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.

The week before last, I had been looking forward to write a long and rambling post about what was going to happen last week. This was until it happened, that is. What was meant to be an extremely joyful moment for yours truly and truly’s better half turned out to be a week’s worth of pain. It ended well, thankfully.

I and my better half attained parenthood on the 26th of the last month. We also nearly became parents-have-been on at least one occasion. Perhaps I’ll blog about it some day, perhaps I won’t – I don’t know yet. Coming this close to losing someone you love, even if that someone has been around only for a few hours – or a few days – is an unpleasant experience indeed.

Why am I posting this here? I really don’t know. Maybe it’s because I sent out a gazillion emails and smses that screamed “it’s a boy, mother and child fine, etc. etc”, and then all this crap happened, and now I can’t bring myself to write back to everybody telling ‘em “well, you know what, things weren’t really all that fine”. I don’t know. It’s past 2 AM, I’m tired, muddled and bleary eyed. I think I’ll let this post be for now, maybe take it off later. Maybe not.

Comments disabled on this post, not in the least because I would like to do without comments of the god is great kind.

At long last…

At long last I did something that makes me feel worthy of the title “engineer”. I might even be so arrogant as to say “hacker”. Never mind that my current job title doesn’t have the word “engineer” (or “hacker”) in it.

My el cheapo pea-shooter 50mm refractor suffered from a bad case of the shakes. My having to take the scope on to the rooftop didn’t help much; Aeolus likes to make his presence felt these days. Focusing it at say, Jupiter, was no small task – the flush of pleasure at having focused the scope would quickly evaporate as Jupiter described a fast moving ellipse and Europa, Ganymede, Io and Callisto transformed from bright little pin-pricks into nothing. Thinking back to the times when Jupiter rose at 6 in the evening and could be caught with the scope positioned by the TV (opening the door to the balcony helped), still as a cat about to pounce, only added to the bitterness.

Thus I passed many days cursing myself for not having blown a little more money on that (comparatively) big 4.5″ equatorially mounted reflector. And then, it happened. The paisa dropped. A bulb magically appeared above my head in a text balloon, and shed some of its light in the cobweb ridden interiors of my brain. Struck by inspiration, I ran to the spare room which holds all our junk, including the computer on which I’m typing this, and threw open the cardboard box which was to go to the guy who bought newspapers the next day. My hands scrabbled around in the box like the tentacles of an octopus deep beneath the sea. They then came up for air, triumphant with their discovery – an old scratched CD.

Off came the nut that held the screw on the tripod which pivoted the telescope in the horizontal plane. Off came the telescope itself, and in went the CD between the telescope and the tripod. The scope, screw and nut were returned to their former positions, and lo behold! The action was smoother than before, and the scope settled down from the shakes much, much faster than I had known.

Of the precious few things I’ve done in the recent past that are worth menion, nothing has given me as much happiness as this did. Except perhaps learning to drive a four wheeled beast – and that comes a close second.

Tagged.

As usual, I begin with an apology – to everybody who’d commented on my blog and hadn’t gotten replies (or even seen their comments here) in well over two lunar cycles.

My absence from the blog can be explained away by two reasons – no, three. The first is an ugly four letter word called “work”. Isn’t it interesting how most interesting (for want of a better word), words are four letters long? Life, Love, Work, and so on. Right now, I can’t think of more examples of four-letter words that can justify my conjecture. Anyway, this business of four letter words is no different and no more (or no less) important than what you will find here.

The second reason is a two-word phrase. Reliance Broadband. I have the misfortune of living in an area where (until recently) there were only two ISPs. The first (again) is a four-letter ISP, BSNL. I didn’t have the patience to wait for a couple of months before I was bestowed the honour of being connected to the world wide web via BSNL, so I talked to the other ISP, Reliance (Wireless) Broadband. It was really cool to have a WiMax antenna on the rooftop, but the chill factor faded away fast – as long as it works, it’s beautiful. The moment it goes kaput, things go horribly wrong. I was off the net for about three weeks without the morons at Reliance doing anything about it, and I couldn’t lift my lazy behind off the chair to go kick them in the pants. I’m just waiting for Airtel to set up shop here, and then I switch my allegiance.

Here’s the third – you guessed it, I’m A Lazy Bum.

Asuph did me the honour of tagging me.

Apparently this is what one is supposed to do when tagged:

——————————————————————
1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
4. If you fail to do this within eight hours, you will not reach Third Series or attain your most precious goals for at least two more lifetimes. (what does it mean? really, what *does* it mean?)
——————————————————————

I will happily continue to write drivel that includes 8 random things about me, but I’m not sure I even *know* 8 bloggers to tag! So here goes:

Ein: I love Top Ramen curry with Olives (both green and black), Tomato Ketchup, jalapenos, gherkins and scrambled eggs. I also like scrambled eggs with all of the above except the noodles. S, my better half, thinks that this is revolting and is probably right – but I’m all for it!

Zwei: S, my better half, thinks that of all the things that matter to me most in my life, food and drink top the list. I’m not sure, but she’s probably right.

Drei: I’m fluent in three and a half languages, and can get by with broken speech in another three.

