Brownian Motion

Bic Runga has been on my mind.. notice a bit of a pattern here? I am obbsessive-compulsive! If I get hung up on something, there is nothing else to take away from the experience. This compulsion extends to naming my shoes, my bike, my toe-nails (two of which I just lost last weekend), talking to trees on my way to work (silently of course, I have to share the ride to work with some asinine creatures, imagine my consternation if they actually could extend their imagination beyond their petty egos), dreaming with the butterflies that flit across my path from home to work, by the dozen.. they may live for just 4 days but they really live. My best friend Derek Vohs taught me how important it was to learn to live, that is the greatest gift a friend can give another. He also wrote me funny stories, created so many memories to live by, live with and loved his mom who raised him single-handed, which was something I often hoped Id find someday. Children make us proud in so many ways and looking at them tells us a lot about their parents.. My heart is full today but Ill never forget Derek.

Ive had some time to dream here in the last month. Apparently, this never goes out of fashion. I had the pleasure of meeting two shorties, who stole a piece of my heart within the first five minutes of meeting them.. they told me a couple of stories and showed me a few dance moves so, Im training to be the next MJ, watch out! They also had strong opinions on the food I was eating (and others were subject to) so, this made me think hard!
So much so, that I decided to go on a cooking extravaganza last night. I got home around 7pm after a bumpy-as ride, minus butterflies… they were all at a music show across the town and had no time to wait for me. Id been preparing exams to give my kids on Monday and I hope they all do well. They inspire me to do my best, every class. Exams are just what we make them to be… and they are perennial. Back to the 7pm hour, I managed to get to a local market here in rural Punjab. I could easily walk around here for hours and talk to people selling the vegetables and other things. I plan on doing this soon! After two to three handfuls of veggies, we stopped at a fruit vendor for a few more handfuls of fruits.. after this we went to a department store and picked up a few more things. I got home around 8:30 and decided to call mom for some expert advice! She was on a date with my dad and giggling the whole time, I could tell exactly what she was thinking but, I decided to ignore it… She started giving me instructions and within half a minute, my head was spinning. I decided to chop up the veggies, take a shower, turn on the AC, sit down for 20 minutes and then start cooking. So, we agreed that she would call me after I had done all of the above.

Thank god for food processors (mine, I am emotionally attached to), a bit of the chopping went by quickly! This was an industrial production..

There was a bit of a snafu with the tomatoes, which were beaten to a pulp by mistake and ended up in chutney rather than as garnish When in doubt, try to fix it rather than throw it away!

The first dish was something that was supposed to resemble avial but, minus too many veggies as some of my audience (or poor suckers who had to eat this) were not feeling to flash and I didnt want to test their pallete.

Of course, all this cooking action left a mess, which made me want to pick up a sharp object but, I was too tired to do so Delirious almost! Cooking with an induction heater is also pretty challenging. The last dish on the menu was Uthappam, which I prepared the mix for and left the kitchen ready to make this in the morning. Even Cinderella had a midnight deadline, Im just an ordinary mortal!
I managed to wash all the dishes on time.. When in college, I picked up the habit of doing my own dishes and then every one’s elses from my friend Cort Stratton! I worked as a dishwasher for my first scholarship so, that work experience served me well. There is a lot of zen in washing dishes.. besides, I love bubbles

I slept well and was up again to start my morning series of fresh food cookin’, still sleepy but happy about being able to indulge in my all-time favourite activity.

The uthappam reminded me of the time when amoeba crawled the earth, in giant sizes Additionally, my expertise with induction cooking made for some burnt, thick initial versions (quality control was on holiday, it was too early in the day for them).

I then realized, I could adjust the heat on the induction cooker (how many engineers does it take to hit a button?) and this adjusted the quality of the burning a little better

I then packed everything and looked back at satisfaction with my handiwork. If nothing, it looked like I had been toiling!!

Cooking is like dancing, the happier you are, the better it tastes.. of course, using uthappam mix is lame but, for a quick meal, why not!!

