Too much time, too little sleep, too late an hour, a sweet tooth and hard-wired-to-engineer mental circuits

This can potentially happen to you if you're up too late, sleep very less, chatting on googletalk with a friend who's essentially crazy and both of you have spent a big part of your life studying physics, mathematics and computer science ...

May 18th 2008

4:55 AM

I-T: hello

me: hio

I-T: what are you doing up at this godforsaken hour :)

me: trying to go to sleep

I-T: you're feeling sleepy
sleeeeeeeepy
look into the winding lollipop

me: my eyes feel itchy and gritty

4:56 AM

I-T: the red and white twirls inside the winding lollipop

me: hey u accept my request :D

I-T: the lollipop is rotating about a normal drawn out of the plane of the lollipop towards you

me: on facebook please please please please please :D

4:57 AM

I-T: The normal has something to do with the moment of centroid of the lollipop

4:58 AM

I-T: the electromagnetic field around the lollipop can be calculated by summing up the volumes of an infinte number of infinitesmal pie segments of the lollipop

me: okay shuttup :P

4:59 AM

I-T: you're sleepy arent you

me: i am

I-T: The inverted lollip law states that an inverted lollipop tied to a string can be used as a plumbline

5:00 AM

me: not if u have a very determined lolly pop lover attached to it
corollary one says: in that case hte lollipop can be used as a leash

5:01 AM

I-T: In that case by extension it becomes a heavier plumbline
:)

5:05 AM

I-T: If you embed two jellybear arcs on both the right and left sides of a lollipop and wind licorice tubing around the lollipop and pass molten chocolate through it, while the whole arrangement is enclosed within two Chocolate bricks of opposite polarity i.e. Dark and White, the reaction caused by the spinning of the lollipop actuator motor will cause rappie to appear, breakdance and go back to his room.

5:06 AM

me: wow!
there's an addendum to this one as well ....

5:07 AM

me: depending on the level of rappy's level of crankiness, the entire structure can disappear with him between breakdance and 'go back to his room'

5:08 AM

I-T: All the great Celestial bodies were once lollipops -- Arthur C. Clarke

me: hehe
what are u doing up this late waisay?

I-T: Until they had their sticks removed -- Albert Einstein
The milky way was once a chocolate factory -- Mr Higgins [Whats he doing here]

5:09 AM

me: lol

5:10 AM

I-T: Lollipops with sticks is an unnecessary wastage of resources, because in space nothing falls - - Stephen J. Hawking

me: how do sticks relate with falling
and where in lollipop-land are u finidng all tehse enlightening quotes?

5:11 AM

I-T: The answer seems to be simple, you lick the large celestial lollipops until they become smaller dwarf lollipops
"The best quotes here are the ones made up by me" -- The Narrator aka yours truly

5:12 AM

I-T: "I'm sacking you for your arrogance"-- The Narrators Manager
"But I love him" -- The Narrators Managers Daughter
"Thats it wheres my shotgun" -- The Narrators Manager
"Exit Stage left" -- The Narrator

5:13 AM

I-T: "But which way is relative in space" - Thomas Finnigan

me: "we want licorice" -- the stage bunnies

5:14 AM

I-T: "Sorry, A little typo there, hope you didnt publish my last quote, it was more like which way is left in space everything's relative" - Thomas Finnigan
"Bunnies are evil" -- Monty Python

me: "but they hold the secret of licorice" -- the dust bunny

5:15 AM

me: oh man i must sleep i got a headache

I-T: "No candy for you evil bunnies, you've had your share of mischief for one eon" -- Cheif Snuggums Official Bookkeeper of the Order of the Bunny Kickers

5:16 AM

I-T: "You better get to sleep little girl" - Nurse Freda [???]

me: "but knight googaham of the Order of the Bunny Kickers stole all the licorice and ate it in one night ... he had to be pulleyed out of his room afterwards, after removing the ceiling" -- Willikums, diplomat bunny

5:17 AM

I-T: "You lie, they all lie" -- Mongizumoid Head of Legal Affairs of the OBK

me: "and we dont' do mischief, some of our things just randomly explode, take this 5 legged chair for example ... *boom*" -- wonikins, technology bunny

5:18 AM

I-T: "For more information on evil acts commited by bunnies you shall have to watch Monty Python - The search for the Holy Grail" -- The Narrator

5:19 AM 

me: "I'm afraid wonikins will be unavailable till further notice, the explosion of the 5 legged chair has addled with his brain and he thinks he is a flying tortoise" -- winkadins, nurse bunny, gasping for breath while trying to restrain wonikins

addled his*

I-T: http://www.bebo.com/Profile.jsp?MID=367137231&MemberId=3951291356

me: time to sleep :) tomorrow is a long day!

