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Rich with Rupees!

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

I’m very happy you didn’t say ‘Borat’ when I said I am from Kazakhstan.

The above quote is from a fellow traveler, waiting here in the New
Delhi airport for the guards to open the domestic terminal at one in
the morning local time. The rest of the in the air was exceedingly
uneventful; I had some paneer for breakfast on the plane, and got into
the airport around 8:30 Delhi time. The first thing that struck me?
AK-47’s. Everywhere. American cops have handguns. Indian
cops carry AKs. There’s also a couple of pintle-mounted machine guns
on jeeps around the airport. They also don’t look too handy with
them, either- in a firefight, I’d be just as worried about the cops
shooting me with them as The Bad Guys. Scary. I’d have taken
pictures, but picture taking at the airport is Highly Prohibited.

Other than that, there really hasn’t been much of a problem. I got
my baggage alright, I got my dollars exchanged for rupees alright, and
I had a couple of samosas from a “Café Coffee Day” stand, which
appears to be a chain similar to perhaps Caribou Coffee, or something
else of that nature. I’ve met up with a few other travelers stuck
here for the night- a project management consultant from Austin, TX
who’s visiting family here, and a recent Soc PhD grad from Ithaca, NY,
who is touristing and visiting his girlfriend in Hyderabad, along with
my new Kazhak friends. I’m sitting in the old terminal of the
airport, which really isn’t all too bad; it’s very similar to lots of
places I’ve been in back home. The new terminal is very
shiny. Lots of marble, steel, and glass. Too bad the airline I’m
taking out isn’t using that terminal.

I also came across a hot dog stand at the airport. It’s
interesting, as an American who is used to seeing the American take on
other ethnicity’s foods, to have that reversed. First thing? The
dogs themselves contain neither beef nor pork, are Halal-certified,
and produced in an ISO 9001-2000 certified facility. The most
directly “American” is the “classic” hot dog, which uses relish,
ketchup, and mustard. Given the rest of the menu, I think I could
forgive them the ketchup. The “Chicago” style dog… replaces
the ketchup for BBQ sauce. Oh, the humanity!. Perhaps
on my way out, though, I’ll be trying one of their very Indian-style
dogs that are more down on the menu.

So far the only downer on the trip has been that my ebook reader
got accidentally turned on in my bag, and a key was held down on it,
so the battery got nicely drained. I think I might have to re-train
the battery before the trip is over.

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Off to the Land of Kingfisher!

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Now I’m sitting here on an American Airlines 777, somewhere over Michigan. On my way to India. INDIA. I’m going to be there for a month. It’s my first time out of the country, and I’m just as terrified as I am excited. It’s not like I’m even going to Western Europe, but freaking India. The in-flight informational movies in the seat back are displaying twice: once in English, once in Hindi. It’s slightly surreal that this is all happening to begin with. CORRECTION: it’s incredibly surreal that I get to go.

I suppose I should start now at the beginning of my trip then, if I wish to blog my travels. My parents took me to O’Hare airport in Chicago today, where they treated me to a marvelous lunch at the Hilton, before seeing me off at the security checkpoint. I managed to put in a couple hours of productivity at the gate while waiting, and then boarded the aircraft. Upon boarding, I discovered I had my part of the row to myself: the isle and the window seats are both mine, all mine!. The headrests have video-on-demand services that are pretty clever; I have a pull-out remote in my armrest that is:

  • An airphone
  • A remote control for the audio/video system
  • Controls for my reading light, flight attendant requests, etc.
  • A game console controller, looking like an attempt to fake an SNES controller with the layout.

Yes, that’s right, the in-flight entertainment includes a personal video game console system. Cool.

This has all been going disturbingly well; my flight from Champaign
to Temple, TX last year was much more eventful (in the bad
way): the flight from Champaign to Chicago was plenty late enough to
make Atul and I miss our flight by seconds. However, here, everything
was… smooth. It took me as much time to go through O’Hare security
into the American Airlines terminal as it took me to go through
security at both Champaign and the Killeen, TX airfields (where I spent
more time putting my shoes back on than any other part of the
process). I’m rather impressed with everything so far.