Until next time, Im back to indulging in some Brownian motion and smiling about something good thats come my way. My nutrition secrets are like so: I eat what I want, within limit. I think hard about what that food means to me an to everyone that grows it. I try hard to cook and eat my own food, rather than processed stuff. When I am really happy, I love cooking for people. I earned a reputation for my dinners in Christchurch My only rule for my friends is that that they dont tell me how it tastes I desperately need to feel like Kungfu Panda in my own kitchen, blindingly awesome!

Suddenly Strange(ly) missing the Rungas

1:19pm on a Saturday………. I woke up late at 8am and lay in bed till 9:30 with a song in my head, a smile and some gladness in my heart. I had no care in the world and did not miss my newspaper or the internet.

Its hard to go through a dark tunnel and then accept the light. Im not in denial anymore though. I live for the day and that brings out the best in me. All the cliches about not being able to control one’s life is all good… however, one must make sure one is working hard to break bread and living independent of others’ sweat and that is OK to want. Its also OK to want that, as it is OK to want to live a little irresponsibly, no judgement. Hardwork is overrated too…… this is not the Animal Farm.. right?

Today, I miss New Zealand. I miss the soulful quietness of people. Its not all about talk, talk, talk, more talk, talk, talk.. Ive met some asinine creatures in the last three weeks and they are all about the TALK and Im so glad I am me I know its been an age since Ive felt good about myself but, it takes a bit of the good and the bad to see and believe and appreciate and fall for………. New Zealand is my favourite country……. coming back to which, when I was in North Carolina, tooling around, I used to teach kids who belonged to familes of domestic abuse victims… we used to read a book called “The Very Quiet Cricket” to the kids. It was an amazing story and new zealand is a quiet cricket. Very very quiet or very very loud when the wind blows from yonder.

Today’s blog can be summarized mostly in the words of the beautiful and talented Bic Runga… one of the greatest artists that lives!

To the many new paths I find I am surrounded with and the happiness that simmers like mist, there and gone, Id sing:

Sway my way, dont come and go, like you do!

To my old doubts and critics and all the villains in my life, Id sing:

And just so you know
This secret part of me never showed
And when you run around like you don’t care
I’m suddenly aware
I know its time

To my running shoes and the blue blue water (as my alter-ego is a water buffalo, no place Id rather be than in the water on a hot hot day), Id sing:

We could sit in the sun
Let the days all roll into one
How could you take so long to decide?
How would you know until you tried?

To all the trails I didnt run in when I was too busy working, Id sing:

Wring out my guilt and hang it on the line
Its been raining all week, it won’t get a chance to dry
I’ve been looking round the pantry for a box of sorries
I’m all run out

Ill tell you about Bic’s sister Boh, another day! She inspires a lot of things too…………. I miss New Zealand! Did I already say that?

To a God Unknown

I picked up a very old book of mine, a Steinbeck, the shorter stories…… Of Mice and Men is one of my favourites as is The Grapes of Wrath.. some stories do get out of your hand though, before you can read them, cover to cover or start to finish. I think people are like stories too. The have beginnings, protagonists, great loves, grand failures, soul searching choices to make and an ending. Joseph Wayne was the main character in this story “To a God Unknown”… speaking of a time when the redwoods, streams, squirrels and children were also like stories, with beginnings, childhoods, adulthood, twilight and endings. It takes a while to see the story though. It takes even longer to understand it. The story begins with a quote from the Vedas so, this was even better.. Steinbeck and the Vedas.. hmm.. So the story set in the places of Nuestra Senora and Our Lady of Joseph, Burton, Thomas, Benjy, Old Juan, Romas, Old Willie, Juanito, Father Angelo, the wives Elizabeth, Harriet, Rama, Jennie, Alice Garcia, the kids Martha and John, the old oak tree, the circular rock and the stream of life all came together in 4 days of reading with an upset stomach and persistent headache! I think this heat will do me in, or make me stronger, whichever comes first… or maybe, as some wise man said “Perhals there isnt any change, ever, in anything. Perhaps unchangeable things only pass.”

