Revertigo

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.........

Reboot V2.0 + Upgrade Path

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.

of Holidays and Non-Working Days v2, and The Long Long Wait

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...

509 Not Out

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.

Political Correctness and the Recycle Bin

Well there's this one thing I have been wondering about for a while.

When you are a person like me who loves computers, you sure get to use a lot of different operating systems. I have had the experience of using many flavors of Linux, Mac OS X and of course the one that we all hate but use all the same, Windows.

Now as it turns out, different operating systems (or OS's for short) have different names for the same things. For example, what is known in windows as the command prompt, is known as the terminal in Linux and Unix based systems. (I know this comment of mine can start a holy war, but come-on, most of my patrons are not so geeky, and thus this would be a completely sensible comparison to them). The "All Programs" part of the (Start) Menu is the "Applications", and so on. One good thing though is that Firefox is Firefox wherever it exists.

There is one thing however that is differently named, and the way it is named makes me thing whether one big software company is trying to please the powers that be in a very subtle way.

With the advent of the gooey (GUI) operating systems, a feature that soon found its way into our lives was the ability to delete files, but not really pipe them to null. They were simply "moved" to another place, safe until explicitly deleted, or in some cases, found to be useful and moved back to the original place.

And this safe haven where the unwanted files find some solace is called the "Trash Can" by some and "Recycle Bin" by others. Now I am not trying to be some environmentalist or something, but these days, "Trash Can" is a bad word, especially with everyone shouting about the dying environment and the lost forest cover each year and what not. These days, it simply does not cut it.

And this is what some genius with enough foresight at that big software company figured out. He called his trash can the "Recycle Bin". Absolutely politically correct in today's world where for all I know, I might have committed a felony worthy of a few days in the cooler when I tossed that polythene bag in the "Burnable Rubbish" can instead of the "Recycle" one.

Guess this can give us some food for thought, but also, is this why all those open-source people can't get big governments to switch to their operating systems????

Return of the Thermal Shock

Well, its been quite some time since the incidents I am about to write about here, but I believe that these do deserve a mention.

A query on Answers.com using the search term "Shock" (yes, an internet search, do you really expect this lazy-bum-wired-into-the-www fellow to ever look up a term in a hardback dictionary?) gives various results, and from them I will list the ones that most closely match the context of this post.

Shock¹ (shŏk)

1. Something that jars the mind or emotions as if with a violent unexpected blow.
2. The disturbance of function, equilibrium, or mental faculties caused by such a blow; violent agitation.

The most common kind of shock that we always seem to be discussing about is Electric Shock, especially with the "Shock laga laga laga Shock laga" adverts doing the rounds.

However, the thing that I am about to discuss here is, as you must have guessed by the title, to heat. (thermal, thermodynamics, heat - all related things)

Now, keeping in line with the meaning, a thermal shock would be something that causes a blow by means of heat. Lets delve into the relevant details to better understand the situation and its implications.

As a part of my job description, I have to take part in Full Vehicle A/C performance testing. This activity is done on a vehicle chassis dynamo-meter in a closed climate controlled chamber. Now, to do this test, the chamber is kept at a temperature of 45^o Celsius, gotta match the actual temperature conditions of the Indian summer after all. And compared to the control room, which has three heavy duty split air conditioners that can bring the room down below 20^o, the chamber becomes something of an oven, capable of serving fresh baked psycho. Especially when the test is underway, the vehicle is doing 100kmph on the dynamo-meter and the engine cooling fan is more than keeping up.

So in the month of May, I was taking part in this A/C performance testing activity, and often had to go from the control room to the chamber during the test. From a cold 20^o room to a 45^o oven with 100kmph air blast had become the thermal shock I took on an hourly basis, sometimes more often.

And as if that was not enough, the same thing returned in September, where for two days I was re-involved in testing, and thus back into the realm of thermal shock. Hence the nomenclature of the post.

However, the best moment of thermal shock did not come in its return. It had come on a particularly hot May Day of testing.

We had to change some engine room components on the vehicle after completing a test cycle, and having run in that heated chamber for two hours, the engine was pretty much boiling. To cool it down quickly we decided to bring down the chamber to 15^o and also manually turn on the engine cooling fan of the chamber to create an airflow of 50kmph. And this is the moment when out boss decided to walk in on the chamber from the afternoon heat of that day. Expecting a similar environ inside the chamber, he walked into a Himalayan storm. The look on his face while gesturing to us in the control room to cut out the chamber fan through the observation window will be the signature "thermal shock" image imprinted on our minds. For a long time to come.

