Rob in Bangalore (& Elsewhere)

Forget every time you've been told that you don't have an accent

2011-06-20T13:55:00.003Z

I was re-remembering today an observation: Indians talk with an Indian accent, but from their perspective, you talk with a really ridiculous American accent! Sure, some people here have American family or have themselves spent a lot of time in American or watch Friends and so they think you sound like Chandler or whatever, but that's sure not everybody, and it's definitely not the guy you're trying to get your 50 cent (!!!) breakfast from. Also, while it's an overgeneralization Americans tend to be pretty comfortable with the various ways English pronunciation gets mangled from Texas to Quebec to New Hampshire to Cancun, so it's likely that the person you're talking to has an even harder time than you with their conversation partner's accent. It's just a reminder that America, and even what we usually think of as the "English-speaking world," doesn't own English.

Four years ago when I was here I worked with Nels Beckman, a recent CMU grad, and Aditya, the full time employee I'm also working with this time. Nels got there first and we tried to have a Skype conversation, and Aditya and I could.not.understand.each.other at all. Nels could understand Aditya becasue they were in the same room, and Nels and I could understand each other over the finicky Skype connection because we both speak Globalized Southern American English or whatever, but my mentor and I were hopeless - Nels almost repeated everything either one of us said for the benefit of the other. Anyway, this was all prompted by a five minute conversation I had with Aditya explaining what a "thing-a-ma-jig" is.

Bangalore World 10K

2011-06-05T14:58:00.006Z

Today I was a spectator at a race for the first time since I watched the Pittsburgh Marathon in 2009. Two friends from the lab, Ted and Sam, were running, and I decided to be a lazy bum (and a cheap bum, as I'm still in a suboptimal cash flow position while the slow gears of Indian bureaucracy get around to opening my bank account). My 10K was on Thursday, when Ted and Sam tried to get to the late registration and I showed them how to get to the starting line with a minimum of street crossings: getting familiar with the area is paying off!

I walked down to the race course at 7am and was able to cheer on the Microsofties at three different points in the race course. Ted and Sam are skinny fast track runners (if I'd run, they would have beat me by about 10 minutes), so the pack was pretty thin even after they'd passed my last cheering point around the 8K mark. I walked to the finish line, but then decided that was a zoo, so I walked back to the grand avenue. Cubbon Park's grand avenue isn't the most photogenic part of the park, but it's easily the prettiest if you ask me, and it's a great way to start the race's homestretch. I watched the race at a spot a few meters before the point where this photo was taken.

So, if you ever find yourself - an American who is, to a first approximation, extroverted - in a foreign country that is, to a first approximation, English speaking, and you find yourself watching a 10K, I strongly suggest you scream your voice out cheering on the runners. Because, hey, sometimes it's fun to spend a Sunday playing to stereotypes, and I the "we are loud and possibly crazy, but usually not in a scary way" is a stereotype of Americans that I'm generally happy to encourage. My spot was where I'd bother a minimal number of the quietly watching Indians, and I just yelled and clapped and cheered for about 20 minutes until my voice gave out completely. It was a ton of fun, and the runners really responded positively to the possibly crazy white guy who was soaked in sweat from the effort of jumping around and cheering. (I'm a sweaty man!) I got a great reaction for the running crowd: lots of cheers back, lots of people going from a walk to a run, dozens and dozens of high fives, and a half dozen requests for me to join the race.

As I walked home, I passed the corporate charity runners, who started later and were in big packs. Basically, the Bangalore World 10K is a 10K race followed by a 10K parade. Weird.

Sunday afternoon I was going to work on a tech report for a collaboration with CMU folks, but I cooked (man, I need to get some spices. lentils without spices are mad boring) and watched TV shows on the internet instead. Oops!

Hike on a hot day!

2011-05-29T12:31:00.006Z

Did a ton of walking today, and took some pictures too; will probably try to integrate the pictures into a project later on.

Had my my first moment of feeling on-edge and vulnerable; having drained my pantry from the previous shopping trip, I needed to convert some money (America-style) into money (India-style) in order to eat! However, once I got to MG road, the main currency exchange places were all closed for Sunday. I was really planning to head back and try to rustle up something to survive on from the snack kitchens at Microsoft or something,* but then I passed a handbag shop (!) that did exchanges, and traded money. Then I went to Empire Hotel, a nearby Indian place that I remembered from last visit, and ate delicious food ravenously.

On the way back, I was walking down Infantry Road and realized I was pretty confident that that road leading off to the right was a shortcut (I did not have my GPS). I was very excited when I was right; I really feel like I'm getting a feel for the "neighborhood." I have no aspirations to do any sort of "pac tom" project, but I'd informally just like to know where I am and how to get home from anywhere within a three or four mile radius of my apartment, which would be a fair portion of Bangalore and would probably put me ahead of most residents and many autorickshaw drivers. I think I'm well on the way there.

By the way, my cousin is currently in Uganda, and has a blog of his own. He posted a video with the comment "the traffic is insane." This has maybe made me just a little bit competitive, so expect some crazy traffic videos next week. Until then I leave you with these pictures from last time.

Windsor Manor Road Bridge Accident

* In reality, I probably would have just broken down and tried to use a credit card; my cards should presumably work here, but in case "oh hi, I'm in bangalore" trips an alarm and the card is denied, I've been avoiding this when I don't have a backup of paying in cash.

Saturday run, Saturday walk

2011-05-28T12:21:00.003Z

Failed to do any running this week, so this morning I got up early and ran for a bit around Cubbon Park, and then after piddling around the office for a bit, took the scenic route home from work today; I'll have to do that again with a camera to actually give people a sense of the place.

My priority for tomorrow is to walk down to MG road and try to trade some U.S. dollars for some rupees so I can re-stock my kitchen. It is an inevitable complication of working in a foreign country that you always start out with an inconveniently small amount of foreign currency and end up with an inconveniently large amount of the same.

Happy Memorial Day!

2 Runs

2011-05-23T01:23:00.003Z

Yesterday I talked about my walk, but Saturday (2 days ago) and today I went on some runs; these are likely to be more frequent.

Saturday's run was just around the block, I'm still recovering from the Pittsburgh Marathon and mostly just wanted to stretch my legs. This morning (Monday) I ran this route, which more-or-less went around the cricket stadium. I had plans to run the length of Cubbon Road and back, but those plans were not to be: in the confusion of construction in Minsk Square, I took Queen's Road towards MG Road instead of Cubbon, and then overshot MG Road, circled the stadium, and made my way back on Infantry Road, a path I'd thought though a little bit after the walk yesterday.

Having a GPS watch was absolutely a godsend for this run: I didn't have a clear idea where I was at any point between Minsk Square and Infantry Road, but I knew whether I was more-or-less running towards or away from familiar areas.

Bangalore, Take II

2011-05-22T11:02:00.005Z

I'm back in Bangalore! I'm not planning on traveling as much as last time, but I am going to try to get to know the city better through running and walking. Right now, the only part of Bangalore where I am confident that I know where I am is on the route between my hotel and Bashyam Circle, which I walked almost daily the last time I was here, (the office is right before Bashyam Circle).

Today I tried to walk to Commercial Street and/or MG road, but kind of failed: once I got to the bus station I was confused and thought I may have gotten off track: I had not, and if I'd kept going straight I would have ended up at Kamaraj Road as I intended. Instead, I turned right at the bus station, but then needed to go one block further than I actually went in order to get to Cubbon Road. I did, however, recognize the intersection of Infantry and Central as a hazy landmark, so I may try to pass that intersection again from another direction to reinforce that.

Anyway, after I bailed and found my way back to familiar relatively-familiar Cunningham Road, I went to the new Au Bon Pain (right across the street from the McDonald's that didn't get the memo about Indian Independence Day), where I got a delicious cappuchino that cost me $0.90. If those guys had WiFi I'd probably move in! Back at the apartment I was able to reconstruct my path with high confidence.

