Gaurav's Blog

This can usually be found on Twitter.

To begin with, this

Ammu explained to Estha and Rahel that people always loved best what they Identified most with.

-- The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

It's true: that with which we identify, we love the most. Books. Places. Movies. But not (necessarily) people.

This last Sunday I saw Annie Hall

(Post left incomplete as on September 17th, 2006)

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okay, I'm not going to have the strength to write this down later, atleast not until tonight, so:

The exam will suck. And I will do horribly.

The rest of the day will be surprisingly good, except for one bad thing which will happen in the afternoon ... but I'll recover by night-time.

I'll feel lonely tonight. I might call Kaberi.

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Okay, my traditional in-the-lab-at-sunrise blog entry!

First of all, the sun is rising from directly in front of me ... but during the midyear, it rises from behind the DSO building ... it's kinda awesome, you see something like that and you realise ... that all that stuff they told you in Astronomy and Physics and Geography is true ... and the world, she's a turnin' ... and maybe that means they're right about all the other stuff too, about enormous planets hundreds of times bigger than the earth, and stars trillions of kilometres away ... and suddenly it strikes you just what a tiny, insignificant part you really play in the grand scheme of things, just how insignificant your screw-ups and misturns and wrong roads really, truely are.

Humbling.

There are so many loose ends I want to tie up now ... I'm just not sure how, but I'm hoping with the whole website/coding thing giving some sort of focus into my life, that ... I don't know ... I'm romantic enough to wish for epiphanies, for a single intense life-changing thought, and *ping* - Bob's your uncle. It's all okay, and it's all alright. Seriously doubt this miracle will occur in a day or two or whatever (and what is a month, but a day or two one after another?), but yeah, it will come, one day it will definitely come.

Can't hardly wait :P

Now, off to screw up my Physio paper (7:20pm! 3.5 hours to freedom!)

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Yay! Just four hours to go!

I have honestly never been this exhausted, tired, sleepy, and just generally devil-may-care about a paper - ever! This is sad, and even as I type this my eyes are blurring over. Am going to go over to the lab and try and study there now.

Another six hours, and I'll be free!

\(^.^)/    (^.^)       <----- the dancing smoe
  | |     / | | \   
  | |       | |
  / \       / \ 

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The bright side: exams finish in eight and a half hours.

The sad side: I am in absolutely no mood to work, sleepy as hell, tired, bugged, bored, dead. And beyond-caring, almost. Today I managed to talk, really talk, with Janani about the whole last-few-months thing, and boy, its so much easier now that the thing is somewhat behind me ... and whatever, it's sorta reassuring and everything, that I can still just sit back and look at the situation and wonder what the best thing to do next would be.

Incidently, Janani says the best thing to do is to not plan it out, but just to take it as it comes. New insight: my biggest fear is that I'll get really badly hurt with this whole thing, but ... apart from the possibility that getting hurt might be my ticket out of this place, it's also possible that the pain just won't be as bad as I expect ... ?

Another thought: I sucked this semester. Bad. But last semester was even worse. So: I'm getting better! :P. Yeah, well. Probably just wait and see where it all goes.

p.s. stomach was acting up a bit yesterday, but now it's fairly okay. Am going to take this Sunday off. Told my mum about it, and she was like, it's because you're not sleeping properly!! If I'm not okay by mid-next week, I'll just take S's advice and go see a doctor. Just worried in case it is serious and there are complications late before I leave Singapore. My hand was hurting pretty bad yesterday. I swear, this Sunday, I'm just going to be sleeping IN!

Crap, should get back/to work ... :I

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Eric Conveys an Emotion .. and my favourite image!

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Site of the day: Sorry Everybody, the site where Americans apologize for having voted Dubya back into power. To counter it, there's You're Welcome Everybody, but with photos like this and this on their webpage ... well ...

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Thanksgiving day! (Okay, okay, so I'm one day late, but I was dead tired yesterday, so you'll just have to bear with me.

