The answer isn't 42

Those who believe that the earth is "mostly harmless" may be quite offended by the title of this blog post. However, even they will agree, that 42 isn't the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. Funny thing is, most don't even know what the ultimate question of life is.

Inevitably though, it crosses everyone's mind. Or rather, for the lack of a better description, engulfs the mind with an intensity that would make a raging wildfire green with jealousy. It, of-course being the question that shakes the very essence of existence of even the strongest people out there.

In the words of the inimitable Dr. Sheldon Cooper, Ph.D., the question can be phrased as "To what end?". Upon most of us though, as we tread wearily through the brobdingnagian monotony that is life, it slowly dawns as a realisation that we don't really know what we want from it.

Given that this question, at least for a lucky few amongst us, results in the forging of a path that they follow for the rest of their natural born life, we may safely assume that this, in fact, is the the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.

For most of us though, this realisation transcends the feeling of falling down an endless pit, with the damn thing not even possessing the common courtesy of having a bottom (Remember, its not the fall that kills you, its the sudden stop at the bottom that does!). Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the feeling of not knowing the answer makes one suicidal, its just that the metaphorical bottom to that pit might be a jolt enough to make one sit up, take stock of life, think, ponder, contemplate. In other words, the metaphorical bottom is the epiphany all of us are waiting to have.

Sadly, so far, any epiphany to the purpose of life has eluded me with the same gusto as the Road Runner evading Wile E Coyote.

Why then all of a sudden, in the dying hours of the year, am I rambling about my (so far) wasted life. I guess it is because despite trying to, I cannot answer the question "What do you do?" with "I'm living my dream", which undoubtedly is the best response that could ever be garnered for this question. Or maybe it is just because despite enough attempts to do otherwise, I am going to spend the new year's eve in the exact same manner I did last year; Asleep before the new year dawns (per IST).

Whatever the reason be, 2011 does not seem to be bringing any breakthroughs. So if any of you out there, who chance upon this rant, have but even a sliver of insight into how to figure out what I want, lemee know.

PS: The crux of the matter however is that even after going through whatever trials and trepidations that lie in the path of getting to know what I want, what I really want, or rather, what I need may be something else entirely. But that perhaps is a topic for another day.

Custom Message v3.0

It has been a really really long time since I last posted here my compilation of status messages that I find below friends' names in the various messengers that I use. More than two and a half years actually (damn, that IS long). Since then, countless status messages have been displayed in my messenger friend lists, and some that catch my eye are saved to a raggedy text file somewhere in the depths of my hard disk. But it is now time.

I'll start with something which, while having flashed across my gtalk window ages ago, sorta perfect fits the current situation that the world is in.
"Due to recent cutbacks and until further notice, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off." This one was from Jay Mody/Drumster.

Related to the same subject is the next one from fundoome:
"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."

Given that the state of the world is not so good, few people do have their doubts about the future. And thus Babboo said:
"The problem with future is that though it is supposed to be better it keeps turning into present."

And on similar lines, Cyrix says:
"A man once told me, "Cheer up, things cud b worse." So I cheered up, and sure enuf, things got worse."

Hmmm, given that the above few post a very depressing picture of the world, lets move on to slightly lighter stuff....

Lets start with another one from Cyrix:
"I hated going to weddings. All the grandmas would poke me saying "You're next". They stopped that when I started doing it to them at funerals."

This post wouldn't be complete without the trademark geeky status message, so here it is, courtesy Anikh Thakur:
"I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code."

Last time around, there were a few engineers pissed at Newton and gravitation. We have one more. This one's from Indranil, a fellow engineer and IITian.
"sometimes as an engineer i wish that Newton had decided to sit under a coconut tree ;)"

Talking of IITs, they are magical places, and as usual, the examination time brings out some of the finest status messages to come out of there. The following two deal with the dilemma that the students face towards the end of their stints at IIT.
"xam time realisation : gettin into iit is tough but getting out is tougher :((" - Indranil
"You think getting into IIT is difficult? Try getting out, b***h......" - Rajeev

Some of us believe in getting through these exams and all. Others however differ, as aptly put forward by Abhishek Gupta:
"padh likh kar kya karna hai, ek din sabko marna hai, markar bhi janam liye to nursery se hi to padhna hai!!"

