The one with the debates

You’re never too far away from somebody who loves arguing just for the heck of it.

You’re used to it all your life, now you’ve learnt to adapt. Just shut up, and keep nodding your head — and if he wants to argue for longer, just say “Let’s agree to disagree.” Unfortunately, “Hitler” doesn’t work in the real world.

I’ve given up friendly debating since nobody ends up agreeing with me. (Of course, I’m the one who is right, and you’re the one who is wrong. But ok, let’s agree to disagree.)

If you do argue, you should look out for the signals that demand the “Let’s agree to disagree.”

Signal 1. Your opponent spits out numbers. Ahem, well.. he seems confident of himself, you really can’t contradict him when he says that 8,456,234,161 people out of the 7 billion in the world are dieing of poverty. Rarely, if he continues to argue beyond the “Let’s agree to disagree” boundary, I fire up google and prove his numbers wrong (See? It’s 8,456,234,162). I don’t care if he’s wrong, I just want the argument to end. Hitler doesn’t have his facts right.

Signal 2. Your opponent makes arbitrary statements which does not really help anybody. Or your opponent makes statements that actually support you, in a tone that says he’s helping himself. Hitler is brain-damaged.

Signal 3. A passionate tone in your opponents voice. You can never convince a Nazi.

Signal 4. You realize your voice levels are above normal. Shutdown your mind for a few minutes, convince yourself that you don’t care. What difference do a few Jews make to the rest of the world.

Signal 5. You realize you really don’t care.

The one with …, oh fuck the title.

I’m at a high in desperation, and a low in confidence, and a high in loneliness right now.

Obel writes in a I-am-no-longer-single tone. Tells me to go out and meet new chicks.

Ochod introduces me to Mekka Blue.

Next door bathroom-mate has a girl in his room till late at midnight, for the last few days.. they keep chatting. I wonder what else they do that I don’t know of. (I met her today, and realized that as a friend’s friend, and a friend to somebody else, she can be very important to me.)

Going to Penn Landing with Anand, seeing couples hugging and playing around and realizing I am at one of the more romantic places in Philly, but with a guy. Sorry Anand, it’s not you, it’s me: Now you might understand why I was so quietly contemplative.

Going to a Afghanistani restaurant called Kabul after that, and realizing that I’m eating with a guy while that pretty girl at that next table is eating alone. (The food was definitely excellent though.)

The waiter asks you if you want extra plates for sharing your dishes, and you suddenly blurt out, NO. Loud enough for the pretty girl to hear.

But there’s still hope to every desperation: Sick Comic, a.k.a John and John.

Also, @P&J: I am definitely in for the strip club idea.

The one with the Business Proposal

I’ve got a wickedly amazing business proposal: Yet Another Social Network!

Now, hold on. I’m not finished.

Claim. Facebook and Orkut, and all other currently existing social networks will eventually die. OpenSocial will die too.
Proof: Eventually all of us current users of Social Networking will be the parents. Many kids will have their parents on Orkut or Facebook, so they will try to avoid these networks.

Now, you could argue that not all of today’s youth are on Social Networks. So maybe 50% of the next generation may still attempt to join FB or Orkut. But having just 50% of your friends on social networks is a certain killer. You have 50% less incentive to remain on these networks, which are populated by Uncles, Aunts, and … umm, somebody’s Grand Uncles and Grand Aunts.

The key to making a new social network that will take off is to find that exact year and time when this is going to happen. The way I see it, it is probably a mathematical question. We probably need a model for how the network grows (ahem ahem, I’m actually reading a pretty related paper right now, as part of my academic work.) Of course, we should assume that no person will join a network his parents are on. Another thing we can assume is that in general, people join social networks first when they leave high-school, or around that time.

Now if we can find that exact boundary for kids who’ll start giving up on social networks: say we come up with the year 2020. That is, the outgoing high-school batch of 2020 would not be interested in joining any of the major networks. Let’s work backwards a little.. to say 2015. This is when we release our new social network, and we target it at kids.. content for kids who are in around 7th grade.

A social network that targets kids will never work in general. So in 2016, we upgrade our strategy to target 8th graders.

In 2017, we target 9th graders.

In 2018, we target 10th graders.

So on, so forth. By 2020, we’ll be targeting the right people, and we’ve got a whole bunch of the right people in our network. So what’s the guarantee that they won’t shift to another network? Well, their parents are on the other networks! (They will not join even if their friend’s parents on the other network, since that would mean their friend is not on that other network.)

If we’re looking at a model of growth, where the growth is proportional to the current network size, we have a hip and happening large social network by 2020. The batch of 2021 would definitely make a decision looking at this size. And so on so forth. Bingo. We’re good for another 20 years.

The one with the Nameless Friends

I’m sure this has happened to you: you go to a social occasion, bump into people, start cracking jokes, etc. etc. Days later, you keep bumping into them, and you keep giving them a nod of recognition.

You’re now .. umm .. “friends,” at which point you realize… that you have no clue about his name. (We’ll get to the “her” parts later.) Either you haven’t asked, or you have just plain forgotten. But now it’s too late already, it’d be rude to ask him his name now.

How has this affected me in the past: 1. The Nameless Friend addresses you by name, at which point you realize it’s not a two-way problem, and a deep guilt starts building up, and you return a … “Hey…. you.” After this, he knows you do not know his name, and makes sure to use your name even more often to make sure you feel the guilt even more. 2. There’s a possibility that the Nameless Friend doesn’t know your name too: this is an ideal situation, although every time you meet there’s this awkward, “Hey” that both of us would prefer to avoid, but social etiquette demanding that we go on with it. 3. The worst is: You need to address him, and he’s not looking at you. “Hey, move out of the way of that car.. hey, … you.”

