Wikipedia describes windchill as follows:
Wind chill is the apparent temperature felt on exposed skin, which is a function of the air temperature and wind speed. The wind chill temperature (often popularly called the wind chill factor) is always lower than the air temperature, except at higher temperatures where wind chill is considered less important.
Now given that Japan is a cold country, these "higher temperatures" are nowhere to be seen except for a short duration of summer. And given it is winter (at least for us people of the northern hemisphere - those down under are perhaps enjoying their beaches right now), windchill is looming larger than life these days.
In the morning, with the air temperature perched somewhere around the lower reaches of the thermometer, and with the wind increasing in strength, windchill becomes the prime reason of dreading the workday, displacing work from its high throne. I mean who in the right state of their minds would ever want to go out to get to office - on a bicycle no less - when the outside conditions are sure to freeze your limbs, give you frostbite and even cause a serious case of brain freeze more often than not.
And all this when we are just halfway into December, they say that the worst is yet to come. And people used to say that Dilli ki sardi was the last nail in their coffins. I challenge them to come here, and face windchill, and just pray that the day does not send their way another dreaded demon of the north - Cold December Rain.
I'm back in the game babay, the game of playing computer games on the LAN with buddies.
One desktop machine (sadly not mine)
Three (or possibly even four lappies)
One 5 port Ethernet Hub
An assortment of multiplayer co-operative, team and every man for himself games.
Four Gamers, three backseat gamers and a hell lot of shouting
The above are the perfect ingredients for a small Lan-Party, and that's what it was last night, though being my first one, the machine was not so well prepared for the gaming. Things will be definitely much better next time though I guess, with me having settled up my lappie for all gaming.
As for yesterday, I was able to hold my own in Age of Empires 2, and Quake 3. And that was without any practice beforehand. This LAN-Party scene is gonna be FUN!!!!!!
I guess it will be a standard Friday night fixture from now on, and maybe Saturday nights too :D
I guess I should be honestly thanking Nuke for this. About a month back, one fine Thursday, we was chatting about random things when he happened to send me a link of some photographs from a videogame exhibition. Me did a little more digging, and found out that it was the Tokyo Game Show 2008, it was not over - as in the open-to-public days were the coming Saturday and Sunday, and much more importantly, it was hardly a 15 minutes walk from my current at that time location - the OVTA Training Center.
And thus that weekend came to be known as the weekend of the TGS2008.
Games, were there in plenty, but, also were present what actually draws the crowds to any exhibition related to games and the like. The boothbabes. They were in good numbers at every stand, and nerds were there in greater numbers to get a glimpse and snap photographs. Honest to god, I never ever saw a larger collection of people with cameras hanging around their necks, not even at the Auto Expo 2008. Of-course, how could I get left behind? My camera shutter opened and closed over four hundred times that day - and I was frankly surprised by the fact that my camera battery lasted that long.
At the end of the day, with my legs broken from standing and walking around all day, I thought that even though nothing significant had been accomplished except filling two memory cards, I can atleast tease all my friends with "being there, done that" :P.
Reading through my blog, you might observe that there are a lot of posts with their titles same as some older ones, with just v2.0 or v3.0 appended. While some might think that this is pure stupidity, to me this comes naturally. You see, growing up the geek way, in earlier days, when software were not released yearly to make all the moolah, the major releases were numbered by increment to the next full whole number, and minor releases and bug fixes were numbered within that whole numbers as decimals. We had DOS 6, Windows 3.11, NT4. Heck I still prefer to refer windows XP as NT5.1.
Anyway, coming back to the titles, the V2.0 here stands for the fact that this is my second long term trip to Japan, and in the first time I am writing on this trip.
This time around, I am here for eleven months in total, compared to the two and a half long duration of the trip last summer. And more importantly, month and a half of these eleven are to be spent in a language training institute, which in my case is OVTA, some twenty miles from the capital city of Tokyo. Too bad that there are time limitations to the time that we can stay out till each night, else a night out in Tokyo wouldabeen fun.
