Other people's pictures

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...

Not in Hyderabad

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

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)]

Badami!

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?

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!

Badami, Etc.

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?

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

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 :).

More Hampi

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!

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...

See Rock City

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.

Motherland

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."

Living in the Future

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!