5:20 AM

I-T: sure
take care
AH

me: you too
hehe what is this site?

I-T: dunno. It says that bunnies are evil
Anyways I'm off
ciao
AH

5:21 AM

me: sure
AH :)

I-T: Exception Caught : not geeky enough
Handler being INvoked
Send Ack

5:22 AM

I-T: Return Ack timer expired , trying resend Attempt 1 out of 3
Resend Ack

for your past *click* *here*

So I have a counter on my blog, which as is obvious counts the visits to here, and also comes bundled with a number of features including where the recent visitors came from and also the referring URL. While I was randomly clicking away at the referring URLs, one of them was a google search for I-T (Iqbal Talaat Bhatti's) blog. So I clicked away from link to link and this is what I stumbled across:

this blog → my statcounter page → Google search: "Iqbal Talaat Bhatti's blog" → youtube result for Iqbal Talaat Bhatti (movie alpha) → Similar vidoes on youtube → *some more clicking* → Batch12 GIKI welcome add → Batch12 GIKI farewell video.

So here it is. Some things I can say about: "I was there when it happened"

Batch12 GIKI Welcome Ad (2002)

Every year, the freshman batch in GIKI is welcomed in by the junior year batch. Typically it includes publicity, multimedia advertisements, all leading to the weekend of the welcome show and the concert. So in 2002, my batch i.e. batch12 (class of 2006) was welcomed in by batch10 (class of 2004). And here is the welcome add that they made for us:




Batch12 Farewell Video (2006)

So like the welcome, the farewell to the senior year is given by the Sophomore year. We did it for Batch10 in 2004 and Batch14 did it for us in 2006. Crofty (Saad Sadaruddin Khan) and Polly (Fahad Rasheed) surprised the rest of us Batch12 people with the following dedication to the batch. Reflects croft's skill at flash and polly's eye for photography and ear for music. It was an emotional 4 minutes 39 seconds for the 170 or so people in the auditorium. Here it is:




About Movie Alpha (sometime in the dark ages between 2002 and 2006, actually the 5th semester)

There are no words to describe this piece of work which I-T, Basim, Babarman, Rizvi and some other people in my batch found the time and brainwave to make back in the 5th semester. Here it is, and you have been *sufficiently* warned!

The Humans are Dead!

Unlike the generic-mindnumbing-youtube-fever that took everyone by storm till all flowed away with it like mere jetsam and flotsam of Web 2.0 humanity, I rarely go there or watch barely any of the clips people keep passing on to me. There are however a few people, whose opinion I trust enough to check out what they're recommending. This one came from I-T. Salut, mon ami!

So without further ado, I bring to you: The flight of the Conchords - The Humans are Dead!








Disclaimer: One needs dominant geek/nerd genes to truly enjoy this one!



P.S: i'm getting reports from some that the video doesn't directly run in blogger. For such, here's the direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoi1MSGu64

Nostalgia

"Friday, November 19, 2004

The night is over and I'm really really weary

After dinner I came back to my room discussed some implemention issues and approaches of the Mousatron with Hashim till 3:00 am. After that it was a couple of 8051 e-Books and Data Sheets for me. It didnt take me long to get bored though and I ended up watching Legends of the Fall again ..."

