Pencil chewers, Duos, Trios and Austin Entities in action :-p

Just thought I would show off my collections of roommates/best friends/couples etc I captured slyly over the past 5 months of action in Austin....Vetti is me, I know ;-)

>> Kaarthic(MK) in action......Tasting pencil,of course...accompanying him is Suresh Talore...another rather famous Avalonite (Avaloner? Avalonian?)...






<< Image 2...The deadly trio of MK, Anand (Madurai Veeran), and Arvind (Chella) ...Anand is upto his usual histrionics, roaring around, making noise ;-)..He has a strange fascination for velakennai, btw ( future brides beware :-))



>> Image 3: Sarath and Arun....This comedy pair was also part of the refugee camp at Avalon 211 around end of May 2006...these two switch between brief fights and gelling together on road trips. Currently roommates-at-large somewhere at the Raleigh...




<< Image4... Krishnan and Tinny(Amit)...were the guys I used to go to Intern with...
They are quite a fun duo...
Tinny, like any hard-working IT specialist, loves to sleep when given the chance(Image 5 )....>>>





>>Sumeet and Keerti,(Image 6) are on the other hand, made for each other, though are quite non-gay...Sumeet loves to cook and also to raid filled refrigerators(see Image 7 below) and Keerti loves to contemplate the meaning of life, when he finds time away from jogging around or doing compilers assignment... I should'nt crib about them too much they have put up with a lot of my antics of late :-)















>>(Images 8 and 9) Any blog entry on Austin entities would be incomplete without our dude Srivatsan, the oft misunderstood, misquoted, but much loved stud of Austin. Herein, I present two rather contrasting sides of Srivatsan...the pic on right shows him reading his gospel (Sundaraghandam) and on the left, he's deep-frying some good old fashioned ground-nuts... Being his roommate has been quite a roller-coaster ride.

Where's the party tonight?

My recent 'break a leg' incident left me literally identifying myself with the 'differentially enabled', and yearning for days to rush by so that I could walk normally again!



Look for the long compression-stalkings on the guy on the left...Sumeet Rao cannot contain his laughter for some reason... Btw, this was at Chinmayi's Bday party the other night. Keerti, has a rather funny take on this photo...

Tanha Dil, Tanha Safar...

The more I listen to this sing, the more I see the correlation with my present rather masochistic life...Tanha Dil, Tanha Safar indeed...

For those ignorant few: This was a song brought into this world by Shaan, in his album Tanha Dil...(2000). Awesome, if I do say so myself! Thanks Keerti L (brought into this world, a few years earlier, in 1982) for reminding me of it!


Some lines, for those who can appreciate good lyrics ;-) :

Aankhon mein sapne liye
Ghar se hum chal to diye
Jaane yeh raahein ab le jaayengi kahan
Mitti ki khushboo aaye
Palkon pe aansu laaye
Palkon pe reh jaayega yaadon ke jahan
Manzil nayi hai anjaana hai kaarvaan
Chalna akele hai yahan
Tanha dil, tanha safar
Dhoonde tujhe phir kyoon nazar
Tanha dil....

Dilkash nazaarein dekhe
Jhilmil sitaarein dekhe
Aankhon mein phir bhi tera chehra hai jawaan
Kitni barsaatein aayi, kitni saugaatein laayi
Kaanon mein phir bhi goonje teri hi sada
Maane kiye the apna hoga aashiyaan
Vaadon ka jaane hoga kya
Tanha dil, tanha safar
Dhoonde tujhe phir kyoon nazar


Cheers...Happy Diwali everyone!

(btw -- This is Keerti L's real identity..Not quite Jason Bourne, eh;-))

In Suspended Animation

I have been inundating myself in tonnes of anime, over the past month or so...Four serieses and almost 200 episodes down the lane, I find the thirst unquenched...a subtle knock inside my brain tells me that I am reneging on the vow to self that I shall dither from spending all my time watching pointless, meaningless, purposeless, listless, endless waste of time, via Manga-turned animation series, a la Japanese anime; english subtitled, but nevertheless far more interesting than tame american cartoons [ 'cartoons' here are meant purely in a derogatory fashion! ].

Perhaps all this TWT can be attributed to the heights of boredom that one tends to fall into when interning...Excellent bandwidth and YouTube are primary reasons for the fall of anime-addicted men!!