Anyhoo, so far the 25 odd days have been real fun. We've been to Tokyo Disneyland and watched an overdose of parades, what with Tokyo Disneyland celebrating its 25th Anniversary, and the Halloween season hanging around. Have also spent a great day roaming around the streets of Akihabara, and hanging out at the camera floor of Yodobashi Akiba, the bloody biggest electrical and electronics goods store in the world perhaps.
The actual work for which I am here is also going on pretty decently. The 5 days a week seven hours a day language classes have given me a slight understanding of the language and the ability to carry out basic conversations. Better fluency in communication will come over time, but as of now I guess I am pretty OK on the language front.
So far so good. Lets see what how the rest of the trip goes. Worry not, I still have lots of minor releases within the v2 of this postcard series to work on.
I sometimes sit back and think about the past twenty or so years of my life that I can recollect at some level or the other.
Of these, the earliest are no more than wisps of memories from Lansdowne, the start of schooling, the cold winters having the longer of the two school breaks, and things like that.
Etched slightly deeper in the back of my mind are the days that I spent after moving to Delhi, continuing schooling, the correct holidays being longer in duration, the friends I used to play with and annoy or a strikingly regular basis.
Next in line are the Rohtak days, with the memories being clearer than the previous two locations, thus including a larger spectrum of things that come to mind. Schooling (again), friends, my first time driving a jeep or riding a motorbike, my first time crashing a car into a pole, my first time falling in love with computers, and thousands of other events that haven't yet faded into oblivion.
Next come the five golden years of my life that are written in ink, but are now slowly beginning to show signs of fading. The KGP days. In theory, these days are supposed to teach you the skills needed to get through your career. Well, don't know about that happening, but I am pretty sure that college does teach something more important than that. It teaches you the skills that help you get through life. And then a lot more. The friendships you forge there last longest, even if the friends are spread across the face of the globe. The things you learn, unlearn and relearn last through life and of-course, you enjoy this period more than any other in life. There are a million things from this time, that if I ever gather the courage to list them down, I would perhaps kill the keyboard by typing too much. Computers, html, c, cars, bikes, formula 1, gaming, one or two academic courses, the hostel, the wing, the wingoos, the sf, the summer training, the job interviews, the bunked lectures, the night-outs, the Cal-trips, and so much more, some of which is already recorded in these pages.
The two years since then seem to have passed in a blinding flash of light, but that does not mean that they are not remembered. The Job, the first few months of no work, the following period of work increasing by the day, Japan, Agra by bike, cameras, computers some more, gaming, and some more job-things.
The one another thing that become clear is when I am lost in these memories is that over the years, I have learnt and known a lot of stuff about a lot of varied subjects. The good part is that I can often recall a lot of it. The sad part is that as I get deeper and deeper engrossed in the things that are happening now, and as they eat up some of the disk space at the top floor, some older things slip away. I used to be proud one to be able to recite the complete specifications of some computer part just off the top of my head that some friend had come across somewhere. Today, it is difficult for me to do that.
And inevitably, more and more things will slip away. I do not want to let that happen. Even if all these things sink deeper and deeper into the folds of grey matter in my head, I want to have some way to get back to them and say, "hey, I knew that".If I tell you the real reason of why I am writing this new blog, you'd perhaps infer that the Psycho has really gone crazy, so I will stick with the one stated above :P
I wanted to title this post "Associative Regression". However I did not. The reasons for that are two-fold.
1. Someone already has a blog post by the same title. (and it also deals with the same subject)
2. The term is as much made up as the current title of the blog is. And of the two made up terms, "Revertigo" is catchier.
So anyway, with the name of the post finalized, I should at least explain the origin of the terms.
Made popular by the hit TV show How I Met Your Mother, the term Revertigo was coined by a character on the show describing how his wife reverts to her high-school self when around her friend from that time. And the term "Associative Regression" was mentioned by that friend, who is supposed to be some sort of behavioral psych scholar....
Anyhoo, whatever be the roots of these terms, "revertigo" is now quite popular, having multiple entries at the Urban Dictionary. Associative Regression, having many more syllables, hasn't been that lucky.
So after a pretty long prologue, now I come to the actual content of this blog post.