A letter from Stephen

Stephen is an awesome young man I know in Bangalore. Him, his brother Andrew and his friend Daniel were at a Booster Juice talk on running Marathons. This was the audience I loved the most in the whole set, my age-group is really in the 4-18 category, grown-ups think I refuse to grow up, my contention is, wheres the fun in that?

Anyway, Stephen just had an amazing performance at his school choir and wrote me about it.. I suppose he had all the pre-performance butterflies but went ahead and delivered a great SOLO show anyway! Now, thats what I call AWESOME Thank you Stephen for being my friend and inspiring me to also do my best

Hey Anu……….
Guess wat?? Ppl who came der said i was awesome…….. firstly i din kno wen i was supposed to sing k, then after one song the guy suddenly says come down!! ur’s next…by the time i was down my songs intro had started n i was just in time der to start…. then i din realise t solo mik was turned off i kept goin closer to t mic n then bam……. t mic waas turned on n it was loud. I modulated accordingly n since this was my first solo… i gav my ALL I was so satisfied wit the way i sang… Our Choir on the whole was just brilliant tat day!!! V even got an offer to go fa the international choir festival in tokyo but it all depends on our coll Princi don think he’l let us go!
Oh… i’ve been to kullu n manali n all….. tat part of India is just Awesome…but nothin beats Namma Bengalooru
N yup…don wit my first internals so chilled out now… actually not

stphenbaptist

Idhellam Doopu

Exceptionally dull Friday here with CRAWLING internet speeds… Look what I found on my player to make me burst out laughing!

sogam azhugai sombal kadhal tholvi
kaduppu exam fail erichal
veruppu vedhanai kobam pirivu nashtam
pada padappu pazhi vaangal paavam
pottu kodhuthu poraamai kindal elappam
echa buthi irumaappu saguni velai
sadhi seyal kozh mottal kurukku buthi
ottu kettal ora vanjanai poi pulugu moottai
dugal velai duppan koothu arakka thanam
peela build up pisaththu kolli kannu kusumbu
chinna thanam sindu mudiyal alla-k-kai alpum
delmaar dimikki oola udhar oppari jaalra
drug adiththal thiruttu velai
thillu mullu sandiththanam

idhellam doopu
jaali than toppu

Stunday Afternoon

Chocolate, No. Happiness, Yes. Something good will come our way, yes. frowning, no. Yelling, yesterday. Stress, last night. Headache, last week. Hope, today. Genuine affection, yes. Understanding all your talents, yes. Wasting a minute, no. Wasting two minutes, no. Wasting 6 months, no. working always, yes. Sleep is for the dead, yes. disrespect, no. False sympathy, no. Lazy people, no. Stupid people, maybe. tolerance, yes. Snobbery, no. Pedantism, no. Poetry, yes. Life, yes. Contradictions, happens to the best of us. Perseverance, always. Mom’s food, sometimes. Appreciation, yes. Cockiness, sometimes. Arrogance, no. Self stupidity, sometimes. Acknowledgment, sometimes. Acceptance, always. Contentment, never. Colors, pretty. Fatso syndrome, temporary. Bluish green, maybe. Greenish blue, never. Admit you are wrong, sometimes. humility, always. giving an inch, only when weak. Pay people on time, always. comfort, never. Peace, sometimes. Discontent, perennial. Disillusionment, temporary. Comedy, all around. Gratitude, always. Obsequious, never. wonder, always. reverence, sometimes. pusillanimity, once in a while. perseverance, always.

eWorld Column

What drives mobile app design?
Dr. Anu Vaidyanathan

The author is CEO of PatNMarks, an Intellectual Property Consulting firm with offices in Austin, Bangalore and Chennai (www.patnmarks.com) and can be reached at anu@patnmarks.com

This two-part article describes several key technology trends that will influence the design of mobile phone applications in the coming years.

It is important to understand the proliferation of different kinds of cellular phone standards, handsets and hardware parameters that affect the compatibility of various applications across various demographics. Various applications specifically for the mobile phone market that are gaining ground include the traditional mass markets of mobile banking, gaming and location-based services.

