Now, I have taken this statistics course. The Math and Stat departments are not fogiving when it comes to homework. They insist - An assignment submission every week. Man, for a 4th year graduate student, this is a bit to much. I like research courses - no homework, no tests. Just read papers, dicuss it in the class and give a final presentation at the end of the semister. Right now, the situation is not like that. I have to get this homework done by 10.10 Am every friday. So I started, on thursday, at 10 PM, as usual, to start the homework. On the side note, one good thing about doing homework is that the students are forced to find out what chapters are covered till now. I usually find that out two times a semister, once before the midterm and once befor the finals. Now its more frequent, thanks to the homework. Anyways, on thursday night I realized that my Prof. has complete 2 chapters in 3 classes and I need to understand every bit of it to finish the 6 problems. The time is 10.00 PM and I have 12 hours to go and I am reading about controlling error rate, the REGWR method, HSD, LSD, Pairwise comparison etc etc. If you are new to statistics, these might look like greek and latin. Well, dont worry, I had the same feeling at 10.00 PM on thursday. I was supposed to know everything a week back. Poor me, I had no idea. Now after a night out, I was able to convert this Greek and Latin to Kannada and Telugu ( These are Indian languages, which I can atleast try to understand). And all this for the second assignment. I have no idea how I will be when I submit the 13th assignment.
So you are a programmer and you are a kind of person who reason out things. Who believe's that we have to question our beliefs. If you are one such person, then I have one way to reason out the existance of so many religions (or for that matter so many ways to reach "God").
A simple way to reason it out. Make GOD as an abstract class with many properties like name etc and some functions like "festivals", "rituals". Now consider different religions as different derived classes of this parent class "GOD". Each have their own definitions of the "name" of the god, different implementations of "festivals" and "rituals". As for you, you can either derive your class "BELIEF" from one such derived class (Hinduism, Islam, Christianity etc). It makes your life easy in the sense that the content of the class is defined already by someone. If you dont believe in some attributes of that class, you overload it and define your own. The other way is to derive a class from that abstract parent class and define each of those attibutes and create new attributes.
Flute is an amazing instrument. I always wanted to learn how to play flute. Fortunately, my roommate had taken formal training from his guru's back in India and is well versed in this instrument. My joys knew no bound when he agreed to teach me the art. In return I will cook dinner for a week. If you are a grad student you will know that "cooking for a week" is a big fee for teaching how to play flute. Anyways, on the first day, after the "guru daskhina ceremony" in our living room, I started the formal training. My guru instructed,
" The first thing to learn in playing flute, is to learn how to blow air. The air should come from your stomach and you should be able to blow it continuously with good control"
So I started. For the first 30 mins, I like actress Revathi in the tamil film "Devar Magan", was telling repeatedly this dialogue "Verum Kaathu than varuthu (Only the sound of blowing air is comming out)", much to the amusement of my other friends who were witnessing this incident. Then after about 30 mins, when I was about the give up, the first sounds came. For me it was like hearing the first cry of a baby. The flutist in me has born. Like a new born child I went "berserk" in my playing, almost blowing away our window panes. Then came the most unexpected incident. To understand this, you should know how the door in our apartment operates. I know it sounds wierd now, but trust me, there is a deep relationship here. Since Minneapolis is a very cold place, our apartment is well insulated. To enter the apartment building you have to have a key to a glass door. People without keys, will have to press a buzzer. You at home will hear a shrill sound and you will press a "door open" button, which opens the door.
Back to my flute learning experience. Now I started "playing" the flute and it was, trust me, "very melodious". Two of my friends thought otherwise. They came running from the other house. One guy was shouting "PRESS THE DOOR OPEN BUTTON, THE GUY MUST BE FREEZING TO DEATH" while the other guy was shouting "SWITCH OFF THE MILK COOKER". Little did they know that the sound was coming from me. By this time, the entire janatha at my home started laughing. This news spread like wild fire. For somedays I felt that when someone looks at me, they imagined seeing a "milk cooker". I thank God that this "impression" dint stick for long, else I would have got another fancy name associating me with this incident, for the rest of my life.
This pretty much ended my "learning flute" and the "one week dinner cooking" contract with my roomate.
Reliance India call, a calling card company, had this promotion of free 15 minute calls to India. The catch is that once you use up this free 15 minutes, you cannot call to india for free from the same phone. Now a general rule is that for every such "abuse prevention trick" there is an exception. Since it is a 1-800 number, you can dial it for free from a public phone booth. Guess what? Every public phone booth was "attacked" by the "grad students". People took the pains to go around all buildings in my university in search of public phones!! One guy was ready to take "one day bus pass with unlimited rides" and go around Minneapolis and St. Paul City (Called the Twin Cities area) and its suburbs in search for public phones. Such was his dedication. And if you are in the assumption that they are calling their parents, man you are wrong. Ofcourse, its to call ones girl friend back in India. One guy also had a ratio. For every call to his parents, he will make 5 calls to his girl friend!! Courtesy Reliance India call.
Now a look at the "imaginary" marketing reports of Reliance India Call.
"This promotion had the greatest effect in the Twin Cities area. Lots of people are tying out this card from all over the city limits and suburbs. Experiencing the quality of this service and comparing the price and quality with other calling cards, there will be a large numbers of takers. "
Little did they think about the bunch of grad students at UofM, who are ready to apply their research skills to anything other than their major area ;) .
I guess I am too enthusiastic to write ( or very lazy to do my research), I am posting one more. Indian names can be notoriously big, hence the need for short forms. My roomate Aravindan is now a days called pinto. Many of my friends dint know how Aravindan, a proper south Indian name became pinto (sounds like pluto, the dog in micky mouse). Well the transformation goes like this.
Aravindan -> Arabindo -> ArrraPinto --> Pinto
For the tamil readers, it also became "mukalpinto" but was dropped because of its length.
As for my name, the credit for the first mutation goes to the System administrator of the computer science department (clap clap clap) here at the UofM. He put my cs id as kodak ( first 5 letters of my last name). For the first time in my life, I realized that my last name can be mutated to be the name of a large corporation :) . People started calling me kodak. In India, we generally give a musical note to the end of the name. Hence it became "kodakeee". Then one guy applied his innovation and make it "dakee".
Kodakara -> kodak -> kodakeee -> dakee
I dont know how emotional (read angry) my family members will be when they come to know that their name (same family you see) is mutated like this. All I can say is, it could have been worse, like the one below
Kaushik -> Kaushikeeee -> keeee
For the people familiar with Indian Ads in TV, the last one sounds like the hissing of mosquitoes in "tortoise" mosquitoe coil ad.
Here I am , after almost one month, trying to post one more blog. Yesterday I was talking with one of my friends (noisyparan.blogspot.com) and he was telling about attending a meeting with other people about "making money in your free time". Basically its a meeting to try and convince people to take up a membership in Quickstar. I think this is a similar kind of business like Amway International. Anyways, the bottom line is that my friend expected to get some free food (the grad student in him is not dead yet). Atleast they should give some food for taking the pains to make it to the meeting and listen to the " seems to be never ending lecture". Unfortunately free food was not on the agenda. He came to know that pretty late, poor paran.