Divergence of Identity

Given that I’ve spent many more years of my life being an expat than a local, this article struck a deep chord with me.

…So you look at your life, and the two countries that hold it, and realize that you are now two distinct people. As much as your countries represent and fulfill different parts of you and what you enjoy about life, as much as you have formed unbreakable bonds with people you love in both places, as much as you feel truly at home in either one, so you are divided in two. For the rest of your life, or at least it feels this way, you will spend your time in one naggingly longing for the other, and waiting until you can get back for at least a few weeks and dive back into the person you were back there. It takes so much to carve out a new life for yourself somewhere new, and it can’t die simply because you’ve moved over a few time zones. The people that took you into their country and became your new family, they aren’t going to mean any less to you when you’re far away.

When you live abroad, you realize that, no matter where you are, you will always be an ex-pat…

Skyfall

When you watch Skyfall with three fellow networking researchers, comments such as the following ensue:

“Why is the list of all agents on a single file, on a single laptop hard drive, and encrypted so weakly that it’s crackable in less than a week?”

“Wait. How can you even trace someone after you strip the headers off the packet?”

“That’s a CISCO switch in that data center! … Huh? What terrible wiring. Where’s the cooling system? Is that a data center built with raspberry pies?”

“I can see assembly code on that terminal.”

“Who the hell plugs-in a terrorist’s laptop to your security sensitive internal network?”

“From where does that little radio transmitter’s antenna get that much power to transmit such a signal in the first place?”

I love being around fellow nerds.

Mosquito love. Not.

My two least favourite things about my hometown are mosquitoes and mosquitoes.

A close third, would be load shedding. For those of you unfamiliar with the jargon, it’s basically a daily state-wide planned powercut for saving unicorns. Or energy. Or something. I can’t remember the details except that it’s annoying. Especially that time it was scheduled to go off right in the middle of a Kung Fu Panda 2 airing on HBO. **Especially** when they seem to introduce the practice only when I’m home for vacations.

So, let’s say you’re suffering from acute internetaddictionitis and the load-shedding kicks-in, leaving you hanging half-way through the Gangam Style video on Youtube, and also leaving you in the not-so-pleasant company of a squadron of mosquitoes. What do you do? Since there’s no such thing as negotiation when it comes to these miniature vampires, the only option is battle.

Now these aren’t ordinary mosquitoes. These are mosquitoes that have been hardened in their craft through generations of exposure to mosquito repellents. I’m pretty sure that evolutionary processes have gifted them a gland that harvests these repellents and converts them into energy or some arthropod-adrenaline-equivalent.

That said, mankind has had to resort to modern science in order to forge a weapon capable of taking on Satan’s pets. Behold! The constant-voltage-electro-plasma-weave-scepter-3000. Or, for the less scientifically inclined, the mosquito bat.

This is what Thor’s hammer probably looked like

Those of you who’re from less threatened corners of the known universe might find this piece of technology rather overwhelmingly difficult to understand. But here’s how it functions. The device works with the wielder holding the charge button, and swinging the device at a mosquito-monster, which upon successful contact, will deliver a very satisfyingly awesome spark thingy to the target. Sometimes, the target ends up stuck in the metal mesh, causing the mosquito to burn with the rather unpleasant odour of a burning mosquito.

Whoever came up with this idea actually brought some fun into the endless and futile battle that routinely happens in most Indian households every evening.

Anyhow, my entrepreneurial instincts tell me that there is room here for improvements.

Enter gamification:

• Turn these bats into Internet capable devices that can connect over WiFi, 3G, 4G, Parle-G, anything.
• Users register their device(s) through an online account.
• The device keeps track of the number of mosquitoes you pwn, and updates a score on a central server.
• The more you kill, the more you gain experience.
• As you gain experience, you level up. All users start at Lvl 1: Militia, and progress their way through to Lvl 100: Zeussian Mosquito Centurion Overlord. With each experience level, unlock features on your bat, like the anti-anthropod-plasma-cannon, and the zappa-mosquito-fragmentation-grenade-launcher.
• Compete with friends, family, neighbours, or fellow countrymen to slay as many of these buggers as you can in mosquito zapping tournaments. Win exciting prizes!
• Profit.

See? No “???” in between.