Photos from trip

2008-12-24T14:16:00.001Z

Finally got the photos up on Picasa:

Italy

Happy Birthday To Me (or: Go West, Old Man!)

2008-12-19T23:57:00.002Z

Happy Birthday in the local time zone happy birthday to me.

I get a thirty-hour birthday this year, thanks to flying West across six time zones starting at 10:30 local time (2:30 AM eastern USA time).

More blogging on Venice flooding

2008-12-15T19:32:00.001Z

As I said before, Venice was flooded (again) in the morning, so we took a train out about 4 hours earlier than we had planned. I'm not terribly surprised, but CNN did a pretty bad job of explaining what was going on - this website gives context to the information I linked to before. I'm writing this on the train to Venice, because I actually downloaded this in the hotel room but didn't realize what I've downloaded:

Centro Maree forecasts the level day by day, summarized by tables and graphs. Here is how to read them:

* if the water level in St.Mark's basin is 65-68 cms., expect to find some water on the ground in front of St.Marks' church entrance. Important: do not think you'll see water 65 cms. high in St.Mark's square: this measure refers to the sea level.
* if the level is up to 85, expect some big puddles in St.Mark's square and in some "calli" (streets) in Venice. The middle area of St.Mark's square will be dry, as it is not perfectly flat. Wear water-proof boots!
* at 90 cms., St.Mark's square will be a lake of salty water. Some vaporettos (public boats) routes will be cancelled and alternative routes will be used. This is because they won't be able to pass under some bridges. Quite a confusion at boat stops. Lower areas in Venice can be accessed via special "walkways"
* at 110 cms, you'll hear sirens: this informs population to get ready. Most shops and warehouse at ground floors are likely to be flooded.
* from 120 cms to 140 cms, Venetians will get worried. Important: again, do not think you'll see water 120 cms. high all around in the streets: this measure refers to the sea level. Acqua alta can result in a 50 cms. water in the streets: which is not little anyway.

The point is that there is a "tide" in Venice that is about a third "regular old lunar" tide, half atmospheric effects, and some grab bag other issues like how much Antarctica's been melting this week. While we were there, the composition of the various sine waves meant that the tide was lowest at dinnertime.

If we read that chart backwards into the past (I couldn't find a "recent history of water levels" when I looked) then we get this story: when Rachel arrived at about 10:30, the water was near it's "second peak," about 100 cm - the high air pressure probably kept it lower the first day than it might otherwise have been. While she waited for me to show up in the train station, it peaked at 110/120 cm and then started going down. This, practically, meant that the plaza in front of the hotel and train station had one spot about a foot or so underwater, and that St. Mark's square was probably a foot underwater, maybe a bit more. The water went down about a foot while Rachel napped off some jet lag and by the time we took the "slow bus" (vaporetto) to St. Mark's square the square was above water, barely, and it kept getting lower while we were inside the chapel up until dinnertime. The air pressure then dropped in the evening and overnight, and that goofy siren about 8 AM was when the water passed 110cm again. When we went to get a train at 11, the water in front of the train station/hotel was back where it had been when I arrived the day before, or maybe an inch higher.

Now we're in Florence!

2008-12-15T09:38:00.003Z

Venice was just a little flooded when we got there, and got increasingly less flooded over the course of last night, so while all the streets were pretty wet, we were able to wander through the city without going through puddles. Rachel believes that we are spoiled by good mozzarella cheese in America because mozzarella cheese doesn't taste much different here.

iPhoto is acting up and I'm having trouble uploading pictures as a result. Slept late this morning, but I today it's flooded again. Found this which is interesting.

Crazy Pills

2008-12-11T15:13:00.003Z

There's something sublime about having a conversation where it is totally clear that you and someone else both think the other one is crazy. I walk into the music store that sells some electronics, maybe they have an adapter so I can plug my MacBook into the Italian output using either my American or Central European plug. The European plugs are slightly closer together and fatter, but they look superficially the same. The Mac World adapter set comes with both, and I picked up the wrong one. A lot of people at the conference have the same problem - the university only has Italian sockets, and lots of Europeans didn't realize they needed something different. Understandable.

"Que parle Englese?" (I ask in awful Italian)
"Si. Yes." (I should have noticed she did not, in fact, speak English with an Italian accent, so is probably here from somewhere else herself.)
"I need an adapter" (shows the business end of a MacBook power supply - E.U. style) "because this is European."
"Um... Italy is in Europe. That is an Italian plug."

It's not, for the record. I bought a universal American/European to Italian adapter in the Rome airport but left it stuck in the plug (arg).

"It doesn't fit in my hotel..."
"That's a problem with your hotel."

Well, sure. Most real hotels and tourist places use a compatible socket that works for both European and Italian plugs, but I'm staying in a dorm and hanging out at a university, which are not overtly tourist-friendly. So technically she's right, but clearly she has no clue what's going on. I try a different strategy:

"Okay. Are there American adapters?"
"Not within the city, maybe outside."
"Okay, thanks."

Then I walk down another block, find an electronics store, and buy a two-euro European to Italian adapter. I debated going back in and correcting her, but my inner don't-be-annoying censor won out.

To Udine (or: Validate your Tickets and Hotels) (or: Expensive Mistakes)

2008-12-10T07:24:00.005Z

I tried to collect thoughts before in the Rome airport, but those darn thoughts were not collecting. I will try to do so now.

Pittsburgh to Atlanta
The sun "rose" as a result of our taking off, which was pretty wicked - it was clearly dusk when we lifted off and then the sun was glaring in my eyes, and after a second I realized it was because we were going up. This is really cool if you can pull it off.

Atlanta
If you're flying to your home city, a seven hour layover is really preferable to a shorter layover because you can meet your family, actually leave the airport in an unhurried manner, and maybe have a meal. I went to church and then lunch with my family, and visited with the pastor (Dad's former assistant pastor and a family friend) and my AP Government teacher. Both Ms. Chambers and I can't go to the inauguration - me because I have a conference in Savannah that day, her because her oldest daughter (who I was in youth group with, eeps) is due to have a baby girl eight days later. She mentioned that her husband had gone to a wedding but she had stayed home because of the pregnancy. I resisted the temptation to mention Sarah Palin.

Atlanta to Rome
In Pittsburgh I got window exit seats on both of the Delta flights, which was good. There was a really big guy in the aisle seat next to me on the flight from Hartsfield-Jackson to Rome - he could put on a seatbelt without the seatbelt extender, but it was clearly uncomfortable for him to do so (you can't use a seatbelt extender and sit in an exit row - which is airlinespeak for "no fat people blocking the exits"). At first I was like "oh, crap, big guy," and it probably would have been uncomfortable if it hadn't been an exit row, but it was actually fine. I clearly amused one flight attendant because I was asleep two times they went by for food and it took me about thirty seconds to get my bearings and speak coherently about what I wanted or didn't want to eat/drink both times.

Rome
Had to go through security inside the airport (never understood why that worked like that). Had water in my red metal water bottle. Was told to go downstairs to pour it out and then "go through security, not line." Didn't really understand how that would work without getting yelled at at minimum, so I threw away the water bottle. Quickly realized I should have just chugged the contents, since, you know, I can drink a half quart of water if I need to.

Rome cannot decide what to call their airport, which leads to the impression they have like three airports.

Rome to Venice
This was the flight that somewhat goofy Alitalia decided to cancel and so Delta re-arranged for a later flight. Slept the whole time - woke up to pop my ears and as we were landing - the view landing in Venice on a clear day is pretty awesome, though.

