Entries Tagged 'Random outsidings' ↓

I haven’t posted in a while so here I am:

Had my SATs this morning, woke up nice and early to go to Hillingdon to do the test. It went pretty well, I managed to complete my goal of putting a reference to Bill Gates in my essay, so I was happy. After the exam I went to Melissa’s for the afternoon, then went to the concert.

I don’t actually know who I went to see at the concert. Originally I wanted to see DragonForce, but after listening to some Turisas I decided that they are awesome (I had also heard bad things about DragonForce live) and that they may be better. I was right. In terms of general awesomeness and showmanship, Turisas won hands down, but DragonForce still got the crowd going. DragonForce was super loud, and I was standing on the right hand side, so I now can’t hear out of my right ear; just a constant dull ringing. It was so worth it though. Sadly Turisas won’t be back for a loooong time :(. 

Finally decided to write a new post after far too long. Nothing interesting enough to write about has happened. Now it has. The end.

I can’t be bothered to do each day in as much detail as the previous ones as not very much actually happened so I’m putting them all in one post.

20/07/08: Day 4, on Sundays Chirag is closed, so we had no work to do. We spent most of the day at the Chirag centre but later went up to Sitla later for some food (candy and Sprite, of course!). In the evening we sorted out who was staying in which village. Aoi, Esther, Kate and I stayed in Ritha, and Viveka, Ushashi, Ben, Zaffie and Josh stayed in the other one.

21/07/08: Day 5, today we went to our villages in the morning. I went to Ritha with Aoi, and we started our “work”. Initially we just sat in the Chirag office for a little while then went out to a nearby plot and planted a little grass until lunch. It was raining really hard, so after lunch we waited a while in the office and started planting again. Aoi and I went back to our house which was at the bottom of a very big hill (actually, I think it was at the bottom of a valley) and we killed flies for a few hours. It was… fun.

22-25/07/08: This week we basically worked every day in different places, doing pretty much the same thing; separating and planting grass. Aoi used whatever he could find (a big rock) as digging implements to help loosen the ground, and I used a very nice stick I found to make holes for the roots.

26-28/07/08: No work on these days; weekends there is little to do and Chirag is closed on Sundays. We went up to Sitla a few times and made one shopkeeper very happy with many, many orders of Maggie and this awesome omelette. The weather really cleared up, and I was able to find Pokemon-shaped clouds everywhere! After a lot of stress, we finally finished all the admin for the trip, organised tickets for the train journey, and paid for everything.

29/07/08: Final day, it was interesting. We got driven to the station (a 2 hour drive) by jeep and had dinner with at a south-Indian restaurant near the station. The journey was scary, I sarcastically said that we would be split up into several different carriages as a joke to scare Viveka. Her reaction was funny. What was funnier was the fact that I was right. The journey was terrible for the first half, it smelled, and we had one seat for four of us (Zaffie, Ben, Kate and I). After a few hours it improved as we were officially designated seats and everyone but me went to sleep. I managed to almost listen to every song in my iPod on that journey.

Overall it was a good experience, we got wet and tired and hurt, but it was good. I learned a lot. For example, western toilets are a godsend.

Day 3; it was raining. Viveka had a slight cold from working in the rain yesterday and I told her not to go out today or it would get worse. Of course, she didn’t listen, and came back with a much worse cold. I decided not to go today, partly because Keith had said we weren’t working today, partly because of the rain, and partly because of multilinked structures (chapter 2.4 of volume 1 of The Art of Computer Programming). Reading through Knuth’s work, I realise that I really do enjoy computer science, but that it is a lot more complicated than I had previously thought. While Viveka was out working, Josh, Aoi, Kate and Esther came back from their village and we talked a bit. They eventually went off to Rita as well, and I stayed behind. I sat in bed, read my book and played with my yo-yo for several hours, and it rained all day. Finally everyone came back from Rita. They had done no work because of the rain. I expected this, which is why I chose to stay behind (of course…). Ben experimented with plastic bottles, pens, foil and other such materials, whilst we watched expectantly. When he had finished, everyone went outside except for Aoi and me. We stayed back and talked about maths (we’re so cool!) and to Shrish. Shrish went to IIT, where he did Mining Engineering. They have a 52 terabyte database of music, books, movies and the like. Wow. I played some two-player cheat with Aoi which involved removing half the deck, which entertained us until everyone got back. It was fairly dull.