Being in grad school at UPenn, you’ve got a whole lot of classmates. Really, I’m not used to so many people at one go. My brain just doesn’t have enough gigabytes to register so many faces, and so many names. Of the hundred names that I had heard in the first few days, less than five might have actually registered.

The invention of the elevator has brought with it lots of potential awkwardness. Being on the 21st floor doesn’t help: probability of bumping into people are higher. It’s hard to avoid your Nameless Friends — and sadly for them — they can’t avoid you. And among the others: you begin to hate those single-serving friends who take it their duty to comment on, “Oh, you live on the 21st floor? You must have a great view from there!”

Pretty girl moves in next door. The Damsel in Distress calls me for help with setting up her ethernet. The brave hero that I am, I puff up my chest and say, “Don’t worry, I’ll use my PennKey to activate your ethernet.” (Heh, the networking setup at UPenn absolutely sucks.) She also can’t access the wireless without a PennKey. “Don’t worry, you can use my PennKey whenever you want.” Some chats later, we say goodbyes. Now my question is: exactly what would have been the correct time for me to have asked her her name? She’s now my Nameless Girl Next Door. Oh, and I’m her Nameless Guy Next Door.

The one about Laksh

Heh. Heh.

She asked me (although, humorously) for a post about her. She’s got it. ;)

EDIT: This post was initially password protected, with the usual password. However, I had to choose between keeping it password protected, and doing my assignments — because curiosity kills the woman. I have a feeling that, for all her efforts, she was disappointed at the content. ;-)

The Morning After

(This is definitely a rant, but I do not hold any grudges against the Ubuntu devels.)

Owning the latest and greatest laptop can be a great feeling, except if the morning after you’ve installed and used Ubuntu 8.10 alpha 6, you get a mail on ubuntu-devel-announce about a “potentially hardware-damaging e1000e driver issue on Intrepid“

These latest hardware is exactly the reason why I am on Intrepid and not on Hardy. There’s the wireless card, the GigE ethernet card.. and probably other fancy stuff that will not work on Hardy.

Since I got the mail, I have blacklisted the e1000e module. I have absolutely no clue whether my ethernet card still works. (I don’t have Vista anymore. Nor can I attempt a live boot-up using an older version of Ubuntu to test it, because it just will not be supported.)

I have used my ethernet a lot on day 1, in fact my entire install was done over the internet using the ethernet. If indeed it is damaged, I wonder whether this can be classified as “accidental damage” for availing ThinkPad Protection.

The one about the new one.

In kindergarten, my ambition was to become an engineer.. you know, that guy who drives engines .. the trains.

Somewhere in middle school, my ambition was to work in Microsoft, and eventually take control of the entire company. (Seriously.)

By the end of high school, I wanted to become a Mathematician and prove the Goldbach’s conjecture, it seemed simple enough.

Then three years of ambition-less life at CMI.

I am now a grad student. A PhD student. And all I really care about is flaunting my Lenovo X200 among the economically backward masters students.

(Alright you got me. This post is just about my X200. My old HP nx6110 has been decommissioned. I had thought I’ll do it real ceremoniously, and so I setup Cheese on my X200 to take a video of the “sudo halt”. However, It Just Didn’t Work (It=Cheese. The “sudo halt” worked beautifully). So that was an event-less end to my two and a half year old laptop.

hmm … why don’t I feel nostalgic here? …

The Lenovo X200 is great. I’d like to go into the details of why it is so great, but then, bloody hell… I’m a PhD student, I’ve got better ways to procrastinate.)

The one with the Progeny

A friend of mine and I were having a discussion, which somehow digressed to him claiming that getting married and having kids is a goal in his life.

But his reasoning is amusing: He is confident that his progeny would be superior to others. He is confident that his genes and his fatherly training can create a whole breed of super-intelligent humans. Self-confidence is a virtue of a first-year grad student.

I’ll digress: hundreds of years ago, intelligence was a necessity for survival. Those were the times of the survival of the fittest, and so the fittest — the most intelligent — survived. That’s why man has evolved to be intelligent.

Unfortunately we’ve hit a peak. And the reason is probably grad school. If you’re in grad school you’re unlikely to have progeny. Worse, if you do get married: it’ll probably be to the last woman standing: the last woman still single at the end of your half-a-decade at grad school. We’re now talking of the possibility of your kids getting the not-so-pretty woman’s (oh, your lovely wife) genes. We’re talking of a whole breed of even worse-looking grad students. The cycle continues. Your breed degrades. It won’t be long before they’re completely extinct.

I, for one, am not excited by the idea of multiple copies of me polluting the planet.

(P.S. Maybe “intelligence” evolves to mean: not joining grad school.)

The one with The Starting Gun

The two ultimate ways of procrastinating:

• Walking up and down the room trying to come up with an optimal schedule for finishing all your assignments, and to have read that paper by Saturday afternoon.
• Listening to Pink Floyd’s Time so as to motivate yourself to follow the above schedule.

Tip of the day: it still doesn’t work.

The one with the Poker Fingers, Episode 2

Never tell anyone outside the Family what you’re thinking again. –Don Corleone

The Godfather knows what he’s talking about.