My eleventh grade

I can now safely assume my eleventh grade was mostly very, very useful.

Except of course for - well, mostly.

All hail xkcd :)

I am going to go thereht og ot gniog ma I

The man has it in his mailbox.

My seventeen year old existence, crushed, trampled and bludgeoned into six pages.

Devoid of the failures, the emotion and the transformation, it lies.

One of the more important passkeys to where I want to be.

Ah well, I'd better cut the mystery drama before I lose the last ounce of your attention that I'm clinging onto.

That Katy Perry song has been playing on repeat for the past forever. There's something about the song that I just can't get over. And I don't think it's the beat. God forbid it's the imagery that it's supposed to create in my head, I have a feeling it's the underlying theme of bold, spontaneous feminism. You know, like the world would've been a better place if not for the Y chromosome.

That said, I wore eyeliner today. Lots and lots of it. A black Revlon pencil + my sister + me = Tommy Joe Armstrong - the voice. I'd show you pictures if I didn't care for your sanity. But I'm nice like that.

Mac! Now, now, it's not like Apple's infallible. Still, one of the best things that's happened to me. Meet Baby Epsilon, my very own MacBook Pro:

Synchronize 2008! Suffice to say, IT happened. :)

It'd be a shame if I didn't tell you about the Alien napping in the attic that I'm so much in love with. :D

P.S.: I'm male. I swear I am.

Averting damage

You know what's to do when you're feeling sour?

You count till ten.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

And you know what's to do if you're still feeling sour?

You sleep.

That way, the sourness goes away without any collateral.

I'm doing just that.

Goodnight.

void main() { /* F1 */ }

I used to be independent once upon a time.

Hell no, not anymore.

Void main, when I used to code.

Now, it's just void, no more.

There's stuff waiting to be done.

Their patience is waning.

They start testing me day after.

I'm in no position to see them through.

My education is the largest hindrance to my learning.

Most of my education.

So goes my whine.

All mine.

"Hahaha. It's in BH-213."

That's what the damn kid told me when I asked him for my bag. Dark complexion, seemingly bratty but precociously smart. BH-213 for Black Hole 213, by the way.

Class was over, it wasn't so good for me, and all of us were leaving.

But just as the last of us walked out, he called us back in.

The classroom had transformed in those few seconds of our absence. For it wasn't the same sunlit, cheery place. The curtains had been drawn and the sense that something had gone wrong crept into my suddenly alert mind. The tables had all gone. They'd been replaced by a multitude of chairs, chairs with desks hinged onto them. The kind that you got into and then closed around you.

He sat us down and started dictating monotonously in a manner most atypical of him. We hadn't even taken out our notebooks as yet.

Me, being me, couldn't seem to find my bag. Initially, I just looked about in search of it. But in no time, I grew panicky. He continued dictating ostensibly unaware of my dilemma.

I got up from my place in the front on the class and turned around in search of it. The class seemed longer than usual. And there seemed to be a lot more of us than I thought. No, they weren't my classmates. Who were they? Some of them looked so much younger than us.

I reached the end, all the while searching. But to no avail. I looked up to the front of the class. He was still dictating. But I could barely hear him. One kid, short, dark, exuding an aura of prodigious intelligence and sharpness looked up at me. Trying my luck, I asked him for my bag.

That's when he laughed. No child-like laugh. Rather, one that represented a defined emotion and frame of mind: pure sadism.

It was while he laughed his laugh that he pointed at a black-something attached to the wall. Not in my two months of study in that classroom had I seen that thing. On closer inspection, it seemed like a vortex.

"Your bag, is in BH-213," he finally replied.

I edged towards it. With every step I took, I needed less physical effort to walk. It was as if all the forces in the universe wanted me in BH-213. Black Hole 213.

It grows three square millimetres every single day.

Backlogs. The single most wonderful effect of procrastination.

And It's backlog clearing time for me. Like this unbounded stack of things to do. And some ten hours a day to do them.

Ah, but complaining's my forte. You don't get better than me when it's whining your doing.

