Man! Talk about fickle! Texan weather beats 'em all hands down. I have given up trying to predict what it will be like tomorrow. Yesterday, it was a hot, humid day. The sun beat down on everyone, and it was muggy in the night. Tomorrow morning when I woke up, it was freezing! Well, not really freezing...more like bracing cold. But brrrrr! I had read something about today being a cold day on the internet, and had thankfully dressed for the day in jeans and two layers of clothing. Many of my friends weren't so fortunate. They were caught in the cold wearing short-sleeved shirts and T-shirts, and, even worse, shorts. The wind howled about all day, and the windchill was probably in the lower 40s. It was a very cold day today. I had cleverly worn a turtleneck, but the wind crept in even through that, making me shiver all the way to my workplace in the Fine Arts library. Now, normally the library is one of the coldest places on campus -- it may be steaming hot outside, but it's cold enough to give me goosepimples inside the library. Not so today. I actually breathed a sigh of relief on entering it, it was a respite from the cold!
After work, I shivered all the way from the FA library to Taylor Hall, which is where the Computer Sciences department is based. The cold crept up my nose, hurting my sinuses (I've had a sinus problem for ages). Even the squirrels seemed subdued today -- one little chap sadly gnawed on his acorn with apathy, and even the sight of me passing by didn't motivate him enough to spring away unlike his compatriots on normal days. I guess they are preparing for hibernation, and the unusually cold day caught them by surprise.
Taylor lab is a dark, gloomy basement with stacks of Linux and Sun machines lining the walls. It's usually freezing cold in there, and I need to often bring along a jacket even on the hottest days if I know that I'll be spending any amount of time in the lab. Not so today. I actually felt warm in the lab! I was stunned.
Yeah, it was a cold day all right! The tip of my nose froze on the way back home. I think it's going to be 88 degrees again tomorrow....that's Texan weather for you!
Monday, October 22, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
A crazy month
It's been a very crazy month. In fact, ever since the semester started, it's been crazy. The sheer amount of studying I've had to do has been mind-numbingly immense, and I cam close to a nervous breakdown a few days back -- all thanks to Graphics (as I write this, I'm casting a baleful look at the textbook, 3-D Graphics by Alan Watt, lying next to me). No course has ever caused me as many problems as this one has. And, what frustrates me, we study only math, physics, and other abstruse concepts in the course, and nothing of creativity whatsoever. I've come close to yanking my hair out this past month.
We've had projects, and my word, were they awful! Well, the first one wasn't...but the second one most certainly was, and though I haven't had a look at the code yet, the third one also seems to uphold the tradition. I finally took the monumental decision today of converting the grading of the course to a credit / non-credit. I might have to take four courses next semester, but that sure beats getting a nervous breakdown, and only a C or worse to show for it.
But I didn't want to crib. I'm actually feeling pretty good right now. I've been working part-time at the Fine Arts Department at the University of Texas at Austin, as the assistant webmaster. For some time, I just had to make HTML or basic Coldfusion updates, which weren't bad at all -- I love visuals, and was more than happy to work on it, and arrange elements of the pages as I wished. But now, I'm doing my dream job -- security!
My boss, Jeremy, has asked me to help out with the security concerns of the Fine Arts website -- and has given me full permission to poke around, and try as many exploits as I can to try to hack into the FA system! How cool is that??! Right now I'm trying to implement a CAPTCHA for the Art and Art History website. CAPTCHAs are the strange twisted words that show up when you try to send potentially spamming material. They cannot be deciphered by machines, but can be read easily by humans, so they prove very helpful deterring spambots.
What I'm actually using is the reCAPTCHA -- which is a nifty little concept. It has two words, like the CAPTCHA, with a line running through them, like a strikeout (it prevents bots from using edge-detection mechanisms to deduce the word), and, the cutest concept of it all, the words come from scanned historical texts, so everytime someone uses a reCAPTCHA, they are helping translate a word that wasn't scanned in well and not recognized by the OCR readers at wherever they do the scanning. I had read about the idea sometime back in an issue of Wired magazine, and actually got to implement it! It's wonderful.
Well, that's enough rant for now. I'm dying of sleep (haven't slept more than 10 hours in the past 4 days), and still have a paper review to complete. So I shall get going, and return again some other day. Adios!
We've had projects, and my word, were they awful! Well, the first one wasn't...but the second one most certainly was, and though I haven't had a look at the code yet, the third one also seems to uphold the tradition. I finally took the monumental decision today of converting the grading of the course to a credit / non-credit. I might have to take four courses next semester, but that sure beats getting a nervous breakdown, and only a C or worse to show for it.
But I didn't want to crib. I'm actually feeling pretty good right now. I've been working part-time at the Fine Arts Department at the University of Texas at Austin, as the assistant webmaster. For some time, I just had to make HTML or basic Coldfusion updates, which weren't bad at all -- I love visuals, and was more than happy to work on it, and arrange elements of the pages as I wished. But now, I'm doing my dream job -- security!
