It has three toes, and it lives on a tree

Ten past five on a Sunday evening,
another weekend wasted;
Sloth snuffed the spark,
nothing proved, nothing created

Just visited God plays dice after wasting most of the weekend. That probably counts as something worthwhile that I did this weekend. Apart from playing with my son, washing the car, and getting my hair cut, that is. There’s plenty left on my plate that needs doing. A nifty little scrap of Python code that should make life at work a little easy some of the time, for starters. I was about three-quarters done on Friday evening, and haven’t moved from there. A few idle thoughts involving the normal distribution, the adler-32 checksum, and some other random stuff needed to be crystallized, and I haven’t done that yet. I haven’t felt this frustrated since cloudy skies made me miss the Moon-Mars occultation last week. Only, now it’s my own laziness that is getting me mad!

I just had to put this in! Paul Graham’s latest essay on distractions is yet another must-read :) Funnily enough, I’ve unconsciously been using the two-computer scheme that he describes. At home, I have an ancient two-year old desktop that I use to hook up to the net, and the laptop from work that I carry home. I don’t have wifi at home, and the DSL router only has one ethernet port, so I can’t hook up to the net from the laptop. Net result, every time I open the laptop, I either hack or read. Most days at work, there isn’t really much free time – so there’s no question of online distractions. In case you’re wondering – yes, I’d left the bloody laptop at my in-laws’ place when I visited them today morning. I can’t wait for The Kid’s neck to straighten up so that S and he can move back in with me.

I just read Paul Graham’s essay Lies we tell kids.

Whew, I’m too keyed up to write anything here! All I can say right now is, read it!

Bleary eyed, sleepy and irritable. I need to be up by six tomorrow morning so that I can wash the Swift. Effin watchman got drunk and got fired by the landlord, so nobody to wash the car. Need to be up now so that the damn mobile phone can get charged off my dabba’s USB port, so that it’s still alive at 6 tomorrow morning to wake me up. The damn thing’s charger died. For some insane reason I’m thinking of all the stuff that I always wanted to do but will probably never ever do. Like getting rich enough to kick my job and go do a Ph.D. Wonder if I’ll ever get any of ‘em done? Pipe dreams, Sigh…

Laurie rescues Friends

I’m not normally a big fan of Friends, but am reluctantly willing to watch it if there’s nothing better on the TV. So it was that today afternoon between 2 and 4.30, my better half and I were idly staring at the none too funny antics of Aniston, Cox, Kudrow, LeBlanc, Perry and Schwimmer. The episode involved Ross’s failed attempt to engage in hol(e)y matrimony with Emily.

I’d walked into the hall when Rachel was cooing “helloooo” in a fake British accent to the British Airways lady, and decided that my attention span was going to be of the order of five seconds. Luckily, I was momentarily distracted by the problem of partitioning an integer in such a way that the numbers in the partition do not occur more than once. (I haven’t found a solution yet, I know almost no number theory. Anyway, if I do find the answer, I’ll be sure to post it here!). When I came back to the world in the twenty-one inch screen in front of me, I was thrown off balance. Rachel was in the plane, and the passenger sitting to her left was – gasp! – none other than Hugh Laurie. The TV had all my attention, and I was not disappointed. This was perhaps the only episode of that wretched sitcom which had some genuine humour in it, something that did not involve food, effluvia or sex. Not that I have anything against humour involving those three, but too much of it gets boring. And when the jokes rely solely upon their content (which is usually one of those three things), “boring” is not enough to describe how boring the jokes get.

Hugh Laurie delivered the goods, his sarcasm matchless as always. I really must get hold of some Jeeves and Wooster episodes, not to mention A Little Bit of Fry and Laurie. Those two were a pair, if ever there was one. There was one other – French and Saunders. Hooray for Brit Humour.

Irrelevant Afterquote
A few months ago, I became the proud possessor of Stephen Fry’s Paperweight. It’s not completely funny, but it’s funny in parts, and those parts are present aplenty in the book. One of my favourites is the part where Fry comments on the palindrome Drat Saddam, a mad dastard – “what a pity his name isn’t Sabdam”. I was laughing like a madman for well over half an hour. The other is where he writes “… Übung macht den Meister, as they like to say in Germany. Und Arbeit macht Fry ein Meistersinger.”. I’m not sure if I have the extract verbatim, but the punchline is intact. I read this, felt that something had hit me hard between the eyes, and read it again. I didn’t know whether to be shocked or to burst out laughing, and after a moment’s hesitation, burst out laughing – having read Fry earlier, I knew that he was anything but a bigot.

Glossary to the Irrelevant Afterquote:
Übung macht den Meister loosely translates into Practice makes perfect.
Arbeit macht frei literally means Work makes you free. This phrase has extremely unpleasant connotations, hence my moment of hesitation after reading the pun in Fry’s book.

Lightning in the Kitchen

This is so crazy that only yours truly could have been the perpetrator of the incident that I’m about to describe. Along with the Volcano Sauce Incident, the Medium-Size-Naai story, and my walking into a lamppost on Sampige Road in broad daylight while fully awake and sober, this is yet another thing that only K could have done. Ha.

The other day, I was sleepy, tired and hungry, having come back home early from visiting The Kid at my in-laws’s place, where my better half is currently in residence. I trudged down to the store nearby and picked up a pack of MTR Ready-To-Eat Bisi Bele Bath. The Bele Bath had to be made Bisi, of course. This, announced the lettering on the pack, could be done with the aid of a bowl of hot water, or with a microwave oven.

Sleepy eyed, and smacking my lips in anticipation of a hot serving of not-too-bad Bele Bath, I opened the cardboard pack, and slipped the foil pouch that lay within into the microwave, and turned on the oven. In about five seconds, I witnessed the dielectric breakdown of the air within the oven, as evidenced by a cloud that appeared between one of the corners of the foil pack and the oven’s walls, glowing purple-white, crackling and popping, with a few sparks flying about. This had the same effect on my system as swallowing in one gulp a double shot of freshly ground espresso, black as sin, hot as hell, without the sweetness of love, would have. I switched the oven off, and took a fresh look at the instructions printed on the reverse of the pack. They clearly said empty contents into a microwave-safe vessel, and proceed to shove it you-know-where. Even otherwise, every competent graduate with a degree in one of the electrical sciences ought to know what happens when metal of any kind is introduced into the cooking chamber of a microwave oven. Especially if the graduate in question had studied the theory behind microwaves as a partial requirement to earn one of his degrees.

The microwave is intact and in good working condition, which is just as well. On the positive side, I witnessed a not too small plasma in my kitchen, at extremely close quarters. How cool is that!

The day we decide to buy another microwave, I’m going to repeat the experiment described above, armed with a camera, unmindful of the objections that my better half will have. This is probably several years away in the future, though.

Glossary for the uninitiated:
Bisi Bele Bath – A Kannadiga staple. Similar, but emphatically not the same as rice combined with a generous helping of Sambar. If you don’t know what Sambar is, WIYF :)
Bisi – Kannada for hot, temperature wise.
Bele – Loosely translates into pulses.
Bath – I’m stumped by this one. In this context, you can take it to mean “rice preparation” – but this is not its exclusive meaning, though.

P.S:
The sparks I can understand, but I wonder how the cloud happened? I don’t know if this is what a “normal” plasma looks like, or if something funny was happening.

Incidentally, all this happened shortly after I’d watched The Prestige on HBO. The movie had generous coverage of a device closely resembling Tesla’s Magnifying Transmitter.