Blogging with Writely

Ladies and gentlemen, this blog post is brought to you courtesy of http://www.writely.com. For those of you too lazy to click on the link, Writely is a web based word processor that allows you to publish stuff online and collaborate on document creation. I had heard about this earlier in the TopCoder forums, because snewman - one of the best red coders at TC - actually works there. It was forgotten all this while, until we heard that snewman was going to be missing the TopCoder Open onsite finals. It turns out that the blogosphere suddenly discovered Writely, and users began to register in droves, forcing snewman to give up on the TCO and scale out their servers. Good thing he did too - they got slashdotted, and we all know what that does to your traffic...

I decided to register since I figured we might find this useful next semester while writing our project report. And naturally, when I noticed that they supported posting to Blogger, I decided to give it a whirl. This is still a slightly experimental service, so let's see how it works out. At the very least, I can give them a bug report.

Minor update - we had our Digital Signal Processing vivas, and things went much better than I expected. The external was one of those chaps who keeps on smiling at you - a few minutes into the viva I noticed that the rest of the viva group(3 other guys) all had equally imbecilic smiles plastered on their faces as well. Thankfully, I was able to resist this, though my control did falter on a few occasions. My finest hour was when he finally asked us what convolution really was. This was something I'd been trying to figure out all semester, so I was able to tell him without too many problems - and his real question turned out to be "Why do you have to fold one of the signals?" This was straight out of the derivation, which apparently only I remembered, plus a couple of properties of linear time-invariant systems...After that, he finished it off with a couple of questions about details that no one really remembers, and that was that. As vivas go, it was pretty good.

The last viva is on Wednesday - Image Processing, to be precise. After that we just have the project presentation the next day, which is mostly a waste of time - I'll be astonished if there's anyone capable of asking perceptive questions - especially after they suffer through the humdrum average projects that appear every year with minor variations.

I think I'll take a nap now. If you're seeing this post, then obviously Writely's interface with Blogger is working, so here goes...

The Crow at the Window

As I write this, a large specimen of the Corvus splendens persuasion sits outside my window, on the edge of the grill. He seems to be preening his feathers - while this is an activity traditionally associated with birds, I'd never expected to see a crow do it. Watching a crow preen itself is not unlike watching a guy pluck his eyebrows - you're left with a vague impression of ludicrous incongruity. I suppose the harsh caw of the crow and its complete lack of fear of the average urban Homo sapiens sapiens gives it a rather macho aura. Yes, even when it's female.

Disclaimer: I have never seen any guys plucking their eyebrows, but I have it from reliable authority that such individuals apparently do exist. Not that there's anything wrong with it. It just seems weird. Metrosexuality, anyone?

The aforementioned crow seems to have earmarked that particular area of the grill as his own personal fiefdom. He seems to spend most of his day sitting there, presumably enjoying the shade that his less fortunate fellows are busy searching for. My sister claims that he's been coming here for weeks. Apparently his loud disposition didn't find favour with her during her exams about 2 weeks ago.

Just managed to scare him off by waving my hand at him. Clearly he's not accustomed to me being at the window, so he made a run(flight?) for it the second I raised my arm. Otherwise, he strongly resists any attempts made by the rest of my family to evict him from his post.

My mom has strung a clothesline along the grill, and every so often she turns up and hangs some clothes there. Naturally, he's grown so accustomed to her presence that she could probably juggle five smooth stones in his presence and provoke nothing more than a raised eyebrow. Of course, I'm not entirely sure he has eyebrows...Presumably he'd raise a perfectly preened feather.

My dad often comes and takes a look out the window. He doesn't disturb the crow, and the crow doesn't seem to disturb him. They seem to exist in perfect equilibrium.

My sister, of course, is the only one who actively tries to scare him off. Being a perceptive fellow, Sir Crow realizes that she's probably more scared of him than he is of her(N.B: This is a girl who fears butterflies.). Consequently, he treats her every attempt with exquisite disdain. Her terrified shoo's arouse no interest in him, and when she shakes the clothesline, he doesn't even deign to look at her. In short, in his feudal view of the world, she is a mere peasant, unworthy of his regal attention.

