But I’m still crazy

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.

After my previous mishap, I managed to get Ubuntu installed. The customizability (is that a word?) of it is amazing, I love it. The only thing I miss is iTunes, and I’m just in the middle of installing SongBird right now which should fill that need. All in all, epic.

Monsoon is crazy. Was out in the rain for 10 seconds and got drenched.

Finished with SongBird. Frankly, it looks terrible. Need to get some music before I can justify my opinion, but things aren’t looking good.

How sad. While attempting to install Ubuntu, I managed to completely wipe (or possible destroy) my hard drive. It now believes that it is 5.8GB in size, and has no OS. I really wish I had backed up watbot (the most complicated program I have written to date). I’m currently downloading Ubuntu again on Nayantara’s computer, hoping the disk drive works so that I can bring my laptop back to life.

Goodbye, watbot.

Farhan told me to write a 4chan bot. I think he may have been joking, but I took his advice and started on it. Sadly the only language that I am good at is Visual Basic, so I’m writing it in that. Still reading The Art of Computer Programming, which is awesome.

Currently the program does the following:

• Loads page 1 of /b/ and then gets the number of every thread.
• Gets the first post of every thread and lets you view them by clicking one of the thread numbers in a listbox (there’s probably a better way to do this but I haven’t found it/ am too lazy to do it).
• Lets you search all of the loaded posts.
• Option to download all images in the first post of each thread.
• Refreshes its post database every 60 seconds.
• Displays number of replies to thread.
• Lets you post in whichever thread you choose.
• Has a button which enables the “bot” which basicaly just searches the first posts of the threads for any of a set of copypastas which I have saved within the program. It then responds to these threads with “wat”.

I know searching for something and then posting “wat” isn’t exactly a bot, but this is the basics. I’m going to try to make it as intelligent as I can in Visual Basic. Hopefully when I go to university I’ll learn how to do proper things, and then just write the ultimate fail program

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 :).

So, I got Farhan to post in 4chan today. He posted a thread about Lain’s 10th anniversary. It all seemed okay, until suddenly out of nowhere:

“who is forhuh menan?”

Coincidence? Yes. Scary? Yes. The thread then went on to talk about Farhan. Farhan was scared. I posted a bit, but predictably, nobody believed that it was me.

It turns out that they had all known about him from over a year ago, when he had his old blog, canyouhearme.  Scary. They seem to think of him as something of an expert on Lain, or at least as someone who understands lain. Some quotes that I’d like to save:

“he some england hacke who actuly undersans lain an he is plan to take over shibuya crossin screen an put lain on like in anime he got fren in jap cos they liv ner his hus he clos his blog tho”

First scary thing.

“He’s talking about DisInformaticians or whatever. It was on here before, remember? We used it in TigRai?”

Showed that it had been here before.

“he is the one who is computer sciencest, not hake he doesn’t know how to do that! but he could probably work it out. he is just a person ignore it we must make planes to meet up and have sex lain”

“You fucking liar. His CanYouHearMe WordPress has been down for about a year.“

This means it’s been known for a long, long time… scary.

“your the dumb one its disinformatics.com/blog/tag/serial-experiments-lain/

what kind of fucking lain watcher are you you dont even know that

fuck you”

Is he some sort of expert? I don’t really understand what’s going on.

“Because he’s FM, the Great Explainer…”

“Ahhhm let me see there, oh yeah, #lain I.R.C. room, and mailing lists, and google, and friends in amine clubs… … …….. your not very good at this”

Farhan didn’t believe me when I said it was the #lain IRC. Told you so.

“i heard F was going to an hero becaus his grammy was a bitch but then he realised that was dumb so he became really good at math and computer ICT IT studies..”

“no i heard his mom took all his computers awayand he had to have a brain surgery because he was born in a mental instertution”

“thats a lie he always uses capital letters hav u even LOOKED AT HIS BLOG U LAIR”

“You guys aren’t so smart in your brains now are you. The only thing as good as LAIN is DISINFORMATICS and DISINFORMATICS.COM/LAIN.HTML (if that dosent work try LAIN.HTM and LAIN.XHTML becus i know that F likes XHTML becus its better becus he likes it)

F is gon to CAMBRIDGE or EMPERIAL COLLEGE and he is getting a DOUBLE STARRED FIRST in COMPUTER SCIENCES and MATH. He is NOT A NERD”

“don’t EVER comper mike sandy to F. tehy say anonymos is not your personel army.. … … becos it belongs to F.”

“No, did you see his post? He thought protestfags were part of Anon.”

The post being referred to was deleted shortly after being made. This means that someone has his blog on their RSS. Famous Farhan is Famous.

All I can say is: wow.

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.