Argh.
Time – that wretched four letter word of which I seem to be always in short supply. That pisses me off to no end.
My workplace has closed down from the 29th of December until the 3rd of January – economy measures and all that. Which means I have eleven days at my disposal to do what I please, (if you throw in the weekends).
What have I been up to? I spent a day getting the broadband connection up. The effing builder who’d built the apartment complex got away with laying el cheapo PVC pipes to carry water. I stumbled upon this fact when the AirTel guys broke one of the aforementioned pipes open with a crowbar, in their efforts to cut a path for the broadband cable through the concrete walkway in the parking lot. The resourceful watchman, Bahadur (as resourceful watchmen in apartment complexes are likely to be named), turned off the valves on the terrace, and the entire building was left without water. I ran behind a plumber (not literally), and got the pipe fixed – which took about half a day. AirTel has rather efficiently outsourced each part of their operations to different contractors – which means that a bunch of guys dig up the roads and the concrete (to be fair, they patch up what they dug out – rather well, I should say), another bunch of guys takes care of the wiring woes, and a third bunch arrive at your doorstep to activate the connection. AirTel does a very good job of ensuring that these disparate collections of skilled workpeople stay sycnronized. It’s just that the entire process sucked out the better part of my day from me – no fault of AirTel, though.
I’ve been reading up on the Peano axioms and mathematical induction, which has been immensely satisfying. I didn’t realize just how long it had been since I’d put pencil to paper. This is trivial undergrad stuff – but for someone on the wrong side of thirty who’s not really been exposed to math (except for a couple of algebra/random process courses that were required for signal processing), this is heady stuff indeed. More about that later.
There is a post elsewhere that I must respond to. Later, though. I’m consciously trying not to succumb to the SIWOTI syndrome.
Update:Drat. I was also wrong – that sentence about the Peano axioms and induction – well, induction is a Peano axiom itself. Grrr.