Venice to Udine
The cancelled/rebooked flight meant that I lost the ticket I'd bought from Venice Mestre Station to Udine, however, after I bought the first ticket the conference organizers mentioned that taking local rail was the easiest way to do things anyway. Commuter rail has been a significant part of my life in two places - New Jersey and Bangalore. In New Jersey, you would never think to get a ticket in advance - NJ Transit is a walk up, buy your ticket, be on your way kind of deal. In Bangalore, even traveling similar distances you would never imagine not buying your ticket in advance, because the trains were usually full and because you didn't want to deal with the ticket window person who spoke a different language, and because you needed to always work under the assumption that Indians were generally benevolent but always trying to rip you off in order to simultaneously retain control of your credit cards and your sanity.

Italy is much more a New Jersey type deal - they had machines which talked English to me and sold me second class tickets to Udine on the next available Trenitalia train. Thank heavens that worked, because, Trenitalia and my credit cards had a brief falling out two weeks ago when I first tried to reserve tickets, but they appear to have made amends since.

So, I lost the equivalent of a $40 Amtrack ticket from Philadelphia to NYC and got a $10 NJ Transit ticket instead. Unfortuantely, I then got hit with a 50 euro fine because I didn't validate my ticket. Rick Steves tells me that there was a yellow box near the platform where I was supposed to do this - I guess I will have to look for where said yellow box is in Udine. Also, apparently if I had sought out the conductor immediately I could have potentially avoided the fine. So, this is a damned expensive trip to Udine.

Udine
I was planning to stay in the CISM dorms, but when I got to the place where the map said CISM was, it was dark and locked, so I was in Udine with, apparently, no hotel. Assuming the conference organizers actually reserved me a room at CISM as they claim they did, I'll probably still have to pay for the room I had reserved tonight, but I'm in a different place. And the internet doesn't work, of course, though there is supposed to be both wired and wireless the latter doesn't work my mac and the former just doesn't work at all so I won't be able to post this tonight - so that's great.

I'm pretty frustrated. Tomorrow better go better.

(Update from the future: tomorrow did go better! And we got the Best Student Paper award. I wasn't able to post this before because I didn't have internet access, but that's a rant for a different place.)

Hveragerði, Abbreviated

2008-07-15T18:42:00.000Z

I woke up Tuesday to learn that my boots were gone. I left them in the dormitory (Hotel Domus) all day monday and didn't especially glance at them more than once or twice. When I went to pick them up today they were not the same boots - a pair of size 9 sneakers had been left in place of a pair of nice size 10 boots.

So, instead of all day hiking around Hveragerði, I went to Hveragerði for about four hours - leaving a bit later and coming back a bit earlier - and still got to see most of the interesting sights. Now I'm back in Reykjavik and thinking about going to bed early...

Hike 6 - Reykjavik Parks & Gardens

2008-07-14T21:02:00.003Z

So much for taking it easy today. It didn't feel like quite so far because my foot didn't hurt. Somewhere along the line my boots started aggravating the Achilles tendon (I think) of my left foot, so that it hurt to take a step. I've been walking through it for days, but today, despite walking seven miles, was a "break" in that I haven't put on my boots today. I went by Hotel Fron where my duffel is living and switched out my Crocs for a pair of actual shoes - not seven-mile-hiking shoes, perhaps, but it did the trick. My feet are tired but my heel feels better.

Tomorrow I go to Hveragerði and actually attempt to walk around in boots with a pack, which may or may not go well. However, there's plenty close to the city so I won't be disappointed even if I can't walk quite as much as I might want to (note that "as far as I might want to" is pretty relative here - obviously I walked eight miles or so in Vík).

Side note: I cannot seem to remember how to pronounce Hveragerði. Part of this is because the pronunciation is weird, but a lot of it is that the tour guide for our Golden Circle tour explained that it meant "steam garden," which resulted in me filing away the town under "steam garden" and never needing to have some rough notion of how it was pronounced in order to remember the place.

Hike 4 & 5: Vík and West of Vík

2008-07-14T10:37:00.002Z

Google Maps doesn't give me enough resolution to chart the probably 3-4 mile hike that I did on Sunday, wandering about Vik from the bus stop to the black sand beach to the hostel, to the church, the cemetery and then through some fields that were more 4-wheeler friendly than hiker-friendly back to the hostel.

Hike 5 is was incredible - the hike pedometer says 7.75 miles - I think if I could see the route better it would be closer to 8. I hiked up out of the glacial valley Vik is in into... well, basically into a cloud, which was depressing - that cloud wasn't there when I started! However, right as I got to Mile 3 the cloud ceiling lifted and I got this dramatic view off the end of the cliff to the ocean, and I could also see the area west of the plateau - the next glacial valley over - and I decided to check it out. Walked off of the plateau to an unnamed town that didn't have the good fortune of being on the Ring Road, but was otherwise apparently similar to Vik. There was a really neat cave-like thing by the ocean, and I met a Swiss tourist whose parents had gotten married in the cave.

In Vík

2008-07-12T15:06:00.002Z

It is nice, but very wet. I walked around for about two hours on the beaches and through the glacial valley uphill from the city and took some great pictures and met a couple of German tourists.

And wireless is seriously in existence everywhere.

Clouds and oceans

2008-07-11T19:36:00.004Z

I'm at the Reykjavik Hostel and am a member of Hosteling International. I'll be back here Tuesday night, tomorrow night I'll be staying at the hostel in Vík, and ~~Sunday and Monday I believe I'll be in the Skógar hostel, though this is not yet certain~~ I'll either stay in Skógar on Sunday or (this is more likely) return to Reykjavik on Sunday night so that I can go on another overnight trip Monday-Tuesday. This is good from a blogging perspective, as I don't expect to necessarily be able to get convenient access to the 'tubes in Vík.

Now that the conference is over and I'm free it has become rainy for the first time since my arrival in Iceland. Oh well.

Talk

2008-07-11T01:16:00.002Z

I gave my talk today. It went reasonably well! No hiking to report today, though I did go to a bar called Boston. Alas, no Sam Adams.

Hike 3: Straight to RU

2008-07-10T10:09:00.002Z

Also, I walked to the conference on Wednesday, attempting to take the shortest path instead of the longest, as usually appears to be my goal, I know. Just for kicks, here it is.

Conference photos

2008-07-10T10:02:00.001Z

I'm told that there are a bunch of official conference photos. If you find me in any of them, let me know!

Golden Circle Tour

2008-07-10T09:41:00.003Z

Yesterday was a bad day to forget my camera. It was the day of ICALP's Golden Circle Tour, a six-hour driving tour around the countryside near Reykjavik. However, Wikipedia has pictures of everything.

First, we went to a volcanic crater - a very regular crater formed by a volcano's top collapsing into its emptying magma crater.

Second, we went to see Geysir (the geyser geysers are named after) and Strokkur, which are in the same place.

Third, we went to see Gullfoss, an amazing waterfall. At one point there was this magnificent effect where the persistent rainbow appeared to be a few feet in front of me to the left and to be out over the falls to the right - I had the distinct impression of finding the end of the rainbow.

Finally, we went to Þingvellir (read: thingveller) where the tour guides claimed, tectonically speaking, that you could put "one foot in America and one in Europe." Obviously this is crap, such a phenomena being impossible to specify that precisely, but it was a cute thought, and it was interesting to see the site of the Alþingi (read: all thing or al thing), one of the oldest parliaments in the world.

When we got back I rehearsed my presentation a bit, but I got frustrated and so I took a walk down the hill to the north shore to clear my head. I give the talk at 3 PM GMT. Wish me luck! Tonight we go to Perlan, which I hiked around on Monday.

Hike 2: North Shore

2008-07-08T23:08:00.003Z

Went on an even longer hike tonight. It went till 11. Sky was still blue. This place is crazy.