While I wrote the last paragraph, he returned, sat still for a bit, jumped to another section of the grill, cawed at something, and left again. He then proceeded to repeat this routine three more times, with minor variations. So this perch is something of a rest stop for him.

As far as Sir Crow is concerned, I seem to be the only unknown factor in this equation. If I poke my hand out the window, he goes into a crouch. Relaxes the second I pull it back in. He still doesn't look at me directly. Fantastic peripheral vision indeed.

In a couple of days, he'll probably have downgraded me to 'Mere Peasant/Harmless Background Object' status. The second bit is owing to my computer's position next to the window. It's probably my imagination, but his last crouch was no longer as tense as the last. This is a smart bird if there ever was one. If there's anything to this reincarnation business, I'm coming back as a crow.

Time for me to get back to Digital Signal Processing. Fourier Transform, here I come...

Oh look, he's back again.

The Joy of Curmudgeonry

It's very rare that you run into a blog that combines devastating intellectual insight, incredible prose style, and humour of the highest order with such consummate ease as The Joy of Curmudgeonry. I ran into it by sheer accident today, but already it stands proudly at the head of my Firefox LiveBookmarks list.

The author is a British bloke with a razor sharp mind, and an even sharper pen(or should I say, keyboard?). His insightful manner of exposing idiocy and intellectual dishonesty with such supreme disdain for the offending idiot is nothing short of incredible.

As an example, check out this post. Truly fantastic rebuttal to an argument that no sane person should fall for. Of course, that doesn't stop many of them from doing so anyway.

Plumb tuckered out

I'm dead tired. For those who don't know, that's what the title of this post means. It also corresponds to a certain state(that of being terribly fatigued) of a certain entity(yours truly) in reality.

That's right, reality. The place where you're hopefully living. If not, just go on reading. I'm not terribly bothered about your mental state anyway. What I am bothered about is my physical state.

We had vivas today morning. They were pretty okay, as vivas go. Seems the teacher decided to go easy on us. Then we went off to make our last submission, and he just asked us to hand it over, leaving us free to go home.

So why do I feel half-dead? It's not like we had a terribly hectic day.

Provisional theory: Lack of sleep, once again. Last night, in a fit of inspiration(and boredom, brought about by studying a memory-intensive subject) I ended up solving the last SRM's div 1 500. Lots of fun and all that, but the upshot of it was that I ended up sleeping at around 1:15 AM. Painful if you have to get up less than six hours later. Even more painful if you happen to be one of those guys who prefers to sleep for about ten hours.

That's right. I'm one of them. The subset of humanity who would like to spend 41.66% of their lives in slumber, as opposed to the others who are happy with merely 33.33%.

Sagar just dropped a bombshell about our project. Looks like we'll have to waste some more time on pointless work.

The ritual TC update: Did the 250 rather slow this time. Could have been much faster. Had a total rating change of 0 points. That's Z-E-R-O. Doesn't happen very often, but it's better than a rating drop.

Have to get back to the MS apping - but time is short. Life sucks.

We now have a plan of action for getting the project report done. Mostly it involves me working like a dog tonight. Why? The dual curse of being both technically competent and a moderately good writer. Worse, I'll probably have to create a mockup of our project GUI to boot.

Working like a dog? Just how much work do dogs do anyway? It's being human that causes all the problems.

Think I'll take a shower before I start. Maybe that'll freshen me up a bit.

Current MSN tagline: The final straw that turned the camel into a paraplegic.

That's all for this post. Back to work.

PS: In case you're wondering about the new writing style, don't. It's probably not permanent. Just a passing phase born of fatigue and boredom.

Not in the mood to think up a title...

Looks like I haven't blogged for quite a bit. Apologies to people who missed my poor excuse for a blog, but I was busy and bugged, and therefore not very interested in coming up with stuff to post up here. Come to think of it, I'm still busy, and not quite done with being bugged either, so I think I'd better get back to writing useless assignments and journals soon.

Brief update: Two vivas are done, three more coming up, and then a little more work while we finish off our project report. Then I can finally rest for a while...

I might blog in the days to come, but then again, I might not. In short, I'm in a very ambivalent mood. Or not.

Back to work. *Sigh*...