Unlike other capitalistic endeavours, this one is purely driven by a social angle which can be summed up by three words, “Kill. All. Mosquitoes.” At the end of the day, we empower people with this device, and get rid of mosquitoes at the same time. Problem solved.

Now to figure out how to solve the load-shedding problem.

Masters, check!

I successfully defended my master’s thesis last Friday, and with that, I’ve now officially completed a two year Msc programme in Distributed Computing. If I were to describe the programme with three words, it would be fun, beer, and bananas.

Headed back to Berlin on an airplane, by a window seat, in a reflective mood that would be fitting for a sepia filter, I’ve made a list of the lessons I’ve learnt over this latest epoch of my life:

• It’s one thing to read about different cultures, it’s another thing to experience them.
• Dreams don’t always work out. Be prepared to fail hard.
• Don’t chase achievements. Focus on doing good work, and opportunities will come to you.
• There are always elements outside your realm of control. As my supervisor tells me, it’s called life.
• Be patient. Very patient.
• Beer *always* works out.

Darned window seat, making me reflective and all.

Chasing the Thesis Carrot

My thesis defense is scheduled for the 22nd of June, so I’ve been in writing mode since the last two weeks. In parallel though, I’ve been evaluating my system, which seems to be producing pretty graphs for the time being.

I’m both surprised and sad at my ability to be distracted when writing my thesis. I’ve always had an attention span within the order of microseconds, but this is an all time low.

Here’s how my typical weekday seems to go off late:

• 8.30: Wake up.
• 8.30 – 9:00: Ponder about the mysteries of the universe whilst showering.
• 9:00 – 9:30: Have breakfast, and watch a full episode of the Simpsons or Family Guy.
• 10:00: Reach the lab. Setup laptop, mouse, keyboard, and extra monitor. Open window for some fresh air. Go grab coffee.
• 11:30: Done checking my mail, zero-unread-ing my feed of web comics, browsing through HN, Slashdot, and some other news sites (and a few “Oooh! Cat picture!” moments).
• 11:30 – 12:30: Lunch.
• 12:30 – 13:30: Post-lunch-procrastination (see 11:30).
• 13:30 – 14:30: Body has begun processing lunch, so feeling drowsy — Need. More. Coffee.
• 14:30: Open up editor for writing thesis. The “let’s settle this once and for all!” feeling surges through my body.
• 14:31 – 14:45: Check Facebook.
• (The above two repeats for a while)
• 15:30: “This is boring! I think I’ll do something that matters. Like code!”
• 15:31: Implement new feature! “Byzantine-fault-tolerant-key-value-based-scalable-elastic-hadoop-LTE-fabric-on-the-cloud!”
• 16:00: Realise that new feature broke all unit and system tests.
• 16:01: git reset –hard HEAD
• 16:01 – 16:02: Check Google+. Doesn’t take that long though because there’s nothing there.
• 16:30: “That’s it! I’m going to do more experiments! Nothing like graphs to make you feel like a scientist!” * challenge-accepted-rage-face *
• 16:45: Fire shell script and watch as the whole testbed dances to your bidding, cables filling with packets, WiFi waves flowing through space. You feel empowered, like you’re about to introduce a tear in the fabric of space.
• 16:47: Realise that you misconfigured everything.
• 16:49: Repeat experiment. Pretty sure it’s correct this time, so need to do something useful for an hour.
• 16:50: Continue with writing thesis.
• 17:00: Time for more coffee.
• 17:05: Back to desk, “What was I doing again?”.
• 17:06: Facebook time.
• 17:08: Booooored.
• 17:10: Write a few more lines of related work. “Previous work by Joe et al [10] has been known to suck”.
• 17:15: Discover some feature in text editor. Optimise key bindings for maximum productivity.
• 17:49: Experiment’s over. Fire SQL queries to extract data from measurements database, and pass it through gnuplot.
• 17:50: Add graphs to thesis. Defend weird results with “Proof-of-concept”.
• 18:00: “Woah! Is it warm here in the lab or what? Screw you guys! I’m going home so that I can write comfortably!”
• 18:30: At home. Have dinner with the company of Homer or Peter.
• 19:00: Feel sleepy. Idle around.
• 23:00: Sleep.
• Repeat.

And I wonder why the carrot’s never getting closer.