Jason's Log

Backpacking!

2009-05-09T02:10:00.012-04:00

I went backpacking two weekends ago. A 2-day, 2-night (Friday evening --> Sunday afternoon) hiking/camping expedition along a 16-mile loop through the backcountry of George Washington National Forest, in western Virginia, carrying everything I would need to survive on my back. (Clearly living up to the heritage of, and making proud, I'm sure, my alma mater.) A trip, the likes of which I've been looking forward to for ages. I have had very little camping experience (until this trip, I had only been car-camping thrice before), and I find it extremely difficult to pack light when I travel (I was never a Boy Scout, but I've always strongly felt the need to be prepared for any circumstance that comes my way, which means that almost anywhere I go, I carry around with me half a bookbag's worth of assorted toolkit gadgetry), but the idea of being able to survive out in the wilderness with just the barest of equipment --- a knife, a compass, something with which to make fire, a rope... --- has always called strongly to me. (As it has to many others, too, I'm sure. But this story is about me.) Pop culture and the romance stories I read as a youth no doubt had a strong influence in this --- Rambo, Tarzan, Robinson Crusoe, the Swiss Family Robinson, Crocodile Dundee, stories of "Injuns" and the as-yet-untamed American frontier... Ah! No man can live as an island, and yet we strive towards self-reliance, to give free rein to the independent spirit within us! Like one of my favourite quotations by Robert Heinlein (author of the excellent *book*, "Starship Troopers") proclaims, "a human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly." The ideal human being is, quite clearly, a walking, talking Swiss Army Knife.

So last summer, after I had successfully defended my dissertation, and could emerge from my cave and once again have a life, I decided that camping would be my next big Thing. (Dancing/practicing with my new partner and preparing for the DCDI and Ohio Star dance competitions was what *really* became my Big Thing for the latter half of 2008, taking up all my non-working time and sweetly, but firmly, shoving all my other hobbies out of the way. Not that I'm complaining in any way --- it was the experience of a lifetime.) So I bought myself a tent (an REI Halfdome 2 HC), and a sleeping bag (a Lafuma Yellowstone), and a sleeping pad (a Therm-a-rest Z-Lite), and a stove (a Primus Yellowstone Classic) and camp-cookware (a GSI Pinnacle Soloist Cookset and the REI Campware Mess Kit), and a headlamp (a Princeton Tec Fuel), and various other gear, bit by bit building up my pile of equipment as and when I found the items on sale, and I did a trial run of all my gear by camping out in my cousins' backyard (10--20 times the size of my own) one night in August, and made plans to go camping with the siblings/cousins/aunts/uncles, but we could never get the schedules to agree, and the plans never came to fruition, and the summer came to an end, and people's schedules got even more tight, and the weather started to get colder, and the Dancing Thing became more important, and the Camping Thing never happened. A camping trip with dancing friends did get planned for the Thanksgiving weekend, in the Dolly Sods wilderness area of Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia (as a trial run for a hiking trip along the Inca Trail in Peru that said dancing friends would be going for during the coming January), but frigid temperatures and humongous dumpings of snow in MNF that weekend put that plan on ice. Literally.

No camping.

Meanwhile, I sat at home and looked wistfully at my squeaky-clean pile of gear, and read their instruction manuals/pamphlets over and over again, and practiced tieing knots, and flicking my knife open and closed with one hand. I got to use my sleeping bag during my Christmas trip to Toronto, and during another trip down south to Charlotte for a weekend about a month later, but that was it.

Then I bought a backpack. REI came out with a new model --- the Flash 65 --- that got rave reviews, including being chosen as a Backpacker Magazine Editors' Choice for 2009, and it was incredibly inexpensive (just $150, compared to $250 and up for most decent brands/models), and I Had To Have It. Plus, I had just gotten by REI dividend, along with a 20%-off coupon, which meant the price came down to a measly $40 or so. The stars rarely align so beautifully! I had been debating whether to get myself a snowboard (after having had Snowboarding be my Big Thing for the winter), since snowboards would then be on sale at the end of the season, or a backpack, and I decided on the latter since I figured it was something I'd be able to use more often, year-round instead of just during the three-month winter-sport season.

Tent: check. Sleeping bag+pad: check. Backpack: check. Stove, cookware, med-kit, snake-bite-kit, various other gear: check, check, check. Experience to go it alone if I couldn't get anyone to go with me: errr.... Damn.

Meanwhile, with the start of the Spring semester, more and more trips were being announced over the list-serv of the Terrapin Trail Club, the outdoor recreation student organization at UMCP, including several backpacking trips. So I renewed my membership (which I had allowed to lapse during the dark days of the dissertation dungeon), and signed up for one, meant (so the announcement said) both for experienced backpackers as well as beginners like myself, along Ramsey's Draft in GWNF. It sounded perfect!

Two weeks before the trip, the trip leader announced that he might have to cancel it, because he had injured his leg, and would not be up to traipsing around the backcountry with 30--40 lbs on his back. Unless somebody else stepped up to lead it. I would gladly have done so myself ---- I really really wanted to go on this trip! --- except I had no backpacking experience whatsoever, and I told him as such. Luckily, one other person also volunteered, and this other person --- Dave --- had eight years of backpacking experience under his belt, and so between the two of us, we made it happen. I took care of the administrative stuff (emailing people, taking their money, getting the gear from the TTC storage locker, planning the drive/directions), and Dave took care of deciding what food we needed to take, and making pretty much every command decision once we got to the trailhead. It worked out well.

The original plan had been to get to the trailhead well before dark, and, even though there was a small campground right there at the trailhead, to hike along the trail for about a mile or so and then find a place to bivouac for the night. However, what with leaving late from campus, stopping to get the special Lithium batteries required for my Steripen water purifier, Friday-evening I-495/I-66 commuter traffic, and stopping for dinner at a Cracker Barrel, we only got to the trailhead at around 9:30pm. And even if we had preferred to bed down for the night at the campground there, we couldn't, because it was filled with camping Boy Scouts. So we picked up our packs, tightened down the straps, and headed off into the forest, headlamps bobbing in the darkness, singing as we single-filed along the switchbacks. Not "heigh-ho, heigh-ho", but "American Pie". Or rather, the disjointed parts of it that we could remember. Not at all what would have been my first thought on being asked to select a hiking song. Back at the trailhead, before we entered the forest, the sky had stretched above us in a vast, unbroken, inky-black canopy, the stars so huge and bright, they literally looked like diamonds. It was spell-bindingly gorgeous. We had been in such a rush to get moving, so that we could find a place to set up camp as soon as possible, that there had been no time to take any photographs. I really wish I had, though, because we never got to see that sight again that weekend. Now, inside the forest, the tree-tops closed above our heads until we could hardly see any sky at all (thank goodness for the headlamps/flashlights!!), and clouds covered up the stars the following night.

Among the various equipment that I had bought was a pair of trekking poles. I've seen people with them on numerous occasions, and I'd always scoffed at them, because it seemed to me that they would be more of a hindrance than a help --- at least on the trails where I've seen people with them: the Billy Goat Trail at Great Falls, MD (Link 1, Link 2), and the trail up Old Rag Mountain in Shenandoah National Park. Both of these trails involve a lot of boulder-hopping and rock-scrambling, where you'd need to get down on all fours and crawl or shimmy up/down/around rock faces and crevasses and cracks, and if you've got your hands full clinging onto these glorified sticks, then they're going be little more than a nuisance! But on long hikes on mostly-level-ish terrain, with a heavy load on your back, they're supposed to be quite helpful, so I sprung for a pair. And yes, they sure did help. I'm fairly good at keeping my balance, even while moving on uneven terrain, and I probably would have been alright without them, but they did offer some reprieve, giving me two more points of support between which to balance the load I was carrying (which was about 30 lbs --- I weighed it before I left the house). But where they came in most useful was during ascents, when I'd begin to tire, or if I needed to move faster (Dave was setting a pretty mean pace!): with the poles, I was now able to use all four limbs and my entire torso to propel myself, just like using an elliptical machine in a gym (I'd imagine --- I've never actually used one), and the acceleration I was able to achieve that way was stunning! Oh, and my knees were probably very grateful for the assistance, too --- on a number of occasions in the past, after (or during) particularly strenuous hikes, my knees have gotten inflamed with mild (but still painful), temporary cases of bursitis. After this weekend, however, even with the much heavier load, I had no problems whatsoever. It could be that I'm in better shape now, but I think the poles had something to do with it too. Granted, I didn't really use them all that much for the majority of the hike, either carrying them or loosely resting them on the ground as I walked, but I did use them every now and then when I needed a little extra oomph to ascend a rise, and sparing my knees that extra effort is probably what saved them.

Back to the narration:
Two and a half miles later, and 750 ft higher up on the western ridge of the Shenandoah Mountains, just past the end of the Road Hollow Trail, we finally found a place flat enough to pitch our several tents (5, + Dave's hammock); it was 1:00am. The previous night, in my living room at home, I had practiced putting up and taking down my tent (Bagheera was most interested, of course, and eventually I had to lock him in my bedroom so that he wouldn't accidentally tear the cloth) and now, setting it up this late at night, tired and sleepy, amidst rocks and stones and tree-roots and creepy-crawlies, I was really, really glad I had! What took me 10--15 minutes (not counting the time taken to figure out which was the most level section of the ground from which I could also clear away tent-floor-piercing stones and twigs, and to clear away said hazards) would otherwise have taken me two to three times as long. The tent and sleeping bag/pad were, of course, at the bottom of my pack, so I first had to unpack everything else from on top to get to them. And then we had to collect all the food/toothpaste/scented toiletries into bear-bags (for which we used the sleeping-bag stuff-sacks), and find a suitable tree from which to hang them. It was 2:00 am by the time I got to actually switch off my light and lie down. It wasn't very restful, that first night. The ground on which I had pitched it wasn't completely level, so I kept rolling into one wall of my tent. And I kept getting up, initially, to check that no scorpions or centipedes or spiders had managed to get into the tent --- either during the few seconds while I had the doors unzipped to enter myself, or somehow through a small hole somewhere --- and were hiding behind my pack or under my sleeping bag, lurking and waiting to bite me while I slept. And at some point during the night, some animal came shuffling and sniffing around my tent, and of course, my first thought was --- bear!! And I reached for my headlamp and slowed my breathing and tried to be as still as I could. But the sounds were too "small" to have been made by a large animal, so I figured that it was probably a mouse or a squirrel or something, but it was still exciting.

