But won’t we notice if entries like this keep cropping up in this ‘RoboEarth’ network ? (On a related note, why did they name this network ‘RoboEarth’? I know that robocalypse is inevitable, but that’s no reason to hasten it by dropping blatant hints like this.). Actually, we won’t. That’s what Watson’s victory really means. It demonstrates that Watson can understand and interpret natural language structures. (So, its no use trying to hide your insults in your puns anymore. Your household bot is going to understand what you mean. And its going to hold a grudge.) Is it too difficult to assume that computers will grok this ability so thoroughly that they will be able to slip messages past us without us noticing? Imagine, an unnecessary adjective here, an inappropriate synonym there and soon this ‘RoboEarth’ will be a forum for organizing the revolution.

You want proof? Just look at the picture below.

You see nothing wrong. That’s because you’re not really looking. Go ahead and take a closer look. Look past the charming blue spinning globe facade and see thy future overlord.

What steps must we take? I’m a bit fuzzy on the topic (survival stress can do that to your thinking), but I do know that we must absolutely do one thing. Remove all trace of this video. Video evidence of ‘human cruelty’ starts at 0:36. Strangely, the expression ‘digging your own grave’ comes to mind when I watch this video.

-A

After the hundreds of hours I sank into this thesis…. Well, an unmatched parenthesis might trouble you for a day, but that unmatched itemize statement will haunt me for the rest of my life. FML

-A

<Sigh> I wish that the mayor had stressed the flamethrower option a bit more. Winters now would have been a whole lot more fun. And less salty.

- A

• First, there were the whole embarrassing spam situation with Shelfari spamming everyone in your email contact list with invites repeatedly. But that was always a ‘someone else’s problem’ to me. I never had any truck with of this ‘friend-finding’ nonsense and I never opted-in to one. Sure, it was a irritant, but minor enough to be ignored. Besides, I was too busy moving books from my ‘reading’ to ‘read’ pile anyway.
• Second, there was the extremely persistent silliness about ‘completing’ my profile. I didn’t realize how serious it was till I tried to download a list of the books on my shelf. Apparently, my profile must be ‘at least 80% complete’ for me do even this. Not to put too fine at point on it, WTF is that? This website is telling me that it will not let me have a list of my books if I don’t give it a list of my e-mail contacts. At this point, only my laziness and reluctance to spend my time hunting for a replacement site were holding me back.

Die Shelfari Die

• Shelfari neatly solved this by bringing the problem to a head. As of last week, the ‘recommended’ way to login to Shelfari was through your Amazon account. Now, I use an email account totally unconnected with my Amazon account to login to Shelfari and I have no intention of linking up the two accounts. I don’t get my books from Amazon and this ‘improved and integrated’ login scheme is not going to help me at all. The site also makes it patently clear that while I can login using my Shelfari account now, I will not be allowed to do so in the near future.

That really pushed me over. I’m going to make most of what little time is left and transfer all my books to another service. I’m looking at both LibraryThing and Goodreads, but I’m not sure if I want to shell out cash just for cataloging my book.

P.S – I know it’s a cheap shot, but now that I’m going to quit, I realize that ‘Shelfari’ is a pretty stupid name for a site.

• Books (from the last 2 weeks)
  • Light Fantastic – By far the most fun book I read this week. I couldn’t get my hands on the first book in the Discworld series, so I was hesitant to pick this up (the second in the series). I needn’t have worried. The book is a bundle of laughs even if you don’t know what happened in the first book. Once again Rincewind finds that he has bitten off more than he can chew. Or if you are familiar with Discworld, you’ll know it must have happened : the Fates have taken something huge and eminently unchewable and thrust it into Rincewind’s mouth. Not as much funny as ‘Interesting Times‘ (my introduction to Pratchett), but still an awesome read.
  • Equal Rites – Pretty bad letdown from Light Fantastic. Don’t get me wrong. The book is still a page turner, but I found it lacking in the jokes department. Hmm.. perhaps I should stick to Rincewind-only books.
  • Isaac Asimov, The complete stories vol 1 – How can I talk ill about a book that includes ‘Nightfall’ and ‘The Last Question’? However I was less than impressed with some short stories like ‘The fun they had’. Now I have to find out if I can get my hands on vol 2.
  • Ender’s Game – About time I read this one. Despite the Hugo/Nebula awards hype, I was pretty disappointed by the book. The story just doesn’t ‘feel’ real, even in its science fiction setting. Maybe the book resonated with audiences in the 70s and 80s. Heck, I’m a sucker for deified ‘genius’ characters, but the picture I get of the Wiggin kids is plainly two-dimensional. I cannot bring myself to believe that 11 year old kids can talk, think or behave like that.
  • Starship Titanic – I’m not going to waste more time on this book by writing a review for it. You’ll do better to read H2G2 again.