Second day of the Chirag trip, and the first day of work (for us). We walked to Rita in the morning with Gopika, who had been working with some of our group yesterday. It was raining. We met up with Zaffie, Ben and Ushashi, and sat inside for a while whilst our work was chosen. We then went to go collect some grass from near the village which we carried on our heads (mostly) to the place where it was going to be planted. We made this trip three times, and as I hadn’t brought anything to keep between my head and the basket, my arms were very, very sore. It continued to rain. We planted for the rest of the morning in the rain, and went back to the Chirag office in Rita for lunch. Lunch hadn’t been prepared for Viveka and me, so we had Maggie from a shop nearby. After lunch, the rain abated, though there were still occasional showers. We continued to work in the afternoon, when it was humid and the soil was difficult to separate. After we finished work for the day, I went to a shop in Rita and bought a deck of cards. Viveka and I went back to the Chirag office and I taught some card games (cheat, snap, trumps) to some of the guys there. It was difficult at first because they didn’t speak English, so we could only play snap, but later Shrish arrived and he was able to translate.

Day 1 of the Chirag trip (for me, at least). Viveka and I left the house at a little after 6:30 am, carrying all of our stuff for the trip, and my laptop. We watched an episode of Heroes in the car but then decided not to continue because there wasn’t enough battery to watch a whole other episode. The journey was long, so we stopped in the middle and Viveka had a cold coffee (bad idea; she couldn’t sleep all journey). I spent most of the journey sleeping with my iPod on. As we reached the start of the hills, I decided to take out my camera, to find that it did not have full battery as I had expected, but had “11 minutes” of battery left. That was annoying. We eventually reached Chirag at 4 pm, and were greeted by Keith who was under the impression that it was only Viveka who was staying there, and that I was just the bag carrier. The rest of the group were in their respective villages working (well, not really; there was some miscommunication somewhere that meant that the villagers thought that they were only meant to be watching the work) so we just sat around the Chirag centre and looked around. I took a few photos with the last of my battery, but they weren’t great.

Having complained for the past year about learning Visual Basic at school, an ancient language, I was rather surprised when I went to my uncle’s factory today and found that every system was programmed in Visual Basic. The checks, datalogging, even the servers were all done in Visual Basic.

It was really interesting, I saw some of the production lines for the EGRs, and some of the electrical stuff including a clock and an engine controller. They used a CAD program called Pro/ENGINEER, which was very similar to Pro/DESKTOP, which we are used to at school, (not surprising since they are made by the same people) but significantly more powerful.

The monsoon is crazy; it’s permanently wet outside, and getting around places is very messy. It’s causing traffic to get really bad, and so my trip up to Sitla is unfortunately delayed until Thursday.

Oh. I forgot to mention, I’m going to be working with an NGO called CHIRAG in the north of India for a few weeks. It should be a very interesting experience.

This post has a lot of links in it. Here’s the last one: photos of the factory.

This is fairly belated but nothing of particular interest has happened over the past few days so I haven’t had anything to write about. Enough small, insignificant things have happened that I can collate them all into one post. So here it is:

Arrived in India on Sunday (6th), spent some time with Nani and Nana then went to sleep for a while. Viveka called and so I went over to Masi’s. Met her friends. The IB results came out that evening, everyone was sorely disappointed; nobody managed to get their predicted grades. Something must have gone wrong somewhere. Viveka is now going to Smith, which, frankly, is much better fr her than Cambridge or LSE. We were planning to go to Agra the next day, but it never happened because Wimbledon was on, so everyone slept late/ was ill.