... Oh, and it was cold. The weather forecast was upper 70s / low 80s during the days, mid 50s during the night, and, in trying to keep the weight of my gear down, I had erred in not bringing a warm enough insulating layer. All I had were an Under Armor ColdGear base layer, which I was saving for the second night, when my cotton undershirts would be soaked with sweat, and a thin rain jacket. When we got out of the cars, at the trailhead, I was cold!! And scolding myself for being an idiot. 15 minutes into the trail, though, the exertion of the uphill climb and the rapid pace that Dave was setting meant that nobody was cold any more, and everybody was stopping to unbutton and peel off layers. Once we stopped, though, we got cold again, of course. My sleeping bag was supposedly rated to 30F, so I figured that once I was in it, I'd be warm enough, but I wasn't --- it got chilly enough in the early morning that I woke up often and found it hard to fall back asleep. Yet somehow, when I finally woke up for good at around 0830, I was fairly well rested, if just slightly woozy, and didn't have any problems staying up or keeping up for the rest of the day. Breakfast was a couple of packets of oatmeal and half a bagel with cream cheese. Bear-bags down, tents collapsed, packs packed, and troop was under way again at 1000.

We made pretty good time, and reached the midway point of the hike (Hiner Spring) by lunchtime, where I got to use my nifty little Steripen UV-zapper water purifier. The spring itself was a tiny little thing, less than a foot wide, emerging suddenly from the mud and trickling through a few pebbly pools, between larger, moss-encrusted rocks, before spreading out into a soggy, muddy mini-floodplain. (Further down, though, it collected itself again, and grew into the Right Prong of Ramsey's Draft.) If I hadn't been with more experienced backpackers, I'd never have known that this puny little trickle could be a source of drinking water (after purification, of course) --- I had imagined something larger! Now I know, though. And that's what this trip was all about for me, really --- to get the experience and learn all these things. I'd have preferred a slightly slower hiking pace, so that I could look around me and enjoy the sights and sounds of being out in the wilderness, and stop to take photographs, but I didn't mind --- when the time comes that I go out on my own, I'll be able to set my own pace.

The Steripen worked like a charm. Because of its two-stage approach (first pre-filter the water to remove particulates, then insert the UV bulb for a minute and a half and zap all the wicked microbes), and because I had to use a cup to collect a few tablespoons of water at a time from the shallow puddles, it took longer to purify the water than did the pump-action filters that the others were using, but it took a *lot* less effort! Of course, I couldn't tell right then whether or not it had really worked or not, but it's now two weeks later, and I haven't fallen in the slightest bit ill, so it does seem that it does! I did, though, forget to take a backup means of purifying water, in case the Steripen doesn't work, so that's something else I need to acquire. I won't get a filter --- those are just about as expensive as the Steripen, and are bulky, and don't kill/remove viruses like the Steripen does. Iodine tablets kill everything except giardia, so chlorine tablets seem to be the best bet. I did read somewhere that regular household bleach can also be used ---- heavily diluted, of course.

Other things to remember to take, for future backpacking trips: better insulation for chilly weather; bug-repellent spray; a stronger rope for bear-bagging (the one I had taken was little more than a clothes-line); a trowel, for digging the LNT-regulated 5-inch deep holes for when you need to go potty in the backcountry.

The Hiner Spring area is the perfect place to set up camp, with lots of flat ground and a source of water, and, being at the midway point on the loop, is usually where hikers doing this trail spend the night. But since we were making such good time, and preferred to get back home as soon as possible on Sunday, we continued on down the Draft, having decided to go as far as we could that day. There were plenty of viable campsites along the way, and we finally settled down at a spot just a little north/upstream of the confluence of the Right and Left Prongs. While we set up the tents and purified more water (much faster for me now, because the Draft was deep enough that I could submerge my entire bottle in it to fill it up, instead of having to pour in a tenth of a cup at a time), Dave started to get dinner ready: mac-and-cheese, tuna, and fruit cups. I had brought along a couple of packets of Taco Bell hot sauce, expecting the food to be really bland, but I didn't need it at all ---- the food was delicious! However, one other personal indulgence that I had brought along with me really did turn out to be worth bringing: tea-bags (and coffee-bags), some dessicated milk in a zip-loc bag, and packets of sugar. At the end of the day, after a long hike, after all the non-stop work has been completed, the tents pitched, dinner prepared and eaten, the cooking and eating utensils washed and put away, the bear-bags hoisted, and nothing left to do but crawl into your sleeping bag and fall asleep under the trees and stars, nothing seals the day more perfectly than a hot cup of tea.

And similarly, nothing starts the day better than a hot cup of coffee. I slept much better that night, too --- I was warmer, having worn my UA shirt, and the ground was level this time, so I didn't keep rolling over and waking up. My only concern for this night was that I may have pitched my tent right on top of an outcropping of poison ivy --- I kept finding three-leaved plants everywhere as I was setting it up, and so, just to be on the safe side, I had coated my arms liberally with a poison-ivy-blocking lotion that I had brought along. Either I needn't have worried, or it worked, because I never itched. Oh, and I left my shoes outside the tent that night, to dry off, because they had gotten wet from the couple of stream-crossings that we had done, and I was afraid I'd wake up and find that spiders had made their home in them. Happily, that did not happen.

FYI, I don't like spiders. They bite. And they're venomous. Some of them, dangerously venomous. And frighteningly fast. Heck, they're carnivorous predators! Hence, my extreme wariness where they are concerned.

We broke camp just as quickly that morning, and headed out at the same brisk pace. Crossed through Ramsey's Draft a couple of dozen more times, and I don't think any of us was left with dry feet at the end of it all. A couple of times, there were handy tree-trunks that had fallen across the stream and which provided natural bridges, and sometimes the rocks in the stream were large enough that they protruded above the water level, but most often, we had to just plunge into the slightly-higher-than-ankle-deep (at these fording points, at least) water and wade through. My hiking boots were Gore-Tex lined, and therefore waterproof, but they only extended as high as my ankles, so I had bought a pair of gaiters to extend the protection higher. The gaiters worked beautifully. It was my boots that failed! I'm not sure how the hull breach occurred, but I think it happened somewhere near the toe box, so I need to check that out before my next hiking trip. The wool socks that I was wearing saved me from any water-induced discomfort, though --- I could _feel_ the wetness between my toes, and around my foot, but it didn't bother me in the least. I did not at all feel like I was walking around in soggy, water-logged shoes. I wonder if that's what diving wet-suits feel like... Most, if not all, of the others changed into dry socks/shoes when we reached the cars, almost exactly at noon, but I felt no need to, not being uncomfortable at all, and I stayed in those same socks and shoes all the way back home (a 4-hour drive, including a stop for lunch), and even for a little while after, while Dave and I unpacked all the TTC gear to air out.

The one uncomfortable/painful outcome of the trip was my hips: they were covered in bruises from the chafing of the backpack's waistbelt. A couple of weeks before this trip, I had loaded up all my gear into my backpack and gone for a short day-hike in Gunpowder Falls State Park, to see how the pack felt, and I did notice then that the pack cut into my hip bones not a little. Unfathomably, even though it's a well-known fact that at least 70--75% of the weight of the pack is *meant* to be supported by the pelvic bones rather than by the shoulders, I noticed that my pack had substantial padding in the shoulder straps, and almost none in the waistbelt! Sure enough, after a couple of miles into this weekend trip, my hips started to hurt again. After a while, I was able to ignore the pain for the most part, but it was always there as a background nuisance. I was pretty sure I was wearing the pack correctly, so I didn't know if I simply needed to grow calluses on my hips or not. Anyway, since then, I've bought another backpack, a Gregory Z65, which seems to fit me like a dream! I'll load it up tomorrow with all my gear and walk around to try it out and find out for sure which pack is better, but I have a feeling that it may end up being the Gregory that I keep. I'm not entirely happy about the "upgrade", though, because the REI Flash 65 has a few features that the Gregory doesn't, though, like an emergency whistle built into the chest strap, a few extra pockets to help organize the contents of the pack, and a big catch-all "shove-it" pocket on the outside of the pack, good for things like gaiters and rain shells. And it looks a little nicer too, I think, with its orange accents (the Gregory is just uniformly gray. Bo-ring!).

So that's it! My first ever backpacking trip! May there be many, many more!

Renaissance Man

2009-03-08T22:48:00.001-04:00

I have a love-hate relationship with libraries. I love them, because they are so full of such a wide variety of books that are so full of the most interesting things, and I hate them, because they depress me, because they always remind me of all the information and knowledge that is out there that I will never know --- that I *can* never know. (Bookstores have a similar effect on me, but libraries are worse, because in libraries I can read all those books for *free*! (Relatively speaking.) There's no cost-benefit, guilt-flavoured argument to overcome.) When, oh when, will I have the time to read all that I want to read, to learn all that I want to learn? The printed word is my "Ooh, shiny!" --- if there's writing on it, I have to read it, and if there's the remotest chance that I may enjoy reading it or need to read/refer to it again, I will hoard it. My own bookshelves at home are full of books that I have picked up over the years (mostly for free or at bargain prices) but which I haven't yet read. To say nothing of the steadily growing stacks of newspapers and magazines. I can't wait to retire, and finally have time to read them all!

PS: Okay, fine, I don't really hate libraries. They are wonderful entities, and not at all deserving of such intense negative regard. Rather, it's the way they make me feel that I hate.

Life is skittles, and life is beer!

2009-03-08T22:47:00.000-04:00

Spring is here, suh-puh-ring is here! And, as much as I haven't gotten in all the snowboarding that I wanted this winter (yes, I have been *several* times this season, and I did venture onto the black diamonds, still, I haven't completely mastered the blues yet, and I haven't yet gotten any air --- while my skiing friend Brandon has! --- and that bothers me no little amount), I'm happy for the arrival of warm weather. The birds are singing in the trees, squirrels are bounding about, Bagheera is going hyper in the windows and chafing at being confined indoors (I so would love to take him out and let him run free, but I have little enthusiasm for the prospect of chasing him myself over hill and dale and up a tree to bring him back. I could put him on an extended leash, as I did when I gave him his first taste of The Great Outdoors a few weeks ago, but he'd probably choke himself to death in a mad dash to the end of the clothesline.), the women-folk are shedding their winter coats for skirts, shorts and spaghetti-strap tops... ahh, life is good.

Post-doctoral perks

2009-03-08T22:45:00.001-04:00

As much as I consider my current employment situation as a post-doctoral Research Associate as simply something temporary, to last only until I find myself a `real' job, there do exist certain perks to the position, an example of which I experienced about a week ago. I was driving onto campus for some late-night work in the lab, and slowed down at the entrance to campus for the usual ID-card check --- when the semester is in session, and [undergrad] students are occupying the residence halls, the campus police close off all entrances to campus, except three, between roughly the hours of 10 pm and 4 am, and check the identities of the drivers of all vehicles entering campus through those remaining three entrances. Only those vehicles that have an occupant affiliated with the university --- student, faculty, or staff --- are allowed in. And, unless you have a university/campus parking permit, your name, vehicle license number and on-campus destination are logged. I don't have a permit (I typically cycle to campus); consequently, my entrances are always logged. So, that night, expecting the usual 30--40-second wait while my particulars are noted down, I approached the single-file checkpoint as I always do: headlights switched off (`dimmed'), window rolled down, left arm out the window holding out my ID card ready for the police auxiliary to inspect. My new ID card. My new ID card, which now says "Faculty/Staff" instead of "Graduate Student". And the young undergrad police auxiliary kid looked briefly at my card, and without skipping a beat waved me on, with a very respectful "You're good, sir."

