Inspirations

When I watch a movie that inspires me because the hero never gives up, I wonder how much more inspired I would be just to hear myself say those very same words, and to achieve my own goals…. it is so much nicer to inspire yourself than to have to look for materials that would do so, and so much more difficult!

One thing a grad student should always do

Assumption: ‘grad student’ implies that the arrival of deadlines tends to be bursty in nature, and far greater than the service rate at times of pressure.

Result: high delays, packet loss increase

Let us equate packets with sleep.

Whenever you can, wherever you can, get some sleep… granted that assumption 1 holds true, and you can means that you still fulfill your other duties..

as you may have guessed, queueing theory floating around in my head in a sleepless night.. nothing else 🙂

The advantage of deadline driven work

There are things that seem such a hassle at times.. things that we just need to get over, and to forget.  Things like deadlines, exams, etc. What is the good thing about them, besides forcing us to go through material at least once?

One advantage I see is– it teaches us to get things done.  Getting things done is much harder than visualizing things being done… one of the major differences being the timespan, and some others being the effort involved, the frustrations in the midst of things, the interleaving with other real-life issues.  Despite all these, we need to get things done.

It helps make the perfectionist inside us see the practical side of things.  So many times, I have to compromise the way I would like to do things because I need to meet deadlines.  I do not really like it, but then, it did teach me that the Pareto principle is perhaps much truer than what I had expected, as far as 20% effort and 80% results go.

Just a short two-cents rant in the middle of “doing things”!

A Poem on a Poem

Common words

uncommonly placed:

with multiple meanings

that change

like patterns in a kaleidoscope

under a glancing eye:

a poem

that is easy to enjoy,

but difficult to comprehend!

Which Picture is the Real One?

A long time ago ( around 8 years back I think), when the Maoist rebellion was beginning to seem extremely effective/dangerous, and I was in the middle of my engineering studies, I used to get shocked by the reports of bombings in Nepal (particularly Kathmandu), the apparently very frequent seiges, etc. The apparent takeover by Maoists of a large portion of rural Nepal was portrayed almost like an overnight event in an article I read in the Times of India (or perhaps, it was just the way I interpreted it).

However, whenever I went back home during my holidays, I would find life going on as usual, and the reports seemed to be a bit exaggerated (quite a bit in fact!).

Later, when working in UMN, I remember a security training session, where we were told about the “frog in a boiling pot” syndrome, where you it is hard to see how badly situations have deteriorated because of the gradual nature of change. I felt the truth of this when we had around 8 hours of load-shedding a day sometime when I was working. The load-shedding hours even overlapped office hours, and though we were lucky enough to have an office that had generators turn on whenever there was a power outage, there were a lot of offices that just had unproductive employees during power outages. “I am a frog in a boiling pot” I had thought, “and I never realized how hot the water had become it seems!” It had been so easy to not realize how bad things had become in some aspects.

When I think about that now, it is funny that the media was not that concerned about these aspects (the ones that actually made me feel like a frog in boiling water!), but that other aspects were covered. And the aspects the media covered were the ones that painted this picture of “Nepal” to the rest of the world.

A slightly less gloomy portrayal by media might be the images of America young people have in mind when they tend to flock here. It is more than media, but then again, is information from your friends, once again, with a certain amount of selective reporting, not suitable for similar classification? There is of course, a lot more realistic analysis by whoever is concerned, but I am just citing an example that seems to convey a much better picture through media.

And then, there is the question of the ‘New media’ (as I shall call it here). The media has spread so well, that it is has snuck into your personal life. It reports ‘everything’ you do, and people know ‘everything’ there is to know about you! The reporter, of course, is you, and the line before this was intentionally exaggerated for effect! However, what you write are your own words, and the pictures conveyed are those of you, as a person, and quite true in fact (the elephant that felt like a pillar to the blind scholar who happened to find the elephant’s foot was still part of the elephant!).

And then again, when your words paint pictures that are stronger than what you imagined, can you reliably say that the pictures are not accurate? Or simply that you are not fully aware of the situation, or have developed a perceptive immunity to it because of gradual exposure? Which image is more real, the image you paint through your words (and pictures) on the internet, or the image you have in your mind of yourself?