Tried to find the Botanical Gardens but (recurring theme alert) zigged where I should have zagged and ended up wandering through a commercial district. However, when I got roughly back on track I found what seemed to be an Olympic village (about mile 1.75), a neat sculpture garden (about mile 1.8), and a Subway (mile 2.5). I remembered my sister's story about going to the Subway in Grenoble because it was the only place with turkey, and stopped to enjoy a turkey sandwich. The Reykjavik hostel is at mile 3 on this hike - I now have some clue what I'm doing after Friday, which is positive. Then I walked the entirety of the north shore of "downtown" Reykjavik, which is gorgeous around 10:30 at night.

Liquid (gas, currency, and water)

2008-07-08T18:25:00.005Z

Two quick train of consciousness issues, as I'm really not all that interested in the financial situation of EATCS.

I was stunned when I saw that diesel was 192 ISK (Iceland kronur) - I had the rough translation in my head of 75 ISK to 1 USD, and that meant diesel was under $3. Then I remembered I was outside of America, where liquid is measured in liters. Some quick Google conversions say that this translates to about $9.50 a gallon. Of course, Diet Coke is about $2.25 per liter, so that's a similar scale of price increases. The ISK has fallen in value against dollars and euros, a good bit in the last year, so that's good (for me). They just mentioned this fact in the business meeting, actually.

Taking a hot shower smells like hell - literally. Brimstone. Everything in Iceland is either permafrost or volcano or somewhere in between, and Reykjavik is somewhere in between, so if you drill down a bit you get volcano. If you pump water down to volcano and then pump it back up, you get plentiful, environmentally friendly, egg-smelling hot water. I was worried that the water would taste like sulphur too, which kept me away from the tap for a day or two, but that water tastes fine (great, actually), so either they have parallel systems or they keep the hot and cold water apart well.

Hike 1: Perlin South

2008-07-07T19:41:00.000Z

Took a bit of a hike today - the long way back to the hotel from the university where the conference is being held. This is the route. I'm certain it was more than 5 miles when you take into account me getting lost south of Perlin, the flower-shaped thing around mile 2 - it's a tourist trap built on top of some water tanks built on top of a hill overlooking the (not international) airport. Around mile 1 I went through a cemetery that was unusual in that many of the fairly recent headstones were wooden - I took pictures but I'll upload them

2008-07-07T10:51:00.000Z

Perhaps it was inevitable that Iceland would end up contrasted to India, or perhaps it only became inevitable when I decided to write an entry or two about it here. However, there are a lot of contrasts between the two that go beyond even my reply to a Facebook thread between some fellow India alumni.

Reykjavik is like Bangalore but about 30 degrees cooler and without the indian people and the pollution and for the most part the traffic and it's at sea level and the colors are kind of de-saturated instead of over-saturated and the rocks are jagged and volcanic instead of worn down by millennia of staying in the same place. Okay, it's like Bangalore in that I'm writing about it in my Bangalore blog, but otherwise it's totally different but still kind of awesome but I'm still kind of a little bit cold.

One of the ones I was thinking about this morning was the isolation -- not cultural isolation, which many of us experienced in India, but literal, there-is-no-one-here isolation. I just went to a shopping mall that was obviously nice and well-kept, but which was nearly uninhabited. And it was so quiet -- the space seemed to totally devour the faint background musak, and the sounds that you do hear are more natural or mechanical - an elevator whirr, some water falling down a drain, a passing automobile. I find myself shy and tentative to approach the ubiquitous automatic sliding door for the frequent fear that it will not be open -- the stores here seem a little relaxed about opening times; that's a similarity with the subcontinent.

Another difference is food - northern European tastes grate against mine in roughly the same way that Indian tastes ended up largely compatible. Perhaps is was an issue of attitude -- I'm going to be here for three months, I better get used to this -- and certainly India increased my vegetarian tendencies which does not benefit me here, as I didn't even see chicken at the grocery store I slipped away to. I wasn't looking for meat, though, so it might have been there. I was generally hungry after missing breakfast and specifically seeking a little fruit, which I found courtesy of globalization.

That's all for now. These strawberries, which appear to be called either "jarđarber" or "flokkur" in Icelandic, are delicious. Being (well, hopefully) able to eat fresh fruit without thick skin is pretty convienent.

On a bus through permafrost

2008-07-06T08:25:00.000Z

At 5:30 PM (EDT) on July 5, I left my girlfriend Rachel and her sister Rebecca on a train platform in the southwest suburbs of Boston. Maybe 10 hours later, my clocks had been reset to 7:30 AM (GMT) and I was sitting next to a researcher from TTI Chicago, Prahladh Harsha on a bus to Reykjavik for ICALP 2008.

He mentioned that Iceland's population was smaller than Pittsburgh's - but it tuns out that Pittsburgh is a tiny, tiny bit smaller - essentially they are the same size, a bit over 310,000 people. His hometown of Hyderabad, on the other hand, has almost 10 million people. I had to prod just a little bit to get him to tell me where he was from - most American researchers on a bus in Iceland don't know where Hyderabad is. Most of them haven't worked in Bangalore for three months either. We talked about Hampi and air pollution in Bangalore as the bus drove past raw, cracked volcanic earth. And that's when it occurred to me to maybe write a thing or two in this while I'm in Iceland.

Departure

2007-09-01T15:37:00.000Z

This will be my last post before I leave India; it almost certainly won't be my last post to this blog. I haven't told every story I intend to tell from this trip, and there are other stories that aren't finished yet. In particular, over the last two days I've done a lot of walking and picture taking of the parts of Bangalore I spent a lot of time in that I'll want to post when I have time.

Tonight, I turned in my Microsoft-issued cell phone and had dinner at New Shanti Sagar. It broke my heart when Brownie/Dennis/Goldie, the Microsoft dog with at least as many names as working legs (the poor thing apparently injured his right front paw) followed me most of the way to Bashyam Circle, and I had to tell him to go back. This is a hard thing to tell a dog, both practically and emotionally.

Lufthansa 755 to Frankfurt, Germany (ETA, 8 AM Local)
Lufthansa 444 to Atlanta, Georgia (ETA, 2:30 PM Local)
Drive to Pittsburgh (ETA, Wednesday PM)

Other people's pictures

2007-08-31T12:49:00.000Z

One of the things about my picasa account is that it's all pictures I took, or at least pictures taken with my camera, and for various reasons it seems easier to keep it that way. However, mostly because I didn't get pictures in Savandurga, this is a big post of pictures I didn't take.

These first two were pictures of taken of the whole research group, though Christian isn't in these (we took some pictures, and then took some more, and were missing a different person each time!)

The rest are from Savandurga. I took this one from the car window as we approached the mountian.

We thought this rock looked like an elephant. Or an elephant trying to imitate a rock.

I think I'm checking my cell phone reception. I promise I also took in the spectacular view!

View from the top!

The Top.

Climbing down...

This fort is one of nine that once made up Bangalore's defence network.

See no, speak no, hear no...

Postcards?

2007-08-27T15:41:00.000Z

I know I'm taking care of this rather late, but does anyone want a postcard from India? Send me an email or leave a comment (by Wednesday) - I'll delete your comment after I take down the address.

[Update August 31] Postcards have been sent!

Independence Day

2007-08-25T16:53:00.000Z

From Miscellaneous India...

I'm not really in the mood to write a great deal about this - see the below post for an explanation of why I'm in an unhappy mood.

However, while I was posting about the depressing events in Hyderabad (and the exciting and awesome hill climb today) I wanted to mention these pictures which are now in my Misc. India album. A week ago Wednesday (August 15) we were strongly advised against going to work because it was Indian Independence day, and lest we make Microsoft look unpatriotic, most of us took the opportunity to do some Bangalore sightseeing. The captions tell most of the story, so take a look at the album if you're interested.

