Fun with tennis

Did you watch US Open? It was a tennis feast, what with Djokovic playing well and impersonating other players for a bonus. What with Federer showing signs of vincibility and then again demonstrating his mental strength to go ahead and win, overcoming Roddick, Davydenko, and eventually Djokovic.

This was vintage stuff from the tennis players. I would be surprised if Djokovic continues to lose at the big stage. Sooner or later, he will win a grand slam. He has the talent, no doubt.

Watching Federer was really good. He is coolness personified. The way Fed handled pressure was fascinating. How good would it be if we all take a cue from Fed and try being cool in our day to day interactions. I tried it myself, and it works!

Wiki-collaboration

I have been following the brouhaha about global warming, and I decided to pitch in my bit. It is towards this goal, that I started collecting tips on been carbon neutral. Every once in awhile, I come across a tip to save energy, water, or some other resource. Wouldn't it be nice if we could keep track of all these tips and share them with other people?

Turns out that there are many wikihows on how to save energy in various ways. For instance, check out http://www.wikihow.com/Increase-Fuel-Mileage-on-a-Car. there are many such wikihows with a lot of useful information. Being a true believer in wikis, I edited a few of these and added a few tips myself.

Optimization

1I consider myself a compulsive optimizer. I try to find the shortest path home from work. I try to multitask relentlessly. I try to write scripts at office to get my work done fast. I try to minimize the time I spend cooking, or try to cook multiple dishes, if the cooking time cannot be reduced. It is not my time alone that I'd try optimizing. I try to optimize my resource usage as well. I try to recycle paper, I try to use public transport, and much more.

While I do realize that minimizing the use of resources is indeed a commendable goal, minimizing the time "wasted" in doing day-to-day things is quite suspect. This point was driven home to me the other day. I was trying to impress upon my friend the need to optimize, when my friend very sincerely asked me what I planned to do with the time that I had saved? It is at that point that I reflected upon such relentless optimization of time. It turns out that the time saved by optimizing my tasks is not the end goal. Surprisingly, it is the thrill that I derived from having optimized that drives me to solve this complex optimization problem.

Since this optimization gives me immense satisfaction, I do not see why I should not continue doing this. However, things become hazy, when other people are involved in the equation. Especially if these other people do not believe in optimization, and moreover, want to do tasks their way. So, now I continue to optimize when there aren't any other people in the equation, and use my judgment, when other people become involved.

Hibernate problems in Dell laptop.

1111111I know that this post comes after a long gap, and I would like to explain this gap. But, I suppose that can wait anyway. The main purpose of this post is to give some information about something peculiar that I had observed.

I have a Dell Inspiron 5100. Recently, my hard-drive crashed and I had to replace it. Thankfully, it was still in warranty. I decided to take this opportunity to experiment with a different operating system and decided to install Linux. I used a very popular distro Ubuntu. Installing Ubuntu was a breeze. I also needed Windows operating system to run some special software, and installed Windows as well. Then started the struggle. After installing both the operating systems, I would say that Ubuntu is far easier to install than Windows. Well, I'm digressing again. Let me get back to the topic.

I installed windows successfully, and after I was done with the session, I wanted to hibernate my computer. To my horror, I could not choose the hibernate option. I did a lot of Google search to figure out why this was happening. To no avail. In fact, one link hinted that my hardware did not support the hibernate function. But this was definitely not true. When I had bought the laptop, it had arrived with Windows preinstalled. This had the hibernate option, which I used extensively.

On a seemingly unrelated note, when I installed Windows, the drivers for various devices were not automatically installed. So, I had to manually install the drivers for various pieces of hardware. While doing this, I somehow missed installing my video graphics card, and consequently the video display was pretty bad, and any videos would frame. I realized this a little later, and when I installed the driver for the video graphics card, lo and behold, the hibernate option started showing up. I do not know how the graphics card and the hibernate option are tied together, but in this particular model of laptop, they are tied together. This is just one of those weird things, one has to accept, I guess.

Orkut

What is Orkut? Orkut is an online community that connects people. Is it any good? Undoubtedly, my friend. Well, Wikipedia does not seem to have too much information on Orkut. You can check this link nonetheless.