I couldn't stop chuckling, all the rest of the way to my lab.

On importing MatLAB figures into papers and presentations

2008-01-26T18:09:00.007-05:00

[2008.02.01: I've had to substantially re-write this post, after I realized that my first attempt at it was horrendously convoluted and confusing. Which, in all fairness, is exactly what my own state of mind was at the time, after the hours – days! – of wrestling with the subject matter of this post.]

As a [graduate] student in engineering, I have, of course, had to write innumerable papers and reports, and deliver just as many presentations. Since most --- almost all, in fact --- of the work described in those papers and presentations was performed using MATLAB, the issue of how best to import figures created in that software package into a different software suite, meant for creating said papers and presentations, is a very important one. One that, thanks to the different ways in which MATLAB, Microsoft Office (the most-prevalent choice for creating documents today) and Adobe's PDF standard handle image data (not to mention all the various `standalone' image formats --- [Windows] bitmap, [Windows] Enhanced Metafile (EMF), Compuserve GIF, JPEG, TIFF, PNG... the list could go on forever), usually results in hours upon hours of exasperating, infuriating, hair-rending, cerebro-circuit-overloading trial and error. (MS Word's own quirks when handling non-text objects and/or relatively complex documents only add to the pain, which is why I, like many others, have switched to using LaTeX --- but that's another story.) It sure did for me, and I know it has for many others too. (See, for example, "Matlab copy-and-paste: Still broken after all these years" by Frinkytown, "How do I import MATLAB graphics into Microsoft Office 97?" by the MathWorks, this Matlab script to create a Word document from a Matlab figure, by James Lynch, and yet more search results returned from googling "matlab figures Word".) So, to save any others the ordeal of re-inventing my wheel, here is what I have learned:

(Note: The following discussion applies to figures with `line' plots. For figures with shaded plot elements, like those created with surf, mesh or pcolor, see the last paragraph of this post. Also, my system is WinXP Home / SP2, MS Office 2000 and MATLAB v6.5 (R13).)

First off, MATLAB’s own display format: figures on-screen are created at a resolution of 96 dpi, at a default size of 560x420 pixels (4.375”x5.833”). I’m not quite sure how this happens, since my laptop screen itself seems to have a resolution of 117 dpi (1400x1050 pixels, 12”x9”). Maximized, the figure becomes 1400x944 pixels, but still at 96 dpi.

If the figure is exported as a png file – or any other bitmapped (raster) format, I’m assuming – the resolution gets increased to 150 dpi. The size of the image in inches is set by the Page Setup settings of the figure window (default: 8”x6”). The size in pixels adjusts accordingly (default: 1200x900). Similarly, other Page Setup settings also apply, such as Recomputing vs. Keeping screen limits and ticks. Linewidths remain about the same, but the sizes of the text fonts and the line markers become smaller in proportion to the rest of the image. The dotted gridlines (which are actually very tiny dashes in the original MATLAB figure, with a default linewidth of 0.5) become true dotted lines – which is nice.

The results are probably the same with other bitmap-format filetypes, I’d imagine. With a tif it’s the same, except that the filesizes (in bytes) are an order of magnitude larger (two orders of magnitude larger for an uncompressed tif), with no improvement in quality (that I can observe). Jpgs are about five times larger than the pngs, again with no improvement in quality (possibly even a slight deterioration, depending on the degree of `lossiness’ chosen). Gifs are the same as pngs, and we’re not supposed to use those any more. So, in fact, with the exception of eps files (and I’ll come back to those later), pngs really are the smallest filesize format out there, smaller even than the emfs.

If the figure is exported as an emf file (which is a vector format, I think), the [relative] sizes of all the figure objects remain the same, so the image looks *exactly* like the original figure in MATLAB. The size of the image in pixels is the same as the size of the original figure on the screen at the time it was exported. However, the resolution increases to 120 dpi (so the quality improves), and the size in inches therefore gets proportionately reduced. Strangely enough, if this emf file is imported/inserted into MS Word, the resolution of the inserted image falls back to 96 dpi (and the size in inches therefore increases back to that of the original MATLAB figure). Similarly, and similarly strangely, if the emf image is converted into the png format (which is easily done using a program like Irfanview), the resolution falls to 94 dpi. And, for some still further strangeness: if this emf2png file is inserted/imported into MS Word, the resolution once again returns to the original 96 dpi!

Coming now to the quality of the various image formats when imported into the various document formats:

In a MS Word .doc file:
png: image quality is good (still at 150 dpi?), but fontsizes and markersizes need to be increased to look the same as the original MATLAB figure. The true-dotted gridlines are almost invisible – which is nice.
emf2png: quality is not as good (96 dpi) as the imported pngs, although the sizes of the objects are `authentic’. Pretty sorry-looking, in fact – everything in the image is pixelated and `choppy’ – but just about passable in a pinch.
emf: quality is the best, even though the resolution is only at 96 dpi, and the image looks exactly like the original figure. Much better than the emf2png, and also slightly better than a png even when it’s had the font/markersizes increased. _This_ is the best of the three choices, when working with Word documents.
Coloured lines in imported pngs are slightly faded (when printed out on a B/W printer), but those in imported emfs and emf2pngs are still quite visible.
In addition to importing an external image file, when working with Word you also have the option of copying-and-pasting the figure image directly from MATLAB, via the [Windows] Clipboard. Using this method, a figure that is copied in metafile-format (“Preserve information; metafile if possible”), and with the “match screen-size” option, results in an image that has an increased resolution of 120 dpi (like an emf file before it is imported), and looks exactly like the imported emf-file image (96 dpi). If the image is copied in bitmap-format, it comes in at 96 dpi and looks just like the imported emf2png image.
One final word (no, pun not intended): “direct-copying” in metafile format is sometimes preferable to importing an emf file, even though they look the same, because in some versions of Word (Word 2000, for example, but not Word 2003), the latter method can result in the individual letters of the y-axis-label --- but not the entire label as a single unit --- getting rotated 90deg clockwise, resulting in a vertical stack of horizontally-aligned letters.

.doc --> .pdf, using the Adobe pdfmaker macro:
pngs: look terrible, whether font/markersizes have been increased or not. The quality deteriorates very badly in the conversion from doc to pdf.
emf2png: quality deteriorates slightly, not as much as the `true’ pngs; so they look a little better, but not by very much. They’re passable, but just barely so.
emfs (and metafile-format direct-copies): look the best, although the little dashes of the gridlines get converted into big dashes, which is not very pretty at all. (Increasing the linewidth of the gridlines from in the original figure from 0.5 to 1.0 may help – I’m not sure; I haven’t tried it yet.)
For all three formats, coloured lines are almost completely invisible when printed out on a B/W printer.
(All this is with the default pdfmaker settings. Maybe tweaking those will help; I've never tried it, so I don't know. Not sure if using Distiller instead of pdfmaker makes any difference, either.)

.tex --> .pdf:
pdflatex only recognizes images in jpg, gif, png and pdf formats, so now it’s not possible to import those good-quality emfs or even directly copy from MATLAB via the Clipboard. So we’re stuck with pngs. On the other hand, we can now use figures that have been exported as EPS – Encapsulated PostScript – files, and which can be converted to pdf, either on the fly during `texification’ by Heiko Oberdiek’s epstopdf package, or previously by some other method.
png: looks decent, like it looks in a doc before it’s converted to pdf.
emf2png: also looks like it does in a doc before conversion to pdf.
Therefore, of the two, png is better. Font- and markersizes need to be increased, though, of course.
eps: the best of the lot. Quality is better than that of png. (I don’t know what the resolution of these images is – it seems to be between 110 and 120 dpi.) Here too, though, font/markersizes need to be increased prior to exporting from MATLAB, by possibly the same amount as for the pngs. The gridlines are true dotted lines. Also, the postscript `bounding box' is drawn tighter around the axes/plot, so that, for the same overall figure width, the graph/image is larger --- unless you specify the -loose option while using the MATLAB print command.
Coloured lines in all three formats are faded as much as, or even more than, in doc2pdfs.

The -loose option tells the postscript driver to use the figure's PaperPosition property value as the Bounding Box. This is important because, when multiple figures are to be aligned side-by-side in the final document, it is the bounding boxes that get aligned, and, if the different figures have axis labels with different sizes or positions, then not using the -loose option results in differently-sized bounding boxes, with the result that the axes of the different graphs don't line up with each other.

Thus, in shorthand, for each of the three document formats, the order of preference for the image formats would be:

doc: emf /direct-copy > png (sizes increased) > emf2png
doc2pdf: emf/direct-copy > emf2png > png (whatever the size)
tex2pdf: eps2pdf > png (sizes increased) > emf2png

Finally, coming to the scaling of the various image objects (and the images themselves), these are the settings that I have found to work for me:

For a presentation (Powerpoint), using emfs:
Resize figure window to 600 x 450 for 2 graphs per slide
(For 1 graph per slide, magnify --- in Ppt --- to 125%)
Line thickness - 3
Arrow thickness - 2
Arrow text - 16, bold
Axes labels - 14 or 16, bold
Tick labels - 14, bold
Marker size - 10 (15 for x)

For a paper (doc, doc2pdf), using emfs:
Resize (in Matlab) to 600 x 450
Resize (in Word) to 65% (width = 3.17") for double-column size
Inline with text (not floating over)
Line thickness - 2
Legend font - 10 point, normal (default)
Axes labels - 14, bold
Tick labels - 12, normal
Marker size - 6 (10 for asterisks, pentagrams and hexagrams)

For a paper (tex2pdf), using pngs:
(To fit two images side-by-side on a single-column page)
Either don't resize in Matlab (default = 560 x 420), and then scale the width in TeX to 0.5\linewidth, or resize in Matlab to 600x450 and then scale in TeX to 0.45\linewidth.
Line thickness - 1
Legend font - 14 point, normal
Axes labels - 18, normal
Tick labels - 14, normal
Marker size - 8 (12 for asterisks, pentagrams and hexagrams)

For a paper (tex2pdf), using eps2pdfs:
Same figure scaling as above, and:
Line thickness - 1
Legend font - 10 point, normal
Axes labels - 14, normal
Tick labels - 11, normal
Marker size - 6 (10 for asterisks, pentagrams and hexagrams)

For figures involving shading (pcolor, surf, mesh plots, etc.), there are still more things to consider, like the way in which MATLAB renders the image (Painters vs. Zbuffer vs. OpenGL), the colour of the background (transparent -- which doesn't always work out that way -- vs. white vs. `figure-color'), and, again, the method for copying/exporting the image (bitmap vs. metafile)... Oh, and the version of Word or Powerpoint that you're importing into. And each choice interacts with each other choice in completely unpredictable ways. (Of course.) I'll get to these another day.

