Category Archives: Vacation

Bavarian Vacation

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Say you’re a Masters student studying distributed systems, and you just completed 3 major project checkpoints, and wrapped up some work with a research project. So what do you do during the Easter break that immediately follows the deadlines? You go on vacation of course!

So I just got back from a wonderful four day holiday split across the dreamy fields of Schwangau and the Bavarian captial, Munich. Schwangau is a must see for anyone who wants to swim in a sea of breathtaking views and experience the European countryside. It is the home to the famous Neuschwanstein castle, which was the main inspiration for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty’s castle. The village of Schwangau itself lies under the protective watch of the Alps, running through the border between Germany and Austria. I stayed with a good friend of mine, and had a wonderful Bavarian Easter with her family, sharing stories of our cultures and lifestyles. On Easter Sunday itself, we went hiking up the Alps, and I’m still surprised that I made it alive at the end of a 3 hour ordeal. After years of not having any physical exercise of any form, this was indeed rather taxing, but I guess all the muscle strain was definitely worth the experience, the views, and most importantly, the satisfaction that followed taking a hard path up a 1.708km high mountain for your first ever hike. :)

The latter half of the holiday involved a visit to old city of Munich. Culturally rich and with a Bavarian feel all over, it was a fun experience to walk through the city streets. One thing I found particularly funny was that the Maximilianeum building, which houses the Bavarian parliament, had no gates nor security guards on the outside, which is in absolute contrast to equivalent buildings back home in India, which can be aptly labelled mini fortresses. The last day of the visit was reserved for a trip around the Munich marketplace and of course, the one and only Allianz Arena, which I finally got the opportunity to visit as a long time Bayern Munich fan. :)

As is always the case with my travels, cuisine formed an important component of the visit too. Thanks to Eva’s help, I was able to compile a list of dishes/drinks I had: Apfelstrudel, Neuernberger Rostbratwuerste mit sauerkraut, Kaesspatzen, Leberkaes mit Kartoffelsalat und Spiegelei, Weisswuerst mit Suessem senf, Schweinsbraten mit Kartoffelknoedel, Schweinshaxen, Brezeln, Radler, Weissbier and Weizen. I particularly loved the German variety as far as beers are concerned. Radler from an altitude of 1.708km tastes heavenly by the way.

I would have loved to stay a little longer, but as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Now back in Lisbon, I’m finding it a little hard to shake off the vacation mood and get back to my projects, but I think I’ll pull that off sooner or later.

The 'Why' behind my Window Seat Crusades

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Throughout a man’s journey across the seven stages of life, there would have been at least one occasion where he would have fought for the beloved window seat. Be it an airplane, a ship, a train or even a car, it isn’t rare to find children letting their fists decide on who gets to grace the seat closest to that flat transparent slice of soda lime. Many of these warriors are as clueless about their quest as are engineering students of today.

Just because I use the word ‘children’ doesn’t imply that I don’t think adults chase the same goal. The only difference here is that we don’t fight about it. And yes, I say ‘we’, because I still crave for that blessed position, even 22 long years after my “Hello World!” moment. When going on a long journey, the necessary condition to retain your sanity would be to either carry a portable music player, or to have interesting co-passengers who you can strike a good conversation with. I’ve never owned an MP3 device until recently, and regarding the second condition, I’m very unlucky, as the previous posts on my travels would suggest. It’s either annoying brats and their annoying parents, or old people, neither of which rank high on my ‘interesting-humans’ list. I find it difficult to understand why it is so that whenever I book a ticket for some form of travel, the probability of a hot chick reserving a ticket for the same train/plane at the same time from some other corner of the planet is zero.

Anyhow, all these years, I used to let my imagination keep me busy through my travels. Most of what I write are culminations of thoughts that go through my head during a journey. This article itself has it’s roots on my recent trip to Bangalore, which I will be describing shortly. My head works best when I’m staring into nothingness, when I’m staring through solid matter, like Superman using his X-ray vision. On a train, this is quite difficult if you’re looking ahead, and you have another passenger in front of you. If you’re a young man in his early twenties like me, and there’s an attractive woman in front of you, this is surely not going to work well for you (I haven’t tried it yet, and I won’t). So I’ve always considered it important that I get the window seat while on a train, only to kill my own boredom with my thoughts, and not because of the sights that await me outside.

On a plane, one might argue that the person-in-front-of-you issue doesn’t apply. That is correct. However, it is still a lot more easier to stare into blankness while you’re onboard an aircraft. An endless field of clouds isn’t going to keep you in awe for more than 10 seconds, and beyond that, your mind gets to take charge, no distractions whatsoever.

My animal instinct for survival got the best of me during this last train journey of mine. The weather refused to let me sleep away the 8 hours I had with me, and Murphy ended up giving me the seat farthest from the window. A very talkative and elderly person occupied what I felt was my right. He was able to strike a conversation with everyone around him. I couldn’t. It was only fair that I be where he is. Holding on to my belief, I thought I’d manipulate my nemesis’ mind to save myself.