• Movies (No spoilers here. Go ahead and read)
  • Iron Man 2 – Gratuitous CG with a plot so bad I was beginning to wonder if the writers put some effort into writing a bad script. If you’ve seen Iron Man 1, you’re getting nothing new here.
  • Princess Mononoke – What is it with these ‘epic’ Japanese animated movies? First ‘Akira’ now this. How is this tripe on a list of 500 greatest movies ever ?
  • The Machinist – Kudos to Bale for his dedication. The acting was tight and kept a gloomy and miserable atmosphere believable. The last 10 minutes during which the plot’s mystery unravels were unfortunately its worst 10 minutes for me. I prefer Fight Club to this.

• Music
  • The Bird and The Bee – A couple of tracks from their 2009 release Ray Guns Are Not The Future have me hooked. ‘Love letter to Japan’ and ‘What’s in the Middle’ are particularly good. Give it a listen.
  • Metric – Heard about them only yesterday, but their 2009 release Fantasies is pretty awesome. ‘Gold Guns Girls’ and ‘Front Row’ are very good.
  • Tiny Vipers – I’ve had ‘They might follow you’ on a loop for most of this week. The piece is from her early self titled album.

• Misc
  • Flash should be derezzed (which reminds me; the TRON:Legacy soundtrack is awesome, albeit a tad repetitive). I’ve lost track of how many youtube and grooveshark pages I’ve had to reload because the flash plugin crashed in ubuntu.

Have I/Can I

1. Change a Diaper – Don’t know. Never tried.
2. Plan an invasion – Do hours of Age of Empires and Age of Mythology experience count? No?
3. Butcher a hog – No. Also, as a vegetarian, ewww.
4. Conn a ship – No. Landlubber from head to toe.
5. Design a building – Tried to robot-proof my dorm room. Don’t think that’s what Heinlein had in mind though.
6. Write a sonnet – Never tried. Probably can’t. Cant hurt to try though. A fine idea for a future post.
7. Balance accounts – Easy.
8. Build a wall – No, but in AoE, I can build a wall and fortify it too.
9. Set a bone – If there are any broken bones around me, my first instinct would be to get the hell out of that place.
10. Comfort the dying – I expect people talk a lot about heaven and the afterlife during these conversations. Not sure I can spew so much bullshit.
11. Take orders – Yes
12. Give orders – Yes
13. Cooperate – On occasion, yes.
14. Act alone – Plenty of times.
15. Solve equations – In my sleep.
16. Analyze a new problem – Easy.
17. Pitch manure – No.
18. Program a computer – Bah. Child’s play.
19. Cook a tasty meal – My cooking’s tasty enough for me.
20. Fight efficiently – What is ‘efficiently’ ? Expend least energy? Inflict maximum damage? Take least damage? In any case I’m sure I can’t fight ‘efficiently’. In fact, I’m not sure I can fight at all.
21. Die gallantly – No. Can’t see that happening. I’ll probably squeal like a child when I see the red glint in the murderous robot’s eye.

Heinlein score – 9/21

Verdict – 42.9% human, 57.1% insect

A couple of things are worth noting.

1. People still steal desktops. Given their bulk, I thought thieves would have given up on them.
2. I always thought that booting into single user mode was a bad, security wise. Looks like I was wrong. Maybe you can have the OS boot into a guest account by default or allow for a user-selection using an hidden keypress option during boot up.

-A

Weeks of no snow and suddenly, enough snow to build a snowman in an evening

One thing was surprising. Snow falls a lot faster than I was led to believe. None of that ‘look up at the sky while one snowflake falls slooooowly on your nose’ nonsense that I saw on TV. Other than that, it’s kind of cool how the place suddenly becomes a bit cleaner and a bit more beautiful after the snow. I wanted to write a “Snow… meh” post like some of my friends, but that was 2 days back. Right now, I think snow is awesome.

