Carthik Sharma

Had a meeting with my advisor today. I did pathetic this semester, and he is not too pleased. “You know I have a lot of students who want to work with me, so we need results by the end of summer.” Gentleman that he is there was not the slightest hint of agitation in his voice as he said this. I need to work hard on research this summer, since I am taking just one class (Cryptography) and an Independent Study with my advisor. I did very poorly on the final exam in parallel processing, which my advisor teaches. I thought the exam was at 12 and it turned out to be at 10, and besides I was breaking my head over some code required in the evolutionary computation class, on the same day. So I ended up scoring the least in the class (which, I might note, is an absolute first in my life.)

My professional life is at its nadir. No way but up or out now. There is no out, so I have to work smarter (and harder perhaps) and get things going. Its all in the mind, I tell myself.

The worst bit is, at the end, he said, ” I can understand if you dont have the resources or the drive. I know when I talk to you that you have read all these papers and journals. Why is it that none of it is reflected in the write-ups, in our proposal drafts, or in the exams? ” I dont know the answer to that. I need to zoom in on the need of the momnet and not think too much.

When I think, I find that I like to come up with possible problems with my approach, and after a time, I have n suggestions or ideas and n^2 problems that might arise if any of these ideas are implemented, and so I get stuck, since the problem seems insurmountable (trust me, I can make any problem look insurmountable.), and just stall on the document. I think, “oh well, whats the point in writing all this up since anyway it sounds like a rotten candidate for inclusion in the proposal?” I just need to up the ante on paperwork, diagrams and the sort. I guess as I write something, I will get ideas as to how to improve things.

I wonder if the above problem stems from my general tendency to be pessimistic about things. I need to learn to be optimistic.

I wish I could let him know that there is nobody else I would do my Ph.D. under. I am NOT unresourceful.

Fire in the belly. What the recruiter from Cognizant technology said during the pre-placement talk was true. You need the fire burning at all times, that fixes everything.

Back to work, then, alrighty!!

Oh, and I forgot, I had a small accident yesterday. I was returning from the Alafaya Library on my bike, it was around 9 in the night. At a four way intersection i jumped a walk light on the sidewalk and ran straight into a car that was crossing the road from my right to the road that was on my left. The guy was dazed, the cycle battered in a way, I suffered a few slight bruises, and I was thankful at the end that it was me who ran into the side of the car, and not the car which ran into me. I was amazed to see that I came out of it unhurt! The guys who I ran into were so dazed and confused and there was the scared look on their faces too. I said I am fine and asked them to hurry along, which they did. A girl offered me a ride home in her car, she was pretty insistent too, but I decided to walk home. I am perfectly fine. My bike lost a pedal, and the wheels are skewed, so no more biking!

This incident made me realize the difference between being in your home country and being in a foreign land. Had this happened in India, I would have known exactly what to do, but since it happened here, I had no clue what to do, and if not for that lady, I would have felt bad that no one stopped to help. But she did stop, so people are kind here too. When I went to sid’s place and told him about this, he said-”you have to be careful bro, this is a foreign land, and anything can happen, and we would’nt even know whats happening.”

So I need to read up on the rules, and avoid biking in the night.

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I went to a basketball game (Orlando Magic Vs. Detroit Pistons) for the first time in my life today. It was a bit pricey at 32 Dollars, but I think the experience was worth it. The crowd was awesome. They gave us plastic tubes to blow up. You could strike one tube against the other for a very shrill and loud sound, produced by the compressed air inside the tube. Its much better than watching games on T.V. There were the cheerleaders doing their stuff during the timeouts and beleive me it was better that the commercials one usually gets to see
I had gone with other Indians. There were three couples (not all of those couples were married.) They are mostly folks who came here as graduate students. Some of them work as interns and study, the others are now working. They live in cypress hills, a relatively upwardly-mobile community. The girls were drinking beer, and one of them turned red when she saw me seeing her drink. I did not mean to make her feel bad or whatever. Why should she feel bad? Indian girls carry a lot of guilt-baggage. They never seem to enjoy anything with abandon.

Later in the evening I went to see “Identity”, yet another serial-killer-movie. Of course , this one was “different” too. I like the way the narration begins, with flashbacks woven in neatly. Good plot too.

And then, the new version of blog.carthik.net is here. I tried an interesting effect with ripples. There is a Kolam on it too. I think this design will keep me satisfied for some time. Feedback, on whether you had problems viewing it in whatever browser you use, is welcome.

I need to promote actively. Will do so over the next week.

Everybody meet . He got the last LJ code I had. Now he doesn’t need to leave his name on the comments he leaves in my journal.