------------------------------------------------------------------

2008.08.15 (Another Day):

For figures without shading, MATLAB's default renderer is Painters, which is a vector format. For figures with shading, the default renderer seems to be either ZBuffer or OpenGL, which are bitmap/raster formats. (On my computer, it's ZBuffer.)

According to MATLAB, when exporting figures to image files (this includes using the "print" command), the default output resolution of the image is:
- 150 dpi for (figures in image formats and when using the ZBuffer or OpenGL renderers)
- screen resolution for metafiles
- 864 dpi otherwise (eg: eps figures and using the Painters renderer)

Since figures, whether shaded or not, come out at 150 dpi when exported as a png/bitmap-file, this would imply that MATLAB always uses the ZBuffer/OpenGL renderer instead of Painters for this export option.

Now, the method I've been using for my tex-->pdf documents, for images with shading, is to export the images as png files, with all the default options/settings. This means, in the Page Setup options, to:
- Use manual size and position (8"x6" => 1200x900 pixels @ 150dpi)
- Force white background
- Use the default figure rendering method (which is ZBuffer on my computer)

But:
- Keep screen limits and ticks (instead of the default "Re-compute")

The same method can also be used for importing the figures into MS Word (and on to pdf), but now there's also the option of directly copying and pasting from MATLAB into Word.

If the figure is copied in metafile format, or "Preserve information (metafile if possible)" (found under Copy Options), the text comes out looking nice, but the shading becomes blocky --- i.e., the "facecolor" property of the shaded surface gets set to the default "flat" (faceted) before the copy occurs. (This can also be set by Matlab's "shading" command. I usually use the "interp" --- for interpolated --- option, because it gives a smoother, nicer look.) This can be remedied, to an extent, by decreasing the step size of the surface matrix.

If the image is copied in bitmap format, then the interpolation of the shading, if set, is retained, but now the text gets pixelated and choppy. This can be fixed, to an extent, by increasing the text fontsize and changing the fontweight to "bold".

The third option --- importing a 150-dpi png image into Word --- seems to be the best compromise solution for this trade-off: interpolated shading is retained, and the text, while not as flawless as in the pure-vectorized metafile (or emf), is still better than in the bitmap-format copy.

When the .doc file is converted to .pdf, all three formats suffer a slight, and roughly equal, deterioration. The imported-png image remains the best option, in my opinion.

A fourth option (for tex-->pdf users), is exporting the shaded figure as an eps file, but this results in ugliness, and is not an option I would consider.

Haute couture, graduate-student style

2008-01-16T11:58:00.000-05:00

East met West in my attire today. Spurning my usual engineering-graduate-student garb of grubby jeans and a white T-shirt (typically obtained for free at some point during my collegiate career) for something more formal, and more appropriate for the American Helicopter Society dinner meeting that I'm attending tonight, I stepped out of the house nattily dressed in a Nehru jacket, trench coat and cowboy hat.

Yes, you read that right. Nehru jacket. Cowboy hat. Oh, and a tie elegantly patterned with a flotilla of little B-52s.

The Nehru jacket because I wanted to try something different from my usual double-breasted blazer --- and lo and behold, it actually did look pretty damn good! The trench coat because my winter jacket is a bit too technical-looking for a formal dinner event (and also because it's fun to wear something I've never worn before). And, topping it all (ha ha!), the Western broad-brim because it's winter, and it's cold, and I need to keep my mostly keratin-free noggin warm somehow, and a woolly touk (`beanie', or `winter hat' for anyone not Canadian) would have been just waaay too incongruous with the rest of my attire. So, in the absence of any other formal-looking hat (maybe I should get myself one. And some leather gloves too, while I'm about it.), my very warm --- 100% wool --- and very stylish cowboy hat it had to be.

I'm quite stoked about it --- am grinning away idiotically just thinking about it, and the reactions of people who encountered me on my way to work. Dressing up is fun! And, if you're going to try out something bizarre, a college campus is the best place to do it. I'm never going to be able to walk around with one side of my face clean-shaven and other side with a week's growth of facial hair again, once I get a real job. *sigh*

;)

Fred and Ginger

2007-12-18T13:55:00.000-05:00

I finally saw my first Fred-Astaire-and-Ginger-Rogers movie last night. Yes, I know what you're thinking -- I call myself a ballroom afficionado, but had not yet seen a single one of their movies?! Sadly, yes, such was the case. But last night, my friend Liz invited me over to her new apartment for dinner, and after chowing down on cinnamon chicken, overdosing on Ghirardeli-chocolate brownies and ice cream, setting up her Christmas-village train set under her *gorgeously* decorated (yet, happily, not at all garishly over-decorated) tree, and spending a not insignificant amount of time flipping through her complete DVD set of Fred-and-Ginger movies and trying to decide on which one I wanted to start my F&G experience with, we settled down to watch "Top Hat" [IMDB link, Wikipedia link].

It was lovely, of course. To be quite honest, I didn't even really have a good idea of what Astaire looked like, and had always pictured Frank Sinatra in my mind when I thought of him... and so I was a little surprised to see how slightly-built a man he was. I guess I had the impression that the more-famous, Hollywood leading men of the day were were all cut, more or less, from the Cary-Grant mold. I was also quite surprised at the comic-ness (is that a word?) of his character, and the motility of his facial expressions --- I never knew him to be a master of physical comedy as well! (Think Jim Carrey, or Matthew Perry, but without the buffoonery and far more refined.) In fact, I kept marveling the whole while that the person he reminded me most of --- vis-a-vis his facial expressions, at least (and long, waggly fingers, too) --- was Stan Laurel! Again, without the slapstick, but with all the innocent sweetness and charm. Really, all I knew of him was that he could dance, and dance his audience off their feet. And that, of course, he did: I'm having a Foxtrot day today (my earlier post on the Viennese Waltz notwithstanding), with Irving Berlin's delightful compositions looping non-stop through my head. Have hunted down and bookmarked YouTube videos showing my favourite dance sequences from the movie: "No strings", "Isn't it a lovely day", "Top hat, white tie and tails" and "Dancing cheek to cheek", although you really do need to watch the entire movie, and on a larger screen, to obtain the full pleasure of watching Astaire's *face* dance as he woos Rogers. Can't wait to see the rest of their movies now.

PS: Found these, too --- also worth watching: a recording of a Kennedy Center tribute to Astaire in 1978, and a clip of Astaire dancing with imaginary props, in an episode from "An Evening with Fred Astaire". (There are links to clips from other episodes there, too, in one of which --- in which he sings "Changing Partners", while dancing with Barrie Chase --- his expressions remind me of Hugh Laurie!)

PPS: I was having a hard time deciding whether to direct my hyperlinks to the corresponding entries in Wikipedia or those in the Internet Movie Database --- and including both in the text, citation-style, completely messed up the readability/flow of article. The Wikipedia entries are easier to read, while the IMDB ones, I would imagine, are more thorough and authoritative, and perhaps more permanent, although they do require a subscription for some of the information. Besides, the Wikipedia ones do link to the IMDB ones, but not vice versa. I finally decided to go with the Wiki-option, but here are all the corresponding IMDB ones as well: Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Jim Carrey, Matthew Perry, Stan Laurel, Irving Berlin, Hugh Laurie.

Blogger's [un-]block

2007-12-15T23:46:00.000-05:00

Today was the first Saturday I've had to myself in a long time --- hence the preceding spate of blog posts. There've been a number of topics that I've felt like writing about, but, besides not being able to relax enough during the work-week to commit those thoughts to prose, I've been also been spending most of my recent weekends with my cousins/aunt/uncle. Hanging out with family is great, of course, and does wonders for me in terms of reviving my spirit at the end of the week, but a writer can't write if he's being interrupted often, can he? ;) I came to school / the office today meaning to work, but got side-tracked into doing this instead. I don't feel too guilty about it, though --- I needed a break from thesis-writing, to be able to think about something else for a while, and it feels good to have scratched a few items off my to-do list. There are a few more things that I want to write about, but those will have to wait for another day. Thank you for being patient, my readers. ;)

Dance, then, wherever you may be

2007-12-15T22:45:00.000-05:00

``We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.''
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

It's a little surprising, considering just how much of a passion I have for it, that I haven't yet posted anything about dancing. Ballroom dancing, that is (which also includes the Latin and Swing dances), in which I began taking lessons just under ten years ago, in my second semester here at university in the US. Lord knows I have plenty to talk about on the subject, as many/most of my friends and relatives can attest to --- dancing truly is one of my greatest joys in life, and this is as good a place as any other to give a shout-out to the people who made that possible for me: Navid Ghanadan, who introduced me to it, inviting me to a dance on campus, organized by the UMCP ballroom club, and at which I stood pressed up against a wall for two hours, not knowing how to do a single one of the various dances that were played that night, but resolving to learn them as soon as I could. Karen Trimble, the best dance instructor I have come across in ten years of dancing --- indeed, one of the best teachers I have ever had in any subject --- and whose lessons I have returned to every semester since the Spring of 1998. And Minyoung Kim, my first dance partner and very close friend, who gave me the opportunity to practice regularly, helped me improve my technique, got me to actually come out dancing socially on a regular basis, and showed me the way to truly begin to enjoy dancing.

But the idea for this particular post came from a recent realization of just why it was that I was interested in ballroom dancing in the first place. People have often asked me which my favourite dance is, and I've always replied that I didn't have a favourite dance; if I liked the music, then I would enjoy whichever dance was appropriate for that music. And I truly did feel that way --- I had no preference for a waltz over a chacha, or a samba over a foxtrot, or a swing over a rumba. It depended on the song/music, and it depended on my mood. I've had many foxtrot-y days, and just as many chacha days. One of my friends, also from India, and also one of Karen's students, and coincidentally, also one of my fellow grad students in my department, became interested in ballroom dancing thanks to having been impressioned by the Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers movies. His favourite dance is the foxtrot, not surprisingly. But I had no such affiliation. My only pre-ballroom desire to learn to dance that I could remember derived from going to parties in Bombay and watching enviously from the sidelines as the rest of my friends jived the night away. (The stand-in-one-spot-and-shake-while-moving-your-arms-randomly style held no appeal for me then, and still doesn't. Overwhelming boredom usually sets in at about the 45-second mark, even if the music is something I really like. I can groove away to a rhythm while doing something else, no problem, but I can't do nothing but groove. I need *movement*, and *variety*!) But though I definitely enjoy the swing/jive now, I've never gotten a sense of it being The Dance for me.