[LP] Linkin Park

I have been listening to nu metal and rap for quite a while now, and thought the least I could do for LP ( other than buy their CDs of course ;-)) is to put this link up ( and increase their Google PageRank™ by a notch!!

Check out "In the End" by Linkin Park launched in 2001 under their 6x Platinum release: Hybrid Theory...

This was followed promptly by Meteora and Reanimation Remix, going over 8x Platinum (over 8 million copies sold!!) with songs like Pts.of.Athrty, Numb and Somewhere I Belong...bringing Linkin Park to #1 on the Billboard US charts in 2001,2002,and 2003. They also sneaked in multiple Grammy Awards for Numb and Numb/Encore with Jay-Z in 2004 and 2005.

The band was touring most of 2004 and 2005, peforming internationally, and most importantly in Texas [ see Linkin Park-Live in Texas!! ]

I have quite an antiquated Singingfool link for some of my favorite songs. The official website has most of the record videos and audio streams at high bit rates. I can't compete with Wikipedia on info on Linkin Park, so go there if you wanna know more!

In the End, is however, their highest grossing single ever, and continues to be played on nu metal/rap radios across the US...
Listen to the music on Amazon.com

Interning to glory!

Aloha!

Being an intern at National Instruments is certainly quite a lot different from what I imagined it would be.... I have pretty much a free hand in deciding the course of my project, and I am being challenged to the limits of (my very limited) knowledge and programming skills...Scarcely would I have imagined that I would have so little to do with electronics at NI....

That said and done, internships are supposed to be fun, and I end up having so much time on hand at the end of the day and on weekends, that I find myself questioning myself as to why I have this much time on hand....Scarcely over the past 5 years have I felt so little weight on the top of my mind, ( could be because my brain has gone to the dogs...but who knows...)...Its actually fun to be in an internship which limits you -- quite strictly- to 40 hours per week, and gives you plenty of relaxation time...

I now know why people who work find it so difficult to come back to academia or to study in specific....its simply awesome to be feel so liberated, and voluntarily going back to the shackles of student, let alone the poverty-stricken graduate student, life is going to be soooo difficult!
This duality, of being an corporate employee and a grad student has its perks though...I get to watch all the FIFA World Cup matches in the relative comfort of my Grad Lounge, as opposed to being forced to run to the nearest pub/bar, as my work colleagues have to do.. (You guessed right...My department's loaded...)

I can't wait for next summer! Who knows where I will be then!!

Dreams for an Insomniac

I watched Macross Zero over the last week , an animation continuation of the popular Japanese Anime mega series Macross ...Watching anime was once a favorite past time. I was hooked onto Robotech in the late nineties...

All the stars seem to be looking down upon me , and having a nice big hearty laugh, with a snicker, they seem to chorus "Loser,loser..."....It is perhaps apt. I am so not in control of anything....Like a troupe of vultures scavenging, perhaps....Maybe those stars are just me seeing stars!! I am sick and tired of not doing anything useful...Maybe it all boils down to the moral paucity one feels in driving oneself to suicidal mania...Or it could be just the caffeine talking...Sleep comes unnaturally, at unghastly hours, these days... Maybe it is all divine direction...Reminds me of the dialogue from Rang de Basanti about youth and usefulness...

The mere thought of the stigma of failure, and the gathering of heavy clouds right over one's head seems all too familiar...especially in context to what comes to mind of Wordsworth and his little gloomy interlude, when he wrote zero works of literature in nearly a year....Being driven into subsuming madness, and amidst repeated defeats at the hands of fate, one does get dark ideas....Amidst extreme self-inflicted pain, and coffee-induced multiple day insomnia...I finally dream of dreaming...Yes...

I can now see why people have breaking points...The mere fact that I am typing this load of BS when I have tonnes of work over the next week, shows the pathetic state of affairs...

It is often difficult to hide happiness, and far easier to hide sorrow, a wise man once said ( Vishwasms , remarkably , concurs ), but for someone who's almost never happy in any situation ( the kind Redford talked about in The Color of Money), my attempts to be cheerful have often lead to drastic drops into spouts of sadness, nay , depression (denial?Me? Naah). Hyprocracy? Never...