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This day, or rather yesterday, she left REC Warangal, where we met, and found happiness, for home. She left by the East Coast Express at 9.30 am. Two years ago, I had left the place, crying uncontrollably. Tears well in my eyes when I realize that no matter what I do, I will never live at RECW as a student again. I want to go there again, sit on the short wall outside the 3rd Mess at 3 in the morning with Eli, and stare at the moon shining through the neem leaves. I want to climb that tree near the rear wall again and buy a cup of tea from Sreenu. My friends, wherever you are, may you find happiness, in a cup of tea, on top of a wall, outside a bakery or in stealing useless rubber stamps from the office.

I found an old RECW senior, Nishanth Asthana by chance. I was looking for MP3DB, a program that helps keep track of mp3s, and I ran into www.bdesi.com which happens to be Asthana’s website. Remember, Siddharth, we once wondered what had come of him?, all we had to do was search on the web! I called a surprised Asthana, who did not remember me (we had done little , if anything, together…) and talked to him for a while…

My spring semester is over. I went to school at 9.50 , and I was shocked to find that the Parallel Processing final was at 10 am and not 12 noon as I had beleived!! I bombed the exam. God save me!! Well, and then, in the night, I was at Sumant’s place, talking, listening to music, and doing nothing in particular…

I also went to the temple today.

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Henceforth I (this journal, not its writer) shall be known as blog.carthik.net

For half the cost of a haircut, I got carthik.net registered. I plan to run the website from the Linux Box at home. Right now, I am at school. I am almost done with the configuration at home. A couple of hours and I should be there… BUT I have a final tomorrow, so it can wait for the weekend.

Anyways, DNS setting take about a day to three days to propagate throughout the WWW, so I guess starting after the final exam will be perfect.

(if anyone needs a http://your-name.carthik.net address for their journal or something, let me know )

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This semester officially ends this Friday. I thought I was done with it, except for the one final on Friday, but it turns out there are miles to go before I sleep. I got a mail from Dr.Wu, of the Evolutionary Computation class saying that she has to have the code for both assignments if she is to assign me a grade. The problem is, my second assignment did not work, and so , since it did not work, I just turned in a report detailing what all I tried (without the code). Now she wants the code and …… I don’t have it I talked to her today, told her that I didnt keep the code cause it would not work, and she said that she cant make exceptions just for me, so she has to have the code, even if its code that does not work. All this leaves me with tonight to write the code. I remember that I had modified the code from the first assignment for the second assignment, and so now I have to go back to that, and try and remember what modifications I made, and submit the code tomorrow so that I can start preparing for the Final in Parallel Processing. The way I figure it out, I have to get 96+ on the final to make an A grade in Parellel Processing, and I was working to a plan. The best laid plans come to naught! I could have done without this twist at the end. Oh well, What the hell!! If I have to do it, I have to do it. See you all, back I go to the cave where all programs come from. (Thank God I did not start on a Computer SCIENCE Ph.D. at this University. That would have considerably shortened my life span.) I promise to be a good man if I complete my Computer Engineering Ph.D. in an honorable fashion, but then there are so many years, and so many more courses before I am even close to finishing.

P.S. Please do not think of this as a crib. It is just a note I am leaving myself and my friends as to my present condition, and if the present circumstances are not good, for whatever reasons, I cannot describe them as being rosy.

P.P.S. Above, ALL else, I love doing my Ph.D. Like Srinath says, there is a certain kick one gets out of working hard without getting paid appropriately which continues to attract thousands towards Ph.D. programs. Masochistic, eh ?

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It just took me five minutes to work on the modified refried paper style, which unlike the original refried paper style allows one to use custom colors(we are talking about LJ styles here, something specific to the way LJ pages are displayed), to generate a style which includes a header image, for , following a comment I had posted on LJ styles, and she honors me thus! Well, if you want to know what I am talking about, go over here and “mouseover” the image at the top of the page!
This really made my day! I did not expect to be mentioned and when someone does something like this, I feel honored!
I notice that I like tweaking LJ styles a lot, and have been doing an unhealthy amount of designing lately. That explains the paucity of posts. I come to LiveJournal to make a post, but end up Editing styles to the point of abstraction. Well, well! I have taken to visiting and LJ support more often, and finding new things to do…..

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This is freaky!! Thodupuzha is the name of a town in Kerala. I always thought that it meant
Thodu - (tho pronounced similar to bo in bore, du as in well, a prolonged duh”)
which means stream

and Puzha - (pu as in pooh, zha as in, well, i have never heard anything similar in english, take ya and round it a bit…)
which means river…

But if you shorten the tho in thodu , it means touch

So this guy changed his surname from thodupuzha to “touchriver”

Indian filmmaker wins top honour in US

Indian filmmaker Rajesh Touchriver’s movie ‘In the Name of Buddha’ has won the Best Film award at the Newport Beach Film Festival, California, US.