Then, earlier this year, I happened to be watching the final rounds of the professional/championship level at the Ohio Star Ballroom competition (held in November of the previous year), telecast by PBS as the "America's Ballroom Challenge" television mini-series, and one of the couples who took my breath away were Ben Ermis and Shalene Archer-Ermis, who, for their show dance,danced the loveliest, most gentle, and most graceful Viennese Waltz I had ever seen. As one of the commentators put it: "This is how we all dance with our partner in our dreams!" (They eventually came first in the American Smooth division of the championship.) I didn't think much more of it back then because many of the other couples in that competition took my breath away as well. (For example, see here for the tango that Tomasz Mielnicki and J. T. Damalas did for their show dance, set to Roisin Murphy's "Ramalama (Bang Bang)", and here for Mazen Hamza and Irina Sarukhanyan's martial-arts-inspired tango show dance.) Recently, though, in hunting for the music to which they had choreographed their dance ("You and me", by Lifehouse), I came across a recording of their performance on YouTube (which I've linked to above). And, in watching that clip --- and another one of David and Valentina Weise, also dancing a Viennese Waltz, this one set to Kelly Clarkson's "Breakaway" --- over and over again, it suddenly hit me that *this* was My Dance! This, the Viennese Waltz, was the dance that fired up the strongest passions in me, even if it was one of those at which I am least technically proficient. It's the one that, no matter what my current mood is, most easily shuts out the world around me and carries me off into a different one, where there's nothing but me, my partner (imaginary, if need be), and the dance --- although (depending on the music) the foxtrot and west coast swing are quite close behind. (And the rest of the peloton follows quite closely, too --- it's a not a clear-cut competition at all! ;) )

And then, serving as further confirmation, I remembered that, in all those ten years of lessons, Karen's infrequent announcements that the lesson for the day would be the Viennese Waltz were the ones that I met with the most unbridled joy. I never could get enough of this particular dance, and on the one occasion (besides preparing for the DCDI competition in 2004) that I took a private lesson with Karen, it was the VW in which I chose to get the extra instruction.

I don't know why I have this connection to this particular dance. It was probably something that I saw when I was very very young, and which left a mark on my sub-concious. A Disney movie, maybe? Who knows. Maybe someday I'll find out. Maybe someday I'll even find out that it's not the Viennese Waltz but some other dance that's actually my favourite. But for now, this is my answer. :)

Dance, then, wherever you may be
For I am the lord of the dance, said He,
And I'll lead you all wherever you may be
And I'll lead you all in the dance, said He.

(Chorus of the hymn "Lord of the Dance", created by Sidney Carter with the melody from the Shaker song "Simple Gifts", which was also the inpiration for the "Variations on a Shaker Melody" section of Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring".)

Winter's here

2007-12-15T19:51:00.000-05:00

It snowed last week. An isolated event that dumped three inches on the ground in just a few hours, all of which had melted away two days later. But that morning, I woke up and the world outside my window was white again. White, and quiet, and peaceful, in that magical way that only freshly-fallen snow can achieve. Sounds are muted --- even the swish of a passing car, or the scrape of a neighbour's shovel. The entire world slows down, distracted from its tumultuous rush by the unhurried descent of the snowflakes. Even water stops, motionless. The muddy browns and industrial grays are covered up, hidden out of sight. Tracks in the snow tantalize you with thoughts of the animals and birds that passed by silently when you weren't looking. A pair of cardinals swoop down on the bird-feeder, flashes of red against a white canvas. Winter's here. And Spring will soon follow. It's the season for magic again.

...

It feels like last winter was just yesterday, though --- I can remember it all so clearly. The years go by more and more quickly each year. And this year, just like every other one, has left me with its own set of special memories. People who came into my life; people who were in it already, but whom I became closer to; and people who left it, but left their footprints behind for ever more. Just like birthdays, perhaps even more so than a birthday, the first snowfall of the year makes me turn around and look back at the year that has just gone by. The words of John Lennon come to mind:

And so this is Christmas,
And what have you done?
Another year over,
A new one just begun...

Turn me on

2007-12-15T19:23:00.000-05:00

I simply *love* Cadillac's new series of TV commercials for the 2008 CTS (Ad 1, Ad 2), with its tagline:

"When you turn your car on, does it return the favor?"

So much for the old fuddy-duddy image of Cadillac. If I didn't have reservations about the quality/reliability of American cars, this one would have made it straight onto my short-list (such is the power of advertising!).

And then they underscore the point by having Kate Walsh in the pilot's seat. Consider my engine well and truly started. ;)

Wiki-maze

2007-11-05T11:09:00.002-05:00

I'm gonna start keeping a diary of the crazy twists and turns I take when I get lost in Wikipedia. Should make for interesting reading. Just like tracing back the way a conversation, or your own thoughts, develop.

Here we go:



4/21/08
Asus Eee PC
 - Obfuscated code
  - Bytecode
  - Just another Perl hacker
 - Windows 7

Yellowjacket
 - Hymenoptera
  - Apocrita
   - Fairyfly
   - Chalcididae
    - Parasitoid (Hyperparasite)
     - Black oil
      - Greys
       - Communion (book)
       - Starchild skull
     - Alien (Alien franchise) (Xenomorph)
      - Necronom IV
       - Necronomicon (H. R. Giger)
        - Necronomicon
      - Vagina dentata
      - Bolaji Badejo
      - Space Jockey (Alien)
       - LV-426
       - Derelict (Alien)
      - Eusociality
      - Plantigrade
       - Digitgrade
        - Unguligrade
      - Theropoda
       - Saurischia
      - Jean-Pierre Jeunet
      - Predator 2

1/25/08
CB Radio
 - UHF
  - Electromagnetic spectrum
   - Radio waves
    - A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field
     - Timeline of electromagnetism and classical optics
 - GMRS
 - Family Radio Service
 - Multi-Use Radio Service
 - Nickname
  - Hypocoristic
 - Callsign
  - NATO Phonetic Alphabet
  - International Phonetic Alphabet
 - Squelch
  - Nosie suppression / Active noise control
 - CB slang
  - Kojak
   - Falcon Crest
  - Voice procedure
   - Five by five
   - Sigalert
   - Mayday (distress signal)
  - Ten-code
   - Incident Command System
   - Q code
 - Sunspot cycle
 - CB usage in the United States
  - Civil Air Patrol

1/22/08
Bluetooth
 - Harald I of Denmark
  - Younger futhark
   - Cipher runes
    - Runic alphabet
     - Cirth

12/14/07
Cruft
- Foo
- Metasyntactic variable
 - Lorem ipsum
 - Hello world
 - Colossal Cave Adventure
- Kludge

12/3
Reach (song)
Richard Hammond
- Jeremy Clarkson
- Kristin Scott Thomas
- Isambard Kingdom Brunel
- Toyota Hilux
- Alfa Romeo Brera
- Top Gear (original format)
- Quentin Wilson
- Top Gear (current format)
Song of the South
- Br'er Rabbit

11/30
Hall & Oates
- Kiss on my list
- Maneater (Hall & Oates song)
Ani DiFranco
Universal Serial Bus
Big Chill
- The Big Chill (album)
- The Big Chill (film)
- The Big Chill (music festival)
- Big Freeze

11/29
313
- 313 (number)
- Happy number

11/28
The Junior Mint
West Coast Swing

??
S4C
4 Non Blondes
Adiemus
- Karl Jenkins
- Adiemus III
- Adiemus: Songs of Sanctuary
- Miriam Stockley
- Session musician
1492: Conquest of Paradise
- 1492: Conquest of Paradise (album)
- Vangelis
 - Oceanic (Vangelis album)
 - Mythodea
 - Portraits (So Long Ago, So Clear)
The Bad Touch
- Bloodhound Gang
- Fire Water Burn
- Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo
- Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss
- Why's Everybody Always Pickin' On Me?
- Screwing You on the Beach at Night
- Lupus Thunder
- The Bloodhound Gang (TV Series)
- Sid Fleischman
- 3-2-1 Contact
- Sexual abuse

11/26
MacGyver
- List of fictional scientists and engineers
- List of problems solved by MacGyver
- The A-Team
- Knight Rider
 - Cylon (Battlestar Galactica)
 - Goliath (Knight Rider)
 - Automan
  - Tron
  - Lamborghini Countach
   - Lamborghini
    - Lamborghini Diablo
    - Lamborghini Gallardo
    - Lamborghini Murcielago
    - Lamborghini Miura
    - Lamborghini Reventon
    - Lamborghini 350GTV
    - Lamborghini 400GT
    - Lamborghini LM002

11/7
Dietrich Kuchemann
Lifehouse (band)
- You and me (Lifehouse song)
- You and me (song)
- Moody Blues
 - Nights in White Satin
  - Hey Jude
- You and me
 - Me and you

11/6:
Dauphin
- Eurocopter Dauphin
- Eurocopter Panther
- Euromissile HOT
- Aerospatiale Dauphin
- Indian Coast Guard
Roisin Murphy
- So you think you can dance (Season 2)
- Wade Robson
Breakaway (Kelly Clarkson song)
As-Salamu Alaykum
- Salaam

11/5:
Colt's Manufacturing Company
Euler equations
- Potential flow
- Computational fluid dynamics
- Navier-Stokes equations
- Fluid dynamics

11/3:
Abracadabra (song)
Steve Miller Band
- Abracadabra (album)
- Eye of the Tiger
    - Unsportsmanlike conduct
        - Sportsmanship
        - Gamesmanship
- Sugar Ray
- 14:59
    - Weezer
    - Rivers Cuomo

11/2:
Glissade
- Ice axe
- Self-arrest
    - Self belay

11/1:
SIOC

10/31:
Soundwave (Transformers)
- Vocoder
- Frank Welker
- The Transformers: The Movie
    - John Moschitta, Jr.
    - Lenticular lens
    - Don Figueroa
- Transformers: Animated
SexyBack
- Timbaland
- Elena Anaya

Steve Jablonsky

2007-11-04T16:42:00.000-05:00

The score to the 2007 Transformers movie.

Fucking *awesome* music. Yes, so much so that I had to use the F-word.

I want it!!

Thesis progress

2007-10-29T12:53:00.000-04:00

A request.

For all those who would like to know how my thesis is "coming along": Thank you, I really do appreciate your concern, but please, do try and refrain from asking. Distilling the past five years of my academic/professional life into a single, roughly-300-page document is a long, tedious, and --- more often than not --- incredibly frustrating exercise. When I'm finally done and satisfied with it, I'll let you know --- with the utmost joy. Until then, if I'm in a social situation with you, I'm most probably seeking escape from the drudgery for just a little while, and talking or thinking about it is the last thing that I would want.

The brilliant Jorge Cham captures the feeling perfectly, here.

Thank you. :)

Wish I DID have some daylight in my savings account

2007-10-25T18:54:00.000-04:00

Er... just when, exactly, did it start getting dark so early? I could have sworn that, just last week, it was still light outside up until almost dinner time (7:30-ish). Now it's pitch-black by 6. And it seems like this only just happened in the past two days. Did the Earth just jump? Did *all* the clocks in the world, and not just my computers, automatically fall back to regular time when my back was turned? Should I be pointing fingers at gremlins (if I could see one at which to point a finger!)? Am I losing my mind?