My sister claims to have noticed a clear 1200% jump in my focus. Off the charts, people!

It's like this: There's Chakko in the morning. I saw this book on his desk, covered with some kind of butter paper, neatly titled "Synthesis of Subsonic Airplane Design: An Introduction to the Preliminary Design of Subsonic General Aviation and Transport Aircraft with Emphasis on Layout, ... Design, Propulsion and Performance."¹ I think the non-homophobic fraction of me fell for him right there. This guy, he takes Physics and Math for me right in the morning at 6:15. And he cheats too. I swear having entered at 6:13 to see him already explaining the next big thing. I mean, the next chapter.

Then there's coming home. Alter Bridge. Coming Home. Four minutes, twenty seconds of aural bliss. Orgasmic stuff. I've never, ever had a favourite band. Clear status change there. My favourite band of all time: Alter Bridge. Digressed but again, haven't we? Where was I? Ah, coming home. I reach home, wake my household, breakfast, yada-yada, study, yada-yada.. lunch, yada-yada, study, yada-yada, FRISBEE!

Frisbee with my little sissy. Must be the second happiest time of my day. And you won't dare laugh. It's intense. And the reason for the very many bruises all over me. Fun. I never thought I could jump half my height ever. Or dive across double my height. Or any of that Michael Jordan stuff.

Some more study happens, then dinner, even more study and then it finally gets funky. Because by eleven, my upper and lower eyelids find togetherness. Even though I prefer them otherwise. And before you know it, <graphic, reader discretion advised> my head finds itself in a viscous puddle of drool, paper, ink and even some graphite if I'm lucky.</graphic> For sleep overcomes me, right there on my desk.

Off with me, now.

Crybaby.

It's apparently common that people have a hard time understanding the Galilean Transformation Equations.

Well, I don't. I mean, I do. But I can't really use them very well. If at all.

Okay, okay, it's called relative velocity in a Physics text near you.

Ahh, I'm slow but it will be elucidated.

 

Day before, was my Calculus AP. (Read previous entry; you gotta' love my pre-exam incoherence.)

So it didn't go very well.

Sorry CollegeBoard, I still love Calculus.

More than I ever will, standardized tests.

 

Computer Science before that, was relatively better.

Yeah, relatively.

I know it's all I've been doing since I was this (.) small. But the stuff that's part of the AP syllabus, has been stuff I've /wanted/ to do, but never got down to doing. Let's see. malloc(). I kinda' know how it allocates memory on the heap: list of pointers along with a size bound for each pointer; gets appended to, on each call to it; truncated, on each call to free(). But I never actually knew how that list worked. But then again, I never thought I needed to know. I used to think it was rote stuff, sorting and searching through a list: not something that'd be interesting. Something the clerk does at a multi-billion dollar company office. Not snazzy.

But that was a long, long time back.

I stumbled onto Knuth, a bit later.

The guy spent half his life writing a book series on searching. And sorting. And finding random numbers. And other 'rote' stuff.

Killed me, 'cause I couldn't get through two pages after the preface. I don't think I liked how every other exercise problem had an AM next to it. Indicating Advanced Math. And how his terse prose went right damn tangential to my skull.

Since then, though, I've always wanted to be an algorithm guy. Not just someone who could code a network stack* using a library AVL tree. But someone who could write the damn tree. And optimize it. And not just someone who vaguely knew how OSPF was used in implementing big, badass border routing protocols. But someone who could do another OSPF all by himself.

 

I'm happy with myself today. And I think it's because today's planned. Phone switched off, when it needs to be, music turned off when it accounts for more than half my miniscule attention span and y'know, stuff like that.

Well, not actually. But it will be planned by 10:45. And I'm going to stick to it. Any which way, I'll get back to you at the other end of today. Until then, I'll let the dots do the talking.

 

Edit: I can't code network stacks, damnit. It just sounds that much fancier. And well, I had to keep it dramatic. :P

The Morning..

Luck.

Please.

God.

Science.

Faith.

Work.

Well.

Have.

