasn't always this easy

Reading an old paper on MULTICS, I came across this as one of the design goals of the system:

"To permit a degree of programming generality not previously practical. This includes the ability of one procedure to use another procedure knowing only its name, and without knowledge of its requirements for storage, or the additional procedures upon which it may in turn call."

Oh the things we take for granted today.

Combustion of Spontaneity

To be both mercurial and indecisive is an extreme pain (without pleasure, mind you). I've often taken decisions in less time than it would take a user process to switch to kernel mode (well not really, since those syscall/sysenter instructions came into place). But then I've also stood on cross paths, deciding which way to go, taking a step in one direction, retreating, taking a step in a different direction, retreating again, and so on. Literally. This usually happens when I start thinking about the decision and weigh it against the other choices. No, shouldn't be done. Especially when one is as spontaneous as nitric acid on copper. To reflect when one can still retreat is something that needs to be avoided. Forget the recent past and live in the moment. Sigh, rarely happens, but when it does, it's such a treat for the heart.

Snow

Have you ever looked down at night, walking along a street, cold and shivering, and seen stars twinkling like diamonds, set in a blanket of whiteness?
It's wonderful.

Mirror

He stared at the ceiling and the ceiling stared back. Its two drunken eyes, one larger than the other, glowing mildly, contentedly, stalking and preying upon the carpet and everything else that lies below. Their spacial placement on the ceiling stank of nepotism, yet were stunning under the gaze of someone who had just begun to recognize the beauty underneath the banal, sending visceral streams of a realization that patterns of life can sometimes emerge from within the motionless serenity that marks this plastic environment.

camera obscura

After much deliberation and debate, I finally ended up getting a camera. Over the past two years when I first got interested in photography, I've gradually realized that to shoot something, anything, it's the eye and not the camera that's the deciding factor between a mediocre photograph and an extraordinary one. To develop such a skill is indeed an art. I just hope I've the time and patience for this.
[photograph: Behind The Gare St. Lazare - Henri Cartier Bresson]

The Big Screen

Over the past two days I've come to realize the only way to sleep less is to sleep uncomfortably; that way, I wake up when I should ought to rather than when I usually do. And I've made it a point to stay away from anything soporific the rest of the day lest it induce me with two hours of what I just scrupulously avoided. I've also been on a tiny cinema marathon watching seven films in two days, the more mainstream of them being Ratatouille. It's been a long time since I saw an animated film on the big screen (I think the last one was Over the hedge) and Ratatouille was just as fantastic and entertaining as 28 weeks later (the sequel to one of my favourite horror films, 28 days later), that I saw last week. Quite a change from the kind of insipid entertainment that usually shows up, and I regret having missed out on The Simpsons Movie. Oh well....

Road Trip

I remember reading a newspaper article sometime back in which the author (of the article) had traveled to the actual place where the book, some Rushdie book, that he/she was reading, was set. Remembering this article that I would have thought barely even registered then, left me wondering, if I had the luxury to do such a thing, what would I read? Barely seconds had passed before I came up with two choices - Jack Kerouac's On The Road (which I've not yet read) and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries, the former set across North America and the latter across Latin America. Given such a travel opportunity, I wouldn't want to waste it by not reading a road-trip book. Of course, the cheekier mind might just think about getting a travel guide.

Weekend

Rohmer, Chabrol, Noah Baumbach, Polanski, Gogol, shopping, rains- well, that's my weekend in a nutshell....

goto

This comic (over at the brilliant xkcd), is what I consider to be an indicator of the presumptuousness of most Computer Science students (including myself). What Dijsktra proposed in his seminal paper "Goto Statement Considered Harmful" is not even deemed as necessary reading for contemporary students of Computer Science. Instead the goto is frowned upon, abolished almost, without caring to understand its history. Now, I use gotos (only recently and very sparingly, of course) because it helps to alleviate unnecessary restructuring sometimes, the most obvious case being function-exit sequences. Thinking about elegant code structures is what takes up most of my time now than the actual coding session. I cringe when I look back at some of the code I've written, how superfluous the statements, how blunt the case-statements, or crude the nested "ifs and elses". I'm not saying it's the fault of the language, rather the prejudice and the inexperience of the programmer, who understands control flows, but not program flows. It is not easy to lift this weight of past-code-disregard off my mind, but to even realize the presence of such a weight is one step in the right direction.
A well-annotated version of Dijkstra's paper can be found here.