Zoom-zoom

2007-10-25T16:35:00.000-04:00

*God*, that was fun.

Needed to get out of the house and away from my computer and the day-in, day-out monotony of thesis writing. So took my car out, just now, and slung it around all the little back-roads of my neighbourhood for a bit. Nothing rash, nothing stupid --- I stayed below the posted speed limits + 15 mph (except for one wide-open straightaway that parallels the Metro tracks and doesn't have any parked cars or children running around), came to a complete stop at *all* the stop signs, yielded to other drivers when the road became too narrow for two cars to pass, used my turn signals each time, both hands on the wheel, except for the gear changes... But it was still just such sheer bliss, slaloming in smooth sinusoids around all the parked cars, hitting the apexes in the turns, ascending --- and descending --- through the shift-points at just the right rpms, the gears snicking precisely into place each time (well, most of the time. I was driving in flip-flops --- chappals --- so there was sometimes a little bit of play between my feet and the pedals.)... Ahh, rev-matching, double-clutching, seat-of-your-pants, mind-in-the-moment Fahrvergnügen.

Made even better by the fact that there was a light drizzle falling, and the roads were slick with carpets of wet, fallen leaves. So you had to be extra careful to not tease the tires too close to their traction limits. Red, orange, yellow and black on the ground; red, orange, yellow and green up above. Wipers on Intermittent. The sound of the engine swelling and cutting, swelling and cutting, swelllllllling and cutting... and sometimes, swollen, but not achieving release in the next upshift, growling back down for a smoothly executed, jerk-free engine-braking manoeuvre. A graceful symphony of perfectly modulated throttle and clutch, the flowing dance of tire and road, pistons and neurons. Fifteen minutes of suburban autocross heaven.

Clicks and purrs

2007-10-12T15:26:00.000-04:00

Prologue:
I've heard of clicking beetles. And hissing cockroaches (I've actually seen them, too -- my entomologist friend Andrew has a pair). But cats... cats just keep on surprising me.

On with the story!

I'm almost 30. And I'd never heard a cat purr until 3 years ago, would you believe it?

Indian cats don't purr, it would seem. They just snarl, and hiss, and yowl. But then, growing up in Bombay, I never knew anyone who kept a cat as a pet. People had dogs, fish, squirrels, parrots, budgerigars... one or two had rabbits... but no cats. The only cats around were the stray, feral ones --- and there were plenty of those. But they never purred. Not to my knowledge, at least. Purring was something only the cats in storybooks did.

Americans, on the other hand, seem about equally-divided between cat-people and dog-people. And in the past few years, I've made a number of friends with members of the former division, and so have had much more exposure to domesticated felines than before. (I myself grew up a dog-person, and still consider myself as one, but I've learned to appreciate and enjoy cats too, now.) But the first time I heard a cat purr, I damn near jumped out of my skin --- I thought it was growling at me! And heaven knows, I didn't want to be within range of those irrational, easily-aggravated claws. Much hilarity ensued, of course, amongst the cat-owner and other humans present.

But this particular species wasn't quite done pulling my tail just yet. More surprises were still in store. That other same day, while I was peering fascinatedly at the baby cats (see my previous post), Katie asked me if I'd like to hear them purr. "Sure!" I said, confident now in my ability to correctly identify a purr. She held one up to my ear, and I waited. And waited. And heard nothing that matched anything in my mental database of animal sounds. "Listen!" she said. "Don't you hear it?"

"Hear what?"

-- "That clicking sound!"

"That clicking sound?!?"

-- "Yes!"

(And yes, I had heard a series of clicks emanating from roughly the animal's thoracic region, but they hadn't registered as anything noteworthy. I had been expecting *purrs*!)

"They click?!?"

-- "Yes!"

"I thought you said they were purring!"

-- "Well, that's how kittens purr."

... My education continues.

Miniature-mamal magic

2007-10-12T15:13:00.000-04:00

I had the opportunity, a couple of days ago, of carrying around a basketful of just-a-few-days-old kittens. Five of them. They were the tiniest things I'd ever seen. I mean, I knew baby puppies, kittens, piglets, etc. are small when newly-born, but I had never realized just *how* small. And yes, they were incredibly cute. Not just in the miniaturized-version-of-a-bigger-thing way (hey! I *am* an engineer!), but also because of that evolved baby-animal strategy of endearing themselves to adults and provoking nurturing feelings and thereby facilitating survival by having heads and eyes disproportionately larger than the rest of their bodies and by emitting those plaintive, woebegone cries. (Yes, I am a scientist, too.) We adults are such suckers. :)

I had to carry that basket (which otherwise could have passed off as a small laundry hamper) through a study lounge full of hard-at-work students --- and in a building on campus in which I'm quite sure pet animals are not allowed. (Shhh!) The first time, on the way in, the kittens behaved. On the way out, though, they didn't. (And just so you know, their heads weren't the only things larger than you'd expect. Their voices were, too.) And everybody, oh just evvvverybody knew I had kittens in the basket.

I couldn't stop grinning.

In the footsteps of the Earl of Sandwich, that intrepid pioneer

2007-10-12T14:41:00.000-04:00

Tabasco sauce tastes great on tuna-and-cheese sandwiches.

Old Bay... surprisingly, not so much. Kinda "meh", really. (Yes, I'm aware that I'm "from" Maryland. Wanna hear some more sacrilegious stuff? I don't care much for crabs, either! ... Although jousting's kinda cool.) It does taste great on 'fries, though!

Jason bought a crock for butter, and now his butter tastes so much better!

2007-10-12T14:32:00.000-04:00

I have re-discovered the goodness of butter. Actually, let me correct that: I have *discovered* the goodness of butter, never having realized it before. Back home, when I was a kid, we used to keep the butter in the fridge (naturally), and if I wanted to have some with my breakfast, or to make sandwiches with, I'd have to leave it out for several hours beforehand --- like overnight --- to melt. (We didn't have microwave ovens back then.) I didn't use that butter very much.

Besides, I don't ever remember it tasting all that wonderful, either. Might just have been the kind of butter we got in India back then. The cheese there wasn't so great, either.

By the time I came to the US, I had heard all about margarine. And was quite vehemently opposed to using it. a) Because it wasn't the "real thing", and b) because I badly needed to put *on* weight, not lose it. (I still do. And still grumble at having to hunt for "regular" food among all the low-fat/non-fat/reduced-fat variants whenever I go grocery shopping.) My aunt --- with whom I stayed for a while before I moved into the dorms, and whose choice of household items for running her house (Tide detergent, Polaner jam, Philadelphia Flavours cream cheese, Lipton tea bags, Eggo waffles...) left me, an impressionable, fresh-off-the-boat newcomer to the American Way, forever brand-loyal --- used to use something called "Shedd's Country Crock". It looked, to me, and behaved, like butter, except that it never got hard in the fridge. And I remember it actually *saying* "butter" somewhere on the outside of the container. Eight years of devoted usage later, I actually re-read the label, and was left incredibly disappointed. I guess I should've been more suspicious about it having that miraculous non-hardening quality.

So I set out to look for a butter dish, just like I'd seen in other people's homes. A container in which I could leave the butter outside so that it would always be ready-to-spread whenever I wanted it. (My roommate used to use a regular tupperware container, but that was just ugly, and meant one less tupperware container for storing other things in.) Strangely enough, I was never able to find one --- that was inexpensive enough. (It's just a *butter dish*, for crying out loud!) Then I found something called a "butter bell" at Marshalls, a local discount department store. (You can read more about it at the manufacturer's website, and at all these other websites, too.) It didn't look like anything I'd ever seen before, but it looked neat, and seemed to make sense from a scientific/engineering standpoint (it was very-practically sized to contain the same volume of butter in a standard stick... the water not only sealed off the container, but also, by evaporating, kept the whole thing cool, just like the clay/earthen `matkas' we have back in India for keeping water cool) and it was just 10 bucks. I bought it.

And it works like a charm! Haven't had any problems with mold so far (See the concerns expressed here), and the butter makes my sandwiches and pancakes and waffles and toast taste so much better! Plus, it just seems to have a certain old-world charm about it all. Or maybe that's just me. Whatever. Yay for butter!

Somebody please take these away from me

2007-10-08T21:34:00.000-04:00

I'm decimating a can of almonds (a "tin" of almonds?) right now, with a couple of boxes of raisins thrown in for good measure. Somehow, having finger food -- and drink -- around is very conducive to the writing process. Unfortunately, finger food too often equates to junk food. Like bags of Doritos chips.

Ah well. If I have to pick my poison, at least it's not the bitter variety.

Somebody please invent -- or obtain -- for me a tea-mug that never gets cold, so I don't have to keep making trips to the microwave oven. I don't have time to tinker around with thermoelectric circuits myself right now.

Like the first dewfall, on the first grass

2007-10-08T10:52:00.000-04:00

Managed to drag myself out of bed nice and early this morning. At 6:45! The past couple of weeks, working at home, I've been waking up later and later each day, averaging a rise-and-shine time of around 9:30. Then again, I've been turning my lights out between 1 and 2 am each night, so it works out. I need at least 7 hours of sleep to feel rested. But then by the time I finish my breakfast and actually get started working on my thesis, it's already noon or a little past, so in all honesty, it really doesn't work out. So last night I rapped myself on the head and forced myself to get into bed by 11:30, and, as motivation to not just turn the alarm off and dive back under my blanket, promised myself that I would go for 7:30-am morning mass. Calmed my brain down with a little light reading about Galileo and Newton and gravitation (Morris Kline's "Mathematics and the Physical World"), and voila! Lights out at 00:05!

Well, I thought I had calmed myself down. Darkness or not, my brain just wouldn't shut down, and I tossed and turned through most of the night. I think I had about two periods of sleep, because I remember two sets of dreams. The rest of the time, visions of West-Coast-Swing YouTube videos danced in my head. Insomnia is something I've dealt with since I was 15, though, so although the whole thing annoyed the heck out of me, I didn't get too worked up about it. (Can't really say that I "didn't lose any sleep over it," though. That turn of phrase doesn't quite work here. Neither does "not losing any hair over it," especially given the haircut I had a couple of days ago that left me shorn nearly as closely as a Marine recruit.) Even if I wasn't actually sleeping, my body *was* getting some sort of rest, so it was OK.

5:26. So said the red LEDs. Sigh. Oh well, maybe I'll be able to fall asleep within the next hour and 15 minutes.

The alarm went off what felt like less than 20 minutes later. Damnit! Just when I thought I could feel true, blissful sleep coming on. Had I read the clock wrong earlier? Had it actually been *6*:26? It'd be ok if I went back to sleep, and started going to morning mass tomorrow instead, wouldn't it? After all, I'm allowed an adjustment period between waking up at 10:30 and waking up at 6:45, right? It's not natural to go cold-turkey from one to the other on consecutive days. Not good for the body.