Off-white walls and meshed window panes, a view from the inside

"There's this boy in the family. A gift."

Oh, really? Gifted, is he? How so?

"They were expecting him to top the country in the JEE. He only got third, though. In the country."

"Bansal sir was so sure he'd top."

"At JEE, the top hundred ranks, atleast, are reserved for the gifted, if not for the next hundred too. And then, as you go down ranks, they're gifted too, just not as much."

Stupid teacher. She should stick to teaching. Fullstop. No philosophical discourses needed. Just teaching, thank you very much.

If there's anything I loathe, it's being told that I can't do something I want to. Especially when it's because of my limited mental ability. And that's just what she implied. That some people just aren't up to it.

"Before a problem was up on the board, he'd have the answer. And two alternative solution methods if he felt like it."

So I'm egoistic, conceited and stuck up. Deal.

I spoke to Mom today.

Yeah, rare occurrence, that.

"What's the use? However hard I work, I'm still going to be beaten by someone who doesn't even know the concept of hard work. I should leave. And hope that He'll throw me back in better equipped next time."

"But you're better than the best, it's just that you don't work!"

"But I've been working and I'm telling you, I'm nowhere. Low retention capacity, long and short term, below par reasoning ability and general /slowness/."

Moms should never do that. They shouldn't ever make their kids believe that they're /better than the best/. They shouldn't lie.

I'll be back.

What this man's all about.

Have your people call my people and let's do lunch?

When an introvert is intrigued by somebody else, he or she remains an enigma to the introvert until time immortal, if not for the action of an external influence.

Also, if a function's derivative is continuous at a point, the function is differentiable at that point.

I'm yet to find either in a book, so bah, thought I'd record them somewhere.

I need me.

Heigha.

It's a bit before midnight and I just got through the second chapter of Thomas and Finney. Nice book, that. But I have a slight problem. I need someone to talk to.

Not anyone though.

Someone who isn't studying math at a quarter to midnight only in want of getting into an IIT.

But someone who just fell in love with Calculus. Someone who just discovered how beautiful abstract math can get. Someone whose heart pumps twice as fast while listening to Alanis Morissette. Someone who appreciates her brilliant songwriting. Someone who spent three hours understanding normal forces, the shortest section in any Physics text and when he finally got it, tried explaining it to his Mom in his excitement. Someone who wasted quarter hour on this blog though he wields only four hours a day.

Someone who's just as much in need of the same kind of company.

Mortals need social interaction.

I'm only mortal, damnit.

I need to talk to another me.

I know I'll find another me.

I trust I'll find another me.

Majority wins?

I've been part of a few teams now. Small teams, big teams, humongous teams, imbalanced teams, teams teeming with talent and teams reeking of indolence. Teams, teams. Some more teams.

When it comes to making decisions collectively, team leaders are only doing their duty in being politically correct and organizing a vote. But is it always the best thing when majority wins?

I've learnt otherwise.

Obviously, I can't exemplify through personal experiences considering I'm still part of a lot those teams. And want to remain part of them. Heh.

It seems real right, doesn't it, the concept of a vote? I mean, obviously the options would be deliberated upon individually by each member and using their experience and insight, a personal choice would be made, which if part of the majority would be the right choice.

Idealism.

That's the flaw with voting.

It's only in an ideal situation that an individual's choice isn't affected by foreign influences. It's only in an ideal situation that the rationale behind each individual choice was perfect. It's only in an ideal situation that the members of the team are intellectually mature (read: s.m.a.r.t) enough to deliberate upon the subject of the vote.

Of the above 'idealistic assumptions', one stands out as being the most idealistic: the assumption that alien influence upon a voter's thought process is non-existent.

During a vote, there is a high tendency that each voter loses his identity to his peers, the voters . Even though an option doesn't seem like the best option for the team as a whole, an influential voter can single-handedly turn the tide of a vote such that the option he votes, is the majority's option. It happens. Much too often.