Armed with my more than obvious body language, I decided to fight for what was mine.

Luckily for me, the person between me and the old gentleman (we’ll call him Gramps from here on), had his eyes get the better of him, and managed to take a nap on the upper berth. So the only battle for me to fight was with Gramps. Like a panther in the shadows, I silently waited for my target to make a move. And soon, he did. Nature’s call FTW. I seized the opportunity to slide casually towards the now unoccupied window seat. The plan was simple, when Gramps returns, I move aside, all the while hoping that he says, “No, it’s ok, you can sit there.” But I wasn’t to rejoice soon; I never heard those words when Gramps got back. I wasn’t going to give up yet. Achilles didn’t give up after his first unsuccessful siege against the Gates of Troy. Battles of this importance are meant to be long. I got another opportunity a little later, when Gramps left his seat to stretch his legs, but the outcome of my attempt was the same. Gramps merely occupied his seat which I had temporarily conquered. But persistence is the key, and after the third attempt, those words finally came, and I high fived myself inside my head. I also pulled off a very polite “Uncle, do you want to sit here?” later on, knowing fully well that his answer would be “No, it’s alright”.

The several hours that followed were blissful. I took a moment of that time to ask myself why I did what I did, which is when I decided to write this post. So there you go! :)

I wonder how many others feel the same? Cheers anyway!

A long vacation, 2010 and Solitaire

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My first post of the year! So here I am, whiling away the last day of my winter vacation at home. December ’09 has been rather fruitful, I learnt a lot about NS-3 and even became a contributor to the project. I also managed to make a good deal of progress with my work on Security Issues in Mobile Ad hoc Networks. :)

Anyhow, the only problem with working from (my) home is the dial-up connection I’m stuck with. My laptop doesn’t even have a dial-up modem and hence, I’m forced to use my trusty (maybe not) 8 year old Windows box, which has housed and nurtured generations of malware. There’s this weird one that forces a click on a particular section of the screen, another one that blocks keyboard input for a while (and surely records/sends it somewhere) before allowing me to continue, and a million others. This system won’t even boot from a USB which ruined my efforts to install Linux on it. And yes, I’m too lazy to go out of home and buy a blank CD/DVD. Anyhow, the dial-up is so slow, I always have a Solitaire window open to keep my fingers busy while my browser struggles to load pages over the connection that gives me blazing speeds of around 1KB/sec. This obviously implies that I’ve played Solitaire a LOT over the month, and this allowed me to make a few observations about it in the progress. Here goes:

1) No matter how many times you hit F2 (New Deal) under a second, the deal won’t change and you’ll end up with the same decks of cards. This kind of implies that their new deal function (which would be using a randomise function) is using the current system time for a seed value.

2) This observation was made possible thanks to all the malware who’ve worked persistently to slow down my system. Upon opening a new card from the deck on the top left (after there’s another card already open on the same deck), and then hitting undo, you can see (only on my machine of course, because mine’s the only slow system on the planet) the entire set of cards upto the previous one flashing by, one after the other. So my guess is, all decks are being maintained as linked lists with a pointer to the card on top and the one just before it. When you opt to undo your action, the entire linked list is traversed (and shown on screen) upto the previous one with the help of the ‘previous-card’ pointer. Guess they took advantage of processor speeds to hide it from the user under normal circumstances. :P

I might be wrong (my guesses usually suck), so feel free to correct me. And do let me know if you’ve made any observations as well. :)

Happy New Year and uhm… Happy Solitairing. :)

Another short vacation

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So I’m back from Bangalore after a five day long trip. While most of it was spent at home playing with my five month old nephew, I did have some quality time hanging around as well. I got to Bangalore after a four and a half hour long flight from Jaipur, via Mumbai on Monday the 13th. Three days at home followed after which I finally decided to see daylight! I caught up with my CA friends Vasudha and Abhishek. We got lunch, did some shopping and took a trip to the office where I got a glimpse of the laptop I was supposed to get the next day. I also managed to meet Swathi, the cluster engineer who helped me with HA-Cron which finally landed me the grand prize. :)

We then proceeded to catch ‘The Hangover’ at Fun Cinema with Tirthankar, another cluster engineer. I kind of forgot when the last time was since I literally went LOL and ROTFL, watching a movie! Damn I just love ‘R’ rated comedies :) . Dinner and a trip to CCD followed, after we which we all got back home.

The next day, Saturday, was the moment I’d been waiting for. Yes, the CFF-2008 presentation ceremony! I’ll let the pictures do the talking here. And my new laptop totally kicks ass! I just can’t have enough of it. I’ll be giving Windows Vista it’s coup de grace tomorrow and I’ll be bringing in Debian Lenny and OpenSolaris instead. Anyways, final year has begun and I’ve got a whopping five guest faculties this semester, which pretty much equates to five subjects less for me this semester. Let’s see what I can make out of whatever little time I have left here in college. Adios for now!

Never heard of mobile etiquette have you?