Ah well, self analysis will get you no-where...or is it now-here? Space-time curves and figments of warped time-space in singularity, with the altogther wrap of being solo ( prnounced 'so low', maybe 'hollow' as the Phillipine island of the same spelling goes in pronounciation ). Twenty Two was a far cry.... Able was I. Vous cherchez, mais vous ne trouvez pas que vous cherchez......Lost ctrl :-(


Jay

p.s. Coz my keyboard's broken ;-)

Twenty-two

Twenty-two is where life begins and days turn sprite...
Every dawn, noon or dusk blooms with her sight.
Twenty-two....All's spite...
To glimpse her afar makes us take flight.
Catch 22? Uncaught...Mostly right...
A year too young for her? What?? That can't be right!


Aiming to meet her, don't have to cuss.
Missing to meet her,is to literally miss the bus...
...and class,
Oh! Dont be so non-plussed!

Route Twenty-two...Chicon...Exposition Loop...Ne cruzes delante ou detras de la autobus..."

p.s. This blogger is twenty-one, in age.

The Karma of Chaos

Wondering about what I will be doing a year or so from now, post-graduation, I feel an intense apathy ( oxymoron ? Lemme know ) towards the weird meandering path my life's heading for...I have, in fact little clue what I shall be doing in 24 hours, let alone after a year in this cold, desolate place ( This is Texas, mind you.)

Chaos & anarchy ruleth me mind...

The Ides of March have passed...

Amidst much disappointed over missing some paper deadlines [ and realizing, to much ado, that there exists great fall before potential pride ], a much more humble, now-perenially [ oxymoron, I know! ] unshaven me has crossed into the path of happiness...Bliss so sweet, that one can feel such intense pleasure only after....

Playing QUAKE III!!

Well I know that Q4 is right around the corner ( or has it been released already ?? Lack of DIGIT magazine access here ensures that I remain ignorant of such tumultous happenings...)



For the uninitiated, Quake and its sequels [ and several other popular First Person Shooter(FPS) genre games ] are a creation of id software, a powerhouse in gaming technology and game engine development... A brief look at their shows how immaculate their 3D rendering technology is/has been; brought to the forefront with Q3 Arena ( which even spawned multiple game shows on several TV channels including noW!).
Tons of clans have spawned up over the years, and the initiation needs are quite different for each clan.

AdDiCtEd, am I.

Spring breaks....

Wow....Was'nt that some match?? Absolute beaut with over 850 runs being scored in it....Amidst rumours of it being fixed, I was stunned by Gibbs' innings in particular....175 (111)!! My gang and I are presently caught up in running reruns of downloaded highlights of the match, amidst periodic reruns of old and new movies alike...Thanks to the 300 GB harddrive one of my friends bought sometime back....UTDCHUB rulz, eh!

I now yearn to drive here, after watching a few friends drive over from A&M....Seems easy enough to use the IDP for renting a car...Ah well...wish I had more time and patience to devote to further that idea...

Amidst hectic research going on, I am trying to catch up on my coursework, and thats proving to be a forgettable pain...Well less said the better!

Spring is officially here....Remarkable that in America, people celebrate it by basically 'chilling out'....getting a week off right in the middle of an hectic long semester ( or quarter, depending on where you are ;-)).

Most SB's apparently look like this....( I flicked this from a SB Album in Webshots)

Well mine involved only one location :-(()....

Reason has dawned on me that perhaps the best way to have fun is to jump into work with happiness...Do whatever you have to with a grin on your face, and things seem easier to take in stride...So many aspirations...So many challenges...Its sometimes difficult to focus on whats important...A reality check, if you like to call it, is in order...

I am happy that the internship processes are finally over....and I have time to devote to more critical things in life ( TV, Movies, Table Tennis, Racquetball :-))
Btw, I smacked a certain Raghavan in the face while playing racquetball, giving him a 'grunge' look in the process...He has been reported to be going around claiming he had got it in a fight....Be enlightened, if you have been speaking to him! The truth beckons thee....

Call it a premonition if you like, but some portion of my brain says that something negative is gonna happen soon.....

Call me a pessimist, but that's me!

Btw, I am now also the webmaster for The 2nd International Conference for Wireless Internet (WICON 2006)....Let me know what you think...The site's still in its infancy though...

Later, dudes...

Of Coffee Drips, Late Nights, Research Papers, and Testicular Fortitude

Aloha,

PhD Comics is so the gospel....especially when it comes to grad school...Coffee drips do keepeth one awake! If you have'nt read it by now, I suggest you start reading 'em or drowning yourself!