In the year 2002, a set of papers detailing records of the original GSM task force were compiled. In this set, a study by Josef Huber methodically deconstructed the market model, traffic trends and the technology parameters classified by services, and offered predictions of the same between years 2005-2010. This study was carried out primarily to arrive at an appropriate methodology for spectrum allocation. These predictions are shown in the table accompanying story.

Both usage statistics and technology parameters, especially bandwidth (owing to the increased role of packet switched networks) have far exceeded initial expectations and predictions.

Furthermore, the success of such technologies as VoIP has, in effect, validated the push towards 4G networks, with a predominantly IP backbone. In addition to this, the least common denominator when it comes to features, even in low-cost handsets, is pretty exhaustive, thereby enabling various new applications.

Four generations of mobile telephony

The earliest version of mobile phones was the two-way radio, primarily used to communicate on set frequencies, not utilising the telephone network. Between 1910 and 1973, the technology saw several steps in its evolution. In 1973, Motorola demonstrated the DynaTAC prototype, which was probably the first commercial version of what is today smaller and lighter by several orders of magnitude. These were still analog devices and the introduction of the 2G standard, which was the term used for TDMA and CDMA systems, came about in the 1990s, to introduce digital, circuit switched transmission. The phones in this generation still weighed about 200 gm at their lightest and saw the introduction of several commercial services such as the short message service (SMS), downloadable ring tones and roaming.

3G networks saw the introduction of competing standards including WCDMA and CDMA2000. Although these standards had to stay cohesive with the IMT-2000 specification (standards of data-rates around 384 kbits/s outside and 2Mbit/s inside), they introduced a lot of heterogeneity. Intermediate standards such as 2.5G networks were also introduced to buffer the transition between 2G and 3G such that at the end of 2007, the subscriber base for GSM had reached nearly 300 million.

Although the proliferation of mobile phone technology has far exceeded expectations, the data-rates on circuit-switched digital networks have not scaled as well. While the main driver for 2G networks was voice, newer applications such as video and digital television are predicted to be the drivers of what has been termed 4G networks, as the limits of short-range communication evolve.

The proliferation of handsets

While network technology progressed in supporting higher data rates and more features, one of the greatest leaps in subscriber base occurred when the Asian continents started to engage with mobile phones. Given that the population density in this part of the world is unparalleled, two driving factors determined the success of both handsets and network technology, first movers and price.

Even though GSM was adopted early in India and China, the handset prices drove the subscriber base, in the initial years. There were many reviews that brought out the fact that even though 2.5G and 3G services were available to subscribers, the price of the handset forced them to choose 2G phones, thereby rendering a lot of the services redundant. Pricing services based on customer requirements has bridged this gap and instruments are more capable, even at the lowest prices, in the current market.

Features of the handsets include price, memory, image-resolution and ability to connect to the Internet. In profiling these parameters for 42 handsets from the leading brands, based on various price-points, it is observed that the most basic handset still has a camera and is Internet-ready. The price-points and concerns about majority of subscribers in the Asian countries using 2G instruments by reason of price are slowly being bridged. It would be interesting and relevant to perform a fine-grained analysis on how the predictions by the GSM committee and studies on spectrum provisioning translate to the Indian market.

In part two of this article, trends in the application space will be explained in detail, including traditional and emerging applications such as gaming, finance, location-based services (such as Foursquare) and E-911.

This data was obtained from Josef Huber’s paper on Spectrum Aspects in the UMTS Related Work of the European Commission, UMTS Task Force, UMTS Forum and GSM Association.

Copyright © 2007 Anu Vaidyanathan. All rights reserved | webdesign

Ummeed

I wish blogger would publish in Hindi, wait, better still, that I knew how to write as fast in Hindi… Seemingly, the older we get, the farther we run from the basics. I had an opportunity to visit Punjab via Chandigarh…… The highlights of our trip were a whirlwind tour of rural Punjab and a visit to Anandpur Sahib, a big Gurudwara. Having never been to one before, I realized how little I knew about the Sikh religion. They are a very brave clan and the place of women in their rhetoric is commendable. Something in my heart just went on a trip.. not very different from being on a bike ride in a new country, without health insurance to cover a high-speed crash.