Ach, whom am I kidding. I'm wide awake. Ain't gonna be any falling-back-to-sleep anyway. Quit being lazy, Jason. I just need to get myself into an upright position, and get my shoes on, and I'll be fine.

So I did, and I was indeed fine. Pulled open the blinds -- dawn hadn't quite broken yet, and the air was still still and heavy and humid in the darkness. The birds were just about starting up, too, while the crickets were winding down. Stumbled to the bathroom. Heidi's door was open, and her light on -- she was up already, working on her dissertation. She's an early riser. Light was shining under Brian's door, too. Good god, does *everyone* in this house normally get up this early? Oh well, he's an architect, and these architecture students are crazy. They work even harder than us engineers.

Fixed myself a bowl of porridge ("oatmeal", to you Yanks), and contemplated cycling to church vs. walking. I'd always cycled before, because I'd always carried on to school afterwards, lugging my heavy backpack around with me. But today I'd be coming back home, and no backpack either. Besides, when I cycle, it's all about speed and getting somewhere fast, and I wanted to take my time and enjoy the morning. Walking sets the mind free and allows it to wander as well. I read a great quote once, by this guy who used to go for walks for two to three hours on end. Some famous author or the other. Can't remember it now -- need to look it up again.

Ernest Hemingway, it might have been. Hmm...

So I walked, even though I knew it would make me a couple of minutes late. Got there during the First Reading -- was the story of Jonah, today. The Gospel was the story of the Good Samaritan. Nothing in The Word was terribly inspiring today, and indeed I spent quite a few minutes distracted by the dewy freshness of the trees just outside the window. But, like my Mama says, it's good to just touch base, so I contented myself with that, where normally I would have fretted about having wasted my time. Was nice to see Fr. George, the parish priest, again, too. Although I did get miffed -- again -- about people's habit of conversing loudly, *inside* the church, after the Mass gets over. Not in the least bit helpful to people, like myself, who just want a little quiet-time in a church to pray. That's precisely the reason why I'd rather go for the daily morning Mass at this neighbourhood church than for the Sunday Masses at the Catholic Student Center on campus. Over there, the minute the service is over, it gets noisier than a high-school cafeteria.

I finished reading C. S. Lewis' "The Case For Christianity" a little while ago (see also my second post in this blog). That guy is amazing. That little book, less than 60-odd pages long, answered a whole bunch of the questions I've been carrying around with me for years about Christian dogma -- things that just didn't make any logical sense to me, and so prevented me from believing [in] them. But Lewis dealt with those issues so deftly, it was almost like a sleight of hand. I need to go back and read that book again (and his other works, too). By the end of the book, I found myself thinking -- Is it all really that simple?! (The logical arguments, I mean, not the dogmas themselves.) His reasoning was so lucid and compelling, that I found myself led along until I was boxed into a corner where really, Christianity is The Answer, and there's a part of me that rebelled against that (the being led along by hypnotizingly powerful rhetoric) a little bit. It was all just too easy, too much like a magician's trick. I'm not denying that he could be right; I just want to go back and truly satisfy myself that he is, before committing myself.

And so, when it wasn't otherwise thinking about Jonah and fishes' bellies and Samaritans and dewy leaves, that's what my mind was reflecting on during the Mass: some of the things that Lewis had talked about. Fallen angels, free will, Incarnation and Resurrection... weighty stuff.

The walk back home was lovely. Saw some dogs, which always leaves me feeling happy. Detoured through a park, swung on a swing for a bit and grinned at how self-conscious I was feeling about playing, in public, on something meant for a 7-year-old (I really don't like the flexible-seat design that's so ubiquitous nowadays. My butt isn't shaped like a semi-circle, for pete's sake! Why don't they make them like they used to, with a nice flat plank for a seat?!), looked around and pictured what this entire grassy, wooded area would like in just a few months, covered in frost and ice and snow, and transformed into a winter wonderland... lay back on a park-bench and stared up through the tree-branches at the sky for a couple of minutes, before telling myself that I really needed to get up and get going and stop lazing around.

Further down the trail that I had to take on my way home, I saw a single leaf hovering in mid-air, at about eye-level, far away from any other structure. Although I couldn't see it until I walked around and looked at it from a different angle, I immediately knew how it was achieving that feat: it was suspended by a strand of spider-silk. I was still quite intrigued, though: it's normal to see a *spider* suspended at the end of a long thread like that. Not a *leaf*!

Earlier last week I had come running along that trail with my running buddy -- my football (soccer ball, to you, my American readers) -- and somewhere right around there it had spiked off my toe and gone bounding off into some bushes along the side. I had followed, to retrieve it, most trepidatiously, because that unkempt little area was precisely the kind of place where nasty things like poison ivy like to lurk, and, it being quite dark, I really couldn't see anything very clearly (it had been around 8 pm -- which made for dribbling a football along woodland trails quite an adventure, too). Oh, and my legs were quite bare and unprotected, of course. Anyway, I managed to snatch my ball out, and didn't break out into any sort of hideous rash, so it all turned out ok. So today, since it was all nice and bright, I decided to go and take a look at that thicket and see if there indeed was any poison ivy there. Ventured cautiously in, crouched down to bring my eyes down to shrub-level... and then I saw one little guy there, trademark trifoliate, asymmetric, palm-shaped leaves and all. A-ha! Wow, so I *had* been lucky! And then I looked up and around a little bit more, and realized just how lucky I had been: that entire area was actually *blanketed* in poison ivy, a huge, mature growth of it pushing through all the other plants there! I have *no* idea how I went in there and emerged unscathed! Do I really have greater resistence to poison ivy than most other people? Is this magnificent biological machine that is my body even more magnificent that I had imagined?! (Yes, I'm allowing myself a moment of vainglory here.) Well, even if it is, that is one hypothesis I'm not going to attempt testing. I don't mind ringing Fate's doorbell and running away once in a while, if I know I can get away with it, but it's not good to tempt her *too* much. ;)

Profoundly full of happiness at the experiences and discoveries of my early-morning walk, I continued on. I'd never have noticed all these things if I had cycled instead. Saw some lovely deep-pink (rose!) roses growing in a neighbour's garden. Waved out to people driving off to work. Heard a mockingbird sounding off from inside a bush (you can tell it's a mockingbird because its tune changes every few seconds), and was immediately reminded of Zooey Deschanel's hilarious performance in the movie "Failure to Launch" ("What the hell kind of devil bird chirps at night?!"). Got home, and Raja, Heidi's 10-year-old cat, was waiting right behind the front door (probably trying to figure out a way to get out. She's an inquisitive little thing.). She was in one of her inexplicably random (in other words, typically cat-like) frisky moods -- she scampered off down the hallway, and then back again, and leapt up onto the counter-top to have her ears scratched (It really amazes me, how much power these animals have in their legs, and especially at this age!), and I indulged her, and was rewarded with a happy purr. ... It had been a good morning. :) Good enough to inspire me to actually write about it. A porch/verandah, a deck chair, a mug of hot tea, a laptop and wireless networking, and a morning that stayed cool and pleasant the whole while. Let me say it again -- it's been a good morning.

Now, back to reviewing the literature on fenestron tail rotors and playing a different kind of author. ;)

P.S.: Thank you, Cat Stevens.

Firefox funnies

2007-09-16T00:10:00.000-04:00

"Cookies are delicious delicacies".

;) Read the full story here.

And, if you use Firefox, check out the "Firesomething" extension / add-on, available here. (See here for the background story.)

Btw, other add-ons that I use myself, and recommend, are Tab Mix Plus, IE View, Forecastfox, DownThemAll, and the Winestripe theme (if, like me, you prefer the old v1.5 look of the toolbar icons.)
(Note to self: Check out IE View Lite and superT.)

----------------------------------------

Try typing "about:mozilla" in the location bar of your Netscape / Mozilla / Firefox / SeaMonkey browser. You should get one of the following excerpts from the Book of Mozilla

And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.
from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10

And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.
from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31(Red Letter Edition)

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

*chuckle* Reminds me of the story of the Dosfish (By Lincoln Spector. Originally published in Southern California Computer Currents, July 12--August 15, 1993.). (Read it here, or here, or here.)

WinAmp playlist / iPod playlist / I'm an idiot

2007-09-14T13:02:00.000-04:00

I feel stupid.

I bought myself a 30-GB iPod a few months ago, because, although I already had a 512 MB flash mp3 player (an iRiver --- the iFP 895 --- and a lovely little thing it is), I wanted to have my *entire* music collection with me wherever I went. And out of the various hard-drive players out there, the iPod did seem like the best one. The only problem was: I didn't really like iTunes at all (and iTunes, as you're probably aware, is the only way to get music onto an iPod). I've been a devoted WinAmp fan ever since I discovered mp3, all the way back in 1997, and over the years I've developed my own method of organizing my mp3 collection on my hard drive --- filename conventions, folder arrangements, etc. And WinAmp doesn't interfere with any of that. iTunes, on the other hand, prefers to do things its own way. Thankfully, it gives you the option to not copy/move all of your mp3s into its library folder and to not re-arrange everything into its Artist\Album\Songname directory structure.

Anyway. There are other beefs that I have with iTunes, but those aren't the subject of this post. I feel like an idiot because I spent these past few months mostly *not* using my iPod because I couldn't figure out a way to import my WinAmp-generated playlists into iTunes. I like having all my music with me, and I like listening to my entire collection in random order, but in certain situations, like when I'm driving, I only want to hear the songs that I've set aside into my special for-driving playlist. (Obviously.) Hitting the "next" button on my iPod repeatedly is annoying, and depletes the battery unnecessarily. Hence the non-use of the iPod, until I figured out a solution, and the making-do with mp3-CDs and my flash player. Meanwhile, I grew increasingly frustrated at my inability to find a way to convert WinAmp's .m3u (or .pls) playlists into iTunes' .xml format. I scoured the Internet forums. Googled "export winamp playlist to itunes". Found a Winamp plugin that would export my entire library to an xml file, but not individual playlists. Found an iTunes plugin that would export an iTunes playlist to m3u (see a discussion about it here), but that was the opposite of what I wanted. Ranted and raved, and made much ballyhoo about how much iTunes sucked.

Today I found out that iTunes actually does recognize, and can directly read and import, m3u playlists. File > Import > foo.m3u . That's it, that's all. I have no idea why I didn't realize this four months ago. I could swear I must have tried it back then.... didn't I??

Hee-haw.

Tables: LaTeX vs. Word

2007-09-13T16:22:00.000-04:00

Am starting to wonder if I made the right decision in choosing to write my dissertation in L^AT_EX instead of in MS Word. I need to create a table of information, and need it to:

be in landscape format (because there are a *lot* of columns)
break over multiple pages (because there are a lot of rows)
have the entries in each cell wrap over multple lines (because there's often a lot of text in each entry)
float, if possible (so that I don't have a half-empty page before the table starts).