Atleast partially, this post is a prelude and run-in to my real thanksgiving day: Dec 31st. New years have always been monumental events for me, atleast in the looking-back-on-it-all sense, and this year I have a lot to look back on - mostly, I regret to say, stupid things. Not bad things - bad things are those which hurt you, and the aches and pains of last year have been mostly bearable, but stupid things, things which have been upsetting or irritating or just entirely pointless for one reason or another (or none at all).

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I'm really starting to love Ask Slashdot!

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... and go to heaven :P. No, I just wrote that 'cos "American Pie" is playing.

So: only one paper to go, lab work and web work looming in the distance, and ... and? Nothing else to worry about for a while, I guess. Atleast not stay-up-to-4am-studying kinda stuff, anyway. Blessed relief. Still, no time to just lie around and take it easy today: helping Shruti move stuff, and there's still quite a bit of residual stress about ... well, everything really. Am hoping to go watch a movie or something this weekend, hopefully that'll take the edge off things somewhat.

What else? Well, the future - the immediate future - looks like a mix of lab work and web work, I guess. I really, really want to push the web work thing - and maybe work hard for the first time in my life! That'll certainly be interesting to watch. I really want to "get out and live", althought I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean, exactly ... I'm sort of midway and confused right now, 'cos I can't just pack up and go wherever/however I want, cos I still have one exam left, and so on. Also, I don't really have a clue where I'd pack up and go if I could pack up and go, and I strongly suspect as of Saturday, I'm going to back in the lab with a manacle. But there'll be evenings, weekends, and so on.

Okay, work has officially began on MyBiomeWeb!!!! Go see MyBiome Web (HEAVILY under construction!) and check out the plans. All advice and suggestions welcome!

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Okay, my exam this morning didn't go so great ... wasn't too bad, but it's gonna pull my CAP down, I just know it ...

My next exam is in an hour and a half ... and I'm ... just ... so ... relaxed! I don't know. I shouldn't be. I really shouldn't be, but my brain is spinning jumping diving wandering ... and ... dreaming mybiomic dreams, I guess. Sigh. I am so in love, it's probably not even cute any more. And I haven't had much time to spend with my beloved ... come Saturday, and I'll probably spend every non-coding non-labing minute telling whoever'll listen about my mybiomic dreams ...

Of course, I hvae to rememebr that I have one last exam left ... one where I've already screwed up the CAs, so I have to do well! Argh ... last exams are always such a pain ...

Okay, okay, enough mumbling ... things to do, things to do, things to do!

[mood: pipey]

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Become a contractor! .... ermmm ... okay ...

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Okay, it's 6:20am; my plant physio paper is in two hours and forty minutes, and I'm scared.

Partially, it's just that I've somehow managed to overdose on sugar or caffeine or sleep-dep or something, and it's bugging! Every bit of my body is tingling. Also, I just can't - couldn't - can't - study for this stupid module! Plant physiology! It's like 70% boring crap I've done already, and the rest is just buried in there somewhere and I just know it's going to jump up and bite me somehow! (Also, the exam is in LS Lab 3, and my LS lab exams never go well anyway ...) And on top of that I'm panicing about how I'm going to recover and get ready for my day-after's exams and ... argggggh ... and it's me and it's early morning, so obviously all kindsa thoughts are going thru my head which I wouldn't be thinking about if I wasn't up at such an impossible time. Also, it's end of exam time, so usual missing-my-friends wonder-if-I'll-get-bored what's-going-to-happen-next-semester worries ...

It's just bugging and weird to focus on ... the future, or my life, or anything ... when I'm lying around in my room, and none of it makes any sense or seems worth anything or anything. And it's just so ... pointless. Plant physiology. When on EARTH am I ever going to refer to that again???

okay ... priority is passing, next is doing decent. Right now, should just do damage control ... hmmm ... so will scroll thru lecture notes, then go take a bath or something to calm me down ... have to get to the library at 8am, then will grab a coffee (if I'm feeling less jumpy :D) ... then will just go in and read. After that? Don't know. It'll be eleven. Might go walk around somewhere or hang out or something ... just to chill a bit or whatever ... ulp.

I hate end-of-sem. But it is the suffering you bear fo holidays.

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Congratulations! You're Aragorn!