And why I am resorting to masochistic self-deparavation of sleep? To 'put' a paper , thats why....Readers from the glorious heydays of SVCE would remember the ease with which paper were 'put', His Vettiness' help notwithstanding! I am realizing how much painstaking work goes behind writing a real paper for starts, one in which, the topic is not arbitrarily picked, and actually makes sense...

I even had to scribble on the whiteboard-common to get the facts straight! Thats so unlike me...I hate writing things down...

Amidst desires of AOE-ing away the weekend, most of the weekend flew past me with polka-dotted dreams of racquet sports disrupting consummate illusions of happiness.When that bubble had burst, I managed to learn one more of life's polymorphic forms:

Life's a constraint satisfaction problem!!

{grin: I could just imagine Viswas MS' happiness on reading this ;-))

How I wish that I had not whiled away my weekend, enforcing the constraints of project due-dates and assignment submissions and my research(gasp!) work, one could say, I am very well caught betwixt and between! An old friend, Sai Siddharth (a.k.a. Diamond Babu, as his illustrious PS Senior classmates call him), dropped by Austin, and lo and behold - the weekend hath passeth! { forgive my poor lizzy English...I shall better imitate Chaucer, perhaps at a later moment... }.

Learning of a new savvy way of torturing the donuts out of the typical male from "Madurai Veeran" Anand (CEO of Lungspace, Mindspace ) , I pondered the consequence of implementing the same on a few choice people(read: roommates)...

Btw, I hope to have my trusted Compaq laptop with me in a couple of days...Blogging would be so much more convenient and colorful with that, I guess...

I shall not further stretch the constraints. Escaaaape.


--

The Return to a Semblance of Normality

Ahh...I feel at the top of the world!!

My sleep cycle has returned to normalcy, and I once again get up at 7am....I hope gone are the days of late night sessions involving pointless movie watching and chatting away....For some reason, I feel revived, 'le joi de vie' seems to have returned, quite inexplicably!

Amidst a dozen or so phone interviews with Apple, I had gone last week to a 'Smartphone Feedback Session', where I had to make arbitrary comments about the look and feel of Nokia's latest Symbian OS development tools...God knows why I am so lucky...I got a cool $50 and pizza lunch for basically nothing! I plan to go again today, and revel in expensive things in the weekend ( like perhaps a trip to one of the Indian Restaurants ?)

We had a large gathering Monday at the peaks of ACES ( 6th floor, where I have my cubicle ;-))...Jean-Philippe Martin ( a fellow graduate student at UT) terms it "Easy Mondays", but rather it was a rather tough experience for me...'C'est un tradition' as he would perhaps like to quip; It involves letting one dude from the 50-student strong Laboratory for Advanced Systems Research (LASR) to talk about his favorite topic (which typically is his work, a la research). I felt like a dumb moron at the meet, being the junior-most grad student of the bunch, and perhaps well-intimidated...Well I guess most of you know that feel!

The past week also saw perhaps what one could best term as unrestrained indulgence....A few of my drinking buddies ( I dont generally drink) got together, and we had quite a blast! We ended up watching 'Captain' Vijaykanth's revolutionary movies, and cracking inane jokes at each other...After a couple of hours of general dancing around, the girl who lived downstairs finally could not take it any more...She came up to my buddy's place, and gave us a good ol'-fashioned 'Intro', followed by a 'Whippin' ( as the natives here call it!)

To quote her exactly, " Hi , My name's ---------, I really love your music, and I really like parties. I have been to several parties on Saturday nights, but you know, the pictures are falling of their hooks in my house...So if you guys dont mind, can you like please stop the stomping around...Thanks."

To which the drunkard (MK) who opened the door said, 'Do you want to join us?'....
(junta feel: 'Ah well, at least she was good-looking!' ). I guess we better look for a new location for our (pseudo)drunken revelry....

I have a new fascination, with a song titled 'Aadat- the remix'...(its available on Megablast.us)...Can't get it out of my head, for some reason...

I guess the best that has happened to me since I have been here has been a Co-op/Intern interview call from Cisco...Finally I hope to get a networking internship!! I am crossing my fingers and praying that it works out...And I have to pay income tax soon! Wow, the knowledge of that made me feel like a grown-up....Guess can't stop old-age from catching up! I hope I can sneak under the tax radar, and actually get it all refunded...there is supposed to be an Indo-US tax treaty, whereing I am(i.e. all Indians working in the US) allowed a significantly higher standard deduction than other foreign nationals...I wish actually ever understand legal documents...Can't make head or tail of these things.