I was travelling with two other South Indians and so, we had to make our mandatory stop at an awesome restaurant to lay our hands on some super-expensive dosas (65 bucks a pop!) and lassi.

The green fields completely blew me away, I was reminded of my travels to my dad’s hometown in Mannargudi which rests literally between nowhere and never-again.

The road-signs seemed to point in the right direction, capitalism ahoy! Maaza aa gaya..

The visit to the Gurudwara was the highlight of my trip with my new friend Harpreet giving us a detailed tour of the place and his encyclopedic knowledge of his religion blew me away.

Unlike most temples, the place was very clean and everyone had covered their head.. me included…….

For some reason, I kept thinking of Rajbir Gujjar, from a book I read, an athlete turned policeman who suffers “the universal affliction of all athletes: struggling to level with the infinitely more complex rules of life outside the playing arena.“

And onwards we go..

The Inheritance O’Floss

After eating enough Paav Bhaaji to kill a small Elephant, I ventured off to the pool after 5 hours of hard work on submitting a paper that was long overdue. Completing my PhD 10 months ahead of schedule came with a big downside, not getting all my ideas published. Academic egos are tied very heavily to publication list-size. So much so that I even had an academic (whom I thought was cute for all of three weeks) tell me “Solving a real problem for ***** may be good work by an application developer. This does not make it the type of novel research that is expected from an academic?” This statement made me cry last week but it made me laugh today……. Hilarious!

According to me, research is the brain-space to think and implement ideas without the corporate or production atmosphere whose only bottom-line is money, not creativity or good engineering… anyway, what do I know?!

As I was swimming and admiring the blue squares at the bottom of the pool, I was thinking of an article I wrote in happier times and I thought I would share that with ya!

Here goes…

4/27/2009
I had two flats on my ride today and the usual lack of ambition that follows one after promptly forgetting water bottles on a 5 hour ride start in 30-degree weather with a dry wind blowing in my face. There also seems to be construction any which way you ride here and this began my morning’s parable “season of gists and conely gravelness”. There were about two-dozen cones on the main road and nope, I didn’t imagine that. The morning had started mostly normally. A big backache and inability to roll out of bed. The new training program is definitely working! I had a 5K swim off the blocks and by the way I ooh-ed and aah-ed before getting in, I knew it was going to be a long swim. In 3.5ks, it was mass delirium. I was still pretty sore from the previous day and had a lot of funny thoughts apparently. So funny that I looked like a mass turbine under-water as the bubbles percolated to the top as I giggled ceaselessly for 100meters. Try it! It ain’t as easy as it looks!

As all good stories start, this one too starts with “I knew a man back in 2006″… He said to me that if I swam any slower, I would sink. I still cannot stop laughing when I think of this comment but, I am getting better with the whole flotation habit. I used to take two times an hour to swim 4Ks (yes, that IS possible and NO I am not talking about water-jogging.. still talking swimming) but now it takes a lot less time to do 5Ks than 2 hours. As I parted water, I was thinking of all the funny chicks I had met in triathlon whose blogs I love to read. I was thinking about my friend who got an order to “cease and desist” from her marine bodyguard at a recent Half Ironman.. I was thinking of this girl whose last name sounds related to Mark Knopfler who told me about breaststrokers in Bohemia… I was three months behind on life and papers but this was normal. I was two months behind on the no-carb diet, this too was normal. I was a few days behind with dental hygene and decided that I should seriously consider the inheritance of a serious floss-ing program. Teeth are so important in triathlon. Tearing apart tape to pack the bike at the airport. Filtering water bacteria when swimming in exotic locations. Smiling like a deer in the headlights for sports photos.. and on the rare occasion, a million dollar smile can also win one a date!