My boss, Jeremy, has asked me to help out with the security concerns of the Fine Arts website -- and has given me full permission to poke around, and try as many exploits as I can to try to hack into the FA system! How cool is that??! Right now I'm trying to implement a CAPTCHA for the Art and Art History website. CAPTCHAs are the strange twisted words that show up when you try to send potentially spamming material. They cannot be deciphered by machines, but can be read easily by humans, so they prove very helpful deterring spambots.
What I'm actually using is the reCAPTCHA -- which is a nifty little concept. It has two words, like the CAPTCHA, with a line running through them, like a strikeout (it prevents bots from using edge-detection mechanisms to deduce the word), and, the cutest concept of it all, the words come from scanned historical texts, so everytime someone uses a reCAPTCHA, they are helping translate a word that wasn't scanned in well and not recognized by the OCR readers at wherever they do the scanning. I had read about the idea sometime back in an issue of Wired magazine, and actually got to implement it! It's wonderful.
Well, that's enough rant for now. I'm dying of sleep (haven't slept more than 10 hours in the past 4 days), and still have a paper review to complete. So I shall get going, and return again some other day. Adios!
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Long time, no see
Wow! It's certainly been a long time since I last updated the blog! I don't think I've even seen the Blogger home page since 4th September -- which was the last time I did an update. Life's certainly been hectic! I have, for some reason, decided to pursue one of the heaviest courses at UT CS this semester, and am suffering as a consequence. But that's not what I was going to talk about.
There have been so many things happening, it's difficult to know where to start. Should I start with the swimming lessons I took? Or maybe with the hours of sleep I get each night? Or about the length of each program we students have to write for the Graphics course? Or the career fair that took place some time back? Or the trip to Mozart's I made with my friends a couple of days back? Hmm...how about a bit of everything?
It's been an interesting month since I last wrote, with quite a lot happening. Probably the most drastic things happening were the sleepless nights in Taylor lab, and the fulltime offer from Dell :) But there were other things happening too. I joined a swimming class for one! Now I'm one of those people who hyperventilate the moment the water level rises above their stomach. I did so during the first swimming class, and the instructor had to spend almost 25 minutes getting me to calm down. When I finally did, I gripped her arm so hard, I'm sure I left welts across it. But by the end of six lessons (five actually -- I missed one because I had too much work), I could swim across the pool using a kickboard. Not bad! Of course, I haven't returned to the pool in ages, so I might find myself thrashing about again if I'm lowered in the water.
But probably the starkest memory of the past month was the nights in Taylor lab. I decided to shoot myself not only in the foot, but in the head as well, by taking the hardest course offered by the CS department, Computer Graphics. Now, I have nothing whatsoever against the course or the professor. The professor is awesome, and the course is excellently designed. It's me that can't cope, I suppose. There's just too much math and too much hard-core programming for my liking. The student population is almost exclusively male, except for my roommate, Sandy, and me. All the boys are the studious, geeky types. There are a few Turing Scholars (undergrads) in the class. I'm sure the grad students are ex-Turing Scholars -- they seem the type. They're the ones who eagerly respond to any question posed, and come up with brilliant algorithms to solve the toughest problems, while I just gape at them, and wonder if there was ever the slightest chance of me getting any kind of solution, ever. Even the undergrads know more than I could ever hope to, and as for the grads, well, I have lost all hope of ever catching up with them. They're a fervent bunch -- people who probably go home and open up a visualization algorithm and worship it, or explain the intricacies of the Phong shading model and distributed ray tracing on dates. They scare me. We recently had a class by a guest lecturer, Dr Fussell (another Graphics guy), who looks like Robert DeNiro with a ponytail (and spouting vector algebra). He was talking about distributed ray tracing. I had slept only three hours the previous night, so it was a task of monumental proportions to just keep my eyes open. What heartened me, though, was two of the undergrads making faces at each other. At least I wasn't the only one completely lost! Dr Mark's classes are much better, and at one point, I used to positively look forward to them. Not any more. All we talk about is perturbation of the surface, and texture mapping, and the like. I could just cry.
The assignments for the Graphics class are another story worth telling. The first one entailed modifying a program that would make photographs look like impressionist paintings, to make them look even more impressionistic. I didn't sleep at all the night it was due, spending the entire night coding furiously. And, of course, two of the features didn't even work, earning me a C. Now the next project is due on Thursday, and I still find myself clutching my hair in despair, and wondering what on earth possessed me to take this course. I'm in Taylor lab right now, half-slumped over the computer, scowling at the screen and at the virtually undecipherable code in front of me. My only saviors are my three best friends sitting next to me (also coding miserably) and my trusty iPod.
