Thursday, August 18, 2005

euphemisms for joblessness

two interesting ways of saying you are jobless:


1. I am evaluating heuristics for NP-hard problems ( == playing minesweeper)

2. I am in deep introspection, reflecting on my work and productivity

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

playing for fun vs. playing to win !

In most cases you would imagine that a person plays something to have fun predominantly ...
unfortunately my brain isnt quite wired with a good definition of fun .. so i have to resort to the mercenarial attitude while playing too -- its kinda sad coz that completely rules out games/activities without a statistical scoring function


Even while playing silly online games against totally unknown opponents (or against none !)-- where there seems to be really very little incentive to win (other than possibly increasing ur score in someway ) I end up getting stressed when things get close ..

Enough Said -- I SUCK !

Monday, August 01, 2005

more thoughts on life/research

important principles to adhere to ..

1. risk minimization/diversification -- self-explanatory

2. adversarial analysis -- thinking like your adversary(= reviewer) and addressing his concerns

3. look and feel / feel good factors -- way more important than one might imagine them to be

4. persistence -- if all else fails this is surely a clincher

on a less serious note ..

here are two amazing examples of my incredible incompetence ..

1. I went for taking the written driver's licence test -- the guy asked me to look into something and read line 4 .. I look in rather casually (assuming that it was a iris scan) and said "line 4" (assuming that was for some voice recongnition/recording) .. needless to stay the guy was stunned beyond imagination at the total absence of intelligence and was even more shocked to see that i passed (only by the narrowest of margins )

I swear this is true .. and I did not do it on purpose (unlike a few amazing guys I know who would deliberately do such things)

2. Got down at an amtrak station and needed to take a bus to get home .. bus stop in downtown is a not-so-unreasonable 4-5 blocks away from the station .. Well .. I spent 1 hour finding it .. (with a heavy 50 pound loaded suitcase dragged) all over downtown at night


more reasons for me to avoid getting into the real world ..