Now I’m somewhere over Ontario. This is the first time I’ve
ever crossed an international border in my life. The map says the
Great Circle for this trip will be taking me through Russia. I’ve
always wanted to go to Russia. Perhaps sometime I’ll take a plane
that will land there, instead of keeping me 33,000 feet above it.

A while back, I blogged while taking the Amtrak from Champaign to
Chicago, the City of New Orleans. It’s one of my all-time favorite
songs, and it’s simply about his journey, real or imagined, on a
train. I’m not aware of anyone having written anything with such
feeling and romance for an airplane. Perhaps the starving artists who
are most capable of such things don’t have the money to take long-haul
international flights like the one I’m on enough to get any
feeling. The rumble of the engines and the sound of this giant
aluminum tube cutting through the air at hundreds of miles per hour
don’t feel as… “organic” as the gentle nock-nock of the train car.
Humans understand Big Strong Things pulling Heavy Stuff distances over
land. However, right now… I’m flying It’s a wonderful
thing, but it’s one of the single most unnatural things a human can
do. I’ve been thinking about making an indie rock album for some time now. I suppose a song on airline flight should be on there.

Now I’m over Quebec, after having my first in-flight meal. It’s
both exactly as and better than I expected. While the details of it are very interesting to me, I suspect you, dear reader, do not wish to read a 5-page essay on the particularities of my meal.

I’m now nearing the Arctic Circle, and I’m beginning to tire of having a laptop here, so I’m going to curl up with my movie. More updates and pictures as they come!

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C is for “Working”, apparently

Friday, February 13, 2009

Looking through my collection of papers, I noticed something today: nearly everything I do at work starts with “C”

Carbon-nitrogen Cycle modeling
Crop growth modeling
Climate generation
Coding
Climate modeling

… the only outlier is the letter B for Biofuels.

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Isn’t 45 degrees kinda… chilly?

Sunday, February 8, 2009

I’ve always liked the song Beds Are Burning by the Australian rock band Midnight Oil. The Oils have a unique sound that caught me early on, listening to Chicago’s WXRT radio that my dad has running whenever there’s a stereo with power.

Right, then. Let’s start with the original.

Now, in 2004, a europop group covered it:

This is a nice cover from an English South African band- the song is very apropos.

A “French Hardcore Band” called Black Bomb A also did a cover. I think they pull it together nicely by the end of the start, but at the very beginning, if they’re wrong, I most certainly want to be right.

Antiflag does a sweet acoustic version at an Aussie radio station; skip ahead to 1:30 if you don’t want to hear radio banter beforehand:

And from later in the day, the event that Antiflag was talking about:

I think that’s quite enough, don’t you?

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Just when you think it’s safe to venture into the office…

Saturday, February 7, 2009

…everything breaks down.

Last week involved a lot of things that involved a lot of brainpower on my part. I had to do a tricky interpolation of a dataset, get a multi-directory, F77/F90 source dependency generator working, re-factor a bunch of F77 I/O into some F90 that I can then wrench around to do as I require, and some analysis on some data to send to a model comparison.

It was all going swimmingly until things started breaking late Thursday. Then come Friday, everything that could have gone wrong over the whole week did. And that’s why I’m sitting here in the office on Saturday, plodding in a new sentence or whatnot with each short re-analysis until I get things done. There are things I missed in my work on Monday that led me here- silly errors that still resulted in things coming out to the right pattern and the right order of magnitude, but threw model results for a tizzy. I suppose that’s why I’m not too grumbly about things, but damnit, I was supposed to take down my Christmas tree this weekend! It’s been up so long the cat’s lost interest in it!

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Blah kind of day

Monday, January 26, 2009

I’m feeling quite ill at the moment. Thinking straight is hard, I can’t sleep, and I’ve taken a sick day from work. As I’m lying here in my bed, with Nekolas Cattington III on my lap, I’ve decided it’d be a great time to blog!

Audience goes “Uh-oh”

I suppose this is about right for a Monday; a week ago today, I ripped a toenail off by accident, I slipped and fell on the ground in the basement, knocking my head something rotten, and 5 minutes later I hit my head quite harshly on a ledge above the stairs trying to get back out of the basement. And then I accidentally ended up in Wisconsin.

