Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Where do I start?!

Before I start with my share of rantings for the fall season, a brief synopsis of what has happened since Boxer briefs, Gayathri Joshi and psychadelic dreams involving romantic rendezvous (thats the plural /rän-di-"vüz/. I just couldn't resist this one) with irrational numbers.

August 2,
After flying for what seems to be an eternity, I come home and realize that the way my apartment number looked and sounded seemed vaguely familiar. Its the kind of feeling you get when you are waiting in line and all of a sudden you realize that you have heard the voice of the old lady standing next to you somewhere before. Its only hours later when you are tossing and turning in bed trying to figure out who it was when you realize that she was the lady who, armed with rather compelling statistics, was egging you on last week to buy and try the latest breakthrough in chest-hair removal technology "brought to you c/o your very own Acme Labs" (the worst part of it being that you did buy it and remember thinking that at the price of only half your monthly salary, it was a steal!) or that she was the rather comely "barely-teen" female you spoke to last Saturday on one of those 1-900 numbers that promise to make a man out of you by the time you are through with the call. At any rate, the bottom-line -- I didn't know what the number was and wasn't any closer to the answer two weeks after I moved in. Its one of those things that just doesn't budge from the back of your mind where it seems to have lodged itself. Imagine my WTF-ness when I take my friend home one day and as we enter my apartment, he says," Dei, your apartment number - #314...Thats Pi..or at least something like it"! FYI: I also realized that there are rather interesting patterns in Pi.

August 2/3..around 12AM (Thats midnight for all the confused folks)
I check my mail. Over time, this task that has, due to abundance of bandwidth and absolute lack of contacts (I still consider this a conspiracy the US of A and the terrorist networks of Pakistan have hatched against me to undermine my importance), has degenerated into a ritual that has no meaning whatsoever. I am reminded of an old Tamil saying which roughly translates to "The man who has too much Sandalwood extract with him is eventually going to wash his arse with it". Anyways, I digress.. So it turns out I have a mail from my advisor and that I have a meeting with my advisor the next day. Next day, I reach my advisors den posthaste. Three hours of grilling, one thesis proposal and six months' worth of research arrears on my back later, I stagger out of her den a broken man. All dreams of speaking fluent German or serenading to the descendants of the Venetian life-forms that crash-landed onto Earth one fine day with my guitar or being able to dole out information on the literal, metaphorical and the hyperbolic interpretations of the Rig Veda that has transcended the generations (I am alluding to the "Spoken German 101", "Basic Guitar Method" and "Sanskrit-101" that I was planning on taking this semester) seemed to have gone down the drain.

August-end/September-ish,
Thesis is going on fine..One fine day, Dope and I start thinking,"What if sinorgams are stored instead of images?". We run simulations, get ammazing results and are basically on the verge of hitting upon something, although not out there with C=B.log(1+P/N), isn't as bad as "The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension". The literature survey which we needed to have done first didn't come till after three hours of simulations. Literature survey told us that we had been a little late (by about 5 years!), the worst part of it being that this was EXACTLY what we had done..not a subset of our work, not work related to our work but THE SAME FUCKING THING! Essentially it was God's way of saying what David Gilmour's enemies told him when he opened his doors to them and asked them if they could wipe the slate off clean.

A few days later, the thesis still going on fine. This was when hit upon another idea. We thought,"What will happen if you take one revolving chair, one foot-long scale, five metres of LAN cable, ten lines of MatLab script, a printer, llots of adhesive tape, a camera and someone who can sit still for a rrrreally long time without moving and add to it two penniless grad students with lots of free-time in their hands". We were expecting this. Unfortunately, we hadn't realized that we had also added a dash of "fuck-up" to the mixture. Hence it blew up right on our faces. What we were left with is this.

In lay terms, we were planning to use photographs taken at many angles and then use filtered back-projection reconstruction to render the surface of the subject. Rathna, the ever-impassive figurehead of SPACL decided to volunteer for this. Two hours and kazillion minute movements of the revolving chair later, we had 128 photographs of Rathna. This was when we realized that we weren't able to isolate the background from the images. Next best thing was a custom-made animation of Rathna in a stop-motion animation sequence.

September 6,
I wake up early in the morning and heading towards the holiest of holy places, I realize that there is a rather painful lump nudging up somewhere in the niche which rarely sees the light of day. One uncomfortable walk to Campus Health, an embarassing meeting with the triage nurse and a painful doctor's probe later, I am sitting in front of my laptop with links google search-strings like "Lump in the buttocks", "Haemmorhoids" (which confuses google into asking me "Is it "hemmoroids""), "cure for hemmoroids" and "Dietary fibers". Seven days of excruciating pain which is there pretty much all the time, constant declining of offers to "take a seat" everywhere I go (where was this politeness when I needed it??) and countless visits to the restroom whenever it was "lotion time", the excess baggage with me still wasn't showing any signs of receding. FYI By this time, I was resigned to a lifelong relationship with Mr. Bulgy Polypson. Without going into more details, it would suffice to say that on September 11, from Andy, I had transformed into "Andy minus one thrombosed hemmoroid plus one huge gauze". Boy was I glad that I had courage enough to let a stranger with a knife near my preciouss!

Somewhere in between all this, our quiz club managed to win a free DVD player and thanks to one particular chetaa, our group ended up with the hosting of the next quiz that we need to do some time in September. But then SHIT happens and shall be taken care of..

..And as always Peace to All..

PS: I forgot, I am not going to rant this time after all...