Comfortably Geek

My thesis defense is scheduled for the 22nd of June, so I’ve been in writing mode since the last two weeks. In parallel though, I’ve been evaluating my system, which seems to be producing pretty graphs for the time being.

I’m both surprised and sad at my ability to be distracted when writing my thesis. I’ve always had an attention span within the order of microseconds, but this is an all time low.

Here’s how my typical weekday seems to go off late:

• 8.30: Wake up.
• 8.30 – 9:00: Ponder about the mysteries of the universe whilst showering.
• 9:00 – 9:30: Have breakfast, and watch a full episode of the Simpsons or Family Guy.
• 10:00: Reach the lab. Setup laptop, mouse, keyboard, and extra monitor. Open window for some fresh air. Go grab coffee.
• 11:30: Done checking my mail, zero-unread-ing my feed of web comics, browsing through HN, Slashdot, and some other news sites (and a few “Oooh! Cat picture!” moments).
• 11:30 – 12:30: Lunch.
• 12:30 – 13:30: Post-lunch-procrastination (see 11:30).
• 13:30 – 14:30: Body has begun processing lunch, so feeling drowsy — Need. More. Coffee.
• 14:30: Open up editor for writing thesis. The “let’s settle this once and for all!” feeling surges through my body.
• 14:31 – 14:45: Check Facebook.
• (The above two repeats for a while)
• 15:30: “This is boring! I think I’ll do something that matters. Like code!”
• 15:31: Implement new feature! “Byzantine-fault-tolerant-key-value-based-scalable-elastic-hadoop-LTE-fabric-on-the-cloud!”
• 16:00: Realise that new feature broke all unit and system tests.
• 16:01: git reset –hard HEAD
• 16:01 – 16:02: Check Google+. Doesn’t take that long though because there’s nothing there.
• 16:30: “That’s it! I’m going to do more experiments! Nothing like graphs to make you feel like a scientist!” * challenge-accepted-rage-face *
• 16:45: Fire shell script and watch as the whole testbed dances to your bidding, cables filling with packets, WiFi waves flowing through space. You feel empowered, like you’re about to introduce a tear in the fabric of space.
• 16:47: Realise that you misconfigured everything.
• 16:49: Repeat experiment. Pretty sure it’s correct this time, so need to do something useful for an hour.
• 16:50: Continue with writing thesis.
• 17:00: Time for more coffee.
• 17:05: Back to desk, “What was I doing again?”.
• 17:06: Facebook time.
• 17:08: Booooored.
• 17:10: Write a few more lines of related work. “Previous work by Joe et al [10] has been known to suck”.
• 17:15: Discover some feature in text editor. Optimise key bindings for maximum productivity.
• 17:49: Experiment’s over. Fire SQL queries to extract data from measurements database, and pass it through gnuplot.
• 17:50: Add graphs to thesis. Defend weird results with “Proof-of-concept”.
• 18:00: “Woah! Is it warm here in the lab or what? Screw you guys! I’m going home so that I can write comfortably!”
• 18:30: At home. Have dinner with the company of Homer or Peter.
• 19:00: Feel sleepy. Idle around.
• 23:00: Sleep.
• Repeat.

And I wonder why the carrot’s never getting closer.

After moving to Europe for my masters, I’ve been accustomed to finding my way around cities using the subway trains. They’re convenient, relatively cheap (unless you’re in Stockholm, where using the word cheap throws an exception), and usually fast enough as well. The only problem I have with metros is that they’re boring as shit to travel in, especially when you’re alone. Sure you can carry a book with you or invest in a tab/pad/slate/smartphone/whatever, but we definitely need to do something about the view from the windows.

Given that there’s hardly anything interesting about rocks and the occasional flash of light in a metro tunnel, I think there’s a lot that can be done to make the metro experience better. Here’s one idea I have to solve this international crisis which is oh-so-more-important than anything else on this planet. I call it, metro cartoons (the animated ones).

The basic idea is to insert cartoon panels between the tunnel walls and the tracks. Since we know the approximate speed at which the trains move, you can estimate the minimum spacing between the panels that would be required to provide a reasonable frame rate required for the animation. I’m sure artists understand these aspects better (thus, I don’t), and can come up with the right kind of drawings for this setting.