Rajesh received a communication to that effect on Saturday. The movie was screened at the festival on April 10.

Hailing from Kerala, Rajesh changed his last name from Thodupuzah to Touchriver, a literal translation of it, after moving to England where he obtained his postgraduate degree in film direction from Wimbledon School of Art, London, last year.

Earlier, he studied theatre arts at Kozhikkode and was a student of the National School of Drama, Delhi. ‘In the Name of Buddha’ is Rajesh’s first film, both as a director and screenplay writer.

The movie vividly narrates the human rights violation by both the Sri Lankan army and the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in the strife-torn island nation, through the character of a Tamil boy Siva, who is forced to take refuge in England.

Produced by K Shanmughanatha and Sai George of Da’Sai Films International, the English language film will be the inaugural movie at the Los Angeles film festival which begins on May 8, Rajesh said. He has sent it to Cannes and is hopeful of selection for the prestigious film festival, he adds.

Rajesh, who is currently in Hyderabad in connection with a movie starring popular Telugu hero Chiranjeevi, for which he is the art director, says he keeps shuttling between London and Hyderabad.

Currently he is making two documentaries - one on popular cartoonist and writer OV Vijayan and another on noted painter MF Hussain. The film on Vijayan will be completed by the end of this month, while the one of Hussain will take some more time, he said.

Rajesh said he would be directing a Telugu movie to be produced by Chiranjeei’s brother Nagababu, who is a good friend of his. The film, scheduled t go to the sets in June, features senior artiste and `Urvasi’ awardee Sarada in the lead and deals with the feelings and loneliness of a mother in her old age.

Rajesh said he would also be directing a film in English on Sage Vatsayana from December this year. To be produced by da’Sai Films, it will have an international cast, he said.

Reminds me of Manoj “Night” Shyamalan, in a way!

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had the following to say regarding my post where I had said that I am getting too cut off from life here in the U.S.

What you say hits too close to home. I don’t think electronic life has taken me away from a real one, and I still write poems. However, I want to post here the concept of “Primary Causality”. A term coined by my favourite Architecture professor, Juhani Pallasmaa (Finnish, very famous and a warm, wonderful man).

Anyway, the idea of primary causality is one where human beings can perceive a primary relationship between cause and effect. For example, when you collect the twigs and wood, and light a fire, the warmth you feel from that fire and the light that is shed from it is a direct effect of your action. The primary causality of the situation is entirely removed when you flip a switch or you sit in front of a heater. We have no direct part in how that heat or the light is produced and indeed, we cannot begin to imagine or understand that relationship. On the other hand understanding the relationship between you and the sun or you and the twigs that burned is a more primary analysis and comes more naturally and leads to a better idea of what it means to dwell on the Earth.

Human beings need primary causality. Maybe it’s psychological maybe physiological. First world countries with their “developments” remove the primary causality from our lives. There is no perceived relationship between the shrink wrapped plastic thing in a styrofoam tray and the beaked and feathered thing in the farm yard, except for an image on the label. And eventually an image in your mind, but the image doesn’t suffice. The effect of primary causality comes through even when things are one or two steps removed. The hand craftings of the stone masons on Indian temples still touches our souls because we can imagine the hand of the craftsman as he creates. It is still human. The extrusions of steel are far harder to feel in the soul. And so Westerns jump and pay their $$ for “hand crafted” stuff, where we don’t understand the value of them because primary causality is ever present in our third world lives.

And the lack of it causes changes in us, physiologically and psychologically. We cannot feel things in the same way and we lose our intrinsic understanding of nature and our position within it.

Anyway, I’ve spent hours and hours (I’ve been in this country 7 years!) thinking about these things and I feel the same frustration that you do. Unfortunately, India is moving ahead in the same manner without thought. And it makes me question and be skeptical of what “ahead” really means!

That make a lot of sense to me. With her permission, I put it here so that perhaps someone else can read it and understand what causes the inexplicable empty feeling deep down inside…

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Today I completed my first research paper ever. How I wish it were good enough to be published in some journal! Maybe I can make it publish-worthy if I improve it a bit. The title is “An Analysis of the Effect of Masked Crossover and Non-coding Segments on the Performance of a Genetic Algorithm” I could not think of anything shorter, I swear! The results of the analysis are not too hot, and the experiment produced mediocre results, not the kind of startlingly good results I expected.

Check out the time of this post..Just in time to say that I completed the paper today, instead of yesterday! I will sleep tonight, without setting an wake-up alarm.

