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.

Raynor, Kerrigan and Zeratul

If any serious gamer were asked to prepare a gaming canon, I'm sure most of them wouldn't even think twice about placing Starcraft somewhere near the top. Gamespot calls it "the most loved strategy game of all time" and "The standard by which all real time strategy games are judged". Korea, apparently, has three seperate TV channels dedicated to its gameplay. With three perfectly balanced factions, a riveting story and strategic to the core, Starcraft is a masterpiece. For me, it delivered an unparalleled gaming experience, the equivalent of which could never be met by an Age of Empires before it or a Command and Conquer or even Warcraft III after. It remains in that distant, elusive realm to which games like System Shock 2 have previously ventured, never to resurface. Then again, I eagerly await Bioshock 2, claimed to be the spiritual successor to SS2. But neglecting Starcraft is nearly impossible. Implausible. It doesn't make sense to create a successful universe and then dump it. So I guess, in a way, the announcement of Starcraft 2 seemed inevitable. Crazy fans, a hugely successful universe and Blizzard. There's little that could go wrong, and I suspect, very little will. I think ID's Quake 2, and their engine which then fueled Valve's Half Life redefined gaming as much as Wolfenstein did a long time back. But I don't expect these games to do the same. Half Life 2 didn't do it, Warcraft III didn't and certainly not Doom 3. Each refined their predecessor, but never just took off in a completely new direction. My only remaining flicker of hope is Diablo 3, when and if it happens. Looking back, not far from now, the experience of playing something new for the first time is simply unforgettable. The only problem is it just cannot be relived.

Fragmentation of Scattered Remains

It was dark. Outside. My legs found their way to the terrace. I stood there. Breathing. Just breathing. A red, like a scribbling across the sky. The Bloody Way. Sad opaque scattered motionless immersive clouds. A distinct familiar shape. Wait. Hold on. This is....my World. My Atlas. Only places. No people. No colors. No overlays. No economics. No politics. No mountains. No deserts. No plateaus. No rivers. No plains. Just plain whiteness all over. Peaceful to indulge in transcendence. I went down. I came up. A camera hangs over my neck. Some point-and-shoot. I am doubtful. I turn back. Forward again. There's now a ledge in front. I climb it. Crouching motionless, like a hunter stalking his prey, I stalk nothingness. Those clouds. Where are they. The sky turns darker, and darker, and darker, till it cannot turn darker anymore. But it still does. I can feel it. Layers and layers of Black. I lift my head. Only slightly. Six stars. Twinkle. Twinkle. Twinkle. Twinkle. Twinkle. Twinkle. Some more join. Some more twinkle. One strays to the left. A little. Slowly. It breaks away. Another follows. And another. They fall. Slowly. Almost gracefully. Suddenly, an unbearable noise starts. A rumble. Deafens my ears. But I cannot shut it out. All the other stars are angry now. They fume over something. They turn red all over. Wait. They are burning. Fast. They start fuming and burning simultaneously. They start to build energy. Some more. Still more. Until they are nothing more than pure energy itself. Concentrated and diabolical. They can no longer hold it. They have to break free. Unchain themselves. Jump over the wall and start running. Like an orchestrated act, they explode. All at once, and once for all. They come crashing down. A rampage. Hit the ground. Fearsome force. A fire breaks out. Water starts spraying. Water. Sweet naive water. Always fighting a losing battle. I am still on the ledge. Watching. Standing now. Standing still. Still standing.

the moment

the needle looms forward, its arched poise splitting the vast indistinct space. motionless, it awaits the culmination of its existence - when it bursts forth a spew of light and turns dark the next, never to be relived again and lost in the incomprehensibility that surrounds it. eye burning bright. how yearned and unfulfilling is the light. fleeting and periodic. the soreness of repetition is lost in the inconsequence of the minute moment. but when does one needle stop and the other begin. when did the first one start and when does the last one end. individually detached from memory, collectively forming it, living it and losing it. rows and rows of them. do they already know their fate. if so, why wait then, why not burn at once, rise and fall in a single cadence, together burn and forever be extinguished. does not the last one already realize he is the last, and the one before him that he is the one before the last? does that not signify to them their fate? but unconscious, are they not, for the most part at least. lost to memory and spurned by consciousness, their souless eyes never blink - not before its tryst with time, not in its radiance, not even after the passage of the moment.

The Twist

Ha aha!, you thought mere html and css could hold me back? I've broken through this senseless syntactical barricade, this....this collection of 'tags'. Bah! What an underestimation of my identity - Yes, I'm talking about my identity of a comment. I've promoted myself, quite self-consciously I must admit, to this superior state of being, this existence of a front-page post. What was meant to be submerged as just thoughts and reflections with only so much as a hyperlink dedicated to it from the main page has become enlightened, liberated even from its own existence. I stand here, extricated from all threads, solitary and autonomous, my head held high, at last living the life I adored. Well anyway, thanks for stopping by!

Oh, and if you're wondering about the post that always hogs this limelight, I've banished him to the "comments" section. Poor fella, he appears perplexed....

Perfume

Halfway through Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, The story of a murderer (translated from the original German title Das Parfum), I felt the novel contained an almost absurd fetish for morality, with characters that torment or otherwise take advantage of the uniquely skilled Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, abruptly but conveniently amputated from the narrative after serving their purpose in aiding Grenouille’s initially ambiguous quest. By the end, I realized Suskind was not being moral, but understanding and sympathetic of the misanthropic Grenouille, who distanced from the world by both smell and appearance, regains it back by scent. Smell – perhaps the feeblest of the senses, acquires astronomical proportions in Grenouille, who neglects all his other senses in favor of it. Suskind’s writing is easy but effective, even reaching a level of elegiac sarcasm on human perception in one particular scene at the gallows near the ending. But while I still cannot share Suskind’s patriarchal sympathy for Grenouille, a feeling of awe and a faint sense of admiration is nevertheless unavoidable.