Not in Hyderabad

2007-08-25T15:55:00.000Z

I am in Bangalore. Depending on how outward-looking your favorite news sources are, you may or may not start hearing a great deal about Hyderabad in the next few days. Hyderabad is one of the closest major cities to Bangalore, but we're talking about a significant distance. In any case, no one has any idea what's going on yet, but two bombs went off in Hyderabad and they're reporting something like 40 people dead, a number that keeps rising.

There were two attacks that were successful from what we know now, around 8 PM - that's 10:30 AM for those of you on the east coast. The attacks were at popular tourist/family destinations, one was at a popular Gokul Chaat store and the other one was at Lumbini Park where a laser show was taking place.

It was an odd irony to hear about laser shows, I was speaking about laser shows today when nine of us from the lab climbed Savandurga, essentially a big brother of Stone Mountain, and my suggestion that this mountain would be a reasonable place to project a laser show as well was ... um ... not enthusiasm - "then they'd put this place in Lonely Planet and it would ruin everything!" I didn't get any pictures: I woke up late and got my camera - sans batteries. However, I mapped out the way we walked up the mountain:

View Larger Map

(Corporate) Culture and Parathas

2007-08-13T18:57:00.000Z

Revi had promised to show Mike, a frequent visitor to India who works in Redmond, this good paratha place on Commercial street, Jason needed to go to Commercial Street to check up on a gift he was getting for somebody, Udai was the person that initially told Revi about this paratha place, and I like food and entertainment. So we all went.

Revi worked at Microsoft both in project teams and at MSR (but not as a researcher) before she left for graduate school, and Mike has been at MSR since about 1996. They told some amazing stories about the pre-dot-com-bust (and immediately post-dot-com-bust) days at Microsoft; mostly stories I won't repeat here. One exception is that I had never heard the story of Bedlam DL3, which was a pretty wild story.

The Microsoft I work for - at Microsoft Research, in India - is not the Microsoft that these guys described, not even close. The company they described was incredibly intense in terms of lifestyle, time, and emotional impact - not quite investment-bank intense but definitely on the same level. Working for MSR India has been, well, notably less intense. We all worked crazy late hours on our conference submission to be sure, but all throughout my internship I've gotten in and been pretty much alone (except for my advisor, Aditya, who works a time-shifted schedule for his family's sake) and gone home after most everyone else (though rarely, if ever, have I been the last research employee to leave). Even so, I've spent much less time at "Scientia" (the name of our office building) than I do in Wean (CMU people know that this means little - I spend LOTS of time in Wean). I think most people here are pretty good at the "work/life" balancing act, which has been a nice to see on a large scale.

[Update: It makes sense that the day I write this entry I accidentally oversleep till just after 9 AM (rolls eyes)]

Metropolitan Badami

2007-08-11T17:46:00.000Z

I've finally uploaded the pictures from the second day in Badami. They're extensively commented as usual, but I think I'm going to be too lazy to map them all out.

Day Two in Badami was not actually spent in Badami. We took buses to get from Hubli Junction to Badami on Day One (buses as in the plural of bus - at the Hubli bus station we were pointed to this random bus to some unheard of place that I only ever referred to as Point C (jokes for nerds!) where we were able to catch another bus to Badami. However, we didn't necessarily trust this system to get us back to Hubli in a timely manner to catch our train Sunday night, so we hired a driver, Suresh, for the whole day to both take us to two surrounding ruins in the towns of Pattadakal and Aihole and then drive us back to Hubli (in style!) for the train. I'm very glad we took the buses there, and I'm equally glad we had Suresh take us back.

From Badami Etc.

In any case, both Pattadakal and Aihole were fascinating places. Pattadakal was this place where a lot of different designs for temples and shrines and idols were tried out; many didn't work, but many caught on and were familiar from other temples. It oddly reminded me of Granddaddy's workshop - the way things had obviously been worked on, set aside, and then "piddled with" over many years.

Aihole was also pretty nifty; the temples there were not as impressive, but there was one very well put-together temple that actually reminded me of pre-Gothic cathedral design, but based on whatever scraps I know of pre-Gothic cathedral design it's simply a case of a similar design working well for temples in general. Also, we were able to walk out onto the roof of one of the structures, and there are some good pictures of that in the Picasa album. Also, it didn't rain the whole time like it did in Pattadakal. Good times.

Badami!

2007-08-10T11:39:00.000Z

From Badami Etc.

Most of my pictures from Badami are now uploaded; I've got a few dozen left to upload and then I may map them all out like I did in Hampi. We had a great if slightly rainy weekend, and none of us had our purses stolen by monkeys, which is more than some people could say (the picture to the left is someone trying to retreive such a stolen purse).

Now everyone is starting to file out - of the people that went on that trip, two have left (Prasad and Natalie) one is leaving tonight (Nels) and the other is leaving in a week and a half (Christian). Then I leave in three weeks and Camilo leaves after that; I guess I have a great deal of time left, but with everyone else leaving I'm in a very "leaving" mindset; it feels like I'm about to leave too!

How many software engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

2007-08-10T03:24:00.000Z

From Miscellaneous...

Two weeks ago my supervisor, Sriram, invited the Rigorous Software Engineering group (of which I am a part) over to his house for a fantastic lunch and much Xbox playing. Afterwards, most of us went to Lalbagh Botanical Gardens and then to Vidyarthi Bhavan, which quite possibly serves the best dosa in Bangalore. I've been delayed in posting the pictures; here they are!

In other news, this means I managed to borrow a USB/5-pin connector off of someone and will be posting a link to my Badami pictures soon!

Robaluru?

2007-08-06T17:15:00.000Z

This came up in the last post, and so it's worth saying something about. So the road I live on, the one that goes towards Sankey Tank, used to be called Sankey Road, but it is now Chowdaiah Road. There is a drive all across India to name things less British sounding names, and I imagine the newspapers and such will be mentioning this more as we approach August 15, when the American expats in India will celebrate with the Indian citizens our collective history of saying in the clearest possible terms that we would like the British to leave, please.

Anyway, it seems that the city itself has finally managed such a name swap, even though it took a few years and approval from something like 18 agencies (due to the simply stunning power of Indian bureaucracy), and is now properly Bengaluru. I'm all for it, even if it means that my domain name is already obsolete :).

No Riot Today

2007-08-06T16:31:00.000Z

From Miscellaneous...

Since I can't upload pictures until I figure out what I did with my USB connector cable, here's an interesting story. So in April 2006... well, no, in 2000, well...

Okay, start at the beginning. People in India are big on movie stars. And not in the Mel Gibson/Paris Hilton sense - at least when compared to the United States, movie stars are heroes and champions and role models. Assuming I'm not the most intense West Wing fan you know, think about what that person thinks of Martin Sheen, and then keep going in that direction for a good long distance and I think you're getting there.

Anyway, Dr. Rajkumar was one of these people, and that Wikipedia entry gives a lot of background on the rest of this story. He was a Kannada movie star - Kannada being the state langauge of Karnataka, of which Bangalore/Bengaluru/that place I'm at is the capital. By some descriptions Rajkumar was the Kannada movie industry, which is different from Bollywood, which is Hindi, or the lesser-known but quite large Tamil movie industry...

I digress. Rajkumar was a star, hero, and a champion of the Kannada language in general. He was kidnapped in 2000, and Wikipedia says the event "threw the Karnataka government into crisis" and boy do I believe it. Either Kentaro or Prasad said that there were riots at this point because the government was not doing enough to get them back. So that's 2000.

Like a number of movie stars, he had a house in Bangalore in the pleasant-yet-accessible neighborhood Sadashivanagar near Sankey Tank, which is to say right behind the office of Microsoft Research, India. And so when he died in April 2006, that is where his body was taken. Most of the employees at that time went home, but the few that stayed got some awesome pictures of the riots, which resulted in most of the (very strong, two layer) windows of our building getting destroyed.