As of today, if I am to sit down and think for a while, mine is a typical bourgeois existence, six days pulling twelve hour or longer days at the office, and then one in front of the idiot box of the twenty-first century - the personal computer (sometimes the twentieth century idiot box also features - usually for formula 1 races - man that was one slick move Massa pulled off today on the McLarens, they could never have seen it coming - too bad his engine blew 3 laps from the finish when he was leading). And thus this bourgeois existence gives you moments when you want to be what you earlier were. Perhaps even from half your life or more ago. And you do get a change of it when you are around someone you knew from that time and are meeting after long. And sometimes not even when really around, the modern means of communication are wonderful triggers of revertigo.
I used to be a big-time blue blooded geek in my college days. Computer hardware was my favorite haunt, especially the x86 and related extended architectures. There was a time when there was not one piece of computer hardware of the aforementioned affiliation that I did not know about.
And in addition to this, I was, since before college, an automobile enthusiast, and a tifosi. Thus, the favored vehicles were the scarlet Ferraris of both track and road kind. Add to those a lot more four wheeled vehicles of varying lineage, and then the two wheeled kind with engines of varied sizes slung in between, and you might be able to paint a picture that would for sure out-stretch any piece of canvas you can get your hands on.
However, being what I am now, there really isn't much time to be a devout follower of the religion of silicon, or that of gasoline - or even diesel - so bloody brilliant diesel engines they make these days that the Le Mans 24 Hours organizers are trying to amend the rules to try and give a chance to the gasoline powered vehicles. Gasoline in your veins is a phrase that perhaps needs replacing lest the spark plug people do something, and do it quick.
However much I claim to be a geek and a auto-afficiando, the bitter truth is that today the amount of knowledge I have about computers and cars is much less than what it used to be at a point in history.
And this is where revertigo, in all its forms, comes into play.
For those few hours when talking with old friends (and even some new ones) about the latest cars and bikes, or even minutes when discussing online the virtues and vices of the newest thing nVidia, Intel, ATi, AMD, Canon or Nikon, I go back. Knowing (or atleast pretending) a lot about computers, cars, bikes, and more recently Digital SLR cameras and lenses is a wonderful feeling that reminds you of simpler times without painfully long working hours and being worried sick about the next vehicle build trials and drawing release dates. Hell I have perhaps gone revertigo twice or thrice in this blog post already.
The good part is, that whenever I am in revertigo, the world feels to be a nicer place to be in. The stress, the worries, the drawing release dates simply fade away. What remain are the things that seemed to matter the most to you back then.
The bad part however is that when you snap out of it, all those bourgeois things are still there, more menacing than ever before, drawing closer and closer.
As of now, I have not been able to decide whether revertigo is a good thing or a bad one. Perhaps your experiences about the same would help me reach there. What I do know for a fact is that revertigo is here to stay with me, perhaps forever. And that I miss the TV show that coined this term, and that they should hasten its return to the old idiot box, so that we can also get it on the newer one. Or, that I should go into a hibernative revertigo and ask someone to pay heed to the Green Day song that goes "Wake me up when September ends.........
Okay, its been another reaaaaaaaaaaaaaallly long break between posts.....
So here I am, back on the blogosphere, raving and ranting about computers as usual....
There's one thing you gotta both love and hate about computers. They are upgradable...
The love part is that when building one personally, you can leave upgrade paths open by making a few decisions that will help ya go places later..
The hate part is that given the speed of development of all these new computer components, as soon as you leave an upgrade path, it begs to be followed...
And thus we reach the crux of the matter being discussed in this post.
Today, I upgraded my machine.
From a lowly 1.8GHz single core processor and a basic mainboard, to components that in their heyday were the best there were - The ASUS A8N SLi Mainboard, and the Opteron 165 Dual Core processor. While the stock clock speed of the processor is the same as my older one, its got twice the L2 cache per core, quadrupling it. AND, given that the A8N SLI was a top board, it is extremely suited to overclocking, thereby allowing me to get a lot more outta the opty 165 that I now have.
As of now, it is just a 20% processor overclock, that I later intend to take to close to 40% - will hafta adjust the RAM speeds some more. But I will get there someday - when the weather is cold enough :D.