And apparently, Mardi Gras is next week, too...With New Orleans basically deserted, I guess maybe we'll be seeing some fun downtown...

Btw, I also heard of this awesome orkut-girl-hunting community called 'Tamil Helmets'..Check it out if you got an account and the time!

Till next time, astalavista!

I can't feel a thing

Ahem....all you Linkin' Park fans out there...gimme a holler......( now that all zero of you have responded , I can safely continue)....

First of all: sorry for ripping off one the lines from Numb.

I can't help it, it seems...I feel dead inside. I wake up somedays and do not feel like getting out of bed....The variation in my life from the pleasurable days of my undergrad ( SVCE guys know what I am talking abt) is so drastic.....the culture 'shock' ( the word -shock- is in quotes primarily because the word is more of a bugbear than anything, I guess), all the living-up-to-expectations crap, and the whole tonne of work ( I like S.I. metrics still...) have sort of had an effect similar to what a nova has on stars...I feel denuded...As if my entire life were a sham....All the hooplah...balderdash..gibberish...( as my limited literature knowledge allows me to spew out alternate words for talk that's trash)

Any guesses now why I named this god-forsaken-excuse-for-a-blog 'an attempt at normality' ( I know all you chemists out there can't but control a smirk...) ?

As the dude who at least bothered to comment on my previous post said, I should be perhaps be happy to be where I am.... but


"Jayesh Seshadri,
Graduate Research Assistant,
Laboratory for Advanced Systems Research,
The University of Texas at Austin"

Sounds cool, huh?? Think its remarkable??
.
.
.
I dont think so....And its quite easy to get here. Ask anybody I know.

Jayesh

p.s.1. If I were a woman, I could blame this sudden spurt of sadness on PMS....Alas.
p.s.2. don't hate me for p.s.1.

Chinese??? Yechchch......

(Back after a long long vacation, this part-time blogger returns to his pseudonative Austin, Texas. )

Singaara Austin....I feel as if I have lived here forever....its soooo peaceful, calm and quiet... a portion of me already feels so comfy here that it does'nt want me to return to Chennai... After my travails, such as getting drunk with gingerale in Orlando, getting chased by mad dogs in Chantilly, hunting down metro stations in downtown Washington D.C. and hatching eggs sitting at home in Melbourne, I am getting back to the grind, of yet another long semester. And I am still searching for the light at the other end of the tunnel... My return day began with me running around to pay internet and electricity bills, followed by dropping off a check at the bank, and crisscrossing UT to meet an acquiantence who had flown over from Boulder... Living independently sucks eh?

I think most things here are stigmatized....people generally follow the trodden path...despite this being the land of opportunities as some old dude once said...I find most of my brethren from India speaketh still as Indians, we call the people of this country , foreigners! A guy once approached me about joining a sales enterprise, with commission bonuses and increased commission for adding other people into the network and so on....with claims of making a lot ( I am talking thousands a year)...I would have probably given it a shot, were I here long enough...but as my 'Indian' sensibilities prevailed, I decided to 'let it pass'... Thats one thing I feel we don't do enough....we don't experiment...no entrepreneurship here at all! We like our own petty lives, no grandoise dreams...day in day out...Aren't we all stuck, then? Sans inspiration??

And here I am, supposed to be RA-ing for a professor, with all the comforts a graduate life ( work, work and more work!)....The drastic escalation from zero work to the oft-to-be-eschewed totally busy workday has left me in a dizzy...the sudden return to 6am naps and the waking up at 12 noon to go to work has left my brain in a weird dull semi-comatose state, from which I desperately want it to awaken. But do I really want to jump out of this perhaps self-induced moratoriam from anything social, anything involving people?? Why do I feel this feeling of emptiness, as if I were just a shell? I have never tried anything 'weird'(American?!)...People say I have what everyone at my age desires here , but is that what I desire ? How do I know ?

/*
Perhaps this is the alcohol talking from the new-year's bash I went... considering that it was a meagre 12 days ago, and I have never tasted champagne before....Or it could be all the C++ and TclTk/OTcl coding thats talking.... Thats quite a possibility!
*/

Have a blast in 2006...
Jay

p.s.

Whoever invented chinese food ? Oh right, the Chinese I guess!
Thaangala ( as the tamil word goes)! I can't stand it...ever...

Soy& vinegar shld be banned. Not that I like thai or any other indo-chinese food any better...Pukes me up all the time.