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I presented the evolutionary computation project in class yesterday. The last 6 days were the hardest days of my life, even harder than the bad week I had last semester. I managed to complete the project after 6 days of continuous programming. I did not leave my house for three days. Sad part is, the results were unlike those expected, and the measures I adopted to improve performance ended up worsening it. I could not complete the research paper which was due yesterday, so I have had to work on it too. I slept for 6 hours after the presentation, and now I feel alive.

I was grading some homeoworks in the morning today, and there was Tchaikovsky playing in the background. My mood was not too good, and everything seemed oppresive. Suddenly the String Serenade - Waltz started playing, and I was so captivated by it. Suddenly, in a moment, as I closed my eyes, the weight of my existence was taken off my shoulders, and I could see the value of being alive. I cannot come close to defining how I felt, the rush of blood, the goose pimples! It has been some time since music had this effect on me. It reset me to my old self. Three cheers to Life!

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instead of having a masked crossover where the ith bit is changed depending on the mask, why not have a masked corssover wherein the mask decides legal positions where 1 or 2 or x point crossover can occur? then, crossover cannot occur at the masked out bits.

talk to dr.wu

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Alealum, Malean, Maliyad, mopla and mallealle are all alternate names of Malayalam, according to this Ethnologue Report!!

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I have created a community . Please DO NOT rush. Everybody gets to be a member Articles, Poems, Links related to / from Kerala are welcome at the community.

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I am one step closer to realising an online personality of my own.

I got myself a bot. You can talk to him here, yeah, I have trained him just a little bit, so you can find out stuff like my favourite book, movie etc… I will train him a lot later perhaps, after the semester is over.

I got to know about these bots from the community on LiveJournal.

Chat away, leave me some conversations I can use to train my bot later!! I can do this on boring summer days.

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Third consecutive night of C programming, the report is due monday. Hope I finish it by then.

I talked to her on the phone today, she had this to say -

“You know, the reason why you cant write poems anymore is because you have lost touch with your world. You are just stuck on the internet. You have changed a lot, where is that nature-lover and where is the present you!, compulsively checking mail, and reading the LJ friends page. You keep reading what others have to say, and have done, no wonder you cant think of anything original to say. I hate this.”

Some time ago, I had written, “I am afraid this place is changing me, and that if I stay here long enough I will change enough to no longer be the person loved by the people I love.” or something to that effect.

She is right. I decided not to check my mail and my LJ friends page only twice daily. I need to get a life.

Maybe thats why I am unhappy. No amount of surfing can compensate for the lack of friends, and an active social life, and being close to nature. I hate America for the way even nature is commoditized. My environs, near home, and at school are carefully manicured, and the landscaping is artificial too. Not a tree or shrub out of place, or out of shape. I was amazed to see pine trees (lots of them) in a warm place like Florida. Later, a friend told me that Brad, a supervisor at the UCF Physical Plant, told him that all those pine trees dont belong to Florida, they were artificial transplanted here. Nature, as I see it, is free of artificiality, free of human interference. Seeing a rabbit or a mongoose at the zoo is not the same as seeing them in the wild.

The first time I went to Connecticut (a week after I came to the US), I told my cousin that America is very beautiful. He lives in a very beautiful community, surrounded by woods and lakes. He had this to say “Oh, I lost that feeling long ago, the day I went to office, and saw that the whole scenery had been changed over a week, by some landscaper, and we had a new pond too. Now, when I see a beautiful place here, I start wondering whether its natural or artificial.” Any one who has visited Orlando would have seen rows of palm trees by the roads, especially at places like Universal Studios. The palms are invariably supported by three or four wooden supports which prop it up vertically. Go to the same place after a couple of months and the palms might be missing, they might have been transplanted at someone’s convenience.

I will also never forget how cheated I felt when I found out that the beautiful plants in my advisor’s office turned out to be made of plastic.

I also generate PHENOMENAL amounts of trash after coming here. Everything comes covered in plastic, or paper, and nothing gets reused. I remember my grandmother, who used to collect Polythene bags, and plastic milk bags for using them later, or selling them by the kilo to the “kuppi-thakaram-paper” fellow who used to sell it to the recyclers.

Instead of finding efficient methods of disposing trash, I think the environmental engineers, and the citizens at large should try and find ways of using less material. I bought a pen and a box of floppies at the UCF bookstore, and the lady handed me a plastic bag! What makes people so thoughtlessly wasteful? I really dont know. Though the per-capita trash generation is India is so low, India is a lot dirtier than the US, which is surprising too, in a way.

So, where was I? Ah, yes, I hope I dont get withdrawal symptoms from not using the internet as much as I do now.

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