ACT I : of Holidays and Non-Working Days v2
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about Holidays & Non-Working Days. My idea those days was of being so immersed in work, that you didn't get much time to let your brain wander.
As Sudu says, be very careful about what you wish for, I actually got so much of work to do recently, that there actually was no time to think about anything. Really.
Which is why, this v2 post. A two day break after a long long time, is really welcome. Especially when you've been working even 7 days a week sometimes, putting in 12 ~ 14 hours a day regularly at office and the fact that a colleague from my department went off to get married leaving me to take care of the issued that he usually handles. Boss's words: "take care of his work too. Will be a bit of overloading but that happens". Amen.
Anyway, he's back now, and this two day break came along and then there are a few more 2 day breaks coming along, life's going to be a bit easier.
So lets get to the next part.
ACT II: The Long Long Wait
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, a psycho once went to Japan. And then he came back. He wished to go back, and thus he took upon himself to endure the AOTS training. Little did he know that he'd have to endure another thing. A Long Long wait.
The Human Resources Development Department of our company is not a very commendable one, and that's like saying that a cold blooded murderer is not the kindest person I know. Anyway, what I mean to say is that the HR department being the HR department, it has delayed our forms so much that there is now a declared delay of three months. What the time duration actually is, nobody knows. That after the psycho has been waiting for almost six months already.
There is no respite from the continuous amount of overwork being done. There is no hope of getting out of the monotonies of daily work. There is a horrifying long wait ahead of you before things will begin to look up.
What do you do? Go...
No this isn't mine or someone's personal best in the game with 22 players chasing a red ball with two sticks. And even though the phrase is stolen from that game, it isn't even remotely related.
What this is related to, in fact, reinforces the fact that sometimes the best things happen pretty much unplanned, rather than after planning for hours on end. What I had been planning was a road trip to somewhere, but after about a fortnight of fits and starts of planning, it never materialized. Then one fine day, a friend sends me a message and then off we went to Agra on new year's day. And came back. On a motorbike. In fact, we visited three places in total, covered 509 km (that's the score), snapped a few pics as souvenirs and came back.
So there I was, at 5:30 in the morning, riding to Faridabad through the twisties at 80 kmph. Little did I know that next day, I'd be reading that the temperature was about 2.6 degrees centigrade, and the windchill made it well below freezing. Reached there and waited for another biker to join us, and then set off towards Agra.
Next stop was an toll-booth, where we decided that to begin a new year on a good note, we should go to the Lord Krishna temple in Vrindavan. So, it was a detour off Mathura, and after a short darshan and 15 minutes of shivering, we were back on the road.
The fact that Fatehpur Sikri was also on our agenda, we took a by-road, rode alone on half-maintained roads and speeds unheard of in those areas, and somehow reached our second destination. We spent maybe an hour there, got bugged to hell by self made guides, snapped a few pics in the bright sunshine, and then started off towards our next destination. The Taj.
However, two kilometers out my friend had a little collision with a lorry that braked suddenly. Luckily, he was unhurt, and except for broken headlamp glass and a bent mudguard. Spent about an hour fixing his bike, rode on to Agra, fixed an electrical bug on the third person's bike, and then got on to our third and final destination for the day - The Taj.
There was a loooooooooooong entry line there, and when we finally got to the entry-gate, the buggers there didn't allow me to wear my armored riding jacket while going inside. Luckily, the sun was bright so the t-shirt sufficed. Anyway, we spent sometime there, snapped a few pics again and then started back.
Some 15 kilometers later, we stopped at a dhaba and had a solid late lunch, for I hadn't eaten anything since that bread omlette at 5:00 AM. Then we started back for home, and rode almost non-stop till Faridabad. One thing that I realized was that the headlamp on my bike was shot and had to ride in perfect syncro with my friend to be able to see anything on the road.
On reaching Faridabad, we bid goodbye to the friend who had joined us there in the morning, and then started back towards the twistied to get back home, Gurgaon. We reached back at around 10:30 PM.
Some people later said that I did not achieve anything that day, just touching the footstones of those wonderful tourist destinations and not staying there. But for me, it was not about spending time at the destination. It was about the journey, seated in the saddle of my iron horse. That night, I had the widest grin ever on my face when I went to bed.