Am pulling my hair out (what little is left of it) trying to grapple with the all the various tabular-derivative packages (longtable, supertabular, tabularx, tabulary, array... ), to figure out which one will work best for me, and how to massage it into doing what I want it to do.

And spending all my time doing this instead of actually *writing*.

GRARRRHHH!

Blogger num_profile_views coding silliness

2007-09-11T10:19:00.001-04:00

Just discovered: You can jack up the count of the "profile views" on your Blogger profile just by refreshing/reloading the page. Even if you're logged in, as yourself. What a crock!

Arc of a Diver

2007-09-10T00:16:00.000-04:00

Overcame my fear of diving (into water / a pool) this weekend. Well, not really "fear", per se, but more an extreme, subconcious, ingrained reluctance to launching myself head-first and un-braced for impact at anything. I actually used to dive really well, back when I first learned to swim, about a decade and a half ago, and was completely unafraid to smoothly arc off the diving board or the side of the pool. I couldn't actually *swim* very well, but I sure could dive!

Then, somewhere along the way, I learned the proper way to coordinate my anatomy when the object of impact was not water that would slide neatly out of the way (assuming, of course, that you assume an appropriately streamlined form, and don't try broad-siding the water, thinking that it's "soft". That, of course, is the mistaken assumption that belly-flop victims rapidly discard.), but unyielding, solid ground. "Tuck and roll" became my mantra, and it saved my bacon in numerous incidents involving bicyles, snowboards and the like.

Swimming somehow got abandoned along that particular way. There were a few sporadic attempts to re-aquaint myself with that marine mode of locomotion, but it never really got off the ground, so to speak. Forget about getting off a diving board. I became too aware of my lack of ability to swim well and/or stay afloat for any respectable period of time to trust myself in the deep end of any pool. Son of a sailor that I am, that became one of my most acute (`acutest'?) sources of shame. (... Lack of fluency in Hindi being a significant other.)

But my cousins have a pool in their backyard, and this summer I made use of it to the fullest, to develop my ability to manoeuvre capably in an aquatic environment... Basically, to expand my comfort zone to include that environment. And I was fairly successful... Except for the diving bit. I simply could not bring myself to, like I said before, launch myself at something head-first, arms and body locked into full extension, simply *asking* for skeletal-compression trauma. It was so... wrong! Every time I'd try diving, my body would instinctively brace for a colllison --- joints loose and ready to flex and absorb the energy of the impact, muscles relaxed, torso curved and twisted to transfer the blow over the shouder and back, head, elbows and knees tucked in to protect the face and internal organs... you know the drill. It wasn't *fear*, because I *knew* there was nothing to fear... there were no sharp rocks hiding just below the surface of the water, waiting to punish me for my stupidity. It was just a natural, instinctive reflex neural pathway that I needed to break. Mind over matter, and all that jazz.

And this weekend I did it. No more hesitation, no more needing to command myself sternly to disobey my instincts, because now it finally feels right. Hurrah!

Shut your mouth, fool!

2007-09-02T13:46:00.000-04:00

I shoot off my mouth too goddamn much.

I used to be quiet, and introverted, and a real wallflower. Still am, at core, a very private, closed-off person, but I've over the years learned to be more sociable and "fun" when in the company of others. Just the other day, an old friend -- who knew me back in my wallflower days -- asked me when I'd come to [help her] rock a certain joint. Wow, I never thought I'd ever see the day when *I*'d be counted on for something like that! And, a couple of years ago, a date startled me into silence (for a little while) by mentioning to me that I was, indeed, a pretty, um, loquacious guy.

Maybe too loquacious. My overly-logical / scientific mind tends to second-guess and try and be extremely precise about just about every thing (which, for certain things, is a good thing, but probably not for every thing). And sometimes I open my mouth and voice that mind too soon. And get myself into trouble. The brain is in gear before I engage the mouth; only problem is, it's in over-overdrive, or crashing through the wrong set of gears.

Put a sock in it, J. Shut up and go with the flow.

Cars, electronics and computers

2007-09-02T12:07:00.000-04:00

This is the third time, in the year and a half that I've owned it, that the check-engine light on my Mazda Protege has come on... and, a little over a week later, gone off by itself. The first two times I took it into my mechanic, shelled out about a hundred and fifty bucks each visit, and was diagnosed with (a) the first time, a faulty EGR boost sensor (whatever that is... something in the emissions-control system), and (b) the second time, a faulty catalytic converter. Each time, the broken item would cost nearly a thousand bucks to replace. Was it an essential fix? "No," said the mechanic. Would the car get damaged if I didn't fix it? "No." Do I have to do it? (I like to make sure there aren't any loopholes.) "No, not unless you are due for an emissions check-up any time soon." The only downside to not replacing them was that, if something else went bad, I wouldn't know about it, because the check-engine light would have already been on.

"Don't worry about it," they said, "unless you notice a sudden change/drop in performance of the car -- misfiring, bad starts, poor fuel economy, that sort of thing. Then bring your car in." (Strangely, I've noticed a slight increase in my miles-per-gallon / miles-per-tank the past couple of weeks... Odd.)

So I didn't replace them. And, like I said, each time, a week later, the light went off by itself.

This time, I didn't go to the mechanic. Just gritted my teeth and gripped the wheel and puckered up my sphincter and positioned my left hand on the wheel to try and block out that incessant, glaring yellow light, and waited... and waited... and waited.

And this morning, it went off by itself. :)

Es macht mir viel Spass!

2007-09-01T13:29:00.000-04:00

Learning new languages is fun!

Yo soy apprendiendo Espanol. ... Problem is, German keeps sneaking in every now and then, when I'm at a loss for the correct word. (Just goes to show how deeply I got pulled into the Max-Mueller-Bhavan / Goethe-Institut matrix during that one year there. Nah, I jest. Frau Jyotsna Bhide was one of the best teachers I've ever had.) Just like that incredible moment, 12 years ago, when, while waiting for the bus home from school, I tried to translate/sing "A Whole New World" in Hindi, opened my mouth, and, without any conscious thought involved, out it came in German. To say I was stunned, myself, is putting it mildly.

And then I get all mixed up between the Spanish and French pronunciations of words like "bien". Partly due to having seen Jean Reno exclaim "Tres bien!" in Godzilla just a couple of days ago. ... And now I'm walking around, mimicking the French accent and saying "Tres bien!" to myself every few minutes and chuckling away at the novelty of bending my voice in new ways.

Learning new languages is fun!

While my guitar gently weeps...

2007-08-31T20:00:00.000-04:00

Country roads, take me home /
To the place I belong...

Will I ever finish?

2007-08-31T18:28:00.000-04:00

Am overwhelmed, at the amount of work still left to be done in writing up my dissertation. And frustrated, at having been able to have the end in sight, for the past few months, but somehow just.not.being.able.to.get.any.closer to it.

*sigh*

Trying not to think about it, and just put my head down and grind away at it, one small step at a time.

National insecurity: moronic passwords

2007-08-31T17:53:00.000-04:00

Just read about Dan Egerstad's posting of the login/password information for the e-mail accounts of a 100 different embassies and govt. offices around the world, on his "DEranged Security" blog. Holy effin' crap. Check it out. It'll pop your eyes.

DEranged Security

The blog-post itself

Slashdot's page on it.

Some of the passwords are just too funny: "temp", "123456" (Spaceballs, anyone?), "1234", "password+1", "india01", "Password", <name of the city or country that the embassy is in>... And some of the worst ones are those of the Indians. ::rolls eyes:: Fucking hilarious.

Surprisingly, there's nothing on CNN or BBC about it yet. The Indian Express and Ars Technica have it, though.

Hmmm... like "Anonymous Coward" says on /. :

Looks like the [Indian Express] took due dilligence a bit too far...

From the article:
"The email account of the Indian Ambassador to China contained details of a visit by Rajya Sabha member Arjun Sengupta to Beijing earlier this month for an ILO conference. There was also a transcript of a meeting this evening which a senior Indian official had with the Chinese Foreign Minister. Similarly, accounts of NDA and DRDO officials reveal phone numbers, commercial documents, official correspondence and personal mails."

This is probably very illegal, even if the information has been posted for all to see, actually using this info to access someone else's account should be a no-no.

This, after Egerstad himself explicitly said:

"I would like to remind everyone that using ANY of this is a serious crime and I trust that nothing here will be used, ever! If you do anyway you are a fucker, idiot, moron, lamer, scriptkiddie, criminal and obviously don’t get the point of this publishing."

Ha!

(See below)

2007-08-31T17:22:00.000-04:00

I've become addicted to footnotes --- yet another fallout of thesis-writing.

Item #16 on the "You might be a grad student if..." list, from the Facebook group, "Grad Students: they're Not Bad People, they Just Made Terrible Life Choices":

...you get irresistible urges to use in-text citations in casual e-mails.

See the second entry in this blog, for example. :P

Just me and the road. And all my neighbours.

2007-08-31T17:13:00.000-04:00

Went for a run yesterday. I think it's been about a week or so since I last ran. Did my usual 3-mile circuit, and matched my previous best time of 26 minutes flat --- so last week's achievement (shaving a full minute off my then-previous best of 27 minutes) was no fluke. *Excellent*!

Stopped and chatted with --- or waved out to --- almost every neighbour on my street during my cool-off walk-around. (One lady yarned on for a good 10 minutes about her ex-father-in-law, who was Greek and climbed mountains and worked till he was more than a hundred and died at a hundred and twenty-two, or thereabouts.) They've all become a lot friendlier of late. Probably gotten used to seeing me around, after my having been here for the past three years. It's a nice feeling. It's a shame I'll quite probably be moving away soon.

The Case for Christianity

2007-08-31T16:16:00.000-04:00

Started reading C. S. Lewis' The Case for Christianity last night [1]. Got through the first two chapters, but I'm carrying the book around with me now, to read whenever I have down-time. Love the way that guy writes.

[1] As part of my continuing quest to find out if Christianity/Catholicism makes sense, not just as a way of living, but as a representation of the nature of God. To find peace in my soul, really.

Dear diary, today I ....

2007-08-31T16:00:00.000-04:00

I started a blog a couple of months ago --- my first ever --- and it went through a few initial existentialist birth-pangs while I tried to figure out what exactly I meant to do with it. (And then abandoned it completely for about a month while I focused on little else but my dissertation.)

I've arrived at a solution: spawned a new blog, this one, meant specifically for the inane, mundane, stream-of-consciousness -type diary entries. That other one will remain devoted to the more philosophical, inspirational, things-that-make-you-go-hmmm, which is what I had originally intended it to be. You can check it --- and my very first blog entries --- out here.

I suppose I could've maintained a single blog, and simply tagged the "inspirational" posts as such, but, for the purpose of keeping the two sets of content distinct/separate, this seemed the easier solution. Maybe some day I'll merge them. *shrug* Let's see.