This leads us to last night, right after we had boarded the train back from Hubli to return to Bangalore on the overnight train. We got a flurry of text messages from Sriram and Prasad telling us not to go to work tomorrow until we'd checked our Microsoft email at our apartments. Apparently money for a memorial to Rajkumar was not being released, and so the same people that planned the aforementioned charming memorial service were planning to march from a movie studio through Sadashivanagar to the Chief Minister's house, which is about two blocks north of where I live. Microsoft was pretty well prepared for this occasion - the insurance companies made them buy a number of bright blue Battle of Seattle-esque riot curtains to protect the building from rocks, but even so we all went home until we found out at about 10:30 that the Chief Minister had skipped town (I believe the official line is "previous arrangements in Delhi"), taking most of the wind out the sails of the protesters - someone said something about them trying to convert the march to a hunger strike, but I don't know if that got anywhere.

And that's the story of how there was no riot at Microsoft today.

Badami, Etc.

2007-08-03T13:39:00.000Z

Gave the first of two talks today on some CMU-related things (Twelf), it was well received by the MSRI crowd and I was happy about that.

Got profiled by Microsoft Research's PR team, and while that's really awesome I really hope they change the picture (I gave them a great picture of me in front of the Queen's Palace in Hampi that Jason took, but they made it a ridiculous-looking windswept sunglass-wearing headshot).

Going to Badami this weekend with five other people, and while I'm kind of exhausted after the talk and want to just lie down for a long time, it should be a fun and exciting trip!

[Update: They did fix my picture. And I'm back from Badami, and can't find my darn USB cord so that I can upload the pictures from the trip. So that will have to wait 'till at least tomorrow I'm afraid!]

I wonder what they'd call the Indian magical academy?

2007-07-24T16:28:00.000Z

So I'm a Harry Potter fan, but I wouldn't consider myself a particularly rabid fan by any means. However, when I mentioned around the office that I'd reserved a book at Blossom Books, that they would be released at 5 AM, and that I was thinking about showing up for the release, I quickly developed a reputation as THE office Harry Potter fan which was as amusing as it was undeserved. Even if I didn't get there at 5 AM I felt like I needed to show up pretty early or I'd be letting my reputation down!

From Miscellaneous...

Most of the 50 or so people at line when I showed up at 5:50 AM seemed as surprised as I was that there were 50 other people there - it was not a festival atmosphere, there was only one under-15-year-old I spotted in the line, and there was not a removable-scar-tattoo to be seen anywhere. That said, it was a happy atmosphere of quiet excitement, with the exception of the one guy who decided to spend the 20 minutes where they were out of books arguing furiously with the shop owners in order to jump the rest of us in line when more books came. (And I was told there were no lines in India! This was, admittedly, by far the most organized line I've seen in 6 weeks.) Another surprise was that I was the only non-Indian person in line (race not nationality; I overheard a few obviously British accents.) I think most of the foreigners were attracted to the other big bookstore in town, I think it's called Legacy or Legend or some other L-word.

In any case, a number of other pictures (with captions and timestamps) are in the Misc. India album that you can get to by clicking on the picture above. After I finished the book on Saturday, Tracy read it from Sunday to Monday, and now Shipla has it, and Prasad has indicated he'll probably read my copy when he gets back from Tibet - I'm thinking I may have everyone who has read my copy write their name on the inside cover.

Fourth of July

2007-07-24T16:07:00.000Z

I posted my Hampi pictures on July 4, which was basically non-crazy moment before the POPL deadline last Tuesday. However, we did do some fourth-of-july celebrating at Opus, which I've mentioned before. I've got one of the earlier on pictures in Picasa, but most of my pictures from the evening weren't very good.

From Miscellaneous...

There was karaoke, as it was a Wednesday night, and a large group of people (including me) did an awful, awful rendition of Surfin' U.S.A. Someone sang Take Me Home, Country Roads and I both sang my heart out from the audience (there was a lot of singing-along going on) and surprised myself by feeling a little homesick (that's a song we sang at Camp Glisson, where I worked for two summers during college. I don't know if non-facebook people can see these, but here is a picture from Surfin' U.S.A. that pretty well captures the painful awkward :).

Next Chance I Get

2007-07-20T02:24:00.001Z

It's been an intense few weeks since the Fourth, as we were trying to get a paper on our project submitted to a pretty big conference, POPL. We got the paper submitted, it's nifty, and we won't know if it gets accepted until long after I'm out of India (the end of September, basically).

It's exactly halfway through my 12 week internship this weekend, and since it hasn't all been work for the past two weeks, I'll try to mention some of the interesting bits of July in the next few posts.

[Update: 12 week not 12 month]

More Hampi

2007-07-03T20:30:00.000Z

Hampi

I just posted and commented on (and, for the most part, mapped) 108 of the 140 or so pictures I took in Hampi - and that's with my camera batteries dying twice during the weekend! Enjoy, I'll put an overview of the trip here --> <-- next chance I get.

Hampi!

2007-07-02T16:12:00.000Z

I left work a little bit early (okay, 6, but I got in after 10!) today because I was tired, and I realize to my enormous dismay that I've forgotten my USB connector at the office so I can't upload pictures; so much of this trip I want to narrate in pictures, so I'm going to hold off on writing until I can do it properly.

In the meantime, Nels has put up some pictures, I especially like this one from the Queen's Bath. The girl in the picture is Natalie - Natalie, Sonnett, and Nick are three astrophysicists who were invited by Christian, a Microsoftie from Denmark, to come to Hampi, but when Christian got sick and didn't tell us about them they appeared as somewhat of a surprise on the train ride. Nevertheless, a awesome (some might say cloak-and-dagger-ly) time was had by all.

Some bookkeeping: since I've started collecting lots of links of places and people, and because in general none of my own photo albums include pictures that include me (because I took them!) I've put up a bunch of links over to the right that should fill out a lot of background that I'd never find the time to explain thoroughly on my own...

Busy week into busy weekend

2007-06-29T13:52:00.000Z

Gosh things have been busy! A couple of updates.

Last weekend I reserved my copy of Harry Potter Book 7. I get it at 5 AM July 21st, which is to say 4.5 hours before it will be available for you Eastern Daylight Time suckers.

I'm heading to Hampi this weekend with Prasad, Nels, and Jason - Christian got sick and Pavol got busy.

My mentor, Aditya, has a new son! His wife had a baby a week ago, sorry I didn't blog about that!

I got the Harry Potter reservation (pictured above) last weekend when we went down to the main drag (M-G Road). M-G stands for "Mahatma Gandhi," and some of us Americans think it's strange that it's not called "Ghandi Road," but coming from a city where Ponce is a road I suppose I have little room to complain. My Misc. India album now has pictures of us bowling, and of the aftermath of an apparently fatal windstorm near M-G road.

See Rock City

2007-06-22T16:53:00.000Z

A delayed post about my trip to Mysore - work is pretty intense right now, and will be at least for the next week or so, so I have had less time to blog. I mentioned pictures of the trip two posts ago, but I will try to tell some stories now. No travel this weekend, but we have tickets to Hampi next weekend. Mysore was fun, though it seems to be more of a tourist destination for people who live in India - Pavol, Jason, Nels, and I may have been half the white guys some people saw all day there. It's not the place you need to spend more than a day at, according to everyone we've talked to (and I agree) - in short, I'd declare Mysore the Rock City of the metro-Bangalore region. That said, for a day trip, it was quite nice.