In fact, I think I should probably return to the code, instead of typing away into a blog. Maybe the extra 5 minutes of coding might earn me a B next time.......
There have been so many things happening, it's difficult to know where to start. Should I start with the swimming lessons I took? Or maybe with the hours of sleep I get each night? Or about the length of each program we students have to write for the Graphics course? Or the career fair that took place some time back? Or the trip to Mozart's I made with my friends a couple of days back? Hmm...how about a bit of everything?
It's been an interesting month since I last wrote, with quite a lot happening. Probably the most drastic things happening were the sleepless nights in Taylor lab, and the fulltime offer from Dell :) But there were other things happening too. I joined a swimming class for one! Now I'm one of those people who hyperventilate the moment the water level rises above their stomach. I did so during the first swimming class, and the instructor had to spend almost 25 minutes getting me to calm down. When I finally did, I gripped her arm so hard, I'm sure I left welts across it. But by the end of six lessons (five actually -- I missed one because I had too much work), I could swim across the pool using a kickboard. Not bad! Of course, I haven't returned to the pool in ages, so I might find myself thrashing about again if I'm lowered in the water.
But probably the starkest memory of the past month was the nights in Taylor lab. I decided to shoot myself not only in the foot, but in the head as well, by taking the hardest course offered by the CS department, Computer Graphics. Now, I have nothing whatsoever against the course or the professor. The professor is awesome, and the course is excellently designed. It's me that can't cope, I suppose. There's just too much math and too much hard-core programming for my liking. The student population is almost exclusively male, except for my roommate, Sandy, and me. All the boys are the studious, geeky types. There are a few Turing Scholars (undergrads) in the class. I'm sure the grad students are ex-Turing Scholars -- they seem the type. They're the ones who eagerly respond to any question posed, and come up with brilliant algorithms to solve the toughest problems, while I just gape at them, and wonder if there was ever the slightest chance of me getting any kind of solution, ever. Even the undergrads know more than I could ever hope to, and as for the grads, well, I have lost all hope of ever catching up with them. They're a fervent bunch -- people who probably go home and open up a visualization algorithm and worship it, or explain the intricacies of the Phong shading model and distributed ray tracing on dates. They scare me. We recently had a class by a guest lecturer, Dr Fussell (another Graphics guy), who looks like Robert DeNiro with a ponytail (and spouting vector algebra). He was talking about distributed ray tracing. I had slept only three hours the previous night, so it was a task of monumental proportions to just keep my eyes open. What heartened me, though, was two of the undergrads making faces at each other. At least I wasn't the only one completely lost! Dr Mark's classes are much better, and at one point, I used to positively look forward to them. Not any more. All we talk about is perturbation of the surface, and texture mapping, and the like. I could just cry.
The assignments for the Graphics class are another story worth telling. The first one entailed modifying a program that would make photographs look like impressionist paintings, to make them look even more impressionistic. I didn't sleep at all the night it was due, spending the entire night coding furiously. And, of course, two of the features didn't even work, earning me a C. Now the next project is due on Thursday, and I still find myself clutching my hair in despair, and wondering what on earth possessed me to take this course. I'm in Taylor lab right now, half-slumped over the computer, scowling at the screen and at the virtually undecipherable code in front of me. My only saviors are my three best friends sitting next to me (also coding miserably) and my trusty iPod.
In fact, I think I should probably return to the code, instead of typing away into a blog. Maybe the extra 5 minutes of coding might earn me a B next time.......
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
My 23rd birthday
It was my 23rd birthday yesterday, 3rd September 2007. It was a nice, memorable one, in stark contrast to my 22nd, as miserable a birthday as you can imagine. But this post isn't about that....it's about my 23rd birthday.I had an awesome time. It was a "surprise" party, planned by my friends. The actual party was on the 2nd at midnight. A large group of friends showed up, it was a super "surprise". (It's not like I didn't have an inkling of what was happening!) But I was still delighted by it. A couple of people invited couldn't make it (one of them had fallen asleep!) but everyone remembered my birthday. I was touched.
The party went on for an hour. There was laughter, jokes all around. I was amazed at how well-coordinated it all was. We thought about taking it out to the pool, but there was already another drunken party happening at the pool, with people throwing each other into the pool and laughing like crazy (the next day we discovered a shopping cart from HEB in the pool). Everyone started leaving at about 1. It was a wonderful party.
After bidding goodbye to everyone, I got a call from an unnamed number. "Hello?" I said, knowing it was probably from India. "Hey!" came the voice from the other side. "Happy birthday! I hope I calculated the time right! Please tell me it's midnight there?"
I laughed. It was my best friend from college, Sonal, from back home in Mumbai. "You're close," I said. "It's one." We had a good laugh, and a nice, long, leisurely chat. It capped off a nice night.
