Making writing a habit

As I plunge into the depths of academic rigor and drown the best years of my adult life in a low paying yet rather fulfilling career I realize the need to make writing a habit. I have learnt over innumerable tasks, its good to take notes. Its also good to compile your notes and make a small sketch of your current work, or even the current paper you are reading. If you find an article or summary, it is important to note that down. A blog does not have to be only for writing the mundane details of your daily life, ranting about culture or anecdotal evidence. It can be a very good place to keep track of your progress and make notes.

Of course not being able to make a latex document with beautiful typography and colorful pictures makes it dull, but its a start. For the more initiated, there are options, dropbox is one of them, create a directory for all your files, update and sync them with dropbox. You can easily view previous versions and look at all your edits. The good part is, its easy to share the file with a reviewer too. I have also been using papers to make a bib of the papers I reference. So here's to more meaningful citations and verbose drudgery.

My cupppa a la india

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/starbucks-opens-in-india-with-pomp-and-tempered-ambition/

This blogpost about a starbucks opening in india got me thinking along two lines. If I was opening a starbucks in India, what coffee would I serve, would it be nicaraguan, guatemalan, brazilian, coorg or nilgris. The choice between a local and international blend is quite the moot point. I would stick with the coorg simply because you can get it fresh, its local and quite rich. Of course, if you charging me 85rs for a cuppa coorg, I would call you a looter and go to the local darshini for my favourite filter coffee for under 10rs depending on which locality you are in. Of course the competition comes in the form of the delectably delicious flavours of coffee. The latte, frappuccino and other espresso variants. The "coffee" as a black brew is totally burnt at starbucks, if there were other unburnt cheaper options I would definitely say "suck it" to starbucks.

Now again, the lattes and frappuccinos have been around for a while with the coffee days and baristas, so what's the big deal. Starbucks needs to offer something special, to be able to cut the mark. It also depends on which crowd you are catering to. Hailing from bangalore, I have seen the India coffee house/airlines crowd and the coffee day crowd. They are both fashionable, in regards to their standing in the society and their own pompous ego. The ICH folks are generally sitting around for a long meeting or with a newspaper. The coffee day crowd on the other hand is generally more young and are at the coffee shop for a round of the gossip and chatters or a very quick meeting. You get the picture, the holy crap we are going to discuss the world over coffee versus man did you hear what happened to katrina kaif. Starbucks being the esoteric nuthead that it is, offers me that clean hangout and workplace sewn together. I wonder how it looks back home.

UnVirtualBox

I recently upgraded to the 12.10 quetzal. Yes, I have my gripes about unity and unity3d even more. The latest gripe is with virtualBox, this godforsaken tool has helped me out a few times; when I have been trying something funny in ubuntu or when I needed windows access. Wine sometimes just doesn't cut it (yes, would you believe that!!).

The latest update to 12.10 wipes out the dns server interface from virtualbox. Of course I did not have time to pick through the code and figure out what was happening. A quick search on the internet led me to install dnsmasq which seemed to solve the problem. The reason I say seemed is because I now have a new problem where my connection keeps dropping every few minutes and I have to reconnect to the router. I am not sure if its a 12.10, dnsmasq or my hardware, but by jove it is annoying. Even as I was publishing this blog post I had a couple drops. Maybe, just maybe its time for an upgrade to hardware with super strong wifi.

IRB and other stuff

This last day has been really eventful. I was able to get an IRB approval for my experiment. This means I can test subjects, human subjects according to the procedures described in my form. The process was a little dull and particularly esoteric. The IRB folks although, were a really nice bunch. They managed to give me clear instructions about reviews and documents needed. Despite that, I found it a little hard to understand what they wanted.

It is surprising to me, that if you know the process really well it becomes harder for you to give out all the details. I really saw this with my data analysis. My adviser says, "I can't read your mind, what do these plots tell me."  The odd thing is that we generally discuss my work in great detail. So,  I learnt that I need to invest my time on more pedagogical tools to make my mind more readable. (where are those beautiful elvish women when you need them)

Some Changes

This is a news update for all the people who don't read this blog. I am moving my articles on science and tech to a separate blog. For the people who do read this blog, you can continue being bored and delivered unto the path of "ALT-F4" or "sudo poweroff".

The laziness on my part is having the same template as this blog, a easy copy paste job. Blogger let me finish this whole process in under 10 mins. Kudos for such amazing flexibility.

Oh yes before I forget - http://extl.blogspot.com/. "The blog that shall disappear into the humdrums of internet buzz and never be spoken of again."