Which Lord of the Rings character and personality problem are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

(p.s. it's true. Arwen is annoying)

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This is beautiful. But sad. But everything beautiful is sad.

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Remind me to really, really, really enjoy myself this weekend, once exams get over. That they will do this Saturday, but that's so far off ... the worse bit is, tomorrow's going to be okay (sort-of), and Thursday ... well, Thursday and Friday I'll manage somehow, or I'll be too bored to care or something. But today is bad, mostly because plant physiology is the single bored thing I've ever come across. It's taken me two hours to get through two pages of lecture notes!

Okay, post-exam dreams. I'm going to be dragged into the lab, obviously, and many grotesque and painful experiments will be performed on me ... or maybe not, it's hard to tell. In any case, I can take solace in the fact that:

1. I will get to work on/towards my dreams, atleast in my free time.
2. I intend to really enjoy my life, kick-ass style (in so far as I, Gaurav Vaidya, am actually capable of that). Okay, what I mean is: no holds barred, get out there and have some fun. I have two weeks all to myself, no-parental-supervision-no-getting-back-home-before-no-nothing-not-at-all (!), quite a few of my friends will still be around, and there is quite a lot that can be done here (my boss would disagree). So will be kicking around, yeah, woo hoo! (I can't believe I just typed that off. Boredom affects me worst than I think!)

Of course, all this means .. studying ... and working ... now ... and ... paying ... argh!

(Goes into the corner and cries)

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This is sad. I don't mean just the animal "rights" abuse (do animals have rights? should people have rights?) but the fact that a guy has to end up working on something so distasteful to him. Sigh ... c'est la vie, I suppose. But it shouldn't be this way!

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So much easier to put the random thought down than in a blog! (And, I'm guessing, so much easier to get it to work). Ah, well. I really want it on SPS, but I can't get anything as simple and elegant as UseMod outside of Perl ... let's see. If All Else Fails, I can just set up something at http://mybiome.com/~gaurav/, but I suppose that'll be a last-resort sort-of thing.

Anyway, why I'm here: idea for a short story. Guy's company is taken hostage, who kidnaps the guy's only daughter from the creche. The security try to take back control of the situation, but the daughter ends up being killed. Jump twenty years ahead. The guy is still around, missing his d., etc. We soon realise that the company is a time-jump company, who send people back in time for a fee. People want to know why he doesn't go back in time and try to change what happened, but he jokes about the cost. A young technician goes back in time, and discovers the dreadful answer: the man had tried to fix the problem, but realised that there were only two options - either the daughter died, or the kidnapper killed everyone in the building. The lesser of two evils prevailed.

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The original article used to be hosted over here. I've put it here cos I think it's awesome. If you're the original writer, and you don't want it up here, please leave me a comment with you're email address, and I'll take it off.

I worked in London as a contractor for a number of years. I spent most of my time either in work or being stressed about travelling to and from work. I'd usually spend 14 hours a day away from home and my beautiful baby daughter.

I was travelling home on a train and it stopped in the dark in the middle of nowhere for an hour, with no reason why. Then an announcement, as the train began to move, that there had been a fatality on the line and that all services on the line had been suspended. The train pulled into a station and we all got off and walked down the platform intending to find taxis home.

I was impatient, and was about the third person off the train.

As I walked down the platform, I began to see, in the half light, that someone had dropped some meat on the platform. I thought "that's fairly stupid, someone will kick themselves when they get home and discover that their shopping bag has ripped and that their steak has fallen out somewhere". In retrospect, I find it amazing that my mind was trying to protect me in this way.

As I got closer to the meat, the image began to get clearer. It was steaming, and covered in little pipelets each of which had a drip of blood at the end. The strangest thing was the pattern covering it. It was all wrinkled, and gray with red smears on it.

I started to retch.

I started to vomit.

It was a brain.

I looked up. The rest of the platform was covered in various bits of body. Arms, legs, bits of lung.

It was just so wrong that we (15 of us in all) had been forced to walk through that. I saw a policeman, got angry, punched him. He didn't complain, odd, perhaps he was in shock too. It was the wrong thing to do; it didn't make me feel any better.