What you see up there in an excerpt from a blog entry that my good friend I-T (Iqbal Talaat Bhatti) made in his blog "I-T's Blog Central" three years ago. This is one of the first few entries. I-T started blogging in Novemeber 2004, back then blogger was pretty new, and all of us were home from GIKI for mid-semester break. I-T didn't stop just there but infact i'm sure he was the single influencing factor in getting many people to blog, including me. Though I never was as faithful to it as I-T, as is evident from his long list of archive as opposed to my very short one. I even killed my blog and reincarnated it after a year. Please do pay I-T's blog a visit, the link is in my right pane under 'More Blabbers'. Anyway, since I am celebrating sad-yet-sweet nostalgia, I will continue to explain the background to the entry I-T made above ...

It was our 5th semester, and me, I-T, Hashim and moody (Ali Osman Hameed) formed a group for our Microprocessor Interfacing course project. We were all hoping to become fully qualified Computer Systems Engineers in another year and a half. We, rather ambitiously, decided to make a mouse-in-a-maze robot and after careful and lengthy deliberation, christened it 'mous-A-tron' (i think I-T and I came up with that one). A huge undertaking as it was, I-T and Hashim took the job of working on the code for the microprocessor itself, with I-T doing bulk of the actual coding, I was entrusted with making a circuit to accept the signal from the processor and send it up to the 15volt stepper motors (stepping it up from 5 volts to 15 volts on the way), which would in ideal conditions turn to make the mouseatron run, and I also designed the robot body in this rather cool engineering design software that we learnt in our 2nd Semester. I can't remember the name right now, but incidentally, it was I-T's elder brother, Kashif Bhatti, who was a mechanical engineer and had graduated in the spring of the same year we had joined, taught us the software back in our 2nd semester as he was our Engineering Design teacher.

Anyway, Moody and Hashim took the responsibility of actually constructing the robot body using the services of the workshop in the mechanical engineering faculty of the university. I-T also single handedly constructed the infra red obstacle detection circuit which was supposed to be the 'eyes' mousatron would use to get out of the maze. We spent some four weeks labouring over the project, during which I-T went crazy learning about the 8051 microprocessor while I could claim a half PhD in stepper motor theory. We finally got done with the four seperate parts of the robot but found out that they wouldn't work when put together and there was no time and hope to debug as the semester was nearly over, not to mention the final presentation was in the next few days, so in the end we showed all 4 components working seperately and incidentally got away with one of the highest scores in the class. Apparently we had done more with a non-working project than many people with fully functional ones :)

Fast Forward a year-and-a-half

All four of us graduated in the class of 2006. Our final exams ended mid-May 2006 with our convocation on 7th of June. Among our various accomplishments was an A in our two-semester, final year project, for which I-T, Hashim and I were again in a group. I think after mouseatron the three of us almost always ended up making project groups together.

Fast Forward three years

I-T: After graduation, I-T spent some time at his home in Lahore with his family. He had earlier applied to Microsoft, made it all the way and got hired. And I believe that he thoroughly and truly deserves it. But even before that, he worked at GIKI for sometime as a teaching assistant (TA), which I'm sure he was really good at. He moved to Microsoft which is situated in Redmond, outside Seattle, in April 2007 and been there since. Other than working, he spends his time experimental cooking, photographing, kayaking, canoe-ing, extreme sporting, biking, travelling and has nearly drowned at one occasion and multiple-fractured his arm at another. He's in Pakistan (Lahore) these days, his first trip home since Microsoft and is due to leave for America in a few weeks time. He blogs very regularly at his blog central. Link in the right pane. He is also found to cheer sad or sick friends up (meaning me) by sending them Chocolates and KFC through gift services.

Hashim: After graduating with the rest of us, Hashim, originally from Rawalpindi, worked in a local software house for a while, then went to GIKI as a TA around the same time as I-T, and left a few months after him. He is currently pursuing his masters degree at Chalmers in Goteborg, Sweden.

Moody: Moody also from Lahore party-ed after graduation and then moved to London, being a British national, as he was born there. There he switched jobs (and apartments) with quite regularity, yet never letting the party die out as many of our batchmates from GIKI went to UK for studies and proved to be his constant companions. He is currently working in the I-T department at Harrod's and can be heard from (online ofcourse) complaining about his 11 hour shifts.

