1. I stirred my tea to dissolve the sugar in it — except that I hadn’t added any sugar to it.
2. I unlocked my cell-phone and listened for a dial-tone. It took me a few seconds to realize there would be none.

I’ve had an inter­esting week.

I spent the whole of the last two nights in the lab, working on a Computer Archi­tec­ture assign­ment. Normally, program­ming assign­ments don’t take long, but this one was in Verilog, that executes in different modules all at the same time. For a C or Java programmer, this is like debug­ging a highly multi-threaded program that is eagerly waiting to jump into infinite loops.

The program finally worked. Enough said about that.

I also almost lost all the data on my laptop. I tried to delete a couple of unwanted parti­tions, and strangely, my data parti­tion also disap­peared. Identi­fying the lost parti­tion using dd, fdisk and hexdump was possible, but not practical. Finally, I tried something called R-Linux that mirac­u­lously restored my parti­tion. Ironi­cally, I easily managed to recover the parti­tions that I had actually wanted to delete — and that too without any special­ized software. Oh well, every­thing is back to normal now.

And before anyone says it, I refuse to back up my data.

That’s right, we had a great party on Saturday night, the official “Freshers’ Party” for Indians, hosted by the Cornell India Associ­a­tion. So the CIA (no, not that one) is the news again, two days in a row.

The Big Red Barn is the perfect place for this kind of get-together. The first item was a very good way of getting people to mingle: you pick up a chit that gives you a word or a phrase, and form groups of five with others who have related phrases. In any case, I’ve noticed that people intro­duce themselves and talk much more freely with others from their own country, now that they are in a foreign land.

To me, this is both a good thing and a bad thing. When we are united by a culture and an ideology, we also proclaim that we are different from all others. A sense of unity at any level prevents us from having the same feeling at a higher, perhaps universal level. People from different states or cities group together when they are in their home country, but the distinc­tion of state or city is seldom consid­ered when they are in a foreign land. If everyone felt the same way back home, how much better our country would be!

Today, I watched Chak De! India, the movie, thanks to the efforts of the Cornell India Associ­a­tion. In brief, this is the story of the captain of the Indian hockey team who is forced to give up the game due to certain baseless allega­tions, but returns seven years later to coach the women’s national hockey team and lead them to victory in the World Cup.

My opinion about the movie: definitely worth watching. The script and direc­tion combine a passion for the game with light touches of comedy and drama to conjure up a couple of hours of sheer excite­ment. There are also elements pointing to the personal lives of some of the charac­ters, adding a measure of reality to the story.

I read the Dilbert comic today, and liked it so much that I had to mention it.

Carl: Although I’ve been fired for gross incom­pe­tence, I’m profes­sional enough to train you before I leave.
Dilbert: Don’t bother. I’ve already coded a Java app to do every­thing you do.
Carl: Every­thing?
Dilbert: Except for the incom­pe­tent parts.

What I like about Dilbert is that he is one really smart guy in a mad mad world.

Making tea for oneself is not as much fun as making it for a lot of people.

Dreams are, perhaps, the best form of enter­tain­ment. The brain comes up with a story and narrates it to you, and in most cases, you can actually partic­i­pate as a key character in the story. The plot is never boring — the brain would change the plot if it were. Pray, where else could you get access to a three-dimensional movie of this kind?

I had a dream last night. Perhaps it had something to do with my recent purchase of a laptop, because this was precisely what I was doing in my dream. Not an actual purchase, but I had a large box with the notebook in it, and I was lugging it around, presum­ably to get it home.

The twist was that in my forget­ful­ness, I kept leaving it behind at different locations — a class­room, on the road and so on — and each time, I walked back anxiously looking for it. When I left it behind somewhere on the road and then went back to hunt for it, it was returned to me by a passerby — but now the laptop was no longer packaged, and my name was printed (not written, printed) on it.

The good news is that I did get it “home” finally, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a house in real life.