Bureaucracy in an institution is  a direct result of hierarchy. Hierarchy is, to an extent, the result of democratic titling of people. Dictatorship suddenly seems so. much. more. efficient. Hell, it is. Alexander, Caesar and Hitler conquered nations. Single people. Not bureaucratic, politically correct governments. Without too much insight, it seems rather counter-intuitive to the logical mind that a dictator's efficiency mauls that of a government; aren't dictators 'bad'? But it does.

I know you know, I'm just saying!

From the eyes of an aesthete

*stuff edited out*

Look at what those morons - ahem - esoteric bunch of scientists at MIT, possessing never-before-heard-of IQ levels through the gene mutation therapy their Stanford counterparts have devised for them, are doing with the Standard Atomic Model. They hack away at it like it's a cake or something. Why? So that it works. Well, yeah, d'oh, that's what they do, they make things work.

It really repulses when things are made to work, though. Like in Chemistry. The exceptions. Hell, there seem to be more exceptions than rules! It's like a whole bunch of kludges were mashed up to form the subject we know as Chemistry.

But on the other hand, I think my aesthete-tendencies are a shortcoming more than anything else. I could make this sound less like I'm whining and more like a philosophical discourse, but here goes nothing. Being an aesthete seems to stem from my disability to handle complications. Maybe complications aren't all that bad. It's only because I find complications, well, too complicated to deal with, that I loathe them.

Everything is indeed a complication. We should've had boxes for bodies if absolute simplicity was absolute beauty. The fact is, we don't. And that clearly proves that it isn't. It's just that some of us can handle complications while others can't. And it's not just that. Some of us can handle 'more complicated' complications while the rest of us can't.

I, me and myself: Egotist musings

I've always wanted to blog about myself forgetting that I might have an audience reading the entry. And here I am, doing just that. Hell, it's okay if it changes your perception of me, I'm not about to care. It's all part of my plan to get rid of my consciousness.

I, am a very jealous person. Just short of having emerald green eyes pierce when I set them upon you. But my jealousy isn't very materialistic. Id est, I don't care if you have a swanky cell phone, a gold-studded watch or a designer tee. What I do care about though, is if you have raw brainpower, organizational ability, a clear mind, focus and/or determination. Out of which, I really do care if you're high on the raw brainpower bit. I can envision myself greasing and oiling my cogs and getting at par to where you are with your focus, determination and whatnot. But what I can't envision myself doing, is getting more cogs themselves. Thus, with the notion that the number of cogs per head is a constant, in an effort to calculate my 'constant,' I end up making guinea pigs out of my acquaintances, benchmarking them in terms of their 'constant' and thereby building this great big hierarchy up in my head of 'constants'. Constants, constants and more constants.

I also am one hell of a perfectionist. Perfectionism is not always a good thing if it isn't backed up by perseverance. Yes, perfectionists who lack perseverance do exist. And those kinds, are the worst kinds. They procrastinate away at their work scared that they aren't going to be able to perfect it. And in doing so, they end up doing a shoddy job so that they can get it done before a deadline. I, most blatantly fall into this category of people. And I desperately want to change.

My perfectionism isn't all bad, though. I thoroughly love myself when I understand a concept, be it Physics, Computer Science or Human Psyche because understanding for me, is a big thing. It's a milestone that I reach only when I've got a close-to-perfect grasp of the concept in question. And the urge for that kind of grasp, is directly a result of my perfectionism. My design sense, also with which I'm pretty happy, is another consequence of my perfectionism. Perfectionism, perfectionism and more perfectionism.

Another one of my more ostensibly innocent traits, is in being diplomatic. It's part of my don't-piss-anybody-off nature. And while being useful, it's also made me a vile, two-faced scoundrel. Okay, maybe not a vile, dirty, two-faced scoundrel. More like a vile, dirty, low-down, multi-faced scoundrel. In an effort to be pro-everyone, I've more than once had to oscillate among views while sharing them with different people. A bunny-faced monster I'm stopping right in its tracks and getting rid of, this one. I'll still be a diplomat, though. Just not on issues I personally have views on.

Creepy, eh?

Well, that's how I work, sorry.