Postcard From Japan

Okay, it has been a pretty long time now since I last posted. On second thoughts, it hasn't just been a "pretty long time", it has been a truckload of time to the power of infinity, it has been three frigging months for crying out loud....

Anyway, whatever's happened has happened so now's high time to post a post.

So, where was I. Yeah, in Gurgaon on some 16th floor of a slick building last time around. But now, I am on the 4th floor (or rather 5th floor in the traditional Japanese way, and also the Indian way, the "paanchwi manzil") of an multi-apartment building, sitting infront of a lappie (yes a lappie, this gaming rig afficiando has been reduced to a lappie user), typing out this post to my blog after ages...

But why am I sounding so negative, heck its been a great time these last three months. Had done a lotta testing work back home at Maruti, enjoyed it thoroughly, got a great chance to come here to SMC, Japan and so here I am, in Hamamatsu City, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan.


So, I arrived here in Japan on 27th May, 2007, rode the Shinkansen (bullet train for the totally Japanignorant) to Hamamatsu, and will be here for a total of two and a half months. The town's a nice peaceful place, and although it is on the seashore, you can't really feel the humidity, perhaps because of the low ambient temperatures (ever heard of someone wearing jackets in the month of June).

Now before you people start bombarding me with questions like "Is Japan as crazy as the movies show us?", I will dispel all the rumors by stating that Japan (well, atleast Hamamatsu) is as normal as a place can be. Dunno about Tokyo as yet, might get a chance to tell ya all about that place if I take a trip there in July.

As far as other things are concerned, the trains here are awesome. No, they are Legen-wait for it-dary. I mean you can set your watches by their departures from the stations, and that is why travelling by train to office is such an easy job. Outta apartment at about 7:50AM, take a return ticket from the machine at 8:01AM, board the 8:09 train, get outta the train at the first stop, and u're in office before 8:30. Perfect.

Some of the superstores here are HUGE, and by HUGE, I mean so severely oversized that it took the three of us almost a whole day to buy two pairs of shoes and a pair of floaters. Did a lot of random roaming around that day too, and it was fun. That was the first day of the last weekend, and on Sunday, we went to the Hamana Lake that is in Hamamatsu. Well not it is not technically a lake being joined to the sea after an earthquake, but still it is a B-E-A-utiful place. And yesterday, just roaming around the town on streets that we had not used before, we stumbled upon Hamamatsu Castle, or what remains of it, a small Castle Tower. Passed by a wedding at a Church too, while roaming around before arriving at the Castle.

Hadta clean up my room today but spent almost the entire day in bed, watching a movie, and gotta admit it, that is for sure the better way to spend the lazy Sunday after a late bar night Saturday.

Hmm, that seems to be enough material to write on a postcard. Heck, I'd have to hire professionals to write in tiny letters if I ever want to put so much text on a normal paper postcard, thank the internet and google and blogger and a keyboard that we can put so much of crap online for potentially everyone to read.

Enough of my rambling for now, cya laters.

The Dilemma of Dressing Up

Well, you'd have one too if you go to office daily in a uniform and suddenly you are supposed to go to work NOT in a uniform but in regular clothes. That too for ten days straight. You're in big trouble. You have no idea what is the usual dress style at work these days. You cannot decide on what to wear from the few normal clothes you have tucked away in some corner of the wardrobe. And sometimes you have no idea where that corner of the wardrobe is.

Life on the 16th floor was one such period. Ten days of work away from office. Well, at least its over for me now. But now the same dilemma haunts my roomie. Its his turn now on the 16h floor, and he's as confused as me. All I can say to him is "Suit Up".

Life on the 16th floor

So i have been outta the office for about a week now. NO, I am not AWOL. I am on an official CAD software training, and the training location is the slick corporate office of the company that provides the software to my company. Now this office happens to be on the 16th floor of one of those newfangled Gurgaon buildings, and oh my, its a sight to behold looking out from the windows of the training room.

Here are a few of the pics i took minutes after reaching that place (thank you camera phone :D). The parked cars and bikes, the road a hundred meters away, and the flat expanse of Gurgaon and Delhi in the distance. It looks AWESOME. Click on the images to see full sized versions.




PS. This is also the 50th post in my blog. Glad that I could bring it to this milestone. Gotta try and make it go a much longer distance.

Changing Lanes

Sometime, going along the unmetalled highway of life, you stick to a lane, following something elusive so intently that you sort of miss out on what else is there around you.

Maybe you realize what has been happening, and suddenly you are jerked out of your trance. Or, it takes a friend to put you back on track. But sooner or later, it happens. You change lanes on the highway. With the hope that you don't fall back into the trance anymore.