Vier: There are four scratches and a dent on the Swift already. It’s not even a month old :( This *is* a random fact about me – if you go by Marshall McLuhan, the car is an extension of my feet. I am yet to get a driver’s license. OK, I have a learner’s license and am taking up my driving test by the end of the month. I’m not all that great with parallel parking yet :)

Funf: I’m trying to read Terry Tao’s analysis book – and happily, I *am* making progress!

Sechs: I haven’t hit the gym in two months. I’ve ballooned again :(

Sieben: Recently, at a meeting in my workplace, I was told something that I found extremely surprising. I broke out with Holy $%^#, but stopped just in time with “Holy”, my voice trailing. My manager, and my manager’s manager, greeted me with all knowing smiles. (And an injunction to mind my language ;) ).

Acht: I get *very* nervous when I’m riding the Kinetic and I see an Innova in my rear-view mirror.

Let’s see, I still have eight hours to think of eight victims to tag. I’ll Be Back .

Down, not out yet :)

Down with a bad case of whatever the heck it is. Okay, “it” is an infection of unknown origin that has attacked my upper respiratory tract. It looked pretty bad yesterday morning, and seemed to get better by late afternoon. Cousin It struck back with a vengeance yesterday evening, however. Post dinner, I’ve just been a lump of lard lying on the bed.

Woke up a little while ago (today afternoon) and ordered some stuff to eat. Bless the guy who dreamed up the concept of food delivered to the doorstep :) I’ve been on an antibiotic diet since yesterday, am throwing up gobs of bright green slimy stuff that is reminiscent of radioactive waste. The damn antibiotics make me feel woozy and tired all day. Crap. Entropy has waved its magic wand again, and the flat looks like it’s been hit by a cyclone. With me in no shape to clean up, things are only going to get messier.

I would love to be back to normal by tomorrow morning. Wishful thinking.

Nightmare

Yesterday, I paid a visit to Phdcomics. It used to be one of my favourite sites when I was in the Institute with Tree Lined Avenues. I finally got to know the real story behind Mike Slackenerny’s thesis defense.

I woke up with a nightmare today. The nightmare was that my M.Sc thesis defense had gone haywire, the external examiner had trashed my thesis completely, and I needed to do more research to write and defend a thesis. It took me a little time to orient myself, and remember that yes, I had indeed defended my thesis more or less successfully, that no, I wasn’t going back to the Institute as a student. Also that I’d left my student days behind by at least four years.

Maybe it was because of my recent visit to Phdcomics, maybe it was because I heard a scare story about someone who joined the Institute along with me who still hadn’t completed his M.Sc – whatever caused it, the nightmare seemed very real.

Whew!

Me and the Monsoon

This post is more than a little disjointed and pretty badly written. I plan to work on it sometime later; I figured that if I did not post it now, I’d never post it ever. I chose to post it now.

Here’s a little background – Every time I have an argument with my wife, nature fixes it so that I lose. Every Time :) Before I start, I’ll need to do the usual thing – provide a disclaimer. Or two, maybe

This post is an unashamed unabashed plug for Nokia mobile phones. Period.

This post isn’t comprehensive. It details what I remember. Those events are mostly accurate. If you (one of the six involved) come across stuff that I have forgotten or have mangled due to a lapse in my memory, please feel free to correct me. Thanks :)

End disclaimers.

My usual brush with the Monsoon is to fight with the fungi which want to colonise the walls of my rented apartment, thanks to the guy who built it having made his profits by using more sand and less cement. It’s no different this year, but my brush with the monsoon was just a little bit more interesting than it normally would have been. 

What am I, part deux

I recently had an interesting conversation with someone who had read my blog. I’d written elsewhere in this blog that I was an atheist.

The conversation went somewhat this way:

Someone: You’re stupid
Me: Why?
Someone: You’d written that you were an atheist
Me: So?
Someone: How do you define an atheist?
Me: Someone who doesn’t believe in the existence of God.
Someone: How do you prove the nonexistence of something?
Me (light dawning): Ahhhhh yes. OK, so I’m an agnostic.

Hmmm. OK, so I don’t believe in God, I don’t care whether God exists or not, I believe that the truth value of any statement regarding the existence/nonexistence of God (other than this one) is unknown and cannot be established; I also believe that the (non)existence of God doesn’t make a difference to anybody’s life. So I guess that makes me an agnostic.

Moved In!

The wanderer has found a new home.

In a marathon one-hour effort, I hammered the final nail into the coffin at my old blog and tagged all my posts here. My fingers ache, but it was worth it :)

The tags are self-explanatory; the Not Worth Reading posts are eminently unreadable. The same goes for the posts tagged personal. They are mostly kept here for myself to see how the quality of my writing has oscillated between utter tripe and reasonably readable.

I wonder what I shall do now… should I hack for some time before I turn in, or should I start reading A Monk and Two Peas? Judging by the way my eyelids are drooping, I shall probably do the latter.

Comeuppance

 

Fat, out of shape, lazy-to-exercise and overweight Kovai has just had his comeuppance delivered to him.

Kovai came back home in the morning from a friend’s place where he’d been invited over for dinner the day before.

He looked around the apartment and decided that it needed a little dusting. Memories of the strenuous house cleaning exercise he had indulged in on the last weekend popped up in his mind. He then decided that a little cleaning shouldn’t hurt, and it’d mean that much less work on the weekend anyway. What the heck, he’d go to work late today. Kovai reached for the broom, and disaster struck.