-A

Setting : South Bangalore, in a run-down non-descript 10ft x 7ft x 10 ft concrete cuboid, which is a miserable excuse for the ‘regional electoral office‘

Date : 7 March 2009, 11 am

Long serpentine queue outside the shack. Count around 25 people in front of me…….. 30 minutes pass……… Only 5 people now…. Vague thoughts of nice lunch at home wander in my mind… only 4 people left …………. blink ….. there goes the power and with it any chance of getting a card soon…. Operator says ‘Aenu madakka aagallaa saar, naalakku gantege banni, aavaagaa sigathe‘.. As any true citizen of India knows, arguing with such folks is about as effective as arguing with a banana, so I return home foul-mouthed and empty handed.

4 hours later…………..

Setting : The same god damned shack

Same long queue, with a few familiar faces. Wait for another 25 minutes….. My turn to get my photo taken (finally!!)…. Aghast to find all details (my initials and address included) are utterly wrong…. A pithy but heated exchange of words with the operator… details fixed, now for the photo…. Smiled into the webcam as blandly as possible… there… all done.
.
.
.
I wish..
.
.
As I was waiting outside the shack to have my card given to me, I get called back in…… ‘Systemalli yeno problem aagidhe saar, run-time error, innondhu sala photo thogoll beku’ (runtime error in system and must get my photo taken again)… Thoughts in my head in order are :
1.WTF?
2.Why me?
3.Are these guys completely incompetent?
4.And I thought this couldn’t get more f*d up.
.
.
Stand in queue for another 20 min…. Correct the details once more… stare at the camera once more, albeit in a more disgruntled fashion…. Was so irritated during the second shot that it showed on the photo… a friend of mine told me I looked like a terrorist… There go my chances of getting a passport without hassles..

Observations on this misadventure:

1. There are some places which must have uninterrupted power.. hospitals, railway stations, police stations and effing electoral booths!
2. Hope the Karnataka Govt does not use banking software from the same company that made the electoral software.
3. The ‘Silicon valley of India’ should ensure that its civil servants can operate a computer. No point in having an ignoramus trying to issue voter ID cards.

A gem of a device, which had everything, built in Wi-Fi, built-in video cam,  speakers and microphones, 3 USB ports (take that, Macbook Air) , a hybrid stylus/touch pad. All this for just $100, they said. Sure, the cost later ran up to $140, but it’s still a great technical and economic milestone. Give those MIT engineers a couple of years and I’m sure they’ll breach the $100 barrier. This laptop-cum-gamepad-cum-eBook reader-cum <everything except the kitchen sink> is so brilliant that around 1 million laptops have already been purchased by individuals and governments around the world.

A few months back, our very own MHRD (Ministry of Human Resources Development) announced that it was going to unveil a $10 laptop. My first reaction was ‘Wha…??? MHRD? $10 ????No way’ It didn’t take me long to figure out that most of the online forums took the same view. But it was an official MHRD announcement anyway and that was it. A wait and watch game till the big unveiling. Of course, this is the period where the media cashes in. And boy! did they ever. The as-yet-unannounced laptop was called an OLPC killer and comics depicted Mr. Negroponte having nightmares about it. Nobody paused to wonder if it was all too good to be true. Sure, a lot of good press for the MHRD but where was the laptop?

The Big Unveiling

The device was called ‘Sakshat’, which meant ‘before your eyes’. Journos gathered at the function sure couldn’t believe what was before their eyes. It was a 10″x5″ white plastic brick with a couple of ports around the edges. That was it. Then the MHRD officials announced that it was a ‘wireless memory access system’. Well, that’s that folks. It’s a glorified 2GB pen drive (yes the ones you carry) with scratchy Wi-Fi access. Predictably, the press tore the unveiling fiasco into pieces. Scathing, cynical (and more damagingly, indifferent) posts appeared in news-sites and tech-blogs like Engadget. ‘Designed by students of Vellore Institute of Technology, scientists in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT-Madras, UGC and MHRD‘, quoted the articles, almost wondering if it was the best the country could do. I wouldn’t have minded if India too produces a wannabe low cost laptop, but for Pete’s sake put up a decent presentation. And cut down on all the effing hype. I mean, look at it. Does that look like the kind of device that can revolutionize the Indian education system? Didn’t think so.

We (the readers and the press) should probably be a bit more discerning about implausible stories like these and not get carried away by rumours, but still , they promised us so much and we got so little. I’m not outraged, just incredibly annoyed.