On the news the next day, I learnt that an 18 year old had seen his train waiting at the platform, and had just run across the tracks behind it in the hope of catching it. He was hit by an express train (the Flying Scotsman) passing on the central track. It was doing about 120 miles an hour.

An 18 year old!

I don't waste time anymore. I don't program for programming's sake. I do XP because it allows me to spend less time at work and more time with my beautiful daughters (we have three now). I don't waste time doing anything more than once. I don't waste time doing things for no reason.

A month later, I quit my contracts and we moved to New Zealand; now I'm a consultant over here. I show people how to do XP, I teach Java, I swim, I play with my girls, I eat, I have a life. I plan to plant a tree. I keep thinking about a book, but I don't really have time for that, I'm too busy enjoying life. I only work where I know that I'll enjoy it.

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Somebody up there really hates me today :(.

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Is this what I'm going to end up as? I wonder, I wonder ...

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But from this no hope, what dreams may come!

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I know it's hard to keep an open heart
When even friends seem out to harm you
But if you could heal a broken heart
Wouldn't time be out to charm you

Sometimes I need some time...on my own
Sometimes I need some time...all alone
Everybody needs some time...on their own
Don't you know you need some time...all alone

And when your fears subside
And shadows still remain
I know that you can love me
When there's no one left to blame
So never mind the darkness
We still can find a way
'Cause nothin' lasts forever
Even cold November rain

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I would be 中村 Nakamura (center of the village) 大輝 Taiki (large radiance) if I'd been born in Japan! Unfortunately, I am a Bambaiya (Bombayite) which makes me just a plain, old, full-of-pride doctor. :-/ Ah well. Destiny is all well and good, but sometimes you've just got to chart your own course.

Take your real japanese name generator! today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

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A nice one is here. Why? All part of my secret plan to take over the world. See you later, slave.

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mental/emotional sponsors, really, but check 'em out ...

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It's raining in Singapore. Drip, drop, drip, drop. Softly, quietly, patiently. It feels like pathetic fallacy (don't you just hate that phrase?)

On a slightly different note: according to blogger, this is my 201st post on this blog, not counting deleted posts. In case you're curious, two hundred and one posts ago came this lil ditty, and this was my first month as a blogger. Interesting that nothing much's changed since then - the exact same things which bothered me in March still bother me today, the same worries, the same fears; and on the other side of the card, the same things still turn me on, the same things turn me off. My position in the world is much the same, and mostly, it feels like the same old same old, once more.

On the other hand, some things (despite my best intentions, I suppose) have changed. Bush has been re-elected. While I can still be pretty edgy most of the time, I'm a little more stable. While this semester is quite screwed up already, I am going to try and salvage what's left. I have some dreams of where I'd want to be, or what I'd want to be doing, with my life - well, okay, very shaky ground there, but it's slightly better than March, I suppose.

I swear more now, atleast in my internal monologue. And I'm a lot angrier these days. And more lonely. I have more friends now, and also less. I still enjoy a good movie, or a great book, and love television. I still love programming. And I still love dreaming. And I can still recite the Gayatri mantra.

To bring this wandering post to a close: much has changed, much abides. The world turns, and the future turns into the present, and the present into the past. That which was is no more (no, really, no more) and only that which comes can change what is. Pain leads on to pleasure, because pain is the mother of pleasure, as pleasure is the mother of pain herself. And thus turns the world.

Good day.

(oh, and in case you missed it: my proto-blog, my first attempt at putting my thoughts 'out there', is still available right here)

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Well, it's too late to write, and there's a lot to "critique" etc. The worst bit is, I saw something today and I was like, "wow, love is real". But now I've completely forgotten what it was (after a semi-bad dream? Or just sheer exhaustion? Can't say). Ah, well. Cute episode of the Bachelor (believe it or not), so I guess I've had my gratuitious love-is-really-real moment for the day. I've put my exam timetable on Yahoo!, hopefully will get me a little more focussed. Also half-heartedly taking part in NaNoWriMo. It's so cool, but am never going to be able to properly take part thanks to the timing! Well, maybe I can make up for lost time after the 27th ... very, very, unlikely. I have a starting :P. But that's about all I have, so ...

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