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Mobile etiquette is something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while. Since I’m the essentially negative bastard that you all know and don’t love (at all), I’ll be pointing out _what_ doesn’t count as good etiquette when it comes to using a cell phone. As with every other rant of mine, this article is the culmination of a bad experience as well, which I’ll merely narrate (what does not qualify as etiquette is rather self explanatory). So let’s go back in time to the afternoon of the 13th of May, 2009.

* The screen fades into a bubbly distortion… and reappears in black and white *

I’m on a Volvo bus en route to the Bangalore international airport and I have close to two hours to burn on the bus. I decided against reading Digital Fortress while on the bus, because the ride wasn’t as smooth as I expected. Ah well, I can always stare emptily at the ever busy Bangalore commuters can’t I? The bus comes to a stop at Shivaji Nagar bus station. A fat elderly man dressed in formals with a tie (the Bangalore based business man look, they’re all old and have bellies that would put sumo wrestlers to shame, trust me) boards the bus and sits right behind me. Ten minutes pass by, Murphy suddenly wakes up in the realm of ether, and decides that my life is way too smooth…

* The Nokia ring tone plays, the typical Bangalore based business man prefers this, I wonder why *

I slowly lay back on the comfortable seating, the silence of the air conditioning filling the space, when suddenly…

Fat-ass-business-man: “HELLO SIR!”….

(I nearly slam my face on the head rest of the seat in front of me…)

FABM: “YES SIR? I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

(Me: How can you if you’re screaming so loud yourself?)

FABM: “YES, I’M ON MY WAY TO THE AIRPORT, BLAH BLAH BLAH….”

(Note: the BLAHs are in capitals as well, indicating the fact that he maintained the decibel level throughout the conversation. Finally…)

FABM: “AH YES SIR, GOODBYE…”

(I recline back into the comfort of my seat… peace has dawned upon my world again… when yet again…)

* The Nokia tune plays *

(Me: Holy fuck…)

FABM: “BLAH BLAH BLAH”

(Me: The deaf have all the fun…)

This ridiculous cycle goes on for around an hour because I think his battery ran out of charge after that. I was glad no one came up with solar powered cell phones or I’d have had to endure this ear drum drilling for another hour or so.

* Fast forward to an hour ahead *

The airport looks just as majestic as it was when I came here a little less than a year ago for my CA induction programme. I guess I reached a little too early (2.5 hours before departure time). I take a seat directly opposite to the Indigo Airlines boarding pass counter and immerse myself into Digital Fortress.

* An hour and forty five minutes later *

I’m at Gate number 8, done with all the formalities and wondering why the security official found my Sun Token Card suspicious (I wanted to tell him it was a calculator, but jail wasn’t on my ‘places-to-visit-before-I-die’ list). Anyways, I’m back to reading Digital Fortress (boring book actually, most things were rather obvious from the start). A few minutes later, a bunch of Kannada speaking people sit around me. Their hand baggage included gunny bags, cartons and sacks and it was at that precise moment that something dawned upon me all of a sudden. My face turned to an expression of horror as I remembered the common thread of unity that all passengers who travel with gunny bags, cartons and sacks share; Their over enthusiasm about traveling by flight :| . I turn to my right to find the guy sitting next to me punching numbers into his cell phone. He was so zealous about it, he mistyped the numbers the first time. And the second time, the call connected…

* Life’s a bitch… *

Kannada-speaking-over-enthusiastic-guy-traveling-with-gunny-bags-sacks-and-cartons-number-1: “<LOUD KANNADA>”

(The guy on my left to his friend on the phone, screaming into my left ear and his friend hearing it through my right)

KSOEGTWGBSACN 2: “<LOUDER KANNADA, AMPLIFIED BY THE POINT BLANK RANGE>”

The rest of the gang: “<COMMENTING ON THE CONVERSATION GOING OVER THE PHONE>”

(Me: How would you assholes like it if I castrated you all with a U-238 coated chainsaw?)

The torture goes on for the fifteen minutes that the prick spoke over the phone, and then this idiot screams the minute by minute details of the conversation into my right ear, while his friend receives the signals through my left. I started wondering whether I was dead and I was a ghost who they couldn’t see. This went on for another five minutes when I finally blew my top, but strangely enough, I was polite:

“Sir, would you like to sit here? I could go sit elsewhere?”

“YES YES, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!”

(Thanks for the parting present you bitch…)

And I literally fled for the vacant seat next to a man who was too engrossed with his laptop, diagonally across the waiting hall from where I was sitting. It took my ears around twenty minutes to stop ringing. With this, I shall summarise what mobile etiquette is all about:

1) If you’re travelling, shut the fuck up and stick to messaging.

2) If you still insist on speaking, shut the fuck up. If you can’t STFU while you’re around others, you might want to kill yourself before you breed. We don’t want another generation of your kind.

Because frankly speaking, no one really cares about that new deal that you struck, or whether your wife picked up the kids on her way back from the grocers or anything else for that matter. If you can’t talk in a low voice, the least you can do is to ask to be excused, walk away from the crowd and carry on with your conversation. Please people…behave!