You can join Orkut only by invitation. An existing member has to invite you for you to get in. You can grow your contacts (circle of friends) in Orkut either by inviting new people to join or by adding on existing users as friends. You can view the profiles of your friend's friends, and by extension their friends and so on. Sometimes, I go profile-hopping and see if I can locate some friends or if there are any interesting people.

I have bumped into quite a few friends this way. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to see one of my instructors on Orkut! I used to take coaching from him in my twelfth class. I was of the opinion that the Orkut crowd was largely a young one. Moreover, I had not associated him with net-savviness. My bad! I then chanced upon his webpage, which he had listed on his profile, which had some material (assignments, mock exams, etc.,) online and realized that he was using the net as an effective tool.

Coming back to Orkut, Wikipedia says that Orkut' s terms of service includes "By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials." I do not know the implications, but you might want to consider them before putting up any of your creations on Orkut.

Crazy India trip

The flip side of living away from the motherland is the infrequent trip to the motherland. An India trip always has an irresistible pull.

Usually, an India trip is the farthest from a vacation and routinely I need a break after returning form an India trip. And this is from the experience of the past India trips. I am leaving for an India trip in 5 days. From the looks of it, this trip makes the past India trips look like a breeze. I will be attending two weddings and two receptions! One of the weddings is my brother's and I will be quite busy with affairs relating to this. I will be visiting Hyderabad, Goa, Mangalore, Bangalore (twice), and Chennai, all in 30 packed days. I will be spending time with some really wonderful friends and some very close relatives, which I am looking forward eagerly to.

The flip side of the trip is that by the time I return a few of my close friends would have left Champaign for their internships or other commitments. By the time they return, I would have left Champaign in search of greener pastures. So, I have to bid these lovely friends good-bye prematurely. And I have to do this in under 5 days!

Yes, leaving friends, going to a new place and making new friends is inevitable. I have successfully done this many times over. Will I pull off a Houdini act this time also?

Mandarin Wok

Some time ago, a friend recommended a Chinese restaurant Mandarin Wok and added "This is the best Chinese place in town, believe me." I was skeptical of that claim. For me, Chinese cuisine was synonymous with kung pao tofu from Empire Chinese Restaurant. I decide to give this new place a try anyway. This place was fantastic. The variety of vegetarian dishes was mind-boggling and most of the dishes were tops. (Except for kung pao tofu, which was better at Empire's. The problem with Empire's was that they had only one vegetarian dishes, making frequent trips or a group outing difficult.)

At any rate, this place got intertwined in my life here as my crowd was crazy about this place and this was the preferred destination for any occasion. The place was run by an old Chinese couple and their daughter, Tina. Life went on normally till one day we heard that Tina and her parents were selling off the business and moving out. We were distraught. A new management took over. Tina and her parents signed a non-compete clause which insisted that they do not open another place with similar dishes in the vicinity. At any rate, Tina's parents wanted to retire and lead a quiet life.

We continued going to Mandarin Wok (under the new management) and told ourselves that we had no other go.

Till we found out that Tina's parents decided that they needed to get to work and had opened a new Chinese place. However, thanks in part to the non-compete clause, they could open the place only at Mahomet, a place 10 miles away. We found out about this new restaurant, thanks to a friend.

One fine day (yesterday), S, A and I decided to try out this new place. We hopped into S's car and off we drove to Mahomet. Tina recognized us and it was apparent she was very happy. She said that not many vegetarians frequented the place and they were out of eggplant (This is what brinjal is called in US.) and she could not offer eggplant in garlic sauce, a perennial favorite. As it turns out S does not like eggplant but to play the role of a good guest, she pretended to be disappointed. For the order, we asked Tina to just get us something good.

Tina got our food and with a flourish placed the eggplant dish and said that she did find some eggplant indeed. It was hilarious to see S's genuine disappointment now. But then Tina immediately followed it with other dishes which looked fabulous. At the end, Tina insisted, despite our vehement protests, that our dinner was on the house!

Good memories are made up of incidents like these! Only after the dinner there, did I realize how much I had missed the original Wok's food. The Wok of today serves good fare, alright, but not as good as the original's.