Photos from trip

Finally got the photos up on Picasa:

Italy

Conference photos

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

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...

Independence Day

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.

Metropolitan Badami

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!

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!

No Riot Today

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.

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.

Travel

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!

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.

Visual Studio

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.

Apartment

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...