Of course I search my soul everytime I have a bad race. Where IS that little stubbly piece of rock that ruined my ENTIRE day even when I was not wearing my shoe? Where IS IT? I was thinking of all the excuses one could make for a slow time or a bad race… “uh yeah, a typhoon hit right as I exited the first warm-up lap and I was worried about my new swim goggles and decided to sit this one out”… “oh.. that day I had this weird intestinal problem that did not show up until race morning”.. “ah yes, I forgot my matching knickers”.. “oh that race, man! I’ll never forget it… I was on this caffeine cocktail on race day and boy, did it not work!”. As with all normal people, I wonder if I just train to be a training queen or whether I will have my breakthrough race sometime soon. Where is that breakthrough when you need it? There is a break-even, a break-out, a break-in, a break-fast, a break-dance but, no break-through yet.

I ended the day with a three hour walk on the beach and made sushi for dinner. Now, that’s what I call a break-away! Onwards with that training log.

Anu Vaidyanathan is busy trying out new Chinese mopeds for her expanding automobile empire. Check out her unimportant ramblings at www.anuvaidyanathan.com.

Of Goals, Goalees and Gatekeepers

Well, just two days ago, I got a mysterious e-mail from my boss, pertaining to this blog. It simply said “Auld lang syne!” While I dont speak Klingon, I intuitively knew what it meant.. something along the lines of “get your lazy fingers moving”…….. With all the highs and the lows Im currently stuck in, this seemed like a garangutan task. No, the word “garangutan” is something I just made up! In my dictionary, which is from the language Klingon-meets-Anu-Version-2, this stands for “simply huge”, not to be confused with “immense”, “vast”, “gigantic”,”colossal” or “mammoth”.. simply huge.

To confuse my depression-meter, I first set out to spice things up with a little bit of grinding activity, in the kitchen. While I used to love my kitchen, even as recently as upto March, this sudden self-imposed road-block, as my buddy Meera would put it, my kitchen and I have not been communicating. So, after mashing all the spices up into some mix of what they could not have been, in their whole forms.. I proceeded to watch copious amounts of TV. Now anyone who knows me, knows that I do not watch TV. In fact, I hate TV. Television, yes, any version flat screen, big screen, whatever, is the bane of my existance. I even go so far as to hate the ones in the gyms where people seem to walk less and be transfixed on this little blue screen…. Anyway, back to the confession, yes, I watched COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF TV for about what felt like a week but was indeed just three days. I love this show called “Castle”. Although the actors seemed theatrical and boring at the beginning, it is actually quite bearable, given that I have watched three whole episodes now…

Post the spice-making and the televisioning, I decided to look up some random chaps that I have been trying to convince to give me a project, more like a long-term commitment of sorts……. All my projects are long-term commitments. When I dont get the project, I get depressed, anxious, moronic, sleepless, tv-orientated, spice-grinded and oh, its 1am, sleepless.. wait, I said that already. In this case, I did not get the project and that made me very very sad…………

Someone told me last night that I must acknowledge the gate keepers to every dream of mine.. somehow I feel that fences, gates and anu vaidyanathan dont go so well together. As a child, I jumped out of every “camp” my parents tried to send me to and when I was 16, even a despotic hostel (that my poor dad enrolled me in unwittingly, he hates fences even more than I do) when I was determined to study for the IIT-JEEs in a different city than my hometown Bangalore. Anyone who has been to Chennai can tell you that they dont exactly think like Bangaloreans……… scary people. They had a rule about going to bed at 8pm at that hostel and phone privileges only if we behaved ourselves (which meant keeping our shoes clean, our nails clean and our clothes washed… umm.. I just tended to differ).

So, back to the question of gatekeepers, I am ok if they are really goalees pretending to be gatekeepers because in that sense, goalees make your game and goals sharper, gatekeepers keep you out. So, I prefer a goalee to a gatekeeper, any day of the week.

I met a chap recently that I really wanted to impress. Besides being really nice to me, he was inspiring on a very different level, having moved back home to teach, after some fancy degrees abroad. Much like my friend SS, who instilled a great sense of what is right and what is just plain boring when it comes to following your heart vs. taking a job just because you were meant to. In this case, I misread the chap to be a gatekeeper, rather than a goallee.. now that my foggy perception has cleared up… I am back on track and blogging like there is no tommorow.. oh wait, it IS tommorow being past midnight.. so, Ill stop now and hopefully my Goosefraba therapy will kick in soon.