We saw the palace, which was interesting, and Jason and Pavol rode an elephant while Nels and I stridently did not ride an elephant. After that we took an autorickshaw up to the temple atop Chamundi hills, which was kind of a mistake in retrospect. See, these autorickshaw things, mechanically, are are like a cross between a decent motorcycle and a really awesome lawnmower, not the kind of thing you necessarily want to use to get three people up a large (say, Stone Mountain-sized) hill. Our lawnmower barely, barely made it up the mountain - we were getting passed by everything, including large farm equipment. It made me glad that we didn't haggle down the price (which was less than $5 equivalent already), as this driver probably melted his engine in the process of getting us up the mountain.

In general, and especially at the top of the hill, poverty was more evident than it usually is in Bangalore... it was at times quite striking, there were definitely a number of begging children that followed us around for some distances on occasion. However, the increased amount of obvious poverty in Mysore when compared to Bangalore was offset by a curious effect that in Mysore, everyone was following us around for some distance - people selling flutes would follow us playing the flute, kids would start up conversations any way possible and then try to direct us to particular markets or sell us drugs (one young guy just shouted "Marijuana!" out of nowhere). In this environment you quickly train yourself to ignore everyone that you're not explicitly interested in facilitating a commercial transaction with (say, an autorickshaw driver), and as a result of this effect you notice beggars less - you've already had to turn off your instinct to engage with people to avoid getting anywhere without being sold things. I was trying to get Pavol to teach me Slovak so that I could respond to people asking me questions/trying to sell me stuff in Slovak and they would go away - a similar strategy actually worked for me in France.

When we walked down the mountain, we were so in ignore-everyone mode that we (or at least I) had to consciously think about the need to re-engage with people, that the people we were encountering on the big staircase were either being friendly or wanted to practice English (or perhaps wanted to take a picture with us.)

That's all for Mysore, at least for now. Tonight I was invited randomly by Kentaro to go to dinner with a young full-time employee and a visiting professor from NYU at the Windsor Hotel, which is right next to my apartment. The food was north Indian - it was supposedly Lucknow cuisine but I was told it seemed more typical of Hyderabad. Whatever, it was wonderful, a much nicer restaurant than I'd been to since I got here, the food all smelled like perfume and tasted fantastic.

ATM

2007-06-19T13:04:00.000Z

I finally stopped by an ATM today. It was a slightly alarming experience, because I got the (equivalent) to an amount that I would usually get in the United States, all in 100 Rs. bills, which are equivalent to about $3. However, I'm used to seeing $20 bills come out of an ATM, so it seemed like I had withdrawn an absurd amount of money.

Travel

2007-06-16T23:39:00.000Z

Mysore

It's Afternoon in America and Really Crazy Early In The Morning in India. I'm taking a day trip by rail to Mysore, and if you read that page on Wikipedia you will know more about Mysore than I do.

[Update: Oh my goodness need to write about the trip; in the meantime here is a link to one of the picture albums. The other picture album from the trip is just 70 pictures of Jason and Pavol riding an elephant.]

Traffic!

2007-06-16T15:22:00.000Z

I've seen three traffic accidents in the past two days. Yesterday I walked to work with Kurtis, who was briefly my apartment-mate before shipping out north to set up probably legal community radio stations with former Princeton professor Randy Wang. We heard a terrible screech as we approached the Windsor Manor Road Bridge, which I cross to get to work, and when we approached the the left-hand lane there was a guy laying down in front of an autorickshaw with his motorcycle a good fifteen feet out in front of him; people were helping him up already, though, so I'm hoping he was okay.

Windsor Manor Road Bridge Accident

The second accident was way more hilarious. Right next to the Windsor Manor Road Bridge is the Windsor Manor Rail Bridge, and today as I walked over the road bridge I noticed that a bus was stuck under the rail bridge! As a train went over the bridge full-speed, I recalled again the difference between tort law in America and India - when I was on the train to Princeton from NY Penn Station, we had had to slow to a crawl for several miles because a truck had hit a bridge and that bridge been subsequently cleared by enough engineers that we could go over it, but not enough engineers that we could go over it fast.

The third accident was minor, and I would have gotten a picture but it was essentially right underneath me and because it all gone quite quickly. Rubbernecking is serious business when driving basically takes the skill of a Blue Angel pilot, and a curious motorcyclist fell off his bike, causing a couple of cars behind him to collide slightly with each other. No one seemed particularly bent out of shape about this, mind you.

This is a good time to point out two things - whenever I have a tiny thumbnail picture in this blog it is a link to a Picasa web album, so you should click on it and see all the other pictures in the album! Also, I've updated most of the links so far: the miscellaneous album, which I will continue adding bits of things to, now has some pictures from the bus ride back from the retreat, the retreat album has better pictures of the pool, and this google map now has the correct location of my office, as well as the route I take to work.

Motherland

2007-06-14T18:24:00.000Z

My friend Rahul from Princeton who is now an paramedic in Pittsburgh sent me an instant message asking "How is my motherland," referring to India. I replied that it was good, but that I either have a nasty cold or my body is unhappy with me breathing here. If you ever have a choice between living in urban India and smoking a pack a day and your only goal is keeping your lungs healthy, I'd have trouble making a recommendation.

I had been thinking about "motherland" on the walk home from Quiz Night at a bar/restaurant called Opus with Nels and Jason, particularly after I nearly got run over in an intersection. For some reason I connect the idea of "motherland" with Great Britain, and it is often amusing to the Americans how, well, unexpectedly British certain things are here. The assumption I started working from was that India had really broken ties with its colonial past, but a number of things - from the way they say "dots" and "dashes" in Morse code (this came up during the trivia) to the whole bit about driving on the left side of the road - remind me that such as one of many reminders that that is not entirely true, nor could it possibly be entirely true.

The left-hand-side thing was, if you hadn't guessed, why I nearly got run over at the intersection, but there was also a quirk about a traffic light there. The bigger problem comes in everyday interactions - when you walk towards someone else, you may not even think about it but you will both "defer to the right" and therefore stay out of each others way. When I pass someone - in a hallway or particularly in a staircase - I tend to defer to the right as I have learned to do for over a decade, but they will naturally defer to the left, which means we step in front of each other. In recent days I have frequently continued up a staircase after such an encounter muttering "defer to the left, Rob, defer to the left."

The Dream

2007-06-14T02:44:00.000Z

I want to write something about how Micosoft Research, India got started, and I wasn't sure I wanted to write this story because I didn't hear the whole conversation. But a conversation with a friend made me want to write this down. I apologize if this is rushed, I'm trying to get to work. Anandan is the driving force behind the creation of this lab, and he was talking with another researcher during the retreat when I walked up. The conversation was along the lines of Anandan recalling having had a dream (as in hope, not as in I-was-sleeping) at some indeterminate time in the past - the dream basically was that someday there would be international students - American and Eurpoean students - studying in a lab in India under the mentorship of Indian researchers. Which is, of course, what I am doing.

Most of the interns here are undergraduates - this was a surprise to me, partially because I would never have thought to do this as an undergraduate. I didn't have the research focus at the time, and even if I had... well, at this point in my life going to MSR India only seemed a bit more unusual than going to MSR Cambridge (England) - but two years ago I wouldn't have been interested in eating Indian food, for instance, which I now love. I suppose in the past two years I've grown in ways that made the simple fact of traveling to India seem less unusual.

And then it occurs to me that two years ago, this lab didn't exist yet. Oh right. That dream of Anandan was only realized in the time since I've graduated from Princeton. It seems like two years ago we were only just getting worried about sending unskilled tech jobs to India. And while I realized, in the process of applying for this job, that it was a little odd for me to go to India just in terms of demographics (see the tagline for this blog), it was the partially overheard comment about Ananadan's dream that made me realize what didn't seem odd - it didn't seem strange to think of MSR in Bangalore, India as a place where research on par with other academic institutions around the world is done.

But while that is a truth, I suppose it's a recent truth. And that is wild. My world moves fast.