What say? I’m pretty sure someone must have tried this already, so let me know if you’ve heard of any such attempt.

Lagom (pronounced [ˈlɑ̀ːɡɔm]) is a Swedish word with no direct English equivalent, meaning “just the right amount”. – Wikipedia

If you’re in Sweden and there’s one word you should know, it would be ‘lagom’, a word that defines the essence of everything that is Swedish.

More than two months into Stockholm and I must say it’s been pretty lagom so far. The city itself is beautiful, with the only downside being that everything is at least twice as expensive as in Lisbon. Maybe that’s what you get for everything around here being so perfect and systematic. And unlike Lisbon, you actually have easy access to a *large* collection of beers, which is definitely a plus.

It’s autumn here right now, and the scenery outside is fabulous. Sadly though, the weather in Sweden is not-so-lagom. Temperatures are already hovering around 5 degrees celsius, and for an Indian like me, this is pretty cold in itself (heck, it never gets lower than 20 in my town back home). The funny thing is, this weather is cute for the Swedes. Let’s see how winter ends up looking like.

Meanwhile, here are some pictures I took from Stockholm over the last two months.

Recently, a teacher at my alma mater turned barber and forcibly cropped the hair of over 90 students who didn’t follow the school’s code of conduct for haircuts (we didn’t even know there was one during our days). Obviously, the students, parents and locals weren’t amused by this barb-er-ic act. Neither were those of us who are proud of being former students of that school.

Indian educational institutions have always been rather conservative in their organisation. There is all too often a strict hierarchy visible in the way things work. Teachers have a commanding authority over students, and it’s common for students to stand up and say “good morning/afternoon/whatever” in unison when the former enters a classroom. Failure to do so is often seen as an act of disrespect. In many schools, even at a high school level, you find that students are expected to form and walk only in a line when moving from one classroom to another. I’ve seen institutions with really silly dress codes, like “boys should only wear shirts/t-shirts that *have a collar*”. There are many colleges where cell phones are banned on campus (and many that go too far to implement their policy). And there are also colleges where guys aren’t allowed to talk to girls.

There is an overflow of rules, and unnecessary requirements on conformance. I’ve had a lecturer yell at me for 15 minutes (out of a 40 minute lecture), ask me to never enter class again, and walk out of class herself in anger simply because I didn’t “write down” the last few steps of a solution to a problem she handed out in class, which I managed to solve in my head to arrive at the answer.

All the above is absolutely disgusting and is an antithesis to what is supposed to be education. We put a bunch of students into a classroom, expect all of them to conform to a strict set of rules, and punish the ones who don’t with expulsion. Ultimately, all these students end up having to take charge of society in some way or the other, and we basically leave our country in the hands of those who abide by silly dogmas, are well trained in the art of superficial respect, can’t think laterally, are used to hierarchies, and with regard to some of the specific cases I mentioned above, are incapable of working with the opposite sex.

I wonder what the net gain is from putting so much effort into running a system like this?

Our future leaders should be capable of making decisions that affect others positively. We need students to be well trained in networking with others, exchanging ideas, and communicating effectively. We need them to be open minded, embrace differences, and adapt to the pace at which the world around us is evolving. How on earth is all that supposed to happen if *this* is their education?

Furthermore, where do teachers get the time and energy to enforce such rules when they have so many important things to attend to?

Teachers have the responsibility of being a role model and not that of a dictator. All those teachers who’d inspired me over my life _strictly_ fall into the former category (from junior school, through high school, and upto where I am now). They were the ones who invested enough effort into figuring out how best to convey their ideas to their students, learned how to tap into our creative potential, and at the same time, stayed up to date with whatever it is that they were supposed to teach. They also served as moral and social instructors not through an iron fist, but through inspiration. They gave us enough room to develop, spared us the fury when we made mistakes and instead, taught us how to learn from them. They made us go “There is so much I can learn from that person!” as opposed to “That person will screw me over if I don’t do this”.

Sure, perfect pedagogy isn’t easy, but chaining students to a gratuitous set of rules is definitely not the answer. They are humans after all.