So, I suppose the biggest change around AwesomeBase Alpha is that we now have a 3rd housemate- the previously mentioned Neko the Cat. He’s rather a Man’s cat, really; he’s muscular, smart, and very much not needy- he’s playful when you play with him, he’s affectionate when you pet him, and when you want him plain out of your way, he’s nowhere to be found (most likely causing some sort of mischief, however).

Having a cat around the house , or more specifically leaning against my leg making quiet little kitty-snores, is making this sour morning go much better than it would be otherwise.

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The best marriage-related rights discussion ever.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

http://qntm.org/?gay

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Shut Up and Geek

Saturday, October 25, 2008

When I listen to Rihanna’s “Shut Up and Drive”, instead of hearing “I’m a fine-tuned supersonic speed machine,” I hear:

I’m a fine-tuned super finite state machine

Does this mean I’m a nerd?

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Academented Programming

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

I work professionally as a programmer at an atmospheric science department at a major university. One of the biggest things about atmospheric research is our reliance on computers for everything. While we’re nowhere near the limit of what we can do with observational data (and indeed in many areas, observational data is woefully short), there are so many things we simply cannot do in laboratory experiments. Because we can’t reproduce most things in a laboratory setting, we’re stuck creating computer models. That’s fine. However, the result of this is that we are almost an applied computer science field with how much we have to wrangle computers day in and day out.

What troubles me is that, at least in my place of employment, practically no-one really understands computers.

I work in a primarily Fortran shop, which many of you would think “well, there’s your problem right there.” Not so much, as there’s a huge literature of already perfected Fortran code to solve nearly every tricky numerical gymnastics problem you can think of (and twice that number of ones you can’t think of). Fortran90/95’s greatest win, and flaw, is that it has incredible backwards compatibility with old FORTRAN77 code (and even some FORTRAN66!). Re-writing the millions of lines of FORTRAN77 that passes through the department on a semi-regular basis would be costly in sanity, time, and money.

But what about how you work with that code? Some of us know a certain friend of mine who sat up for hours manually inserting rows into a dataset to account for missing time in hourly reports. It’d have taken half an hour to whip up a MATLAB script and have it loop through the dataset. Almost nobody uses any form of version control (those that do have a sea of directories resembling projectname_vers-num, with num being their revision number), and most of the Unix programming is done through running VIM in vi compatibility mode. Changing an identifier within the code from one to another is typically a day-long affair for most (hint: it should take perhaps 5 minutes, 10 if the SAN is feeling sluggish), and inter-routine data dependencies are best described as a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Makefiles are written in a manner where it’s a requirement to run “make clean” before any recompile, and some folks swear by Intel Fortran’s -save flag, which makes all local variables static. That flag is used entirely for its side effect of initializing all local variables to zero, however, and not a thought is given for the actual effects.

This is actually a rather sad, sad state we’re in right now. It isn’t anyone’s fault, either. There’s no overarching culture of programming and software engineering at my place of employment, so there’s not many examples of folks “doing it better”, with those of us who are being categorized as “Oh, but you’re one of those crazy geeks who just know how to do it.”

I’m one of those crazy geeks because I sat down and forced myself to learn how to do it, because I saw that it would pay off, in dividends. It has, too.

I’m not trying to claim I’m some wunderkind, either. There’s gaping holes in my expertise and practice that hinder me daily (which I’m trying to correct). What does it come down to for me? Right now, I’m sitting down and reading the GNU Emacs manual. I can’t be arsed to dig up my copy of The Pragmatic Programmer, but there is a section in there that says one should really master a text editor. I’ve taken it to heart, and with my limited time, that’s my “journey of a thousand miles starting with a single step.”

What have you done to be a better programmer today?

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From The Economist:

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

On a short little blurb about Sarah Palin reading The Economist, the first comments are:

I’m beginning to think that Sarah Palin is trolling us. Which makes sense, since she admits to reading 4chan.

Interwebs FTW.

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