Patience, m’boy , patience!

I consider myself to be someone with great amount of patience. I just have passed another test today! Wow, what an achievement!

My car battery has been giving some trouble for about a month now — every time the car has to be jumpstarted. I, being such a gentleman, don’t want to embarrass others by asking them if I could get a boost from their car. So, I always call the emergency roadside assistance for a jumpstart. It usually takes about two to three minutes, but I generally have to wait for about 45 minutes for the emergency assistance to arrive.

I decided to replace the battery. So, I called the assistance again to get my car started. I waited for about an hour but nobody came by to help me. Then the despatch called me to inform that the responder was stuck on the road because there was an accident on the road and it’d be another 30 minutes before he could arrive. So, I took out a book from my backpack, lay down on the backseat and started reading. It was very cold outside and I could not but open the window every five minutes lest I got suffocated inside.

Another 45 minutes passed — no one came by! Then I called back the despatch to know what was going on. She tried to explain everything mumbling jumbling and fumbling, but the calmness in my voice got her settled — I told her I understood that it must be very difficult for the responder to arrive in time because the traffic was so bad.

Another hour passed, then Big Joe, the responder came with his huge truck. (He actually signed his name as “Big Joe”). I received him in the parking lot. He immediately started explaining why he was late: 1. it being a weekend they were short in number, 2. one of the response truck broke down which had been sent to rescue somebody else, 3. his own car-seat broke — so he had to get it fixed first then he was stuck in the traffic. He was probably expecting a huge outburst from me. I told him it was OK and I was lucky that I had been home. Freaked-out Big Joe came down to ground level  of his anxiety and started working on my car. It did not take more that two minutes to get the car started. I signed the necessary paperwork. Big Joe thanked me for my patience and then took off.

After a few minutes I started thinking what I would have done had I not been so occupied with the car:  I could 1. get some research done, 2. finish up one of the computations, 3. cleanup my apartment, 4. cook some nice food, and more importantly 5. do the laundry. Then it started happening: a huge raze begun pouring all over my brain slithering down my spine. Why, for heaven’s sake, did I not ask them to send someone else?  I got so angry that I could burn the whole car by just gazing at it.

A few hours later I found myself waking up from a nap — blissfully oblivious of the day’s episode.

Linux, Mozart and Brittney Spears

“How much market share does Linux have ??” — Windows fanboy trying to make a point.

“Quick question, who makes better music: Britney Spears or Mozart?” — someone who loves to look beyond

Priceless!!

Link.

Home

I always feel bad when I have to move to a new place. I feel very very sad. I had been living in a college town in Texas for last six years. The place became my second home. I knew almost every nooks and corners of the place. I knew the place where I’d like to be when I feel happy — I also knew the place where I can be with myself when I am sad. After I graduated with a PhD on May 16, it was time for me to look for a new job. As a result of that I had to move to a big city in the north east. I drove all the way for about 1500 miles. The journey was a remarkable one (let’s save that for another post!), however, after I had reached here, I found myself in a totally confused situation. Nothing is like the way I used to see and perceive things. Some things are bad (most of them are, to tell you the truth — of course, that means I’m being biased to the standards of the previous place), and some things are good — overall the things are just different. That makes me frustrated. I just miss the way I used to do thing. I also miss my friends who became an integral part of my existence.  And that, my friend, makes me sad.

It’s not the first time I am moving to a different place. I started moving around places since I was in my teens. But I never learned how to get over this sadness. I know you’ll tell me that it’s natural. I know that, too. However, I changed places so many times, it’d have been my second nature to get settled to a new place very fast. I’d often wondered if I could really call a place my home. But as soon as I move to a new place, I feel like the last one was the sweetest of all!

I guess I should stop my rant here and give it some time.
It’s time to explore!

An Apple a day

In my last post I  mentioned that I am very much addicted to Ubuntu. For starters, it’s a modern Linux distribution (“distro”) which lets me work in a very secure environment (meaning no reported virus or malware so far), and most importantly does not require me to go through a series of maintenance steps  every week to make it run smoothly.

A lot of time has passed since that post. So far I have played with other distros as well, for example Absolute Linux (which is derived from Slackware),    Damn Small Linux, OpenSuse, besides other distros with Ubuntu flavor, e.g. Xubuntu, Kubuntu. It’s true that I hardly had to spend any time on maintenance,  but the time that I saved was used on customization.  If you are in the loop, only then you can realize what it feels like to make things the way you want  it to be: I love the way I can customize my machine. Everything was not very smooth by the way; for example, I had to learn the hard way how to fix the boot-loader after it was swept away by a new distro that I installed — it was very painful. But other than that, I don’t remember if I had to spend another sleepless night just to fix my system. I spend just too much time using it — so it’s very important that I keep it running. However, at some point of time I realized I am just wasting my time! Sure, the learning experience is great but the bottom-line is I’m not utilizing my time for the things that I should be doing.

Not too long ago, I found that my computer was not playing any sound. If I poked the headphone port with a pin from one of my headphones it suddenly became alive again, but most of the time it did not make any sound other than the whirling of the fan. I called  the customer support just to find out that my warranty period had expired a few weeks ago! No point in pulling my hair now! It was time to get a new machine.

I was eying on the Macintosh computers for a long time — just because they are too fancy, but I always hesitated to buy one because of the huge price tag  (or in words of the Apple haters, “Apple tax”). I realized that I could do almost everything in Linux that I expect to do on a Mac, and I would be paying this  “Apple tax” for the fanciness! But at the same time, I also craved to play with the new system. And along came a Macbook with OSX 10.5 (Leopard) installed. It’s been about three months I have this new machine, but somehow I have found that I don’t have to spend too much time on maintenance. Neither do I have the need to customize it so much as to meet my expectations. It’s just a great system! Well, to be frank, I still spend some time everyday tweaking it, but those are  just minor ones. I feel that I have the perfect system to work with now!

To end today’s rant with a sweet note (!), let’s have a look at some of the funny  Mac vs. PC commercials. Just as a side note, I don’t hate any OS and I’m not a fanboy of any of them — they are just tools to get my work done.

And here’s the punchline:

Technorati Tags: mac, pc, linux, rant

Yah! Now call me doctor

Last a few days have been a nightmare for me. Can you believe that I put  last five and a half years of my research into my dissertation within a little more than three weeks? People  take months (sometimes, years) to finish their dissertation!

On top of that I had about a day or two to prepare my talk for the final defense. However, during my presentation I felt a strange sense of confidence I never felt before while talking in public — which I guess comes after gaining a certain level of expertise. So, I guess after all I know ‘something’ in my field!

The only complaint that I got from my research committee was that my dissertation had a lot of typographical errors. Let me tell you a secret: I hardly had enough time to proofread it carefully! After finishing it up in such a short time, I just had enough time to run it through a spell checker. Shhhh! don’t tell it to anyone.

I am lucky (smart?) enough to get past the ordeal, but I would not suggest it to any one else.

Technorati Tags: phd, grad