The next day, I went to the Apple store at Barton Creek mall to get my iPod fixed -- it had, for some reason, stopped working. My friends, Archana and Vaibhav, and I went to Serranos on Red River for lunch. The food wasn't anything to write home about, but the ambience was terrific. We were there till nearly four, and then left for the mall. On the way, it started raining. The rain escalated into a full-fledged downpour, the water just lashing down, which delighted me -- it has rained on my birthday, every year for the last 23 years, and this just continued the tradition!
The bus wound through the wet streets of Rollingwood, and halted at the mall. I marched into the Apple store (where the iPod, as is often the case, worked perfectly fine), and then back to downtown. Archana left then, and Vaibhav and I were joined by my roommate, Sandy. The three of us went in for a quick coffee at Starbucks, and then were back out, and decided to roam around Congress. We did so, taking in the brightly-lit stores, the beautiful tree-lined views, and, of course, Town Lake in the distance. We did walk upto Town Lake, and walked down to the old Congress bridge. It was lovely. By then it was getting dark, and I looked up expectantly to see bats, but didn't see any. We walked along the bridge for a while, enjoying the sights of the setting sun a
nd the lights of South Austin reflected in the darkening water.We then walked back to Congress, and walked back to Sixth Street. We walked along sixth for a while, watched a couple of live bands performing in the Irish Pub and Friends Cafe. Sixth was still lively, even on a weekday. We then caught the bus back to 32nd and Red River, and then walked to Star Seeds Cafe on the I-35 for dinner. I was too full to really appreciate dinner, but I did appreciate the time spent with my friends.
And so ended my birthday. We all walked back to our house (Sandy's and mine), talked for a while, and then parted ways. It was a lovely, memorable birthday -- and probably my last birthday as a student! I really enjoyed myself.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
The Domain
Yesterday, my friends and I headed to The Domain near Braker and Burnet, on the Mopac frontage, to do some shopping.I'd heard about the Domain at Dell. It's a ritzy, exclusive shopping complex, with some good electronics stores -- I knew there were Apple and Sony stores there. There's also a Borders store there, which is what actually attracted me. It's my birthday tomorrow, and I wanted to do some birthday shopping there. So off headed me and two of my friends -- Sandhya (Sandy), my roommate, and Vaibhav, another friend (the guy in the photo alongside).
We caught the 3 to go up Burnet, and halt at Braker and Burnet. It was a pleasant day, so the trip felt rather nice. Even Burnet looked good for once -- I usually abhor the road, it looks horribly dry and dusty most of the time. As the bus hit US 183, pleasant memories of traveling to Dell every morning rushed back. I grew even more excited as we headed toward Braker. The bus turns at Braker, and goes along it. We got off opposite the UT TACC.
From there, it's a long walk to the Domain -- almost a mile, I'd say. It's a narrow, winding road, and gives hell to the pedestrians. Luckily, we were too enthused and in good spirits to count the close shaves we had narrowly avoiding being run down by passing cars. Prickly bushes scratched my bare ankles, and I fought the urge to let out growls of frustration.
Finally, we hit The Domain. The first store I saw was Borders, and I headed in as if pulled by a magnet. It was a large, two-story store, and I looked around in awe. In hindsight, it was probably smaller than the Barnes and Noble at Arboretum, but it certainly seemed huge!! I rushed over to the manga section, and grabbed Cantarella vol 5 and 6. It's one of my favorite mangas, and I'd searched everywhere for volumes after 3, and this was the first place I found it -- save Amazon, of course.
Sandy, Vaibhav and I went upstairs to the Seattle's Best cafe upstairs, and had a leisurely coffee milkshake. It was a nice place to hang about, even if we found a seat only after 15 minutes of glaring at people who occupied tables. We were in Borders for almost two hours, and left at about 6:30, deciding to see the rest of the Domain.
It's a pretty place. There is a long, tree-lined avenue, and flanking both sides of the road are stores. They are individual stores, not a huge mall -- I love stores like that. I hate malls. There were lost of stores -- Neiman Marcus, Apple, Sony, Puma, Macy's......the pricey types, the type of places you go to after you've started earning, not while you're a penniless grad student without any assistantships. I finally entered the Macy's store to get "something nice" for my birthday. I guess my usual dressing style isn't very "nice". I did get a very pretty blue shirt, gifted to me by my two friends. I'll wear that to the party tonight.
There was live music being performed in front of the little waterfall in the park sort of thing in front of the Sony store. It was a jazz band, and the three of us listened to the music for a while. It was beautiful, and we appreciated it.
We were in the Domain till almost 11. We left at 10:45 pm, caught a 11:04 bus back, and then went to Austin's Pizza on Guadalupe at almost midnight. We got back home at almost midnight.
It was a fantastic day, though....enjoyable all the more because I was with friends. And now I've struck another name off my list of things to see in Austin!
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