Everyday, countless scientific discoveries are being made. The next statement is from Issac Asimov, but for all purposes, for me, it simply was Vivek Malewar/Matterlogic's status message.
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, isn't 'Eureka!' but rather 'hmm....that's funny'."

And also, often what the scientists and physicists feel while working hard for these discoveries is also aptly put forward by another Matterlogic status message:
"I feel like i'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe!!!"

A lot many people like eagles for being the majestic creatures that they are. Little do they know that "Eagles may soar, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines." I forgot whose status message this was.

It is human nature to make jokes at the expense of our friends. The next one was the status message of Siva Krishna, making fun of Abhishek Chaudhary a.k.a Chow
Chow (verb.), Lacking hope. example: "After failing to impress women, Abhishek felt chowed"

Talking about friends, Anshul Singhal said:
"I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends going to both the places :)"

Of late, I have been interested in photography and camera equipment (okay, I'll admit, I have been obsessing about it for over a year now). The following two were not status messages but forum signatures picked up when hanging around the www.dpreview.com forums
"I don't believe in fate, but I do believe in f8" - Mr. Ken Phillips

You gotta know a wee bit about photography to understand the one above, and you for the one below, you need to know about Nikon's DSLR lineup when the D700 was launched (Mid-2008-ish). This would also please the Chuck Norris fans amongst those who understand it.
"Chuck Norris round-house kicked Ken Rockwell's D3, and now we have the D700. Contrary to slanderous claims that the D3 slept with the D300 ~9 months ago!"

Last time around, after I posted the custom message post, I was requested to include a few of my own status messages. Unfortunately, I never remember mine after changing them on the messenger window. Things like twitter now help. This is what I came up during a recent week long spring break from office:
"an idle mind is truly the devil's workshop. But worse than that, it gives you way too much time to think over your own thoughts....."

Fortunately, Rishi Doshi (RiDo) has a solution:
"I like the music loud. So that I can't hear my thoughts."

In life, we are always in the pursuit of happyness, but sometimes, this is what you should have in mind when heading that way:
"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story....." - Siddarth Khastgir

We also make a lot of mistakes in life, but I guess you'd never learn without making them.
"Here's the thing about mistakes. Sometimes, even when you know something's a mistake, you gotta make it anyway... Even really, really dumb mistakes." - Ted Mosby, Architect, from one of my fav. TV series, How I Met Your Mother.
"Everybody makes mistakes, that's why they put erasers on pencils" - I picked this one up from a blog post, don't remember whose.

For making mistakes, we often criticize a lot of people. This should help you get a little more out of that process:
"Before you criticize people, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away. And you have their shoes." - saw this as Debjeet Sen's status message.

Talking some more about mistakes, one of my friends has caught upon a mistake countless men make. Manuj Nagpal was enlightened with this knowledge:
"Many a man who falls in love with a dimple make the mistake of marrying the whole girl."

If however you do make the mistake, the following are words of wisdom.
"Do u know why a gun is better than a wife? Because u can put a silencer on it." - TKB
"if ur wife wants to learn driving, u shudn't get in her way" - I forget whose status message this was.

We dream a lot about what we want to do and what we want to be, but be very careful, as this quote from one of my favorite game warns:
"Dreams have a nasty habit of going bad when you're not looking." - Max Payne

We all know that English is a very very strange language, with the same word having many meanings, thus leading to funny sounding phrases, strange grammar rules, and on top of that more exceptions than rules. This leads to the following observations:
"More than 1 mouse is mice; more than 1 spouse is spice." - from Bhavesh/Voice

"A famous painter met his death because he could not draw his breath." - Sonali/sonik

There's another one from Sonik, about a cold truth of life.
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he'll not bite you. This is the principle difference between a dog and a man."

And as long as we are back to discussing about life, I now present to you(and also close my post with) the status message that got me back into the game, and inspired me to dig out that text file and post the collection of status messages once more. I saw this as a status message a few days ago under Arijit Pal's name on my messenger window.
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!"