I: Having gotten a job offer from P&G while I was in my 8th semester (I had interned for them in the summers after my 6th), I moved to Karachi just 2 days after graduating from GIKI. I started with the company on 12th June 2006. Coming from Islamabad, which is as diametrically opposite to Karachi as any two cities can get, I have had a rough time living alone here, with very few friends, a few personal set backs, and limited mobility due to the rather unsafe nature of the city. I have been here for nearly 1.5 years now, and I spend my time away from work in my room, staring at my laptop screen, enjoying the delights of unlimited internet. I was reading through I-T's blog archives when i stumbled upon the post above. My mother is still in Islamabad, where she has lived for 27 years and where I was born and raised. My sister now lives in Dubai with her husband, having gotten married some 2 months after I came to Karachi.

Here's the link to I-T's blog entry that triggered the cascade: The night is over and I'm really really weary


Here's a google map with GIKI, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi tagged along with my impressions of them. For Redmond, London and Gotenborg refer to your nearest google map.



View Larger Map


P.S: I'll try to dig up some old mouseatron stuff from my old PC which is lying like a relic in my room now and post them here. Next time I'll try to post about Egypt. A few people were interested in that.

About Thor and Laptops

What does Thor, the Norse god of lightning, have in common with laptops? Or Zeus, or Jupiter or Leir for that matter, who are his Greek, Roman and Celtic counterparts respectively. To answer the question, nothing, at least not apparently, until I delve into the story of my laptop and how it can be related to any of the above mythological deities.

As a manager at P&G, I, on joining the company, was given a brand new standard issue HP laptop. The laptop with bare minimum specs is good enough for reading and sending emails and running Microsoft Office, which is what you mostly do as a manager but given my rather geeky disposition, and my technical job descroption, was no way capable of simultaneously handling at least 20 windows for at least 20 hours a day on an everyday basis (Yes, yes, I admit, I sleep with my laptop, and that too switched on). Needless to say the poor thing started to give up in this already losing battle some 14 months into its operational life. And that's when i decided to get it sup-ed up. Major changes: hard disk from 40GB to 80 GB and RAM from 512 MB to 1.5GB. It feels awesome ^_^

However I was not satisfied with just 'back end' changes, and bothered by the fact that my laptop looked EXACTLY like at least 50 other laptops in the office (people who know me will understand my utter need to personalise EVERYTHING that i own), I wondered if I could do something about its rather drab exterior. Since the laptop is legally still a property of P&G, and under warranty from HP, which goes void if I mess with the paint job itself, I settled for a 'sticker job', i.e. drawn and painted on paper, cut out, then glued to the laptop lid, which can easily be peeled off later when the time comes to part my ways with it. This obviously brought me to the question of what exactly to put on it. Buoy-ed up that I was with the very perceptible increase in my laptop's performance, I settled for two lightening bolts, slanting inwards at the tip, in silver to go with the matte gray original color of the machine. Thus further excited, I discussed the idea with a few of my good friends, namely Saady, I-T and Basimio (their blogs are listed under More Blabbers). Got an excited thumbs up from all of them. I-T went on to Christian the 're-born' laptop "Thor's Laptop" or "Zeus' Laptop". And there you have it.

Bringing the idea to execution took another 2-3 weeks since I was traveling as well as very busy with work. Also a minor tragedy dampened the euphoria a little. I finally managed to put the lightning bolts in place on a Sunday, and the next day I had to turn my laptop in and move to a temporary laptop because I was for a few days having serious heating problems which had started to affect the hard disk. However not to be mowed down, I managed on getting the hard disk, RAM and keyboard of my old machine inserted into the replacement machine. The DVD drive and battery were already from my old machine as this one didn't have em. That took care of the interior, and left the sticker-work on the lid of the machine i was giving away. I therefore pestered our local support person till he called the vendor and I got the entire screen switched between the two laptops ... hehe. So now I'm a rather happy camper, with a machine that performs at least 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, and had a custom paint job too!

Obviously this post would be incomplete without the pictures, which I've naturally added. No comments on the dirty room!

my laptop proudly sitting at its rightful place on my bed. Usually its turned around
but here it's posing for the picture ;)

Shimmery silver thanks to fabric paint on paper. Glows in bright light.