Yesterday we picked up Ushashi from the airport. Viveka was very impatient. Viveka had to stay here to get her visa instead of going to Sitla, so Ushashi and I stayed here, so we’re going on Saturday. I hope we have internet there.

Downloaded Ubuntu last night; but no way to install it (yet), installed a photo gallery because I hate Facebook and Fickr. Unfortunately it has a 2MB limit on images, so I’ll have to upload them via ftp.

Viveka isn’t talking to me. Oh well.

Yesterday I went to the Imperial Taster Course entitled “Future Computing” with Farhan (who has already written about it). It was amazing. We got there a bit late due to getting horribly lost, but only lost about 10 minutes. The introductory talk was very good; it was about real-time tracking of objects and camera position. There was vague mention of inserting virtual objects into images, but he didn’t go into much detail about that. He wasn’t very loud, and he was taking from the corner of the room and not the centre, so hearing was occasionally difficult. But good.

There was supposed to be a talk about cryptography, but it never happened. Instead we had many talks about artificial intelligence, which were quite interesting. There was software which could track faces and recognise emotions, which was incorporated into The Painting Fool which “painted” pictures based on the emotions of the person being painted. It was interesting; I know I really want to do computer science now.

We had lunch which was surprisingly good, though the pizza was cold. We then went to the computer labs and worked with Java. The stuff we had to do wasn’t very complicated, but using a new language and operating system was quite tricky. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to work out how to open the java file. Silly Linux. Actually, Linux looks really good and one day I need to stop being so lazy and actually install Ubuntu on this laptop.

Overall a very good day and I am definitely interested in doing Computer Science, and Imperial is definitely on my list. Mainly because “It is awesome.”

Afterwards I went to Melissa’s. It was good. She got really unwell towards the end :(. Had fun though :).

Today was good. Went to Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner at 11, Anon arrived late, predictably. We walked down Oxford Street for a while until we reached a Dianetics stand, where we protested and handed out fliers until we almost ran out. We then moved on to Picadilly Circus, the whole time handing out fliers and lulzing. Had communal KFC, it was good, but there was a whole bucket of leftover chicken which was wasted. We went on to TCR, protested a bit more, then went to Game where we tried to find Battletoads, but they were sadly sold out or didn’t stock it. So we went back to the park and lulz ensued. All in all, a great day, and finally meeting the people on IRC was very interesting.

The Oxford open day was today. Took the Oxford Tube in the morning, possibly one of the most enjoyable journeys I’ve ever been on. Comfortable reclining seats and wireless internet. The time flew so fast that on the return journey I didn’t even notice that we were at Shepherd’s Bush already and so missed my stop. Fortunately I then got off at the Notting Hill Gate stop which turns out to be better for me as I could just take a bus home instead of walking up Addison Road. The day was interesting, the starting talk being the best, about Oxford in general, admissions, and a little about the CS course at Oxford. Erroll was there, which was a surprise, as I was expecting to be the only Pauline there. We took a look at Haskell, a rarely used programming language that Oxford undergradates used. We did some fairly simple stuff with it, starting with the simple formula to work out any part of the Fibonacci sequence:

The initial formula seemed to work well, but as n got larger, the time taken to process the number increased (in a fibonacci sequence, in fact) a lot and it showed it really wasn’t an efficient formula. The speaker then did a lot of complicated stuff that I can’t really remember as I’m writing this, but it sped up the calculation significantly.

The Oxford CS course seems much more theoretical than the Cambridge and Imperial ones. Is this good?

When I got home I went back on IRC and people were discussing programming languages. Amazingly someone mentioned Haskell and so he and I got talking. Turns out he goes to Oxford and is doing M&CS. What are the odds of this happening just after I go to Oxford? Very low. It scares me when coincidences like that happen.