The Laziest Person On the Planet

It's Official now (atleast as per the life and happenings research department of Psycho McCrazy). I am the Laziest person on the entire planet.

I have been lazy almost my entire life, and if you ask, my parents and my aunts and uncles would vouch for that in a jiffy. I would always be totally unenthusiastic to do anything that did not interest me the least bit. Would more often that not get me into more trouble that I had bargained for, but that was my thing. It was what I did. I was lazy.

As the time progressed, I slowly joined the rank of elite procrastinators, laying off all tasks till the latest possible minute, and had even without knowing that it even existed, started following the "Theory of Round Figures". While the exact definition of this theory is something that the original theorizer only can comprehend, it generally means that the most urgent task at hand can wait till the next hour, or the half hour strike before it has to be begun.

But now, my laziness has gone to levels that the even I wasn't prepared to encounter. I mean earlier it was only the things that I disliked or did not interest me, but now even my hobbies and the things that I used to do when lazying off other real tasks have become victim of the unprecedented levels of laziness that I am displaying.

I like photography, but for the last four or so months, I have not taken out my camera and gone out of the room. I was conveniently blaming it on the cold weather, but now that the last few days have been beautifully sunny without the crazy wind blowing, (except for today, damn rain), I still cannot make myself get off my arse and take a walk outside.

I like to blog, and was pretty darn regular in college when I thought that my laziness was at its peak, with all the bunked classes, the endless hours of doing absolutely nothing, and not giving a damn about it. But now, even though there are a thousand things to choose from to write, I cannot make myself to sit in front of my monitor and type some. (Only I know how I have battled the monster of laziness to come up with this post).

I also am an crazy avid videogamer, but now a days, sometimes I am so lazy that I prefer to stay lying in bed rather than getting up, walk three steps to my chair and play on for few hours. This when I used to laze around about zillions of other things just to play for some time longer.

I mean for god's sake, have I become so pathetic, that my laziness is now getting to swallow up the things that I actually liked to do. Anyway, so far this laziness has not gotten to the point where it causes me some real damage, because as yet it has not caused me to miss work or something like that, but given the levels that it has gotten to, I'm not really sure about how long it will be before that happens. Damn, I gotta do something before it gets me!!!

That Last Maggi!! Postcard from Japan v2.04

There are both benefits and disadvantages to spending sometime in a foreign country like Japan, away from home. The advantages, while not limited to, include the five day work week, dust free environment, the infrastructures of an developed country, going to the Tokyo Game Show and ogling at the booth babes, and the good traffic sense that allows you to ride a bicycle and keep moderately fit. Also, for those who are into experimentation about their food, a great part is that there are so many new dishes to be tried that they can spend a great amount of time on that.

The fact however remains that almost all of the items are non-vegetarian and thus to a lot of people from India that poses a great issue because of their vegetarian dietary restrictions. For someone like me however, who lies in neither categories mentioned above, while survival in Japan is pretty easy as I can eat the stuff that is available easily in the office and hostel canteens, the McDonalds and Mos Burgers at the crossroads and grab the sandwiches from the 24 hour convenience stores and eat whenever.

But, there comes a time when on the days off, the canteens are closed, one's had way too much bread and milk, and the lazy me is in no mood to go out because of the windchill, Maggi comes to the rescue. Simple enough that someone like me with practically ZERO cooking expertise can prepare it in a jiffy, and then eat it steaming hot.

Maggi has been the mainstay of bachelor sustenance for as long as I can remember, as in my elder cousins taking bucketloads of it to college, me also depending a lot on Maggi at the hostel canteen for all late night snacks, and then carrying mass quantity packets of it to both my trips to the Land of the Rising Sun. Maggi without doubt is one of the god's greatest gift to bachelor-kind, nay, mankind.

However, as I now look at the one remaining packet of Maggi remaining with me, I an wishing for the news of anyone coming here from India on any short term trip so that they can carry some and I can stock up on the supply for another few months.

Windchill!!! Postcard from Japan v2.03

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.

LANPARTY!!!! Postcard from Japan v2.02

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

TGS 2008: Postcard from Japan v2.01

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.

Postcard from Japan v2.0

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.

hey, I knew that

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

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.........