Visual Studio

2007-06-13T08:37:00.000Z

I am at work waiting for Visual Studio to install so I can hopefully get some work done - today is a process of being very excited about starting and getting into the project, and being very frustrated and annoyed at the random hurdles needed to get there.

MSRI Angsana Retreat

However, the retreat was amazing - I have some pictures up on Picasa. I was pretty jet lagged, but I still managed to stay up until midnight Sunday night - some of the interns and a lot of the employees sat in a circle and sang beautiful songs in a wide array of beautiful Indian languages. I started learning about the various languages that existed in India before the English this weekend, but that is a post for the future.

Living in the Future

2007-06-09T15:46:00.000Z

It is 9:30 PM here, and jet-lagged Rob is exhausted. Dad asked me to explain who Nels was and what "living in the future" meant, and this fits nicely with saying what I did today. The only order of business today was connecting with Nels, which I finally managed (Peerappa smiled knowingly and showed me I had to press "0" twice). There are three interesting things about Nels.

Nels is one of a few American interns here this summer - there will be four or five total.
We are working on the same project for the first half of the summer
He happens to work two offices down from me at Carnegie Mellon

Nels decided to work for MSR India a few weeks before I did - his research interests are more directly aligned with this project - and knowing I would have a friend here was a contributing factor in me deciding to come as well. I got in touch with Nels through his cell phone, and it looks like I'll probably get one too. That will be convenient, because my internet connection isn't quite good enough to consistently do Skype well.

Nels also coined a phrase "living in the future" to describe the effect of the time difference between India and the United States. The idea is that, while it is 9:30 on Saturday here, it is only noon Saturday there. My day is done, and yours is only halfway over (or perhaps just beginning, if you sleep late). When you wake up Sunday morning, don't bother living Sunday - just call me. I'm already finished with Sunday, I'll let you know how it went. This thought is the basis of the joke that I'm "living in the future."

I went to a busy shopping district with Nels and Jason, another intern who is a rising senior at Harvey Mudd, to look around, buy a surge protector so I can plug in my laptop more conveniently, and eat dinner. It was busy but fun - there are lots of street vendors and more than a couple of beggars, but if you disregard the fact that they get right up in your face (Indians have a somewhat different idea of "personal space") they seemed friendlier and more polite than ones in most American cities.

Tomorrow I go on a two-day retreat with all the people I'm working with before actually starting any work. It's a pretty good deal!

Where I Am

2007-06-09T09:47:00.000Z

Where am I? I realized pretty quickly that I didn't know much of anything about how to answer this question beyond "In Bangalore, India." Luckily, I have the internet and an unusual landmark right outside my window: a golf course! Google Maps only located two of these in the city - a golf course in the middle of an urban area is already kind of unusual, so this didn't surprise me.

After I found me, I speculated that I might be able to find Microsoft's offices, based on a fuzzy memory of how I was driven here from there last night, so I took a walk, which was thwarted by a wrong turn and the fact that I need to break in these new shoes.

Here is a map of the walk which includes my apartment and where I currently believe I would be, were I Microsoft Research India.

I also think that my address may involve 28/1 Cunningham Road, 560 052, but that is not yet enough information to do anything with. I'll see.

Apartment

2007-06-09T05:14:00.000Z

Miscellaneous India

Here are pictures of my apartment. My apartment is one of four in a kind of suite-like setup - those four, and possibly others, are managed by Peerappa (possibly Peeyappa). I've realized I need to keep the door out to the suite closed; otherwise Peerappa thinks I need something. This will make it harder to meet my suitemates by chance - I don't even know if they exist, and if they exist if they are Microsoft people.

Electricity is funny in the apartment - a piece of plastic is attached to my door key so that removing my door key kills *all* the power to the apartment. Furthermore, every plug has a light switch next to it, allowing power to to the socket to be cut off. This seems awesome and obvious, once it has occurred to you that, say, your TV or cell phone charger drains power when plugged in, so you should be able to turn it off your charger without unplugging it, and turn off your TV when you leave the apartment. I'm not sure how this interacts with the fridge, however...

[Update 6:30 AM June 10] There are four switches in the apartment with red lights on them. One is the master power switch, and the other three control the air conditioner, the hot water heater, and the fridge. None of these turn off when the master power switch turns off. The fridge is off (nothing in it!) and the air conditioner is off (really, now) but I was very happy when Jason mentioned the whole hot water heater being on a circuit thing, because the first shower was rather cold...

Arrival

2007-06-08T20:30:00.000Z

In airport time a day and a half has passed, but during the process of that I went 9 and a half hours into the future (I adopted this term for flying east from Nels) so that it's really been just over a day.

I had a croissant at McDonald's in Frankfurt because it was 9 AM. Then I went ahead and switched to India time on my laptop, which made it 1:30 PM. I contemplated eating lunch...

The plane ride was uneventful, unless you count me sticking out like a sore thumb, which has happened frequently enough in my life that I actually don't consider it eventful. I thought of Thomas Friedman watching a Bollywood production in which the hero kind of seemed, to me anyway, like a Ken Lay style brilliant businessman slash scumbag; he was redeemed/redeemable only because it was more the government than the middle-class shareholders that were ultimately screwed over. The government was played by a judicial panel of white guys that spoke middling Hindi.

Upon arrival, I managed through the zoo of the airport (it took me 45 minutes to get my bag - customs took about 15 minutes...) and found Suresh, who had a sign with my name (correctly spelled) and who got me to my apartment.

Now I'm going to take a malaria pill, a Benadryl or two, and pass out for a few hours.

Introduction

2007-06-07T08:30:00.000Z

At the request of a number of friends and especially family members, I decided to try to keep an online journal during my 12+ weeks in India; I think it is more convenient than emailing lots of people, in any case. As a warning, this whole journal it is likely to go away after the summer is over, I am not sure I approve of leaving dead journals floating around everywhere.

I'm writing this on a laptop flying from Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta to Charlotte, North Carolina. I walked the entire length of Hartsfield today - I had time, so I took the moving walkways from the atrium to Terminal D, and then took the moving walkways from Terminal D to Terminal E to get a smoothie because the food selection in Terminal D is a little lacking. From Charlotte I will fly to Frankfurt, Germany, and from there I will fly directly to the Bangalore airport, where I was instructed to walk outside the airport and look for someone holding my name, "possibly slightly misspelled." I am to introduce myself to this person; he (I presume he) will take me to the Microsoft-provided housing I will have for the summer.

Why The Heck Are You Going To India?

2007-06-07T07:30:00.000Z

First, while I plan to mostly talk about my impressions of Bangalore and India on this blog, I wanted to start with why I'm having these impressions in the first place:

My role this summer is in the Rigorous Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research in Bangalore. If nothing else, I find it exciting that for the first time I can explain to even non-computer-scientists what I'm doing. The first thing I can explain to people is that I'm trying to make Windows crash less in the future. If their eyes haven't glazed over already, then I can explain that one of the reasons Windows locks up and becomes completely unresponsive is that a driver, one of the little pieces of software that helps all the hardware (iPod, printer, camera card reader, video recorder, hard drive, mouse...) work. Drivers are usually written by people and companies that really want to create hardware, not write drivers, so the drivers are often badly written and get stuck in loops that they can't get out of - when this happens, Windows will stop responding. If people are glazing over at this point, I explain that I'm trying to make that happen less. Otherwise, I can explain a little bit about how this is relates to software property checking, which is what I'm doing - the above is just my take on why Microsoft is particularly interested. That's the idea, anyway.

So in large part of why I am going to India because that is where I was able to find the most interesting internship. It is a risk, because my background is different than that of the project I'm working on - not to mention that, at this point in my career, it isn't like I have *that* much background period - but I hope it is a risk that will pay off.